Having a baby forced me to confront my mortality, but spending $6.50 a month on life insurance means I don’t lose sleep over it
December 11, 2019 by Becky Kleanthous
There’s nothing quite like growing a new human life to make you confront your own mortality.
Conceiving soon after miscarriage, and being naturally predisposed to worry, I simply couldn’t shake the feeling that in pregnancy, I was fighting a fire that the universe wanted to fan. Other pregnant women seemed to be glowing and serene, but I saw wolves around every corner.
Every decision I made felt like a type of insurance — like I was building up an intricate web of safety around myself to counter a plague of ferocious ‘”what ifs.”
As the pregnancy-tracking app took us from a gestating plum to an apple to a grapefruit, I purchased all manner of “just in case” products in an attempt to calm my fears.
I bought a doppler so I could listen for a fetal heartbeat whenever her thrashing limbs felt unnervingly still; a whole bunch of nipple shields — a buffet of sizes — in case she would struggle with latching; and a Snuza breathing monitor to clip to her diaper at night, monitoring the rise and fall of her stomach.
(In the future, this would occasionally emit its heart-stopping alert in the cold hours of the night, prompting me to snatch her frantically from the mattress and cry “WAKE UP” into her peaceful little face. I still wonder if this unfortunate habit had anything to do with my darling not sleeping through the night until she turned 3 years old…)
As my bump grew, so did the fire-fighting shopping list. Then, a few months before my due date, I booked us into the mother of all anxiety enhancers, a baby first aid course.
It was extremely informative, and the teacher provided each participant with a certificate, a cup of tea, and a preoccupying fear of innocuous-seeming objects, including cups of tea, popcorn, and balloons. Absolute death traps for children, it turns out.
Why I finally bought life insurance
And it wasn’t just the baby I worried about. We were millennials paying high rent, so our savings were negligible, and I was hyper-aware that if I should die (which seemed quite possible, in my overwhelm), there would be a problem. Not just in the oh-what-a-terrible-shame sense, but in the very real practical sense, too.
Click HERE to read the full story via Business Insider.