The Fear

“And so all the trees forgot to wake

They were dropping all their leaves

On the ground below them

But here

Closer every year

So near

The fear is coming clear

My dear

The fear is here”

  -The Fear, Travis

Five months, I have carried this new life inside me since the Jubilee weekend and yet it feels no closer to me than the halcyon memories of a summer bursting with national pride. I feel him move inside me, the rolling tide of him surging against the confines of my womb, already testing boundaries and yet I am finding it hard to feel for him, to feel anything past the lump of fear that grows as quickly as he does.

Him, he, my son, my brave new future with two young boys. A life created in love and passion relegated for now to the dark depths within the rolling flesh of my stomach. This tiny life, at around a pound in weight has me terrified. Not just for how I will manage with two children, but for how the next few months will go. Will I fail him like I did his brother, will my body betray us.

Will I spend hours and hours, days and days laid strapped to a monitor, listening for every little hitch in his heartbeat, a heartbeat that now runs fierce and fast, full of life. Will I await for other people, people more knowledgeable than I to decide our fate, to tell me when my body is no longer able to support us. My body replaced by a plastic box, tubes not gritty, null placenta. My maternal need no longer able to surround and support him, will he be an alien in a spaceship so distant from me.

So many worries, they fall like the golden, burning autumn leaves. I nurse them in the glooming fog, nurture them in the dampening mulch. These fears are the cold coming winter, so against the warmth of my fecund body, yet I grow them as I do my son. I cling to the fear, the worry is something familiar, something I have some control over when everything else is waiting.