It feels like this cycle has become our way:
She does well, she is smiling big, she talks freely about her day,
but then the tendrils of anxiety start to edge out of the dark cracks, and try, once again, to ruin everything.
Before long we are back at my bedside.
I’ve noticed the mattress is beginning to sag at the edge from the constant weight of us perched there, talking things out;
Sharing our often common burdens and concerns.
Cry
Cradle
Repeat
I silently plead with her to just be OK.
Chloe was born with eyes that look like the sea on an overcast day.
They can soothe you or swallow you, and sometimes you can’t tell which one is happening until you’re tossed into their darkness with your head now touching the balls of your feet.
She was a difficult baby, and a frequently inconsolable toddler who was able to lull innocent onlookers with her soft curls and perfect round cheeks;
But the eyes….The eyes are always what catch people,
and she uses them to truly see, but sometimes we seers take in too many things…
She picks up on nuances most people would not;
An empath, an artist.
Both the cool water, and the worn down river rock.
When she was eight we saw her often crippling anxiety for what it was as she started throwing up almost daily at school, and having debilitating panic attacks that terrified us all.
She couldn’t stand being without me.
I would try to go for groceries, and she would scream and cling to the handle of my car.
My oldest daughter, Alena, was traumatized, herself, from so many times of having to pry her off.
To get her to sleep at night I’d kneel by her bed praying for, and singing to her until my knees felt like they were almost as broken as my weary mother heart.
I’d plead with God to rid her of such an inward pain.
The next day, the same cycle.
We’d do it all again.
We got her counseling and supplements, and those helped her a lot, as has the fact that she has grown and learned about herself, her own triggers, what helps her the most,
and what does not.
Now the days of her throwing up from stress are long gone.
Now it shows up as a more grown-up version –
More of me finding her sometimes crying alone, when for a second I see that same frightened little girl, clinging to my car handle screaming for me please not to go.
Two nights ago I found her alone at that same bedside,
and after talking to her about what was going on,
I discovered that it was a mixture of fear over some symptoms she was having possibly being Covid after doing everything to avoid it for so long,
with a big helping of the kind of loneliness the last two years have brought along in their knapsack with them.
I told her to climb up into my bed with me for a little bit, then I held her as I have since she had those same soft curls and those same round cheeks,
and I reminded her that even the hardest things we face do something most powerful in us;
They help us become.
Her anxieties had made her a true friend, a nurturer, and seer.
The pain builds a sort of scaffolding for future us to stand on –
Part scar tissue, part ladder.
I told her about something my own mother had said to me that very day when I’d called her complaining about some things happening.
She had said,
“Sometimes we lose sight of the destination because we’re so focused on the bumpy road.”
I had really felt that deeply.
I hoped she would also grab it with both hands,
and hold it to her, close.
Chloe stayed nuzzled against me that night until the sky was black, and everyone else was snoring. We watched movies, and laughed until we cried.
I didn’t let go of her until I felt her tight shoulders slack,
and when she sat up to go to her own bed
something shiny dropped onto the bed from out of her hair.
It was a single stud earring.
She saw me pick it up and asked,
“Whoa. How did that get there?”
She said she had been looking for that one everywhere.
I held it in my palm, realizing she couldn’t have been wearing it because the back to it was still on.
It shone in the light as I picked it up and kind of cupped it back and forth,
suddenly remembering something from nearly 7 years before:
When she had been in the height of her worst anxiety all those years ago,
when I’d gotten to the point of feeling like maybe she was beyond help, and there was nothing more I could do to bring the true HER back to me,
I remember one day I had been making her bed, and I had pulled her comforter up tight and smooth under her pillow, when at that moment, I felt my hand hit something sharp.
I had looked under the pillow then to find a sea of stud earrings;
Her whole butterfly jewelry box, dumped.
When I’d asked her about it, she had been unable to really explain it to me.
She had said that feeling them underneath her pillow with her hand at night somehow just made her feel more safe.
She liked to run her hand over them as she went to sleep.
The stud earring phase had only lasted a short while.
A random, passing type of bizarre sounding thing that every parent knows is specific to each child;
But holding that single, seemingly lost earring in my hand that night,
it was like the distance from those days to these cinched up around me, tight –
As if all I had was that one moment,
looking at that tiny sparkle in the dim bedroom light in my palm.
That visual of another time when fears and anxieties were high, and we had both felt threatened to be swallowed by them;
Another time I had wondered if it would ever end, and if we’d all be alright…
There I sat with my now beautiful teen who has grown, and learned how to move in this world more freely than she did then;
There, looking into those eyes – Now a more tranquil sea.
To everyone else, just one tiny nothing earring,
but to me, a reminder to keep going,
keep sitting at all the bedsides.
Look what we overcame.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
