What life is like...

are you afraid to go to the gym because you don't know how to work the machines?

are you scared to go to the grocery store because you'll forget something and have to go back because you panicked the first time you thought of your list and forgot half of it?

do you panic when you are riding your bike and think that maybe the garage door opener in your pocket has a battery that is dead and your neighbors aren't home?

No?

This is how I lived.




My husband once said to me that living in fear is no way to live life.  That figuring out all the permutations of a situation before ever setting foot out the door is going to drive you crazy.  Maybe...

I'm just starting to understand the ramifications of living with a person with mental illness.  My father had his first breakdown when I was three.  He was hallucinating and thought people were coming to kill him, with guns.

I've done a lot of soul work in the past few years.  When my first child was little, we really didn't go anywhere.  She screamed all the time in the car seat and screamed in Publix and screamed everywhere else.  So we just stayed home, went for walks in the woods behind our neighborhood.  I waited until E got home to go out and run errands.  If he couldn't be with me to go to the grocery or WalMart, I didn't go.  I was so afraid of criticism and my preemie getting sick and judgment and all those people who look at you...  Maybe that's abnormal, maybe it's not.  For a new mom, probably not.

With the second kid it got a little better.  He was a laid-back, happy baby who was content to go anywhere.  My first went to preschool so I ventured out more.  I still garnered criticism from people who thought that my baby carrying was being done wrong (it was New Orleans after all, and a sling or mei tai was pretty uncommon in 2006), but I wasn't so darn scared all the time.

Then we moved to Iowa and I was forced to ask for help, forced to go out with three kids in tow, one of which was 16 weeks old, in the snow that I had never driven in, just to get out of the house or go to preschool.  I think I'll always be grateful we lived there, because people there help out in ways that you can not imagine anywhere else.  There were people who caught my middle child at the mall when he was running away, people who told me the tricks and helped me learn how to drive in snow, people who were kind when I was nursing, kind when my children were screaming, kind when I needed them to be kind.

Suddenly I wasn't so scared anymore.  And I began to accept that kids are just kids- they scream, they throw fits, and they run away at the worst moments.  There are people who have been there who sincerely want to help.  I began to see the best in people.

You see, living with someone who is paranoid and thinks everyone hates him or is out to get him is very likely to affect you when you are five.  There was a long, steady decline in my father from when I was three until I was ten and he moved out.  And then when he was stable we had visitation.  Don't get me wrong, my father was one of the most generous and loving souls I have ever known.  But he lived his life in fear.

There were specific places we would go, every time we were with him.  The same places again and again.  I realized when I had my own kids that these were the only places he felt safe.  He'd done them before, knew what to expect, and that there would be no surprises.  He hated surprises.  He once got so angry he punched the windshield because he got lost on the way to a birthday party at my friend's house.  He hated the discipline surprises.  He wanted us to act in predictable ways.

I found some of his writing and his ideal day is a day where he spends all day with his wife and his kids are quiet and keep to themselves all day.  We were four and one when he wrote that.  So his expectations, his fears, and his anger coupled with children that he could not control in a predictable way made for a difficult relationship.  Our visitation times were miserable, when he was not in control.  He would just start screaming, with no warning at all as to what set him off.

My fears were probably compounded by this experience.  I know that people say that it is unnecessary to blame your parents for your current behavior, but there is some truth to the fact that my behavior had precursors in the way I was treated.  I was so afraid of letting anyone down or provoking someone screaming at me that I nursed in the car or at home until I had my third.  By then we lived in Iowa and people were very supportive of nursing in public.

I started to let go of my notion of control over others and relax a little bit, because I knew an awful lot about child development from birth to age three.  What we were going through was normal.  I started to recognize when I was responding to my children out of my own fear.  Then I started to explain it to them, "Mommy gets really, really scared when you run out in the street.  You could be killed.  Please don't do that again".  Once I started naming my fears, they started to go away.

One by one they have dissipated.  I am finally getting to the point that I can forgive myself for my fears and my foibles and my many, many parenting errors.  Releasing the past has been very fruitful and healing.  Forgiving my father for the way he was has helped me move on.  Just recognizing where my fears came from has been very helpful in overcoming them.

Except, I'm still afraid of those machines at the gym.  I think for now I'll stick to my yoga mat, my bike, and my feet.