FEAR OF WHAT IFS
Welcome to The Small Jar, a podcast where we explore how to intentionally design the life that you want in the space between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 19.
Hello, my friends. A few mornings ago, I took my baby, who is no longer a baby, to the airport to go away for six weeks in the Bahamas, no less. It's an amazing opportunity for him and the first real time he's had a chance to get away and explore his own independence, particularly since the pandemic really limited these opportunities for the past few years.
I'm excited for him, but along with the excitement, I'm feeling quite a bit of worry and anxiety. The friend in all of you might tell me, it's going to be fine. It's only six weeks, but my brain will want to argue with you.
This son, my baby, has type 1 diabetes, and so my brain is offering me a long list of what ifs. And I'm not going to lie, it's scary to have your brain constantly preoccupied with the worst case scenario, but our brains do this constantly, right? It's like a moth to a flame. We can't help ourselves but think endlessly of all of the terrible things that might happen.
And look, our brain's tendency to focus on the negative, terrible, awful what ifs has served us well from an evolutionary standpoint. When we were living in caves, we had to constantly be on the lookout for danger. And as we observed our environment, we began to learn and adapt.
We learned it was more dangerous to go out at night, so we wouldn't do that. We learned there were certain precautions we could take to avoid being eaten or hurt. Our brain has this incredible ability to learn and adapt to find solutions.
And when it comes to danger, our brain will immediately, on default, look for ways to keep us safe, alive, and unhurt. One could argue this is all a really good thing, right? The problem is we're no longer at risk of being eaten by a wild animal on a daily basis, for the most part. But our brains are still looking out for danger.
And in addition to the fear or worry that consumes us when we think about the danger waiting for us or our children out in the world, in addition to that sensation of the feeling of fear and worry, our bodies are also chemically reacting to these fears. Our bodies release stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Our blood pressure and heart rate increases.
We start breathing faster. Our blood actually moves from our hearts out to our limbs so that we have the physical power to fight or run. They say people have extraordinary power in these moments, that mothers have lifted cars or run at extraordinary speeds just to keep their children out of harm's way.
When you think about it from this standpoint, how awesome is that? That our bodies are literally designed to give us superpowers in the moments of danger. The problem is when we apply this superpower to our everyday lives and our minds find danger in everyday scenarios, stress builds up chronically in our system. Even relatively undangerous circumstances like work or school deadlines, messy homes, stimulate our stress response.
Studies have shown that this level of prolonged chronic stress has damaging effects on our bodies. We intellectually know that the stress is bad for us, but it's hard to let it go. We spend a lot of time in the what if mind, particularly as it relates to our kids.
What if he doesn't get into the college he most wants? What if someone slips a drug into her drink? What if he gets into a car accident? What if he spends the whole summer alone because he doesn't have a strong group of friends? In these moments, our children are not actually in danger, at least not in those moments, but we imagine, we project all of the things that could go wrong, all of the pain that they could experience. The what ifs, our children are no longer kids. And so they're going out into the world and we have less ability to protect them from the dangers out there waiting for them.
So we imagine these dangers and bring the pain of the projected experience, that projected danger or negative feeling. We actually bring it into our present moment, that pain. When it comes to protecting our children, it's what we do, right? It's hard to let go of that survival instinct because we care so much about their survival.
My husband actually gave my son a speech as they were making the final preparations the night before his flight. My husband brought up my son's management of his diabetes while on the trip. Now my son is actually incredibly independent and resilient when it comes to managing his care.
He's learned to manage his diabetes on his own for the most part. He was diagnosed when he was three. And so this has been a part of his life for a really long time.
But up until this moment, he's always had us as a safety net. If his blood sugar ever went low overnight and he didn't wake up to give himself juice, I would hear the alarm and come in to wake him. If he ran out of supplies, I would typically have backups stashed everywhere.
If he was high, I would run and get a syringe and give him extra insulin. Have we helped too much? Maybe. But also it's what we do as parents.
As long as they're under our roof, we will do everything we can to keep them safe. But now he's going away for six weeks, and his care will be almost completely on his shoulders. Stepping back from being this safety net for our son is really scary for me, for me and my husband.
My son is not worried about it at all. Young people have this amazing ability to feel invincible in their lives. And you know what, maybe it's a beautiful place to be.
