The interesting fear I developed in my marriage after Jude was born.

My anxious attachment style was on fire.

Last night James and I were reminiscing on the early days of Jude. Granted it’s still early days…he’s only a week shy of nine months! But I mean that first week home from the hospital. Our bodies a mix of oxytocin and adrenaline. James made his first trip to the store (with my mom at home with me and the baby) and came in the door post shopping trip as if he’d slayed a dragon.

I got the cookies you love from the grocery store bakery! And hand soap refills! And dog poop bags!

It was like we were in a newborn bunker and everything felt safe and controlled so long as we had…the right carbs, the right toiletries, and 4000 earth friendly dog shit bags. We were drunk on love and baby grunts.

James had started a playlist while we were still at the hospital. He filled it with all sorts of classic songs (the Beatles, the Kinks, the Beach Boys) that tugged at our heartstrings and felt unequivocally Jude. I added Kacey Musgraves “Too Good to be True” playing it at least once a day.

There are a few parts of the lyrics like…

Made some breakfast, made some love
This is what dreams are made of

And then:

Please don't make me regret
Opening up that part of myself
That I've been scared to give again
Be good to me, and I'll be good to you
But please don't be too good to be true

…that cut me in two.

We tend to chalk everything up to hormones(!) post birth, and granted, a lot of that was at play. But I don’t believe my consistent uttering to James of “Please don’t leave,” or the fear he would leave, or the way the above lyrics GUTTED me were just hormones.

The type of love and connection and warmth and family and bliss I experienced in the days and weeks after Jude’s birth was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before (said a million other parents). But it also made me feel so much more vulnerable. And with that old thoughts and feelings and wounds reared their ugly head.

I had strong armed a lot of my anxious attachment style and fear of abandonment over the years. I’d worked through a lot of it, to be sure, but some of it lingered.

I don’t believe we every really consider how vulnerable joy can feel until we’re thrown completely into our own pool of joy and suddenly feel unmoored. Feeling so good is really, really unnerving.

This, to me, is perpetually the missing piece in conversations around dating.

I often come back to the phrase, uttering it at times as if it were a sacred prayer:

That which we do not yet have we do not feel safe to receive.

It quite literally can feel like TOO MUCH.

In those early days of Jude, that’s exactly how it felt — too much. And if it was too much, well it was too precarious. And so my husband was going to leave, or the bottom was going to fall out somehow. It didn’t matter how many times James rubbed my back and said he wasn’t going anywhere. It wasn’t actually about that.

My flailing, so to speak, was an immature means of coping. I couldn’t be with the joy. My nervous system needed to recalibrate to this new state of being and family. Instead of sitting with all of that, I lashed out (albeit mildly) at James. While we didn’t say the exact words — it’s your attachment style (!)— we both knew what was at play.

I often work with clients who 1) have an anxious attachment style 2) date/end up with people who ARE emotionally unavailable and trigger their attachment style. The tricky thing is that they often think, “It’s all me! It’s all my fault.” When really they’ve fallen into a scenario that is anxiety inducing. It’s a double whammy as often the role of trying to convince someone to love us (or that it involves work), holds its own scent of familiarty.

But once we fully let go of those individuals, no longer letting them seep into the cracks of those first or second dates, we face one remaining hurdle. Actually being with the person who wants to be with us. It requires a shifting of roles, namely our own, a redefining of safety, a radical sense of self trust. It always takes some getting used to.

I adapted pretty well when it came to James. There were a few shaky moments, but I was (mostly) able to hold his love. But the arrival of Jude threw me. The love was too overwhelming. To allow it terrified me because, suddenly, there was so much more to lose. It wasn’t just a partner or husband (though that’s likely just my hyper-independent defense mechanism), it was a child. A whole family. A whole world. To want something so big and allow it in felt unsafe.

Nine months later, this part of me feels a bit foreign. I feel both mine and James deep, unwavering devotion to Jude and our family unit (it’s likely why we finally had the capacity to sell our home, more on that later). But the whole experience made me so much more acutely aware with the fear that comes with letting in that which we wish for. What it actually requires to hold it all.

xx Clara