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Swine flu anxiety is making me agoraphobic. I’ve been through an entire bottle of organic purell today alone. Normally, I take the baby everywhere and am secretly pleased with myself when people touch him without washing their hands and I don’t flinch- “more immunity,” I say with a smile that shows just how un-neurotic a mother I am. A dog licks his face and I crow. But now, I want to enclose my baby and me in a sterile plastic bubble and emerge only when the WHO says it’s safe. I know the risks are low. But…
About a week after my son was born I had the baby blues something fierce. I wept all the time, and I had terrible anxiety about death- his, my husband’s, even mine. My mother said to me, “now you’re a hostage to love.” Indeed. The anxiety has faded as I see just how resilient the little guy is…but swine flu is making me completely irrational. The intense mother love that's grown exponentially in just a few months is very susceptible to fear. My husband’s great-great-grandfather Archie, after whom my son is named, lost three of his four sons in one week to the influenza epidemic of 1918. Here is an anecdote from Archie’s granddaughter:
Dad was the youngest and they had shipped him out of the city to relatives in upper state NY [during the flu epidemic]. Can you imagine how Grandpa and Grandma must have suffered? …. After Dad and Mom got married they all lived together in an apartment over Dad’s shoe store in Brooklyn. Dad was afraid of germs and always washing his hands with that awful smelling red soap and I think that must have come from Archie. I remember him as saying; did you wash your hands?
As Karen Walrond wrote, she’s “not agoraphobic, but my kid is starting to smell like Purell.” Does applying copious Purell give you some sense of control back? It does for me! We’re so blessed in this country to usually feel in control of our children’s health. For most of us colds and flu are par for the course. The scary thing about H1N1 is the lack of control it presents. Is it lurking around the next corner? At school? At a restaurant? We like to think we can control nature, but as Nordette notes, she is beyond our control. I had to go to New York for work yesterday and I found it difficult to be in the city. I sat in Penn Station waiting for a train and wishing for that sterile bubble. What if I inadvertently brought flu home to my baby? Panic rose in my chest as the tunnel between New York and New Jersey was closed and I was temporarily stuck in the city, far away from my infant. We’re supposed to fly to Virginia this weekend and I’m thinking of staying home. Airports feel way too toxic.
I met a colleague at Starbucks today and had the baby with me. It felt too crowded. She said she was thinking about asking her husband, who works in New York City, to walk to his office instead of taking the subway. When I got home I locked the door and realized, I don’t want to go out again with the baby.
For some reason, I've been thinking of the literature that we read at a young age, which is full of such deaths, most of which we could of course control today. Melanie Wilkes, dying frail and ill after childbirth in Gone With the Wind. Beth in Little Women, who had consumption. Little Eva, the angel child who (I recall) wastes away in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Dickens children are always dying of flu, as are their parents, which leaves the children prey to lives of extreme hardship. The canon is full of vulnerable children and mothers who die of colds and flu. Something like swine flu makes me feel close to the mourning parents who made such an impression on my youth. Is there something seductive in the drama of it all?
I think my hysteria is less about any real dangers the H1N1 poses and more about my realization that being a parent makes you extremely vulnerable because you love something so much that seems so helpless. The first American casualty of the virus was a toddler. I’m sure that sent a shiver down the spines of
