The Thing Parents Don't Tell You

So, the fear started the night we brought Logan home.

This is pretty standard, I'm guessing: first-time parents hovering over the crib, wondering if the weird breathing sounds and pauses in their 2 or 3 day-old is normal. Even two highly educated physicians are not immune to this. In fact, we're probably worse because we ran through a list of potential horrifying things that could go wrong.

But it didn't go away. It just morphed into a different entity. Instead of being right out in the forefront of my thoughts, it hits me at the periphery and when I'm falling asleep. Especially when I'm falling asleep.

Every night, even now, at seven months, ends with fear. The cutting edge of your thoughts in which you wonder if this is the night that he rolls into a position he can't get out of and suffocates. During the day, when I help him sit up from lying down, and sometimes his wrist cracks a bit, I think: Did I dislocate his wrist? When Ripley sniffs around his feet, I think: She could bite his face faster than I could get there. When he's scarfing down his food and coughs a little, I think: He's going to aspirate, get a bad pneumonia and need to be intubated.

When I try to sleep, terribly scenarios run through my head: carrying him down the stairs, tripping and falling. Having him in the car and getting into a horrible wreck.  Him running into the street and getting struck by a car.

I banish these thoughts as fast as I can, but the absolute terror and bolt of fear is like nothing I've ever experienced before. I don't think it's making me into a crazy, over-protective mom, but I definitely do things like buy him his own seat on planes so he can be in his car seat not our laps, and thus, safer in the event of an on-the-ground collision. I also won't buy rice food for him any longer because of the arsenic thing. His car seat is in the center of my car, even though it kills my back to lean in like that, because it's safest.

Parents told us how hard it is to have kids, how awesome it is, and how potent the love is. Nobody ever told me about the panicky terror that grips you with astounding regularity. I don't think I'm the only one, but man, when Logan suddenly screams in the middle of the night, I'm halfway out of bed before I'm even awake. This has happened twice since he started sleeping in his own room. Both times he went right back to sleep, and I don't even leave our room, but apparently my system has been newly hard-wired to be on edge at all times when it comes to him.

Maybe it's this fear that makes the love feel so....fierce. Primal.  Like I might someday need to kill every single person to ensure that Logan got whatever he needed to survive. And I'd be totally fine with that, even though the very idea of killing anybody for any reason is abhorrent when I think about it in the daylight.

I'm guessing that even if someone had told me about the fear, just like with the love (which people DID tell me about) I wouldn't have understood it until I'd gone through it.

Yet another in the long line of things you discover about yourself when you have a child.