My true companion

An old friend called the other day and revealed a happy secret: she’s six and a half weeks pregnant!

And understandably, after years of yearning, months of trying and a recent miscarriage, she’s nervous.

She has her seven-week ultrasound on Friday. “Once I get through that I think I’ll feel a lot less worried about everything,” she confided.

Bless her dear, wee naïve soul.

She doesn’t yet know, of course, that the worry she feels now won’t go away at the seven week ultrasound, or at the end of the first trimester, and certainly not with the arrival of a beautiful, healthy baby. She doesn’t yet know that worry, an occasional visitor for most people without children, becomes a constant companion once you become a parent.

If there is one single aspect of parenthood that I was completely unprepared for, that I simply could not fathom, it is, hands down, the constant worry.

The early days of my pregnancy were a blur of anxiety. Every trip to the washroom was an ordeal involving baited breath and prayers. I counted down the days until I finished my first trimester so I could “stop worrying.”

Three months into my pregnancy I started counting the days until I figured my growing baby would be viable if worse came to worse. Twenty-six weeks? Twenty-seven? Thirty?

When Graham finally arrived, in addition to being stricken by thoughts of SIDS and RSV, I faced the very real prospect that he was disabled. The worry I lived with during those early days was so intense and so pervasive that even now my heart constricts and my eyes well at the mere thought of it.

That particular fear was unfounded, praise God. Graham is happy, healthy and full of beans. A more gorgeous, blessed child has never been born. He eats and sleeps like a champ, rarely gets so much as a cold and appears to be, in my humble opinion, a bone fide genius.

And yet I still worry.

I worry about childhood illness and predators and things that go bump in the night. I worry about him being bullied and crossing the street and swimming at the lake and getting his driver’s license. I worry that I never should have taken him for his first flight. I worry about him marrying the wrong person and never finding a job he enjoys and having to face the depression that tends to run in my family.

I lie awake at night sometimes and as sleep eludes me, a sense of unease about my good fortune creeps into my bones. I have done nothing to deserve the abundance who sleeps, so heavily and damp and peaceably, in the next room. Can I really be allowed to enjoy his continued robust health? Surely there will be a reckoning, won’t there?

Just please let it be mine and not his.

Things look different in the light of day, of course. I do not spend my days fussing and fretting. My friends and family would never characterize me as a worrier.

But I am.

It’s been more than three years since I first saw two pink lines on a pregnancy test and since then my worry has become just like an old shoe, worn and comfortable and so much a part of my life that, just like my son, I can’t remember when it wasn’t there.

On luck and the cruelty of fate

I learned some important life lessons yesterday.

I was visiting my parents and catching up on family news with my father when talk turned to a cousin I’m quite close with. He’s younger than me, but has a beautiful wife, three small children and a number of business ventures on the go. As is tradition in our family, he’s also an enthusiastic private pilot.

My cousin is smart, dynamic and a hard worker. But even as dad and I agreed that he deserves every bit of his considerable success, I felt a tiny twinge of jealousy gnaw at my stomach. What a charmed life he’s led, I thought. Some people really have all the luck.

Just a few hours later we got the news.

My cousin’s father-in-law, a man we all consider part of our extended family, was killed yesterday while piloting his small plane in Florida where he was vacationing.

My entire family is reeling in shock. I haven’t yet spoken to my cousin or his wife, who I adore, but my heart breaks for them and their children.

This man lived next door to my cousin and his family in the small community near where I was born and where almost every person, it seems, is related to me in some way. This man was an integral part of the tight-knit gang of local float plane pilots, comprised largely, it seems, of my relatives and of which I am the sole female member.

Along with me and my father and my cousin, this man was one of the pilots who every summer ferry several dozen people in and out of my family fishing camp, accessible only by air, when we spend a weekend together camping, laughing and making music.

I can picture him now by the lake’s shore in the bright sunlight bouncing his baby granddaughter on his knee and watching her daddy fly in with the latest arrivals.

Yes, I learned a few things yesterday.

I learned that flying small planes, this sport I love, that I learned at my father’s knee, that my husband is now learning, that I was proud to introduce to my son, is not a sport to be trifled with.

I learned that fate is cruel and that no one, no matter how charmed they seem, gets through life without their share of pain, misfortune and bad luck.

I learned that the stresses in my life, that seem lately to pile one atop the other, are not nearly as profound as I believed them to be just a few days ago.

Knock on wood

Like most parents, I love it when someone compliments my son.

And I won’t lie: the very best kind of compliments are the kind that make reference to my parenting abilities, whether they’re merited or not.

Graham happily eats everything he’s ever been offered? That’s because you ate so well when you were pregnant. Graham slept through the night at six weeks? That’s because you’ve been so calm and consistent with him. Graham’s happy and good natured? That’s because you and Rob are so easy-going.

Ah, what could be more soothing than the warm balm of self-delusion?

Because the truth is, as much as I might luxuriate in remarks like those, I know it would be disingenuous to take even an ounce of credit for what amounts to just plain old good luck.

Human beings, blessed as they are with self-determination, don’t like to think that their fortunes, good or bad, are a result of something as capricious as luck. When things go wrong, we look for someone to blame. When things are good…well, we must be doing something right.

Especially when it comes to our children, the idea that luck is most often the determining factor in whether babies will be easy or difficult, or more importantly, sick or healthy, is not just anathema, it’s downright terrifying.

For the most part we expect things to go well for us here in the First World in the year 2008. We are armed with knowledge our ancestors never dreamed about and, rightfully so, we use it to try and mitigate the risks that other people in other countries and other times accepted as part and parcel of child-rearing and life in general.

We sterilize baby bottles and toys, we baby-proof our houses from top to bottom, we pay outrageous sums of money for high-tech protective devices like SIDS monitors and video cameras.

We stir vitamins in oatmeal and obsess about every morsel of food that passes our children’s lips. We rush to the internet to research every rash, every bump, every upset stomach. We call the doctor when the cough lingers or the nose continues to run or they just don’t seem like themselves.

But beneath all this tending and protecting, aren’t we mostly just hoping and praying?

Hoping fervently that our kids won’t be the ones in the hospital ads that make us cry. Praying that our child will never be the subject of a eulogy written by their 30-something friend. Whispering "There but by the grace of god go I" every time we hear that life has dealt a losing hand to some other parent, some other child.

I have always said that having a child is not for people who like to play it safe. In giving birth, we give the universe the power to enrich our life immeasurably or shatter it irrevocably. No matter how great your effort, parenthood is a crap shoot and every one of us knows it.

Graham was an easy baby. Graham is healthy. Parenting Graham has been a relatively smooth ride.

And while I’m happy to gobble up all the compliments on parenting that come my way, deep down I know I’m just lucky, lucky, lucky.