Cling-Ons

Blimey. Splashed all over today's news is a picture of the missing Madeleine McCann. It's a mock-up of how she would look today at the age of nine, five years after her disappearance from a hotel in Portugal while on holiday with her parents and twin siblings. Fuckadoodledo if this isn't most spine-chilling story for anyone who's experienced an exploded vagina, or at least witnessed one. I have one nagging problem with it though...

You know, even five years after the event and the thousand times I have envisaged how I would react if Kraken Junior disappeared (badly. Terminally badly), I still can't get my sweating brain over how Maddie and her siblings were left alone in the hotel room while their parents went out for dinner. Yes, yes, yes, I know that the restaurant was just across the pool from the room and that the parents checked on the kids every half an hour but, fuck me...is that really a risk worth taking?

Aye, it's easy to become dangerously obsessed with your kids to the point that you could accidentally become conjoined. I never quite rest unless I can see or at least hear Kraken Junior, hollering my location across the house at her if I so much as go for a shit. It's the same wherever we go and whatever bollocks we do. In the summer I love evenings in the garden but my creeping fear that KJ could need me while I'm casually flicking my snot into the grass keeps me in earshot and close to the back door. 

So it's utterly beyond me that I would ever leave her in an unlocked room hotel room while I dined with mates, even if said eaterie was so much as a burger van ten yards away. 

Ok, Ok, so this says way more about my insecurity than it could about the life-changing mess the McCanns have been pitched into, but isn't just the vague perception of danger enough to make a parent careful to the point of insanity? Isn't it the same cold fear that drives us to always put babies to sleep on their backs and makes us rush, screeching, to A&E when our firstborns develop strange rashes?

This is in no way a condemnation of the McCanns. Fuck knows if they haven't already turned themselves inside out and punished themselves daily for what has befallen them. It's an existence that I can't even imagine surviving. Yet I still find myself taken by the urge to shake them and ask, "What? What were you thinking?"

Tragedies can happen to anyone. Shit slops down onto the most virtuous of parents. But sometimes it pays to keep up an umbrella, even if this makes us laughably and embarrassingly cautious. I realise how nuts my motherly radar makes me look and how I could probably do with releasing the reins but, on the offchance - even the vaguest most absurd offchance - that something goes terribly and horrifically wrong, I'll keep clinging on, thanks. 

KJ is the same age that Maddie was when she disappeared. I don't want to have to imagine her from her on in. I'd rather see her in all her snotty glory and for that I'll never, ever understand what the McCanns are thinking now, and most of all, when they were thinking then.