Because even though when you act invincible, you may open yourself to unnecessary risks. On the other hand, there's some beauty in saving yourself all this mental anguish about worrying all of the time about your survival. So my husband's talking to my son.
And he asked him, if you had to take care of an infant with type one diabetes, would you ever just forget to give the baby insulin after a meal? My son immediately responded, No, of course not. And so my husband asked, Why not? Why wouldn't you forget to give the insulin to the baby, but sometimes not all the time, but sometimes you forget to give yourself insulin after you eat. I don't want to throw my baby under the bus here a very large percentage of the time he's on it, but he's a teenage kid.
And sometimes he forgets or gets distracted. So my husband asked him why it would be different if you were taking care of an infant with type one. And my son answered, Well, I would feel responsible.
And I wouldn't want anything to happen to the baby. And my husband said, Yes, exactly. That's exactly how your mother and I feel about you.
We brought these little people into the world and the majority of us accepted this unwritten contract that we would do whatever we needed to do to keep our children safe and healthy. And here are children making it really difficult for us to ensure their safety. It's not that they wish harm for themselves, but they just don't see the stakes as high as we do.
Maybe their imaginations just don't entertain the negative possibilities as much as the awesomeness of the independence and the new experiences they're embarking on. My son is definitely looking at this next six weeks as an adventure, fear or anxiety about his health. They're just not on his list.
And look, he's not going to be entirely on his own. There's an incredibly capable medical team who will be watching over him and I have no doubt they have the experience to care for him if he needs help. But in our minds, sometimes the facts don't matter.
Sometimes you still find yourself thinking about the worst case scenario and everything that could go wrong. It's like the what-ifs play in an endless loop in your mind. So the morning we drove my son to the airport, I sat in the back seat watching him.
I literally had the thought that I was drinking him in, the essence of him. As I'm saying this, I literally still have the perfect picture of him in my mind sitting there in the very early morning on the ride to the airport. I was in that moment so clearly with him.
I was so present to the fact that it would be a long time until I could see him again and I couldn't help but already think I was going to miss him. And on top of that, I think that the fear of the what-ifs honestly made that time in the car so much more precious because I couldn't help but want to hold onto him a little bit longer. Do you know they often say it's the things that you're not worried about that turn your world upside down? As I was thinking of this for some reason, September 11th came to mind.
I remember living in the city then. September 11th, 2001 was a beautiful, spectacular New York City day. The sky was clear, blue, gorgeous.
There are a few people who say they had premonitions that something bad was going to happen on September 11th, but for the most part, none of us could have ever imagined what actually happened that day. There are just moments in life where there's no predicting the catastrophe in front of you. And you know, I think that's a good thing.
But we still spend an awful lot of time and emotional energy contemplating these imaginary what-ifs, all of the worst case scenarios, and just keeping ourselves so stuck. It can take your breath away, the thought of something terrible happening to your children. For many of us, there's just no more precious thing in the world than our children.
Some of the what-ifs in our mind are simply unspeakable. I've talked about my mother before. I just adore her.
She's always been such an incredibly positive and powerful force in my life. I've come to appreciate her more and more with every passing day and year, her wisdom and her strength. And I remember when my sister was sick with cancer when she was a teenager.
Throughout her treatment, she was a fighter and somehow managed to maintain this unbelievably positive attitude. My sister is still a fighter and such an incredible woman. I will never forget though, when she relapsed, she had had the successful bone marrow transplant or so we thought, but her relapse meant that it hadn't worked and she was facing an even riskier second round of treatment.
At the time they had never performed a second bone marrow transplant on a patient and the form of aggressive cancer she had, it was really the only treatment that was thought to offer a cure. All I could think during that time was what if we lose her? What if I lose my sister? I didn't have an answer. Just this unbearable fear of what was to come, what life could be like without my sister.
I remember driving with my mother to the hospital. I asked her this question that I couldn't get out of my mind. I asked her, what if we lose her? And she answered something I have never forgotten.
She answered, then we will miss her very much. I've thought so much about those words over the years. It was the words, but also the way she said them.
So matter of fact, so stoic and brave without a tear, what she said was absolutely true without a doubt. And in those words, there was this incredible acceptance of the reality, what might be without a shred of the pain, or at least it seemed to me without a shred of the pain of that future, marring her present moment. If we lose her, we will miss her very much.
