I read a couple of reviews of Rabbit Hole, but even that was difficult. Because my children are still small and somewhat helpless, I feel so, so protective of them. This is the most primal force in my life: to keep my kids safe and happy. So the notion that something horrible could happen to them is what keeps me awake in the middle of the night.
Literally. After reading The New Yorker's review of Rabbit Hole one night, I got into bed and tried to sleep. I couldn't help it, nightmarish visions infected my brain: me driving with the kids in back, the car skidding on ice and crashing, flipping...me regaining consciousness only to find the broken, bloody, lifeless bodies of my two lovelies lying by the side of the road.
No, no, stop! Go away! There is no worse image for a parent.
When these horrible thoughts plague me, I force myself to think about something (anything!) else: how I'm going to decorate the dinosaur cake for my son's birthday party, what I need to pick up at Target, etc. I make myself breathe deeply and slowly until the panic subsides. The toxic visions lurk at the edges of my mind, but I keep pushing them away until I finally fall asleep.
At these times, I'm always reminded of a girl I used to know.
During college, I spent a summer studying in Salamanca, Spain. One weekend, a few of us American girls decided to take the train to Portugal. It was a night train, and if I recall correctly, we had beer, so everyone started opening up and sharing their stories. I think we were talking about divorce, and this one girl was explaining why her parents had split up. I'll never forget her story.
She was six years old, playing in the front yard with her three-year-old brother.
"My mom asked me to keep an eye on him," she said.
But since she was only six, of course her attention wandered. Her father had an errand to run. He got into his pickup truck, backed down the driveway, and ran over his three-year-old son, who was in the driveway and in the truck's blind spot. The boy died.
"I was supposed to be watching him," the girl whispered.
Her parents couldn't deal with the grief--it split them up. And 14 years later, this sweet, pretty 20-year-old was still carrying around an awfully heavy load of guilt. I couldn't even imagine how her parents might still be feeling.
She pops into my mind occasionally--when I read reviews of movies like Rabbit Hole, or when some horrible tragedy is splashed across the newspapers (like the "Tragedy on the Taconic" in 2009)--and I wonder how she's doing.
But mostly I just get scared that it could happen to me.
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