"Look, Mommy! Milk!"

I am convinced that fear is a useful emotion for a mother. Doesn't it help us protect our children? Hunter-gatherer mothers surely held their babies close at night while they slept to protect them from the dangers of wild animals and cold. Was this a sensible precaution or an instinctive fear? Do modern mothers ache to co-sleep because of some genetic instinct to keep their babies safe?

I am certain that fear has helped me keep my children safe. For example, take water safety. As a mother, my fear of them drowning makes me vigilant when even small bodies of water are visible, applying every safety tip I offer as a pediatrician. I counsel parents about how to keep their children from drowning and talk to them about developmentally appropriate precautions. But for parents to actually act on my suggestions, there has to be an element of will, concern, awareness that this risk is real. That caution in their particular setting is warranted. Sometimes that may come from knowledge, but it often comes from fear. If fear is just a useless emotion, separated from true danger and meant to be medicated, how do you reconcile that as a parent, your children are likely to almost always be at risk of something truly dangerous?

If I was not so afraid of Max losing his vision, would I be as insistent about him wearing his patch? My knowledge just magnifies my fear. Medicating my fear would put him at risk of losing his vision.
We went to pick up his glasses today. Ready for him to object, I planned that he could take off his patch when we tried on his glasses. But he still cried "No Mommy!" as he yanked off the thankfully durable steel frames. So I upped the ante. If he wore his glasses the whole time we were grocery shopping, then we could make cupcakes when we got home. He loved this idea and wore them happily as he "drove" the spaceship grocery cart up and down the aisles.

He kept pointing at things and showing them to me, as if he had never seen them before. The grocery store seemed more full of wonder than Costa Rica. "Look, Mommy! Milk!" He exclaimed, pointing at the wall of milk. Maybe he hadn't really seen things this clearly before, he certainly has never been so lively at Hannaford's.