Anxiety

The other night at about 4 a.m., I woke up and began to worry.   Was I worried about terrorism?   Our lack of an exit strategy in Iraq?   The upcoming crash in the oil supply?   The declining state of the American economy?   Bush's Supreme Court pick?   Was I simply trying to wrap my mind around the intricacies of the Karl Rove-CIA-leak story?

No--those would all have been rational things to feel anxious about.   Instead, I was tossing and turning because my daughter Hortense was on a train.   Specifically, she was on a train to Madrid, almost a year and a half after the bombings there and several weeks after the bombings in London.   That one's chances of being killed in a terrorist attack are far lower than the chances of being killed by falling off a ladder -1 made no difference to my anxiety level. When a parent goes into worry mode, rationality plays little part.   If our fears were based on reason, we would be paralyzed with terror every time we got into a motor vehicle.  

But parental anxiety is not logical--it is the deranged instinct of the mother grizzly bear.   As I lay in bed fruitlessly counting backwards from 1,000 by threes (this usually works), all I could think about was how much I love Hortense, how if anything ever happened to her I would die, and how terrible it is to care that much about anyone.

Prior to her train ride, Hortense had phoned me from Barcelona.   Though her friends think this is weird, she is very good about checking in with me because she knows how I am, and that parents' imaginations can take them from mild concern to total freakout in seconds.   She's aware of the phenomenon all parents experience of Seeing The Headlines, so she humors me.   On the phone, she was telling me about the fabulous dinner she'd had the night before, which seemed to involve ironing a tomato (unless I misheard her) and sangria, when suddenly I heard one of her angry squeals, the sort she generally emits when the cable goes out in the middle of a new episode of DeGrassi -2.   It turned out that some passing garbage men had somehow managed to splash her legs with a putrid substance.   She hung up in a state of indignation, muttering, "I'll call you from Madrid."

The day before that, she had called my cellphone as I stood in line at the mall.   She was crying.   It was unbearably hot in Barcelona, she said, and she had a bad headache.   She had taken some Advil, but it hadn't helped.   "I want to come home," she said, adding, "and live there forever and ever."  

Between her graduation from college and her departure for Europe, where she is planning to stay indefinitely, she and I had spent a halcyon time together recreating her childhood, or perhaps, the childhood she would have had if I had not been a working single parent.   We went everywhere together.   I cooked her foods she liked.   We played board games.   We went to the zoo.   I got hooked on DeGrassi with her (and so did my husband--I think he's still watching it).   One day, we painted glass bowls from a kit someone had given us years before.   "I'm your little sidekick," she said to me as we drove to my office, where we spent the day together; I worked and she read online celebrity gossip, which was all she had been interested in since burning her brain cells out on her senior thesis.   Every so often, she'd update me on the latest news of Tomkat or Brangelina.   It was the perfect existence for both of us.

Then, suddenly, I was lying awake and wondering where she was.

Finally, I gave up on sleep entirely and went downstairs.   I lay on the couch, right next to the phone and closed my eyes for a little while.   Hours later, she called me from Madrid.   The train ride had been fabulous, she said.   The only ticket she could get was in First Class; waiters had brought her food and wine the whole time and had given her headphones so she could watch the movie.   "There was a movie?" I asked.   Somehow I'd been picturing old-fashioned trains, like in the Hemingway story, "Hills Like White Elephants," where a couple had waited for a train in the scorching sun somewhere between Madrid and Barcelona.  

"Of course," she said.  

Madrid, she said, was fantastic, and she had bought a great dress for only fifteen Euros.   "It's the kind of dress I'll have all my life," she said, knowing that I was about to ask how she thought she could afford clothing.   She was in the middle of a sentence when her phone card ran out.

I stood in my kitchen, holding my cell phone and looking at all the boxes of cereal she had not closed properly.   When you poured cereal from any of them, moths flew into the air.   There had been no talk of her coming home this time.   The rational parts of me were happy for her; they think living in Europe is a wonderful opportunity, blah blah blah.

But the mother grizzly bear parts would be a lot happier if she were asleep in the room next to me right now, a room I can hardly stand to go into because it makes me miss her.   Those bear parts want to hear her whiny little voice calling "Mooooommmmm!" while I try to write.   But she's probably at the Prado right now, and I hope she's having a great time.   She'll probably call me from Madrid a few more times to tell me about all the wonderful things she's seen--or crying; you never know with Hortense.

So now that I don't have to worry about her, for the moment, I can worry instead about the war in Iraq, global warming, and the Supreme Court.   There is so much to be anxious about in this world that we hardly have time for it all, so we have to make time in the middle of the night.   Often in the past when I have written about various sins, I have advised people against them, but in this interesting time, the sin of anxiety seems appropriate, and as I lie awake tossing and turning, I know a lot of other people are tossing and turning, too.   George W. Bush is in the White House, sleeping like a baby, but the rest of us are staring at the ceiling and waiting for a glimmer of sunrise.