It’s easy to look at a newborn baby and imagine you can protect them from everything, writes Eleanor Gordon-Smith, but you can’t, and that’s OK
I am 30 years old, married to the most exceptional person I have ever met and have a six month old baby girl. Since the day she was born I have been consumed by an overwhelming love for her, which sometimes feels almost hard to bear. I find myself always wanting to hold on to her, nervous to take her to public places, and most nights I only half sleep, worried that something might happen to her. My impending return to work date is looming over me, and the idea of an eight hour day during which I can’t touch her, soothe her, hold her, feels like ... well I don’t even have the words. I want to raise her to be resilient and strong but I don’t feel like I am modelling that at all at the moment. I don’t want the volume of love in my life to change at all – I just want to have the strength to wrestle with it a bit more.
Sometimes when fear starts pacing around us we let it eat a little of our lives. We give it what we think it wants, like it’s hungry and this will make it hush: I’ll get up to check the baby one more time, I’ll ring the doctor to make sure, I’ll google symptoms just this once. It takes many people a lot longer than it’s taken you to realise that sometimes the more you try to sate a fear the more of you it wants to eat.
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