The veil of death

I am afraid of losing my child. Our child.
I am afraid I will wake up one day with a corpse beside me.
Every day I am afraid our child will die while in my care.
Every time our child stops crying, I have to check to make sure he's still breathing.
It is almost an expectation, an inevitability, that our child will not survive to adulthood.

He has no known health problems. He is very well natured. He has even been attractive since the moment he was born. There is nothing that agrees with what I feel in my heart to be true.

When I check on him and see no obvious signs of life I get heartsick, fearing - almost knowing- the worst. I look first to see if he has turned blue and if I don't see him breathing soon enough, I'll check to see if he's cold.

What mother lives like this? What mother sees her child as a living corpse?

I do.
I know I don't deserve a child. I know I'm not promised "normal" and "happy". I know life is full of heart break and tragedy. I know my life. I know pain. I know pain intimately. I have survived pain I wish had killed me. More than once I have given up on living. What right do I have to create and nurture another living being when I'm still not convinced that my being alive is a good thing?

So many pieces of me have died... how can I give birth to anything but death? And so I live - as if I have given birth to death.

I do not worry about our child when he is in the care of others. Sometimes I won't let him get very far away from me when other people are holding him but it's not because I'm anxious. It's almost as if I want to experience him without the veil of death I see when he's in my arms.

I know mothers worry about their children - especially new mothers - but, from what I understand, they worry about the unkown. Most mothers worry about what injury or discomfort might befall their child... I know what will befall my child - death! It's not a question of what might happen, it's simply a question of when. Is today the day my child dies?

I feel almost as if my genes are poison. The only reason our child has survived this long is because my husband's genes diluted mine.

I hope to someday not live with this certainty of death. I hope it mostly for the well-being of our child.