But seriously, what if I lose my kid?

True story: Even when I’m not worrying about this, I’m worrying about it.  Sometimes, I'm awakened in the night by this nameless fear. It lurks in closets, under beds, behind doors, and especially out in the streets.

 

But actually, it's not nameless. It's like Voldemort. I don't want to say it, because I don't want it to wake up and start hissing at me with its freaky noseless face. But shhh, okay, here it is, the name of the fear is: Fear of Losing a Kid.

There is nothing funny about losing a kid. And there is especially nothing funny about becoming a parent and suddenly, finding yourself worrying about losing your kid. All the time.

Sometimes, I think it’s all the Internet’s fault.  We know stuff now. Bad stuff. All the stuff. We know that there are crazy people in the world, that there are bad things that can happen, that there are crazy bad things that can happen, and very crazy, very bad things that can also happen.

Only once, knock on wood, knock on anything really, anything at all that will keep me from ever having to feel this fear come up so close to me again,  have I experienced a true feeling of, “Oh no, I’ve gone and done it. I really did Lose My Kid.”

It was a sunny afternoon. Both of my children, J three at the time and M just past one, had woken up from their naps at the same moment. (Yes, they napped at the same time. It was glorious and probably my greatest parental achievement, other than having them in the first place. I could probably sell millions of copies of a book explaining how I managed to entice two toddlers into sleeping the afternoons away, both at the same time, so that Mommy could work on her book. But the problem with writing that particular bestseller: I don’t know how I did it. It just happened. Sometimes, I think it’s because they loved me so much and wanted me to have time to write. I know this is probably not true, but it’s what I’m choosing to believe. Closer to the truth is likely that they learned early that when Mommy didn’t get time to write she was grumpy and erratic. Better to lie in bed, eyes wide open, waiting for the tapping of keys to stop.)

On the day I faced the Nameless Fear head on, the angelic tandem-nappers had awoken and J had asked if he could go downstairs on his own to play while I changed the baby’s diaper. “Of course,” I said. “Meet you down there. We’ll bake cookies.” (I’m making up the “We’ll bake cookies" part. When my son was three, he believed cookie dough came from a tube. He was incredulous when he spent the night at his Nana’s and she actually made cookie dough using a range of ingredients.)

Five minutes later, I carried M down the stairs and called something out to J, probably a snack suggestion or game idea. No answer.

I went into the living room, but he wasn't there. I checked the basement. The lights were off. Not there, either. I looked in the cold cellar, and the laundry room, and the little alcove under the basement stairs.

I started calling his name. Still, nothing.

I ran upstairs, back into the living room, and looked behind the couch. My daughter, on my hip, started shouting his name, too, in her endearing, babyish way. "Are you?" She called. “Are yoooouuuuuu?"

I ran upstairs and checked his room, our room, the bathroom, my office, my husband’s office. I called J’s name again and again.

I ran into the backyard. The gate was swinging open and the yard was empty. The sight of the open gate made me feel sick. Had it been open before? Could he even open it himself? Worse: had someone else opened it? (This is when it does not pay to be a writer. Worst case scenarios are not always funny stories, and these not-so-funny stories are not only given credence, they’re given a storyline, a plot that forms all by itself, with villains and subtexts and a conclusion in which you one day see your son on a backstreet in Paris, but he doesn’t remember you because his memory has been wiped out.)

I sprinted around to the front yard and looked up and down the sidewalk, hoping to see a little boy with blond curly hair, wandering down the street, back home towards me. This was not like J. He was cautious, would never have ventured more than a few feet away from the house without thinking better of it and coming back home again. I knew this about him. Which meant he was gone. Gone. Just like that.

I ran inside to get the portable phone, but before I did, I took one last look up and down the street. I felt like I was standing at the edge of a precipice, with my life before this happened behind me, and my life after this happened a horrifying chasm I was going to have to dive into. (I told you, I have a wild imagination.) Is this really happening? I asked myself. Where is he? What do I do?

