Parental Fears

We all have them, we all know that feeling.  That gut tightening, heart quickening feeling.  Those PARENTAL FEARS.  When you are a child and you have things that scare you, you can run to Mom or Dad and they can help ease your fears and make you feel better.  However, when you become a parent...it's a little more difficult to chase away your fears and feel better about them.  We don't all have the same parental fears, we may have several in common but chances are we do not share all of the same fears because well, we all come from different backgrounds, different lives, and well, we're just different people.  So my parental fears may not be the same as yours.  However, with Christmas approaching and a new year almost upon us I find myself laying in bed at night struggling to fall asleep because I'm worrying. 

Worrying over everything.  Scared.  I try my best to pray and gives my fears and worries to God, because God is bigger than all of my problems, and he's always guided our family through so many situations.  However, sometimes it's just hard to give those problems over.  As a mom, we want to be able to fix everything, and make it better.  That's kind of what we do.  Worries can eat at us that's for sure!

Remember back to when you were pregnant and you didn't feel your baby kick or you had an odd cramp or a bit of spotting.  You freaked out didn't you?  (Especially with child #1).  You called your labor and delivery unit or OB at any hour of the day concerned that something was wrong.  When your baby was born, you counted fingers and toes and made sure they were breathing and waited for that first cry when they came out.  You were happy and scared all at the same time.  First time you held that little bundle I bet you were scared.  Were you holding their head right? Were they warm enough?  Were they really OK after that birth?  Were you a little awkward and stiff at first or fall straight into the 'mom' embrace? When your little one started meeting those mile stones you were a little afraid.  Afraid because you realized your little one was growing up, and then afraid because well, are they meeting the mile stones correctly?  Are they eating enough?  Growing right?  Is that normal?  Shouldn't they be rolling over?  Why isn't she crawling?  Why won't she take a bottle, or try baby food, or what am I doing wrong, he won't nurse? As your child started to crawl and then pull up and then walk...you feared them getting injured, and baby proofed EVERYTHING.  I don't know about you but I lived with a hand vacuum in my hand and was always vacuuming around base boards and under and around furniture getting any little thing they might choke on (ironically the same son almost chocked to death twice because of something my husband and I missed that we didn't even know was on the ground).  You used plug covers (only to realize your kid could get them off in 2seconds flat, and he found your car keys one day and plugged it into an outlet...zapping himself across your new home living room you were in the process of trying to unpack...)  Scary.  Remember the feeling you had the first time they teetered on the edge of the stairs and you were waiting for what would happen next as you got to them quickly, or when they were finally old enough to do stairs alone but it still scared the pants off of you?  How about that first day of Day Care, or preschool, or that feeling you had whenever they got a shot?  Or got SICK (scary!), that feeling of their first day of KINDERGARTEN (emotional that's for sure!). 

Since Christmas is approaching it has me thinking about LAST Christmas.  Last Christmas was rough for us.  My Mother in law had just moved out and left us in a bind, and a week and a half (roughly) before Christmas my husband was fired from his job, and at the time I was a stay at home mom (looking for employment), but babysitting on the side here and there to help pitch in to the family budget.  When my husband told me he had been fired, it was a devastating blow.  We thought Christmas was going to be so rough.  Thanks to some amazing "Santa's" the kids had a great Christmas and for that we are forever thankful and hope to some day pay that forward. But it was scary.  Especially trying to figure out how to pay the BILLS for January.  The middle of winter. Thank GOD I was able to find a job right before Christmas and started right after Christmas and my husband started a few months later.

This year....my husband and I are both working, still struggling  a little but we are both working (with a schedule we love that works amazingly well for our family that I am so blessed to have).  We have wonderful bosses and we absolutely love where we work and who we work with and for.  (Added bonus my husband and I work together, which is something we've done in the past and have always loved). 

