Jane Austen's got nothing on this kid

I am a worrier.   I can worry with the best of them.    I can obsess about those two little words, “what if”, like my very breath depends on the outcome.  But in all my days of worrying and panicking and probably sending all kinds of stressors to my heart and brain functions, I have never seen anybody worry like my Big Kid.

This child doesn’t just worry a little.   He is a full blown professional at the age of eight.  He can out-fret the little old women in Jane Austen’s novels.   You know, the ones who skitter about and have to take to their beds because they’re so upset they nearly faint every other minute?   I’m a worrier and yet I’ve never seen anything like it.

He’s always been cautious.  He has always taken his time to analyze a situation before jumping in to participate.    He’s always been meticulous in taking care of his things and listened, unlike Little Kid, when I told him not to dive into furniture or other hard objects with his head.   Even so, I didn’t see this coming.  

Somehow, he drove right past Mildly Concerned Court and wound up on Hyperventilate Highway.   I think he missed the exit around the time Little Kid was born, but I can’t be certain because I, myself, was too busy being on What Have I Done Drive.

And yet here we are.  We have arrived in Worryville and I don’t know what to do about it.   This child worries about everything from the fact that he can’t exactly, and I mean exactly duplicate the computer drawn model of a cursive letter for his homework assignment to the possibility that the first rumble of thunder may mean a tornado is headed our way.

He worries that my favorite bush has not received enough water of late, that the cat is going to scratch him, that a tiny speck of dirt is, in fact, a man-eating tarantula and that we don’t yet have a replacement for his near-empty tube of toothpaste.

And poor Little Kid.  That girl can’t wiggle a finger without him jumping up to make sure she isn’t sticking it in an electrical outlet - even though this is, miraculously the one source of trouble she has not yet discovered.   He follows that girl like a Child-Safety Stalker.   He seems to think that every time she picks up a piece of paper or taste tests an inanimate object, she is doomed to severe punishment or tragic injury.   He polices Little Kid like she’s got gasoline on her hands and matches in her pocket.  

I remember a time when we were standing in a Walgreens and I was trying to compare medicine labels, no easy task with two children jabbering the whole time.   But, the task became all but impossible when Big Kid began to give me reports on Little Kid’s every flinch, faster than Ashton Kutcher could tweet his way to a million followers.

She’s touching that, she’s got that in her mouth, she’s trying to get out of the cart, she is, she’s going to, she might….  I finally lost it.    I looked him square in the eye and told him that I have my own tendency to panic, my own irrational fears, my own pattern of freaking out, but even I could not worry that much!
I just can not comprehend what it must be like to live inside his head all day.   I’m torn between feeling sorry for him and wanting to shake the fretting right out of him.   It is exhausting, absolutely bone-tired exhausting to try to get him to stop.

It’s like he’s hard-wired for it, an entire circuitry of criss-crossed wires that can not be undone lest a bomb go off.    I try to talk him down from the ledge with love, but when he still throws one foot off the side, I end up screaming at him because it’s just the most infuriating thing I’ve ever dealt with.

How can a little boy who gets straight A’s in school, wield the vocabulary of a literary genius, garner compliments upon compliments for his manners and sweet behavior, be so tortured with worry within? 

It is mind-boggling.   Is his sister so opposite him in her adventurous spirit that he was thrown into some sort of personality-difference overload?  Have the Other One and I  done this to him somehow?  Did we satisfy his little genius-brained curiosity with too much explanation, too much information when he was young?   Or did I somehow corrupt him unknowingly by simply passing down the worst aspects of the gene pool?

Whatever the case, I sincerely hope and pray that he will grow out of this.    And the sooner the better because if being a mom and having to juggle 963 things a day isn’t enough, I feel like I have to be 14 steps ahead of any sign of danger at all times.   I’ve been a mom for a while now, so I’m pretty keen on being 2 steps ahead, but I can not fathom the infinite ways in which he conjures up scenarios that may destroy our very existence.  

