The day I found out our kids were going to be out of school for two weeks in March, I had probably the worst anxiety episode of my life. I remember rushing to two grocery stores and stocking up. Sitting at my mother’s house and my heart racing, simply unable to grasp what was happening around us. I bought art activities on Amazon, worried over if we had the proper devices, and was pretty sure my world was crumbling.
This was over two weeks of having four kids at home. TWO WEEKS.
I mean, I think perhaps we all knew this was going to be longer than that. But every time I thought about the possibility of the kids being home through April, or to the end of the semester, I would have a full-on panic attack. So I decided just not to think about it.
Every day for the last five months plus, I’ve tried to take it day by day. Each day it gets easier to think in a larger time frame, to tell myself and my kids that we can’t change anything except how we decide to handle the parts we don’t like.
My anxiety reared up again as we faced making decisions about whether to send our kids back to school or not. For weeks, I agonized. I felt guilty if, as a stay-at-home mom, I sent my kids back to their schools in person. I felt guilty and worried for my 11-year-old daughter, who is an extreme extrovert starting middle school.
But once I made that decision…I’ve been back to the baseline.
I’m dealing with anxiety by coping moment by moment. There are all kinds of things to be angry about right now: the political climate, that my daughter can’t start middle school in a normal fashion, even the fact that those gym and museum memberships I paid for are going to waste.
Just like I encourage my kids, though, I try to embrace the things I can actually control and accept the things I can’t. We will do the very best we can; we will get through this one way or another.
But, oh my, how glad I am that I didn’t know how long this would carry on in March.
The human brain — or at least my human brain — isn’t big enough to grasp that kind of immediate change. I’ve always felt sad when I am driving in the Midwest and can see for miles and miles ahead of me, with no mountains to block the view. I just don’t think we are meant to see that far into the future. We can make all the plans in the world and they can still all just collapse around us. (Trust me, I know.)
As we all face another who-knows-how-long before we return to any normalcy, I hope we can agree to take it one day at a time. Take a deep breath, bake some bread (like I know you did in April), and create rhythms even in the time of turmoil.
