Nightmares

Since before he was born I have been having nightmares. Some of them while I am asleep, and some of them are like nightmare day-dreams. And no, they don't involve poop...

I actually have horrible dreams/visions about something happening to him. I had dreams that the pregnancy ended, dreams that he died during labor and delivery, dreams that he has been kidnapped, dreams that he has been sick and died at home or in the hospital. I have these sort of awful visions while I am awake of all the scenarios that could end in him being taken from me or even killed. It's horrible. It's acutely distressing and extremely anxiety producing to think about or dream about these things. And it is all something I did not expect.

I knew that parents worried about their children, even after their children are grown. I knew parents who had lost a child; in the case of my friend Kathy it was an infant son, and for my mother's friend it was a teenage boy. I looked at it like any other death. It was tragic, painful, and sad. Of course there was grief, and grieving. But I didn't have any real concept of what it can do to a parent to lose their child. I didn't understand what kind of love it is that parents feel, and what kind of bond. Now I do, and it's both remarkable and terrifying.

I wish my mother was alive so I could tell her I am so sorry for all the things I did to put myself in harm's way, all the things that gave her nightmares, or made her suck in her breath in that sharp way moms can do, or made her cry from the fear that something would happen to me. I am sorry for not looking when I crossed the street at 4, and wandering away from you in the grocery store for most of my childhood. I am so sorry for climbing that cliff on the Oregon coast when I was 6 or 7. I am sorry for driving too fast on a gravel road and wrecking your car at 16. I am so very sorry for sneaking out of the house, discovering alcohol much too young,  riding in cars with reckless boys who did donuts in the snow, and moving to Chicago from the safety of a small town.

I know my son will do things that immediately bring that sharp, distinct fear for his well-being into my brain. He already tries to fling himself backwards out of my arms when I walk down the stairs, and he stretches at impossible angles, just narrowly avoiding sharp corners with his soft head, when I am changing him on those tables in restaurant bathrooms. I know he will do much worse. He will drive too fast, he will jump out of trees and run down steep hills and play with all kinds of dangerous toys, he will go places where doom is imminent. He will talk to strangers and wander away from me in crowded places. He will put all manner of things in his mouth that shouldn't go there. And in all likelihood, he will be fine. And the reasonable part of my brain understands this.

Then there's the mother part of my brain.

That part screams out in terror at the thought, shrivels into itself and weeps at the idea, the very notion, that something in this world could take my son from me. The mother part of my brain already knows that if someone were to take him, I would never rest, never sleep again, never stop moving, until I found him and took him back. And if something were to take his life, I don't know that I would ever recover the love of life and energy for experiencing it that I have now. I cannot imagine that I would ever be more than a hollow shell of a person, always aching to hold and hug my boy again.

I watched a documentary today about a love story during the Holocaust; this couple who went to concentration camps wrote letters to each other through the war, survived, and got married afterwards. It was a lovely story, very moving, very thoughtful. They are in their 90s and were telling the story of how it was for them, what they saw and experienced. And then they were speaking about the children, and how children were taken from their parents and often sent off to other camps without them, and more often than not, died without their parents. They said that 1.5 million of the deaths during that war were Jewish children. I can't even write that without crying. It has brought, for me, a new level of horror to the knowledge I have of that time and the suffering that those families endured. So many broken hearts, so many mothers in such indescribable pain...I cannot imagine the agony. Except now, maybe just a tiny bit, I can, now that I have a son of my own.