Parenting Ourselves Through Our Parenting Anxiety
Yesterday, Beena Boo and I were on our daily afternoon exploration when she signaled that she wanted to walk up the stairs to the “corriente”, a little stream that snakes through our building’s property. Holding hands, she stepped up one step and without stop, tried stretching her legs to the next step. With each step my chest tightened. “What if she slips”, I worried silently. “What if her hand falls out, she falls backward and cracks her head?”
29 steps later, Beena Boo runs toward the corriente. I don’t breath, because she’s headed to pick up leaves near a ledge. If she falls it’s a tumble in bramble. A sprained wrist. A broken nose. She picks up one leaf and crawls on top of the little bridge over the corriente. A breath. (Take a breath readers, please!). But, quickly, she sticks her head between the railing on the bridge. In a leap, I’m standing behind her and simultaneously thinking: “Oh no! What if her head gets stuck? How will we get her out? How do I explain this sh*t to her dad?” Panic. “AAAHHH” I’m screaming inside. Then my breath breaths itself. A feeling of calm comes. A little and short one.
Beena Boo walks back down off the bridge and picks up another leaf.
…..
This is what ever day is like. A mundane object is a potential weapon. Beena Boo fell last week missing the front door’s hinge from impaling her eyeball by half an inch. My job is keeping her alive and managing my stress. Sometimes it feels like these two things are fulltime jobs. And, managing guilt. Especially, the guilt that I’m not doing enough. That, and the guilt from feeling relieved when, after a morning of near misses, her care giver arrives. (Yay! It’s another adult’s turn to keep Beena Boo alive!)
How do we parent ourselves through the stress of parenting? Sometimes the best solution feels like breathing. Like an unconscious action is all that’s possible in the moment. For me, I thank a Higher Power for my years and years of spiritual searching for spiritual bypasses. The end of that search, and a lot of meditation, is an enduring groundedness and access to presence. But who cares, that’s enough to survive these early parenting years. We’ll, that and Grace.
In those parenting moments when my anxiety feels it will lunge out of my mouth in an authoritative “Beena Boo, NOOOOOO!” scream, there is the breath. We all have breath. It can breath us. It’s the simplest parenting- ourselves-parenting move we can take. We let our breath breath us.
At least, until our child wants to descend those 29 stairs they climbed up.
With gratitude,
Cecilia
