Don't Waterbury

As I sit here on the 23rd anniversary of 9/11, the day after the first debate leading up to the election, I’m experiencing a niggling sense of anxious worry. Of course, this is nothing new. I often wake in the middle of the night (as menopausal women do) and my mind spins around worrisome thoughts about my family, my life, things that haven’t happened, but might, how I might prevent those things from happening (spoiler alert - I can’t). The specific topics rotate, as if my amygdala is shuffling cards every night and pulling out a random issue to focus on for the evening. When these feelings start to overwhelm me, I am reminded of something my Ukrainian immigrant father used to say: “don’t Waterbury.”  His command of the English language was never great. He was trying to say “don’t worry” and Waterbury is a town in Connecticut near where I grew up. Close enough - we got the gist.

Don’t worry about things you can’t control (which is most things). Everything has a way of working itself out. Said a little more elegantly by Corrie ten Boom, worry doesn’t empty tomorrow of its troubles, it empties today of its strength.

A few weeks ago, during the waning days of summer, I was on an early evening walk in my neighborhood and a memory came to me, unbidden. It was August 2020, around the same time of day. I was walking in our neighborhood, sobbing. My son, a rising senior in high school at that time, was inside our house a few blocks behind me, bereft. He had been studying for the SAT exam for years and, because of the pandemic, it had been canceled. Again. This was not the first, second or even fifth canceled test. Earlier that year, on March 14th, the day New York City officially shut down because of Covid 19, he had stepped out of a taxi with his Dad and approached the big public high school building where the test was to be administered, only to find a yellow sticky note on the door that said “SAT canceled” (and canceled was spelled incorrectly). From that moment on, for several months, he (and I) were living in some particularly cruel version of Groundhog Day. He would register for a test location, the College Board would take our money, then it would cancel the test about a week before it was scheduled, but not within the timeframe that would allow us to find another location. He was simply out of luck, over and over again.

On that walk, as dusk descended, I was crying on the phone to my dear friend Steff. She was saying all of the right things to support me (as she always does, as good friends always do). Things will work out somehow, everything will be OK. She was saying the things I would have said to her if our roles were reversed. Of course, she was right. In that moment, I didn’t believe her.

The feeling that haunts me from that walk four years ago is how big and horrible everything seemed (and was), the crushing worry. Lo and behold, four years later, I can acknowledge that everything actually DID work out. My son managed to take the SAT - twice, in fact, although not without a herculean effort - and got the score he needed to get into college. He begins his senior year in a few weeks. Steff (and my husband, and many other people) reassured me that everything would be OK, and that worrying about it would not change the outcome anyway. I knew instinctively that this was not the end of the world, and that there were much more important, more horrifying things happening, even at that very moment. But I couldn’t help myself. The worry, the feeling of helplessness, was overwhelming. 

The impulse to catastrophize is strong when things go south. It’s hard to constantly look on the bright side, to compartmentalize the feelings of worry and despair. It’s even harder to be a parent and caregiver who is asked to do this repeatedly, swallowing my own fears and anxiety to console and counsel one of my beloved people. The emotional labor of this is exhausting. Fake it ‘till you make it can only get you so far.

So how to overcome the “waterbury?” Perhaps it’s small things, tiny sparks of light and comfort. A kind word from a stranger. Reading a good book. Cooking a nourishing meal. An unexpected note from a friend checking in. Helping someone else in their time of need (probably the best way to get out of your own head: keeping eyes, ears, hearts and minds open to the needs of others). Laughing with friends. Or, as I did this morning on this sad anniversary, noticing the bright blue cloudless sky and the warm sun on my face.

During a particularly challenging few days last month, I was texting with my older daughter, a young adult now, and she validated my feelings of worry and then wrote, “it’s going to be OK, Mama.” To see those words - words that I had spoken to her and her siblings countless times over the years - parroted back to me felt like a turning point. Of course it was going to be OK. Or it wasn’t, and we would figure it out. Her confidence in saying that to me was significant. Somehow I had imparted to her a lesson that I myself needed that day: worrying about the future only saps you of your joy today. Life is hard, bad things happen, we have no control, really. All we can do is reframe, stay hopeful, keep going. Overwhelm the waterbury with joy.