Another One about Various Other Nasty Phobias.

Do you ever know in advance just exactly what Complexes (Complices?) you are going to give your children? Like, are you a neat freak and you just know you are going to breed children who cannot go to sleep if their stuffed animals are out of place? Or maybe you are super stranger-danger-phobic, and you have instilled in your children a deep fear of all people, and they will assume that every person they pass is going to accost and torture and murder them? Perhaps you are afraid of sheep and your children scream every time they hear "Mary Had a Little Lamb." You get my point.

Well, I already know what my kids' neuroses will be. HAH! You think I'm going to say germs! Well that goes without saying. I plan to raise tiny tiny robots who use Clorox Wipes as toilet paper and who take bleach baths and who drink shots of Purell thrice daily. Bygones.

However, my other deepest darkest secret is that I am a choke-phobe. I am terrified that my kids will choke. And I know I'm instilling this fear in them. I must say at least 40 times a day, "Stop talking while you eat you'll choke." "Do not laugh and eat, you'll choke." "Please take super little careful bites, I don't want you to choke." "Tiny bites! I SAID TINY BITES!" "Stop doing weird inhaley things while you eat your sandwich, you'll choke." "We do not sing whilst we eat." "QUIT LAUGHING." "STOP FUCKING AROUND WHILE YOU'RE HAVING LUNCH, YOU'LL CHOKE GODDAMMIT." (That's only on a bad day.)

I just know my children are going to grow up thinking that they'll die of sandwich-asphyxiation or carrot-hack. I am just waiting for the day when I walk in on Maya playing with her dolls, and hearing her admonish them, "Take tiny bites of cake, Runchel,* I don't want you to gruesomely die right before my very eyes. RUNCHEL YOU COULD CHOKE!!111122!@"

*Runchel is the name she invented for her very favorite dollbaby.

Anyway. I don't know how to fix this situation. I don't know how to find a happy medium. As it is with so many other things in my life.

How do you ever let your kid gnaw on a raw carrot? How do you ever give them a whole apple without slicing it tissue-thin? How do you let them eat the shit out of a hotdog without dicing it into microscopic pieces? Godsakes how do you let them eat innocuous things like cereal and not tell them, "Fucking quit fucking laughing with your baby sister right fucking now, you'll both fucking DIE!!"

Above all else, how do you let them eat OMG whole grapes?! When is the day you decide, "OK, now my child is ready to shovel perfectly sized choking hazards down her gullet"?

When I was 19, I choked on a bite of salad. CHOKED-choked, not just sort of got it halfway down the wrong pipe. I was with a friend and I was just about to laugh, and I inhaled, and *thwap* a piece of lettuce completely sealed off my airway. With an audible thunk. I stood up, flailing, unable to even cough. Eventually I managed to push out the last remaining air I had in my lungs and barely dislodge the lettuce, enough to gasp and wheeze and let air whistle & screech through my windpipe. I coughed and coughed for like an hour, trying to fix things. Through the grace of God I am here to tell you this tale.

Yesterday I choked on a minuscule piece of ground beef. A crumb, really. Like, choked quite badly. Thought, "What if I sit here and die right in front of my two children because I can't get any air in or out?" Finally managed to get my lungs to cooperate and un-seize so I could cough.

So I know that choking can happen at any age, with any food. It's a lifelong hazard. But I am just terrified it will happen to my kids.

How do you get over something like this? Or, how do you just accept the fact that you are creating mini-paranoiacs?

Monday Musings. Plus Lots of Other Random All-Consuming Fears, Unfounded or Otherwise.

This is rather a grim Monday Musing, and it has nothing to do with germs whatever, but who said I have to muse about germs? I have a lot of phobias and fears and it's my blog and I can muse about whatever I want to JEEZE. 

Today, I was musing about eyeglasses. Specifically, what happens if you're wearing eyeglasses in the car and you are in a horrible, tragic car accident? And even more specifically, if the airbag goes off and bashes you about the face? Do your eyeglasses shatter into pieces or crack in half, the force of impact shoving them into your poor innocent unsuspecting eyeballs, giving your gruesome and devastating ocular injuries?

One wonders.

This is the kind of thing my brain things about constantly. 

While we're at it and a bit off topic, let me list for you the other things I'm terrified of that don't have to do with my germ phobia:

Other things I'm freaked about:

• Driving over a cigarette that someone flicks out of their car while driving--I'm afraid it will get caught in the underworkings of my car and it will explode my ride.

• We have ancient and very very not-up-to-code springs in the garage door and every time I press the button to open the garage door I am afraid they will spring loose and I and my children will be decapitated.

