Heart on My Sleeve

The best description I've heard yet for what it feels like to have a kid I attribute to Teresa Strasser, although she attributes it to someone else, I can't remember who. She was trying to explain how much she worries all the time about the well-being of her baby, how she's just now realized that she will feel this way for the rest of her life, and said, "It's like now you wear your heart outside of your body."

This is true. I, who was always something of a worrywart to begin with (there's a reason Scott will never, ever own a motorcycle as long as I draw breath), now experience each day haunted by the specter of something bad happening to my daughter, and this desperate need to make sure she's safe all the time.

I'm not one of those moms who refuses to leave her child in the care of a non-family member, or who has to call home forty times when she goes to the market, or who checks in on her sleeping baby every ten minutes to make sure she's still breathing. And I think those women are...well, maybe not crazy, but burdening themselves in a way that cannot be enjoyable to deal with on a moment-to-moment basis.

That said, I can no longer stand the thought of my baby being in danger in any way. And, as I've discovered much to my own chagrin, I can no longer stand the thought of anyone else's baby being in danger in any way. In the space of about a year, I have somehow turned from the person who made dead baby jokes at the drop of a hat (Why did the baby cross the road? Because it was stapled to the chicken!) to someone who wants to mother the whole world. Seriously. I heard a girl crying for her mommy at Babies R Us today and came charging into the aisle, shopping cart and all, convinced that someone was trying to kidnap her. Turns out the perp in question? Her dad.

This week has been tougher than usual because Scott's been out of town, which makes me hypervigilant when it comes to taking care of Sadie. Since she was born I've started experiencing semi-regular night terrors, which is something I've rarely suffered before. I've read a lot about them, out of curiosity -- now I don't have to. Night terrors suck.

If you've never experienced sleep paralysis, it's basically a phenomenon in which your brain wakes before your body does. While you have the sensation of being awake, you can't move and you often experience odd and unpleasant sensations, such as a pressure on your chest (one theory says that people who claim to have experienced alien abductions are really just prone to especially vivid night terrors.)

With me, what happens is that I will think I'm awake. I feel myself lying in bed, and I can sense the room around me, although it's always pitch black. Then, in a frenzy, a stranger will burst into the bedroom and hurtle themselves toward me. I can never see their face, but I sense them and I can't move. Two nights ago, I awoke at five to feed the baby, then woke again to hear her crying a short while later. I vividly remember turning over to see that it was 6am on the nose, and thought, "Okay, I guess she's up for good this time." That's when her crying got louder. It came down the hall towards me. The bedroom door burst open. Someone was running into my room. Holding my baby. It was too dark to see anything but I could hear her, in the room with me, and him.

That's when I woke up for real, to dead silence.

So, yeah. It's kind of been screwing with my head, a little. But I actually didn't even write this post to talk about night terrors, I swear. I actually was going to share a funny anecdote about how I almost dropped Sadie on her head the other day. She was sitting in my arm as I was carrying her into the kitchen to make a bottle, holding a Pyrex cup full of water in my other hand to heat in the microwave. A moment later, she'd leaned back too far, past the tipping point and was rapidly falling backwards towards the kitchen floor. The look of alarm on her face was almost comical, but probably not as comical as my reaction, which was to drop the cup of water all over the kitchen counter, fall to my knees and stick my hand under her head to catch it while her legs were still tangled up between my arm and my body.

Of course she was fine, and I was fine, and the glass didn't even break, and I think the sound of it clanging on the counter scared her worse than the falling. Me? I'm still getting over it. How does anyone manage this? Wearing their heart on the outside like this? What happens when she gets old enough to go to school? Have sleepovers with her friends? Get behind a wheel of the car? Can I legally lock her in her bedroom until she turns 18? Mothers everywhere, I tip my cap to you for making it through theday without having 14 consecutive heart attacks.

Sadie on a Hike