The first time it happens to me, I am four months pregnant, and it is February. I am walking around my car to reach the driver’s side door, and as I pass by the rear bumper, I step onto a slick of black ice and my feet fly out from under me. I lie there, my left buttock and outer thigh throbbing, stunned into inaction and then: sudden fear. My neighbor, who had been smoking a cigarette on his front porch, calls out my name.
“I’m okay!” I shout back, my voice thin, shaking.
I hear his breath, drawing nearer, and he rounds into view.
“Be careful!” I admonish him as he inches toward me, his arms held out as if he is trying to reel me in from a great distance.
When he has pulled me to my feet, gotten me to stable ground, my thoughts finally turn inward. “Do you think it’s okay?” I ask, looking up at him, my vision blurring. “Do you think the baby’s okay?”
It is the first time I experience the fear that is so inherent in motherhood, the fear that will come to live inside of me, next to my heart. I continue to feel it throughout my pregnancy, the fear that I will break her. I feel it after she is born, the fear that I will fail her.
Fear has never felt so close before. Sure, I have long embraced horror, loved the first mass-market paperbacks I pulled from my father’s shelves, the ones that hinted at supernatural worlds superimposed upon our own. I loved the B-movie horror flicks I watched in dark basements with high school friends, with twist endings that revealed nothing was what it seemed. As I grew older, I found myself appreciating books and movies that played with psychological horror, the ones that suggested that the true horrors were in the everyday. That the true horrors were within us.
But these days, the horror that terrifies me the most feels somehow wrapped up with the fear I feel for this tiny being ensnared inside me. I am undone by the horror flicks that are unrelentingly claustrophobic, the ones that show that the worst thing of all is to be trapped. Trapped in a world filled with unseen monsters. Trapped in a situation that has come about in the wake of a poorly made decision.
The first time I see The Descent, I spend the entire one-hour-and-forty-minute run time with my heart a hot fist in my stomach, my breath shallow, as a group of female spelunkers—trapped in an uncharted, underground cave system—fight and strain to find a way out. Never mind the monsters hiding in the shadows. There are jump scares, yes. But what is most terrifying—at least for me—is the sense that their air is running out. That their time is running out. That soon, they won’t be able to breathe at all. It is chilling in the way it feels familiar. Walls closing in. Time disappearing as each character is forced to choose between two paths. And then another two. And then another two. Back or forward? Life or death? Who wouldn’t be panicked by the dark pressing in on them?
After my fall in the driveway, I walk back to my car, get in, and drive to a country club twenty minutes away to teach yoga. I cry as I drive. I am so shaken I nearly get into an accident on the way there. This time, my car hits an icy patch, and as I struggle to regain control, I slam into a curb.
When I eventually return home, I set up an emergency visit with my ob-gyn so she can perform an ultrasound. After I explain what has happened—the driveway, the curb—she assures me I don’t have to worry. “As long as you don’t smoke crack,” she says cheerfully, “your baby will be just fine.”
When my daughter is born five months later, there is a new fear. The bogeyman that is SIDS. The thing you can’t quite control. That can’t be explained. This fear consumes me, just as it consumes many mothers.
I soon find that my love is wrapped up in terror. In those early months, I have a camera for a baby monitor set up in a corner of my daughter’s room. I place the monitor on my windowsill so I can see it from where I lie in bed. The image is small, fuzzy. I find myself squinting at it, trying to decipher my daughter’s every move. When her wail comes through the monitor’s tiny speakers, slightly delayed, I fear something is wrong with her. When she sleeps, when she doesn’t make a sound, I fear she’s dead. I get out of bed, crouch down by the window, stare into the monitor. Is her body moving? Can I see the gentle rise and fall of her breath, or am I just imagining it? Eventually, I walk across the hallway, quietly open her bedroom door, tiptoe over to her crib, and lean in, stare at her tiny form. I place my palm against her back, wait for it to move. I wait for proof that she is still with me.
The days aren’t any easier. I am wrung out from childbirth, still carrying my body around as if it were a fragile object, still wearing Depends to stanch the bleeding that drains me further, leaves me depleted. And still, my body is the barrier I must use to keep my daughter alive. To protect her from the world. My body is the thing that feeds her.
I watch Mark Duplass’s Creep around the time my daughter turns one. The specter of SIDS still hovers. A friend of a friend has lost her child to crib death at the advanced age of two. But there are other fears now as well. The fear that she will choke in her car seat while I am driving. The fear that she will fall off my bed or pull a lamp down on top of her head. I am so afraid, all the damn time. I won’t leave her with anyone other than my own parents. I trust no one.