I remembered something I'd read once about the first 20 minutes a child is missing being the most crucial. Why is this? Who knows? I didn’t want to think about it too deeply.

I called 911. The operator asked my address, then my name, and how to spell it. I couldn't remember, but this could be in part because my husband’s name is long and Polish "Please," the operator said to me. "Please calm down and understand that these things almost always turn out fine. The faster you answer my questions, the faster we can help you find your son." Find your son. I think my son is missing. These things almost always turn out fine. Almost. But not always.

I answered all his questions, continuing to run around the house as we talked, up the stairs, down the stairs, into the yard, out onto the sidewalk again, over and over until I was sweating and my daughter was bumping and giggling on my hip, thinking we were playing a game. “Arrre youuuuu, buddeee?”

Now the hard part: “What was he wearing?” The operator asked. A red shirt? A blue shirt? Just his Pull Up, or was he wearing shorts? What kind of a mother was I that I didn’t know?

Next, I described his body type, his hair, his eyes.  Then I sat down on the stairs and started to cry. I cried because I was describing my son to the police. I was describing my son to the police because I couldn't find him. He was with me one moment, and then he was gone. Hello, Nameless Fear. It’s not very nice to meet you.

I heard a voice. "Mama, why are you crying? Who are you talking to?"

J had chocolate and crumbs all over his face. His beautiful, perfect, not lost face. "The police," I said. "Mama called the police." Now he was smiling. The police. You can call them? Cool.

“Can I talk?” He asked.

I shook my head, feeling stupid and happy at the same time. I should have known. While my son was indeed cautious, and not the type to wander away from the house, he was at the time, and still is, a Food Sneaker. He had a particular proclivity for these double chocolate cookies from Costco that my mom would bring over. Some of them had been in the cookie jar. He had probably been lying in his bed, during his two hour nap, planning a way to get downstairs on his own so he could have a cookie. When I said I was going to change M he saw his opening and went for it.

How had I not thought of this? I glanced into the kitchen and saw the stool pushed close to the counter and the empty cookie jar sitting open at the edge of it. I'd make a terrible detective. I'd missed all the clues, and panicked instead.

"Hello?" Said the operator.

"I found my son," I said, sheepish.

"I gathered that. Is he okay? Do you need medical help?"

I thought about saying something like, “He might after I’m through with him,” but knew it wasn’t the time to make a dumb joke. Plus, they might call Children’s Aid. "No. He was just hiding behind the easy chair in the living room, eating cookies. I'm so sorry to have bothered you."

The operator assured me I was not the first mother who had called him in a panicked state about a child who wasn't really missing. He cancelled the police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances. “Thank you,” I said, over and over. Then I hung up and hugged my son so hard he wriggled away.

"Why are you sad, Mama?"

"Because I thought I lost you," I said, wiping the chocolate from his little mouth. Vowing that I would never let him out of my sight again, take him for granted again, do anything except be a perfect mother again.

Of course I have, many times since that day, let him out of my sight, taken him for granted, been an imperfect mother. And that Nameless Fear, it still stalks me constantly, most particularly on the not-so-perfect mother days. Essentially, nothing really changed during those ten terrifying minutes on that hot summer afternoon. I learned a few things: that I’m awful in crisis. (I'm too embarrassed to fully reveal the extent of my hyperventilating, but suffice it to say the operator could possibly now qualify as my therapist.) I also learned I need to keep the cookies somewhere else. And I learned, in a very small way, that everything really can change within the confines of a minute or two. Catastrophes like earthquakes, oil spills, acts of cruelty, they can strike. And none of us, no matter how careful we are, or how much we have, or how smart we are, or how nice we are, are immune. That kind of sucks.

The bottom line: you have to live your life. You have to go out and do things and hope for the best.

Besides, the kids will probably notice if you wrap them in cotton batting and implant a tracking chip in their forearm. (Don’t think I haven’t considered it.)

Clue # 3: The Enforced Sobriety

Clue # 3: The enforced sobriety

 

(To recap, I'm attempting to give clues about what it feels like to be a parent. If you feel lost, read post one and post two.)

