You offended him!

While waiting for breakfast, the kids decided to play car racing – as in the 2 older ones are commentators and the little one is supposed to be the audience. Maybe this concept was hard to communicate to the little one who thought that he could actually play with the little, toy cars, only to be reprimanded by his eldest sibling, “don’t touch that car!”.

Very hurt, the baby looked at me with his pout and sad, little puppy eyes, then proceeded to crawl away, in sort of a I-would-prefer-to-stomp-but-I-don’t-know-how kind of a way, to the far (relatively) end of the living room, where he sat on the floor in front of the sofa.

Because no one paid to much attention to him, he proceeded to climb on the sofa, as if to get even further away, sat himself with a loud ‘thud’ and a sigh, and then for even more dramatic effect, he stood up and dropped himself face-first back on to the sofa – at which point, my eldest took notice to proudly proclaim, “mommy, look at him! I offended him!”

Don’t panic, I’ve got you covered

Occasionally, and mostly at nighttime, I feel like I am dying – no, not in an ‘inevitably’ kind of way, but in a ‘right-this-instant’ kind of way.

This past weekend when I thought I was actually having a heart attack, I decided to pay attention to my feelings and visit a doctor, who diagnosed that I am in fact suffering from anxiety and not heart disease.

It was in many ways a huge relief to hear this news, not only because of the obvious reasons, but also because not having any answers was really just adding to my anxiety and making matters worse. It was also a tremendous comfort to know that I was not the only one that was experiencing this (as I felt slightly stupid about my ‘fake’ heart attack), and thanks for all of your comments and emails!

I am feeling 100% better, and not because my problems have been solved, but because I finally understand what is happening to me.

The interesting thing that I discovered was that the anxiety is not necessarily brought on by stress, I mean, it can be caused by stress and workload, but I think that it depends on how each individual person handles stress or workload – I think that the anxiety comes because of things in our lives that we feel are our responsibility, but that we are perhaps overwhelmed by. In many cases when the anxiety is caused by workload, I think it is because the person does not completely enjoy and/or understand the work, leading not only to stress, but also to panic.

My panic is not caused by my workload, I don’t think, because I really enjoy my job, and to me, it is almost therapeutic to lose myself in a website design or a challenging project, even my writing is a point of emotional release for me, and because I love these things, although they may become stressful at times, I don’t feel the anxiety.

I know the cause of my panic attacks, and I am doing everything that I can to find a solution, but sometimes I forget that I am not the one in control. Looking back at all of times that I have felt this way, I realize that those were the moments where I felt like it was my duty to solve all our problems but I didn’t know the answers, all I knew was that I couldn’t do it – that I was failing, which of course led to feelings of insecurity and panic. Often the feelings would just sneak up on me, at times when I felt like I wasn’t thinking about anything, but of course feelings of insecurity and failure do not leave us, they remain and linger, just waiting for us to let our defenses down…

When discussing possible treatments, medication like Zoloft often comes up, and although I know that there are people who need it (some years ago, it helped my mom), I don’t think I am in need of medication at this stage, instead I am opting to employ some self-care strategies.

My first defense mechanism is meditation, and for Muslims this usually comes in the form of prayer – it does help the most, at least for me. Secondly, I am trying to keep up with the squash, or I think any form of physical activity, but the reason I am so in love with squash is because it is a competitive game and provides a welcome escape from the somewhat dehabilitating (I know that this is not a real word) thoughts that fill my head.

Thirdly, I love crafty things, so I am trying to just do things that I enjoy, and sometimes I even include the kids! Today for example, I spend an hour outside coloring the patio stones with chalk – coloring is somehow very relaxing for me. I also started to do art journaling, which is somewhat akin to scrapbooking but without the expense and the stress of having to create with perfection, but more like free expression of thoughts in a visual form, and again the process is very relaxing – I also bought journals (from the dollar store) for my kids so we occasionally work on it together. [a more detailed post about art journaling later]

Here is some more information about anxiety and panic attacks, there is also some other suggestions for self-care.

How are you dealing with the panic?

Functional

Yesterday I thought I was having a heart attack, seriously – I even told my sister to call 911 for me – but we both had our doubts about it really being that serious. After about 5 minutes I started to feel a bit better and decided to go to a walk-in clinic.

On Sunday night, I had a similar thing happen to me and could not sleep – I think it was after 3am that I managed to finally fall asleep. All weekend I felt a tightness in my chest and a general feeling of “unwell” – I really didn’t know what was happening to me, and I still don’t know for sure, but I do feel better today.

The doctor thinks that I have anxiety and suffered from a panic attack. I don’t know what to think because I don’t feel particularly anxious nor do I feel like I am in a panic-y kind of a mood.

I said to the doctor that I didn’t think I had a reason to feel anxiety and his ‘professional’ opinion was that all women, at some point, suffer from anxiety. I believe him. I guess that although there is not one specific thing really worrying me, everything just adds up.

For the past couple months, my husband and I have been playing squash and it’s been great, but we didn’t play in the last 3 weeks, and I think that I just didn’t realize how important it was for me to have that “release mechanism” in my life. Of course, I am just speculating, because I don’t know the cause of the problem for certain, but I feel that it was not cool of me to deny myself that mental escape.

Anyone else anxious?

Oh, the anticipation!

C-A-T

One additional thing about being a mother of a few kids, sadly, is the uncontrollable urge to swear (not at the kids, but you know, just because more kids kinda equals less tolerance for nonsense), even though I am not a person that would ever swear in conversation.

And because I have kids that do repeat a lot of the things that I say – you remember the time that they started saying damn energy, damn energy? – now when I am discussing particularly anger-inducing subjects, I will spell out certain ‘choice’ words.

Last night, as we were eating dinner, I was spelling out a word to my husband, when my son interrupted us to say “ahhh-sss-sss, hey! what does aassss mean?” Ummm, yeah – we just laughed that one off and completely avoided the question, but more importantly, he can S-P-E-L-L!

We were so happy about it, I totally forgot what made me mad in the first place! The next hour was filled with “spell cat, spell bat, spell dad, spell mug, spell every-3-letter-word-except-the-aforementioned-choice-word.

My 4 year old is officially reading! Yeah!