Worry = My New BFF

Jackson has been awake most of the night for the past three days. Fortunately, this time it was not due to illness (as it had been the past week) but teething. He has two molars coming in, and judging from the shrieks of pain coming from my child at midnight, 2 am, 5 am, and 7 am, it HURTS.

I have yet to meet a parent who wasn’t totally exhausted. I saw an episode of “The Twilight Zone” where this guy when totally insane, and at the end of the episode, you find out that he was part of a military experiment in sleep deprivation.  HA. They could have just filmed any given parent for that episode. We’re all permanently exhausted.

New parents have it worst, with babies waking up every two hours to be fed for two solid months (if you’re lucky!). But even when they’re older, they’re keeping you up due to illness, teething, nightmares, or the topic of today’s blog: WORRY.

Much like True Love, a tattoo, or that Lady Gaga song you’ve had stuck in your head since 2009, once you become a mother, worry will never leave you.

Worry accompanies you at every stage in your child’s development. From the moment they are born, you start worrying, and it doesn’t stop. Are they eating enough? Why are they crying so much? And don’t even get me started on the sheer horror that is SIDS.

Now that my child has passed his first birthday with all his fingers and toes and most of his mental faculties, my worries have changed. I worry that he’s not getting enough social interaction with other children his age. I worry that I don’t play with him enough. I worry because he’s not walking yet. It seems I’m always encountering moms who have amazing stories about their child walking when he or she was 6-months-old, talking at 10 months, and solving differential equations by one-year. Then there’s Jackson, who has yet to show even the slightest interest in walking.

From what I hear, worrying doesn’t ebb as time goes on. When they go off to school you have to worry about bullies and oh-dear-God, pedophiles. I have so much to say about pedophiles that they should probably be a separate entry, but this is my blog, and I’ll go off on a tangent if I want to. The abridged version goes something like this: I have to be careful when I look up the registered sex offender list, not because I’m afraid of what I’ll find, but because I know that if I DO find a sex offender living on my street, I’ll get a posse together with pitch forks and torches and show up at their house demanding blood. And since severely premeditated murder is a capital offense in the Great State of Texas, I probably don’t want to go there. Instead, as a precaution, my son will go off to school with a homing beacon strapped to his head, a Taser in his lunch box, and a 200 pound Rottweiler by his side. (I looked into getting a Navy Seal for a body guard, but they ended up being prohibitively expensive.)

Anyway, psychotic child-molesting freaks aside, there’s plenty of things to worry about. Soon they start driving and dating. The very thought of that makes my stomach churn, and suddenly I understand why my own parents were so paranoid and hovering as I was growing up. 

Since I still have a few years before I have to worry about the more treacherous aspects of raising a child, I’ll just stick to what I know: that being a mother is terrifying. It’s terrifying because for the first time in my life, I love something more than life itself. Before, there was always a sense that I was invulnerable. I could handle anything that life threw at me. But when you have a child, your soul starts walking around outside your body, and you can only protect it so much.

So from the moment your child is born, you get to wander around sleep-deprived. I figure I’ll be able to finally get some rest when I die. Until then, a good night’s sleep is a distant memory.