The Land of the Worried

I feel as though I’ve been underground, or in a cave, or under the bed, I’ve been away somewhere.  I’ve been in The Land of the Worried.  I have been focused on worry, I’ve been looking at it as through a microscope, zeroing in on it, magnifying it, making it big, making it almost my life.  I’ve been doing this intensely for about 2 weeks, maybe more, worry makes you lose track of time.  It makes you lose track.  It wipes out everything else. It becomes a horrible drug, without which you cannot function.  But the thing is, you can’t function when the worry is there, either.  Worry takes you to lands that aren’t pretty--lands like depression, sadness, anger, lands where you are lost.  Worry takes over, worry won’t let go, worry rules.

What me?  Worry?  Oh, yes.  I have everything there is in life to have--I have a good husband, great friends, a nice, comfortable house, enough money, children who’ve never been in real trouble, a mother still alive and spry at 88, a brother with mental illness, yes, but who doesn’t flagrantly break the law or do harm to others, beautiful grandchildren.  So what does someone like me have to worry about?

No matter who we are, no matter how blessed we are, if we are worry-prone, we will find something to worry about.  And I am one of those--one who thinks that worry will somehow get me prepared for the worst, will somehow help me solve a problem, will in the end show me the solution.  But that is not the case.  The only thing worry does is manufacture more worry, build upon itself, until there is a very high mountain where there once was a tiny molehill.  Worry digs a deep hole under that mountain and buries you in it.

So what was I worrying about for the past 2 or more weeks?  My itchy, flaking scalp, which got so bad I finally had to go to the doctor, my home remedies not working.  My mother and her increasingly failing memory, who had to have cataract surgery and then had to live with me for a week while I administered her eyedrops four times a day.  My 19-year-old granddaughter, Alecia, who woke up one morning deaf in one ear.  My brother’s inability to be responsible for significantly  helping to care for our mother.  A pain in my upper back that I’d had for over a year and put off going to the doctor about.  A myxoid cyst on my finger that keeps returning.  A broken heat pump which resulted in my having to build fires for the entire week my Mom was here to heat the house until it could be fixed.  The dread of my 21 year-old grandson being sent to Iraq in August.  And some other family developments that I don’t want to put into a blog post.

When I list those items I can see it’s no wonder that I was stressed.  It was what is so often called lately “a perfect storm” of circumstances, all of them coming at once, any one of them enough to make me worry a little, to turn things over in my head at night when trying to sleep.  With all of these incidences coming at once, there was nothing I could think about at night, waiting for the float into sleep--I would start to think about my grandchildren and Alecia and what she will have to do in her life now that one of her ears refuses to hear would cross my mind and I would begin to worry about it.  Or I would begin to think about the dangers of my mother’s short, short memory, potential horrifying scenarios playing out in my poor itchy head.  I managed to shy away from thinking about my grandson going to Iraq, but I was not successful with the other more immediate concerns.  There seemed no place for my brain to land that wasn’t full of pitfalls.  So I read novels before sleep, but only novels that provided deep escape--vampires, werewolves, different centuries, different countries and cultures, never anything that could remind me of present situations.  When I laid down to sleep I would try to go to those places rather than staying here in the place I found myself.

Though I thought keeping my Mom in my house for a week, and making sure her eyedrops made it into her eyes as often as they were supposed to, would be a good thing, maybe a little different schedule, the TV on most of the time, I did not realize that having her here would make me worry about her more.  When she took 3 sleeping pills one day and tried to take way too many allergy pills on another, I realized that her lack of memory was getting dangerous and I couldn’t hide the fact from myself anymore.  I lay awake at night, my head slathered with steroid ointment under my plastic shower cap, listening for her movements downstairs, hoping she wouldn’t fall or take too many pills.  After she was back home, the worry continued because now she wasn’t here where I could keep an eye on her.  I began to panic, crying to my husband that there was nobody to help, why couldn’t my brother help, my future looked awful, it couldn’t possibly get better.

But I am back now--how did I find that road back?  I’m not sure, I wish I knew so that I could make it back easier next time.  I did some things--I vented to my husband and a couple of old friends, to a daughter, pouring it out regardless of the possible consequences--friends running away, husband not listening, daughter not taking it seriously.  Those things didn’t happen--my husband was consoling, offering words of love and advice, my friends were supportive offering their ears and one friend even helped me find a place in town that I might find caregiving help.  My daughter and her husband both offered compassion and advice.  I went to a doctor to check out the pain in my back and my scalp started to get better.  I guess I moved forward, that’s all I can attribute the new outlook to, the climb up out of that hole.

I can sleep again, even though I am still treating my scalp and wearing my little shower cap to bed.  I have graduated to reading whatever strikes my fancy, rather than books that I can crawl into and put behind me everything in the real world, the pain in my back is a little less.  It helped most to have the friends, my husband, daughter and son-in-law included in that category, to talk to, to say it was okay to feel the way I was feeling.  It helped, too, to read this phrase in an article in Sun Magazine about Buddhist teachings:  “The Buddhist teachings....encourage us to relax gradually and wholeheartedly into the ordinary and obvious truth of change.  What it means is that we’re not the only one who can’t keep it all together.  We no longer believe that there are people who have managed to avoid uncertainty.”