Safe is a Strange Word

When I was young, safety was mostly a person. My mother and grandparents were part of my daily life, but my grandfather was often the person I went to when something had gone wrong. He was patient. He listened. He explained things without making me feel foolish for not already knowing them. Sometimes he fixed the problem. Sometimes he helped me figure out how to fix it myself.

More than anything, he gave me somewhere to catch my breath.

He didn't protect me from every mistake or uncomfortable experience. He wanted me to learn, think for myself and understand the world around me. I could retreat for a little while, get my bearings, and then go back out into it.

I didn't understand that as a definition of safety at the time. It was simply what being safe felt like.

By sixteen, I was largely figuring things out for myself. I had already spent years helping manage a household, and independence came early. It also stuck. I am fiercely independent now, and I suspect some part of me learned very young that competence was its own kind of protection.

If I could handle things myself, I would be okay.

That belief served me well. It still does. Being capable is useful, particularly when life becomes complicated. But capability and safety aren't quite the same thing.

As I got older, safety accumulated more recognizable furniture. A marriage. A house. Financial stability. Routine. Knowing what tomorrow was likely to look like and what was expected of me. They were the things I associated with a secure adult life.

For a long time, I mistook the structure for proof.

Those things really could create stability. They could make life easier and more predictable. What they couldn't do was guarantee that the people inside that life were safe.

I learned that distinction in a way I would not have chosen. Someone I trusted more than almost anyone violated that trust profoundly. I don't need to revisit the details to know what it changed. Familiar stopped being evidence. So did history, promises, roles, or the fact that someone had occupied a particular place in my life for a long time.

That left me with the considerably more complicated task of figuring out what safe actually looked like.

Strangely, some of it didn't feel safe at first.

A calm response when I expected anger could make me wait for the anger to arrive. Saying no could feel uncomfortable even when the answer was simply accepted. Disagreement could leave me braced for consequences that never came. I had to learn that discomfort wasn't necessarily a warning. Sometimes it was just something unfamiliar.

I've become much more interested in what people do when things don't go their way. Anyone can be easy to be around when everyone agrees and the day is cooperating. Tell someone no. Change the plan. Make a mistake. Disagree with them. Give them information they don't particularly want to hear.

What happens next tells me considerably more.

Safety, I've learned, is often surprisingly undramatic. A boundary is accepted without punishment. A disagreement remains a disagreement. A changed plan doesn't become a crisis. I can rest, be ridiculous, change my mind, admit I don't know something, or simply stop monitoring the mood of the room.

I no longer want to outsource my safety.

That doesn't mean I don't trust other people or that I need to do everything myself. My grandfather was someone I could depend on. I could rely on him without giving up any part of myself in the process.

What has changed is that I no longer expect another person, a relationship, a house, or a predictable life to make me safe simply by existing. I pay attention. I trust behavior more than roles. I can set a boundary, leave something that isn't right for me, ask for help when I need it, and decide for myself where my trust belongs.

Having children has made all of this considerably less theoretical.

The more people I have lost over the years, the harder it has become not to imagine everything that could happen to them. Sometimes I have to remind myself that at their age I was already out in the world making choices considerably more questionable than anything they're doing.

I know where they are. I know who they're with. I can text them. If my imagination becomes particularly ambitious, I can check their location and confirm that civilization has not collapsed in the twenty minutes since I last heard from them.

Then I have to let them experience their lives.

I don't want my fear to become the boundary of their world. I want them to have the freedom to explore, make decisions, make mistakes, learn what they can handle and discover what matters to them. I can't make sure nothing bad ever happens.

What I can do is give them skills for navigating the world and somewhere safe to come back to when they need to catch their breath.

I suppose I've come back around to my grandfather after all.

I understand the temptation to make life smaller. Once you know how quickly it can change, predictability can become very appealing. You can avoid the unfamiliar, keep everyone you love close, make careful choices and try to reduce

the number of opportunities life has to surprise you.

I don't want that life.

The expected is boring, and life is too short to hide from experiencing it. I still want unfamiliar cities, new people, changed plans, ridiculous ideas and things I haven't learned how to do yet. I want my children to have those things too.

There will always be risk in that. There is risk in loving people in the first place.

As a child, safety was somewhere I could go when the world became too much. For a while, I thought adulthood meant building a life secure enough that I wouldn't need somewhere to retreat.

Now I think my grandfather had it right all along.

He gave me a place to catch my breath, helped me understand what I was dealing with, and trusted me to go back out into the world.

I've spent a lot of years changing my definition only to arrive somewhere remarkably familiar.

I still want a safe place to land.

I just don't want to live there.