On Fear

The Fear's got me again. About the time I thought I had it licked, Wham!! It hit me again like Freddie Krueger back for sequel number 13. This time, it was an article in the Telegraph about children being left in cars and slowly baking to death. It caught me off guard, like most truly horrible things do. As I unwrapped the paper, it was the front inset and I knew that it was part article and part warning by the way it was set up, letter-box style, in the middle of the other stories about Iraq, taxes, and the other horrible workings of the world.

I couldn’t bear to read more than the first couple of paragraphs about the little red-headed baby whose skin blistered and sweat plastered her hair to her head as she slowly expired and cried and no-one came to help. It must be the worst fear in the world, not only that something horrible and painful will happen to your baby, your heart and the dearest love of your life, but that you will somehow -- through stupidity, forgetfulness or just brain burn -- be responsible.

I think it’s worse because the parents of young children are typically exhausted and more likely to make stupid mistakes while handling a life that is so very fragile. It may also have something to do with having recently lost our little cat to a stupid mistake, a horrible death, when she climbed in the dryer for the umpteenth time and we didn’t see her in there among the dark clothes, turned it on and lost her to a very bad death. It only takes a moment of looking away, to not see the impending tragedy, for the smallest slip of fate, to take a creature you love so dearly.

Connor, my son, is currently teething, which had me up last night every half hour between three and 7:30, when I turned to my husband and begged for relief. He took him for a walk to give me an hour of desperately needed sleep and came back with roses and a smile. How lucky am I to have this kind of support and not have had to be at work at 8 in the morning, try to function and try to pick up the baby at the sitter after a full day on fractured sleep and try not to forget anything. Yet. How lucky am I that with the bowl of oatmeal I have for brains today that I don’t have to do anything more risky than send some photos over the e-mail, begin compiling syllabi and reread a chapter I’m writing. If I screw those things up, I just have to do more work tomorrow. No-one dies. I don’t have to get on the road with this bundle of fat little legs and toothless smiles and wonder what stupid thing I’m going to do to him today. Okay, I forgot to change his diaper and he had to cry for a few minutes before I remembered that it was his naptime, but I count myself ahead of the game even so.

According to the article in the paper, it’s many times high achieving people who leave their children behind in the rush to get everything done. Perhaps its part of the new culture of parenthood that doesn’t want to recognize how messy real life is. With just a new organizational routine, the magazine articles promise, your family, too, can run smoothly. I can see it running so smoothly, with all the ducks in a row, from the 6:30 wakeup to the 8am arrival, that you don’t see the baby for the deeds. For those of us who are organizationally obsessed, with a rage for order and a series of checklists and tight schedules, I can see the disasters we try to stave off by our checks and balances, ripping us open from the other end completely.

I could see this being me – is the horrible thing. I so rarely go anywhere without Connor that if he’s not in my hands or line of sight, I feel like I’m missing something. It stops me at doorways and restaurants – what have I forgotten? What happens, though, when I go back to teaching, get into the habit of not having him with me and spend my tightly organized days trying to do in five hours what I used to in eight? I’m tempted to do as Leonard in Memento did, and tattoo Connor’s name on my hand, so that I will remember always to check, to listen, to look for him, to never let him fall in the way of harm that might be waiting for him. I will lose his toothless smiles to the teeth that bite his gums, his babyhood to the world I must give him up to, his innocence to war and money and the brutality of real life. But I pray I will never lose him to my own stupidity of thinking I can fight the messiness or real life with ordered exhaustion that leads to complacency of thinking I’m every going to have it all together again.