Careless

I have a tendency to be careless with the things that I own. 

When changed out of for bed, my jeans tend to stay on the part of the floor they land on until reaching the washing bag the nexy day. 

My clean clothes don't get ironed as they will only get creased. 

I don't save anything for "best", because one cannot tell when "best" is, or indeed if it will ever come.  Better to live in the now and enjoy our possessions than to have a relative find the things we kept and never used on our passing.

I am, as I say, careless with the things that I own because they are only things.  I use them often, I enjoy them, and I have fun with what I have (which after several evictions and a number of moves is not a great deal).

I am not careless with the things that I do not own.  When I am loaned something, I am extremely careful with it because it does not belong to me, and as I have been entrusted with it it is my duty to ensure that it is kept with care and in the same state with which I received it.

It saddens me when other people do not have the same attitude to things that do not belong to them.

For example, I often say that I "have" t'midgets on borrow.  This is to remind me that they are not mine to keep, they belong to themselves, and that my job is to feed and water them until they are ready to get out there on their own.

I take great care with them because they do not belong to me. Whilst I am not a good parent by a great distance, it is highly unlikely that you would ever find my three year old wandering the corridors of a hotel at 11pm at night in urine sodden in their day clothes. 

There is no danger that a strange woman in a hotel will be the one to comfort my child as they cry inconsolably for their mother, tired and confused, nor that she will end up covered in my child's urine and be unable to change them because they are not her child and she is told not to do so.  I cannot conceive of a situation whereby this strange woman will hold my child close and tell them that it is ok, that she will help them, where she will struggle to return the child to its parent and room only to find two other children, the eldest of whom is 10, sleeping alone in a hotel room, all fully clothed, with a television brought from blaring out cartoons.

I can't think why I would leave my children in a room in such disarray and squalor that, despite having been there for two days it appears to have been lived in for many more than that.  I do not believe that the strange woman would have to make what appears to be increasingly hysterical and unreasonable demands to contact the police to the managers on duty who are more concerned with getting themselves home for the night, delaying taking the action that they know they need to take by repeating what the strange lady has told her about the legal age for leaving children unsupervised whilst the other fiddles with the cross around their neck being anything but christian in their actions.  That the strange woman will be telling her duty manager to phone all the managers above him to confirm that he should call the police, that she will have to tell him to call an inhouse manager, nor that she will end up shouting over her superior's voice as he leaves increasingly confused messages, that he will tell her to shut up and she will tell him that she will not.

I will not return to the hotel at 12.15am to be confronted by someone who has pulled from their bed, who does so with such grace and calm that the strange woman thinks that if her child turns out like that she will burst with pride?  Who then ensures that the matter is passed to the relevant authority, because it is the right thing to do and because they are a decent human being.

I don't believe that any of these things could ever happen with something that didn't belong to me. 

In a time when children are disappearing, when a parent is not prosecuted for their neglect because they are "professionals" or because they paid the ultimate price of leaving their child, that of their child's life, I don't see how any of us could knowingly be careless with something that does not belong to us ever again.

Tonight, I will hold my children tight and be grateful that I know the value of everything and the price of nothing, and that the cost of carelessness is not something that I am acquainted with.