When school first starts and the season hasn’t changed yet, I leave for work in the mornings in the dark. By the time I drop Maizy off at school and get to work the sun is up. The weird thing is, I don’t notice the change. Is it because it happens every day and I just tune it out, am I not paying attention to it? At what moment does the day change from dark to light? I started thinking about this and made a conscious effort to figure it out this morning. I tried but there was no way to pinpoint it. Maybe because it is so gradual that there is not an exact moment when it happens. This is the same way I feel about being a mom. My twins are 16 and I cannot for the life of me pinpoint the exact moment when they went from babies to kids and from kids to young adults. When Maizy was little her hair was always in pigtails. I can’t put a date on when or why we stopped doing that. We just did. When kids are little it feels like adulthood for them is so far away. And while you are living in the moment day to day and washing dishes and driving to volleyball practice and checking homework it really is far away. Then one day it hits you when they get their first letter from a college with tour information on it and suddenly it's so close you feel claustrophobic. That’s where I am. I feel trapped in a clown car at the circus and I hate clowns. Anyway, this is not a post about how they grow up so fast. You already know that. It’s about what goes along with it, in particular, worry.
Growing up comes with a lot of responsibilities and trial and error. My kids watch the news, they listen to people talk, and they see things that they might have ignored when they were little. The world is a scary place and not all people are good. When you are little you don’t know that yet. My kids know now and it is proving to be harder than I ever thought it would be. What do you say to a ten-year-old child who says she’s afraid to leave the house? What do you do when she has a panic attack at a birthday party because there are too many people? How do you handle her constant crying over not wanting to go to school because she can’t do the work or fears a lockdown? When your child falls down and scrapes a knee, you give a band-aid and call it a day. It’s all good. But there is no band-aid for anxiety. I wish there were so I could have given one to Maizy when she was in Kindergarten and I had to put Scentsy bricks in her pockets so she could smell them instead of smelling the cafeteria food and fearing she would throw up. And I would give one to Avery so she wouldn’t feel like she had to recite the words “Please don’t let there be a school shooting today” before entering her school every morning. Anxiety is a very real thing and for my kids, it’s a problem. I know there could be far worse things that they could be dealing with right now but for them, this is a big deal. It’s an issue every day. It’s something they can’t escape and as a mom it sucks that there isn’t anything I can do to make it better. I wrote this post because as a parent we all want our kids to be successful and sometimes we tend to hide things that give the appearance that our kids are different in some way or struggling. I am not looking to do that. I am seeking advice. If you have had any experience with teaching kids strategies or tools to help them calm down and ease their mind I would love to hear about them. It takes a village, right? I could really use my village people right now!
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