Now, anxiety is obviously not just a mom thing. I was certainly no stranger to it myself before I became a mother. If I’m honest, I’ve probably had some level of anxiety since I was a child myself—motherhood has only heightened my Spidey anxiety senses. And there’s science behind it. Beyond the stuff we choose to subject ourselves to (like this, and this and this) there’s also the super real fact that moms are pretty much biologically wired to be hyper anxious. As soon as that umbilical chord secures itself, we’re not only physically and emotionally attached to our children, we have a chemical predisposition to fiercely love and protect and constantly worry about them until death do us part...or until they drive us so fucking crazy that we actually consider killing them ourselves.
According to The Atlantic, a pregnant woman's brain begins to change even before she gives birth. "Gray matter becomes more concentrated. Activity increases in regions that control empathy, anxiety, and social interaction. On the most basic level, these changes, prompted by a flood of hormones during pregnancy and in the postpartum period, help attract a new mother to her baby. In other words, those maternal feelings of overwhelming love, fierce protectiveness, and constant worry begin with reactions in the brain." - Romper
But what about after the postpartum period...like five years after?
My husband recently took my five year-old on a nature walk with his uncle and same-aged cousin. My youngest is still on pretty stringent nap schedule so I stayed back home with him and did what any other mother of a child at this stage would do. I napped too. Therefore, I did not pick up my phone when my husband called to tell me that 5 had just fallen in the creek. Wait. WHAT?!
Yeah. I didn’t find out until they got home. But turned out, he was fine. It’s winter in Minnesota, albeit a middle one, and the path was slushy and icy. The boys had gotten a little too close to the water’s edge and he just slipped right in. Thankfully his dad was nearby and pulled him right out. They weren’t too far into their walk and therefore close to the car, so they whisked him to dry terrain pretty quickly. Crisis averted, right?
“I didn’t even cry, mom,” he said when they got home and told me the whole story, like he had just earned a badge of honor. There he was, barefoot in my living room, clad in a pair of his cousin’s too small pajamas and holding his wet shoes, socks, clothes and jacket in a paper bag (yep, leave it to dads to put wet clothes in a PAPER bag) telling me that he was fine. F-I-N-E. Fine. No danger. No death. No dismemberment. All was well. Better than well. They had gone, this thing had happened and now they were back and I had slept right through the whole ordeal.
But still, standing there and looking at him very much alive and kicking, all I could think of was my baby boy, being helplessly yet swiftly carried off, the cold winter water stealing him off into oblivion...as I stood on the shore unable to help. Here, in reality, the threat was over, the monster was gone. It had drifted away with the current and did not take my boy with it. So why was this crushing wave of anxiety washing through my body and flooding the pit of my stomach with a sense of dread and heart ache, as if his story had ended in a completely different and much more horrible way?
Well, I mean, the true crime podcasts and documentaries don't super help. But also, as mothers, it seems we are constantly in a state of silent yet active disaster dread. Hell, some of us are such worry wizards, we can even make this shit up out of nowhere. In the fearful theater of my own mind, my kids have drowned, been run over, broken, stolen, abandoned, poisoned, pummeled, you name it. And that’s just on their way to school. Sure, somewhere very deep down, we know that these disasters are very unlikely to happen, but still. Shit. Can. Happen. And we want to—no, we need to—be prepared to protect. It all starts when our children are babies, when motherhood is new. As one mother writes of her early postpartum days,
Each day my own baby fell down the stairs, died in her sleep, choked on a grape, was mauled by a stray dog. I watched her die on loop. And it was agony. I stopped reading the news. Was the world going to burn up? Were terrorists plotting an attack in my city? When we went to a mall I searched for a man with a crazed look and a gun. There were too many monsters in the world, invisible and otherwise, too many potential paths that led us toward oblivion.
Sounds horrible, right? It also very much sounds like one of those things that we just don’t talk about yet so many of us have experienced. In fact, as many as 15 percent of new mothers develop anxiety disorders. What new mom hasn’t brought her beautiful new babe home and checked his/her bassinet at least 86 times in one half hour, just to make sure he/she is still breathing? Or pulled their car over mid route to a destination they’re already late for and checked the baby’s car seat, just to triple verify that it’s fastened properly?
But it doesn’t just stop at birth or once those first few hazy and hormonal weeks of new momness have subsided. Or even six months after that. Or even a year after that, especially when motherhood is just another notch on your already well-worn anxiety belt. Even when the thoughts of tragedy graciously subside or we just simply forget about them, the day-to-day churn takes their place.
When you're a mom, there's no escape from the constant worry. I feel trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of responsibilities, all ranging from relatively minor to extraordinarily important. I wake up, rush to get the kids ready for school, and the moment I drop them off I worry about their safety. When they get home, after I've finished my own work, I'm stressed out about their homework, about dinner, and about trying to connect with my kids while simultaneously crossing off a mental check list the size of Texas. Then, when it's finally time to lay my head down on a pillow I probably should have washed earlier that day, I am plagued by all the things I didn't accomplish in a 24-hour period, and my anxiety prepares for it second act of the day. - Romper
Fear is fear. Anxiety is anxiety, right? Whether it’s literally watching your kid slip into danger or looking at a seriously threatening to-do list, we process it all the same. 40 years on earth, 5 years of parenthood and 2 children has given me, an already anxious person, a lot to process. That day of the near water tragedy, I probably had enough feelings of real and perceived threats stored up in my body that the mere story of my son’s incident was enough to release the floodgates. Plus, it was only natural. My mom brain interpreted an anxiety-ridden thing and my body reacted by sending off the fear flares: my child had encountered danger and I needed to protect him.
As 5’s little bare feet padded happily off to his room, my husband and I exchanged that look to each other, that one that says, Holy shit what the fuck is this real life thank god that's over and is there vodka in the house? I was super thankful that we had seemed to survive a potentially perilous thing and that we indeed did have vodka in the house, but I also remember immediately thinking, what about next time? Will we be this lucky next time? My brain desperately wanted to start worrying about the next worst thing that could happen.
A few days later, I happened upon a story about another mother's experiences with fear and anxiety, first her own and then her young daughter's.
I tell her it’s okay to worry but that some things don’t deserve so much attention, like tornadoes when we are living in the middle of Detroit. "Tornadoes happen, but they are very rare here. Tornadoes don’t like cities." We have a long talk about what rare means. ...We lie in bed together staring up at the smoke alarm. It takes some time to help her understand that the alarm doesn’t cause fires, but alerts us to them. Nevertheless, its presence is unsettling. A reminder of the “just in case.” “Rare” she repeats, a new mantra. “Rare,” I say, staring into her eyes, trying to convince myself of the words coming out of my mouth.
Rare.
R-A-R-E.
Rare.
One, simple four letter word. I like four letter words. And it's easy to repeat. I think I'll hang on to it for a while, just in case. I have feeling it's going to come in handy...plus, we're going to be out of vodka soon.
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