Real Fear: Part One

This is a piece I’ve been working on since my teenager was a newborn. I’ve struggled with the format, the length, and especially the tone; generally I go for light and fun, but then my undergraduate training in analysis comes out and it gets way too serious and pretentious. I’ve got this pretty much the way I want it, and it’s the best it’ll be, and I’m actually pretty proud of it. It’s long, so here it is in pieces:

Introduction: 2010  

I’m jolted awake from a sound sleep by a sharp ringing noise: my daughter Layla’s baby monitor. She has an electronic pad under her mattress that tracks her movement and shrieks like a smoke detector if there isn’t any. I run to her room, my heart beating hard, and I burst in. She had been fine, but now, having been woken up by the light, is screaming louder than the distress signal. The pad had just moved too far away from her. It was a false alarm. This time.  

Before having Layla, I had been a hardcore horror fan for two thirds of my life. I never looked away from the screen, no matter what. And even when I was pregnant and experiencing severe morning sickness—strike that, severe all times of the day sickness, because morning sickness is a misnomer—gore never bothered me. As far along as my ninth month, I watched Saw VI with no problems, even though it shows a lady chopping off her own arm as well as a guy getting pumped so full of sulfuric acid that his torso melts. (Somehow the scene of a pregnant woman getting slammed in the stomach by a door and having a miscarriage didn’t faze me; during my second pregnancy with my son Orion I happened to watch the movie again, and it became my worst nightmare—my job at the time required me to frequent a lot of stairwells with metal doors.) I still love horror movies, but after having kids, I don’t have the same tolerance for the genre that I used to. The violence turns my stomach. Not long after having Layla, I saw Cabin Fever II, which involves high school students contracting a flesh-eating virus. I was doing fairly well until a pregnant girl’s unborn fetus falls out of her in a bloody clump. I felt nauseated for the rest of the night.   

^{*author’s note from present day–no longer as much of an issue–gimme that gore!!!}

I’m also much more vulnerable emotionally. I’ve always hated romantic comedies, but while watching Up in the Air (for a job as a teaching assistant, I swear), a scene when a groom with cold feet reconciles with his bride had me crying. Any movie that places a child in a dangerous situation is bound to trigger me. In The Joy Luck Club, when a sick and dying woman leaves her babies behind in the hopes that someone will find and raise them, I was bawling uncontrollably. I wanted to stop—I couldn’t. Even a segment from the sitcom Modern Family when an overachieving teenage girl starts sobbing when she realizes the pressure she’s under made me sniff. But besides the nausea and sensitivity, horror films affect me in a whole new way: they actually scare me, because as a parent I have worries I never dreamed of before.  

As a single person and as a newlywed, I lived for myself. I walked where I wanted alone at night; I ate what I wanted without concern for calories or cholesterol. Then I became a baby house. Suddenly being reckless endangered not just me, but also my defenseless unborn child. I had to change everything. And even though my children aren’t physically attached to me anymore, I’m still unable to relax, because now I have the lifelong obligation to protect them. In addition, besides the practical anxieties of a parent (rashes, constipation, normal development) I now have multiple phantom worries about things that could happen, like the kids falling or choking or breaking bones.  

Heather B. Armstrong’s book It Sucked and Then I Cried illustrates how irrational but compelling the urge to worry about our children is: “When Leta was born all sorts of maternal instincts were slammed into the ON position—the instinct to protect, to nourish, to comfort […] I had to retrain my body to sleep. My instincts were telling me that when I slept Unknown Things happened […] I was unconsciously listening to the sound of her breathing or swallowing, and if those noises sounded okay then I’d listen to the sounds of the house to make sure monsters didn’t crawl out of the house to hurt her” (102).   

Watching horror movies doesn’t help with these fears at all because I’m presented with awful, implausible-but-still-somehow-believable things to be afraid of. The genre is rife with children in danger. They highlight in so many different ways how helpless parents can be. We work around the clock to ensure our childrens’ safety, but at any moment something could come along and destroy our dreams.   

I never knew real fear until I became a mother. 

Heather B. Armstrong (2009). It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita. NY: Simon Spotlight Entertainment.