Anxiety About My Mother

The world will always hand you something to worry about, and some of those worries are real. But when the worrying runs past a certain point, it stops protecting you and starts taking you apart. I never pictured myself as someone who struggled with ongoing anxiety. Then came a stretch of my life where I was wound tight, sleeping badly, and dealing with panic attacks, all of it rooted in what was happening at home. From where I sit now, having come out the other side, that time reads in my memory like years. It was only months. The hard chapters always stretch out longer than they were when I look back on them.

The thing I was afraid of had a name, and it was my mother. Our situation was genuinely dangerous, not something I was blowing out of proportion. My whole family knew about my father's drinking. Once he'd been at it, he turned into someone who screamed and hit her, and even as a small kid I lived with the dread that one day something would happen to her that we could never undo.

By the time I hit my teens, I had started stepping in. I'd put myself between them to break up his rages. He scared me, no question, but I was fairly sure he'd never lay a hand on me physically. That didn't change the math: every day he drank, the outbursts came back, which meant my mother was under threat almost all the time. She had walked out of the house more than once over the years. She always drifted back, and the same routine would pick up where it left off.

Eventually I grew up and moved out, and that was when the worry really dug in. With me gone, there was nobody left in the house to interrupt him. I thought about her constantly. I'd be walking down a street and feel my nerves spike at every corner, half-expecting bad news. Sleep went out the window. My mind kept dragging itself back to that old house and to her, and everything I loved about her felt like it was sitting out in the open with no one standing guard.

So the two of us agreed to get help. We found a psychiatrist, who put each of us on anti-anxiety medication, and together we planned an intervention. Looking back, I'm grateful it unraveled as fast as it did once we actually moved. We sat my father down as a family, and he agreed to quit drinking. My mother started spending time with him again, this time on far better terms, and across the next several months all of us watched him get calmer and safer to be around.

My body didn't get the memo right away. I stayed keyed up, braced for the next awful phone call. The calls had stopped. I could see with my own eyes that sobriety had genuinely changed him. And still the anxiety hung around. If the phone so much as rang while I was asleep, I'd jolt awake in a panic.

What finally helped was a slow, deliberate reworking of how my head operated. I kept telling myself the plain facts: she had been with him for a long while now with nothing going wrong, and there was no reason to sound the alarm. Everyone around me knew they were doing better. The job was to loosen my grip and let it be okay. That turned out to be enormously hard to actually feel rather than just recite.

I spent a long time hunting for the kind of inner steadiness and hope I'd need to rebuild my outlook from the ground up. Teaching myself to look past the fear was slow going. I got there without a professional guiding that last stretch, and I'm proud of that part.

Fear still visits me now and then. These days it's the ordinary kind, mostly about my son and how he's doing. The panic attacks are gone, and I sleep.

Anxiety is a slippery thing. Early on you can convince yourself you're simply matching a dangerous situation with a sensible dose of fear. Then you notice the fear has a life of its own, changing shape and hanging on long after the danger that started it has cleared out. Left alone, it has a way of creeping into every room of your life. You don't have to hand it the keys. When it starts reaching for them, the move is to find whatever gets your mind and body back toward seeing clearly, and to do it fast.