• I am afraid of spiderwebs everywhere and I walk around waving my arms wildly and bowing with my arms straight out as if praising the doorstep or giving worship to the gateway. If I do walk through a spiderweb, I panic and shriek and shriek and do a manic shaking flapping jumping flailing dance to try to rid myself of a spider that may or may not be on me, including flipping my hair upside down and raking my fingers through it and tousling it and shaking it all about. The I do the hokey pokey and I turn myself around. That's what it's all about.

That's really me. I guess I was embracing my fear that Halloween.

• I'm afraid of anything pressing on my temples. No massage, no sleeping with my hand under the side of my face, etc. Because when I was little, my mom told me that pressing on my temples could cause me to die. True? False? WHO CARES. It's ingrained in my psyche.

• I'm afraid of touching lunch meat and then not washing, because I'm afraid of getting listeria on my hands and giving it to my baby from touching said lunch meat and not washing thoroughly afterward. Even though listeria is really only an issue when you consume it while pregnant.

• Every since I read about two boys who dropped a rock from an overpass, and it killed a pregnant woman driving underneath, I constantly envision people dropping rocks from overpasses and one falling through my car window and smashing me to smithereens.

• We have huge old trees in our backyard and every time there's wind, I'm afraid one will crash through our bedroom window and, yes, smash us to smithereens.

• When driving on the freeway, I'm afraid of ladders or lumber or pipes or things falling off trucks in front of me and impaling me--I will switch lanes if I am driving behind a truck carrying lumber or other metal poles or such.

• If I am driving in a two-lane road, I am terrified, TERRIFIED, BEYOND TERRIFIED, that the other car will cross the center line and, you got it, smash me to smithereens. If it's a four-lane road, I will always drive in the far right lane. If my husband is driving, I announce, "DANGER LANE!" until he moves over.

• I worry about getting stuck in traffic under an overpass and that there will be an earthquake at that very moment and I will be, um, smashed to smithereens by falling overpass.

• I an obsessed with the terribly, horrible, gut-churning idea of my babies choking. Maya likes to eat gummy fruit, which are about yay big, the size of a small marble, and yet do you know what I do? I CUT THEM. I cut them until they are the size of a huckleberry.

Behold, gummies pre-cut. Note the ring for comparison.

Perfect choking size, am I right?

Well here's what I do. I slice those fuckers until they are half or a quarter of that size:

And often, even smaller. I am so, so afraid of my babies choking. 

Even gummy bites cut in half seem too scary for me.

More things I am terrified of:

• Getting papercuts on my tongue when licking envelopes.

• Unloading the knives out of the dishwasher--I'm convinced I will get a huge gash or a cut from reaching in to take out the cutlery.

• When driving right beside a semi-truck on the freeway, I'm afraid it will blow a tire and the tire will explode out and will hit me and I will either swerve out of my lane to my doom or be forcibly thrown over a lane by the exploding tire, again, to my doom.

• I'm terrified of driving and parking in downtown Seattle. The one-way streets throw me for a loop, and the brazen pedestrians cross the street at will without having the right of way so I'm always afraid I will hit someone, and the only parking available is parallel parking, and even though I technically know how to parallel park and fucking aced my fucking driver's test, I get sick to my stomach having to do it in live traffic, stopping right there in the lane, putting on my signal, and hoping people will give me enough room to back into my spot. Then I always mess it up the first time and my blood pressure goes through the roof and I have to try again, and meanwhile angry Seattle drivers are fed up with me, and I just want to crawl into my glove compartment and hide forever. So basically, if I can help it, I never, EVER drive downtown.

• I lock the car doors if I'm at a stoplight and I see someone on the sidewalk who I fear will try to enter my car and accost me.

• I always fear that waitresses bringing over a tray of several refilled drinks for several different customers will mix them up and give me some herpiatic cold-ridden nasty stranger's Sprite or mixed drink.

Which one's which? Whose is whose???

• I'm afraid of catching blood-borne diseases or a raging fungal infection while getting a manicure.

• I'm afraid of re-breaking my nose, and because my baby tends to bash her head into mine as I hold her. I never look at her straight on as I hold her close. I keep my head turned. I'm afraid she'll slam her head right into my poor damaged nose.

Happy on drugs:

Hours later, miserable, hotpacked with terrible nose and ear pain:

DO NOT WANT TO HAPPEN AGAIN.

• I'm afraid that my husband will keep forgetting to clean the dryer lint trap and it will cause a fire (it really can!). So I check it obsessively. 

• I actually spend a great deal of time worrying about having a brain aneurysm or choking to death while I'm at home alone and leaving my babies unattended and thus very unsafe.

• Every. Single. Time I step down the two steps into the baby's room, I'm afraid I will trip and fall on her and crush her.

• I'm afraid, no matter how many times I check (and I check 479 times a day), that our back sliding glass door will be unlocked and an intruder will come in. I yank on that sucker every time I pass it, even when I know that it was locked three motherfucking minutes ago and nothing's changed since.

I don't know. There's so many more. I guess that's enough for today.