Parental anxiety: Why worrying will get you only so far

Doomscrolling might be a fun way to avoid sleeping, but it's no use in a crisis.

OPINION

It was nearly midnight on a Friday and I was lying in bed, online shopping in a futile attempt to ease the anxiety that had accumulated over the hours I’d just spent doomscrolling, when my wife’s phone rang.

I stopped breathing because I knew both from experience and many, many nightmares that the phones ring at that hour of the night only when someone has died. I immediately ran through the most likely possibilities and even started grieving some of them before my wife said: “Hi [name of parent who was hosting our daughter at a sleepover]” and my body flooded with relief. We had been anticipating the sleepover failure and resulting phone call at some point, this being our daughter’s first attempt at it, but what with all the doomscrolling and shopping, I’d completely forgotten about it.

My wife offered to go pick her up, but my body was so flooded with adrenaline and cortisol from the doomscrolling and phone call, I couldn’t have stayed in bed even if I’d wanted to. I was so full of stress hormone I could easily have run the two or three kilometres to the sleepover and back again.

Driving through the quiet, suburban streets, I quietly told my mind and body to embrace the calm of the night, but of course, my mind and body weren’t interested in doing that. I tried yelling at them, but that didn’t work either.

I drove down a long right of way, at the end of which was a cluster of houses. I had been there once before, but that had been during the daytime and was more than a year ago. Now, in my befuddled state, in the dark, it could have been any one of about five houses. I wandered around, hoping something would spark my memory, but nothing did. I was lost in the dark down a right of way at midnight on a Friday. I had a feeling something terrible was going to happen.

Anxiety gets a bad rap for wreaking havoc on your wellbeing but it rarely gets the credit it deserves for making the imagined threats you’re being so irrationally vigilant about less likely to eventuate. I began to imagine someone from one of the neighbouring houses taking me for a burglar and shooting me to death in a vigilante killing, then claiming self-defence. I knew I couldn’t put my family through that, so I put aside my fear of my wife and woke her with a phone call for the second time in 20 minutes. With her begrudging help and the use of Facetime, I eventually found the right house.

My daughter was happy to see me and the parent who had been hosting her was kind and polite about the whole situation and I felt my anxiety ease: The worst would not happen, as it usually didn’t.

The problem with letting your guard down is that life is always waiting. As my daughter and I walked down the darkened driveway to the car, I suddenly realised the ground was not where I expected it to be and my right foot was now well below the point at which my left had been stopped by solid concrete only a split second before. I was, I understood, stepping into quite a deep hole.

I lost balance, stumbled and, as my jandal-clad foot made contact with the bottom of the hole, I felt my toes bending back at an unnatural angle, followed by a searing pain that made me cry out in the night, like a burglar being shot by an over-vigliant homeowner.

“Oh!” My daughter cried out in the night. “Are you alright, Daddy?!”

She was obviously very worried, and I was touched by that, but hated the thought of her worrying about me, so I said, “Yes, darling, I’m fine”, even though I could barely walk.

As we drove home, we chatted happily about what she’d been doing at the sleepover and stuff like that. She was obviously relieved to be returning to the place she felt safest. It was a lovely feeling and I didn’t worry about the pain in my toe, or anything else, until the next morning when x-rays revealed I had broken it, and would be forced to work from home, in the company of my three children, for the entire second week of the school holidays.