Arwen, who is pregnant with her first child writes:
Arwen/Elizabeth: “It was after the baby was born, apparently quite a few months after. Bryan came back from an outing with him (yes, him! make as much or as little of that as you will) to tell me that the government had taken the baby away from him because a woman had reported him for feeding the baby a tater tot in a restaurant. This was apparently an offense serious enough to justify having the baby removed from our home, and the authorities would hold onto our baby for up to 30 days while they investigated the incident.
My subconscious’s ability to create strange legal scenarios aside, what was striking about this dream was how viscerally I reacted to having my baby taken away. I sobbed so hard in the dream that when I woke up, my chest was hurting. It took several minutes to shake off the horror, and half-an-hour later I’m still ready to cry thinking about it. They took my baby away. Even though I’m well aware it couldn’t really happen like that.
So now I’m wondering: is that what motherhood feels like? That deep, that vulnerable, that real? I love this little one I’m carrying quite a lot already, but I’m expecting – especially from watching my sister with my new nephew – that I’ll be much more aware of that love after he’s born. But if what I was feeling in the dream was like reality, I’ve got no idea what I’m in for. (In a good way, of course.) Moms, clue me in here. Is that what it’s like?”
Yes Arwen. And the bad news/good news is that it feels like that pretty much as long as you are alive. During pregnancy there is of course the fear of miscarriage and stillbirth. You live in anticipation of each little kick or twirl in your stomach hoping and praying that everything is well. During delivery you pray that there will be no complications and are only relieved when you hear that first cry with a smile and a nod from the birth attendant and baby doctor.
During infancy you worry that they are sleeping too much, that they aren’t sleeping enough. Every story or image you have in your mind of SIDs from the woman crying to King Solomon to the nightly news is close by somewhere in your mind.
Toddlerhood brings its own set of problems and I often wondered why God gives these little ones the ability to be mobile without the common sense to use it.
There is always now the terror that our children will be grabbed off the street, off of their own front yard, even out of their beds. I’m sure the media helps to put that fear there but it sure seems that you cannot be too safe or too vigilant. Your fear of losing your baby for a tater tot is not too far off base either. It takes one person to misinterpret or have a problem with you and another nightmare starts.
Teenagers WANT to get away from us. We have to let them. It’s hard to let them go new places, try new things without you, but we must and pray that they stay safe physically, mentally and spiritually.
I haven’t had the pleasure of having a teen out for fun with a car yet. That’s coming. I look at my mother’s beautiful head of snowy white hair and realize that my sister and I contributed to that. I deeply respect my mother now for all that she endured while we were teenagers.
From what my mother says, the fear of having a child taken away didn’t end when we became adults. She worried about our spiritual health as we drifted in early adulthood. She worried about us, our spouses and now her grandchildren, only intervening when she felt she absolutely had to say something. I give her a lot of credit for that. Perhaps she feels a bit like her mother felt, that someday she will be gone and we will really be on our own, and worry that we won’t all be able to meet up in the next life.
For mothers it is indeed an eternal cross to bear.
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