Anxiety is a big floppy dark bird that flies behind me, always. It seems ridiculous that he (yes, my anxiety is gender specific) should be swift because he is so large and lacking in grace.
And yet, he flies.
He catches me on the uphills and wraps his wings around me. He does not have feathers. He is a being clothed in darkness and velvet that smothers. His wings compress my chest and cover my face and his darkness sinks into my mind. The ability to breathe is gone. My heart races away from me. The darkness catches me.
I feel like I used to be unstoppable. Reading back on old blog entries and remembering how I used to run circles around an airfield at 4pm, in the middle of the summer, with the heat index sitting at 110, pushing a stroller containing a child that almost broke me. The stress that was present in those days was overwhelming at best. I feel so much weaker now, and I struggle to understand how I stood up underneath all that weight. I used to run so fast, anxiety couldn't catch me until I stopped. Now I am fallible and weak and not fast enough to outrun it.
I'm so confused by this anomaly. Those were such hard days, those early stroller days with Sam. Getting up at 4:45 to run on the treadmill in the early hours. Another run later in the day. Everything was regimented. My life was broken up into segments of predictability and battle. I didn't have time to dwell on how I felt, I just kept going. Molly's schoolwork got done. Sam was defined by the all consuming hope of him eating and drinking. Those were the days when he still threw up constantly. Baby blankets went with us everywhere, to soak up the mess that was inevitable. He did not speak. He was so far behind developmentally. Molly was on a competitive gymnastics team. My husband worked from dark to dark and got one weekend off every three weeks. I did it all and I held it together. I made cloth napkins and hung our clothes to dry on a clothesline because it was better for the environment. All our meals were homemade. My husband ate on a different schedule because he worked late, so I always prepared a plate for him that was waiting in the fridge for him when he got home. My kids got minimal screen time. We read books and played. We ran errands and they went with me everywhere. During the 4+ years we lived in North Carolina, as far as I can recall, we never had a babysitter. It just never came up. I never went out at night. My friendships were defined by children.
All these things. I did and did and did. Are they anything? Do they count? Are they just chasing the wind?
My son devours books now. I taught him to read. He read voraciously, but talks of almost nothing but video games. He tells me how many games he plays over the weekend, when he is not with me. The child that couldn't watch an episode of The Andy Griffith Show, or get through Monsters Inc without hiding behind the couch to avoid the conflict and stress, he now watches Clone Wars.
I poured myself into Molly from the beginning and it was joyful. She was my best little friend, from South Carolina to Alaska to North Carolina to Indiana to Hawaii. She was conversation and sunshine and light and fun. She is the reason I bought my first Bob and started running outdoors in Alaska, avoiding the main streets because I didn't want anyone to see me wearing shorts. We saw marmots and moose and avoided bears when we smelled or heard them. We saw Denali in the distance and climbed small paved mountains. We joined a Mom's running group and I traded strollers with moms that pushed doubles and did hill repeats because I didn't mind the pain. I wanted to push harder and feel it hurt. I taught Molly to read when she was six. She went from being illiterate to reading chapter books in less than six months. Stroller running became a different experience. Loads of books, contained in a plastic bubble stretched over the stroller so they wouldn't fall out when we crossed streets. Molly was a dance. She was stubborn and refused to eat and fell asleep on her broccoli when I told her that she couldn't leave the table until she had eaten. I could make her cry just by looking at her and she was incapable of telling me a lie.
Sam was equal parts fragility and iron.
He was cuddly, happy to snuggle in a rocking chair for hours. I gave him parts of me that I did not know that I had. He brought elemental things to the surface. He stripped the skin from my bones, the sanity from my mind and left me raw and then clawed at me. I stood between him and death. Death taunted me on one side and he struggled on the other and my brain broke. I became a shadow person, just functioning, carrying on from one task to the next, crashing at the end of the day, then getting up and repeating the process. One of the biggest challenges of parenting, in my opinion, is being nice. Just- being nice. Anyone can function on minimal sleep. Not everyone can sleep for only four hours nightly and still be nice. Eventually, it wears you down and you want to cut a bitch. If you have small children, you don't cut anyone, you just get really angry at bad drivers and drink an obscene amount of coffee.
With Sam, everything was broken down into small incremental bits. Things that I took for granted with Molly were celebrated as milestones.
I gave Sam everything that I had left and more. I have no regrets. Except for that one time when I accidentally overdosed him on heparin. I regret that.
My life is a snowglobe, turned upside down and shaken. All these things that I have done- teaching my children math and how to read, all the things they have seen and the stories we have told and lived- what are they worth now? There is no mental rest. There is only transition and questions.
"What will you be?"
"What will you do?"
Why is anxiety catching me now?
Is it
the divorce
the pandemic
the quarantine
protests
racial tension and the desire to show love, but not knowing how
the uncertainty about my future
a job
finances
child support back payments that are still floating around somewhere
?
It's probably just the unbearable lightness of being.
There is so much going on in the world right now. I am struggling to balance it all, to properly mentally allocate priority to all the different things going on. I feel like I'm being pulled in so many directions right now, to care about so many things, and I do care.
This season of thought, time, and isolation, equally defined by inactivity and revolution, it is bringing memories to the surface and causing me to examine myself. I'm studying who I am and what has built me, these blocks of life experience.
I look at my hands, and they are old. My brain is tired and my emotions are weary and worn out. My limits are set lower. My tolerance for manipulation is gone. I crave real things. This is why I love the trails and the ridges and the waterfalls and the mountains. These things are real and hard, soft and green. They cut and heal.
Anxiety, I am tired of you. Fly away, dark bird. Drown and dissolve.
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