She got it right.

{this is actually a copy paste from something I wrote a little over a month ago, but it seems right to re-post it here}

Our baby shower invitations featured a Elizabeth Stone quote: "Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body."

Being my first (and only, so far) pregnancy and birth I had no idea just how true that statement is.  I had an idea, but you can't really know until you've had a child (or been a parent I should say).  There is often this completely irrational fear that something is going to happen to them when they are away from you; even if it's just in the other room, sleeping.  You worry some poisonous spider will creep in and bite them and you'll wake to find them swollen and feverish.  You worry they'll get twisted in their sheets and strangle themselves and you'll discover them cold and blue.  You worry someone will break into your home, through their bedroom window, and see them sleeping so peacefully they'll want to snatch them and take them for their own and when you check in on them you'll find the window wide and gaping and them gone...

How likely are any of these things to happen?  Slim to nil.  But if it's happened to even one other parent you fear it will happen to you, no matter how many parents never have to suffer it.  You keep this thought of "I don't want to be the ONE" tucked away in the back of your mind, not always visible, but always there.  You get up at night to check on them, feeling silly, but knowing that if you don't, and something is wrong, you will never be able to live with yourself again.  You dread it so much that you will call the sitter six times in two hours simply because you get that feeling in the pit of your stomach that if you don't, something will happen.  Not that it has already, not that, but that it will if you don't check.  You can go days without feeling it, and then it'll creep back out and hit you with such force you tear up and your insides feel hallow and heavy... even though your baby is sitting right next to you, safe in your care.  You stroke their hair, lean in and inhale the scent of them, kiss them so that your lips can confirm what your eyes are tell you.  They are alive.

I find myself feeling this a lot lately, with my little boy in that "I'm a big boy" phase of toddler-hood.  He's no longer in a crib, he picks out his own clothes, he helps feed the cat.  On top of that he jumps off the couch, stands up in the tub, and wants to break free and run every chance he gets, having no idea how much it scares me and trips up my heart.  I try to stay calm, I breathe deep, remind myself that I can't protect him all the time, but I WANT to.  I want to so desperately that it hurts.  Being a parent makes you so terribly, horribly, extremely, wonderfully vulnerable.

"When you are pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again; yet after giving birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external, subject to all sorts of dangers and disappearance, so you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to keep {him} close enough for for comfort." — Jodi Picoult - Vanishing Acts

She got it right.