There is little need for a therapist when you have a three-year-old and a five-year-old asking you probing questions and analyzing your thoughts.
“Mom, do you have an-ziety?” Katherine asked me the other day on the way to the pool. A few minutes earlier, I had reached down into my pocket, and when I discovered that I didn’t have a pen (I ALWAYS have a pen), I panicked, and turned the stroller around to go home and get a pen (OCD?).
“Anxiety? Do I have anxiety?”
“Yeah, do you have an-ziety?”
“Um. I do have a little bit of anxiety right now. How could you tell?”
“Because you’re brave and ticklish.”

Huh, I thought. Maybe she means I’m brave to confront my feelings head-on instead of chugging down a liter of vodka, or eating my problems away with three pints of Ben & Jerry’s. And I suppose being ticklish is like being too sensitive, which contributes to my anxiety.

“And because you have poop on your head,” Katherine added.
Ah yes, she’s referring to the crap I’m presently sorting through in my brain.
I’ve been in therapy long enough to identify my two greatest fears: of my marriage failing, and of being a bad mother. When anything or anyone touches one of those two fears in the slightest way, even with a feather, my amygdala, the brain’s fear center, automatically posts signs “Toga party tonight! Everyone welcome.”
With enough therapy I can trace the fear trigger–what comment or e-mail or piece of news, in particular, pressed Amy’s (that’s what I call my amydgala) button, what idiot gave her the girl Viagra that has her going ape (we do have monkey brains after all) in my noggin.
Two hours before Katherine told me I had poop on my head, we were visiting a friend. When she started to act up, he told me to never, ever give in to a child, that if I did, I would create a monster of a teenager, and that a parent cannot raise kids with sympathy.
I’m still too much of a people-pleaser to have recognized a boundary was crossed, and told him that I choose to parent in my own style, and that I’m not completely responsible for the way she turns out, that she is her own person.
I thought of all that later, of course, like an hour later, when I got really pissed. (This is progress. Two years ago it would have taken me days to get to the fear trigger.)
It reminded me of the afternoon a year or so ago that a good friend confided in me about the problems she was having in her marriage.
“You feel that way too, don’t you?” she asked me.
Wanting to console her and to people-please, I didn’t say anything. But I should have. I should have said, “No, actually, I don’t feel that way. Eric is a very supportive husband and I appreciate that about him. But I feel badly for you.”
Because by absorbing her problems, I made them mine. I started to doubt my relationship, when, in reality, her problems didn’t have anything to do with mine. She had just triggered my Amy button, that’s all.
My other therapist in the house, David, wrapped up the counseling session that day at the pool with this assessment: “Mom, why do you worry about the happy stuff?”
Bingo. My marriage. My kids. It’s happy stuff. Even if it all gets hit with poop once in a while.