Dread

Dread comes barreling into the world right alongside our babies, hand in hand with joy, trepidation, and shock. 

Liz Sarb

Early each morning, as I tiptoe about making coffee, a feeling creeps up on me. It’s the same feeling you might get watching a scary movie, before the scary thing happens: maybe some creepy foreshadowing has occurred—you’ve seen the yucky-looking doll in the corner of the old broken-ass house the couple just bought and have a bad feeling about it—but no one has yet been bludgeoned to death with a chair leg.

This is the feeling I get before my toddlers wake up. 

I don’t understand it. Most mornings, the boys just get up and play with trucks or snuggle next to me. There’s no bludgeoning. Our mornings are often sweet. But the feeling of dread is unmistakable as I hear the soft sounds of babies shifting in their blankets. 

Perhaps it’s a holdover from the newborn days, when dread was warranted. The bleating of a two month old in need of midnight milk, dragging me from a lovely warm burrow of blankets and cats. That’s a real, clear thing to dread, and I dread it nightly, and have for nearly ten years running. I don’t feel bad about that one. My second-born sought night nursing until around 14 months. When he finally stopped we experienced a sweet chunk of time (before our third joined the family) when no one woke in the night. I noticed, during that phase, that I’d hear things–kittens romping, the furnace pulsing on–and jolt. 

“No,” I’d think. “No, nooooo.” And then I’d realize it wasn’t the baby. The baby didn’t need that anymore. The dread, so stark, would fade. 

So maybe it’s this that holds over into my mornings, as those babies become toddlers. Maybe I’ve powered through the night and now, in my quiet morning moments, I fear the disruption, even though it’s often sweet. Right now, just this moment, my 5:30 a.m. boy hugged my leg gently and laid his cheek on my knee. Why don’t I eagerly await that? Why am I not stomping around hoping to rouse my favorite people?

Maybe it’s something else. 

Maybe, it’s knowing that in their beds in those early hours, they’re safe.

I’ve been thinking a lot about dread this week, after another shooting took young lives. I send my older two away in the car each morning with a kiss, and a “Be kind, listen to your teachers, God bless you.” I smile and wave at their little faces as they pull down the driveway to mask the stabbing fear in my heart. I make sure I tell them I love them before they go in case it’s my last chance. 

W H A T.

We were in line for my daughter’s first COVID vaccine when she told me about her school’s active shooter drill.

She was five.

We were literally moments away from trading one set of risks (contracting the still not-very-well-known COVID) for another (this vaccine is new, we don’t know the full scope of side effects, she’s the youngest age allowed). I sat there, listening to the Christmas muzak, fretting over whether the risks we were assuming were better than the ones we were reducing when my curious little girl piped up. “We did a new drill today at school!”

“Oh yeah?” I said, scanning consent forms and side effects.

Big smile: “A lockdown drill!”

The papers sank softly to my lap.

None of this. None of this was on my radar when I became a parent. I never envisioned a world where I’d worry about my tiny children wearing masks at school so as not to breathe pathogens while hiding silently under their desks so as not to attract shooters with assault rifles.  

This isn’t a story about early morning interruptions, or night feeds. It isn’t a story about mass shootings although I could, I could, write 20,000 words about how sick and twisted it is that American parents feel this way about sending their kids to school because a subset of powerful people have a perverted attachment to weapons that they value more than babies’ lives. 

No. It’s just a story about parenting. Dread comes barreling into the world right alongside our babies, hand in hand with joy, trepidation, and shock. 

I think horrible thoughts as a parent. What if my car submerges in a lake? How could my husband and I possibly unbuckle and swim four children to safety? What is the order of operations? What if a fire breaks out at our in-laws while two children sleep in a room two floors down? How will we get to them and get them to safety in the three to four minutes it takes for a house to become engulfed in flames?

When each baby first slept through the night, instead of “Yay!” my first thought was blind panic that they suffocated in their tiny stuffed animals.

I sound mentally ill (and maybe I am) but I know I’m not alone. Once, while pregnant with our second at a crowded outdoor Christmas tree lighting, I started thinking “This seems like a prime target for a shooter—” but my husband’s voice cut me off mid-thought. 

“Hey,” he said. “If someone starts shooting, just run. Get yourself to safety. I’ll take care of the baby.”

W H A T.

Horrible things happen all the time. Horrible things happen to children. Mostly those things are firearms and water, but they can be car accidents, illness, falls. Our job, our God-given job, to protect these babies, is not always possible, and it leaves us in a state of ongoing crisis mode.

We are tired because the kids wake up at night.  We are tired because they don’t give us alone time. We are tired from early mornings, and arguments about clothes, and teaching manners, and potty training, and cleaning up after their rampages. 

But we are also tired from the never-ending awareness that these kids are ours to protect, yet every minute of every day could be the one that we can never take back. The two minutes we stepped away from the bathtub. The one time we buckled them carelessly. The one morning we sent them to school, shoes untied, cheeks glowing with anticipation.