Anxiety in My Mommy Head and Mommy Heart

I have mini heart attacks every day.  I find the more time I spend with my kids the more coronaries I have.  As so many things in life are uncontrollable, children being highest on the list, you might imagine how often I feel like crawling out of my skin.  It really got started at birth (probably mine), but I was referring to Zoey and Hunter’s births.  For several months after they were born I religiously listened for their breathing, watching their chests rising and falling to make sure they were still alive.  This is something I still do today.  I look in on them before I go to bed and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and rush in to gently place my hand on their backs to feel that they are breathing.

I’m not exactly sure where my need to control things and the resulting anxiety began.  Did it come from my childhood or is it just in my DNA?  It goes hand in hand with my perfectionist tendencies.  These inclinations aren’t all encompassing.  My house is not immaculate to say the least, but I can’t stand to be wrong and will never make the same mistake twice.  My grandmother had obsessive compulsive tendencies (her house was always perfectly decorated and clean) and so do other members of the family.  In my case, the need to control my surroundings stems from not being able to control my internal feelings or emotions.  

anx·i·e·ty 

Noun:

A feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome. Desire to do something, typically accompanied by unease.

Hunter in the "noodles"

I don’t have much control (ha!) when this uneasy breathing monster chooses to gurgle up inside me.  The other day Joe, the kids and I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).  Hunter went running about in the “noodles” with Zoey.  There were a handful of other kids rushing around in there too.  While I stuck close behind my toddling Hunter, I didn’t feel anxious about him getting hurt.  The next day when we were at the park with no crazy kids nearby, I was on high alert.  Hunter was playing on the slide and my anxiety was chomping away inside me.  I was constantly bracing for the fall that I felt would inevitably come.  When he did fall face first off the slide, I felt slightly vindicated, yet angry at myself for allowing it.  My overbearing feelings hadn’t been for naught!  He stood up crying through a mouthful of sand, and while he was only slightly annoyed at the crunchiness in his mouth and recovered quickly, he had still been hurt, if only a little.

Joe tolerates my madness for a while, before he inevitably gets upset with me.  As I become more on edge, I react angrily to everything and everyone around me.  On my rampage this morning, I was short with both Joe and Zoey and while I was aware it wasn’t appropriate I couldn’t help myself.  Who was I mad at?  I was mad at myself for not having been more organized.  All logic disappears when these crazed moments occur.  Joe simply picked up the phone, called the doctor and asked if we could get copies.  Of course, they could replace them, but that wasn’t really the point.  They shouldn’t have been misplaced!  Of course about two minutes after he picked up the copies, I found the originals.  They were in the most obvious place, the kitchen table.  They had been folded up and looked like they were something else, so I had never even picked them up to look at them.      

Shortly before the fall

My mood is easily affected by my anxiety and this creates tension in my relationships.  Joe is a saint to deal with me when I’m taken over with anxiousness.  While it’s something I’m trying to get a handle on and be more aware of, I still struggle with it.  My anxiety involving Zoey has changed as she has grown up.  I’m no longer so worried about her getting physically hurt, as I now am with Hunter.  I worry more about how her emotional hurts about how her extreme height or her left handedness will affect her.  I’m anxious for her before I even need to be.  I want to make things easier on her before I even know if these things will be difficult for her.  I get all twisted up inside thinking about the future and my desire to control what I can’t.  

Maybe this type of irrational anxiety is something I can try to talk myself out of. Maybe it will fade as the kids get older.  Maybe in time I will be able to truly grasp that my struggle to be the perfect mom is an impossible feat.  I will have to get it through my mommy head and my mommy heart that I just can‘t control every aspect of my kids’ lives.  They will stumble, they will fall, they will get up, brush themselves off and be okay, and maybe, just maybe, so will I.