A note: At the risk of some weird tense shifting, I’m keeping much of this post in its original form, as I wrote it in real time in the Notes app on my phone more than two years ago. By the end, I hope, it will have been worth it.

I didn’t mean this for publication, but it came to my mind this afternoon as I listened to a recent episode of the Ten Percent Happier podcast, an interview with Sebastian Junger about his most recent book and brush with death.

The flip-side of fear, he posited in the interview, is reverence. I think I learned that lesson once before. Read on.

Here we sit, the night before the baby is due to be born. The c-section is scheduled for 9am tomorrow; it has been for weeks. But here, eleven hours early, we sit in a hospital room. But it’s not that hospital room. It’s not even that hospital.

Instead, it’s the pediatric ER, after our daughter woke up with a raspy cough and so much trouble catching her breath that she literally and involuntarily shat herself as I held her in my arms.

“It seems like we need to go to the hospital.” I just wasn’t expecting those words in this context.

So now we sit in the hospital and wait. Wait to make sure that the breathing treatment—a combination of an anti-inflammatory and a steroid—does its work, that there are no adverse effects, and that the symptoms don’t come back. It’ll be a couple of hours more.

And we wait to decide whether to postpone our appointment—our scheduled hospital visit—for which we are supposed to leave the house in about eight hours.

We never really discussed it explicitly, but I’m afraid.

I’m eager, and I’m excited. But I’m afraid. Will we traumatize our daughter by bringing another baby into the family? Maybe “trauma” is too strong a word. But we know that for an only child who’s just three years old (especially one who has spent most of her life at home with her parents under some degree of lockdown/precaution due to a global pandemic) the notion of sharing your parents with a tiny, new, helpless baby turns the world as she knows it upside-down.

Approaching the baby’s birth, we’ve seen the realization that things are rapidly changing settle in. “I don’t want to share anything,” she said the other day in response to a question of what she expected of being a big sister.

This one broke my heart: “Are people also going to come and be excited to see me, too?” This after overhearing one-too-many people express their genuine (and wholly innocuous) eagerness and joy about the baby’s impending arrival.

Intellectually, I know that the mathematics of a parent’s love has more to do with exponents than division; but I can’t help but fear that all of this adds up, in her mind, to some form of abandonment. Left with someone else (even someone else who loves her endlessly and unconditionally), for a few days in order for us to welcome this other child into the world and family; then we bring this other child home to take up space and resources that once were undivided.

There’s no turning back now, but I am afraid.1

We made it home from the ER. And we made it to our (rescheduled for slightly later in the day) appointment. This delivery, unlike the last one2, went off without a hitch. Our baby boy was gentle and soft, both in the way of a newborn and, it appeared, temperamentally. Growing is hard work, and the world outside the womb can be overstimulating. Even under those circumstances, though he was healthy and strong, he rarely opened his eyes.

That is, until his sister walked into the room. He opened and locked his eyes on hers as if he’d been waiting—saving his energy—for her all along. They held hands. She sang him songs. It was as if they knew each other already, had known one another all along.

I wasn’t so naive as to believe that that was it: Fear and anxiety, all done and dusted. I recall a metaphor likening emotional life to a fishpond, feelings swimming all around on their own. The advice was to do your best not to be the fish, but rather to be the pond.

This was a good reminder that fear and anxiety aren’t alone in the pond, and they don’t have to be the biggest fish, either. I posted a photo to social media that day:

“Feast your eyes,” I wrote, “on my daughter—gentle, generous, curious, and kind—welcoming her baby brother into the world.” And it was a feast. I’d never been more in awe, felt more pride, or held more fully the abiding sense that everything was just as it should be than I did in that moment. And I may not have known it so clearly since.

But the memory is visceral enough for me to recall even now, to know that fear does not need to be avoided, hidden from, banished. It doesn’t even need to be let go. It needs to be welcomed. It needs to be examined. To be picked up, held, and turned over. Because on the other side is neither more fear nor even bravery.

No, it’s reverence.