I think it’s because I have so much that I worry constantly about losing it all.

I think of the saying that goes, “God doesn’t give you trials that you can’t handle” and I wonder if that means I’m just super weak or that someday the sh*t’s gonna hit the proverbial fan, that my number will be called and I will lose everything like Job. Because my life right now is pretty amazing, and not a day goes by that I don’t acknowledge all that I have. Look at me: I have the sweetest baby on earth who is healthy and thriving and who smiles at me all day long and who only cries when he’s hungry and sometimes just a little bit when he’s tired, and who actually sleeps pretty well all things considered. I have a husband who is so supportive of my endeavours, who changes diapers when he’s home from work, who is legendary in his love of and care for our son, who loves me with a great deal of his heart (the part of his heart that’s left after he allocates his love for Hutchy and Apple products, in that order), and who works hard to keep food on our table. And about that table: I have one, and chairs around it, and yes, food on it, and I am so very very blessed.

I think of the reasons I can’t enjoy it. Why do I feel like at any given minute it might all come crashing down? I hold Hutchy and on the one hand I am euphoric, smelling his freshly washed neck and nuzzling his baby-chick head, and on the other hand I almost weep at the possibility of losing him.

I read horribly sad blogs by people who have lost or are in the process of losing their babies to cancer or to whooping cough or to liver failure or to a slice of apple, and I feel their sorrow like it is my own—because it could be. At any moment.

I lay in bed wide awake with Poor Kyle on one side of me and Baby Hutch on the other in his bassinet, both of them snoring so sweetly and I can’t enjoy it, not any of it, for the fear of falling asleep and Hutch maybe dying, or for the fear of Poor Kyle getting in a wreck on his way to work tomorrow and dying, or various other morbid and sad, sad endings to our stories.

I worry more: is all my worrying postpartum depression? I worry that it’s all in my head and that that’s actually the problem: would I even feel this sad if I had never heard of postpartum depression? Which came first, postpartum depression or postpartum depression awareness?

I worry about not worrying; that maybe in some twisted way my worrying about bad things happening is actually preventing them from happening, and that if I let my guard down I will somehow be welcoming disaster. I think how worrying really is the best solution: how if nothing bad ever happens then I will be relieved, and how if something bad actually does happen I will be able to say I just knew it was coming.

I cry a little bit.

And finally I drift to sleep, one hand holding Kyle’s, the other draped over my son’s gently lifting stomach, his steady rhythmic movement reassuring me that at least for now I haven’t lost my precious boy.

I bargain with God: I’ll do anything—everything You ask—if You will just not take them from me.

Please.

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