H

H is for Henry, my son. Anxiety nearly stopped me from meeting him.

A for Anxiety is a weekly publication that takes an alphabetical journey through my life with anxiety.

Let me tell you a little about Henry.

Henry is two and a half. He has beautiful blue eyes, blonde hair and the belly laugh of an old, drunk man.

His eyelashes are the longest I’ve ever seen.

He calls butterflies ‘futterfies’, loves tractors and thinks deeply about everything.

Recently, when he saw an acorn fall from a tree onto the road, he spent the next couple of days asking what had happened to it. Was it OK? Had it been squashed? Did it need its mummy and daddy?

Like me, Henry feels everything deeply.

He is, after all, my son - my universe.

Yet, thanks to anxiety, I came close to not meeting him. To never experiencing that entire galaxy of love vibrating within his tiny body.

Anxiety nearly stopped me from meeting my Northern Star.

Life Before Henry (BH)

For most of my life, I always presumed I’d have kids.

It wasn’t a conscious decision, more an assumption. One stored within that identikit blueprint that’s issued at the birth of most females. According to its plans, I’d go to school, then university, get a job, meet a guy and start a family.

It seemed so obvious, so evident, that I never questioned it.

I spent my younger years creating a variety of dry-run families.

Firstly with dolls, and then by cutting out models from the Freemans catalogue. I’d stick the figures onto a piece of paper: always a smiling mum, a handsome dad and two kids. I’d give them names, including (for reasons I still can’t explain) a Mum called Tracy.

Next up, and thanks to the dawn of EA Games, my apprenticeship in family life extended to the digital world. Herald, The Sims.

While my friends played this game pretty similarly - using the ‘cheat’ code to get rich quick (always buying that lime green sofa in the process) - I instead forced my depleted Sim folk to reproduce.

Furiously so.

I remember one family who, over the course of a couple of weeks, had 9 children.

Initially, all was OK. They had a big house, enjoyed late night parties and knew how to make Lobster Thermidor.

But then, red flags began to appear.

The mother kept peeing on the floor and stopped showering. At night, I noticed she wandered the nearby graveyard, crying.

The thought bubbles above her head - that the house was dirty, that she was hungry or lonely, her anguish that fridge was empty (again) - multiplied.

On reflection, her mental load was obviously crippling.

Eventually, Tracy died of exhaustion. She crumpled up on the floor next to her family as they complained about being hungry.

I remember pausing and thinking how unfair I’d been on Trace. On reflection, perhaps she’d deserved more - the opportunity to get a job, or work on her art skills. Maybe she’d have liked to have hung out with Mortimer Goth.

Fleetingly, it all seemed quite sad.

I then deleted the family and started again.

Tracy VIII incoming.

My Twenties and Early Thirties

After a couple of years of submitting my virtual families to domestic slavery, I glided onwards towards adult life.

During this time, the assumption of children remained on the horizon - although I wasn't quite sure when.

I was always waiting for a more mature version of myself to appear. I was confident that I would, at some point, wake up one morning with child-bearing hips, a no-nonsense approach to life and an unshakeable air of competence.

Except, this version of myself never appeared. If anything, I regressed - feeling less and less component as the years went by.

In my twenties, my anxiety really found its stride; tackling me to the ground when I was about 24. It floored me and stripped me of my confidence. If I couldn’t look after myself, how would I be able to look after anyone else?

It’s then that a seed - small and fragile - took root at the back of my mind.

Maybe I wasn’t strong enough to be a parent. Perhaps I wasn’t good enough to be a mum.

It’s a thought that I quickly pushed to the back of my mind and heaped with soil.

I moved forwards and tried not to look back.

When My Life Changed: The Blog

A year or so later my anxiety began to improve. Fuelled by a desperation to claw back the time I’d lost to poor mental health, I decided to do the obvious thing.

I’d relaunch my life and undertake an entire personal rebrand.

Like P Diddy or Gerri Halliwell when she went posh.

I’d always loved photography and, captivated by the solo female travellers that were starting to fill an infant Instagram platform (this was 2014), I suggested to my sister that we start a travel blog.

On reflection, I’ve no idea why.

The last thing I wanted to do was travel. I was barely making it out of the perimeters of my own town alive. I’d sooner have assumed the life of Tracy The Sim than put myself through a flight.