I still think back to last Christmas and get a little freaked out.  Financial crisis is always a HUGE fear for probably every parent.  It trickles down into several other fears!
Financial Crisis is a pretty valid fear.  Without income, it's difficult to pay rent or house payments (which leads to a whole new fear), hard to buy food (and I'm sorry but food pantries do not always give you reasonable foods to actually be able to cook nutritious meals for your children a lot of food pantries give out more than enough snack foods and odd ball items that make no sense at all).  Which lack of food...a whole new fear.  Financial crisis would make it hard to keep electric and water on, and your kids in proper clothing.  Not to mention any medical care your family might need.
Homelessness is another fear.  We rent, and have, in the past, moved several times (mostly because the places we lived in were too small for our expanding family).  However, I hate to move.  HAAAATE IT.  I also hate renting, but am grateful for that opportunity.  I'm hoping to some day be in a position to be able to OWN my own home.  I know people who have been homeless with children.  It's hard.  It breaks your heart.  I want my children to be able to lay their heads down at night on their own pillow in their own beds in their own rooms.  I want them to feel comfortable in their home, not have to feel like they are walking on egg shells in someone else's home.  Or worry about sleeping in a tent or on the streets or in a car.  That's a rough way to have to raise a family and parent, and yet every day families do it. 
No Food, is another fear I have.  I'm always afraid I won't be able to feed my children.  Which is looking in my cupboards or freezer and fridge you'd laugh at because trust me...my kids are far from starving.  We are blessed to have a well stocked pantry. You never know when or how that could change. What if there was a natural disaster tomorrow?  What if we were homeless?  (We couldn't carry all that food with us!) What would we do?  How would I feed my children?  My sons are six and my daughter is eight, they eat...a lot.  I would gladly give up my last morsel of food to my children so they wouldn't go hungry.  As blessed as we are with food right now, I still worry about my children going hungry because I know that somewhere RIGHT NOW there is a child crying, hungry, and their parents are probably crying because they can't give food to their child.  How many children will die from starvation?

I fear losing my children.  For any reason.  Whether it be from them passing away (which is my absolute BIGGEST fear) something NO parent every wants to think about at all!! When my youngest son was first diagnosed with cancer...that's something my husband and I actually discussed.  What will we do if our son dies?  *shudder*  NOT a conversation I wanted to have about my newborn son! I remember spending the first YEAR of my children's lives (at least) constantly waking up in the night to make sure they were all breathing.  One of my sons was a particularly HEAVY sleeper and I would literally wake him up just to make sure he was breathing because you couldn't tell otherwise if he was breathing.  I fear my children disappearing, you hear about I all of the time on the news.  Children, vanishing without a trace.  Parents left wondering if their child was taken by some crazed person, or if they wandered off into the night and met some horrible accident.  Just the THOUGHT of my children not being with me makes my heart break.  To not be able to reach out and touch their sweet face, to hear the sounds of them giggling (or yes even arguing!) is something I can't imagine.  To not feel their sweet little arms around my neck in a big bear hug, to not hear their voices, or see their sparkling eyes and crazy hair, it's a thought that most parents cannot even think about let alone put into words.

A fear of OTHERS.  By others, I mean other humans.  I may be able to control what I do, but I can't control what someone else might do.  If someone chooses to drink and drive and my family is driving down the high way safely just getting home from the grocery store, and that drunk driver hits us...I can't control that.  I fear 'bad guys' that might want to cause harm to just anyone randomly wherever they are.  That sort of thing is all over the news now.  Schools being shot up, movie theaters, crowded places, etc.  Just random people doing random acts of violence.  I can't control what these people do either. Personally, I feel like no amount of gun control is going to stop it from happening either.  If someone really wants to do an act of violence...they'll find a way to do it.  It might take them a little longer to do it, but they'll do it I'm sure.  That's so terrifying to me.  I always worry about what will happen in our country.  What is someone going to do next? Will it involve my family?  Will we be in the wrong place at the wrong time? What does the future hold?

Fear of drugs.  I always fear that no matter how hard I teach my children, that they might do drugs. That it could ruin their lives.  I've seen it happen.  I have family members who have struggled with drugs, and friends who have struggled and I've seen what it has done to their lives.  I try to use this as life lessons to my children on what it will do to your life.  Don't throw your life away for drugs, or alcohol.  (I don't want my child to be the drunk driver that hits someone on the high way either!)

I fear suicide.  I lost my father and an uncle to suicide, I don't want to lose anyone else to it either.  When I was just a toddler my father died.  I have no memories of him.  When my daughter was a toddler I had a really hard time emotionally because I was afraid my husband was going to do something stupid like that (and I honestly had zero reason to believe he would ever do anything like that and he assures me he won't) it was just a fear.  I lost my dad when I was a toddler, so I was terrified my daughter would suffer the same loss that I had experienced.  It was a REALLY rough time period for me, and add on to that, that I was also pregnant with the twins at the time I was super emotional and clingy and struggled a lot with that.  My husband is the one who made the connection to my sudden fears and the past loss of my father.  The second he connected the dots, it suddenly clicked for both of us and we were able to work through it, but wow, amazing what a subconscious fear can do to you huh?

