Parents & Worst Case Scenarios

Once, I told my father I wanted to ride an elephant in Thailand. He put down his paper, looked at me with a jaw slack with incredulity and said, ‘why would you want to do that? It will reach up with its trunk, pull you of its back and put you in its mouth. It will kill you.’ I stared at him. He cleared his throat, and went back to the paper. Contextually, it might help if I tell you this is the same man who forbade my mother from taking her photograph with the MGM lion, when they were dating, because he was concerned it would break its shackles and bite her head off. The lion was, at this point in its life, ripe for taxidermy. However, the possibility of an elephant hoisting me off its back and popping me, whole, into its mouth is bordering on farcical and next to the elephant plucking me off its back with its trunk and skewering me on its tusks, or pinning me to the ground then stomping on me, the absolute worst outcome an elephant ride could reach.

This tendency to point out the worst case scenario is something of a skill that I think we develop some time soon after the birth of our first child. At some point, it ceases to be enough to simply say ‘don’t do that you’ll hurt yourself,’ and becomes necessary to imbue a simple act with a range of dire consequences a la ‘don’t do that, you’ll trip and fall chest-first on a skyward pointing shard of glass’ or ‘be careful you don’t slip land with your neck at a strange angle, and choke on your tongue.’

My mother has a stash of automatic Worst Case Scenarios she uses for the most banal of activities.

‘Careful going for your walk Livvy, you don’t want cars to career into you.’

‘Just be careful on the boat, you don’t want to fall overboard and drown, or worse, get eaten by a shark.’

‘Put shoes on Livvy, you don’t want a snake to chase you, pin you down, bite you and kill you.’

‘Don’t ever lock the bathroom door, what if you slip and break your neck in the shower, no one can get in to help you.’

‘Oh don’t step there Livvy, there’s some glass, you’ll slice your Achilles and bleed to death.’

The thing is, WCS are often uttered in calming tones as Mum brews herself a cup of tea, as if these dire words of warning are a simple greeting.

‘Hi Mum, did I tell you I’m off to London next month?’

‘Oh fantastic, do be careful of suicide bombers though.’

Because I will go out of my way to chat to men with darting eyes and bulging trench coats. I realise such a description could be of the local flasher, and I wouldn’t go out of my way to chat to him either.

Mum’s calmness is in stark contrast to my father’s widened eyes and escalating voice. One can only assume it is because mothers are so much more practiced at the WCS, it is second nature, whereas fathers still feel they need to inject their warnings with warranted theatrics. They haven’t quite cottoned on to the fact that extremes lost their impact when we turned thirteen and realised we weren’t going to break our necks every time we sped our walking pace up on tiles. In fact, despite the fact my father’s three children are young adults and have weathered the maternal WCS storm, he is still not one to shy away from hyperbole. He has been known to hiss, upon hearing I was going to a gig in a certain part of Sydney, ‘schweppes, that’s stabbing town Livvy,’ and then look at me like he knew I wasn’t really going to a gig, I was actually going to complete an illicit drug deal.

Part of me suspects parents employ Worst Case Scenarios for their own entertainment. There has to be a level of boredom alleviation. One gets tired of repeating oneself; over time ‘don’t run on the tiles, you’ll slip’ loses its lustre and the need to jazz it up arises. I think there may also be an element of competition, within themselves, to see just how bad they can get an outcome to be. Can they feasibly weave a nail gun accidentally misfiring into a warning of how dangerous too much caffeine can be? Can they up the ante from last week’s ‘be careful you don’t lose control of those scissors and slice through your rib-cage, into your heart’ to a more dramatic, yet still subtle, ‘be careful when you’re slicing cheese you don’t slip and plunge the knife deep into your sternum, severing a vital artery on the way.’

Of course, occasionally, these worst case scenarios come to fruition. My mother did always warn me to give bull terriers a wide berth, and the one time I didn’t have her calmly telling me it would go for my throat and never let go – ‘they’re trained to lock their jaws Livvy, they don’t let go till you’re dead’, one went for my thigh. Thank God it wasn’t a fleshier part of my body, otherwise I would have been toast, something both Mum and Dad repeatedly told me. In fact when I called my parents to tell them of this latest escapade (I was in Greece at the time) Dad came on the line and said, sans any sort of formal greeting/check on my welfare,

‘Do you have rabies?’

‘No, Dad I don’t have rabies.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘It happened yesterday and I feel fine.’

‘If you start sweating profusely and get a high temperature, you have rabies. I’ll put you back on to Mum.’

‘Okay, bye Dad.’

Look, I’m sure that one day, when I have children, I will be telling them to guard their arterial veins and not walk with lollypops in their mouths. And it will probably be whilst I calmly brew myself a cup of tea. In fact, just the other day, I found myself saying to the six year old I look after, ‘be careful you don’t wriggle around too much in the bath, you’ll ingest water accidentally and choke, and my CPR is rusty.’

I’ve started already.

* Feature image of lollipop courtesy of Fran Ulloa on Flickr

* Photo of the elephant is not the one I never rode in Thailand … although I’d imagine he would have looked something like this fellow.