Yet, for whatever reason - we pursued the idea. We set up an Instagram account and blog, and began to post pictures from old holidays.

In some bizarre twist of fate, however, the blog did quite well. In fact, within a year we had nearly 50,000 followers and our blog was receiving good traffic.

Before we knew it, we were being invited on press trips and were creating content for brands and destinations across the world.

Within two years, we’d both quit our jobs and were working full time on the blog.

Of course, during this time my anxiety was still alive and well. Each trip tested my mettle and I regularly had intense panic before and during trips. Yet, I marched on - determined that my anxiety come along for the ride.

From LA to Abu Dhabi, the Faroe Islands to Seattle, I explored the world with a potent blend of unfettered freedom and reliable panic. At times it felt hard, but it was always worth it.

My life felt exponentially bigger and for the first time in a long time, unrestricted.

And so life continued like this - a privileged, free and spontaneous sort of life. It was one dedicated wholly to filling my own cup, to pursing my own dreams and living life on my terms.

Suddenly, life no longer felt scary.

It felt great.

A Threat to Life

It’s around this time that my anxiety began to mount a new campaign.

Suddenly aware that I was living a life I quite enjoyed, it set about furiously identifying anything that might threaten this happiness. It was like a pack of guard dogs prowling a perimeter.

It wasn’t long before they’d spotted their target.

At the time I’d just turned 30. Our business was booming and invitations for brand campaigns and international trips were filling our inbox.

Of course, and so is life for a woman, it’s also around this time that societal expectations and questions from family members began to escalate.

‘Will you be starting a family soon?’ people asked. ‘You should think about trying - you won’t know how long it’ll take’.

‘Your mother would love a grandchild!’ my Dad regularly declared.

And so it went on, a rising pressure of obligation and expectation filling my days and nights.

I’d finally constructed a life I was enjoying and now I was being asked to change, alter - or possibly even dismantle - it.

The idea was overwhelming and terrifying. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t stop ruminating about this life changing decision.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Tracy the dead Sim.

Somewhere in the background, that small seed of doubt - that little husk of insecurity I’d hidden all those years ago - began to blossom.

‘You can’t even look after yourself’, it whispered.

Sensing my rising panic, my anxiety was quick to act. It threw me off the steering wheel and quickly assumed control. Throwing on its bullet proof vest it called it in: the threat to my happy life now finally identified and verified.

Prowling the pathways of my brain it set about capturing the culprit - cornering it somewhere in my frontal lobe.

And its identity?

A tiny, little baby.

Anxiety About Motherhood

Unable to deal with the tsunami of fear I felt when I thought about having a baby, it wasn’t long before I decided to follow anxiety’s lead.

Being defensive seemed much more appealing than being vulnerable. Maybe making babies Enemy Number 1 was the safest way to go.

‘Who would want children?’ I began to ask. ‘Are any parents truly happy?’

I came across Instagram accounts dedicated to ‘honest’ mothering; reels of new mums crying into the heads of their newborns. They seemed overwhelmed by the weight of responsibility on their shoulders and, in short, sad.

‘Who would want that?’ I asked myself - my heart rate rising each time I saw a tear-streaked face.

As the years passed, I tried to stick to this new, hardened manifesto.

When it came to the topic of whether or not I was having a child, I now read from a new play book. Something that probably sounded a little bit like a Communist Manifesto - cold and divisive.

Rather than leaning into whatever I was feeling, I found it easier to adopt an ‘us and them’ approach to reproduction. I decided to view parents and non-parents as two opposing camps.

I’d speak with other ‘child free’ people I met on my travels; seeking reassurance that our camp was the right one to be in. ‘It’s more liberating here, isn’t it?’ I’d ask. ‘More enriching?’

‘The grass is greener here, right?’, I’d plead - as I gazed across to the parenting camp.

As far as I could tell, that camp looked terrifying. One full of sacrifice and monotony. Vomit and poo.

This camp, by comparison, felt calm and clean. A place free from responsibility and judgement. Hunkering down, I dug my heels into this child-free camp.

Those terrifying, tiny babies, couldn’t get me here.

The Other Side

Of course, and in March 2020, my life - along with the rest of the world’s - changed.

Covid swept the earth and with it, our lives and airspaces closed.

Suddenly, any trips I had coming up - Mauritius, Jordan and Canada - were cancelled and my life was reduced to just my home.

