"You don’t know fear until you have kids.”
That’s what an aunt told me when my first child was seven weeks old, and we were visiting family in Arizona. “I still worry about my kids, and the oldest is on Social Security!” my grandfather said three years earlier, and shortly before his death at 84.
I’ve known close friends, family, and acquaintances who've lost children to various blows of fate: overdoses, suicide, accident, disease. I’ve read books and articles on grief-what to say and do (speak their names, acknowledge their existence, tell stories, share pictures and memories) and what not to say (avoid "there are no words").
The most recent thing I read on this was a piece in the Atlantic by a father who in 2019 lost both his teenage children—around the same age, birth order, age difference, and gender as mine—in a car accident with a drunk driver that both he and his wife survived. I can’t stop thinking about it, and every time I do my heart starts racing and I break into a cold sweat.
“You have to be lucky in this world.” Another quote, this one from my mother, a practicing psychiatrist and pragmatist. “It’s that simple.”
My mom grew up as an orphan in foster care and was preoccupied with death during my childhood: The death of her parents, which she spoke of freely and excessively; fear of my death and my dad’s; grim stories from medical school; trips to graveyards. As a result, I came to view death as something inevitable, which of course it is. But I also deeply wanted to believe it was something I could inure myself to in advance, through obsessive magical thinking, which of course it is not.
Having internalized my mom’s vicarious trauma, I used to think her death was the worst thing that could happen to me. The minute my daughter arrived, screaming and looking like a little purple monkey, I knew for a fact I would only really care about two things ever again: predeceasing my kids, and living long enough to see them grow up.
But whether I get to do either of those things is out of my control, and I know it. It’s learning to live with that lack of control and that uncertainty that feels impossible. What do you do with that level of vulnerability? The sheer rawness of the exposure? It’s almost a deterrent to having kids at all. Of course, the irony is you don’t learn that until you do. It is literally the ultimate fuck around and find out.
The closest I've come to as a solution (besides mental healthcare, self-care, and some amorphous prayer-adjacent begging to the universe) is "gratitude practice." I once thought that this was woo-woo bullshit. But I now realize that "practicing gratitude" is actually a good way to re-wire your brain. Every day that my kids go to bed healthy (and at least somewhat happy) is a day I need to be--and am--immeasurably grateful for. Whatever the future holds for my children, for better or worse, reminding myself of that is somehow the closest I get to being able to tolerate the vulnerability of parenthood.
