by Joyce Slaton posted in Products

So you have a baby. For a long, long time, you're almost literally attached at the hip, or sometimes the boob, cuddling, feeding, soothing, holding. The baby gets bigger; she's able to run off on her own under your watchful eye. Bigger still, she goes off to school! And you're away from her all day long, yet still delivering her to and from every day: meeting a bus, lining up at the pickup spot.
Then one day, suddenly, she's old enough to take herself to school. She gets up, gets ready, goes out the door all by herself. Poof! She's away from your sight, your earshot, your supervision. And you're supposed to be totally okay with that.
I wasn't. Here's a photo I took the first day I let my daughter walk to school with a group of neighbor girls as I stood crying on the corner watching her walk away from me and get smaller and smaller and smaller:
I sat at home all day feeling sick to my stomach. I pictured cars flying through red lights and hitting her, her tripping and falling into the road. I thought about kidnappers. I thought about menacing men with no faces. I wondered if the school would call to let me know if she never made it there. I wondered what getting that call would be like.
By the time she made it home I had worked myself up to a panic. And so it went. Every day, she left, I worried about her, I wanted to cry with relief when she walked back in the door.
If only I could watch her when she was away from me, know that she made ...