How to Be a Safety Queen

Being a Safety Queen isn’t about using common sense and modern methods to encourage safety for your family—anyone can do that; a Safety Queen wages an all-out war on potential catastrophe every single day, with every breath she takes.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

1. Safety Queen status can start as soon as parenthood is impending. Begin by reading baby magazines, baby-proofing guides and noticing every horror story in the local news about mishaps with crib railings, pit bulls and homicidal babysitters.
2. If pregnant, allow the hormones to take you beyond common sense and reality; obsess over articles on premature birth, rare diseases, SIDS, kitty litter and shaken baby syndrome.
3. Once your precious bundle arrives, whether by birth, adoption, fostering or marriage, dive into parenting with reckless abandon, losing all sense of self and wallowing in the miracle of motherhood.
4. Once bonded with your child, consider your environment with new eyes, seeing potential danger in every crevice (smothering), small smooth object (choking), hooded sweatshirt string (strangulation) and painted window frame (lead).
5. Take every precaution: lead tests, radon tests, crib nets, stair gates, cupboard locks; hire a safety company to supervise, then double check their work.
6. Share your constant concerns with anyone who will listen. Make a mantra of your fears, thinking the spoken word will ward off disaster, and that unlisted dangers lurk ready to pounce.
7. Having alienated everyone you know with your gloom and doom dialogue—except other Safety Queens—continue to hover over your child, ensuring safety as only a mother can.
8. Once your child enters school, and is beyond your protecting arms and eyes, a) obsess about the state of the schools, the quality of government lunches, guns on the playground, Internet predators, teen sex and whether you can afford a good college, b) have another baby, or c) get a life and some perspective.

Tips & Warnings

• Anyone can follow expert advice; what separates a Safety Queen from a normally protective parent is that she NEVER FORGETS the potential danger. It sits like an ever-present malignant troll in the frontal lobe of her brain, spouting safety statistics like a ticker-tape machine.
• When constant vigilance, sleepless nights, selfless living and marital strife take their toll, Safety Queens can seek psychiatric help in the form of counseling, medication or both.
• As a Safety Queen, avoid supervising field trips, since the manic wanderings and erratically unsafe behavior of 35 school age children could overwhelm your synaptic security cameras and make your head explode.
• Describing your in-laws’ home as a “safety nightmare” or “den of danger” could alienate them—consider sharing your concerns sotto voce and alone with your spouse, rather than loudly in the kitchen with the entire extended family present.
• Being a Safety Queen will not make you a GOOD MOTHER or protect your child from accidents, childhood injuries or terrorist threat. While the intentions are good—protecting the ones you love—obsession could cause ulcers, premature gray hair, divorce and avoidance by the other moms at school who are working hard at banishing their own internal Safety Queens.
• There is a little Safety Queen in most mothers. Keeping a sense of humor about your fears can help gain perspective, and keep your inner Safety Queen from ruling your life, padding your child and sucking all the fun from your parenting years.