Fear and Forward Momentum
" 'Inevitability,' unavoidable phrasing, seems to me then a crucial attribute of great poetry.” - Harold Bloom
There seems to be little discussion or appreciation for the fact that parenting often challenges us with moments close to complete and utter terror. There’s a lot of things that we discuss when people are preparing to have their first child. Conversation floats around preparation of living spaces, sleep deprivation, feeding, car seats and carriers. But we tend not to challenge (or support) new parents with the truth that there will be times where they will be quite simply, terrified.
A month of colds, coughs and an incubation period lasting a full week reminded me of the fact. When you have twin babies that spent the first three months of their lives in the neonatal intensive care unit, you tend to learn about fear very quickly, very suddenly. It was a period of our lives marked by a very deep, instinctive fear, concern, longing and trepidation. Our boys, born three months early, had to fend for their lives in a range of ways and it was hard to tell from one day to the next what their lives would look like. Truth be told, it’s still hard. Eighteen months old now, they’re home, they’re happy and are a typically boisterous, assertive and charming couple of mess makers, but the nature of life ahead for them is an unanswered question that is uncovered as much as it is obscured on a day to day basis.
But we know. More than anyone, that they have been blessed as much as they’ve been burdened. The calm and quiet of the NICU is permeated by a sense of loss, as much as a sense of hope, as the families and medical staff carry the bittersweet burden and great responsibility of keeping one sibling alive whilst grieving another. We haven’t had to face that. We came close, but God willing, they came through and ours is a different fight.
Nonetheless, when you hear that little body suddenly struggling for breath; when a simple cold becomes too much for little lungs to bear: you remember fear. It comes back to hold you in a peculiar, cold paralysis that makes you question every next action as a potential misstep. You’re reminded, suddenly, violently, of your responsibility protect the very life and breath that your children bear - a fact usually obscured by the distractions and diversions of daily toil and every other moment that they aren’t fighting for survival.
But the fear forces you to act. You must take steps, inevitable steps that may be flawed, but are still critical and perhaps inevitable. You must choose something, do something, to move forward to a point that carries a momentum that will carry you as much as it does your children. You must move past that point of fear to one of autonomy, motion, meaningful action. Do you choose the ambulance, or your own car? Do you take the other six kids (this isn’t a problem for you?) with you, or quickly find someone to mind them? Do you drive towards the hospital, or the local clinic?
In the end, you simply act. You embrace the inevitability of action and let it carry you. In days and weeks that follow, you will know with greater certainty if you made the right decision. You will know if you prioritised the right things, cast aside the wrong and took the best course, which is more often than not the lesser of some disappointing and difficult options. But in the moment, you must simply choose, simply act with every faculty and instinct that you possess, to move past that fear and into moments of greater clarity, calm and control.
As a parent, you will come to know this. As a creative, a collaborator, an artist, you’ll know it in a different form. There are questions of order, structure, intention and articulation that will plague you. More so, they can and will utterly stop you from moving forward; from finding the peace that comes with the resolution of having progressed.
Once again, there is little to do but to move your piece. Fear is best conquered through forward momentum. Advance towards the inevitable and free yourself from questions that have no answers. The answers will find you in due time, but only if you invite them by your autonomous participation in the act of creation, of life, of expression, whatever your art may be.