Worry is my drug
These first weeks of the year are always the hardest – for me and probably for the lot of us. The weather doesn’t help (although I’ll take the warmish, gray days over the snowy ones), and indoors, things always feel a little bit drab when the Christmas lights come down.
But my January droop is more about missing my kids.
Missing them is a constant for me, but the weeks after holiday break are worse because I’d just had them around me. My son came in from the west coast, and although I didn’t see him as much as I would have liked, the days I had were enough to refill the tank. My daughter was here for most of her college break – she and a gaggle of her high school friends who filled the house with chatter and laundry and requests for hot breakfasts and snacks. It was like old times.
But now she’s back at college and I’m struggling. It’s the lament of the empty nester. Where did the years go? Why do they have to leave? Is it time to resume worrying about them now?
That last question is the one that’s got me cornered. Sure, I worried about them when they were growing up, but they were always within arm’s reach – the first few years literally so and then after that, at least theoretically and emotionally. Those years, the worry was pointed more at myself; my anxiety was aimed at my perceived failures as a parent, which I spilled out upon them by way of occasional hyper-mothering. Ask them about it, they remember.
Now, the worry is about the things I cannot control or help or make better. I finally stopped talking to my son about eating more vegetables (he’s 24), but now I find I’m replacing it with texts reminding him that hand washing is the best way to not get sick. My daughter, on the other hand, has politely thanked me for all the forwarded warnings about how to be safe when using Uber.
“I know, Mom,” she texts back.
“You can never be too careful,” I text, again.
“You sent me three of these last week,” she writes.
I don’t know if my worry is really bothering my kids, but it’s bothering me. January has become the month of anxiety, bad dreams, chewed fingernails and fidgeting. The fidgeting goes back to elementary school, when my first-grade teacher told my mom I popped up and down, smoothing the back of my skirt over and over again all day. By middle school I was the student who jiggled her foot constantly. I’m hardwired for anxious.
And now it’s worry, which I am starting to understand in a new way because of something I read just yesterday. In her book, “Grace (Eventually)”, Anne Lamott talks about the pain of having our children grow up and move on.
“It’s wrenching for the mothers, and the drug they use is worry. And their worry is exhausting for kids.”
Bingo. She’s right. I worry about my kids so I don’t have to feel sad about missing them. Worry is my drug. I think I need a new drug.
My kids are too nice to say so, but maybe I’m exhausting them. Let this be my written word that I promise to text them less. We’ll see how that goes.
Tomorrow we abandon January. I hope February is better, for all three of us.