The weekend I discovered I was pregnant with our first child we had plans to travel to Niagara Falls for an Allman Brothers Band concert. If you’ve ever listened to the Allman Brothers Band, than you know that it helps to be under the influence of something while listening to the Allman Brothers Band. (I’m sorry, but 33 minutes and 41 seconds is just too long to have to listen to a song without lyrics while not buzzed on something.)

Of course, now that I’d gone and peed on the stick and had that profound, “A whole other life! Growing inside me! I'm like Celene Dion! This has never happened to anyone else in the history of time!” moment, I wasn’t going to be buzzed on anything other than my own excitement about becoming a mother. 

Mountain Jam while sober, here I came. 

I hate to admit this, but I actually spent part of the concert wondering if the loud music was going to harm the fetus. I know. 

The morning after the concert, while my husband and our friends sprawled about hotel rooms in various states of hungover disarray, I awoke at 7 am (because I’d gone to bed at 10 pm), went to a restaurant alone for breakfast and then walked (or, more accurately, stomped) toward the falls, alone.

Being a good sport just isn’t in my nature. I was pissy. I was hormonal, or at least I was trying to use the fact that I was maybe hormonal, because you're allowed to be when you're pregnant, as an excuse for being in such a shite mood.  I was also grappling with the realization that I was going to have to be a good sport for nine months (which were actually ten and were going to feel like twelve). It had only been 24 hours, and I was already raging against the self sacrifice. And all I'd had to give up was a few drinks. But what, exactly, was I doing this for? My stomach was still flat. The baby felt like a ghost. 

Which is definitely a feeling you’ll have as a parent. A feeling of self-sacrifice, even when you don't know exactly what the reward, if any, is going to be. And also, a feeling of not only enforced sobriety, but enforced maturity, too. 

It was much less complicated in the olden days, when you had kids primarily so they could help you hoe the fields and milk the cows and carry on the family name and if they refused you threw them in a shed. (Hmm, maybe I've just read too much tortured early-Canadian literature and that was never what it was really like? Anyway.)  

The reality of modern day parenting is that you will have to give some things up, for a while, and you can't make your kid hoe a field in exchange for the gift of life. You'll have to give these things up for as long as it takes for your life to change enough that doing the things you used to love probably won't ever feel the same again, even when you have the time to do them. Mostly because you'll be doing them while thinking things like, "I wonder how junior is enjoying his trip to Port-au-Prince/Ciudad Juarez/Kandahar. I'm so happy he's changing the world, but an email/text/Skype would be fab." These sorts of thoughts can put a damper on relaxation, I'm guessing/

The truth is, I miss a lot of things. I miss sleeping in without feeling indebted to my husband when I finally crawl out of bed. I miss reading at leisure, all the time, any time. Even more, I miss being able to write something down the very second I think of it, or spend all day writing something I really want to be writing without feeling guilty and sad about what I'm missing out on while I'm writing it. Or guilty and sad because wanting to write this thing has made me grumpy and less present and that's not fair to anyone.

I miss the days when I could behave badly and not have to turn around and see two pairs of eyes taking it all in, thus causing me to relive and regret said bad behaviour for days, weeks, months, ever. And mostly, I miss not feeling as vulnerable to the whims of the world as I do now that two people I love a crazy lot go out into the world every day and I can't always be there to fix everything and keep them perfectly safe and perfectly happy.  

But there are rewards. It's true what they say. The things I love most about being a parent are possibly trite and maybe predictable, but here they are:

I like to watch them sleep. It's exquisite, truly. It's just like in that book by Robert Munsch that I can't even say the name of or I'll cry.

I like the way they smell, even when they smell sort of bad.

I like that not only are they my people, but that also, I'm their person.

I like how much they love me and I like it when they say it at the most random of moments. I like it when they say "thank you" to a stranger.

I like it when I realize that there's no one in the world they want to be with at a certain given moment than me.

