Image credit: Photo by samzie2006 on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

I woke up this morning, muscles clenched like a fist and throat tight with anxiety, wanting to grab my son and never let him go. I crept to where he was sleeping and ran my fingers through his curls, reassuring myself he was there and safe. He'd actually been better than usual in this morning's version of my recurring nightmare; at least in this dream, I'd found him in the end.

I've had some variation on this nightmare — in which I lose one or both of my children — countless times. In a nightmare theme a few weeks ago, I'd happily, if absent-mindedly, voiced my assent to my 6-year-old daughter's trip to the mall with a friend of hers on Christmas day. Dream-hours later, when she wasn't home yet, I realized I didn't know the friend's name, address or phone number and there were no stores open on Christmas. She was gone, taken, and it was my fault.

Last night, my husband was the bad guy for a change instead of the usual villain: me. In my dream, he'd planned to go out to run some errands alone, but Austen begged to come, so the two of them went off together, but only Mark returned home, having forgotten he'd brought Austen with him. We rushed back to find him, with my dream mind running through the very real-life possibilities that Austen would not be able to communicate his needs and get help. We found Austen and he burst into tears mingled with a steady stream of anxious, repetitive shouts and questions with no answers, very much like what I'd expect of the real Austen under stress. Then the chime of my alarm woke me, still tight and panicky, and truly wanting to punch my husband, who was sleeping innocently beside me, totally unaware of what he'd been doing in my dream.

I realized, as time passed and I calmed down, that on top of the fear that I will lose my children, the sheer panic that they could be hurt or lost or worse — a fear any parent understands — there extends through all of these nightmares a different kind of fear. In each dream, at some point, I always think, "Oh, no. I'm not going to be able to find this child by myself. I have to ask someone — the store clerk, a police officer, a neighbor — for help. But if I tell them I lost my child, they are not going to want to help me. They are going to blame and judge me. They are going to tell me I didn't work hard enough and do well enough. They are going to tell me that it's my fault. And even if we find my child, they are going to think that my husband and I are such bad parents that they take our children away forever anyway." It's not just the realization that my child is missing that causes the nightmares to be so traumatic, it's the realization that my child is missing, that I might be blamed and that the problem is so big, I can't fix it by myself.

And I recognize that isolation and loneliness, that self—blame and guilt. I recognize those fears: The fear of asking for help. The fear that mistakes or weaknesses or imperfections will cause me to lose everything I love. The fear that I'm not working hard enough. The fear of judgment and of blame, and not just in and of themselves, but as agents of loss. I recognize in all of these the deep roots of addiction and codependency still present in my mind, gripping me when I sleep.