The New Face of Fear
I've been scared before in my life, many times actually. I've been scared of the unknown and the known, scared of failure and even scared of success. Fear has driven many of the major decisions in my life. It's kept me complacent when I should have made changes, and has encouraged me to change when complacency was an old comfortable friend.
Yet I've never been as frightened as motherhood has made me. Sure, I was worried during my pregnancy, worried about the baby's health and about the delivery. But I was never afraid.
I got the first taste of the fear during labor. My labor wasn't progressing and I was given a drug to speed things along. The baby's heart rate began drop after each contraction, but no one seemed too worried. Suddenly my doctor was saying C-section. I heard someone say the placenta might not be functioning. My eyes locked on my husband, he was thinking the same thing as me, I could read it on his face. The placenta, which provides the baby's oxygen, might not be functioning? Images of brain damage and worse filled my mind.
When my son was delivered, healthy and beautiful and perfect I laughed at my fears, like whistling in a graveyard. Silly us, we thought. Little did we know that those fears would be forever ingrained in us, sub-consciously, like a low pitched hum in the back of our minds.
It's not a bad thing, this fear. It's what makes us be more gentle with the baby after playing has frightened him and made him cry. It's what makes us buckle him securely in his car seat every time we hit the road. It's the impulse that causes us to tip-toe into his room in the middle of the night to check his breathing. It's the force that brings home the over-whelming sense of responsibility of being a parent. It makes us hold him tighter and kiss his head and caress his back. It drives us to make fervent vows and to whisper desperate prayers for patience and wisdom.
You might ask, isn't it love that inspires those emotions in a parent? Yes, but... The indescribable love I feel for my son is what scares me. For if we, his parents, don't do all the right things, what harm might we cause him? Yet we can never do all the right things. His very life is in our hands, and we are imperfect.
So I look into his trusting, innocent eyes, kiss his round little cheek and whisper another prayer, that his trust in me never be misplaced.
For that, after all, is my biggest fear.