“Do you have faith in me?!” My daughter shout-asked from across the skate park. She stood there, helmet and pads on, never having been on a skateboard before, opting for a scooter at this birthday party, considering going down a small ramp.

“Do you have faith in me?!” she repeated, this girl who is nothing if not supremely confident.

In just a six-word question she summed up the last eleven years of my life, of trying to control my worry, my anxiety, real anxiety, to have faith. In me. In them. In the world.

For me, raising children has been one long strength-building exercise in self-control. Not the kind of self-control that really matters — I yell, throw tantrums, slam my fist down on the table when everything’s unraveling. But the kind of control it takes to keep my anxiety wrestled into a submissive position, to remind myself that tragedy isn’t the only option, to attempt to hide from them that I’m worried. I’m always worried.

Becoming a mother made my anxiety — a thing I never really thought I had — explode into a Technicolor fireworks display of irrational imagination. In just the sixty seconds it took for me to hustle down to our roadside mailbox and back, I imagined in graphic detail how it had been just enough time for our two lazy dogs to rip my infant son apart, to pull him from his cushion-enclosed nap spot on the couch and devour him in a feeding frenzy. It was the thing that made every trip to a playground, bike path, or pool one long exercise in me shouting “Be careful! Watch what you’re doing! Pay attention!” which never inoculated them from anything. Not her from falling off the monkey bars in a position that can only be called “invisible chair”, when I thought she had broken her tailbone. It didn’t inoculate him from choking on pool water or either of them from falling, on their teeth, on the side of their heads, on their knees.

It never inoculated them from anything, it never saved us a trip to the ER.

When my son was six he was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder as one component of his Asperger’s diagnosis. As parents (as humans) I think we’re very quick to say so, okay, that’s YOU. That’s your thing. It took me awhile to realize, waiiiit a minute, I think that might be MY thing too.

I slowly began to trace its spidery web backwards. My protective shyness as a kid and, to a lesser degree, as an adult. My fear of hurting myself — I have clear memories of inching my way down our hill in winter to get to the school bus stop, careful to avoid the patches of ice hiding under the snow that were just waiting to betray me. My profound fear and avoidance of pain make my kids miracles in more than just that whole Miracle of Life way. It’s why I don’t ski, snowboard, mountain bike, and barely know how to swim. I’ve never plunged into a pool, jumped from a boat into a lake. The risks I take are emotional, creative, and mostly theoretical. They are never physical.

And just when I thought I had a handle on it, had named it, or at least understood it was there, like a disloyal shadow it turned on me.

Last September I prepared to get up in front of eighty people — the most open, supportive, enthusiastic eighty people — and make a brief ten-minute announcement. That’s it. That’s all. The longer the speakers in front of me took, the more I felt my nerves suddenly ramp up. In a flash everything inside of me went haywire. I imagined what walking up to the front of the room would be like. I felt my legs about to buckle. I didn’t faint, but thought I might. I felt my chest tighten. And in an instant I leaned over to my partner in this project, a partner not prepared to speak at all, threw her my notes and said, “I have to go” and walked out the side door just as my introduction was happening.

I didn’t know what happened. I still don’t know what happened. A panic attack, I guess. My first.

It felt like an anomaly. Maybe I wasn’t eating enough, not enough protein, I wasn’t sleeping a lot on that trip, we all drank together the night before, maybe I was dehydrated. But two months later I was in a meeting, a routine mundane meeting, and as we went around to introduce ourselves, the longer it took to get around to me the more nervous I felt and as soon as I thought “Oh God I hope what happened in September isn’t happening again” I triggered it. I made it through, the thought of the humiliation greater than the anxiety, but barely. I’m sure I was blushing, I felt like I was speaking from under water, but no one could have known I’d been seconds from fleeing, from passing out, from wanting out.

I don’t know what’s happening, this anxiety that reshapes in me every ten or twenty years. I don’t know why this fear of the physical is now exploding into a fear of the interpersonal, the mundane, the part of the world I felt like I had a handle on. I can trigger it the way you can feel the electric zing of a loose tooth by pushing it with your tongue. I test it. Which seems unwise, but frankly, I’m pissed about it. I didn’t do anything you didn’t want me to do and now you want to take even more away from me?

Fuck you, anxiety.

If I’ve learned anything about the human experience it’s that we think we’re alone. We always think we’re alone. But every time I reveal something of myself, take the risk in asking a friend, “Has this ever happened to you?” the answer is almost always a shy, quiet yes. Miscarriage? Yes. Fear of going broke, ending up homeless, disappointing everyone who loves you? Yes, yes, and yes. Panic attacks? Oh, yup, that too. We’re so afraid of failure. And anxiety feels like one long fucking failure.

I’ve learned over time to avoid some of the situations where I’ll hold my kids back, where I’ll be nothing but a chorus of becarefulbecarefulbecareful. Those are the things my husband fields, where he lets them be kids and take risks and get hurt and get back up again. They know I’m the Parent Who Worries. I don’t think they understand the true extent of it, but maybe I’m just being naïve. Because by the time my daughter was four and I shouted “Please be careful, watch what you’re doing!” as she scrambled around with a friend on some boulders near the lake she quietly replied down to the rocks, “Mom I’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

Don’t worry.

But as they get older and more capable, I find myself loosening up and trusting them more. My son has pushed past so much of the anxiety that crippled him as a little kid. Maybe that’s why my anxiety is now pointing inward, at me and not outward, at them. But if I’ve learned anything, anxiety is as adaptable as a virus. It’s not something you simply outgrow.

“Do you have faith in me?”

“I do!” I yelled back at this question my daughter had never, not once, asked me before. Tears sprung to my eyes, no one around us understanding the profound depth of our exchange.

A girl who scooted past her, a girl neither of us knew, shouted, “I HAVE FAITH IN YOU!” and that seemed to mean just as much as my reply.

She asked one last time, “Do you have faith in me?!”

I shouted back, “I do!” and the scooter girl zipped between us again, repeated, “I HAVE FAITH IN YOU!” and off she went in one direction as my daughter made her inaugural trip down the ramp.

Do you have faith in me, I do, I have faith in you. This circle so snug between the three of us. A mother, a daughter, a peer.

In that moment, the balance between what our parents tell us and what our peers tell us. How they become equal, one meaning as much as the other. How the people who know us the least are sometimes just as much a vote of confidence as those who know us the most. The people who know us well maybe giving too much, sometimes feeding our fear (like I used to do with my son, confirming his reasons to be anxious). The people who don’t know us at all, believing everything is possible, push us (here’s looking at you, scooter girl). We need both.

I repeat this to myself now, in a round. In those moments, the moments when I worry, the moments when I wonder, “Is this happening again? Could the worse happen?”

Do you have faith in me?

I do.

I have faith in you.