At the beginning of my oldest’s 3rd grade year, she had a panic attack. It was textbook — she felt like she couldn’t breathe, she swore up and down she was dying, she was convinced her heart wasn’t beating.
I took her to the pediatrician, who gave her a clean bill of health. I reached out to her school guidance counselor. After one session with her, my girl had some coping mechanisms she could lean on, but the worries persisted. Worries about things that would never happen and worries about things that could happen. Worries about death, about school, about friends. Sometimes she’d give me a deeply detailed fear she had like losing her tooth in her sleep and swallowing it. She was convinced of the possibility that her moving her head on her pillow would be enough to rip an entire tooth loose from her gums.
And while part of me wants to tell her to stop being so ridiculous, say, “of course that would never happen”, the truth is that I get it — I was a worrier as a kid too. And I’ve always had an extremely overactive imagination. I once heard my older sister’s pager vibrating on a bookshelf in her room (yes, this was the ‘90s) when I was home alone and convinced myself it was a murderer using her pencil sharpener.
All these years later, it turns out that I can use all those extremely vivid mental pictures to my advantage as a parent: Being a person with an overactive imagination has made me an incredibly patient mom with my kid’s anxiety. Because you know what? Maybe there is something making noises at the window.
Of course I don’t tell her that. I don’t tell her “OMG, there probably is a ghost in these walls” (even if I believe in the supernatural, too). I just listen to validate her. I hear her worries, her concerns, her stress, and I say, “You know what? I get it. I understand why you’re worried about that. But here’s why I think that won’t happen.”
I can give her real info she’s not aware of at the moment. I can pull back the curtains and show her the tree branch hitting the glass. I can teach her about the mechanisms of a house and why sometimes it creaks and groans. I can promise her over and over that even grown adults are terrified of the dentist, that sometimes it’s just a thing you have to do and know that it’s going to be OK on the other side.
My overactive imagination is still here. Sometimes I have to go into their bedrooms in the middle of the night and make sure they’re still sound asleep in their beds because what if somebody grabbed them in the 10 minutes I was in the shower? I sometimes have to convince myself at 3 a.m. that the truck I hear going down the street isn’t a repo truck because our minivan isn’t behind on payments. I still quarter my 5-year-old’s grapes when she takes them to school because what if she gets distracted at the lunch table and chokes?
Some fears are valid, rooted in experience and research. Some fears are just stories you tell in your brain because you read something scary once or a random thought popped into your head so violently that now you’re convinced it was less of a brain doing brain things and more of a sign, an omen, a prediction. Sometimes you watched too much Robert Stack as a child and have to peel back years of worries.
But all of it makes me a better mom. Because when my girl says she’s scared she’s going to flunk the fourth grade, I know exactly how she feels. And even though I want to shake her and say, “Omg you literally have all As, you just had a near-perfect score on a milestones test, not once has a teacher ever told me they were worried about you,” I can just hold her and reassure her. I get it.
Life is scary. Everything feels uncertain. And when you’re 10 years old, you don’t have the years of everything being mostly OK under your belt yet. You just have a tiny bit of life lived — and a whole lot of imagination.
Samantha Darby is a Senior Lifestyle Editor at Romper and Scary Mommy and a PTA soccer mom raising three little women in the suburbs of Georgia with her husband. Her minivan is always trashed.
