The Scared Gene

I am not a scientist. As a student the periodic table was something I looked at periodically, like the night before a test. And the Bunsen burner never held much fascination, except for the time my 7th grade teacher, Mrs. Shell, accidentally lit her hair on fire.

I have, however, recently stumbled upon something that’s sure to pique the interest of those in the scientific community. I can already see the headline in all the medical journals “DNA Nuclei Found to Contain Transcendental Trepidation Gene.” Or in other words “Nutty Fears can be Inherited.”

My friend Connie swears this is true. “He’s got the scared gene,” she says to me all the time about her four-year-old who’s scared to play alone in his own room. Of course, along with not being a scientist, I’m not a psychologist. But my instinct tells me that when you have to hire your neighbor’s no-speaka-no-English nanny to stay at your house overnight when your husband’s out of town, the scared gene jumps right off its double helix and plants a big sloppy kiss on your preschooler’s cheek.

“So, what do you talk about?” I ask Connie one morning after the nanny had gone back to her day job.

“Oh, we don’t talk,” she tells me. “She comes in, goes to the guest room, shuts the door and watches TV.” But for whatever reason, Connie sleeps better knowing the 4-foot-8-inch powerhouse is in the room next door.

This cracks me up (but only because I’m not afflicted with her home-alone phobia).

So back to my scientific discovery. To understand how it was unearthed, we must turn the clock back a few years, okay, decades, to when I was in first grade, snug as a bug in my warm, canopy bed at night. From down the hall I could hear the muffled TV set and my parent’s occasional conversation.

What if they’re really not my parents, I would muse. What if they’re actually bad guys dressed up to look like Mom and Dad. Î would lie there corpse-like, allowing my brain to grip my 45-pound frame in paralyzing fear, which could only be allayed only by the blessing of heavy eyelids.

Mind you, I never mentioned this little gem to anyone. That’s why I was so floored one recent morning when my seven-year-old-son, Alex, came into the kitchen and quietly climbed onto a barstool.

“Mornin’ Honey,” I said through a yawn, adding a little coffee to my sugar and holding my newborn in the other arm.

“Mom,” he said, eyeing me suspiciously, “How do I know you’re really my mom and not some bad guy in a mom suit?”

Luckily little Emma missed being showered in hot coffee as the vanilla hazelnut I’d just sipped came back out like it was poisoned, or even worse, decaffeinated.

I stood there for a second, stumped as to how heredity had obviously dealt him a doozie. When I told him I used to worry about the same thing when I was his age, his tense little shoulders fell in relief. “Yep, perfectly normal,” I lied, my mind reeling at the reality that he got his daddy’s eyes and my paranoia.

When I told my mom about all this, she didn’t bat an eye. “Oh, sure,” she said, like I was talking about the fact that he has elbows. “I used to worry about the same thing,” she said, reinforcing the fact that the scared gene is dominant and inherited from the maternal side.