My 22-year-old son spent last weekend ice fishing with buddies on some frozen lake in central Minnesota.
He’s an experienced angler and has driven on many frozen Minnesota lakes to auger countless holes in ice to retrieve untold numbers and species of fish.
Therefore, I told myself (again) I should not worry that my firstborn will fall through the ice surface and plunge to a frigid death.
But I’m his mother.
So I worry.
That’s what mothers do.
Not that it changes anything.
Worrying never does.
But it doesn’t stop loving mothers worldwide from worrying about everything from “Are they eating enough vegetables?” to “Are they wearing their seatbelts?”
The list is endless …
… and exhausting to the really dedicated worriers.
I’m trying to get my worrying under control.
For example, I no longer worry about widowed socks in the laundry. I used to feel lonely for them, but more often than not, their wayward partners show up and they’re happily reunited. The ones who don’t remarry get tossed. The end.
I also no longer worry about the weather. Experience has proven I can’t control Mother Nature. I can only control whether or not I drive in a blizzard. Which I don’t.
But sometimes my children and husband do, and in those cases I try not to worry.
I used to worry about running out of topics for my column, but in 25 years at the Star Herald, it’s never happened, nor have we ever run out of news to share with readers.
The bigger worry is how we’re going to fit the infinite news possibilities into a finite work week and limited number of pages. This is a happening community, and I used to worry we’re overlooking some major news.
But I don’t worry about that anymore, because we’ll never wrap our notebooks and cameras around all the news. Lots of great stories get away.
We just do the best we can with the information we’re able to track down.
Yes, I’ve let go of lots of worries.
Instead I pray.
Especially about the big things that moms — or any human beings for that matter — would never begin to control.
We need to leave those things to a much higher power; to worry would imply that we don’t trust His plan.
And so, we trust, and we hope, and we pray.
And try not to worry.