On Worry

I have worries. I have cares. I have concerns weighing me down. Don't you? Don't we all?

I recently discovered this Chinese proverb some of my friends tell me they were raised on:  "That the birds of worry and care fly over you head, this you cannot change, but that they build nests in your hair, this you can prevent."

I have many friends who help keep the nests at bay. I am so grateful for that.

But my mother was (and still is) a total worrier. There is nothing that doesn't worry her, including the exact time I will arrive when I travel to Florida to see her. God help us all if my plane is overdue. Not only will those waiting with her hear nothing else but her worry about it, when I arrive, I will hear it too...for the next couple of hours. If I am driving her somewhere in her neighborhood, or for that matter anyone is, we have to move to the lefthand turn lane at a certain juncture or her anxiety becomes extreme. She all but grabs the arm that is on the steering wheel. Granted, she is 91 as I write this so some of her behavior is understood. But these are recent examples of a lifetime of worrying that infected my whole family.

And what does worry get her or any of us? Fear. It gets us fear. And most times we become fearful of something that is not likely to or never will happen.

I remember once staying overnight at a girlfriend's house when I was very young. Her father was out of town, but her mother was there. At some point during the night the mother heard a sound outside the house (might have been a car driving by or an owl on patrol). Before I knew it, we girls were up too. She armed us all with heavy pots and pans, and we waited in silence by the backdoor for a long terrifying interlude. This is what my friend lived with all of the time, and in some sense, I did too.

I am the mother of a son who has been ill countless times: four separate cancer diagnoses, hip and shoulder replacement surgery, pacemaker/defibrillator surgery (several times, once because of a manufacturer recall), huge doses of chemotherapy, huge doses of radiation, a bone marrow transplant, and almost four years ago, a heart transplant. Throughout everything, I have worried about his ability to withstand it all and survive. (He did and has.) If he died, I have worried about how I would continue to live a life that didn't include him. (That hasn't happened.)

To me, this kind of anxiety, especially from a mother, is understandable. But I should do my best to keep my concern from infecting those around me. This is a goal rather than an outcome. I certainly am a long way from having perfected that part of me. But at least I know it's a good thing to try to do.

Now, I find it impossible to sweat the small stuff. If I chose to worry about the little moments of my life as well as the big, I would live in a perpetual swill of unremitting, stomach-churning, throat-constricted anxiety. To what end? It certainly wouldn't make my life longer or happier. And it wouldn't make people around me more genuinely glad to be with me.

It's a life lesson. I wish I could transmit it to my mother, but so far, on that score, I've failed.