My fears make me too selfish to support my little girl properly

Like most children, I screamed bloody murder when I awoke after a particularly hellish nightmare.

The notion that I sounded like horror personified was the last thing on my mind as I shrieked for my mother and attempted to unpeel myself from my sweat-soaked sheets.

I paid scant regard to my mother’s demeanour once she eventually crossed my threshold and held me close.

Was she frightened by my screams? Was she rattled by my dishevelled appearance? Was her imagination running just as wild as mine as I gasped that there was a man under our stairs?

My regular childhood nightmares never graduated to full-blown night terrors, but they were frequent enough to warrant concern and often enough to justify the dark shadows under both mine and my mum’s eyes.

Once I reached the age of ten, I suffered less nightmares and when I did, I knew how to calm myself without screaming for my mother.

By the time I entered my teens, the memory of these occasions had almost completely disappeared to be replaced by more pressing issues like eye shadow, glitter pens and good looking prefects.

They didn’t leave my mother’s memory, however, as I recently learned when I confided that Ella’s imagination was starting to take its toll on me.

“She’ll tell me she saw men looking through the bedroom windows,” I told my mum in a shaky whisper after one particularly unsettling night.

“Is she still half asleep when she’s telling you this?” my mum asked.

“I can never be sure, I responded. “She’ll speak coherently, but her eyes are wild and I don’t know if she’s recounting the dream or telling me that what she actually saw in real life caused the nightmare.”

My mum, unsurprisingly, questioned why I hadn’t explored the issue further in the cold light of day.

“I do, I insisted, before faltering slightly.

“Well, I ask her if she’s OK over breakfast and she'll barely remember the incident. But I’m scared to linger on it too much in case it plants another seed and we have a repeat night,” I amended.

My mum continued to look at me.

“You’re scared to get into it with her because you don’t want to be frightened,” she said.

She was right.

I thought becoming a mum would mean I would grow out of childhood fears, but Ella’s screams had brought my own rushing back to me.

I suddenly realised what my mum must have gone though all those years ago as she attempted to unpeel me form her nightshirt and lay me back to sleep.

Fear of strangers, burglars and bogeymen had plagued me as a youngster, and while I grew out of it, it seems Ella’s nocturnal distress has reignited all my old upset.

While I no longer have nightly breakdowns, I do exercise caution and sometimes go overboard when it comes to security – something which I now realised hasn’t gone unnoticed by my daughter.

I check the doors and windows religiously throughout the day, I don’t allow Ella’s dad to watch crimes shows if me or Ella are within earshot and I wander through the house like a patrol guard before bedtime  in an effort to ensure neither me nor my family fall victim to the people I used dream about.

“It’s your behaviour that’s unsettling the child, “ my mum said after what looked like a moment considering the repercussions of the accusation.

I couldn’t deny it.

“You refuse to placate Ella the following morning because you don’t like to hear exactly what went through her head and frankly, that’s selfish.”

Again, spot-on.

“It’s not going to go away if you ignore it. You need to get to the bottom of the issue and, for crying out loud, you need to stop checking that the door is locked thirty times a day. Children pick up on these things.”

Loathe as I am to admit it, my behaviour may have planted a seed in Ella’s mind and my reluctance to scratch the surface (for my own self-preservation) is just another example of how I need to improve as a mother.

I’m sure I’ll get there eventually though.