I'm afraid of fire.  House fires to be precise.  I'm absolutely terrified of my kids being trapped in the house in a fire and me being unable to save them.  I fear the idea of losing everything in our home and having to start over.  I don't even know where we would begin. 
Same with drowning.  I cannot swim that well, barely well enough to save myself, and certainly not well enough to save my child. So the fact that my kids are almost swimming completely on their own makes me feel SLIGHTLY better, but not much.

My sons cancer relapsing *or fearing any OTHER illness in our family at all*.  The thought of this...makes me sick.  Right along with him developing a secondary cancer due to his chemo treatment.  (or any of my kids being diagnosed with cancer).  You are never quite the same after you've had a child diagnosed with cancer, and yes...families CAN have more than one child stricken with cancer in their family, under the same roof.  After having one child diagnosed with cancer you kind of jump at every sniffle, cough, bruise, swollen gland, stomach ache, bone pain, headache, weird eye in a photo, EVERYTHING. It makes you a little paranoid quite frankly.  You don't WANT your child to be sick by any means but you just know how important it is to catch that stuff QUICKLY, and how the tiniest things could be a sign of cancer.  You learn all of this when you become a cancer parent. 

Fear of my kids losing ME.  I am thirty one years old now.  I'm not a spring chicken, nor am I OLD.  However, we do have heart problems that run in the family, and diabetes. My Mother has had heart attacks and was diabetic until she had a kidney and pancreas transplant several years ago, she also lost part of her right leg because of diabetes. She struggles with heart issues still, and they were worried over the summer she had a stroke (still not sure what the final consensus was on that).  So I know I need to be careful, especially since I have thyroid disease (hypothyroidism).  I will admit, I was NOT good at taking my meds over the past two years.  That's not a good thing.  Your thyroid...is a super important body part.  I could develop heart disease.  I could have a heart attack.  I could DIE.  I do not want to die young.  I want to raise my children.  If they lost me now??? What would happen to my children?  Trust me, they NEED their mom. 
Fear of losing my husband.  Considering the fact that this guy and I have been together solid, since we were seventeen years old, I'm kind of fond of the guy. I mean, I did marry him, and have three kids with him.  Sure, we have our moments, but he's my husband.  He's the father of my kids.  His dad passed away this year, and he was only in his late 40's.  That's young.  I don't want that to be my husband.  I don't want my children to lose their dad.  I lost my dad when I was a toddler, and it is hard to grow up as the kid whose dad DIED.  It's one thing if your dad and mom divorce or split up, but to be the kid whose dad just died...well that sucks.  Most of the time you just get pity, and I don't want that. Kids need a dad though, and my kids happen to be quite fond of their Daddy. I know that he is scared of dying young too. He doesn't want to miss out on seeing his kids graduate or get married.  No one wants to miss that. I'd like to grow old with my husband, to have someone to pick on after the kids move out.  I mean, my kids are pretty close in age, nineteen months between my daughter and the twins, so they are going to leave the house kind of right at once! I need someone to bug and pick on and go do things with after the kids leave us to start their own lives.  I don't like the idea of "starting over" I just got this one almost trained  *grin*.  I don't want to have to train a new one! I don't want my kids to have to have a step parent.  I want them to have THEIR dad. 
Fear of not being good enough.  Good enough for what or who?  I don't know.  I just worry I'm not good enough.  Am I good enough mom?  I mean early on I had my Mommy Confidence knocked down to almost a zero by other moms who thought they knew everything and how everything should be.  It took a LONG LONG time to get that built back up.  Why I let it bother me so much....I have no idea.  It was silly actually to care what they thought.  I think every parent wonders though from the moment they get pregnant "Am I good enough?"  "Am I going to be a good parent?"  We don't want to fail our kids, especially not BIG TIME let them down.  We want to do our best and raise our kids to be good people.  I always ask myself am I good enough at this or that.  Am I good enough friend?  (The answer is...I feel like I'm the worst friend ever)  I suck at calling people back, I hate texting and emailing, I don't ever get to go visit my friends, I hardly remember birthday's (unless Facebook reminds me), I'm not going to lie, sometimes my brain drifts when I'm on the phone talking to a friend and I honestly have no idea what we're talking about...(please someone tell me I am NOT the only one that does that...).  Am I a good enough wife?  Do I do all the things I should as a wife?  Am I sometimes too bossy, too rude, too sarcastic as a wife? (probably yes...).  Am I a good enough daughter or sister?  Probably not.  I don't get to visit often, I hardly talk to my sister (I do talk to my Mother multiple times a day though!) 
Fear of losing my Mother.  As I got older and realized that my father had died, I REALLY struggled with losing my Mother.  She never super sugar coated things as to why my Father wasn't around, that he had killed himself when I was little.  So I feared that my Mother would do the same, or she would leave me or something would happen.  I remember being awake nights at a time crying.  Afraid to die, afraid for my Mother to die, sad because I didn't have a dad.  I still worry about my Mother and don't want her to die anytime soon.  I think my Grandma was in her 70's when she passed away suddenly.  Plus my Mother has all kinds of health issues, and it scares me.  I still need my Mother (I always forget how to make noodles at Thanksgiving time, and pumpkin pie, and apple pie, and so much other stuff I REALLY need to write down but haven't because my Mother is my recipe book and family history teller and so much more).  Mother's need to be able to live forever. Their kids always need them, no matter how old they are.

