The Ghoulies
Here's something I never expected from parenthood: fear.I'm a person of low anxiety. I generally know who I am--and who I'm not--which happens when you get older. Age usually eliminates the anxiety over undefined borders. Day by day, the fog of war starts to lift, and one day you realize that all the blurry parts about yourself have been filled in. That doesn't mean they look like you hoped they would, but at least you can see them.
So for years, I hadn't been anxious or afraid about anything. Then Eli was born.
The early days of parenthood aren't about fear--they're sheer terror. I still remember the near-paralyzing panic I felt the first time I put Eli 0.02 into his car seat for the drive home from the hospital. Newborns don't fit into car seats. It will never fit as snugly as you want, and their heads are going to flop all over the place, even with the special neck cushion or whatever it's called. So I was sitting in the parking garage on a day when it was a hundred degrees, sweat pouring down my face, wondering how many months we could live here until Eli grew enough to fit properly in his car seat.
It's all terror for the first few months, really. Babies are so fragile and so helpless that you're expecting them to break any second.
That terror will eventually go away, though. Eli was at least version 1.0 before I felt it start to recede, but eventually the giant weight on my chest started to lessen.
Now, with Eli at version 5.0, I can't believe how much fun it is to have a relationship with a little boy who loves you and respects you and wears mismatching socks just because you do. Who will walk up sometimes and give you a big hug just because he feels like it. Who will tell you to stop tickling his stomach, but pull up his shirt at the same time to make sure that you don't.
And that unreasoned terror, the most frightening thing I've ever felt in my life, has gone away entirely.
Almost.
At least two nights a week, when I lie down in bed for the night, I'm afraid. My mind begins racing with all the bad things that could happen to Eli 5.0--accidents, diseases, kidnappings, every bad thing I've ever heard happen to a child.
I am generally an extremely rational person (sometimes to my detriment), and things like this just don't pop into my head. They never have. But I love Eli so much that in those few, dark moments, I'm afraid that he'll never get to live a full and happy life, afraid that some horrible accident will take him away from me.
And in truth, I think about the second before I think about the first.
After going through this a few nights a week for over a year, I make myself get out of bed immediately whenever I feel the ghoulies creeping in under my door. And every night, I go into Eli's room before I go to our bedroom.
Just to make sure he's okay.
He always is, of course, and I always have this moment where I feel so much love for him that it's like a blizzard of confetti, tiny pieces of red and green and blue, little bits of happiness all over.
I could never explain that to him, but I hope that someday when he has his own children, he'll tell me.
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