Decades of scientific study on the phenomenon of maternal instinct have yet to offer an explanation for one of the most puzzling of motherly behaviors: bizarre paranoia. Every mother stakes out her freakish turf, finds the one threat to her children that keeps her awake at night, the one that has the power to make her clammy with fear. This perceived danger then becomes the focal point for years and years of worry and fretful precaution. For my mother, the terror that stalked her family was trichinosis. Her dread of undercooked pork sentenced us to many a dinner spent gnawing at pork chops so thoroughly baked as to require nothing more than cleats and laces to turn them into soccer shoes. Nor was she content to merely transform pig into leather. She described trichinosis to us in careful, obsessive detail, explaining that it all began with a worm that lived inside the meat. Fail to cook this worm, she'd warn, and you'll end up with a fever, and aching limbs, and horrible swelling, and then you'll die. Small wonder that as a child I didn't have much of a taste for meat. If something is loaded with worms and possibly deadly, why, I wondered, were we being forced to eat it for dinner? My mother wasn't interested in debating the matter with me, and would instead flip one of the scorched, curled, wretched little chops onto my plate, and remind me that children were to be seen and not heard at table. If it wasn't for the spoonful of applesauce that invariably accompanied our overdone pork, I expect I might have choked to death trying to get it down. Now, all these years later, my mother has finally been vindicated. According to the journal, Archives of Internal Medicine, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was killed by trichinosis. A musical genius, cut down in his prime by undercooked pork! No matter that Mozart's death in 1791 occurred some years before the advent of refrigeration, for my mom, the fact that anyone was felled by trichinosis more than justified her lifelong obsession with the disease. In fact, if Mozart, a legendary genius, can be taken out by pork, what hope did a handful of tone-deaf kids in the suburbs have of surviving supper?

My Grandma Blackhair, on the other hand, cooked pork with abandon, but was terrified of two loathsome and potentially fatal childhood killers: trench mouth and tapeworm. Trench mouth lurked everywhere, it being the result of children putting nasty, dirty objects into their mouths. Since kids, especially toddlers, are prone to doing just that, my grandmother was forever on the alert for the signs and symptoms of trench mouth. She was a little vague on just what these might be, other than to say that our mouths would fill up with painful sores, that we'd run very high fevers and that, unless our lips and tongues were immediately painted with tincture of iodine, we'd die, probably in our sleep. My cousin Renee actually came down with trench mouth at about age four. I don't remember the specifics of the affliction, but I do recall Renee's frightful howling as her mouth was swabbed, and how goofy she looked with blue lips and teeth. Now, whether she actually had trench mouth or just a cold sore scarcely mattered; in our family, home doctoring was a tradition. She recovered and lived to adulthood, which was proof enough for our grandmother that the diagnosis had been correct.

Unfortunately, Grandma never had the satisfaction of curing any of us of tapeworm infestation, but it wasn't for lack of trying. According to her, a sure sign of tapeworm in a kid was a mysterious increase in appetite accompanied by no significant gain in height or weight. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of the tapeworm's habits. One acquired the parasite, she informed us, by walking barefoot on dirty sidewalks. Once the tapeworm got inside your body, it nested in the intestines, and gobbled all of your food. A child with a tapeworm would eat and eat and eat and never gain any weight. The only cure was to sit on a bowl of warm milk, lure the beast out, and bludgeon it. Terrifying. Repulsive. Effective. We were careful to wear our shoes outside, and thought twice about too much snacking. Unfortunately, my cousin Renee - the poor thing - had a growth spurt at about age nine that was carefully monitored lest it turn out that she'd become a tapeworm victim. There was some dire talk about giving her the warm milk cure, but luckily, and not a moment too soon, she shot up a couple of inches and so was spared. To this day, I've yet to find anyone who has seen a tapeworm, much less treated one, and I've asked dozens of nurses, doctors, and paramedics. I don't doubt their existence, but I suspect they're far more rare than my Grandma Blackhair ever imagined.

Tetanus, better known to us as lockjaw, was another of the grim maladies looming over our childhood. We were more afraid of rusty nails than we were of bullets. As a young girl, my mother actually managed to step on a rusty nail herself, and was promptly dragged to the nearest Emergency Room by her older sister. Even after getting a tetanus shot, she was convinced that death was imminent. That very night, she awoke in a cold sweat, terrified, her jaw paralyzed. Or maybe she just dreamed that she couldn't open her mouth. Either way, a lasting impression was made, and as soon as she had kids of her own, her fear of tetanus went into hyper drive. My husband's mother had an equal dread of lockjaw, but she had solid reasons for it. A friend of hers was bitten by a cat, contracted lockjaw, and died. It was a swift, painful, horrible death, and there was nothing that could be done to save her. I may have grown up in the shadow of my mother's irrational fears, but my husband was raised by an honest-to-God eyewitness to lethal lockjaw - to this day he won't touch a stray cat or wander around without his shoes on. His mom also suffered from fear of the pilot light. The pilot light, for those lucky enough to have grown up with only electric utilities, is an ever-burning flame that can be found in gas-powered appliances like stoves, water heaters, and clothes dryers. Pilot light paranoia takes several forms. First, there's the worry that at any moment the whole house will explode. Second, if the pilot light is extinguished, a family could inhale enough natural gas to kill everyone in their sleep. Finally, if the pilot light goes out and has to be re-lit with a match, it's very possible that the person doing the lighting will have his or her face directly in the path of a massive fireball, resulting in total loss of eyebrows and lashes at best, and gruesome disfigurement at worst.

Hookworms, pinworms, and ringworms also stalked us. Just because we never knew a living soul who'd suffered from any of the above didn't make it any less likely that we'd be afflicted ourselves. We tried mightily to stay in good health, knowing that to do otherwise would surely be our death sentence. A bad cold could easily become whooping cough. A high fever might be scarlet fever. A rash was probably measles. Scratching a mosquito bite meant getting an infection, which could lead to gangrene, resulting in amputation of the affected limb. My family was obviously fixated on creepy diseases and disorders, but mom paranoia can take any form. One of my favorite examples comes from my friend Anne. Her mother, a chiropractor and a woman of considerable common sense, would not allow a color television into their home. She'd gotten the idea that a color television was likely to explode, sending shards of glass directly into the eyeballs and brains of her three daughters. That this had never occurred anywhere on earth didn't deter Anne's mom in the least. Nor was she bothered by the fact that hers was the last family in America to trade in their black and white TV. She was simply protecting her kids, the best way she knew how.

I can't wait to discover my own maternal paranoia. I already lurk outside the bathroom door while Eric is in the tub, just to make sure he's not drowning. (He's eight, and likes to think that he can manage a bath by himself, thank you very much.) And I worry about him getting hit by a car while riding his bike - normal, reasonable stuff. On the less reasonable front, I'm currently looking into Lyme disease, since we live in an area plagued by ticks. Lyme disease has just the sort of symptoms that I've been raised to cower from: fever, achiness, lethargy. With Olivia, I fret over dropping her on her head, accidentally sitting on her, or inadvertently starving her due to improper nursing technique. However, I won't be turning into my mother with her deranged fear of pork. I've struck out on my own and am developing new and creative insane fears. My first is that we'll be out for a walk, the baby napping peacefully in the stroller, when suddenly a giant wild dog will come out of nowhere, attack us, and eat her. Go ahead and scoff, tell me it won't ever happen. That's what we used to say to my mom--that is, until we found out that trichinosis killed Mozart.