Disaster Is a State of Mind

Posted September 07, 2007

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Ben is making an "Action Journal." It's kind of a chart, with various activities listed and a grid to check off the times he does them. So far it's got running, hiking, bike riding, and soccer on it. (This is the same Ben who said recently, "I might like to play more soccer -- but only if I could be the goalie all the time, since then you don't have to do all that exhausting running around.") He looks up from his careful lines, taps the pencil eraser thoughtfully against his chin, and says, "I was going to put in a spot for emergency running? Like running away from a fire? But then I decided not to." "That's probably just as well," I say, and wink at him. And he winks back.

"Catastrophizing" is the term I learned when I was pregnant with Birdy and a therapist friend of ours was trying to explain my style of worry -- its calamitous trajectory. My particular talent is scanning any given situation and mentally plucking from it the direst possible outcome. You see a runny nose; I see pneumonia. You see a splinter; I see an inevitable gangrenous amputation. You see a blood-lead score happily below the "action level"; I see a child with so much metal in her brain that magnets could fly off the fridge to stick to her skull.

Even something like the sight of a "Runaway Truck Ramp" sign can set my heart to pounding: I see the sign, then I picture us in our little car, driving ignorantly along, while a runaway 36-wheeler is flying down behind us; or I picture me, driving the truck; I picture Birdy driving the truck. (I much prefer the "Soft Shoulder" signs, which just calls to mind a delicate perfume or maybe the sensation of nursing a baby fresh out of the bath.) Airplane safety cards give me that same feeling -- I can picture the smoke, the blur, all of us scrambling after our seat cushions, clutching air masks to our children's faces, trying to remember if we were supposed to put ours on before or after. I don't even like to see a fire extinguisher behind glass: Does that eeny-weeny hammer really work?

Happiness is so precarious. The babies arrived here so suddenly; I assume they could be snatched away just as suddenly. Our lives are held together with cobwebs, it sometimes seems, protected from shattering by only the barest coating of glaze. A moment can be consequential. Slopes are slippery. One minute you're wondering if you're happily enough married; the next you're filing for divorce. One minute you're flipping through People magazine in a waiting room; the next you're undergoing lifesaving treatment. One minute your child is climbing on a structure and swinging from a rope, the next he's hitting the side of his head -- blat! -- against a pole and staggering over to where you're sitting with the end of a picnic lunch.

At least that's what happened recently in a playground. Ben, with his tongue lolling out of his head like Wile E. Coyote after the roadrunner tosses an anvil onto him from a cliff. You could practically see the stars orbiting his skull, the cartoon birds in a chirping circle. "Yeesh," he kept saying. "I could hear my brain slosh into the side of my head." His eyes were glazy. And the thought that came to me, along with the one about Ben's concussion and imminent death, was that in fact my constant-crisis feeling has mostly passed me by, and I hardly even noticed. This sudden onslaught of panic actually felt unfamiliar -- like maybe I haven't had it so much since ... since I don't know when. Since Birdy outgrew choking? (I literally knocked on wood after I wrote that.) Since my heart stopped flying up into my throat every time I heard them on the stairs and anticipated the sound of them thudding all the way to the bottom? The deafening crescendos of panic have been quieting down lately. Maybe my outlook is shifting; I am worrying less, growing more moderate in my assumptions. I don't always gasp suddenly at the thought of the disaster averted, flinch imagining it, have to say "Nothing" when Michael asks me what's wrong.

Except this thing with Ben. My anxiety starts up again like the bass you hear through the floorboards when the music's too loud in a downstairs apartment. "Does he seem okay to you?" I ask Michael for days afterward, even though Ben says his head doesn't even hurt anymore. I've been trying to teach him solitaire, and now his bottom lip hangs open like a flap; he puts black cards on black, forgets what the aces are for. "He's fine," Michael says. "Solitaire is a hard game." Why can't I be more like this instead of making a case for Ben's head injury, assuming that his intelligence is Flowers for Algernoning away into the past?

And -- here's my real worry right now -- how much do I end up transferring this worry to the kids themselves? Ben, with a grid in his exercise graph reserved just for a breathless escape, the flames licking at his calves. Maybe I should just be glad he didn't include it in the end. "Probably I really wouldn't need it," is what he said. "And anyways, even if we did have that kind of emergency, which we probably wouldn't, I could just write it in later."

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Disaster Is a State of Mind

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by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Disaster Is a State of Mind

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