Coronavirus, anxiety chickens, and why I’ve stopped using the Calm app
Are humidifiers dangerous
Are humidifiers dangerous babies
Are humidifiers dangerous babies 9 months
Are humidifiers dangerous UK
Are humidifiers dangerous babies UK
Are humidifiers dangerous babies 9 months UK
Such are my Google searches as I ‘relax’ on the sofa with Baby Daddy one evening. The Bundle — after another busy day of screaming at her toys, hiding food in her onesie, and trying to throw herself off the changing mat head first — sleeps peacefully in the next room, her new air humidifier puffing away nearby. I observe it on the baby monitor with a deep and watchful suspicion, as innocent little clouds of steam rise from its lid and drift a few inches before disappearing completely. How, I ask it silently, will you contrive to kill my child?
The internet doesn’t have much to say on the subject (steam, it might surprise you to learn, is generally not considered a threat to life), but that’s ok, my imagination is on hand to fill in the blanks. Maybe the humidifier will catch fire, it tells me. Stuff catches fire all the time. Maybe it will malfunction, and start producing poison steam. Is that a thing? It could be. It’s getting pretty misty in there now, isn’t it? Is it too much? You don’t want her to drown. Can you drown in steam? You have no idea, do you? You irresponsible halfwit. Google it right now.
I haven’t always been like this. At school my pathological lack of give-a-shit was noted on reports and raised frequently at parents’ evenings. Through university my emotional range expanded to include periods of truculent arrogance and dramatic melancholy, but I still don’t remember worrying about much, beyond whether next month’s wages would cover both my drinking expenses and my rent, and if not, how to break the news to my landlord (luckily this was the North-East, so he was largely sympathetic to my priorities). In my mid-twenties, around the time it began to dawn on me that the things I had — supportive family, lovely boyfriend, more mates than my limited social skills had earned, income higher than living costs — were an extraordinary privilege, and not guaranteed to last forever, I started to wake up in the night and fret. My imagination would roam the corridors of my happy existence with a shotgun, looking for victims. It put loved ones into cars and drove them off bridges. It gave them rare disorders. It downed them in plane crashes and made them hostages in terror attacks. My worries were sensational, glamorous; glittering disco balls of tragedy borrowed from soap operas and violent crime documentaries. In the morning, when normal concerns about train delays and meetings I had failed to prepare for took centre stage, they faded away as though they had never existed. But they always came back. At first it was occasional, then regular, then more-often-than-not. I didn’t mention them to anyone, firstly because it was always the middle of the night, and secondly because there really is no easy way to tell a person that, last Wednesday around 2am, you turned their upcoming work conference into a bloodbath in which they were beheaded and strung up by the feet from the doorway of the Hilton Hotel.
After the baby was born my imagination, high on hormones and turbo-charged with evolutionary instincts more suited to cave living than modern life, had something of a field day. My worries gathered around our bed each night like a clucking brood of anxiety chickens. They mated with each other, hatching fantasies where rare disorders caused planes to crash and unleash terrorists on the barren wastelands of the unimaginable future. They sacked me from my job and made us destitute, they put child-snatchers in my bathroom, they set my car on fire with all of us inside. They did everything (everything) they could think of to the baby. Ever the pragmatist, I decided to avoid the brood by not going to bed at all. I sat on the sofa for a few nights, staring blankly at the TV, clutching the Bundle and Googling her every move until even Mumsnet seemed to be telling me to relax.
Obviously, that couldn’t go on for very long. My midwife referred me to the women’s psych department at our local hospital, and I was booked in for an assessment with the lovely Dr Karen*. On the form she gave me while I was waiting in reception, I was asked to rate the extent to which anxiety was interfering with my life. Had I stopped going out? Stopped laughing as much as I used to? Stopped taking care of my appearance? No, no, and no (sadly, I always looked liked this), I answered. The only thing I had stopped doing was going to bed, because there was a brood of very concerned chickens roosting on my pillow. There’s no way this minor inconvenience qualifies me for anything, I thought. So imagine my surprise when the good doctor took one look at my form and booked me in for twelve weeks of one-to-one treatment.
Have you heard of mindfulness? Dr Karen asked, at our first appointment. Come on love, I told her. I might look a bit strung out and, yes, I do think there are barnyard animals in my bedroom, but I haven’t been living on the bloody moon. In the last decade, meditation has transformed itself from the preserve of Buddhist monks and mid-life divorcees in kaftans, into a billion dollar industry. My generation, it seems, are particularly open to the idea that improvements to mind, body and soul can be read out to them by their phones while they sit with their eyes shut and think about how the air feels as it passes their nostrils. And as a solution to everyday worries, I totally buy into it. If you’re obsessing over the presentation you have to do at work in a fortnight’s time, and the mounting stress is preventing you from getting anything done, bringing yourself back to the present moment with a bit of breathing and focusing on the now can be enormously helpful. But if your imaginary problems are printed on billboards and mounted up and down the highways of your mind every night, screaming ECONOMIC CRASH!! KNIFE WIELDING PSYCHOPATH IN TESCO!! FATAL SALMONELLA POISONING!! as mine are, counting breaths and thinking about the sensations in your right big toe feels like a fairly weak defence. Anyway, Dr Karen and I did a bit of mindfulness together — throughout which I mostly worried that I had forgotten to put my phone on silent — and I promised to keep up a daily practice during our time together, with help from the Calm app.