The vast plains of the green, liberated child-free camp were suddenly fenced in.

Pacing the shrunken perimeters of my life, I realised it wasn’t such a big adventure after all.

It was, I realised, a bit empty.

And so it’s around this time that I began to rethink my decision about kids; to try to see this choice through my own lens, rather than anxiety’s.

It was beginning to occur to me that I was (once again) being conned by anxiety; drawn in by its siren-like warnings and conspiratorial whisperings.

While I thought I’d gotten better at recognising when it was speaking for me, I’d perhaps not noticed its creeping influence on this newer, parenting narrative.

Before I knew it, it had nearly written the entire book.

Then Came Henry

After working through this realisation, it was time to do what I’d always done with anxiety. It was time to thank it for its concern, its attempts to protect me, and move forwards.

I needed to throw myself into the unknown.

A year later, in February 2021, my son - Henry - was born.

Now, this earlier acceptance did not mean that my pregnancy was one of undiluted joy and delight. This was no Hallmark pregnancy.

I cried terrified, panicky tears when I fell pregnant. I felt incredibly vulnerable - as though all my shortcomings were about to be revealed.

I’d wake up in the middle of the night and cry (and not just because I needed a wee again). I was unable to process just how much ‘unknown’ came with having your first child.

I had no idea how to fill this void.

However, I ploughed on. I decorated his nursery, chose his name and stared in dreamy fascination at his baby scans. As with travel, I was scared - but slowly, a window was inching open. A stream of sunlight was creeping in.

Late one Friday night, at 11.35pm, Henry was born by emergency c-section.

Effectively paralysed by an over-zealous anaesthetist, I didn’t get to see him for a little while, until he was eventually placed in my arms on the ward.

I remember the weight of him, the feeling of his hard, coconut-like head against my chin. He’d been crying, but the moment he landed on my chest, he stopped.

I kissed the top of his head, waiting for the fear to set in. I waited to feel threatened by this new, tiny stranger. But I felt nothing of the kind.

This baby, I realised, was mine. I stared at his blue eyes and wanted to laugh.

He looked so familiar. How could I have been scared of this?

This wasn’t a stranger - some anonymous threat to my life. This was a baby - my baby. And he always had been.

Henry wasn’t anxiety or panic, fear or doom.

Henry was love.

Henry’s Lesson

Of course, our story doesn’t end here.

Newborn life, nay, life with kids in general, is tough.

Just as those social media accounts promised, there have been plenty of tears and feelings of sadness. Moments of claustrophobia and helplessness, frustration and monotony. There have been many times when I’ve wistfully thought back to those carefree days of my ‘old’ life.

Yet, what those accounts don’t mention - or perhaps can’t even begin to articulate - is the gut wrenching, life altering, soul shattering love you feel for your child.

Those deep emotions that form the wider iceberg: the vast, limitless body of love that sits beneath its visible, jagged tip.

I guess I can forgive anxiety for missing these feelings, too. It was, after all, too busy looking at the tip of the iceberg; desperately trying to steer around its sharp, dangerous edges.

It had no idea of the boundless love that lay beneath.

I sometimes feel shame about how I felt about having a baby. The emotions I felt now seem cold and haughty, defensive and shallow. But I understand I was just acting from a place of anxiety and insecurity.

For what it’s worth, I’m eternally grateful that I decided to wrestle back control of the ship. I’m so relieved that I didn’t let my fears stop me from exploring the inky blue depths of motherhood.

Of course, my life has changed significantly since having Henry. I don’t travel as much as I did. I have little time to myself and my life can feel heavier.

But this heaviness is love.

This heaviness is the weight of his tiny body lying on mine. It’s the pull of his tiny hand and the way he reaches up to me. It’s his beaming smile when I collect him at the end of a day, and his constant searching for my face in a busy room.

This heaviness is his gravity - his immensely powerful and irresistible pull. It’s an unexplained law of attraction that means I never, ever want to leave his orbit. It’s an energy that smooths my edges and slows my spinning. Without his presence, this universe would feel vast and empty.

The feeling of his solid, predictable weight in my arms is what has finally grounded me.

It’s a weight that’s endowed my own sense of self with both solidity and substance. It’s gifted me that fixed and firmly tethered belief that I am enough.

I am a good mum.

Yes, motherhood can be heavy. But it’s in this heaviness that I’ve finally found weightlessness.

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