It's after the birth of a child when the worries really begin

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

I phoned her the other day to ask how her pregnancy is coming along.

"I'll be glad when it's over," she said in a weary voice. "I'm a nervous wreck. There are so many things that can go wrong. I can't wait for this baby to be born."

My friend is having her second child, but this is her third pregnancy. A year ago she miscarried, so all during the early weeks of this pregnancy the possibility that she might again miscarry kept her joy on hold.

Now it's the nagging fear that something else could go wrong that has her on tenterhooks.

"I'm 36 years old. All the tests have come back OK, and I feel fine and the doctor says everything looks good, but I'm so scared. I just want it to be over. I want to stop worrying."

Enjoy this time, I tell Lynn. This is the easy part. It's after the baby is born when the real worrying begins.

Lynn already knows this. She has a 3-year-old. She has locks on all her cabinets, rugs on all her floors, smoke detectors upstairs and down and a deluxe safety seat in her car.

And still she worries - about crazy people, about accidents and viruses and calamities, about a world over which she has no control.

That's the thing about having children. They make you realize how vulnerable human beings are. All the time you're pregnant, you beg God to please let them be well.

And then when they're born, you pray even harder that they will stay well because now that you've seen them and held them and felt their softness and smelled their sweetness, you know that whatever happens to

them happens to you, too.

You worry when they're infants about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and car accidents and fire and someone stealing them and diseases that you read about in the paper, that you never even noticed before.

You worry when they're toddlers that they'll put something in their mouth that will choke them or poison them, that they'll run into the street, or fall into a pool or down a flight of stairs.

Lynn knows these worries. She's felt these fears.

But what she doesn't know is that the worries grow as the child grows. The list of things that can hurt - germs, storms, cars, buses, trains, planes, wars, bullets, knives, other people - increases while a parents' ability to protect a child shrinks.

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you but are not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

Before I had children, I took comfort in Kahil Gibran's words. We are all on loan. Nobody belongs to anybody else. Everyone is everyone else's son and daughter. His philosophy buffered me.

But then I held my son, and he wasn't the world's. He wasn't "Life's longing for itself." He was mine.

That's the surprise in the Cracker Jack box of life. That our children are precious solely because they're ours.

When I was young I thought that as my son grew older and grew up, I wouldn't worry quite so much about him. I thought that when my daughter was 21, her hurts wouldn't hurt me as much.

That's what you believe when motherhood is new.

But it doesn't work this way.

During the summer, I visited my mother's best friend. She took out photos of her children, all grown now, and her grandchildren and she told me about each, what everyone was doing, including both the good and the bad.

And it struck me that here is this woman ostensibly finished with motherhood, supposedly in the no-worry zone of life, with even more people to worry about because there are more people she loves.

It's awful, she said. It gets worse with every grandchild. You love them so much but you can't protect them.

Enjoy your pregnancy, I tell my friend. Don't let what might be tarnish what is. All life is a risk. Children don't come with warranties. The best you can do is to pray for their well-being and for strength for yourself to endure whatever life holds.