I don’t travel often for my job. In fact, it is a rare thing for me to leave the kids behind for anything. However, once in a blue moon, I am able to do just that. In fact, I am going out of town this week. I know that I am leaving my kids in the more-than-capable hands of my husband. Yet, he is not me. He has his way of doing things. They are not usually my way of doing things, though. And, yes, I will admit that his way does work. The kids are happy. But I worry anyway.

And I make lists. Many, many lists. I make lists with the schedule. I make lists with phone numbers. I make lists about the lists to make sure everyone knows where to find the lists. This family is more than prepared when I leave town than they are when I am at home.

It is silly for me to worry, really. The teenagers barely notice I am gone except when it comes to food or the lack thereof. It is my daughter that always gives me a catch in my throat when I have to leave. She is great about it. She barely misses a beat when it comes to my leaving. Yet I am a mess.

I am not a meticulous housekeeper, by any stretch of the imagination. When it comes to cleaning and cooking and other domestic pursuits, good enough is…well, good enough. It’s a busy life we’re living, and I have better things to do than worry over whether the window cleaner left streaks on the back door. (Do you like how I just made it sound like I’ve been cleaning my windows? Honesty alert: it was the only example I could think of. I haven’t cleaned my back-door window in ages. See? Not meticulous.)

But there is one area where I’m picky: laundry.

Last week I heard about this story of a woman who allowed her 9 yr old son to ride the subway alone and make his way home to their apartment. Ironically enough, I was in New York City at the time.

At first I was aghast. My goodness, who in their right mind would ever let a 9 yr old out of their sight in the dangerous city. Much less allow him to navigate the subway system. But then I read the article the mother wrote for The Sun in which she explains herself:

"Parents are in the grip of anxiety and when you're anxious, you're totally warped," the author of "A Nation of Wimps," Hara Estroff Marano, said. We become so bent out of shape over something as simple as letting your children out of sight on the playground that it starts seeming on par with letting them play on the railroad tracks at night. In the rain. In dark non-reflective coats.

The problem with this everything-is-dangerous outlook is that over-protectiveness is a danger in and of itself. A child who thinks he can't do anything on his own eventually can't.

My 8-year-old son has a girlfriend. Not a girl friend. A girlfriend.

Not that they talk to each other much. Or even make eye contact. I think I can describe their relationship as standing next to each other while simultaneously pretending the other person doesn't exist.

But my son makes things for her. Drawings and cards mostly, where he gushes his love. I know this because he can not spell well and so asks me to write things on the drawings like "You are beautiful" or "Don't tell your annoying little brother that I made this for you." I try not to comment when he hands me a picture with cupids shooting arrows at hearts all over it. Or point out that the hearts don't usually drip blood into big gruesome puddles.

When I was a child and wanted to do something that was not allowed, my mother would say to me, "It isn't you I don't trust. It is the rest of the world."

Oh how I hated that answer. "If you trusted me enough you would know that I could take care of myself!" I would retort.

Because surely it was reasonable to be 11 years old and want to ride my bike to the public beach and hang out there all day all alone while my mother was at work. She was so unreasonable.

Now that I have a child who is old enough to ask to do completely ridiculous things, I find myself tempted to say similar things. But the fact is that I don't trust him. At 12 years old he is not mature enough to handle himself unsupervised in all situations. Are some 12-year-olds? Maybe, though I doubt he is more immature than other children his age.