Dealing with Anxiety

Dear Beanie,

It's things like this that make me laugh.

I wonder if you reading this letter will be the first time that you know for certain that I have problems with anxiety. Probably not... I hope not. I hope that I will always feel as if I can talk with you about the big things in life, and me having anxiety may sound as if it isn't a 'big thing', but to me it is. I know that you are currently going through a boom in your language development, and I see it as a big part of my job to give you words for the emotions that you feel, which will hopefully allow you to feel as though those emotions are valid, that you aren't the first person to ever feel that, and it enables you to communicate this feeling in a way that doesn't involve tantruming. As part of that, I see it as really important for me to be telling you how I feel too. If something makes me angry, I will get angry, tell you that I am angry, and you learn that anger is a part of life and there are appropriate ways of dealing with that feeling. For example.

So right now I feel horribly anxious. It is a feeling that sits high up in my stomach; a feeling that makes me cold and a little shaky; a feeling that makes me want to stop eating, makes me want to pull my knees up to my chin and makes me want to close all the shutters and pull the blanket over my head.

It is important for me to show you that there are ways of dealing with these anxious feelings though. So I'm trying to be a really strong and brave mama and to soldier on with normal life, being happy and playing with you, dancing to music with you, going for walks and seeing friends with you. Because I know that shutting myself away won't make it any better.

One of the reasons why I aim for you to become a bus driver or a hair dresser when you are older is so that you can spend your days doing something that makes you happy, and won't fill you with feelings like this yucky one I have now. I have always been a perfectionist, been totally self-driven in my ridiculously high expectations of myself, and I don't want that for you. It is a really hard way to be. And it means that when somebody says something that is in some way critical, it can be devastating to your idea of self. Something that, if said to another person, might just roll off them, sticks so deeply in my heart and feels like an acid burn.

If you were older and talking to me about having feelings like this, I might tell you to draw how you feel, or write about it. So that is what I am doing.

I have made a time tomorrow to speak with this person who, maybe accidentally, caused this feeling in me. The thought of this confrontation, and the thought of attempting it in broken English and broken German, makes me want to be sick. But I am a mother now, a real-live-grown-up-woman, and I am going to have to learn to deal with these things and to deal with confrontation in a better way. So I made an appointment to talk about it. That is what I would tell you to do, if you were in my situation.

Peekaboo! I hope that you'll only ever
hide from me as a game, little one. 

In some ways, having you in my life has made me so much stronger. I am learning to think about things in this way, where I have to be a role-model for you, and that helps me. But in some ways, having you in my life has made me the most vulnerable person on this planet. I love you so much, I feel such extremes of everything when it comes to you, and I am yet to learn how to sometimes control those emotions so that I can still function!

Last night, while putting you to bed, I said that I love you exactly the way that you are, and that I wouldn't change a thing about you. But then I caught myself, and thought... is that really true? Wouldn't I want you to eat more vegetables? Or to sleep better? Or to love having your hair washed? Or to let me brush your back teeth? But no. I do love you exactly as you are. All of those things are part of a whole you. There are reasons behind all these things you do. And I am learning more and more, every day, that I have to simply trust in you to be you. And my goodness, how I love the you that you are.

It's true.

Love Mummy.