Is it my fault?

My mother was an alcoholic.

No, AA/NA/Al-Anon friends, I'm not saying it wrong.

Was, as in she's already passed on.

What does this have to do with my baby/pregnancy blog?

A lot, actually.

Children have a capacity called, "magical thinking." Wikipedia defines it like this: "Magical thinking is causal reasoning that looks for correlation between acts or utterances and certain events. In religion, folk religion, andsuperstition, the correlation posited is between religious ritual, such as prayer, sacrifice, or the observance of a taboo, and an expected benefit or recompense. In clinical psychology, magical thinking is a condition that causes the patient to experience irrational fear of performing certain acts or having certain thoughts because they assume a correlation with their acts and threatening calamities.

"Quasi-magical thinking" describes "cases in which people act as if they erroneously believe that their action influences the outcome, even though they do not really hold that belief".^[1]"

Long story short, children have a tendency to believe that they can affect the outcome of a situation, even when they can't, really.

Example A: The child who says, "If I'm really, really good, dad will come back." You've seen statements like this in movies, most likely.

It's cute, when what they're saying is, "Step on a crack, break your mommy's back!" and then don't step on cracks for the remainder of the walk.

It's not so cute when they say, "If I had been better, mommy wouldn't have gone to jail."

"If I wish every single night on the first star for a year, then mommy will come home."

Sometimes, this bit of magical thinking isn't something we ever grow out of... how many of us have seen the TV or movie scene where the mean character breaks down and cries, "Why didn't my dad love me?! Was I bad?!"

Only it's not funny, when we realize how many people actually still harbor this fear on some level.

I did, for years.

If I had been better, would my mom not have needed to drink so much?

Was it because of me that she needed to?

Was it because of me that my parents got divorced?

Of course, intellectually, I know better. My mother was an alcoholic from high school on. She went to prison because she couldn't stop drinking and driving. They divorced because dad got tired of living with an alcoholic.

But deep down, there's still a little girl in the back of my head who asks, "Why didn't my mommy love me enough to be a good mom? Was I bad? Did I not deserve it?"

And it's for that little girl that I promised myself, years ago, that if I ever had a child, that his/her needs would come before anything else.

And it's for that little girl- until I hold my little boy in my arms and his needs become realities to me- that I will do it for my little boy.