Obviously, as a mother, something you DON’T WANT TO DISCOVER is that your toddler has picked up a drug addict’s thrown-away hypodermic syringe with exposed needle!

But that is what happened last week.

My 1.5 year old toddler was wandering towards me, proudly waving something he had found, as he often does, at the edge of the lake in the local park.

Usually, it is a chewed up tennis ball, or a confectionary packet, or a plastic bottle top. But this time it was the potential for my baby to get AIDS or Hepatitis or god knows what else.

I’m sure you can imagine my TERRIFYING,  CHILLING, UTTER HORROR… as I realised what it was.

I snatched it away from him, stripped him off, and searched his skin for any signs of a needle prick.

Once I assured myself he was unharmed, I felt a wave of sickening anger surge through me. The kind of anger driven by fear and anger. I wanted to roar. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to cry.

How can this happen in my park. Near my home. How could anyone be so cruel, and unthinking, as to throw such a thing into a drain, where it would wash down into a lake?

I guess that is what happens when you are on drugs.

And then I felt sorry for who ever he or she was. I mean, I don’t imagine that whoever did this dreamed of growing up to be a drug addict when they were at school. They probably thought, as I did, that their future life would be perfect, and they would be everything they wanted to be, a lawyer, a movie star, or a plumber or something. How did they become so lost they ended up on drugs?

But I was still so outraged and scared and sickened and angry.

And then I felt weak at the knees with relief that Liam was okay… and that he didn’t even realise he had been in danger.

So there I was.

Sad, relieved, angry, frightened and sympathetic, all at once.

Sigh. Life is so complicated.