CREEPY CATALOG

I've Been Having Terrible Nightmares About My Newborn Baby

Somebody's gotta wear a pretty skirt

Somebody's gotta be the one to flirt

Somebody's gotta wanna hold his hand

So God made girls...

The melody of the bubbly country song faded in and out of my hearing as my husband drove 90 miles an hour down the highway. Although I found the lyrics somewhat sexist, what did I know, maybe that WAS why God made girls. But he also made them for another purpose, as evidenced by my looming belly, prepared to burst. Just a few days before my due date, too.

It was funny, as we pulled up to the ER, I had a sudden moment of panic. I didn't want to have this baby. It wasn't that I didn't want a child – my husband and I had been trying for two years before I finally conceived. It wasn't that I was afraid of the pain promised in the next few hours – that I could live through. It's just that I finally felt as though I'd gotten used to the feeling of being pregnant. There was something beautifully intimate about growing another little human inside of you. Now that that human was (probably) less than 24 hours away from being placed in my arms, I was terror-stricken.

But a few hours later, I was holding my sweet baby Nathan for the very first time, and my heart was so swollen with joy I thought it would pull apart at the seams. Everything about him was perfect: from his pale blue eyes to his tiny curled toes to the shrill little pierce of his first cries. My perfect little baby.

Joey and I were ecstatic to bring our little Nathan home for the first time. We had our own house that was little more than a tiny cottage just outside the edge of town, blue with white trim. I daydreamed excitedly about Nathan taking his first steps down the cement walkway leading to the house. Joey babbled on and on about teaching him to swim in the little creek a few minutes from our backyard. We both talked endlessly about future birthdays, play dates, picnics, and adventures.

Thinking back now, I can definitely say that these were the best few weeks of my life.

I won't pretend that I wasn't stressed out. Having a new baby was really tough. Joey and I rarely got any sleep anymore. One of us was always out of bed, either soothing or changing Nathan, or both. I was high strung and tense about the littlest things. Did Nathan's forehead feel too hot? Did his crying sound different today than usual? Why didn't he drink as much milk today as he did yesterday?

As Joey went back to work, things slowly got worse and worse. I began to think that I was a terrible mom, unable to care for my own son. I felt as though I did nothing right by him. Every time he cried, it was as though he was accusing me of my own incompetence. There was nothing in the world I loved more than my baby boy, and he hated me.

Nathan hated me.

It was around this time – when Nathan was about four months old – that I began having this strange nightmare.

I would wake up in the middle of the night to go check on Nathan in his crib. As I approached his door, there would be a red glow coming from his room, accompanied by a quiet crackling. As I rushed into his room, I'd see his cradle up in flames. His skin would be draped over the side of the cradle, singed and smoking. Standing in front of the cradle was a grotesque, bug-like creature, with spindly praying-mantis legs and a sleek black body, long sweeping antennae and a set of pinchers dripping with venom. The disgusting thing would look at me, and then, to my horror, it would crawl inside Nathan's skin. Once it had slipped inside my son, Nathan would turn to me. He would look utterly normal, except for the bulging black orbs where his eyes should be.

And he would scuttle like a spider across the floor towards me...

I'd always wake up at that point, drenched in sweat. I could swear each and every time I woke up, I saw that black creature scuttling away just out of my vision. I'd go check on Nathan, but he was never harmed or in danger.