Fear for my children being unhappy, sad, bullied, depressed, hating themselves, thinking no one loves them or understands them.  Them feeling lost or without direction, my children hurting in anyway.  (especially if I don't know, they won't communicate with me or keep it bottled up).  When it comes to my children, I want to know everything.  If you are hurting, please tell me.  If you are scared, please tell me.  If you are angry, please tell me.  If you are happy, please tell me.  Even if you think I can't help, or don't understand or whatever...please tell me.  Sometimes...just the act of TELLING someone really can help.  I don't want my children to ever feel like they are alone in this world, that no one cares for them or is there for them.  I am always in their corner.  They are my babies for always and ever.  As a parent you don't like seeing your kids struggle (though yes, a certain amount of struggle is a good thing) but all in all, you don't want your kids to be struggling so bad they hate themselves and don't trust anyone. You want to raise your kids to be (or at least I do anyway) to be strong, independent, caring, thoughtful, intelligent, helpful, hard working, loving, vocal, moral, individuals.  I don't want them to just follow the crowd all of their lives.  I guess I fear them making the wrong choices and ruining their lives.  As a parent, we see all of the potential that our children have from the moment they are born.  Their potential is endless.  It's all right there, they can be ANYTHING they want to be.  We watch them grow and we always see them as our babies.  See their innocence.  Worry about them as they near adult hood.  That life hasn't damaged them too badly. 

I am sure that I have a few other fears, but these seem to be the ones that top my list.  The ones that I do often think about at night when I am laying there TRYING to go to bed.  The things you think about, but never say because you feel like you're the only one that feels them, which is silly you aren't, but you feel like you are.  Because who wants to think about these things? No one.  But we do. 

While I DO have many fears, I also try to not let those fears run my life.  I still get out there with my family and we still make memories and have fun.  We don't hide out at home hidden away in a bunker.  We meet life, and embrace it.  We smile at the sun every morning and thank God for another beautiful day, another day  that we're breathing air and walking on this earth.  I know  that I cannot control a lot of things, that's scary.  It scares me.  However, I know that God is there (if you don't believe in God or how our family believes, that's fine, but we do believe in God and we DO thank him for all our family has, that's OUR beliefs and it's ok if our beliefs are not the same). 

I want my children to know they don't need to be terrified of everything in the world.  I do want them to be cautious and aware of what is going on around them, and be conscious of the choices they make.  I don't want them to be oblivious and off in their own world thinking that everything is perfect.  Be realistic and know that things are not always perfect and smooth sailing, but that with every struggle, with every storm, you can  get through it.  For our family, that means leaning on God for guidance.  That's different for every family though.  There is good and bad in this world, everywhere you go. 

Some families may have totally different parental fears than I do.  Many reading this may have the same fears, or share a few of the same parental fears.  Just know, that it's ok to have fears and worries, it's normal.  Don't let them eat you up inside though.  Too much fear is a bad thing.   Sometimes I think we feel like our fears make us vulnerable, and maybe that's true, but sometimes I think our fears make us stronger.

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