Staying Strong When Anxiety Looms Large

It was bad enough when I was diagnosed with anxiety in 2010; I never once suspected that my daughter would also have it.

I honestly thought that it was something I could handle all on my own, and I was wrong. I thought I could deal with the sense that I needed to be super mom and pay bills and take care of all my job responsibilities while I was at it. I couldn't, and it resulted in me having massive panic attacks a couple of times.

Have you ever tried parenting when you're having a panic attack? Yes? It's not the most fun you've ever had, and when the kids are little, it's even worse.

I somehow managed to get through that and for almost seven years, was kept stable on medication and once it kicked in, it worked beautifully. I was evened out and felt like I could breathe for one of the first times in my life. Of course, I still had anxiety—life did continue—but it was like I had a buffer zone like I never had before, and it was pretty incredible, because I could think straight.

When my daughter was around 10, I got a report from her teacher that she had been struggling with focus issues in class and when my daughter actually came to me about a week later saying that she was having issues, we decided to explore what that meant.

Off we went for testing, which boiled down to a few weeks where we'd go see a psychometrist who asked her several questions with each visit and asked her to do a bunch of tasks. After a few weeks, we got a report—she had Generalized Anxiety Disorder, which might also have been compounded with ADHD, but there wasn't enough evidence, according to the report, to fully diagnose ADHD.

All of a sudden, I was in a situation where I had to be the role model for how to deal with anxiety and I was scared. It's one thing to be a role model; as a teacher and a mom, I know I'm very much under the microscope. However, when you have a mental health challenge and you're trying to illustrate to your young daughter that anxiety can't hold you back from life, that's a lot of pressure.

There have been days where we have come to shouting matches about me trying to "push" her onward into new activities and events, but we've both learned how to discuss these; sometimes we go for a long walk or drive, or we spar (we do karate together, and she's 5'9" tall, so we're reasonably evenly matched) to blow off steam, or we go for ice cream. Once we're calm, we talk and find a middle ground.

It's not always easy to stay strong in the midst of having anxiety, and there are days where frankly, I simply feel like running away from home. There's no two ways about it; raising kids is hard enough, but trying to raise them in today's 21st century world adds significant challenges that our predecessors would never have considered even a decade or 15 years ago. In today's charged climate where today's generation is far more informed about what's happening in the world than we ever were back in the 1980s, kids are getting seriously freaked out, and as both a teacher and a parent, I can't help but be freaked out for them. The world that this generation of kids is set to inherit is full of perils that we would have never considered when some of us were kids. That's fuelling a lot of the anxiety that's happening now.

As a teacher and a parent myself, I get it. I'm fielding questions, both from my own kids and my students, about some of the stuff going on in the world today, and this generation of students is getting increasingly worried. However, I have to teach the kids that are watching me, and that includes my own kids, that we can live with anxiety that flares on occasion when things seem bad in the world—whether they perceive that world as highly individualized, as in self-contained in their homes, or as part of a global perspective.

It is possible to stay strong with anxiety, but you do have to make the choice to own it.