Birthmarks and Breakdowns: A Raw Look at Maternal Anxiety
I remember winters in the mountains. We always went to see the snow when December came around. There were winters with Godfamily, and winters with our family of four. Later, there were winters with just Michael and me. For now, though, a winter in 2008.
The storm had picked up, leaving our caravan of minivans at a near-standstill on the highway up the coast. The rain fell in such torrents that we could hardly see two feet out the window–just a foggy, distortion of the outside world from the comfort of the heated interior of the car.
Then there was another winter in 2015, another storm. On the mountainside, a snow chain had somehow fallen off one of the tires, so the men ventured out into the blinding snowfall to look for it.
I remember fear blossoming in my chest as my mom noted, with rising panic, how long it had been since they left the safety of the car. Each minute started to feel like an hour, as rangers yelled at us that we couldn’t stop on such a narrow stretch of road, and when my mom yelled back over the storm that our husbands had gone out to look for our fallen snow chain, they gaped at her in disbelief.
“There’s no finding a snow chain in all this snow!”
The unspoken? Y’all are a crazy bunch to let your family members leave the car and do battle with Mother Nature.
As my mother continued to ask in anxious tones, “Where could they be? We never should have let them go. Why aren’t they back yet?” my own mind jumped to what life would be like as a widow at 25.
Dramatic, I know, but can you blame me?
My therapist says I have a severe case of catastrophic thinking. Well, I could have told you that. At any minor setback, my brain somehow determines it’s the literal end of the world, and I start jumping through the mental hoops of how I’m going to cope with it.
On October 20, 2023, I noticed the bruise-like pigmentation on my daughter’s skin had not faded since I first noticed them a couple weeks prior. They spread like ink blots across her shoulders, back, and ankle. Strange, I thought, but possibly nothing to worry about. Still, I wanted to make sure.
Without thinking too much about it, I took a couple photos, wrote a message to her doctor asking if these seemed like bruises and whether or not I should be concerned, then sent it off.
An hour later when the nurse called in response to that message, I’d already forgotten I sent it.
I stood in the kitchen, the baby napping in our bedroom along with my husband, as the nurse asked a series of routine questions about how long it had been since I noticed the supposed bruises (possibly after her last pediatric appointment more than two weeks earlier), whether or not they had changed in shape or colour (perhaps the one on her shoulder had gotten a little bigger, maybe), if the baby had had any changes in behaviour, sleep, or eating habits (no).
At the end of the call, she advised me to take my baby to urgent care right away, adding in her notes that “baby seems very sick and weak.”
Cue: panic.
From urgent care, I was sent to Rady’s emergency department to get a full blood work-up, skeletal x-ray, and CT scan.
While waiting for a room to be made available, I paced back and forth outside the emergency room entrance.
“What if she has cancer?” I thought and asked over and over to my husband and myself.
“She’s going to die.”
“If she dies, I will die.”
My mind raced through these three thoughts on a loop, each step pushing the belief of impending loss deeper into me.
Looking back, this all seems ridiculous, but of course, I couldn’t have known that at the time.
Through a nightmare of an emergency room visit, during which my four-month-old baby was poked and prodded multiple times (ironically causing actual bruises) because no one seemed able to locate her tiny veins, I started to regret acting on my own paranoia and listening to the “professionals,” as tears streamed down my face from seeing my child screaming in pain and fear, and I, helpless to stop it.
Eventually, the bloodwork results started coming back normal, and my fear began to subside.
As you might have deduced, I was not widowed at 25, and my daughter does not have terminal cancer.
Two weeks later at a follow-up evaluation, we learned that birthmarks don’t always appear at birth, and sometimes peak around 4-5 months. In fact, more marks may continue to pop up over the next few months before gradually fading away.
So yes, I put myself and my family through a twelve-hour hospital visit, intense scrutiny from Child Protective Services, and two weeks of heightened anxiety … over birthmarks.
I’d like to say my catastrophic thinking days are over after this experience, but the other day, my five-year-old said he wanted to help with house chores so he could be a “good boy,” and I immediately started thinking about which therapists I could take him to and whether or not his sense of self-worth was permanently damaged.
As Michael likes to say frequently, “My Love, you need to relax.”
“You say that like it’s so easy,” I usually retort.
He’s not wrong, though.
If I have learned anything from these incidents, it is that even though the worst could happen, it doesn’t always happen.
Which may not be all that comforting in the middle of it, but at least I have a few examples I can now look back on to point to when my anxiety shows up with torches and arrows to do battle on my senses.
Winter is coming, but then it will give way to spring, then summer, then autumn. And then it will come again. Both in 2008 and 2015, we made it to the safety of our hotel rooms without any deaths, and the storms eventually subsided.
So also will the storms I always think will bury me come to an end. They ebb and flow like the seasons, predictable only in their unpredictability.
Yet unlike them, I am still standing.