I'm pretty sure that I would not be able to read Sophie's Choice if I picked it up right now.
I started thinking about it last night when Yellowstone Public Radio broadcast a new opera based on the William Styron novel. (If you haven't read it or seen the movie, I don't think it will be too big a spoiler to tell you that the story involves children and Auschwitz, and God knows that never ends well.) I remember reading it when I was 14 or 15, the age at which bearing children was more a threat to keep horny teenagers out of backseats than it was any kind of reality that could someday happen. Even so, the novel left an impression on me, and as I often re-read books throughout the years to get a different perspective, I imagined that I would someday pick up Sophie's Choice again. Truthfully, I don't think I could handle it.
It was at about the same age--14 or 15--that I can remember being flabbergasted to see my mother crying while we were watching TV. One of the kids on one of those eighties family sitcoms was going off to college. I could not for the life of me figure out why some fictional kid going off to a fictional college could upset her, especially since I was three years away from doing the same thing. (But to a real college. Fictional colleges don't give good scholarships.)
I get it now, Mom. I get it all. Once you have kids, there are no more "fictional" children. When you see a tragedy--or even a "joyful" event, like a new life phase--involving a child in a book, a TV show or movie, a blog post, a newspaper story, an obituary...it's not theoretical. It's right in your gut and it could be your child. Dear God, it could be my child. And then you want to go throw up.
Just a few weeks after we had Connery in Prague, we started watching Six Feet Under. In one of the last episodes of the first season, a three-week-old baby dies of SIDS. I can still see the way they filmed it, as if from the point of view of the baby, and it still makes me want to hurl. I don't think that either Chip or I slept the night after we saw it. Probably Connery didn't sleep a wink, either, since we spent the whole night running in and out of his room, checking his breathing. I remember thinking, then, "How on earth am I ever going to survive motherhood? How do people live while being so fucking afraid all the time?"
I'm still trying to figure that out.
Of course I'm not that keyed up all the time; it's not always that raw. The absolute terror portion of things does lessen as children get older and life gets routine and you finally fall over from the utter exhaustion of the terror. But it doesn't take much to trip the fear or, more often now, the twinned wonder and sadness of watching them get bigger and more independent. You can hastily switch off Grey's Anatomy any time you see a wide-eyed child, but that doesn't mean you won't get blind-sided by something unexpected.
True story: On Saturday we were eating at Buffalo Wild Wings, and I looked over at Connery, who happened to be wearing a Burger-King-crown-style hat with little cardboard buffaloes on the side, and I felt tears pricking my eyes. The hat was pushing his hair down on his forehead and his eyes were so blue next to the yellow hat and all I could think was, "He is so not going to be willing to wear one of those for very much longer."
There are days when parenting seems to go on forever. When Emerson won't nap or Connery won't listen or you put your foot down on a Lego and it hits right in the middle of your arch. And then there are days when your baby wrinkles her nose at you and you realize that her mannerisms will be completely different by this time next month. Or when you just get totally pwned by your firstborn in a hat celebrating spicy chicken parts. It's sometimes hard to know which is more painful.