I often wonder if CaveMoms (yes I made that term up) had it better. Or maybe the correct term is easier. Aside from the obvious not having any modern medicine to rely upon and the occasional wild beast storming the camp, did they have less worries?
Sometimes I find myself spinning in a world of worry.
It starts gradually and then builds until I’ve decided it’s no longer safe to leave the house. Even the house can generate an innumerable amount of fear. And don’t even get me started with school and the internet. Those two things combined can make me decide that the Amish may have it right. I worry my children will get bullied, I worry they won’t make friends or that they’ll make the wrong friends. I worry that the economy will crash and our once comfortable lifestyle will cease to exist. Then I decide to go online and the worry explodes. I find myself falling head first into the vortex of stories about children getting injured and every single one makes me question how I am ever going to raise my children safely.
On top of worrying about virtually anything and everything, I sometimes think that this first world I live in makes me crazier than it should.
For instance, the CaveMom never had to wrangle a three-year-old into a car seat or have to clean a massive diaper explosion on the way to church. I don’t recall the CaveMom having to think about “nursing clothes.” She didn’t worry about a nursing cover or her breast pump or her two-door coupe becoming a minivan full of crushed crackers and boogers! She surely didn’t stress about getting up early in order to register her child for the most elite preschool only to find out that at 6:02am the class was already full.
No, the CaveMom had far fewer worries than I do.
And what about potty training? Child peeing in the cave? No worries, it’ll dry. Hard to distinguish the smell of urine from the smell of a musty cave.
On the other hand, the CaveMom didn’t have Starbucks, or epidurals, or most of her teeth. So, I guess while it may have been slightly less stressful I’d still take my world over hers any day. (Any day that my children aren’t running around like starving wild beasts attempting to zap any youth I have left that is).
NOT worrying is the hardest! And in our culture we always have someone to point out new things we SHOULD be worrying about 🙂 I took my son to a college class I teach and a student said I shouldn’t put him on my teacher chair because it was too tall – he could fall and get hurt. I complied, but later I thought…I know my son better than you do! He does well in chairs (for the most part). I wonder if CaveMoms were judgmental? Ex: “I heard Betty lets her kids pee in the cave!”
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