To be honest.

The odds are good that Preston will leave tomorrow's appointment with a clean bill of health. The odds are good that he will never need open heart surgery. So why am I fretting agonizing over it? There is something I haven't told anyone. Not Scott. Not my mom. Something I have barely admitted to even myself.

It was easy to brush aside - this disgusting, dark twisted thing which begun to grow so many months back. From it's roots sprung sharp thorns that cut, and pricked and made me bleed. A premonition, a whisper that started before Preston was ever born. I have ignored it, explained it, buried it under a mountain of mundane, motherly tasks and still it springs to the forefront of my minds eye every now and then. He not yours to keep. It has spoken to me from the moment I laid eyes on his screaming, flailing frame. Hormones, I excused it. Stress, I explained it. Pessimism, I revealed it. But nothing could quell the premonition that took up residence in the back of my head. Pounding it's stake into the soft membranes of my cerebellum.

Scott and my mother can attest to my unusual anxiety after he was born. I obsessed over his umbilical cord which fell off too early. I was convinced it would become infected. "I can take him into the walk-in clinic if you want" Scott suggested. I shook my head and was repelled by the idea. Not there. Those places are full of germs and disease and danger - too much danger for a newborn. Then my sister-in-law came over with my cute, sick nephew in tow. I tried my best to beat back the panic. But after they left I melted down. I sobbed hysterically while spraying every toy and surface with Fantastik. Scott looked at me as though I'd lost my mind but every cell in my body was screaming to protect Preston. Protect him. It was unusual, I can't stress this enough - I have never felt this way with either of my other children. Even when Gabriel was born prematurely... I never had any doubt he was supposed to be mine. So this gnawing, clawing, panic inducing feeling grew, and knotted itself inside me like a hangman's noose.

When his breathing became laboured and his diagnosis threatened to crush me under it's weight - the voice, the doubt, this thing that I had never been able to shake - reared up and grinned like the Cheshire cat. This was the answer to the riddle. This was how it would happen. Even now I curse myself for thinking it. But here it is - this premonition, this fear - now written in black and white.  No longer a monster in the myst, but a true foe that I need to defeat.  I need to expel it from my mind, I have to exorcise it somehow - and maybe writing it will destroy it's power over me. But this is why I blanch about tomorrow's appointment. This is why the platitudes and reassurances do nothing to ease my anxiety. Because I saw it coming even before I saw it's form.

It's more than pessimism - it's a feeling that has dogged me from the second he was born. This heartbreakingly beautiful, little human does not belong... Why I feel this way I don't know. I can't explain it. He's so full of light, and hope, and happiness. 

 and To be honest I don't deserve him, but I so desperately want to.