Love is just a shout into the void

When it comes to young adult literature, I've always been an early adopter. I was reading Harry Potter before the word "Muggle" entered the vernacular, and I'm proud to have been one of the first to read The Hunger Games. 

So I read The Fault in Our Stars when it was still up-and-coming, before the backlash about how John Green isn't necessarily the second coming of YA literature and before they made a movie.

The Fault in Our Stars is narrated by Hazel, a 16-year-old terminal cancer patient. I've never been a terminal cancer patient, but I've been a 16-year-old girl, and that's how I experienced the book when I read it. In fact, I've always suspected that one of the reasons I love YA literature is because, at heart, I'm still a 16-year-old girl.

I felt that way until I saw The Fault in Our Stars, the movie. Probably because the book is narrated by Hazel, she's who I identified with when I read it: her crush on a boy, her struggles to relate to a friend.

In the movie theater, though, that's not who I focused on. There's a scene that flashes back to a critical moment in the ICU, when Hazel is 13 and close to death. Her mother tearfully assures Hazel that she can let go and that she shouldn't be afraid. Then she collapses back onto Hazel's dad.

"I'm not going to be a mom anymore," she sobs.

Cue the ugly tears. I know it's a hideous cliche to assume that there's something universal about motherhood, especially in the face of tragedy. But at that moment all I could picture was my boy, my Eli, and what it would be like to lose him. This terrible panic gushed through me, right there in the movie theater, as if I had never considered it before.

When you're a new mom, you spend at least 23 hours of every day convinced that you might accidentally kill the baby. You might drop him on his head while trying to cram him into the Baby Bjorn, or wrench off one of his limbs while changing his diaper. You might leave a blanket in his crib or let the stroller roll away or poison him with spoiled breastmilk.

As Eli slowly grew from a baby into a person -- a walking, talking, opinionated person -- those fears eased. Suddenly I was all cool as a mom, like, "Chill out, post-partum depresssion, I got this!" I let him climb ladders on his own at the playground and stick his hands in dirt and eat apple slices I hadn't meticulously dissected into 1-millimeter slivers. He was no longer an infant! We were safe!

But watching Hazel and her mom, I suddenly realized: We're never safe. "It's like I have to worry about him the rest of my life! Anything could happen to him at any time!" I said to Phil, who promptly pointed out that I just turned 31 and my mom still worries about me if I have to take the subway home alone after 9 p.m.

I remember vividly the first time I ever felt like a mother. It wasn't when my newborn son peed on me or when I nursed him to sleep in the rocking chair or even that first moment when we made eye contact and he smiled, like, "Hey, I know you."

It was when Eli was nearly 4 months old and bouncing merrily in his jumperoo after our first family trip to the Queens Zoo, when we turned on the TV news and found out that 20 children had been killed in an elementary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.

It was the first time I had ever experienced that kind of tragic news as a mother -- the first time I ever looked at my son, all snuggly and smiley in his jumperoo, and imagined a world without him.

It's been said that becoming a mother is making a decision to have your heart go forever walking outside your body. I've always been a fiercely independent person, even as a mother, and I like my heart right where it is, thanks. But when I came home from the movie I snuck into Eli's room, basically a copycat of that creepy mother from I Love You Forever and unashamed of it. I loomed over my boy in his crib and watched him breathe for a while.

I am not the most sentimental mother out there. I have never been one to say "He's growing too fast!" or "I wish I could keep him a baby forever!" It's a big, deep world and I want him to get out there and explore it. But oh, how beautiful it was just to watch him sleep and believe with all my heart that I could keep him safe forever.