Is My Baby Dead? And Other Questions You Were Afraid To Ask

Four or five years before my daughter was born, I went to see my physician for a yearly checkup. While I lay there staring at the ceiling as she poked at me a little, we got to talking about children — if I recall correctly, because she was pregnant. “I feel like I would just be very nervous,” I said to her, as the prospect of a child was discussed. “About what exactly?” She asked as she motioned for me to sit up.

“Okay” I said, “Like this: I feel like I would always think the baby was going to die. Is that normal?” “Ha!” She laughed before regaining a straight face almost instantly. “I’m not sure that IS normal,” she said. “Well, at least,” she continued, “It shouldn’t be the first thing you think of.”

She’s right: Death shouldn’t be the first thing you think of when you think about having a baby, but it often is. Death shouldn’t be the first thing you think about when you find out — for sure — that you’re pregnant, but it often is. And death shouldn’t be the thing you expect most when you bring your baby home from the hospital, but it often is.

That’s the thing anyone who has a baby knows, but maybe doesn’t spray around town: We lay awake in bed at night, the unspoken question between ourselves and our partner, or ourselves and the baby monitor, if we’re alone. “Is my baby dead? Did she cease to breathe in the past five minutes?”

When I was a child, I used to have this ongoing fear-driven argument with myself. The argument was this: I was lying in bed at night — not every night — but many of them, and I said to myself, “The house is on fire, and any minute I’m going to smell smoke or feel it pouring under the door of my bedroom.” As I lay there thinking about it, gripped by fear, another thought came to me: “Well, a lot of minutes have passed since I thought that, so, it’s likely that I’d be smelling the smoke by now. The house mustn’t be on fire, then, after all.” And of course, just as I allowed myself to relax a bit from the strain, knowing that the house wasn’t on fire after all, it came to me: “Maybe it wasn’t on fire when I first thought of it, but maybe it is just now starting.” And thus, it began again.

I’m not sure how many hours I wasted this way, alone in bed at night as a child, but this type of worry, the one you can’t control or do anything about because the threat could descend at any moment, has followed me through much of my adult life. It’s not a fear of personal danger, even; I’m not afraid of heights or roller coasters or airplanes. I’ve come to realize that it’s not a fear of things I can’t control, either. It’s more that I fear the doom of neglect: I could have gotten out of bed to check to see if there was a fire, thereby saving my entire family in the process, but I didn’t, and now we’re all dead. Same goes with a coffee pot I may or may not have left on — I didn’t go back to check, and now we’re all dead.

Except we’re not.

Now that Zelda is fourteen months old, I feel comfortable telling you: My baby is not dead. She wasn’t dead the first night we brought her home, after calling the hospital to see if we could bring her back because she had a stuffed up nose. She wasn’t dead the next night, either, when we took her to the doctor at the earliest possible second and then cried when she declared the baby to be perfectly healthy and sent us home. She didn’t fail to thrive from not feeding enough. She didn’t stop breathing in her crib, she simply got better and quieter at sleeping. She didn’t get SIDs. She didn’t choke on grapes or peas. She didn’t conk herself out trying to learn how to walk. She didn’t get lead poisoning. She hasn’t come down with a case of secondary drowning in the bathtub.

This isn’t to say that I feel like she is safe, since I don’t. I’m not even sure that I’ve learned anything from accepting all of these situations that have occurred, the months that have passed without resulting in fatality. I don’t even feel safe typing these things because although I don’t believe in luck or jinxes, something in me keeps thinking: THIS CAN’T BE GOOD TO SAY ALOUD. I can’t even see a baby in danger on TV these days without breaking out into hives. But my baby isn’t dead.

I believe that only the most oblivious people don’t live in fear ninety-five percent of the time for the first year of their child’s life. I’ll be a lot more laid back if I have another, yes, but I feel perfectly happy admitting that the first time around I was absolutely certain that tragedy was never far off. I have always held onto my own life rather tenuously. I fall easily and roll my eyes all the way down. Having a child brings import to death: for the first time, someone else’s — not your own — is the worst case scenario.

It’ll be easier the second time around, should there be one, because I see that my worrying wasn’t fruitful; it didn’t make her safer or me happier. But it also wasn’t avoidable, because terrible things, they do happen. That doesn’t stop you from getting on an airplane, but don’t pretend you don’t think, just for a second around the time of takeoff when you hear something funny or smell something weird, “Well I’m a goner, it’s been good.”

I have been, in the last year, more embarrassingly a slave to my own thoughts. And I’ve found in those terrible moments at two in the morning, when the tiny young, weak baby is quietly “sleeping,” the best way to deal with the creeping feeling that something is terrifically wrong is to exhale, and then blurt out into the darkness, “Do you think she’s dead?” Your partner will probably say, “No, of course not, that’s ridiculous” and make you feel so much better. Failing that, maybe he’ll just run into her room and check really quick.

Photo by Todd Lappin

The Parent Rap is an endearing column about the fucked up and cruel world of parenting.