Scaredy-Cat Mom
I used to love flying. Then I had a child.
Posted by Rebecca Teti
in Just me
on Monday, August 29, 2011 12:00 PM
Here’s a strange phenomenon I’ve never seen addressed in print.
I used to adore flying.
Now it terrifies me, and the transition pre-dates 9-11.
I have lucid memories of a turbulent collegiate flight to Europe that terrified many of my seat-mates, but didn’t bother me.
Perhaps I was just too motion-sick to be afraid, but I’m temperamentally pragmatic and tend to weigh probabilities more than worst-case scenarios.
I figured pilots are trained and planes are made to weather storms so we were probably going to be fine. And if worse came to worst, we were in God’s hands and there were more prolonged and agonizing ways to go.
No big whup.
It caught me by surprise, therefore, the first time I boarded a plane after our eldest child was born, to find myself profoundly anxious about what had become a decidedly big whup.
Many things to which I never gave a thought are now a Big Whup.
I’ve never gotten over that wrenching fear since (it’s now 14 years later).
I can talk myself through it, but nothing changes the fact that flying, for me, has become not a pleasant adventure, but a white-knuckled, rosary-clenching trial.
I got to thinking about this transformation while talking to my (single) younger brother, who lives within walking distance of our home, yesterday.
Sunday morning at 2 AM, during the peak winds and rain of Hurricane Irene, the power suddenly went out and the house was shaking, so I went to check that the kids weren’t afraid and the basement wasn’t flooding.
You know what my brother did? Walked down to the river to see what it was doing!
There was a time when I would have done that too. Our mom raised us to love storms and to appreciate their wild beauty and power.
But it didn’t even occur to me.
Did that happen to you, too: a transition from somewhat fearless to kind of a fraidy-cat?
I’m not speaking about a mom’s duty to protect her child.
Had it occurred to me to go out and exult at the wild river at two am, I couldn’t have done it. It would have been irresponsible for me to leave when the basement might need bailing at any moment, and my husband, who is bold on his own, but would make me hold his hand crossing the street if he could, would have been really angry.
I have a responsibility to put my family first.
But the thought didn’t cross my mind—when once it would have.
I was, truth be told, a little anxious. I would have loved it if one of the kids was in need of comforting, because I could have used a hug myself!
Having kids taught me not only to be protective of them, but also to be more anxious about my own life, which previously I’d not held all that dear.
This change appears to have sprung not from rational analysis of my new duties, but innately, instinctively, almost from the DNA.
I know I’m not completely alone in this. Other moms have told me about being surprised—and in some ways hampered—by fears that suddenly sprang up in them once they’d had a child.
Isn’t that odd and interesting? Did you experience the same?
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I was more timid earlier in my life and my husband was the adventurous one. I tagged along with him everywhere and learned to be too. Now, with children, I feel like I’ve had to ‘rise to the occasion’ in a lot of ways for my kids and it comes naturally for me now, and to help them overcome any fears that they may have.
