I suck at serving the peanuts

One of the scariest things about becoming a parent is realizing that you don’t know how anything is going to play out, much less have control over it. When you think back, you realize that your parents never did either.  

• Would you make it to the bottom of the ski slope without breaking a bone, or worse? No clue.
• Would the family be OK after dad lost his job? No clue.
• Would you survive that high-school breakup and ever find someone else to love you? No clue.
• Would you get thrown out of college for yelling at your Pulitzer Prize-winning professor in the middle of class (yes, this happened)? No clue.

Yet the answer was always, “It’ll be ok.”

I don’t know whether that line was a lie they used to shut me up, to make getting from Point A to Point B a little easier. Maybe my parents calculated the odds on the situation at hand and figured they were strong enough to bet on the side of optimism. Either way, they sold their party line well.

I can’t do that. I can’t lie. Whatever I’m feeling is written across my face, at all times. I live with an anxiety disorder that was diagnosed in my childhood and since has simmered in the background, managed but never cured despite 30+ years of therapy and medication. It’s always threatening to boil over and splatter on anything within striking distance.

These liabilities make it hard to face the unknown, to cope when the unknown deals you a tough hand, and to hide the fact that you’re terrified about it.

For example: This morning, TJ had a routine 2-year well-child visit. His height, weight, and head circumference measurements charted beautifully. He aced the vision and autism assessments and passed the ear, mouth, and throat exam. Then the doctor gently put him on his back to check his abdomen. She pointed to his groin area.

“Do you see this a lot?”

“This” was, I quickly learned, an inguinal hernia. And the answer was no; in the thousands of diapers I’d changed since TJ’s birth, I’d never seen anything like the bubble-like bump protruding from inside his right hip. The doctor explained that, although this kind of hernia was usually benign in a toddler, it wouldn’t be for long. It needed to be addressed, surgically and soon.

I gripped the exam table, looked down to the floor, and hyperventilated. Maybe it was because I in no way expected this news. Maybe was PTSD from two years ago, when the same doctor told us TJ’s “just a post-C-section formality” ultrasound showed he had bilateral hip dysplasia. I thought about how much TJ had already gone through and imagined what it would feel like to sit outside an operating room while he lay on a gurney, alone, inside it. Tears stung the corners of my eyes and knew I was about to lose my shit.

The doctor tried to calm me down, but I have no recollection what she said. The blood had rushed to my head and my ears were pounding, muffling any sounds except my own catastrophizing thoughts. Then I looked up and saw TJ looking at me. He was crying – I could hear again. The doctor told me I could pick him up, and when I did, he wrapped his arms around my neck tighter than I remember him ever doing before. I ran my left hand gently up and down his back and told him what my parents would have told me.

“It’ll be OK. It’ll be ok. It’ll be OK.”

I had – and still have – no idea whether that’s true. Somehow I sucked my tears back inside before they fell, using our hug to collect myself. Even though TJ didn’t fully understand the situation, I didn’t want him to see me crying. I didn’t want him to see me scared. That would only make him more scared.

There’s a passage in Glennon Doyle’s Untamed (yes, that book again) that touches on this stoic-parent dynamic. She describes a situation when she freaked out over how her divorce was affecting her kids, and a friend compared her role to what flight attendants must do during severe turbulence: 

“If the flight attendant appears to be panicked, the passengers panic. If the attendants are calm and steady, the passengers feel safe and follow suit. …We survive these things. The kids don’t know this yet, so they are afraid. They’re going to keep looking at your face for information. Your job right now is to smile at them, stay calm, and keep serving the freaking peanuts.”

I understand that sentiment. It’s expedient. Keeping kids calm makes things easier on all parties involved in the near term. And given the relatively low odds of a flight going down because of rough air – or a negative outcome to a common pediatric surgical procedure – thinking positively is a reasonable course of action. But in the long run, is it the right one? Do we build resilience by invalidating fear? Do we encourage strength by pretending bad things can’t happen?

I think (probably too often) about the internal struggles I’ve had as an adult trying to navigate this world. My fears feel like they’ve grown tenfold since I became a parent two years ago. Everything seems more dangerous than it did when I was a kid. Problems seem more intractable and people seem more violent today than they did 30 years ago, when mom and dad responded to every disconcerting thing with a steady diet of “it’ll be OK.”

Yes, that phrase made me feel safe and allowed me to have what just about anyone would deem a “happy childhood.” But it also made realizing that that the phrase “it’ll be ok” is more of a parenting tool than a statement of fact really hard to reconcile. How much better would I face things now if I knew that, all along, things weren’t actually OK? That my parents really didn’t know how anything was going to play out?  That we just had to deal with uncertainty as it breathes?

I don’t want TJ to grow up with crippling anxiety. I do want him to understand the world for what it is so that someday, when he’s sitting on his couch trying to digest a scary personal diagnosis or the global crisis du jour, he knows that it’s ok to be scared, even if things do turn out ok in the end. So I somewhat disagree with what Glennon’s friend recommends. It seems like she does, too, because at the end of the chapter, she herself suggests this approach instead:

“We sit down next to our babies. We turn their faces toward ours until they are looking away from the chaos and directly into our eyes. We take their hands in ours. We say to them: ‘Look at me. It’s you and me. I am here. … We will hold hands and breathe and love each other. Even if we are falling from the sky.’…Whether we’re falling or flying, we’re going to take care of each other through the whole damn ride.”That’s something I think I can do. After all, I’m a terrible liar.