But she is here now. We don't have to miss her now. God, if we could all live our lives this way, fully present.
That's not to say that my mother wasn't going to do everything in her power to help my sister because she did. She gave up her job. She lived in the hospital with my sister for years, literally years.
She was an unwavering source of support for our entire family, but she refused to waste the precious present she had with my sister by worrying about a future outcome that thankfully never came to pass. In that moment, my sister was with us. She was fighting for her life and none of that was easy.
But the present moment included both the harsh reality of fighting cancer and beautiful, precious moments of just being together, of being present for each other, for just cherishing the time we had. I wish we didn't have to experience such awful periods of hardship to be present and appreciate the people in our lives. But sadly, sometimes it's these reminders that bring the importance of being present so much to light.
We typically spend so much of our emotional energy worried about the mere possibility of future pain or disaster, and all of this energy just brings pain to the current moment. And that's the tragedy because here we are, panicked that we'll somehow lose our future with the people we love. But meanwhile, we are literally squandering our present perfect moment with those same people, our children, our spouse, our parents.
So many of the things we worry about will never come to pass. And when it comes to death, here's the harsh reality, it absolutely will come to pass. All of us will die.
All of us. Of course, we want to delay the inevitable as long as possible. We're never ready to lose the people we love.
But when we worry for our kids or the people we love that something absolutely awful will happen, something that has such an infinitesimally small likelihood of happening, at least in the way we're imagining it, this disaster hasn't even happened and we're already in the pain of it. It's as if it's happening for us now in our minds, the horror of it. It's almost like we think it, so even just the thought seems important, as if our worry will somehow ward the danger away.
They say worry feels important. But I don't believe the danger is the kind of thing you can manifest unless just by thinking it, you somehow put yourself in actual harm's way. But it would be like thinking about an umbrella and bringing on the rain just by thinking about the umbrella.
If it rains and you thought about the umbrella, well, maybe it was just supposed to rain. When we die, it's not always up to us. If someone we love gets hurt, it almost doesn't matter anymore if it could have been prevented.
If something happens, we will then feel the pain of it and we will do what we need to do in the moment of it. But let's leave that pain in the future. There is no upside, literally no upside to holding on to that pain now.
When it comes to our children, we can create so much pain, worry, and anxiety in our present moment by imagining a terrible future. Look, sometimes our ability to project danger in the future helps us be prepared. We warn our kids about the dangers of drinking and driving.
We talk to them about safe sex. We tell them about the risks of taking drugs even one time. But then we send them out in the world and we're not sure that they listened or we're pretty sure that peer pressure or just the excitement of independence will make them a little less inclined to listen to our advice.
We might also be worried that they aren't going to be making friends in the world, that they'll be lonely or sad, that they'll be too stressed and not able to take on the pressure of school or a job without our support. Danger is everywhere. We can imagine it everywhere.
Eckhart Tolle says, realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. What is true in the present moment for you? Even as you worry about all of the what-ifs for yourself, for your children, for your family, close your eyes and ask yourself, what is true now? Right now, we have this perfect, precious moment where everything is exactly as it is. Maybe there's pain, maybe there's joy, but the reality of what exists right now is perfect exactly as it is.
And I'm willing to bet you know exactly what you need to do right now. And instead of investing energy in the what-ifs that bring you pain, can you invest energy in the what-ifs for yourself, for your children that make you smile? What if they have the time of their life? What if they discover a strength they didn't know they had? What if she falls in love? What if on the other side of this job, there's something even better waiting out there? What if after my children leave home, I have an incredible future waiting for me? What are the what-ifs, the imagined futures that will bring you joy, peace, hope, excitement, pride? What if it truly all turns out okay? So in my current precious moment, I think about my son being truly independent for the first time in his life. And I'm thinking, what if these are the most extraordinary six weeks of his life? What if he finds such power in his independence that he comes back having grown into even more of the man he is meant to be? What if all of this is perfect exactly the way it is? What if I could spend my life looking for how right now is perfect, rather than looking for all of the ways the future will be painful? What if? Until next time, friends.
Thanks for listening to The Small Jar Podcast. Please visit us at www.thesmalljar.com, follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Small Jar Coach, and subscribe to this podcast. Remember, you are the author of your story.
