For years, I thought my mother had some kind of personality flaw that caused her to imagine every awful thing that could possibly happen to me, as if her mind ran some constant mental version of Lemony Snicket's "A Series of Unfortunate Events." It seemed just ridiculous that, even after I'd been out in the world on my own, she'd still lie awake worrying about me. She really needed to get a grip.

Then, within hours of becoming a mother myself, I was appalled to discover my mind envisioning the most dreadful scenes of potential danger for our new little daughter. What kind of monster must I be to imagine things like this? Here I simply wanted to cradle this tiny pink bundle in contented bliss, but instead, all these hideous thoughts kept bludgeoning their way in. I figured it must be post-partum exhaustion.

As these scenes continued to hijack my unsuspecting thoughts, I finally confided in a friend about them.

"Oh, THAT," she said, the dismissive wave of her hand obviously meant to reassure me. "You can't help it. Now that you're responsible for someone so helpless, a part of you has shifted into 24-hour vigilance for any possibility of danger."

When I protested that having such things flash through my mind made me feel bad, as though I were somehow responsible for them, she insisted knowingly, "It's normal."

As years passed and our two children grew increasingly mobile, my mind's little screen of horrors (slowed, at times, by too little sleep or too many questions) began a pattern of looping in on itself to replay scenes of things that had almost happened. There were numerous such rewinds of our 4-year-old son's shout of, "Hey, Mom! Look!" when he dangled by one hand at the top of a slide at least 12 feet tall. In another frequent rerun, I'm struggling to cut open a box when our daughter, then 6, suddenly appears beside me at the foot of our basement stairs brandishing the largest carving knife we own and chirruping, "Will this help?" Beyond making it down those stairs safely with this terrifying object, she'd also had to climb up (and subsequently down) a counter to retrieve it from a rack mounted on the side of a kitchen cabinet — all in well under a minute. The dreadful potential ramifications of that scene still play in my head — and she's now 26.

Stage by developmental stage I watched our kids move off into their own lives. With the advent of their driver's licenses, I simply couldn't fathom how I'd ever been so callous and exasperated about my own mother's requests (made even after I had children of my own) that I call her after I'd arrived home safely. What arrogance of mine had scoffed at her lying awake until she'd heard my car in the drive, or heard my bedroom door close? How hadn't it all made complete sense to me all along?

My empathy deepened, of course, as our nest began to empty. In the case of our oldest child, it was as though a hurricane upended it overnight. Twelve hours after her high-school graduation, her father and I stood in the driveway in our pajamas waving her off as she struck out in her fully packed, aging Volvo for an internship on a North Carolina farm. When she was finally able to find a phone in that rural setting, nearly three days had passed and I had actually managed to live through them. So, when, short of becoming part of the space program, she next went as far away from home as she possibly could to live and work in China, I was pretty well conditioned for letting go.

I know today that if it hadn't been for a couple of very important discoveries, I'd have disintegrated under the weight of the world's hardest role, whose job description seems to demand holding as closely as you can while simultaneously letting go.

Early on, one of many wise friends who had survived this dilemma reminded me that, whatever my own personal faith happened to be, or not be, greater forces besides my own were at work in our children's lives. A kind companion during some rocky hours, she managed to impress on me the fact that life would feel a whole lot better each time I stopped and remembered this. And it does.

Another undeniably helpful strategy — one that's useful anyway if you're trying to practice parental vigilance — is to learn how to be more present in the moments you're already in. How I wish I'd learned this sooner. It's one of the very best parenting gifts to offer our kids. It automatically increases our ability to draw on the resources within ourselves, beyond ourselves, and also the ones that reside within our children.

One of my most instructive moments came when my son met my eyes earnestly as he acknowledged my concern for him and urged, "I can do this, Mom." The unspoken remainder of that plea was, "Please believe in me."

"In the treasuries of the knowledge of God there lieth concealed a knowledge which, when applied, will largely, though not wholly, eliminate fear," Baha'u'llah has written. This knowledge, he adds, should be taught from childhood, as it will greatly aid in the elimination of fear. "Whatever decreaseth fear increaseth courage," he reminds.

One of the big gifts our children offered me as a mother was that invitation to let go of fear, to surrender the worry that's often called "an insult to God," in order to be as fully present as possible in both their lives and my own.

Even though some of those Lemony Snicket scenes still creep into my head every once in a while (I'll always be a mom, after all), I can also see how they began to diminish the more I tried to express my personal faith by believing in our kids, and in life itself.

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Phyllis Edgerly Ring, mother of two, is a writer and editor. Her current book project addresses how adults can recognize and nurture children's spiritual nature. She is a former program director at Green Acre Baha'i School in Eliot, Maine, and has been a member of the Baha'i Faith for more than 30 years. Email her at {email columns@bahai.us}columns@bahai.us{/email}. See the website of the Baha'is of the United States for more information. © copyright 2007 by Phyllis Edgerly Ring.