It starts with a little thing like not being able to sleep very well one night. Your mind is racing and you can't turn off the thoughts. You remember that you have a pill to help you with this very thing, you take it, but part of you is like... "but my anxiety has been better since the beginning of October! Why am I taking a pill in mid-November? Am I a failure in recovery?" Because chances are if you have an anxiety disorder you have other issues going on with your self-esteem and your perfectionism and probably other things too.
Yes. You think that every time your anxiety gets better that it should be better... FOREVER... dammit. Right? I mean, I got through it before, I should be cured for life! The reality is that you will probably have it flare up here and there for life to varying degrees. It will hopefully not be debilitating like it was 10 years ago when you were sometimes afraid to leave your room, but it is there. Two good months and you think you've solved it all, and this is wrong.
Then one night while getting ready for work you have these terrible thoughts. Your husband and child are safely asleep in bed and you think, "what if my husband dies in his sleep and my son wakes up all alone and cries for hours and hours until I get home?" It's a ridiculous thought. Your husband is healthy, in fact he's probably above average in health, even regularly goes to the dentist and everything. But this thought just will not leave you. No matter how much you tell yourself that the chance of this happening is slim to none, you can't stop thinking about it. And you find yourself panicking and feeling like you will never be able to leave for work, in fact you will never work again, you will never be able to leave your child alone with anyone ever again. How will life go on?
You take your anti-anxiety pill again, because if you didn't, you would sob through work, you give yourself a little pep talk about the extreme health of your husband, and you go to work. While at work, you see a newborn baby crying on a commercial for like 3 seconds on TV and you cry because you can't pick up that baby and hold it and make it stop crying.
Then the next day after your son's nap, you bring him to the potty, to pee, because that is what he's done most days after nap for a while. But today he screams and refuses and he cries, but you feel determined, and you try again, and then you give up finally and put his diaper back on and he immediately pees in it. A normal reaction, would be "well I guess he wanted to go in his diaper, that's what they are there for after all." But this is not your reaction. Your reaction is to stomp out of the room and cry on the couch about how you have failed as a mother. How you must be confusing your child over the potty, how you have failed at elimination communication, how he will probably be in diapers for years, but how you just CAN'T IMAGINE handling diapers for even 6 more months.
Your husband, who is really a swell guy, tells you that you didn't fail, that you are actually doing a really good job, how you didn't fail at elimination communication, it helped prevent diaper rash after all. He probably should just say something like, "stop crying you crazy woman, you are amazing and you are way too hard on yourself! The kid is going to do what the kids is going to do, let's go to the park!" But he's a nice guy and would never say anything like that. At least not like that.
And then the next day your period starts, and then, and only then, for some silly reason, you realize that the last few crazy days were from your goddamn womanly hormonal changes. You realize that you don't always do all the things you did those last few days, you pretty much only do them a few days out of the month right before your period comes. And you think about charting it to actually prove it, but you'll forget by next week when you are feeling way better.
No comments:
Post a Comment