Meanwhile, the protagonist of Creep finds himself at the mercy of a man who is not who he says he is, whose story keeps shifting. But even as the sense of danger escalates, even as things turn dark, the hero of the story feels compelled to give his tormentor the benefit of the doubt. He wants to trust him, even after everything he’s faced. In the end, choosing to trust this strange man costs him his life.
The ending stays with me for months after I watch the film. I ache for the man who chose to trust. I ache because he didn’t deserve what happened next. But this outcome validates my own fears. I spend my days as a new mother desperate for help, but fearful of what could happen if I trust the wrong person. I don’t want a bad decision—the decision to entrust my daughter to someone else—to end her life. The only person I really trust is me.
The next year or so of motherhood passes in much the same way. Then, when our daughter is just two and a half, we enroll her in a preschool located eight minutes from our home. For three hours a day, three days a week, we trust that these strangers will take care of our child. On her first day of school, we accompany her up the walkway to the house on Park Street, her backpack straps sinking into her coat, her pom-pom hat pulled down to cover her ears, and she seems so small. She clutches her stuffed animal, a cheetah she calls Chester, in her hand. When we pass her along to her teacher, I pretend I am wiping an eyelash out of my eye. My daughter doesn’t look back.
Over the next two years, my daughter grows into an odd mix of cautious and fearless. She refuses to go down slides, yet she will follow another child up a steep embankment while wearing hand-me-down jellies that slide off the backs of her heels. She hesitates to participate in sing-alongs, yet she will approach strange children at the playground, saying matter-of-factly, “I’m Emily! I’m five! Do you want to play?” I admire her. I fear for her. And always I hover, poised to catch her if she falls.
When my daughter starts kindergarten, the circle of people in whom I must place my trust grows ever larger. Administrative staff. Class parents. Young teachers forced to contend with groups of more than twenty students at a time. Young kids who have been raised differently from my own, with different rules, different values, different belief systems. That small, intimate preschool, I could handle. My extended family, I could lean on when I was desperate.
But once upon a time, it was just me and her.
I miss that time when she was always attached to my body, clinging to my legs, pulling at the edges of my sleeves.
I was suffocating. I was questioning my every decision. But I still felt like I had a measure of control.
She is six now, and the illusion of control is slipping out of my hands.
One time, when I was just five, I couldn’t immediately find my mother when the teachers marched us out of school at the end of the day. As we approached the crosswalk at the midpoint of Van Houten Avenue, a block away from the elementary school, I whipped my head around, craned my neck, searched everywhere, panic building in my chest. There were so many people around me. Parents taking their children’s hands. Teachers directing their students to go two by two. Pedestrians pressing past.
And then I saw her. Standing in a cluster of other mothers. Just across the street.
She had never been across the street before.
“MOM!” I yelled, and without a second thought, I darted into the street, pumping my legs, my backpack slamming against my lower back.
I was later told that the entire crowd of people on both sides of the street—teachers, parents, students—held their breath. Cars coming from both directions skidded to a stop. Time stood still.
But I barely noticed the commotion around me. There was only my mother. And she seemed so far away. It seemed to take forever to reach her.
When I finally, at long last, flung myself at her torso, she knelt down, wrapped her arms around me. “Why did you do that?” she asked me. “Why didn’t you wait?”
She gripped my upper arms and looked into my tear-streaked face.
“I was right here,” she said. “I was coming to get you.”
She shook her head and hugged me to her again.
“I was right here.”
I want to tell my daughter that I will always be right here. That she’ll never have to look for me in a crowd and feel that she is lost. That she’ll never be hurt because I won’t allow it. I want to tell her that the bogeyman under the bed, inside her closet, can’t get her as long as I am here.
But as close as we are right now, as much as she delights in pressing herself against my body, clambering on top of me, grabbing my legs when I attempt to leave a room so that she is dragged along the floor, giggling, she doesn’t seem to need that.
Still, there is the fear that lives next to my heart. Always.
At least when I watch my fictional horrors, I can know that my fears are nothing new. 
Steph Auteri has written for the Atlantic, the Guardian, Pacific Standard, VICE, and other publications. Her more literary work has appeared in Poets & Writers, Creative Nonfiction, Under the Gum Tree, and elsewhere. She is the author of A Dirty Word and the founder of Guerrilla Sex Ed.
