"Intuition"

The other day I craved a buffalo burger from the drive-up restaurant. It made me sad. I'm not going to talk about that.

Here's the thing about being a Mom... You know how they say that Moms seem to just know when something bad is happening? Or that they have the ability to predict when their children will be sad/hurt/upset? Wow. Those people don't have a clue how it really works. Let me tell you the secret...

Just like I magically learned to cook when I said "I do" to Stephan 3.5 years ago, as soon as Sawyer was born I entered a state of near-paralizing worry. Everything that could possibly happen to him went through my brain constantly. It's the reason I slept with him next to my head with my hand on his tiny chest the first night in the hospital. I was convinced that if he stopped breathing I would wake up immediately and be able to do something. It turned out that I just simply didn't sleep that night. But, whatever.

Over the next 11 months the woman who is known to friends and family as the one who has plans for things like black holes swallowing the Earth and spontaneous pole-shift, has thought of every possible danger. I've pictured cars careening out of control on our quiet suburban street, crashing into the wall of his room. What if there's a fire? What is the fastest way I can get to him and get out of the house? I've made sure I know how to kick out all the screens in all the windows of the house. I've thought about how to tether the stroller to myself in case something bad happens to gravity while we're taking our walks.

With all of these things going through my mind on a near-constant basis, if something were to go wrong, I could just say, "see! I knew it!" But the odds of something going wrong during one of the 1440 minutes I'm worried about him in a day is pretty high.

That's the secret. It's not that the worrying is rare, it's that the accidents are more rare than the worrying.

Now you know.