Tag: children
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Happy Father’s Day
We are clearly in a season of parenting that is h-a-r-d. Parenting one child battling anxiety and panic, while also trying to meet the needs of a “typical” child. This is the part that nobody warned us about. This is the part we couldn’t have even imagined. This is the part where there are more…
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The Day My Son Discovered My Blog
A few weeks ago, I was honored to have a piece I wrote for the blog about the realities of anxiety and panic attacks in children, republished on the incredible website The Mighty**. The day it was published, I forgot to click off the web page and my son found the article up on my computer. And he…
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The Cheese(s) Stand Alone
This morning was the annual volunteer breakfast at the elementary school. The teachers and staff do an amazing job of putting together a morning of food, goodies and performances from the students. I went into the morning expecting to see my daughter play a flute duet with a friend, and hopeful that my son would…
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It’s Not a Phase…and 4 Other Things I Want People To Know About My Son’s Anxiety and Panic
I get it. People mean well. They are trying to be sympathetic and make us all feel better. Anxiety disorder and panic disorder are big, scary, frightening ideas. Nobody wants to know that somebody they know is struggling with something like anxiety and panic, especially not when that somebody is a child. So out of a desire…
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Letting Go to Hold On
This week has been hard. Most weeks are hard lately, but this week was hard in a different sort of way as I painfully let go of something I loved, in order to hold on tighter to the people I love. I believe deeply that we all have an obligation to do as much as we…
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Between a Rock & a Hard Place
Parenting a child struggling with anxiety and panic is the personification of stuck between a rock and a hard place. Our days are marked not by hours, but by the spaces between anxiety fueled outbursts or shutdowns and panic attacks. We have very little control over the “rock” or “hard place” moments. But I’m beginning…
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Why Our Story, Isn’t Just “Our” Story
My intelligent, compassionate, musically gifted, goofy 10-year-old son has a level 1 autism spectrum disorder, and has recently been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and a panic disorder. As parents, we knew there was something wrong almost 2 years ago. We consulted various specialists, consented to a variety of tests and assessments, and our son has…
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It Might Be Time for a Dream Catcher
When I was 11, my grandfather had a brain aneurysm rupture. He was hospitalized for days before he died. The entire time he was in the hospital, I had a horrible dream each night that a masked man with a gun was threatening to shoot every person in my extended family. That dream was my adolescent brain’s…
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“You’re Okay. You’re Okay. You’re Okay.”
Mother’s Day 2016 I woke up this morning at the LA Zoo with my daughter, the 10 other girls in her Brownie troop, and 3 other mothers. We had a troop sleepover at the zoo on Saturday night. Not a traditional start to a Mother’s Day, but even with a body sore from sleeping on…
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The “Name” I Don’t Want to See on Caller ID
My cell phone rang a couple of hours ago. I glanced down to see who was calling, and felt a pit in my stomach when I saw the call was from my kids’ school. In the past the first thought would have been, “I wonder which one of them is sick.” Today my first thought…
We're All A Little Broken 