The Struggle is Real

Having a child with anxiety is like working for the Secret Service. I am always on the lookout for possible triggers. To those of you who wonder what a 6 year old could possibly have anxiety about, the answer is everything. Everything that you, as a grown adult, deal with on an everyday basis with such ease, she struggles with. She worries about who she's going to marry, who she's going to live with when we die, what people think when they see her, if she looks good enough, if whatever plans we have that day will work out. But most of you can shove those thoughts and feelings to the back of your mind, or work through them. She can barely contain them.

We watch what we say so that R doesn't take it the wrong way. Heaven help us all if I have to take both R and T into a public bathroom together! We all have to turn around, despite the fact that she is a nudist at home. Even her clothing has to be just right so as to not set her off. One day we had her put her bathing suit on under her clothes, and by golly, you would have thought we tarred and feathered her by her reaction! I had to lift her up to show her in the mirror that she looked normal. I had to Google images of other girls wearing clothes over their suits to show her it was acceptable. And for a half hour she screamed and cried and wouldn't let her daddy or sister look at her. It took her this long to accept that maybe she looked normal and that she would grudgingly go along with it.

Last weekend we went to see fireworks with family. And folks, it was something. I'm not even talking about the double rainbow that appeared, or the stunning fireworks that rained shrapnel down onto the crowd. I'm talking about my experience with R. It was an emotional roller-coaster. The first thing that happened is R wanted to play with a couple of girls from blankets near us. Right away I could see a problem. R was super nervous about approaching them, and there was one of those girls. I can't fathom how these girls exist at such a young age already. They are the ones that take joy in being cruel, in forming clicks and keeping just one person out of it in a very obvious manner. And to my joyful surprise, R either didn't notice this Mean Girl behavior, or just ignored it. Personally, I wanted to trip the kid. Nonetheless, crisis adverted.

Shortly after, R made friends with this wonderful, unique, entertaining girl from the blanket behind us. They got along well, and hung out until right before the show started.  R's cousin who is the same age joined us, and the three of them played together nicely. Right before the fireworks, we noticed R had wandered over to her new friend's blanket and photobombed their family photo! I laughed! What an amazing, wonderful, spirited, joyful child I have! I was so happy to see her over her shyness and participating in new experiences. My hubby laughed too, for much of the same reasons. R laughed, too, until she didn't.

And friends, this is the hard part of our life. This is when my heartbreaks for her. A switch flipped in her, in a nanosecond, where she perceived that we were laughing AT her. She instantly felt embarrassed. She jumped at me screeching "Why are you embarrassing me?!" and dug her nails into each side of my neck, repeating this with tears streaming down her tiny little face. At the point, I had to think and react quickly. My next move would make or break the night. Of course, my first instinct is to punt this tiny, painful pest away from me. It hurt! But I knew what she was going through. I knew very well that her emotions were out of control, and that she was having a knee-jerk reaction to the overwhelming amount of feelings that were bubbling up inside of her without an outlet.

Let me be clear. Physical violence is not acceptable in our house. We do not allow this behavior. That being said, that isn't what was happening here. And I knew that with every fiber of my being, because not two weeks earlier, I was in the same boat. I didn't latch onto anyone like a leech, but I had an anxiety attack and felt like a volcano with no safe way to let off my steam. She was not having a temper tantrum and attacking me. She was having an emotional overload with no outlet. My daughter is fiercely loyal to me, and has never done this before.

So, after I detached her from my neck, I knew I had to get through to her. I cupped her cheek and told her I needed her to hear me. And then I talked her down. It's hard to see someone so small, so young, feeling these emotions that are so intense and premature for her age! She shouldn't be so hyper-self-aware at her age. It breaks my heart for her. I reassured her that we would never laugh AT her in such a cruel manner. I told her how awesome both mommy and daddy think she is. I told her that we loved her. I had to point by point break down her perceptions of what happened with what we were really doing.

And the whole time I was doing this, I had to fight through my own feelings of hurt. Not only did my neck hurt, but my heart hurt. I hurt for a little girl that feels too much, too soon. I hurt knowing that my child tried to hurt me. Even knowing the cause, that she wasn't in control of herself, didn't help me all the way. I hurt thinking about what the future would bring if we can't find a way to help her channel her emotions. It hurt when I told her that she had hurt me, and all I got was a muttered sorry because she couldn't concentrate on me due to the chaos around her. I hurt so bad, and had to set this all aside and present a calm facade so that she could calm down.

For the rest of the night, she chose to stay by my side. She politely declined her cousin's invitation to come share the chair with her. This blew my mind as R would usually rather be with a friend than her boring old parents. She laid her head down in my lap and hugged her bunny and was content to just be with me, emotionally spent after a long evening. That was her heart's apology, I feel. What she couldn't say in words, she showed me in actions. She even held my hand when we weren't even crossing a street!

R isn't a bad kid. She's a loving, loyal child who struggles daily with problems she has little control over. I can't imagine what other parents thought when they witnessed last night's events, but I would hope that they didn't judge. I would hope that they could see through the surface to the hurt and uncertainty that fills my poor girl. And on the other side, when you see my kid being happy and vivacious, I'm thrilled you see that side of her. But if I confide in you that there's something more going on, please don't write it off because you are only seeing the one side of her. She's a deep kid, and I love her to her depths.