Motherhood Made Me Confront My Deepest Fear: Myself

As a child, I lived next door to a playground that I was never allowed to play in. I watched other kids run around in it after school through the window while I played librarian and scullery maid inside, alone. I tried a few times to make friends with the children in the house opposite, but I was never allowed to cross the fence to play with them either. In fairness to my parents, it was the notorious 1980s in New York City, and at night the playground hosted parties, leaving broken bottles and drug paraphernalia behind to be found in the morning. The house next door, where several women lived with many children but only one man who came and went, was, to put it diplomatically, not an ideal playdate spot. My parents and extended family were also World War II refugees who viewed the world as a dangerous place by default. The legacy of their war trauma compounded the genetic hardwiring for anxiety they had passed on to me.

So it’s not surprising that I became an anxious, panicky, phobic adult. Throw in running through the streets to escape the collapsing Twin Towers and two terrifying, traumatic childbirths, and by age 37, my fight-or-flight meter was permanently stuck on danger. And that is an exhausting way to live. But of all the fears I had as a mother of young children—for their safety, their future, their health, their education, their happiness—my biggest fear was that they would be like me: afraid of everything. Always unsafe, forever insecure, waking up anticipating a perpetual worst-case scenario.