I like it when they laugh their belly laughs. (I also like jumping out at them and scaring the crap out of them. Call me a sicko, but there is nothing. funnier.) 

The list of things I like was different when they were babies (I liked it when they would sleep on my chest, I liked to carry them close, I liked the way when I put my finger on their hand while they were sleeping, their little hand would automatically close on mine and hold it tight) and I know it's going to be different as they grow. I know there are going to be dislikes, too, but I'm not going to borrow trouble by imagining what those might be. 

Most of all, I like being a parent even though I have no clue how I'm going to feel from one day to the next and even though the peeing on a stick, nausea and enforced sobriety/maturity did very little to prepare me for what was in store. And I like my kids. I think that helps a lot. 

Clue # 2: The Nausea

Clue # 2 (About what it might feel like to have a kid, if you don't have one yet): 
The nausea.

(For Clue # 1, read the first post) 

One particularly clear memory from my first pregnancy: I hadn’t been able to eat much for days. Everything I tried was either repulsive or delivered instant heartburn. 

Chicken soup, I suddenly decided. I need chicken soup. Chicken soup is exactly what I need. It’s full of vitamins and nutrients and almost all the food groups. It’s going to make both me and my baby healthier and smarter.

So I left our downtown condo and headed along Queen Street until I found the right Polish deli, the one that made the fresh, homemade soups. I bought a large container and returned home.

I grabbed a spoon. I opened the lid.

The smell. It was probably just regular chicken soup, maybe a little garlicky, maybe that was the problem, but whatever it was, I gagged.

I put the lid back on and ran down the hall to dump it down the garbage chute, then gagged again as I imagined the container exploding its hot, smelly contents as it traveled toward the dumpster below. 

Maybe the entire condo complex was going to smell like the soup now. Forever. Gag, gag, gag.

I went back inside and took a nap. When I woke up, I realized that what I needed was calamari. (Who knew?)

Really? you might be thinking. Being a parent is like having nausea and hating chicken soup? That’s my clue? 

Totally no. The key to the second clue is:  you will feel a sense of powerlessness that you will immediately try to solve. (Chicken soup!) Then, once you stop trying so hard (Nap time!), the answer will become apparent (Calamari!).

Example: This experience is actually almost exactly what it’s like to try to feed a toddler or preschooler or young child (and maybe teenager? I haven’t found out yet). You try and fail a number of times at getting him or her to eat something, anything, that is not an ice cube, or a Skittle, or a cracker in the shape of a goldfish, or piece of Lego.

Then you come up with the most innocuous thing you can think of. Chicken soup! Who doesn’t like chicken soup? Plus, it has all the nutrients! Almost all the food groups! Plus there are those books! It's good for the soul! 

Well, guess who doesn't like chicken soup? Your kid doesn’t like chicken soup. She gags, screams, cries, holds her breath (they really do that) and eventually, the soup is dumped down the drain and both of you are left wishing to never have see soup of any kind, or each other,  ever again.

Then, everyone takes a nap. 

And later, you discover that all she really wanted was a pack of Hot & Spicy seaweed sheets. 

(This has actually happened to me. Seaweed sheets. For real.) 

Stay tuned for the Third and Final Clue ... 

The Clues: Part One

Sometimes, people say things to me like,  “I had no idea what it was going to be like to be a parent until I actually had a baby.”

Well, yeah. 

There are no parenting simulation programs (and carrying around a bag of sugar is nothing like having an actual baby, by the way. Neither is having a dog. Sorry. But did you push your dog out of your vaj? And yes, I do realize this is a good argument for getting a dog instead of having a kid.) 

A friend considering having a child recently asked me to give her a clue or two. "What's it like to be a parent?" She asked. "How can I know if I'm going to like it?" 

The truth: there’s no way to know for sure how you are (or are not) going to feel the moment you give birth. Or the moment after. Or the moment after that. (How about now? Do you feel it now? That’s because you have no idea what you’re supposed to be feeling.)

