A little woo

Late Sunday afternoon, I headed off for a solitary trip to Dirty Kroger. When I left, Peter was in the kitchen with Henry, James in his arms. Grocery shopping alone has become one of my luxuries, and I enjoyed myself plenty picking out tapioca starch and a new toothbrush. But when I was standing in line to pay, I was hit by a sudden lurch of panic, as if I were supposed to have the boys with me but had accidentally forgotten them somewhere.
Of all the hundreds of things I get scared about regularly, this is actually not one of them. I'm convinced that the intense and harrowing early weeks postpartum were, in part, nature's design to make sure that I never ever ever could forget from then until I die that I now am a mother.
A friend of mine who lived in LA told me once that a certain area of her brain was given over at all times to tracking traffic patterns so whatever else she was doing, humming along behind the scenes was her brain, working out how to get where, when, by which route. My brain now operates in the same way with respect to Henry and James, so that even when I am reading, or cooking, or talking to a friend, or crying my eyes out, I am also always keeping a mental eye on where they are, what trouble they could be getting into, and what needs to happen when to move them along to the next thing. In other words, the panicky feeling at Kroger was not just unpleasant, but truly surprising.
When I got home, I immediately started telling Peter about it.
"That's very strange," he said. "Because the whole time you were gone, Henry was inconsolable. He was crying and said his stomach hurt and that you were not going to come home. It was like he had some kind of panic attack."
I said something vague, and hopeful, about attenuated attunement across space, thinking a little about gold to airy thinness beat.
"A psychic tentacle," suggested Peter. He then went on to float the theory that the barometric pressure was awry and acting on us each independently in a similar way.
Oh, OK, fine. Still, the whole thing seemed very strange, as I kept feeling the need to say all evening. And I felt, momentarily, ever so slightly nudged back toward the optimistic agnosticism about the mysteries of the human condition that used to be mine.