I did not sleep a wink last night… well, not until the wee early hours of this morning when my hubby came home.

I’ve mentioned a number of times that my husband is a long distance truck driver who is usually away from home for a week at a time.  This arrangement has afforded me the best of both worlds, especially pre-children, as I was able to participate in committees and boards, go out to dinner with friends and participate in evening events without having to give any thought to the impact it would have on him.

Being an independent woman and very comfortable with my own company, I never held any fear of being on my own or alone in a house at night.  I’m the type of gal that is likely to head outside to investigate a noise (just like those silly people in horror movies do) without a second thought.  Intruders or trespassers have never been of concern. I’ve always been confident in my own abilities to handle myself and have never once been scared for my safety whilst at home.

But yesterday all this changed. Before you visualise a break-in or an intruder in my home, I want to assure you I’m ok and no one broke into my house!  Someone did however break into my neighbour’s car the night before last and for some reason it’s spooked me greatly.  My neighbour (who also works for the same organisation that I do) lives two blocks over so that in between our houses is a vacant block of land.  She emailed me to tell me her husband’s car, which is always parked out the front of their house overnight, had been broken into.  They stole his wallet (yes, she gave him a serve for that) and a few incidentals but that was it.  Police were called, the incident was reported and that was that.

But it’s made me nervous.  But I don’t think it’s because of a car being broken into, we’ve had our car broken into before and I never felt this way.  Today I think I worked out what it was and it’s got a lot to do with this:

Late last week, I came across this ‘Meth, not even once’ advertising campaign video above by the Meth Project.  If you haven’t seen this I highly recommend watching it.  If you did watch it, what did you think? I found it confronting and compelling and from a marketing perspective, quite well done.  I also found it scary and it made me fearful about the future for my girls.  In addition to this, I also happened to watch a story on Sunday on our National TV program 60 Minutes about a mum of three who became addicted to ICE which you can read here.

Clearly all this ICE talk has been stewing around in my subconscious for the last couple of days and upon hearing about the neighbour’s car being broken into, for the first time in my life I was afraid of being home on my own.  We have a significant ICE problem within our community, so it’s not the first time I’ve heard about the impacts and destruction that ICE creates.  But the video above took it to a whole new level for me.  After getting the girls to bed, I was going about the general tidying up around the house and had to take some garbage outside. At one point I was peering through the peephole and turning on every light in the house before I went outside just so I could make it very clear someone was home.  When I had to feed the dogs, I was worried that I would go outside to find them dead from being baited or witnessing someone half climbing over the fence and into my backyard.  I was planning escape routes around the house and wondering how would I get both girls into one room in a split second and which room would I pick.

And it was like I was floating above myself and watching someone I didn’t recognise.

My hubby actually came home last night in the wee early hours and I had given him the heads up about the neighbour’s car earlier that day and told him to bring in any valuables inside with him when he got home.  He came home to find the house lit up like a Christmas tree and all the backyard ablaze in lights. When he came to bed, I instructed him to call his locksmith mate to get a lock put onto our internal garage door, as there presently isn’t one so if the garage door happened to roll up or was broken into, there’s clear and easy access into the house.  The locksmith is coming on Friday!

Even to me, it seems a bit overdramatic to be feeling like this, after all, I don’t even know if the person who broke into the car was a drug addict or not.  I’m still trying to process it but I’m intrigued by my response and wondering where it changed.  Is it having kids or is it the information overload about ICE and the epidemic the world is facing? I’m not sure.  But whatever it is, I can tell you I don’t like it one little bit!!

Have you ever felt scared in your own home? Are you hearing a lot more about ICE/Meth in your town these days?