Not to sound all Smug Mummy and been-there-done-that-ish, but the feeling that comes with being a parent is one you can only get by actually being a parent. It's sort of like jumping out of a plane.  (Except that if you’re a woman, just before you jump out of the plane you have to lie down, spread your legs and start screaming until they drug you. At which point, if you said previously that you didn't want any drugs--because you had no idea it was going to hurt so eff-bombing much--they'll start reminding you about your birth plan and telling you drugs aren't what you really want. But yes they are.)

So at first, after my friend asked for clues, I thought,  no way, there are no clues. This is not a Nancy Drew novel! But then I really thought about it. And realized there are lots of clues, which means I probably should have seen it all coming ...

Welcome to my three part series! Clues About What Parenting Might Possibly Be Like. It's a service piece. You're welcome.

Clue # 1: The part where you have to pee on a stick.

The home pregnancy test-on-a-stick. The one you urinate on. And obsess over. And, possibly—at least in my case—then keep in a plastic baggie in your underwear drawer until the day you can bring yourself to throw it away. Which by the way will be never! You might see it as a foul, old, dried-pee covered stick. I see my two sticks, with their bright pink lines—now admittedly slightly yellowed by the presence of the aforementioned dried urine—as poignant reminders of two moments in which my life changed forever. Moments when I became aware, for the first time, of the existence of people I had never needed in order to live my life before, but, from the second I knew of them, suddenly needed more than anything. (I feel the need to apologize here. I’ve read a lot of articles and blogs and books about the ambivalence of motherhood, and I’m not judging: I get that some people don’t feel that desperate, all-consuming love right away. Or ever. The fact that I did and do feel it sometimes makes me feel guilty and apologetic. But honestly, I don’t think the Instant Mother Love I felt makes me a better mother. Sometimes I wonder if it makes me a faulty one, because it immobilizes me all too often, and has, over the years, morphed into something that feels a bit obsessive at times. Yes, I'm one of those moms.)

(And, incidentally, moments after I realized how much I needed these two small people, and felt the Instant Mother Love, I also realized I was somehow responsible for keeping them safe and happy and healthy and well-rounded and sane and … holy. feck.)

Back to the pee sticks. I carried my first one on the subway all the way downtown to my mom’s office (in my handbag; I didn’t actually carry it in my hand on the subway), to use as a prop when telling her she was going to be a Nana. (I don’t know why I thought I needed a prop. I also brought dollhouse furniture. Seriously.)

Disgusting, right? A pee stick. (And dollhouse furniture. That's just weird.) 

But there it is, the clue:  Things that you once found disgusting will become things that you love. Example: A stick that you just peed on is no longer a stick that you just peed on.

Just as, conversely, several months down the line (they say it’s nine but it’s actually closer to ten and feels like a minimum of twelve), the small person covered in the stickiest, scariest, most disgusting substance on earth—it’s called meconium; you can’t possibly know how it’s going to feel to wipe this off a baby’s bum until you have to do it so it’s best not to think about it now—is not just a small person covered in sticky, nine-month-old poo. This is your small person covered in sticky, nine-month old old poo. Your very own person,  screaming a scream that will cause a biological reaction in you that will alternately incite feelings of love and protectiveness, or push you into a pit of exhaustion so deep you'll feel forever changed. (You're not. You'll get over it, even if it is the kind of exhaustion that made Macbeth go insane.) 

Stay tuned for Clue # 2....

Introduction: So Your Kid’s a Lemon! (It’s not your fault.)

Years ago, (makes me sound too old)

Some time ago, (makes me sound even older, and also vague)

At some point in my careless, wanton youth (yeah, no.)

Once, I had a pregnancy scare. (Okay, fine, not just once.)

Once that I can remember in particular, I had a pregnancy scare.

