the creep

Sleep is an allusive beast these days.  

Yes, it is partly because at nearly thirty-six weeks pregnant I am experiencing multiple awakenings to use the bathroom, sore shoulders, and a stiff neck.  But those are small items; nothing to complain about.  

I've been waking up, usually for good, around four each morning.  I try to force myself back to sleep.  I imagine bargaining with a little pipe-smoking man who lives inside the control deck of my brain.  Flip that switch, the blue one by your right hand, back to sleep mode and I promise I will go for a walk and let you operate the exercise panel after I get home from work tonight.  But after nearly 32 years he, unfortunately, knows me better than to accept my bargains, especially when it involves exercise. So I am left to stare at the spinning ceiling fan until my blood sugar drops low enough that it forces me to accept defeat and get out of bed.

I know it is because of The Creep.  That familiar fog of anxiety that starts rolling in over the hills.  It is slow and insidious but I've come to recognize it in its earliest moments.  It settles over everything, even though I know it has origins from a distinct place.  

This morning The Creep woke me up again at four.  I laid there thinking about an article I read yesterday about something particularly sad and random (which I won't go into specifics about because of just how sad and random it actually was) that happened about, I don't know, ten miles from our house.  It was something so completely unexpected that there wasn't anything really for the people it affected to have done in order to prevent it from happening.  A perfect storm of events.  A series of dominoes, that led them to be in the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time.

Life is full of bear traps.

I am scared for this little girl I am carrying.  I thought it was a dangerous existence inside of my womb but the world outside is so much more treacherous.  The sheer randomness of shit that happens makes even the mundane seem to hold so much peril.  Nothing seems safe to me anymore.  How do you protect someone from something no one could have foreseen coming in the first place?

Maybe all this anxiety about not being able to protect my daughter stems from what happened with George. No matter what we did for him we couldn't protect him.  We couldn't save him.  We never even saw coming the trap that swallowed him up.  Life went completely out of our control and that completely fucks with your mind.

Or maybe all this anxiety is just about being a parent, regardless of whether it is in the context of suffering a traumatic loss or not.  I think about my own childhood and the anxiety my father had about my safety and that of my sister.  He worried about us with a consistency of an olympic athlete in training.  I think he still does.

Maybe I'm not the only soon-to-be parent or seasoned parent staring at the spinning blades of the ceiling fan at four in the morning wondering what possible dangers to their children are lurking out in the world.

Maybe The Creep is universal.