How Parenting Changes You: Fear
I’ve now officially been a parent for a full year. What they say is true – it really does change you.
This time, I’m going to talk about something that I wouldn’t have predicted.
I’m a very confident, fearless person. Not in all aspects, of course. I think I would be too afraid to sky dive or bungee jump. I’m not reckless, particularly when it comes to the possibility of personal injury. But I’m not afraid of things like going bankrupt or getting fired or failing at major life things. I tend to worry pointlessly about things from time to time, but never too seriously. If you asked me a year ago, “what are you afraid of?” I probably would have said “nothing.”
Before my son was born, I like most people sometimes thought to myself, “wouldn’t it be awful to have a child with some kind of disability” but didn’t think much of it. Now, a year after my son was born, that passive thought takes on a new weight entirely that only other parents can appreciate.
On Cable channels like Discovery Health and sometimes TLC they have stories about children with rare conditions and how their families cope. Those have transformed from mildly amusing shows to horror stories. Those shows scare the living shit out of me now, far more than any actual horror film.
I never really thought of myself as an empathetic person and in general, I’m not. After having a child, I find that I empathize with the parents of these children sometimes to the point that it almost brings me to tears. For example, Batten’s Disease.
The thought of something like Batten’s Disease suddenly besieging your child and being faced with the fact that he is going to slowly degenerate until he dies before his 12th birthday is the stuff of nightmares. Nightmares. When your baby is born healthy, you breathe a sigh of relief. But then you learn about things like autism, how it suddenly develops at some random point in your child’s development. And you think what if that happens and it’s horrifying.
What I’ve found is that these possibilties have instilled in me a new type of humility. I’ve always found it easy to not be afraid of possible bad things that can happen to me personally because I’ve never thought for a moment that I wouldn’t be able to weather those storms and come out better than I came in. But I find that is nearly impossible to not be afraid of possible bad things that can happen to my son (like Batten’s Disease, God forbid) which are entirely out of my control (or worse, essentially my fault since Batten’s is a recessive genetic condition).
The musing of how bad it would be to have a child with a terminal disease takes on an entirely new gravity once you actually have a child.
“The Fear”
Absolutely.
I could not survive the fear of another pregnancy – the thought of anything going wrong destroys whatever peace of mind I might manage to salvage.
With my first, I was nervous, of course. You want everything to be perfect, but not that worried. And after my first was born, I remember tossing her up in the air (which she loved) and watching my father suffer from “The Fear”. I laughed at his reaction. I’d be protective of my first, but there was no fear of every little thing.
I remember exactly when I first got the “The Fear”. When my second was a just over a month old, I was reading an article by “Robert X Cringely” about how one of his twins died in his arms. I immediately got up from the computer and when to check on my second, and check I did every 5 minutes thereafter.
After that, little things that I had done as a kid which never bothered me (jumping down a three foot drop – little things like that) would send me in a sharp attack of adrenaline as I was prepared to give all to rescue them from whatever mishap befallen them.
As my children get older, it doesn’t lessen for me, it gets worse. Raising children has become all about managing my fears and not letting it control me. My children are of an age where I have to let go a little, to try not to protect them from absolutely every little thing. It’s very, very hard. I’m so worried that anything might happen to them.
And yet it wasn’t all that long ago that people very often dealt with the loss of siblings, of children, of their friends. How much more our fewer children have become more precious.
“The Fear” is very very real. Try to not let it rule your life.