But if I could, I’d probably have a lucrative career as an action-adventure writer.   Hey, maybe there’s hope for him after all…

I am woman! Hear me... please?

When did it happen?   When did I cease to be a woman and just exist as a mom?

I’m fairly certain that before I had kids, I had a life.   But then again, that was so long ago that maybe I’m just dreaming that up to fulfill some need to have stories other than those about childbirth, potty training or homework struggles.

And yet, I seem to remember a little red dress…  or was that a little red wagon…or a big red dog?  Oh, it’s so hard to tell anymore.  It all just blurs together.   

Still, whether “she” ever existed or not, there are times now when I desperately need her to appear or reappear.    When the Other One barely notices me or thinks my greatest need from him is to pick up milk on the way home, I just want to say - uh, hello, do you think I spent forty five minutes putting on makeup and curling my hair while lecturing on attitude with one child and trying to pry the other one off me, so that I could hope to be admired by the cat? 

And it would sure be nice to feel like a woman when I walk into a party or business gathering, but as it is, within minutes, somebody is asking me about the kids.  I mean, come on, I did my best to clean the spit-up, chocolate and play-doh off my clothing, put on a 3rd layer of under-eye concealer and shove my 4 belly rolls into the most snug-fitting clothes I could find; the least you could do is talk about the weather.  

Of course, I can’t blame any of them.  I am a mom.  And the truth is, these kids take up a huge part of my day.   Okay, they take up all of my day, because the little bit that is left after they’re asleep, is nowhere close to a woman, but rather just a big pile of exhausted bones.

So when?  When do I get to be a woman again?  Or did I somehow get duped into giving that up for good when I traded the little red dress for the little red wagon?  

There are times when I want to scream, “I’m still in here!”    But, I don’t think anybody can hear me anymore.   I’m just a mom, or mainly a mom, or only good at being a mom or some combination of all of it.    Nobody else can hear my voice and so I begin to think that maybe I’m imagining it too.  

But I long to step away from all of this.   Oh don’t get me wrong.  I see how fast the time is going when my children learn new words or skills, move up to the next clothing size, understand more grown up concepts.    But while time is flying for them, it feels like it’s screeching to a halt for me.    For though I love them and enjoy them (well until about that last 2 hours of the day) and would never in a million years think of actually, physically “stepping away” from them, there are times when I wish I could both speed up and stop time simultaneously. 

In my desperate moments, I want to speed up time so that I can get a breather.  But in the very next thought I want to stop time.   They are already growing up too fast and I want them to stay little and sweet.  I want to stop time because I know how sad I will be to see it all end, but also because if I could stop time, maybe this woman inside me longing to get out, could find her way back to the surface.

Somehow in my twisted brain, I think that if I can just get someone to see me as a woman now, amidst the whining and sticky fingers and eye rolling, life would be good.   But, the way things are going, that woman inside sinking further and further into oblivion, I fear she’ll never be seen again.  

For you see, I’m very aware of how old I was when I had these children, and thus, how old I will be when they are grown.    It is the imagined image of the much older face looking back at me in the mirror, the face I’m already seeing dreadful signs of, that keeps me clinging to my children’s youth for my own sake as well.    I see it all the time, that we are “growing up” together, and while the end of this road for them is just the beginning of a lifetime of new roads and opportunities, it feels very much like a dead end for me.

Oh, I know I won’t be that old in physical years.  It’s just that I’m afraid once I take off the Mommy robe, rather than discovering a beautiful woman still existing underneath, I’ll just disappear all together.  

Had I known when I hung up that little red dress that it would be for the last time, I may have strutted past my husband just a few more times.   Because now, this road that leads to my children's future is filled with both excitement and concern at the same time.  When my daughter sets out in her own little red dress and my son takes on the world in his suit with red tie, my own red dress will be faded.

It's strange.  I don’t know when it happened, this intertwining of who I used to be and who I have become, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t have a say in it.