I've always been a worrier. I remember being very small and working myself into a fit of melancholy because my stuffed dog had decided to be a pizza maker and no one would buy his pizzas, thus rendering him very depressed. I cried, and assured him I would always buy his pizzas.
(I'm ninety-nine percent sure that little melodrama was inspired by a skit on "The Electric Company" in which a chef gets fired because he cannot tell the difference between a head of lettuce and a head of cabbage, something I thought was deeply unfair at the time. I couldn't tell the difference either. The chef wept. I wept. It was very moving.)
I worried my way through elementary and high school with only mild aggravation. Mostly I was too busy swimming or playing sports or catching up on homework or some such nonsense to pay attention to it. Worry, while a constant presence, was a low-grade hum in the background, like a television accidentally left on somewhere in the house.
In college, things amped up a bit, resulting in occasional sleeplessness and the seeking of comfort from friends. I had one dear housemate who, every morning during a particularly stressful patch during exams, would make a giant percolator of coffee every morning. I'd jog downstairs in my pajamas and we'd have mugs of it together, holding them tight in the morning cold and running through what we had to accomplish that day. To this day, the sound of a percolator and the smell of coffee are two of my dearest comforts. Except I don't have a percolator. So I never hear them. I just look fondly at the ones for sale in Target when I am there and remember the sound.
There was one hideous night when I couldn't sleep (there was, of course, a paper due, a paper I had put off and was horribly, horribly stuck on), and graduation was approaching. The bottom felt like it was falling out of everything - classes were ending, people were preparing to move away, money was running out, a college-length relationship was over...ugh. All of these things and Henry James's letters to Edith Wharton and what they might or might not have indicated about the relationship between private criticism and public were keeping me up. So I thought I'd watch a movie to pass the time.
I popped in "Breaking the Waves".
After the movie ended, I was torn between throwing myself out the window (not really), throwing the TV out the window (possibly), or going and finding Lars von Trier and throwing him out the window (obviously not going to happen). I settled for climbing into my roommate's bed, telling her about the horror that was the film and falling asleep with a cat on my head.
I'm not even going to start in on grad school, because this is long enough. But trust me, I worried. Let's put it this way: one of the ways I deal with worrying is to work out - to run, to bike, to swim, to do yoga until the worries fall away. In a single twelve-month period during grad school, I trained for and competed in two sprint-distance triathlons, an olympic-distance triathlon, a half-Ironman distance triathlon, and two marathons.
And yet, it seems that this lifetime of worrying was itself only a preamble, a warmup to the main event, which is the way I've worried since giving birth. It started immediately once the baby was born and it hasn't stopped. My mind is an active little spider, scurrying around trying to find something to seize upon, and once it does it spins and spins and spins the thing, wrapping it tighter and tighter and tighter in worry. The floors in our house are uneven. The baby doesn't eat enough. The yard is a mess. The baby naps too much. The baby doesn't nap enough. My clothes don't fit. Is there lead dust in the house? Is the baby eating it? I don't talk to the baby enough. I talk to the baby too much. Letting the baby cry will damage her. Not letting the baby cry will damage her. Does she spend too much time with me? Do I limit her world? Is she growing enough? Why do people always comment that she is tiny? BPA. Pthalates. Crap in our food. Chemicals in the house, our clothes, outside, in the water, in the air. Cars crashing. Planes falling.
It's like someone has flipped on my worry switch and then removed the switch itself so I can't turn it off, and there are not enough percolators in the world to make this go away.
I am learning to manage it, and learning to tune some of it out - to relegate it to background noise once again. But I am also increasingly aware at how much of the "parenting industry" is aimed at re-instilling these worries in me (and every other parent out there). So many books, magazines, television shows, websites, and blogs are just vehicles for cultivating a certain "I'm not doing enough for my child" attitude. I'm not protecting her enough. Making her room beautiful enough. Stimulating her mind enough. Looking good enough that she won't be embarrassed to have me for a mother. Being vigilant enough about the food I buy. The toys we have. The surfaces in our house, what's in them, on them, and how we clean them.
I can't keep up. The last thing that a parent needs to hear is that they are not enough for their child. It is the worst message you could send. And yet, often it is all I hear, and I wonder why.
And so, I've stopped reading parenting books for the most part. I change the channel when bad baby news comes on (I do check for recalls occasionally, though). I'm turning off the computer more, and not using it to search for advice.
And slowly, I'm starting to learn that I am enough. Good enough, smart enough, and gosh darnit, my baby likes me.
