8.4.2017
Our anxiety, Ourselves
She has her daddy’s eyes. His athletic ability. His love of math.
She has my stick-straight hair, my flair for the dramatic, my tendency to rush.
It’s this last one that worries me. When I see her scribbling her answers to homework just as fast as she can. Is she hurrying because she’s seven years old and impatient, or is it because she, like her mama, gets heart palpitations at the thought of having work left to do?
When I was her age, I sped through every assignment I got. Not because the work was easy, but because if I left it for too long I would start thinking about how much there was to do, and how difficult it was going to be, and how I probably wouldn’t finish in time, and how even if I did, I’d get all the answers wrong and everyone would find out what I already knew: that I wasn’t as smart as they all thought.
Nobody knew about the creepy-crawly feeling I got sometimes when I thought about the future. They couldn’t see the giant boulder pressing down on my chest. I didn’t know to call it “high-functioning anxiety” then; I just knew I didn’t want anyone to know about it. So I kept it to myself.
Is that what she’s doing? The little girl who gets up early to do her homework, racing to finish before her younger brothers wake up. The one who refuses to come downstairs until she’s completely dressed for school, who begged to do her entire science fair project the day it was assigned, who always eats the food she likes least first to get it out of the way. My husband says she’s strategic. I wonder if it’s something else.
Who am I kidding? I don’t “wonder.” I worry. I worry that she’s just like me.
I can hear my father asking, “Would that be so bad? You turned out okay.” Which, is true. I turned out fine. But there was a period in college when I stopped being able to feel my legs. Which, at the time, felt like less of a big deal than the full-blown panic attacks. The stomach cramps after every meal. The doctor at the campus health center told me it was IBS. Another doctor decided I was allergic to wheat. Nobody saw what I was really suffering from – an all-consuming fear that I would never be enough. Smart enough, successful enough, capable enough, interesting enough, likable enough. All the things I was trying so hard to be.
That fear propelled me through my twenties. It was behind every achievement, every professional success.
Until, one day, I saw two pink lines on a stick and suddenly it wasn’t just a ball of panic in my belly but a cluster of cells that would grow into a tiny baby girl we weren’t expecting so soon. The surprise gave way to worry, so much worry -- what if I miscarry? What if there’s something wrong with her? What if I die during delivery? What if I drop her on her head? – but when she got here, when I held her in my arms, the fear receded. It wasn’t I got this so much as I am this, a mother, her mother, a role I couldn’t earn and most certainly didn’t deserve but still could never lose. I’d gone to church all my life but never truly comprehended grace until this.
But still I worry. Not about my own identity anymore, but hers. I don’t want my beautiful, brave, creative creature to ever doubt her worth. Because isn’t that what anxiety is at its root? Behind the incessant flurry of what-ifs there’s one quiet what-if that we’re trying so hard to silence, what if I’m not good enough? It’s a question the world will answer for us, over and over again, you’re right, you don’t measure up. Because we don’t. None of us do.
So what’s my answer? I need one ready, next time she misses a math problem and her hands ball up in fists. I usually tell her that right answers are overrated, that the most interesting people get lots of things wrong. But where is the grace in this?
This morning it’s spelling homework. She’s filling in missing letters to words I’m impressed she already knows. “Bicyclist” trips her up. Her foot starts bouncing. She’ll start biting her eraser next. Grace, I remind myself. Give her grace in this.
I’m quiet for several moments, searching for the perfect words, aware that there aren’t any, which, I realize, is the whole point. So instead of saying anything, I lean over and pull her into my arms, my girl, and I let that be enough.