On Risks, the Taking Of

"Hello, this is Gillian’s phone."

"Hi, I’m looking for John’s mother?"

"Who, again?"

"Are you John’s mother?"

"I’m sorry, I think you have the wrong – er – uh – wait – yes, yes this is John’s mother.  That’s me."

"Oh, sorry, we didn’t have your name in is file.  This is his pediatrician’s office calling to remind you . . . "

 

*  *  *

 

I never imagined that 4 hours of interrupted sleep at night would feel like enough, more than enough, would feel like relief, but here we are. 

 

* * *

 

In our pickup truck, I follow Patrick and Jack in the Matrix to Sears Auto Center.  My windows are down, the music is up.  I blowdried my hair for the first time today, and it whips in the wind as I belt along with Metro Station – Shake Shake, Shake Shake Let’s Shake It.  The spring air is beautiful.  We pass a bank of brilliant red flowers.  Patrick pulls onto the highway, merging fluidly, driving conservatively, and I do the same.

 

Then I realize that they are together, and I am not with them, and we are on the DANGEROUS HIGHWAY, BY GOD.  And I turn down my radio, roll up my window, and begin to focus my superstitious new-mother laser beam stare on every other car on the road, on every possible hazard coming their way.  I fly behind them, their protector, keeping them safe with my vigilance.  Suddenly I see a huge 18 wheeler come plunging over the highway divide, plow into the car of precious cargo in front of me, roll them off the road, and both explode, they are an inferno, and tears spring to my eyes as I mourn my lost son and husband, even as they drive safely through the flames of my imagined horror.  These visions come to me all the time, virtually the only symptom of postpartum depression or baby blues that I have experienced so far – visions of loss, of unimaginable violence, of irrevocable harm.  They grip me often – watching a BBC wildlife documentary, I see those tiger’s teeth ripping into my baby’s torso; walking on the second floor of the mall, I see him tumbling out of my arms over the railing, falling to the tiled floor below; pushing his stroller along the street, I see it slipping out of my fingers, plunging into traffic, being crushed under the wheels of a car going too fast.  Wrapping him tightly in his swaddle, which is the only way he will sleep in his crib, I see a mummy baby, a child wrapped for burial, and I think of Juliet’s lines to Romeo as he leaves her after their wedding night – "I see thee, now thou art below, as one dead in the bottom of a tomb."  The first night I put him in his cradle, wrapped like that, I didn’t sleep for a second.  I sat vigil by his bedside and watched him breathe, made certain that he never stopped breathing, gripped by the superstition that by thinking him dead, I have killed him.  If I was rich, I would hire someone to stand guard over him all night.

 

I am not rich, and I can’t watch him every second, so I have had to come up with a way to deal with my neuroses, and that is by re-imagining the awful vision with me intervening to rescue him.  I stop the BBC documentary tiger with a cold stare and my hand held out, and she slinks away from my fearsome mother-power.  The baby slips from my grip over the mall railing, but then I launch over it, holding on with two super new-mommy-strong fingers, and I grasp his foot and haul him back over.  I lose the stroller, but it glides through a break in traffic and I am able to fling myself after it and push us both safely to the other side before a car comes.  The sight of him in a swaddle is a little harder, because crib death, however unlikely (0.1% chance, I chant to myself, 1 out of 1000), is still the most likely of these scenarios to come true.  So I tell myself that our dog, Virgil, has a superpower sense of the baby’s welfare, something like how animals can sense an impending earthquake.  Virgil will bark and wake us up if Jack stops breathing.  Virgil will watch him for me while I sleep.  This works most nights.  And on other nights, I wake every twenty minutes and check that his chest is still rising and falling, and roll my eyes at myself, but still I can’t relax or fall asleep again until I have made sure of him.

 

So today I veer my truck into the path of the 18-wheeler, and my car takes the hit, and my family are safe from harm, and that being done, we drive on to Sears and then to a state park and then to Target and so on, and the day passes and ends with all of us safe and well, of course.

 

* * *

 

Part of me is anxious to get pregnant again, right now, immediately.  So I have more than one, so if something happens I have another to sustain me.  Ridiculous, on many levels, and I know it.

 

* * *

 

I thought at first that I had these anxieities because of him.  Because his so small, so fragile, so exposed in the wide world.  But of course it is not our baby’s vulnerability that is the root of the problem.  It’s my own.