I was fine for a few years, no panic attacks. Then I had my baby. I turned into the biggest worrier ever to exist (or so I thought). I constantly had images in my head of horrible things that could happen to my baby. What if the knife slips while I'm chopping up veggies for dinner, soars across the kitchen and living room, and lands on my baby, killing her? What if there's an earthquake and something falls on my baby? What if a plane crashes into my house? What if I drop dead and my baby has to grow up without me? What if I drop dead and she goes hungry, crying from starvation, until someone finally discovers her and hopefully before it's too late? What if I go crazy and kill my own child (it was all over the news at the time with the Andrea Yates thing ... hey it happened to her, what if it happened to me)? What if? What if?
I kept telling myself that I was just overreacting. But all the worries just kept popping up in my head. I couldn't control them. I couldn't relax.
Finally I saw a short Australian film (only 6 minutes long) on Oxygen called, "Living with Happiness", about a woman who has a baby and goes through all of the terrible thoughts that I had been experiencing. I was so thrilled to see that I wasn't the only one that this has happened to. It was obviously so common that somebody made a movie about it! It finally helped me to relax. I apparently wasn't so crazy after all.
It turns out worrying about death after you have a new baby is pretty normal.
