On Motherhood and Anxiety

Like most expectant mothers, while I was pregnant with my son I received all sorts of frightening though well-meant warnings from people who already had children and who felt compelled to puncture the fantasyland of pre-maternal delusions in which I was dwelling. Most of these were standard kiss-your-life-for-the-next-two-decades-goodbye type admonitions. Never again would I sleep eight consecutive hours, leave the house for anything other than grocery shopping or mommy-and-me swim classes, eat regular meals, or have a moment to myself for frivolous things like personal hygiene. Another, less conventional warning I received came from a friend who told me, “Once you have a child, you will understand fear on a whole new level.” This, as it turns out, was the truest statement of them all.

For the record, this fear thing isn’t new to me. I am an anxious person who even before having a baby lived pretty much perpetually in or on the verge of a state of panic. But after having a child, my fears and anxieties multiplied exponentially. The utter vulnerability and absolute helplessness of my newborn son cast into relief my own vulnerability and relative helplessness. I became acutely conscious of the extent to which I was subject to a whole host of conditions over which I had little or no control. It was as though I could feel the solar winds scraping across my skin. It was both terrifying and deeply humbling.

So anyway, I worry A LOT about MANY things. To illustrate, here is a far-from-exhaustive list of things that scare me:

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Natural disasters including but not limited to: hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, floods, droughts, earthquakes, microbursts, and cloud-to-ground lightning

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Man-made disasters including but not limited to: nuclear holocaust, climate change and the effects thereof, biological weapons, and human stampedes

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Car accidents

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House fires

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Eastern Equine Encephalitis

  

The low levels of radiation emanating from my microwave oven

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 That one day my son might want to play football

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That one day my son might want to join the military

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That one day my son might want to drive a car

Because my son had swimming lessons earlier today, I’m currently worried about something called Cryptosporidiosis, which is a diarrheal disease caused by microscopic parasites that live in things like raw meat and public swimming pools. Oliver likes to drink the pool water, and it’s conceivable that he might also have consumed some of these nasty critters. That the risk of this is extremely low does not matter. The chance exists, and so I worry. Of course, I wouldn’t be worried about this if his swimming instructor hadn’t devoted five minutes of the first lesson to warning parents about the various dangers and symptoms associated with this particular infection. But she did, and now I’m freaked out.

Forewarned is forearmed, but I’m starting to wonder if maybe parents today aren’t a little too aware of all the dangers threatening their children. Take SIDS, for example. At this time last year, I was obsessed with the fear that my son would die in his sleep. Most new mothers I’ve spoken to about this subject admit to being or having once been similarly terrified. I don’t want to sound callous; SIDS is a terrible thing and awareness is important, but again, I think there’s such a thing as too much awareness. Months before my son was even born, my obstetrician handed me a pamphlet about SIDS. I was given the same pamphlet again before leaving the hospital. And again and again and again at his first three doctor’s appointments. Every baby book I read had at least a few pages devoted to SIDS. As you can imagine, all of this was really scary. And to make matters worse, no one could tell me a surefire way to prevent it from happening. Putting the baby down on his back could reduce the risk, but not eliminate it. Despite the fact that a healthy infant’s chances of dying from SIDS is around 0.05%, I was a basket case. If my son slept more than three consecutive hours, I was sure he had asphyxiated in his sleep and would rush in to check him. On more than one occasion, I actually jostled him until he woke up because I was convinced that he wasn’t breathing. This is not healthy behavior, but I know I’m not the only mother who’s done it.

 

And this SIDS thing is just one example. There are, it seems, an infinite array of diseases, disorders, and syndromes waiting to strike down apparently healthy children. It’s truly frightening and certainly worthy of concern, but isn’t it possible that too much concern can be detrimental?

 

I guess I’m worried that all this worrying might turn me into one of them. The parents who send irate emails to their kids’ second grade teachers demanding to know why their sons/daughters got a B in reading when their children are demonstrably excellent readers or who scream at little league coaches for sticking their kids in the outfield when they should be playing second base. These people are annoying to pretty much everyone, and I don’t want to be one of them. But maybe I’m starting to understand where they’re coming from. Like you spend countless hours worrying that your newborn will stop breathing and then worrying that maybe he isn’t yet waving hello to people because he’s autistic and then worrying that maybe that isn’t a mosquito bite on his arm but some sort of cancer and that even if it is just a mosquito bite, maybe the mosquito was carrying EEE or malaria or something, and then pretty soon worrying becomes a way of life and you become consumed by the need to control everything within your child’s environment, including other people. Don’t these teachers know what they’re doing to my child’s sense of self-esteem? Is that little league coach so blind that he can’t see how incredibly and exceptionally talented my son is? How many years of therapy will I have to pay for to undo all the damage these idiots are doing to my child?

 

Except, really, as most rational people recognize, in their fervor to protect their children, these parents are actually harming them. So I’m trying to chill out, but it isn’t easy. For instance, when my son’s swimming teacher wanted to use him to demonstrate underwater submersion, I bravely handed him over and watched as she casually tossed him into the pool and continued talking while my baby hovered under the water flailing his arms and legs like a damaged sea turtle. The other parents in the class tightened their hold on their own children, and my own maternal instincts impelled me to push that bitch of a swimming teacher out of the way and SAVE MY BABY! But I didn’t. I forced myself to watch calmly. Eventually, after what felt like ten minutes but was probably closer to ten seconds, the swimming teacher (who is really a very nice lady) retrieved my son. He emerged coughing and spluttering, but unharmed. I’d like to believe the experience made him stronger, but I can’t say for sure. I do know, however, that it made me a little stronger.