When the pep talk mantra doesn't work
02 November 2011 06:20 AM Categories: Childhood hangover
It was a day of little triumphs, like the amazing feeling of getting a fidgeting, recalcitrant first grader to push through words she thought she couldn’t read. Every time she did it and I told her see, I knew you could do it, she giggled with surprise (at her abilities? at my goofiness?). We ended the session with a high five and I thought: this is the kind of stuff that makes me feel good.
It was a day of strangeness. I had my monthly medication check-in with the psychiatrist. We made Mad Men psychiatry jokes and talked about the good parts of being an introvert, and then my worries about my son’s social contentment, which are all mixed up with feelings about my social issues as a kid. It’s waking me up at 1:00 a.m., these worries, despite my constant pep talks to myself: he’s fine, there is nothing wrong with him, there was nothing wrong with you, think of all the support he has that you didn’t, he will get through childhood relatively unscathed, he’s only six, etc. etc. I was clearly fighting back tears when we spoke, which is when she asked me the salient questions. Have I been crying a lot lately? (Kind of, but for what feels like good reasons.) Any suicidal thoughts? (Absolutely not.) Usually she asks me what I think we should do with my medication. This time she made the decision to stick with my usual dosage.
There was money stress, figuring out how we were going to pay our property tax and its surprise supplementals, making sure our monthly bills were paid, doing the accounting for the next six months, complete with emergency savings plan.
Then there was the regular Tuesday play date with the boy’s good friend, except something is happening to their friendship and I don’t know what to do about it. Actually, I know I can’t do anything about it. I can see what was once close fading in front of me and again my insides stir up, they tighten. It’s like I have tangled wires in my gut. They fight about everything, these two opinionated personalities that want to control the agenda in different ways. I intervene because I have to. I play monster to make them laugh and keep the peace. I want it to be easy, or at least I want to know that when this ends (if this ends) that my boy has someone else he can be comfortable with and I worry again that his social life will never be easy. How can I give him the tools to make it better for himself?
Finally, at dinnertime, with the takeout from Gregoire, my post-5:00 p.m. beer making me groggy, my everything is fine/don’t want to wallow in worry attitude not working very well, I told my son about my first grade best friend and our huge fights, the way I was jealous of her closeness with the neighbor girl, and how it got better as we got older. There was a Halloween tie-in, the story about her Halloween visit to our apartment in fourth grade when my mother followed trick-or-treating with an ill-advised reading of Edgar Allen Poe’s Murders at the Rue Morgue.
Do you have any more stories about Halloween to tell me, he asked. He’s heard them all before, but I told them again with more detail. Halloween 1976, second grade, was where my mother wanted me to wear a mask and I didn’t, because I was dressed up as a Colonial girl and Colonial girls didn’t wear masks. She refused to let me trick-or-treat without one, so I sat at home and watched the kids in their costumes, my chest tight and the streaks of dried tears still on my unmasked face (Nana was very stressed back then, the explanation always goes, and it is absolutely true). Halloween 1980, sixth grade, was where my best friend and I wandered along a windy unlit country road to get to another neighborhood and I worried about deer stampeding when I should have worried more about being hit by a car.
I don’t know how it happened, but the boy started getting teary and then I did, too, and when I walked over to hug him, I knocked my knee into his chair in a very painful way. After that, I put on pajamas and took to my bed. My husband kindly did the rest of the evening routine while I read magazines and stared at my computer.
And at 1:00 a.m., the worries spilled out again. They woke me up with their relentless whining. I concentrated on my breathing. I let thoughts of the closeness of others comfort me, and, eventually, I fell back asleep.
Image: The boy this summer.
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