Mornings at home are easy. Sundrenched and slow. I sip coffee
and listen to the radio. Juniper is happy to play, feed, then fall asleep for a
few hours.
It’s the afternoons away from home when it hits me. Lethargy.
Weight. A hollow fullness of the gut. Senseless anxiety resulting in a fatigue
so strong it’s as if my body is moving through syrup and not air. There is
something wrong deep inside my abdomen. Yesterday, out shopping in town, bent
over my cart, I become disoriented in the store. Dizzy with the danger of all
the strangers around me. Every single one of them is a bit off. My body
stiffens when I pass them, they all have arms to reach out and touch the baby,
to grab the baby, harm the baby. What am I there for? Wandering around on the
border of panic, feeling as if I may fall over. Rational thought tells me I’m
ok, I will not pass out, but rational thought is such a pushover, extremely
susceptible to the convincing powers of anxiety.
I pull through. Always do. Go to the library. The new one with
the stairs. Somehow I make it up them, grab the book, walk back down. It takes
all my power to let the sight of the railing pass through me as I ascend and
descend, to ignore the scary drop to the hard tiled floor. How does one ignore
gravity? Of course, more attention is paid to something being actively ignored,
and in so ignoring, quite the opposite effect is attained. The muscles clench,
the bowels tie themselves in knots, in tatters, in muddy mats like a messy head
of hippie hair. My innards. Dreadlocks. Locked with dread.
This is how it is. My role as mother. Walk around in constant
computation of danger to baby. And, everything means danger. Worse, every
possible horrific outcome, I witness inside my mind. I am in a constant state
of trauma, grief, agony over everything that could possibly happen, because
somehow my brain can’t tell that these images are simply meant as warnings, are
not actually happening.
I can relate to this so SO much. Replaying what just happened and all the ways it could have gone wrong. Or jumping ahead and seeing what is about to happen and all the terrible aftermath. The awful truth is that those things sometimes happen. And it's in dealing with them that we learn to cope. Beatrice fell off my bed when she was tiny. Face first and her whole body flipped over her. How did her neck not snap? I wept as though it had. Then two years later, she knocked a set of weights onto her own tiny hand and cracked a bone in her bird finger. Later that day, when we were finally home from the hospital? She dove down a flight of stairs and snapped the finger the rest of the way. She spent that summer in a full arm cast. What will it be next? I am a good mother. Careful and protective. But they slip right through.
ReplyDeleteand when they cry like it is all your fault!
DeleteDo you try and talk yourself through those moments? I have anxiety issues, but they are mostly related to eating and stress. I find if I say what I am feeling outloud it helps to calm me down. And I see the mental health worker who comes to our community once a month to help work through the anxiety. It has been very helpful!
ReplyDeleteI'm considering talking to a counselor... Mostly, I try to let these moments pass through without noticing so much. It is a near constant presence. I was on medication for anxiety/ocd before the baby but tapered off when I found out i was pregnant. I'm considering going back on but ick, I'm trying for now to see if I can managed with yoga and walking and eating well and fish oil etc.
ReplyDeleteI find the intrusive thoughts have ramped up ALOT since baby was born but part of me believes it is just a normal response to hormones etc. It is a way the body alerts you to the present dangers to the little creature in your care. It's insane. It's like I'm the Terminator but my eyes scan for sharp objects and shady people (and there seems to be a lot in Whitehorse).
We mothers were made this way to keep our young from all the dangers out there. 99% of kids make it through with only a few scars and scares, seems the kids whose mom kicks them out of the house in the morning with a board with a nail in it to play with manage to survive to adulthood. If you imagine 10 or 15 guardian angels hovering around your babies it will help you relax. I know all their greatgrandma's are watching them pretty close from heaven or the next demension. Always helped me to imagine that anyway and I have all 4 kids grown to adulthood alive.
ReplyDeleteHi momnonymous, I never thought of it that way... Grandmah is probably hovering over us ...of course she is probably pretty preoccupied with Hunter and Owyn in Ontario so we only get her some of the time...
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