Protecting Baby

Bill talks in his sleep. Not every night, but often enough. He also laughs in his sleep, and sometimes gets up and walks around and tries to do things. All of these wake me up. Especially when he yells expletives at me for no reason. Then I wake up angry.

Last night (this morning) around 2:30 a.m., I woke myself from a dream that I was having -- something bad about the roof falling in? I'm not sure. As I'm lying there, half-asleep, trying to decipher what had happened in my own head, Bill rolled over with his hand right above my stomach and said, "That could've been the most dangerous thing ever."

The first thing that came to mind was that he almost rolled over and hit me in the stomach by accident. "What?" I said.

With the light coming in through the window, I could see him looking at his hands. "I just picked up these hands and they were completely different hands," he said. "But I'm going to keep them separated."

Oh, OK, Bill. Was that all?

Then he got out of bed and walked to the window, and came back and laid down a second later. I text messaged the conversation to him right away so I could laugh at him in the morning, and ran to the bathroom to pee so I could get back to sleep.

This morning, when I was laughing at him for this late-night exchange, he said that he realized as soon as he got to the window and had nothing to put there (besides his own hands, I suppose) that he was dreaming and probably sounded like an idiot. I agreed that, yes, that is exactly what he sounded like.

But later I got to thinking about it, and the whole thing had made me nervous. First, when I thought he had almost hit me in the stomach, because I might not have reacted quickly enough to shield the baby. But then when he got out of bed and went over to the window -- and you have to understand here that there's a window seat and an armchair, and that's where we have been piling tons of stuff we need to organize or put in the attic -- I started to wonder if he was going to unknowingly bring something into the bed that would in some way hurt the baby.

Now, he's never done anything that stupid before (not even during the expletives dream), and he usually wakes himself up as soon as he starts talking jibberish. But, well, on Grey's Anatomy, the soldier guy has PTSD and he started choking Christina in his sleep. And then on Private Practice, the psychologist is pregnant and one of her patients (who had lost a baby) went crazy, drugged her and started trying to cut out the baby she claimed the psychologist stole from her. I think about these things. Plus it was 2:30 a.m., so I wasn't necessarily coherent either (although I managed to keep these thoughts in my head).

But it brings up something I haven't really thought about yet: What would I do to protect this baby? Or a better question, would I be able to protect this baby? In my womb? Once he or she is born? It is scary to think that you are the sole protector for a tiny, helpless life.

And, like I said, I'm not -- there's no reason to think that Bill would hurt me or our child, and God help the person who tries to hurt either of us because Bill would kill them. But what if something happens when Bill isn't around? There's sickness, violence, natural disasters ... How do you protect something so small from everything scary in the world?

Most parents, I'm sure, would say that this is the ultimate question, and everyone worries about this, and you just have to do your best. I think that I've tried to stay pretty positive throughout my pregnancy, and maintain a "we'll worry when there's something to worry about" attitude, but how much will this change when my little one is born?