High Anxiety

So far a lot of parenthood seems to be about ruling out the horrible. Or maybe that's just my version of parenthood, but either way I spend a lot of time thinking about the things that Milo isn't doing or hasn't done yet or might not do in the future. Which means that when he started smiling a few days ago, my first reaction wasn't "omigod that's so cool he's smiling!" as much as, "thank God the kid is smiling, at least I don't have to worry that I'm going to raise a child with a broken smile I mean what if he never smiled and then I'd have this sad, unsmiling kid and who knows what else might be wrong with him." And when he reacts to loud noises I think thank God he's not deaf, and when he noticed my existence a few days ago I thought well, at least he's not blind or otherwise visually impaired and he can recognize faces and stuff so that means his brain is probably okay too.

It also means that I apparently never get to have a dream at night that doesn't involve Milo being in danger or dying or almost dying and being resuscitated by me at the last minute, except for the other night when I dreamt that my uterus fell out (a welcome, light-hearted relief from all those nasty death dreams!).

I think I never realized just how high one's anxiety level can reach once one is responsible for another human being. I've never thought of myself as a particularly anxious person, but lately I've found that I'd much rather have a good stiff drink at night than Nutella, and for me this is very strange behavior indeed. And the worst part is that I'm fairly certain the anxiety will never go away. Maybe it will lessen, maybe I will learn to deal with it better, but the proof is in my own childhood experiences, those moments when I forgot to call home or came in a few minutes past curfew or told my parents I was one place only to have them find out I was somewhere else, those seconds after I would walk in the door and see the look of sheer terror on my parents' faces, quickly replaced by a combination of relief and anger.

But of course, it never goes away. When I mentioned to my father that Milo seemed to be sleeping a lot while the nurse was here, he said, "Maybe she's drugging him." When I was crying and miserable and couldn't pull myself together those first few weeks after Milo was born, both of my parents said to me, "I'm not worried about your baby. I'm worried about my baby."

I guess this is what I have signed on for - a lifetime of worrying about my baby, whether he is sixty days old or sixty years.