The Anxiety Alphabet I Wrote for My Son
A is for afraid, B is for breathe, we authored his calm together.
My son's fear kept office hours: 7:40 on school mornings, at the shoe rack, with the left shoe always half on.
He was seven. The stomachaches started in June and the pediatrician found nothing, twice. She was kind about it. She used the phrase 'school refusal' the way you might hand someone a heavy parcel, carefully, watching their arms. The child psychologist she recommended had a waitlist of four months. Fear, it turns out, does not take a token and sit in the queue.
The nights were the worst part, because at night he asked his questions... What if you forget to pick me up. What if the fire alarm rings and I'm in the toilet. What if I vomit in assembly and everyone remembers it forever. I answered every one with logic, and I learned what every parent of an anxious child learns: logic against fear is a man explaining rain to a river.
The alphabet started on the back of an electricity bill.
It was almost eleven on a Tuesday and he was still awake, doing his spiral about the fire alarm, and I was out of reassurances. So instead of answering the fear, out of pure exhaustion, I wrote: A is for Afraid, which everyone is sometimes, even Papa, especially Papa. I read it to him. He looked at me with suspicion... checking whether this was a trick to make him sleep. Then I wrote: B is for Breathe, four counts in through the nose like you're smelling dosa, four counts out like you're cooling it.
He said, 'What's C?'
You have to understand, this was the first question in weeks that wasn't a what if.
I nearly wept over the electricity bill.
C, we decided together, is for Counting five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can touch. D is for Don't have to be fixed today. E is for Everyone's brain has a smoke alarm, and his is a very good one, so good it goes off for toast.
That toast line did more work in our house than any doctor. For months afterward, mid panic, one of us would say 'toast?' and he would do a wet little laugh through the tears and say 'toast,' and we could begin.
F is for False alarm. G is for the Growl in your stomach, which is fear wearing a costume. H is for Hand, meaning mine, meaning available.
It became a real book, in the way that stapled printer paper becomes real when a child illustrates it. He drew the smoke alarm with a face. He drew the toast looking guilty. We wrote at night, one letter at a time, never more, because scarcity kept it precious.
I threw away my first drafts of almost every letter. Everything I wrote as a lecture died on the page, and everything I wrote plainly, at his eye level, lived. The whole project was, I understood much later, a prompt: give the fear a letter, and the letter gives you somewhere to stand.
I thought I was writing it for him.
That lasted until the letter W.
I found W on his desk on a Sunday evening, in his handwriting, which at seven was a fence in a storm. It said: W is for When you worry too. I can tell becos your voice goes fast.
I stood in his room holding that page for a long time.
Because my voice does go fast. It goes fast at the shoe rack at 7:40 while I am performing calm, and performance, I learned from a seven year old, is deafening to an anxious child. He had been reading me the entire time, the way children read us... fluently, without mercy, without judgment.
My own smoke alarm goes off for toast too. It always has. I had simply been hiding the ringing, and he could hear it anyway, and my hiding was teaching him that fear is a thing to hide.
So I stopped hiding it.
This was the actual turn in our house, more than any letter.
I started saying mine out loud at the kitchen table: my chest is tight about a work call, I'm going to do B. And I would sit there and audibly smell the imaginary dosa, feeling ridiculous, while my son watched his father be afraid and survive it. Some mornings he did B with me out of solidarity. Helping a child with anxiety, nobody tells you, is mostly letting the child catch you helping yourself.
Courage in a seven year old does not look like a lion. It looks like shoes going on very slowly, and going on anyway.
I will not pretend the alphabet cured him. The waitlist ended, the psychologist was excellent, and she deserves half the credit and takes none of it. She read our stapled book in her office, cover to cover, while he narrated the illustrations, and then she said, 'Keep going. You're already doing the homework I assign.' There were still hard mornings. There was a fire drill in November that undid three weeks of progress in ninety seconds. Healing is not a staircase, it is a shoe rack, and some days the left shoe just takes longer. When I eventually wrote about that year, it came out as something between an instruction manual and a love letter, and I filed it in my head where poems about love and healing live, because I could not tell the two apart anymore.
The letter X stayed empty for months. We tried X-ray, xylophone, all the dictionary's leftovers, and he rejected each one with the seriousness of an editor. Then one night he closed the book and said, 'Leave it. X is for the days we don't have a word yet.'
Seven years old. I wrote it down exactly as he said it, and I have written very few better sentences myself.
The book lives in the front pocket of his backpack now, dog eared, the staples rusting, the toast still guilty. He is nine and he does not need it most days... which is the point of every book we make for our children.
But last month there was a hard morning, a maths test morning, and I was hurrying him, and my voice was doing the thing. He stopped at the shoe rack, left shoe half on, and looked up at me, and instead of crying he said, 'Papa. Do B. Your voice is fast.'
So we stood in the doorway and did B together, four counts in, four counts out, two sensitive smoke alarms in a small hallway, learning, together, the harmless smell of toast.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.