Eschews Issues

Since becoming a Mother, my anxiety has been a big problem.

I watch Baz noshing away at the boob. His eyes droop. He gets all sleepy and milk drunk. Then boom, his lips fall away from me, and his breathing gets slow and steady. He sleeps, beautifully. Wonderfully. Blissfully ignorant of any such thing as stress.

I think about how his biggest sources of worry are when I put him down, or when I leave the room. He gets upset because he doesn't know where his milk bar has gone, and I represent food and sleep and safety, and I imagine that's pretty stressful for a baby, but as soon as I pick him up again, or throw him on the nip, he calms down. Resolution accessed. He is happy and content, the stress of a moment earlier completely forgotten.

This.
This is what I need to do.

As an adult...
I should clarify.
As an adult with a history of control issues, anxiety, and some compulsion problems, I am incapable of letting go of things. My constant goal is to be in the moment, to dwell in the now, and I used to be better at that when I had a day job. Nothing keeps you present like minute to minute problem solving. At the end of the day, maybe I'd be exhausted, or I'd be angry about something that happened, but ultimately, the reason I had to leave my job was because my employers were severely anxious, and while I strove not to be ruled by those thoughts and feelings, they took it to mean I wasn't as invested in my work if I wasn't having a meltdown about every little thing.
It wasn't a healthy expectation, and I was so relieved when I left.

Anxiety and stress are like plaque buildup. If you don't find a way to brush them off at the end of the day, they build up and eat into your soul. If you let them run riot, you need to call in a professional to help you fix the holes because you're no longer capable of doing it on your own with the little tools you have.

Cosmically, I know Mercury is in retrograde, and we are entering a solar eclipse season. The moon is waning, and there's a fuckload of weird, transitional, uprooting, seachange type energy running through us little animals right now. I look around and I see everyone reexamining their progress, their achievements, their goals. Some people are making big commitments, getting married, moving, starting new jobs and the like. Some people are falling into bad habits and comforting unhealthy rituals because they do not feel they have the ability to change their lives, or they feel they are not in control of the changes occurring in their lives.

I know this.
And I know which category I fall into.

DOES THIS MAKE IT ANY EASIER?
Fuck no!

For me, my ability to control my environment ties directly to money and food.
Hello.
As a kid, some of the biggest and worst things that happened to our family were money related, and completely beyond my control.
I think a lot of kids who grew up poor(ish) become adults for whom budgeting and monetary organization is very important. We never feel secure. We can have 401Ks, retirement savings, back up plans for our back up plans, and we still feel like it could all be stolen away from us at any moment. In small doses, this is healthy. If you let it seep into your every waking thought, not so much.
When I began controlling food, it was a way of controlling my environment too at a time that I felt I had no control over my body, my relationships, or my life.
It's amazing to me that here I am, 15 years later, and I am still tempted to fall back into those habits when things feel like they're spiraling away from me.

Because having a baby means you must control every environment constantly. This is for your baby's well being and health. It also means you must be okay with having no control over what that environment may contain at any given moment (which completely undoes your previous conception of what environmental control means to begin with).
At any given moment the baby needs to be fed, contained, comforted, and cleaned.
At any given moment those needs are brought into perilous rotation by the baby.
We go from screaming from teething and needing to be cuddled, to pushing away because we need to move, play, and crawl. We go from howling for food to writing from the discomfort of a wet diaper to long, languorous sobbing out of pure exhaustion, and all of this can be contained within an hour.

As an anxious human who has had a couple of moments of mistakes (I left him on a hotel bed for a moment to grab the diaper bag and he rolled off and hit the floor like a starfish, another time, as I peed with him crawling over my lap, I didn't notice he had grabbed the toothpaste tube and had it in his mouth until he had a minty fresh mouthful). I know mothers experience these trials and mistakes all the time, but I cannot forgive myself for them.

I currently do not have a job. I do some occasional freelance work, but as of right now, I am experiencing a little dry spell, and the frustration I feel about not contributing to the household makes me want to be extra awesome at mothering our child.

Except it's really fucking hard right now.
I miss writing.
I haven't been able to, since the baby graduated from "sure I'll sleep on you for four hours while you type, Mum"..to.."I must constantly be moving toward things that will kill me and/or be engaged otherwise screaming, also sometimes screaming anyway".
I am not getting decent sleep due to teething, sleep training, and growth spurts.
I have very little left in my emotional reserves to back up the psychological and spiritual reactions I am having to the lack of control I have over my life.

Does this make sense?
Can anyone else relate?
Last night, after logging in to facebook, where I was greeted by yet another article about how the planet is doomed and we're leaving our children a broken, unfit world to inherit, I had a bit of a breakdown.

I can't do this, I thought.
I can't keep ingesting this casual negativity and just carry on.
I keep internalizing all of this guilt, all of this horrible stuff. Cops shooting defenseless people. Monsters shooting up schools and theatres. Earthquakes. Floods. Religious zealots murdering en masse. Complete hypocrites attempting to control the consumer rates by making people simultaneously hate and love their bodies and crave products to make themselves worthy of love.

All interrupted by constant videos of people melting chocolate and cheese all over everything and then declaring how much better they feel about themselves for devouring it while guiltlessly wearing a crop top.

I can't do it anymore.
I'm so fucking over being told what I should value and what I should strive for.


Yesterday, in line to buy a coffee, with the baby strapped to my chest, a woman cut in front of me. She placed an enormous order, and then was looking for exact change in her purse.
I had been staring laser death rays into her back the whole time we were in the shop. How dare she cut in front of me? How dare she be so rude? How dare she be so selfish? So unthinking?
And then I realized that I had a quarter which could totally help her out.
And I realized that if I smugly held it in my hand and thought about how haha now she has to break a dollar she doesn't want to break, it sets off a chain reaction of how she'll be in a bad mood and maybe go out and treat someone even worse than she normally would because of the inconvenience.
So I offered her the coin, and she was so grateful and thanked me a bunch of times, and tipped the barista three bucks (which he totally deserved), and then she went on her merry way, and maybe she held the door open for someone later because she was in a better mood, or maybe next time she's in a coffee shop she will let someone go ahead of her.

I will probably never see her again, but you know what?
I feel better because I did the good thing.

Being bombarded with negativity is not making it easy to do the right thing.
It is encouraging me to be selfish and frightened and to hide.
It is making me lazy and full of excuses.

I am taking an active role in being positive and turning my reactions to the world into good ones, and it starts with me limiting the amount of horror I ingest on a daily basis.

So I'll see you over here, in the thoughtful space, but no longer will I participate in the negative hate orgy that I see on social media.

And that is something i can control.