I am overwhelmed with parenting and sporting events and back to school coffees and the twelve emails a day reminding me that I need do something for an event that I volunteered for, etc.  You know it’s bad when you have a friend in the hospital recovering from surgery and you think to yourself, “Wow that sounds nice.”

For the LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD IN THIS WORLD, I need a break from ass wiping and hearing myself say, “Clean your room, chew with your mouth closed, don’t speak to me like that, if you roll your eyes one more time...,” or “Yes of course I would love to help with the Spring Fling, can’t wait and yes, please yes, sign me up to be preschool room mom again this year because I spent all summer dreaming about the mom’s tea party I would plan and thank GOD it’s finally here.” 

I take on too much. I know that about myself, can't help it and then I pay the price.  I push, push, push and eventually I push too far and the world starts spinning and I don’t mean figuratively.  I mean I wake up in the middle of the night and feel like I am on the Teacups at Disneyland. Every time it happens I react like Redd Foxx. This is the big one and grab at my chest while quickly running through all the people who will wake up the next morning to hear the news.  Not you people of course, because without me there would be no one to write this narcissistic blog every day and you would have no idea.

Every muscle in my body tenses up, my chest gets tight, my stomach feels like it does when you crest the top of the hill on a roller coaster and have begun to descend, I start taking in huge breaths of air, but release only a small amount, my body gets hot, then cold and my hands start shaking.  Then a small voice in the deepest darkest most hard to find place in my brain whispers, “It’s just an anxiety attack.  You aren’t going to die.  Breath.”  And I do. I start to slowly breath in and breath out.  I count to five while I inhale and then five again on the exhale to even my breaths. I lie there and remind myself that this has happened many times before and that NEVER one time did I die because if I had, I wouldn’t be sitting here having an anxiety attack now would I.  Then, after several nights of talking myself off the ledge, I am finally able to fall asleep at night after a rerun of Law and Order and sleep until ColtonColton aka: Moose, Duece, Colt, CJ
Age: 3
Favorite Word: Fart
Hobbies:  Playing in the dirt, setting off fire alarms at preschool and bossing people around.
Best Qualities:  The sweetest disposition this side of the Mississippi. approaches my bed at exactly 5:55 a.m. and stares at me like a freak until I wake up and pull him into our bed.

But (Yes, I know you aren’t supposed to start a sentence with “but”.  BUT, I don’t care. Did it again.) anxiety is a clever opponent and one that isn’t willing to be beaten easily.  Once I have mastered the first round of attacks, it changes the rules manifesting itself in a physical way.  For example, last year after getting the night attacks under control, I thought I felt something odd in my throat when I swallowed. You know, like a cancerous lump. Then I started swallowing over and over and OVER to try and see if I could still feel it.  There was no cancerous lump of course, but by day three I had created a real situation, because who knew your throat was not designed to sustain 38 swallows per minute, and all the muscles in my throat were overworked and sore as hell. The crazy ass part of anxiety is that I ALWAYS know what is going on, but I can’t help myself from getting caught up in it.

There was also the time that I convinced myself my vision was blurry and that I must have a tumor behind my eye.  The mind is an amazing thing.  If you tell yourself your vision is blurry, guess what? Suddenly you start to see things as if they are blurry.  This went on for days until I looked at our babysitter and my eyes did a weird thing where one caught the light behind her one and one was focused on her and for a brief second I thought, “This is the big one” and I about shit myself in panic and excused myself and stumbled into the bathroom so that she didn’t have to witness my dying moment and there was that voice again, “ Its just an anxiety attack.  You aren’t going to die.  Breath.”  And I did. I still get the biggest giggle out of what I must have looked like with one eye going one way and the other going the other way and then the panicked look on my face just before I excused myself. She must have been mortified.

I have had anxiety attacks since I was a child.  They were smaller then.  I can remember the first time it happened.  I was lying on our living room floor one evening and suddenly it felt like everything went dark and my stomach started to have that weird feeling and it felt as if there was no time or sense of now.  Like I was floating out in space and belonged to nothing and it was terrifying. The beauty of youth is that you recover quickly.  Within seconds I was outside playing hide and seek in the corn fields and hoping my neighbor George would find me and kiss me again on top of the dog house and had forgotten the whole event.  As an adult, you remember and you are petrified that it is going to happen again, thus perpetuating the cycle by causing further anxiety and making it REALLY difficult to get on top of the attacks.

I have never chosen to medicate.  Instead I have chosen therapy over the years to resolve the issue.  Though these days, I no longer need to go in and write a fat check.  I have figured it out and while it is difficult to handle, I do. I don’t have strong convictions on whether one should choose drugs to help.  Whatever the hell fixes the problem, do it, because anxiety is debilitating.  I chose to go the drug free route because I have never ONE TIME seen my mother without drugs in her system.  Over- the-counter or illegal, she isn’t picky.  She says my grandmother handed her the first Valium she ever took the day she married my father.  She was 17 at the time and pregnant with me.  I would have taken it too.  She never recovered.  She has spent her life at the mercy of drugs and therefore they scare me more than the anxiety.

Everyone's anxiety is different and comes on for different reasons. For some it is constant and never goes away. I am lucky that mine is "triggered" by something that I am aware of and can deal with. For example, I could stop volunteering for every possible opportunity. I could quit feeling as if I have missed my kids wedding day if I don’t make it to one of their games. I could bring bags of chips instead of hotdogs, buns and condiments for snack duty. I could be the kind of mom who says, “too bad”, when their kids call and say they have forgotten their lunch again.  Try as I might to be that kind of mom, I can’t.  At some point in my childhood as I watched my mother being revived from a drug overdose or maybe it was when I stared out the back window of the car as we drove away from yet another rehab facility, I looked the devil in the face and swore that if I could just somehow make it out of the hell that was my childhood and I was fortunate enough to have children of my own, I would be a PERFECT mother. I now know there is no such thing, but the dye has been cast and letting go is a work in progress and one that I fail most days.

I wish I paid more attention when the anxiety is whispering at me, but I don’t.  I am too busy volunteering, cooking, driving and planning to pay attention.  When the anxiety starts screaming at me though, I listen. I slow life down because it is no longer an option to keep up the pace and maintain any semblance of sanity. It does me good and each time, I vow that this time, I will be better at paying attention to my needs.  I will spend more time focusing on myself and I do a good job of it for a while.  Then the phone starts ringing and the emails start coming in and suddenly I find myself right back where I started.