Worries

I'm about to write something terrible. Don't judge it too hard, some days I do not get enough sleep. I'm about to talk about news, motherhood and Buddhism in a way that only someone that thinks not even her family reads her blog can do (literally, I did not tell my family about my blog).

So, I was reading the news and thinking that those horrible stories involving kids trigger on me one or two of these reactions.

-Thinking that even a crazy story can happen to anybody
-General bad feeling that can even prevent me from continue the reading

Being a parent makes you understanding. Understanding of the mum that forgot her child in the car, of the father that went to the kitchen for a second when the disaster happened. Every parent knows that not losing your child out of sight for a second is not possible, and it is unimaginable what a child can make out of a second. Please raise your hand if you ever had to run out of the toilet, knickers around your ankles, after hearing something in the living room, raise your hand if you ever closed your eyes for a second and opened them again to find your baby about to practice bungee jumping from the dining table, raise your hand if you ever recovered paper, coins, soap or last weeks food from your little angel's mouth, and raise it again if you ever failed to recover it and after some biting you decided "it will anyway be good for his immune system"

Being a parent is trusting the angel that every kid gets assigned, so when he falls from the swing he only scratches his knees, opens a window when your husband locks him accidentally in a room and reminds you of your Christian morals so you do not beat him when he puts his feet in the potty, rolls in the mud screaming if you try to put on his globes, steals candy from the supermarket and runs away laughing, or throws a glass of juice on your new dress after you repeated twenty times "stop that! You are going to drop it!".

Being parent is turning yourself into a crazy person that one second is biting his tongue to not say something really wrong to that little son of a bitch and the next one is kissing him and crying because just thinking for a moment that something bad could happen to him gives you stomach ache. It is calling your mother once per month and your babysitter every two hours. It is talking trash about the people that smoke in the restaurant while your offspring rubs spaghetti on the chairs. It is looking for sales in the supermarket and then buying enough Kinder eggs to make an omelette.

Buddhist monks know that lack of desire brings happiness, and I know that only the lack of a family brings peace of mind. Having a family, children, is exactly the opposite. It is being scared every second because in the way to the kindergarten there are cars, and bacteria, and delinquents (I think in Nuremberg one sees every day the same number of bacteria and delinquents). Being a mother is worrying because of a car trip, because the kid ate too much, or he didn't, because your irresponsible husband let him play in the fountain, because there are hormones in the chicken, earthquakes and tornadoes. A mother will also worry about her irresponsible husband because cleaning vomit together is something that made you really close after some time.

And what is newsworthy, what understandably is not understandable for the rest of the universe is that if you would have to choose again, you are masochist enough to say that even with the stomach ache, the worries, and the possibilities of ending up in the news, you wouldn't change your family for anything in this world.