Specific things I have anxiety about
March 26, 2024
I think they’re mostly organizational and social anxieties.
- Forgetting to pick up JB from school (Again grateful that Noemi mentioned phone alarms ages ago which gave me a tool to snap me out of my focused fugue)
- Booking a flight for the wrong day and/or time (am vs pm or vice versa)
- Running out of diapers for Smol Acrobat when we’re out and about (also related to are we ever getting them potty trained???)
- Saying something really stupid and/or too true to another parent at school in a moment of unbridled honesty
- Forgetting the stove on and causing a fire (PiC has actually forgotten it twice and I haven’t but it haunts me.)
- Oversleeping and missing another staff meeting (this has happened once in my entire career)
- When once-close friends stop talking to me, I wonder if I’m too much work as a friend. (at least once)
- I can’t start or finish certain types of projects or commitments. I can’t identify in words what the pattern is but I shy away from taking on certain things because I know I can’t finish them. It’s not a rational weighing up of commitments and choosing not to overcommit. I overcommit all the time. It’s something more visceral than that.
- The sight of dishes piled high in our sink, in between emptying and reloading the dishwasher, reminds me of how I felt when I used to see that in the family sink. And that always brings on embarrassment and regret for not being more proactively helpful to my mom when I was growing up, and particularly not in my early teen years. I had more of an excuse as a late teen. I started working full time at 17, supporting the household, so I’m less guilt-ridden over not keeping up with the dishes from 17 on. But that math struck me today. I’m still punishing myself for not being a better kid between the ages of 13-17. Why do I feel so bad that, for a short span of teen years, I wasn’t as responsible as I am now? Maybe I’m now old enough to fully empathize with how my mom must have felt as a more than full time working mom with a spouse who was (self described as) useless as a co-parent. She died when I was 27. It feels like I didn’t get enough time with her as an adult (9 years) to atone for how shitty a kid I had been (since birth I guess, I was a tough kid). Or at least I hadn’t gotten enough time with her to repair our relationship so that I didn’t feel like I had to atone for being a crap kid. Or maybe while I knew I was loved by one parent, I don’t think I ever felt liked except by a very few people. No wonder I don’t feel likeable.
- Not being loved or part of a family beyond the little unit that PiC and I created here. The teen years, if they do that whole rebellion and hate your parents thing, will be hard.
That’s a really great tweet thread. Middle age has helped me learn some of those lessons.
You were more than enough for your mom. You did more than enough. You were not a shitty kid. You were a kid. I think as our kids go through the normal stages it’s easier to give younger us the grace we give them. When my father screamed at me right before I cut contact that I’d been terrible since I was 7, I was able to look at my kid who had had a rough patch ~7 that zie had gotten through and KNOW that nothing was my fault. Nothing is the fault of a 7 year old. Kids don’t have to be perfect– they’re learning and growing and testing boundaries. Nothing is set in stone. (And nothing is set in stone for us as adults either.)
Re: the other anxieties– they sometimes happen and it’s usually ok. The outcomes are generally survivable. (Maybe not actually starting a fire… some anxieties have good reasons behind them.) I also worry about the forgetting to pick up a kid thing, but that’s mainly because that’s something my father would do on a somewhat regular basis– I suspect my kids are more resilient, plus they have cell phones now. Calendar alerts are great!
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I was routinely forgotten at school and other places as a kid. At the time I just sat down with a stack of books and read until someone remembered me but I recognize now as an adult that sucked. JB’s school calls me when I forget pickup time, it’s maybe been twice? That guilt hits me harder than it should. Not sure why yet.
I have to reread that tweet thread regularly. I tend to forget that baseline a lot.
My baseline for what’s a “kid” thing is also very borked and needs to be revised. I still struggle with not passing along the ingrained responses and expectations to JB and Smol Acrobat.
Just gotta keep swimming….!
That tweet thread is fantastic. What a good therapist! And so great it hit when the person was able to hear it.
It’s so good you know your mom loved you, and I am sure she was proud and grateful you were such a stand-up human being. She certainly lived long enough to know which parent you were modeling yourself on! It’s so sad she died when you were so young.
