(Day 3 of the 30 day Writer’s Challenge @writersbootcmp). Read my other Writing Prompt posts here.
Today we have been asked to write about what we fear most. In South Africa, we all have the same “usual” fears of being attacked, robbed, hijacked etc, and these types of fear are so common, and so expected, that it is natural to dismiss them as “obvious”. Equally, I would imagine that any mother’s primary fear would be around the safety of her children. So I will treat these fears as a given, and try to dive deeper.
But even assuming the presence of these fears, my other fears still revolve around my children. I fear that I will not do right by them, and that I am a lesser parent than I should be. I am not striving for perfection, and I know that all parents make mistakes and we all have regrets. Yet it is a folly to assume that just knowing or acknowledging this makes you a good parent. That’s crap. The world is full of bad parents, and there are many children the worse for it. I want to give my kids everything I can, material and not, and I fear that at that I am failing miserably.
In similar vein, I fear fear dying too soon. I fear that I will die before I have made a difference to anybody or anything that is worthwhile and that is beyond merely existing. Certainly if I were to die tomorrow this would apply. I have just seem in my Twitter timeline a gorgeous quote from Carl Jung:
That’s how I feel about my life. And given that I am still in my very early forties, I pray that I will be given another forty years to put the extensive research into practice!
Over and above that I am scared that I disappoint those who are close to me. But I suspect that there will be a writing topic soon that will force me to talk about disappointment, so I think I will leave that discussion for then.
