I'm learning to live with my fear for my baby's safety: it's the price to pay for love | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

I write this from a home slowly emerging from Covid, which has finally caught up with us after two and a half years of the pandemic. In some ways breastfeeding a sick little baby with a sick husband while being very sick myself was a more hellish experience than giving birth. There were times when I wondered how we would be able to take care of him. Luckily my mother arrived with Calpol and old fashioned cough syrup. For the past week she has been feeding and caring for us, risking her own health.

These challenges mean that I have been thinking a lot about fear and its connection to parenthood. The baby's history of respiratory problems meant I was really scared when we caught the virus, and although I knew it didn't affect children much, a child I know and love had a reaction very serious illness. This, along with my son's time in a newborn intensive care unit, made it hard for me not to let the terror overwhelm me, and yet I managed to cope. While I was there I saw very sick babies and very scared parents. There was a moment in the bedroom, as I rocked him feverishly, when I half-hallucinated all the women who had done the same with their own sick offspring. Most of us only have to look at our own family trees to see multiple infant deaths. In my own family's story, there is a story of coming home after burying one child only to find another dead.

It all sounds rather dramatic, but I am convinced that these tragedies past are somehow encoded in us. They are, after all, an integral part of human history and in many parts of the world continue to be a living reality. Maybe that's why other moms I talk to admit that they too check their baby's breathing at night. How many times over the past few months have I put my hand on my son's chest to check that he's still alive? It makes sense, though: only in the last century have we been able to have great confidence in the survival of our babies, and even then you have a myriad of terrifying and unpredictable threats: Sids, meningitis , poliomyelitis - again.

Fear, says my mother, is the price we pay for love. The fear that I feel that something will take my child away from me is so terrible that, like an eclipse, it is better not to look at it directly. And yet, I am not a particularly neurotic mother and not nearly as anxious as I thought. My history of PTSD – which at one point manifested as health-related anxiety – meant that I viewed parenthood with concern. Would I be consumed by fear? Would I pass this fear on to my baby? And yet, the things we believe will happen don't always happen.

Of course, there are the intrusive thoughts. I am grateful to Anne Enright, whose fun and brilliant book Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood prepared me for fear in many ways. She writes: “Once, maybe twice a day, I get a picture of terrible violence against the baby. Like a flicker in the corner of the eye, it lasts a quarter of a second, maybe less. Sometimes it's me who inflicts this violence, sometimes it's someone else. Martin says it's fine - it's just his amazing vulnerability doing weird things in my head. But I know it's also because I'm trapped, not only by her endless needs, but also by the endless, insane love I have for her. It's important to stay on the right side of a love like this."

Reading those words meant that when I took the baby out in his pram for the first time and imagined a car plowing into us, killing us both, I was prepared for that thought. When you have a baby, you become a sort of automatic detective in a world full of traps. Your mind is engaged in a frequent thought experiment: Could this hurt the baby? It has, of course, a purpose: survival. I also liken it to what Edgar Allan Poe called "the pervert's imp", this urge to do the thing that's bad and terrible, to throw yourself off the high building you're standing on, to laugh during the funeral. "Wouldn't that be awful?" you think. Such thoughts keep you in check.

Of course, when out of control, intrusive thoughts can become problematic. no limit of two or three per day: "If I receive my...