Here's something I have no memory of but that my parents old me about when I was a bit older. I guess that around the time I was an infant there had been several children who died in their cribs when milk from their bottles curdled in their airways suffocating them.

One evening, my parents had put me to bed with a bottle. They heard me choke, or make some kind of crying sound, & then go silent. They rushed in & I apparently wasn't breathing. My father, as I recall him telling it, picked me up by my legs & hit me backwards against the nearest wall which dislodged two curdled balls of milk from my nostrils.

I've always struggled with a great amount of fear in my life. And I wonder if, perhaps, that experience was at the root of that. It may be that in that moment my father both rescued me, & destroyed me, at the same time.