by Tara Shafer posted in Parenting

In the last year I have experienced anxiety at a level I have not experienced in years. I'm used to white-knuckling things. It was becoming difficult though, to do that. While my anxiety is partly rooted in baby loss, many people who parent bring with them a complex history of loss that is either ambiguous or real.
I remember reading an article somewhere in which a doctor said if you weren?t suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, you were suffering from pre-traumatic stress disorder. This, I think is correct. Because life is both wonderful -- and also hard.
I saw my doctor who gently asked me why I was white-knuckling it. ?Why don?t we get to the bottom of your post-traumatic stress disorder"? she asked. If I?m being honest, I?ll just go ahead and confess that I have, at different times in my life, had bouts with severe depression. I am not ashamed of that. When I lost a child, I was walloped by grief. Anxiety set in as one part of post-traumatic stress disorder. I understand my response to these things -- they make sense to me. In fact, I really wouldn?t have it any other way. My grief is a natural outgrowth of life and of loss and to deny that is to diminish myself.

Still, I found myself beginning to reach a breaking point. I often listened to music and cried in the car when I was alone. I felt less able to parent my children, overwhelmed at the effort. I had way too much to do. And the evolving political world felt so we...