I’m curious about those projects you tend to avoid – that’s interesting sounding. Unless it’s terrible – no need to excavate it here or anything! I’m finally taking on a project in my house that means decisions and money and interacting with humans and relying on them to get the job done and do it well and .. I’m just trying to break it down into small pieces and not spin out. I’m pretty good at making decisions and moving on so will be relying on that a LOT.
It’s weird, I know she loved me, I knew she’d do anything to protect me if she could, and yet it still felt … not conditional but like I still wasn’t good enough. And I don’t know how to reconcile the two feelings. Maybe it’s just the betrayal from my dad ran so deep it undermines what I got from her. Or the independence I had to have because they were immigrants who didn’t know how to navigate the school and professional systems with me so I was totally on my own for administrative things from high school on? I dunno..!
Projects: I keep wanting *in theory* to do something freelance/entrepreneurial to mitigate the risk of having all our financial eggs in W2 baskets but don’t and won’t. I seem to distrust myself and/or my ideas and can’t handle either the thought of the inevitable learning failures OR the idea of success. Both are scary for their own reasons. When JB was born, I noodled with the idea of designing address labels for an Etsy shop. A couple years later, a friend pushed me to try designing tshirts and books on Amazon Merch – they made several salaries worth of extra income from that and I’ve earned, to date, about $51. A few years ago I tried to develop some printables for Etsy, but that flopped as well. My guessed at diagnosis: I can handle the scutwork of building things, I’ve done it very well for other people, but I seem to lack the vision part of creating a business that provides something that people would want.
My mother is still alive… and I had to eventually go no-contact with her even though I didn’t want to because she would not allow me to go no-contact with my father without going no-contact with her as well. There’s a lot of very complex feelings around that… why did she stay with my father, how she’s still a victim now, how much she tried to protect us, why didn’t she protect us more, how really she’s just human and she’s making choices I did not make and will not make.
Given that you didn’t link to your merch in your reply, my guess is some of the problem is with lack of advertising. This is the first time I’ve even noticed the support AGSL box up in the upper corner. So much of entrepreneurship is sales. *Disclaimer: I don’t actually know anything about entrepreneurship.
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I have shared some of the merch over time in posts but you’re right. I’m ABYSMAL at advertising and sales! So I always thought I’d need a partner who was good at that thing if I was ever to make a real start at an entrepreneurial thing.
I have to agree with NicoleandMaggie and Bethh. You’ve never sounded like you were a bad or particularly tough kid. I think you were a good kid who was normal, and part of being a normal good kid is doing the good things a fair amount of the time, but definitely not all of the time. Part of being a normal good kid is sometimes actively NOT doing good things sometimes–out of ignorance, or wanting to try out a behavior, or feeling contrary, or whatever.
You were one of 4 people in that household, and (I think?) the youngest. Your parents didn’t establish a rota, your dad didn’t proactively step up, your brother didn’t. Your mom, apparently, didn’t ask or tell them to. Don’t castigate yourself for not doing things you weren’t asked to do. Especially since I suspect that you were doing so much already that it would have been unjust to load even more onto you if it wasn’t also being loaded onto the rest of the family.
(And as a woman who nearly always does the household dishes, kitchen cleanup, laundry, etc. on her own and is not too bothered by it most of the time: I would never think badly of my kid for not doing it proactively. Kids are kids.)
“Part of being a normal good kid is sometimes actively NOT doing good things sometimes–out of ignorance, or wanting to try out a behavior, or feeling contrary, or whatever.”
Phew, this is 100% the opposite to how I grew up and probably why I still harbor feelings of failure. Not doing good things or being contrary, esp for a girl, was considered the biggest of failures.
I can just about wrap my head around this being true for my kids, so as not to perpetuate the cycle, but I haven’t found the path to internalizing this for myself yet. I really appreciate you weighing in with those thoughts, I keep chipping away at the unhealthy bits little by little and this helps.
Oh my god, where to start? I’ve f-ed up the flight bookings, left the stove on…ugh.
That tweet thread is everything. FWIW – I relate to the self flagellation stemming from childhood that is in fact misplaced and suspect it’s also misplaced for you. Permission to start slowly releasing that <3
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I think it is also misplaced for me but golly am I struggling to disconnect from that pattern. Very much a WIP.