A Game: An Anxiety-fueled Post at 3 AM

The other part of it, of course, is the anxiety. My anxiety is as old as my memory. When I was six, I insisted I go to bed at 6:45 pm EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. for I was convinced I'd never be able to sleep if I didn't. Bless my parents, they accommodated this demand and then spent many nights sitting up with me as I cried well past midnight. By fifth grade, my anxiety had expanded and taken over; I cried every single day for the first six weeks of school filled with worry about things I didn't have words for. It's hard to make friends and be liked when you're constantly crying for no reason, so eventually I learned how to internalize those feelings and instead would start awake each morning gripped with a sense of terror that ripped me from my dreams and set my stomach on edge. That's when I stopped eating breakfast.

By seventh grade, I decided the only way to deal with anxiety was to take complete control of any and everything I could. Sure, that led me to develop an eating disorder, but I was also a straight A student, star athlete, and successful musician. That summer I shot 100 free throws, served 100 tennis balls, and rode my bike 10-15 miles every day. It turns out perfectionism is a pretty effective way to deal with anxiety; it drives you to be the very best at everything, even if doing so isn't well-advised or necessary. The downside of course is that when you're striving to be perfect, you miss a heck of a lot along the way.

Eventually, I internalized my coping strategies so deeply, that it wasn't until recently that I understood how much my anxiety still controls my life. Parenting has a way of highlighting these kinds of things for you, especially when your children start to exhibit some of the same behaviors you remember struggling with as a kid.

Texts from Sky; he outgrew size 12 but hasn't grown into size 14....

During the three plus weeks that I was in Japan for work, Sky frantically texted me almost every day. The nature of the texts were largely the same--they either highlighted for me whatever was going horribly wrong at home or repeatedly asked me to walk him through something that was happening or about to happen. Autism and anxiety go hand in hand, and Sky's anxiety is absolutely brutal. From thousands of miles away and with my own anxiety percolating just below the tipping point, I eventually had to stop answering his texts and hope that somehow Ren was on top of it.

These are just the moms I managed to fit into the screen shot.

Calling home didn't go much better. The first Skype call ended in a wrestling match. During the second, a lamp got broken. I stopped calling after that. For kids on the spectrum, change is hard. Reminding them of that change by calling leads to chaos, so as awful as it seems (and is), it's actually better for me just to disappear when I am gone.  Fewer interactions meant slightly less anxiety for all of us.

Even as I felt things falling apart for me on the depression front while I was away, I also knew that my family wasn't the place where I could find solace or respite. We love one another fiercely, but mental health issues are hard on everyone. Special needs parenting requires your A game, and if you can't bring it, you don't get the option of sitting this one out. Your best (and only) hope is that the other parent can be on their A game while you try to hobble alongside offering support where you can.

In the first 24 hours I was home, Stow broke a door, attacked his sister over a couple of Hotwheels cars (causing her to have a pretty scary asthma incident), wept uncontrollably multiple times at the thought that I don't love him, and ran away twice. When I tried to introduce the kids to a new board game, Sky got so anxious that he gave himself a nosebleed bad enough to convince me that he was patient zero for a new Ebola outbreak. It took two of us to help him get it under control and to keep him from passing out in the middle of the kitchen. I spent the rest of the afternoon in bed with headphones on and a towel over my eyes. At dinner, which didn't happen until 9 p.m., Stow spilled a plate of curry, eliciting an unwanted critique of plate carrying methods from his brother who didn't, of course, extend his helpfulness to assisting us with the clean-up.

Stow's "Welcome Home" note for me: "Please don't leave me like that. (heart heart). How much I love you __________ Moons."

Mercifully, despite the fact he single parented for 25 days (the longest stretch, yet), Ren senses where things are for me and has managed to stay on his A game so far. I know the limits of his reserves, though, so I'm hoping to turn things around quickly and take on some of this load.

First, though, I really need to figure out how to get some sleep.