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…