I Wanted to Die; My Son’s Anxiety Is Making Me Live
The Fight For His Mind
Forcing Me to Conquer My Anxiety Is Keeping Me Alive
Lately, he’s taken to sleeping in my room, my eleven-year-old. It isn’t nightmares keeping him awake and robbing us both of peace, it’s the panic. Hours into what I insist will be a quick article on anxiety I finally commit to print what I’ve easily admitted out loud; My son’s anxiety and OCD are suffocating me. The feelings that wash over me as I look across the room to watch him sleep, are not what any mother should have to experience. At the sight of my sleeping son, afloat in the largeness of my bed, I am filled with a heady mixture of love and sorrow…fear and panic.
It kills me to see those words laid out before me — to know that I’m the one responsible for giving them life; but if I don’t begin to give these emotions a voice how can I ever expect to conquer this? It isn’t an exaggeration to say that if I don’t get these anxieties and fears under control, his and mine, I’ll die. I suppose it sounds extremely melodramatic to read those words and in another time, another version of myself would have agreed. That person no longer exists; in her place is just me, and I barely remember yesterday.
