Fear

Riley is going to be ten months old this weekend. I can't believe it's been almost a year already. When you have a baby, people say all kinds of stupid things to you but it turns out a few of them are actually true. Like how fast time flies. It really is amazing, especially considering how long some of our days feel. Haha. I love every minute of it.

I've been noticing recently that little Riley is no longer the brave little man that he was born as. There are little things that seem to scare him now. The other day we went through the car wash and he literally screamed the whole way through. I felt so bad. It's just that, up to this point nothing has really bothered him. Grandma Bonny put him in the bath tub for the first time and again with the screaming. We let a stranger hold him in the restaurant, and his little face scrunched up in the cutest mini-terror I'd ever seen. Then yesterday, he started whimpering and crying during a scene in his Baby Einstein video that featured different kinds of bugs. I tried it again this morning to see if it was really the video, and sure enough it was. My little man is afraid of bugs.

He's still not afraid of falling or any kind of physical pain, I guess because he hasn't really experienced it. Then again, I don't know of any traumatic bug incidents, either.

I've always been told that fear was something learned, and I think to an extent it is. But fear is also something in our nature. I've been with this Man nearly every second of his little life so far, and I watched him develop it. It's pretty amazing, actually. It's also kind of sad.

I recently saw a women's speaker at the church and she said something that really struck me. "You pass one of two things on to your children and that is all. Either you give them God's promises, or you give them fear." This hit home for me because I live in fear of...pretty much everything. It's weird, because I'm not even a careful person. It's not that kind of fear. I definitely fear emotional damage more than physical damage. I can say personally, that after having a baby, not too much scares me in the pain department. In fact, I've said to Josh before that if I could describe my childhood in one word, that would be Fear. And I think that is extremely accurate.

I'm going to be very careful not to pass fear on to Riley. I hate the way I feel most of the time. What that speaker said really made me think about the fears my parents handed down to me. I think both of them (and this is my natural parents I'm talking about) are afraid of success. That seems weird if you're not afraid of it, but if you are it means having to branch out and try something that may very well fail at. So more accurately, they were afraid of failure. The answer to that of course is to not even try. You can see how that affected my relationship with my biological father. His father was a failure, so he didn't even try to father us. It makes sense. I think this is one of my biggest problems too.

So, that being said I'm going back to school. I need to finish this for myself, and also to show Riley that I could do it, even though it scares me to death. Finishing school is the easy part, it's doing something with myself that scares me. If it means one less fear or excuse for Riley to make for not pushing himself, then it's worth it. Not that college is necessary for everyone, it's just that it's what I started. And what I'm afraid to finish. The only thing that will keep me from doing it at this time is if it turns out I can't get enough grants and scholarships to go for free. I refuse to get more college loans. That's not fear, it's just smart.

Anyway, that's my speculation. Take it as you will.