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 Dad on a LarkA blog by Rand Richards Cooper, on parenting baby Larkin
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June 27, 2007
Baby on Board!
 The SUV zoomed up close behind me, veered out to pass, then cut back in. It was massive and menacing and way too close. It was threatening my baby. I hit the horn. "Hey, you big fat cumquat!" I yelled, as Larkin chattered on in her car seat, oblivious. Back in our pre-Larkin years, I resented those Baby on Board bumper stickers. What, I'd say, am I supposed to drive more slowly just because you have a baby? Is your baby's life somehow worth more than anyone else's? I see the whole Baby on Board issue a little differently now. The Baby-on-Board driver, it turns out, isn't trying to engage you in a theoretical argument about the relative worth of different persons. He's simply trying to get you to slow down, and thereby to lessen the mortal harm you are aiming at his daughter, whom he does in fact love more than his own life — and certainly more than yours. This is just one of the many ways my outlook has changed now that I have a child. I think about our life itself as a car ride. Before, Molly and I were cruising along, happy, heedless tourists, seeing the world and its wonders. Now, we're carrying a precious treasure with us, and we're guarding her for all we're worth. Go ahead, slap the sticker on our car. The question is, how do you deal with risk, once you have a baby on board in your life? How much worry is too much? I keep files of articles on household dangers and how to minimize them. But I also keep an article about a couple who got addicted to childproofing. They hired a professional consultant, spent thousands of dollars ... and ended up leaving one single drawer in the house unlatched — so that their little boy could have "a sense of control." I don't mean to mock them. I know I could end up there myself. Once you start trying to eliminate dangers, it's hard to stop. You cut off one potential hazard, and two more spring up in its place. You become a worry junkie, a safety freak. Who's the one, really, who craves the sense of control? Years ago, as a college student, I interviewed the novelist John Irving. He had just published The World According to Garp, and I asked why he'd written the horrifying passage about the death (in a car accident) of Garp's infant son. Irving told me he had terrible nightmares in which harm befell his young children, and said he'd written it as a way of exorcising those fears. I remember thinking, Man, this guy is pretty uptight. But now I understand, because I have the dreams, too. Larkin falling from a cliff, or taken by kidnappers, or drowning. Our little girl is an adventurous child, and a fearless climber. Stop watching her for ten seconds, and she's liable to climb up the armchair and take a swan dive headfirst onto the hardwood floor. Her recklessness drives Molly and me crazy. Suddenly we have all these stairs and drawers and shelves to think about, table corners, sharp edges — at every turn, a disaster waiting to happen. And that's only inside the house. What about ... out there? At some point in your mind, the specific checklist of dangers morphs into a general worldview of danger. Parenting becomes a state of perpetual anxiety. I remember, five years ago, when Molly and I bought the house we'd previously been renting, and almost overnight, my take on our city neighborhood began to change. Before, I'd thought of our block as picturesque: it had characters, it had texture. Once we owned the house, however, I began to grind my teeth. Couldn't those people down the block just fix their house up a little, instead of trashing it? For better or for worse, I was viewing everything through the prism of our investment. In this sense, a child is the ultimate investment; and now that we have Larkin, suddenly our city neighborhood seems full of pitfalls. Like our way-too-busy avenue, where cars shoot by on their way to the highway. Or other, scarier dangers. Friends up the street were broken into as they slept. There have been nighttime muggings at the corner ATM. Should we move to the suburbs, find some quiet street with yards full of swing sets? I've lived in cities all my adult life. But now sometimes I put Larkin in the stroller and take a walk through the town just beyond our neighborhood, and I find myself seeing it through the eyes of a father, and liking it. It's so ... safe. Recently, a mom I know forwarded me a link to a Website called Familywatchdog. It gives you a street map of your area, with icons denoting people convicted of rape, sexual battery, or offenses against children. (It then tries to sell you their criminal records). I put in our address, and found that 581 convicted offenders live within a 5-mile radius of us. I began inputting other addresses. One suburb west of here had only 32 offenders. Burlington, Vermont had just two. Should we move to Burlington? I'm guessing that the urge to worry won't go away just because we change addresses. The world will always seem dangerous with Larkin in it. This is going to be one of those themes — and challenges — that come up again and again, right through childhood and adolescence, every time we try to teach her the right balance between openness and self-protection. I recognize that dangers exist, but I want to be rational about them. Molly and I don't want to convey to Larkin the picture of a world fraught with peril. We don't want to "solve" all the world's dangers for her, leaving only one safe drawer for her to open. Take the Baby-on-Board impulse too far, and eventually you will have converted your house, your life, into an armored vehicle. There's a line beyond which safety becomes an obsession. I guess the trick lies in knowing when you've crossed it.   Rand Richards Cooper is the travel correspondent for Bon Appétit, and is author of a novel, The Last to Go, and a collection of stories, Big as Life.
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