My
devoted husband travels a lot.
It’s pretty much a guarantee that once a week, for a duration lasting
anytime between one to five days, he will need to travel for work. This was especially difficult for me
when my children were babies, and exacerbated when I was isolated in California
as a new mother with no family around and few close friends.
To
this day, my mother-in-law always knows the details of my husband’s travel,
since she makes it her business to know where he is traveling, what flights he is
taking, what kind of rental car he is driving, what hotel he is staying at, how
clean the sheets are, and generally if my husband is well. It turns out that it is a good thing
that she knows all of these details, because I got to the point where I was just
aiming for survival at home, and needed to focus all of my attention on my
family’s needs at home so I didn’t mess up and forget to buy something during
my brief windows of opportunity. I
was afforded contact with other adults via my mother-in-law, who would call me
to make sure I was surviving, after which she would find out if her son had
called me and told me whether or not the hotel room was smoking or non-smoking.
As
a young mother with my first child, I was too exhausted to be scared. Every night I ran to the shower as soon
as my daughter went to sleep, turned on the dishwasher and turned out all the
lights and passed out in my bed.
After we moved back to the Boston area, I had more energy to worry. I was worried about our safety, having
more energy to watch the news and listen to the horror stories about nighttime
attacks. I decided to take
defensive action and slept with a heavy French rolling pin next to my bed, in
case anybody entered my bedroom. I
imagined how I would grab the heavy rolling pin and clobber any invading
crooks.
I
grew up in the Boston area, and while I was single and living at home, my
parent’s house was robbed. Fortunately it was burglarized when the house was
empty. But still I felt invaded. My space had been trespassed. I didn’t feel safe in my own home for
months after the burglary. That
feeling had left me when I was living in California, but my return to the East
Coast brought all the memories back.
One
day I was discussing the woes of traveling husbands with another mother. She confided in me that she slept with
a twelve inch carving knife at her side.
My uncomfortable memories of the burglary at my parent’s house came back
to me, complete with the solicitation calls from the alarm companies
afterwards. How did the alarm
companies know that we were just robbed and needed to secure the house? My parents had an elaborate security
system installed. When the system
was new, we set the alarm at night, to go off if there was an intruder in the
house. Several times we made
mistakes in setting the alarm and when I moved my arms while sleeping at night, I tripped off the
siren.
It
suddenly occurred to me that the only people who were truly interested in coming into
my bedroom at night would be my own children. After I came to this shocking realization, I put the rolling
pin back in the kitchen and never brought it back into my bedroom.
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