The First in a Long Line of Fears

Hayden almost choked tonight. She was crawling around in the kitchen, gnawing on the empty, (clean!), seltzer bottles she's obsessed with lately. Seriously, give that kid hundreds of toys and what does she want? Recycling. So, she was contentedly munching on plastic while I sorted out the junk mail. I could lie and say, "I turned away, just for a second", because that's what we're supposed to say, rather than admitting the truth, but the reality is, when she's quiet and doing something that I'm comfortable with, I'm pretty happy to take the opportunity to go through mail, unload the dishwasher, etc. especially when I'm in the same room less than five feet away. I was thumbing through a baby catalog, imagining the plans for her first birthday party, when I looked up to see her sitting there with the cap to a beer bottle in in her mouth. I wouldn't have seen it except that her mouth was open around it, in a big, shocked looking "O". I ran over and pried it out, and she started crying, maybe because I did it so fast, or because those things have really sharp edges, or, more likely, because she really wanted to eat it.

I'm a realist. I know that this is just the beginning of a long, long, line of, "holy shit, look what could have happened" moments. And I know that at least 99% of those will be ones that will leave me feeling like a monumentally crappy mother, at least for a while. I mean, we're not the kind of family who loses a kid to choking on a beer cap for God's sake. (Now, a wine cork, that I can see...) And, to feel like my kid was in danger, even for a second, because I was sorting junk mail just does me in.

This isn't the first time I've felt that deep fear of danger averted. The first time we were still in the hospital. Hayden was less than a day old, and the midwife came in to apologize for the monumental series of missteps leading to her birth, beginning with the fact that they never caught the fact that she was breech (and had been the whole time, most likely) through the fact that when my water broke with a levee-breaking gush and didn't stop, they didn't ask me to come in so they could be sure of the umbilical cord situation, straight through to the twenty hours of labor (unmedicated) while the midwife dealt with more pressing issues. It wasn't until I saw her face and heard her talk that I grasped the weight of the situation. She told us we were lucky that everything turned out well. She said it a few times with a sadness etched on her face that didn't match our reality. I got the distinct impression we were the family where it turned out okay, and that there was another couple, maybe not so different from us, who sat hearing the other side of that reality.

At the blessing before Hayden's birth, a friend said that having a baby is making the decision to let your heart live outside your body. It sounded quaint when she said it then. Now that I catch glimpses of that raw volnerability now and then, it is no longer cute or funny, or greeting card hokey. It's the most frightening thing I can imagine. Beautiful, but so goddamn scary.