When you are single and you get together with couples with children, as friends, your brothers or simply with neighbors, you talk to them and make the mistake of saying that you would also like to be a father, at that moment it is as if you blow open a pressure cooker. There is nothing a father or mother likes more than talking about his fatherhood. Many will talk to you about the sleepless nights, the eternal afternoons when they start with the no, about small hooligans or the big ones, in short a whole series of reasons why you should continue as you are, that is, without having children.
Then, when the first two beers are finished, the "but" always comes, that moment of peace in the storm, a "But ... I wouldn't know what to do now without them" a "But ... those laughs can with me", "But ... I've never been so happy" and then you wish again to have a couple of them running around the room. But what nobody ever tells you, what nobody is going to talk to you about, what nobody wants to get out of the bottom of their own Pandora box, is the fear.
The shadow over your head
Fear comes to be placed on you from the moment you know you are going to have a child. A new life that will depend on you, will it be alright? Will I endure the whole pregnancy? Will i lose it Will I be the father she expects me to be? Will i be a good mother? Then they come future fears, You are able? Will you be up to it? How many mistakes will you make?
They are the uncertainties that will take away more than one night of sleep and it is that it has not yet arrived and you are already worried thinking about how tomorrow will be.
They are perfectly logical and normal fears that are overcome because we are not yet fully involved in fatherhood, but we can see how it looks.
Then, when you finally have your child in your arms and you see that everything is more or less well banished part of those fears that have accompanied you for nine months. The problem is that They have only left room for new ones.
When you feel him, when you notice so much life in such a small body, so fragile and weak is when the shadows attack you again and then you raise, together with your partner, a wall of protection around you and yours, it is the instinct of mother or father who seems to have woken up and you will spend days, weeks, months, watching every step your child takes, home thing that is brought to your mouth, sterilize everything, watch everything, watch him when he plays, when he eats, when he sleeps, you get up if you don't know move (That feeling of is he breathing? Why can't I hear him breathing? It ends up being really distressing if you let yourself go and don't control it in time).
And they keep growing ... and fears keep changing
No, fears do not go away, at least not at all. They have already grown, the fear that something physical happens to them, a serious illness, a blow, etc. have diminished or at least you have learned to live without affecting your life too much, yes, the day your mobile rings and you see On the screen the number of the school goes through your mind.
"Neither Stefen King, Friday the 13th, nor the Treasury. Nothing scares you more than the phone ringing and the school number on the screen."
However now new fears begin, now the doubts come, not knowing if you are doing well or not, because overnight, without knowing very well how you find a different child, one who no longer likes Nothing he loved yesterday, that he does not want to play his favorite game and that he has become angry with those who were his best friends, but that happens too.
Years later you find yourself again before a teenager who has ceased to be the laughing child for whom you were his idol, the best mother in the world, the perfect father, a young man whom you hardly recognize and who doesn't want to know anything of you, or almost. And fears come back, will you have done well?
And those difficult days come and you overflow, and you do not know if you do it right or wrong, if it is your fault, your partner, the child or society, because You find yourself lost again.
But the greatest of fears, the one that never leaves but you end up doing it to him and continuing with your day to day, is the fear of losing everything, to get up one day and that those eyes so alive are not there to look at you, that those little hands never look for yours again, that nobody wants to sleep on top of you, that they never call you mom or dad again.
