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Sunday 20 March 2011

Tricks of the mind

It's amazing how easily your mind can start to play tricks on you when you're in the house alone at night. I use 'alone' in its loosest possible term as I'm not counting the 3 sleeping children and 2 cats, none of whom would be much use in a fight (unless there's a martial art which involves screaming very loud and very high that I haven't heard of; they'd be very good at that. The children, not the cats that is.); but I am technically the only responsible adult in the house.
I sent my eldest daughter down to the shop to get some milk this afternoon, and what I didn't realise until about five hours later was that she'd left the back door open. Not wide open, just not shut properly, and that's all my brain needed to go into paranoid mode.
[Just to explain - the back door is actually at the front of the house, but leads into the basement, which is why I didn't notice it until I went downstairs to do some washing.]
So I had a quick look round down there, mostly to make sure the cats hadn't escaped, and they hadn't so I carried on with what I was doing. About 10 minutes later I started thinking about how I'd been up on the top floor bathing the girls, and anybody could've come in without me noticing. The little rational corner of my brain told me I was being stupid. After all, we live in a pretty safe area; the house is a long way back from the road so it's not like anyone would be able to notice that the door was a teeny bit open when they were walking past, and presumably they would've shut the door properly behind them so it would look less suspicious.
Unfortunately the rational corner of my brain is but a whisper against the strident shouting of the irrational paranoid corner of my brain, who's also a bit of a smartarse and can come up with a rebuttal argument for any point you can make. Admittedly, this usually consists of  'ah, but you never know', but that can be surprisingly effective. It worked against the first two rational arguments, and then we went into double bluff for the third - would they have closed the door? Or would they have left it exactly as they found it, just in case it had been left that way intentionally in the first place and thus shutting it would have been more suspicious rather than less.
Naturally I gave into my irrational brain and went downstairs to perform a thorough check of every nook and cranny, just to be sure that no sneaky double bluffing burglar/rapist/murderer/werewolf was hiding down there. 3 circuits of the playroom, bathroom and utility room later, I'd just about convinced myself that all was well. It's still possible that I'll barricade the door downstairs just in case a very thin burglar/rapist/murderer/werewolf managed to hide behind the oil tank (the only place I didn't look, because the gap is so small only my 5 year old and the cats can fit through it), but hopefully rational me will win on this occasion.
I do suspect that this paranoid part is something that comes along with being a parent and having responsibility for small people. I distinctly remember in the years pre-children when I really did live on my own, once waking up in the middle of the night because I thought I heard a noise downstairs. I was so tired that the only thought that went through my mind that time was, "Well if there is someone down there, they can take what they like, just as long as they don't disturb me," after which I promptly went back to sleep. I really wish my brain still worked like that.
As it doesn't any more, I'm promoting my mental wellbeing on this occasion by watching a real life crime documentary before I go to bed.
Don't have nightmares.