I just want to love my son... by Mary Okorn-Jimenez

I just want to love my son

I never thought I'd be a parent.  I never really thought about it past birth control.  I was meticulous about birth control because I knew what it was like to take care of children.  The oldest of four siblings and party to the care of many, many foster children by the time I went away to college, I was pretty much done with changing diapers, babysitting and loving other peoples' children by the time I was 19.  

Now I have my own.  Oh yeah, the cliches are all right on the tip of my tongue, but absolutely do not come close to describing the maelstrom of torture constantly defining and redefining my existence.

I'm on guard in every moment.  Horrible scenes and fears are constantly torturing me.  While he's at my breast, I'm so enthralled, so in love, I know nothing bad will ever happen.  Then, unbidden, it's as if someone violently shoves a horror film in the DVD player of my mind and I am audience to all the horrible things that could happen.  Then I torture myself for thinking these things - in essence giving them a road to reality - and drive myself crazy trying to negate the images.

It's like I walk around in this beautiful bubble of loving my son always afraid someone or something is going to take some sort of sharp implement and skewer it.  "Oh, baby, how cute!  You said 'shoes'!" and wham! a car slams into the side of the house and through where he's sitting, leaving only a shoe.  Or, "Baby, watch your head," and splat! a plane falls from the sky and flattens him.  

I've been through some things in life and I have known a bit of nameless fear.  Never too much, and it always revolved around something really base like losing my looks or an arm or a leg - but I never could have imagined this fear. I hate it.  This fear has a name that I have never feared before and that name is Death.  

I want to say so many things, like if he left, I would follow, but things like that always sound so trite when I read them in print.  I want to find words to encompass this enormous love I've been given, but I also need to find a way to express the fear that Death will take it away.  Because I would follow Death if the bastard took my child.  I'd hop right on that unknown underground express and ride it all the way til I found my child.  That doesn't scare me at all.  The few moments of realization that would exist before I could react - should anything unspeakable happen - are the moments of pain I fear.

Somehow, though, I feel better now that I said it.  I'm afraid he'll die.  I'm not afraid to die, I'm afraid of those few moments of fleeting realization that I would be forced to experience if anything happened to my baby.  They would only be fleeting though - I may not be able to predict the future, but I certainly have a plan.  That I have to at all pisses me off.  Death is not normal, I don't care what anyone says.  And now that it's personal (i.e., I have a child) I'm angry that humankind has remained complacent for so long and just accepted this aberration of perfection as natural.  Somebody better figure it out before I have to.  Because I don't really want to.

I just want to love my boy.