Mornings at home are easy. Sundrenched and slow. I sip coffee
and listen to the radio. Juniper is happy to play, feed, then fall asleep for a
few hours.
It’s the afternoons away from home when it hits me. Lethargy.
Weight. A hollow fullness of the gut. Senseless anxiety resulting in a fatigue
so strong it’s as if my body is moving through syrup and not air. There is
something wrong deep inside my abdomen. Yesterday, out shopping in town, bent
over my cart, I become disoriented in the store. Dizzy with the danger of all
the strangers around me. Every single one of them is a bit off. My body
stiffens when I pass them, they all have arms to reach out and touch the baby,
to grab the baby, harm the baby. What am I there for? Wandering around on the
border of panic, feeling as if I may fall over. Rational thought tells me I’m
ok, I will not pass out, but rational thought is such a pushover, extremely
susceptible to the convincing powers of anxiety.
I pull through. Always do. Go to the library. The new one with
the stairs. Somehow I make it up them, grab the book, walk back down. It takes
all my power to let the sight of the railing pass through me as I ascend and
descend, to ignore the scary drop to the hard tiled floor. How does one ignore
gravity? Of course, more attention is paid to something being actively ignored,
and in so ignoring, quite the opposite effect is attained. The muscles clench,
the bowels tie themselves in knots, in tatters, in muddy mats like a messy head
of hippie hair. My innards. Dreadlocks. Locked with dread.
This is how it is. My role as mother. Walk around in constant
computation of danger to baby. And, everything means danger. Worse, every
possible horrific outcome, I witness inside my mind. I am in a constant state
of trauma, grief, agony over everything that could possibly happen, because
somehow my brain can’t tell that these images are simply meant as warnings, are
not actually happening.