This was before I was married, but not before I was with the man I would eventually marry, so the scare wasn’t a panicked, “What am I going to do now this guy is never going to pony up for child support oh no what if the baby gets his funny shaped head?! I’m staring into the void!” kind of a scare, but rather an “Oops! I didn’t realize being on antibiotics made birth control impotent, what a strange time to use the word “impotent,” I’m never going to that dodgy nail bar again” kind of a scare.  I knew that either way we could probably make it work, but I can also admit to a certain amount of concern.

To help lighten the mood, a friend I’d confided in sent a funny email that prompted us to start writing a story, back and forth, about what would happen, in a bizarre, parallel world, if I really was pregnant. (This is what some writers do. It somehow makes things better, to speculate about Worst Case Scenarios, to elevate situations, via prose, to levels of such ridiculousness that hopefully mean of course this is never going actually happen to you. And if it does, at least it didn’t happen in the horrible, bizarro world way you envisioned it might, so it’s win-win. Really!)

In this fictional, could-be world, my baby lived in the closet of my not-yet-husband’s bachelor pad. We called him Little Joey. He was entertained by a mobile my not-yet-husband and his roommate had constructed out of empty beer cans and playing cards with nude models on them. When Little Joey couldn’t sleep, we took him clubbing. In the story, I was frazzled but ridiculously hot (I’d gone home from the hospital in a mini skirt and thigh high boots), and was still finishing my journalism degree (which I was at the time, hence the edginess about the potential pregnancy; no one at J-school had ever brought a baby in a papoose to class. I sensed it would be frowned upon), while waiting tables and reading parenting books between shifts with titles like, “So, Your Kid’s a Lemon. (It’s not your fault!)”  

Oh, those emails made me laugh. The absurd conjecture. The absolute hilarity. The patent ridiculousness of the idea that I would ever be the kind of person to read a parenting book. Ha. Ha. Haaaaa. I was way too hip for that, and also, even at such a tender age, or perhaps because of the tender age, way too self-assured. I was going to be a great mother, when the time came. I wasn’t going to need any book. It would all just come naturally.

In the end, I was relieved to discover I wasn’t pregnant—but the relief also came along with a pang. Maybe you know the one. The one you feel when you’re finally with someone you can envision having a baby with, and you have that first “scare” (funny, isn’t it, how quickly something that was once a “scare” can turn into something that it defines your life to attain?), and it turns out to be nothing. But it could have been something. The crisis has been averted, but there’s a tiny part of you, tinier in some than others, that misses that feeling of “what if”? Because this “what if” is huge. A whole other person. A whole other person you might have been in charge of. (This is the first of many pre-parenting fallacies, by the way, the notion that you are in charge at all.)

Guess what? It turns out I am the type of person to read parenting books, to obsess over tiny details, to feel uncertain a lot of the time about what I’m supposed to be doing, to wonder how it all  happened (aside from the obvious), to feel that I’m inhabiting a grown up role when in so many ways, I feel like I’m still that 23-year-old. This is when I think things like: Better read a parenting book! Maybe an actual adult can tell me what to do.

At this point, I’ve read dozens of the books, and not read dozens of others. (Sometimes, I just leave them on my bedside table. Their very presence, their take-action titles, alternately soothe me and give me pre-bedtime anxiety attacks.) Regardless of whether I’m reading the books or not, there are moments when I feel like a good mother, even a great one (these moments don’t tend to last long and are often punctuated by someone falling off of something and possibly needing medical attention, except I can’t find a good place to put down my wine glass), and other moments when I feel like the worst mother ever. (Someone recently told me that the next time I feel like a bad mother, I should watch Honey Boo Boo. I haven’t worked up the courage.)

 Other days, I feel like something and someone in between.

And, every once in a while, I think of the feckless days of my youth, and the fictitious title of that parenting book comes to mind. So Your Kid’s a Lemon. (It’s not Your fault!) I think about how writing it down, even though it all seemed so silly, somehow made everything feel better. And, more importantly, I think about how writing it down made it all seem funnier. 

So I've finally decided to enter the Parent Blog milieu. Yes, I realize I'm about a decade late to the party, but I have some seriously funny stories to share. The bonus? You just might learn something. I know I did. (And still am.)