In subsequent weeks we tried various other coping strategies. In one session, Dr Karen had me visualise my anxiety as a stone hanging around my neck, and then led me through an elaborate story where the stone became a small, innocuous light glowing by the front door, a bit like the friendly blue flames in that old British Gas advert. In another, we invented something called my ‘perfect nurturer’, and had this imaginary person (who looked, for some reason, a bit like Whoopi Goldberg) tell me I was doing a fantastic job at being a mum, and deserved all my happiness. We talked about my desire to control everything, and how this was affecting my mental health. So much in life is outside our control, Dr Karen counselled me wisely. You can’t spin all the plates all the time. I know I can’t, I said, and nodded in agreement, while inside I thought mutinously: hold my beer. Some of the strategies helped a bit, some of them I’m amazed I made it through with a straight face, and some did absolutely nothing. Unfortunately, social anxiety prevented me from being totally honest with lovely Karen, so at the end of the 12 weeks I assured her I felt much better and went on my way. There were many people, I was sure, who needed her services more desperately than me, and anyway the parking outside her office cost a fortune.
The anxiety chickens continued to come and go. Some of my worries now tended towards the more prosaic end of the spectrum (CHILDCARE!! INTEREST RATES HIKES!! COST OF BABY FORMULA!!) but my imagination still dealt me a fair number of outlandish and highly improbable stories as I lay awake at night, trying to relax my calf muscles and chatting away with Whoopi Goldberg.
Interestingly, and proving that the future is a slippery little git who can’t be pinned down even by the most advanced worrier, not one of my concerns was labelled GLOBAL PANDEMIC!!
I start seriously worrying about the Covid-19 outbreak around mid-February, in what is probably the least cool example in history of being slightly ahead of the curve. I stand by the sink and give Baby Daddy a detailed critique of his hand-washing, I impound his phone and drench it in Dettol at every opportunity. One night, after several glasses of wine, I stay up until 2am watching Netflix documentaries and disinfecting every hard surface in the flat, including all of the Bundle’s toys. By the time the pandemic is a household name in the UK, and Boris Johnson is on the telly telling us to freak out but only a little bit, I’ve been in a state of fairly constant anxiety for about a month. But something strange is happening. As the story grows, taking up two headlines, then four, then consuming the entire news, the screeching alarm bells of panic get quieter, and one-by-one stop ringing. I feel, if not exactly calm, then at least rational. What’s going on?
Maybe it’s that I’m no longer alone. At least, I might think, as I watch the rumours of lockdowns and streams of quasi-medical advice ping around my various groups and social media feeds, fretting is now a national priority, and feels almost patriotic. But no, there’s no comfort there. Anxiety squared is panic, and panic squared is hysteria, and when anxious people get together, we only give each other ideas. If anything, the fact that everyone else is now making up horrific possibilities for the future when they climb into bed each night, and then waking up in the morning to tell me about them on WhatsApp, makes the whole thing worse, not better. So that’s not it.
Could it be that, no matter how bad things get, they can’t possibly be as appalling as the outbreak was in my imagination? If you’ve seen I Am Legend, we’re basically talking about the evacuation scene, where Will Smith screams ‘Scan her again!’ at a line of masked and armed guards when they refuse to let his missus through a blockade, while helicopters buzz overhead and humanity falls apart at the seams all around them. We’re not there yet, are we? No. But as we watch with horror the video clips sent back from the frontline of the crisis in Italy, we have to admit we’re not a million miles away, either.
Walking the Bundle to our local Turkish supermarket one afternoon, through streets that should be quieter than usual but are actually buzzing with a frantic kind of activity, I finally realise why I feel more grounded than I have in weeks. It’s not that my own anxiety chickens have gone away. It’s that I can suddenly see the broods gathering around everyone else as well. The same survival instincts that awoke ferociously in me after the baby was born are now lighting up across the world, making previously rational people fight over bales of toilet roll they don’t need, or (on the flip side of the same coin) having them insist it’s ‘not that bad’, while refusing to follow the rules that science tells us will prevent the worst possible outcome. To some, the virus itself is the bone-chilling enemy; to others, it’s the fight against it that terrifies — the lost work, the overdue rent, the strong breeze suddenly blowing into the high-wire trick that keeps our children fed and our lights on day after day. In the unfolding crisis, our instincts are screaming at us to loot the supermarkets or bury our heads in the sand, they’re firing on all cylinders to ensure we help ourselves, our families, our nearest, but no-one else. If we listen, it really will be a disaster movie in no time at all (albeit with fewer zombies).
Luckily, we’re human beings, and so add up to more than the sum of our evolutionary parts. We’re capable, when we try, of expanding our empathy beyond ourselves, beyond our families and friends, beyond our national borders. It’s not always easy, but when we think of ourselves collectively, when we each peg ourselves to the same standards and agree where the limits of our selfishness should be, we win, society holds together, and Will Smith doesn’t have to scream at anyone (forget the zombies for a minute).
Sure, my instincts would have me bundle the last two tins of formula into my trolley when I only need one. But as a parent, as a human, I know that your baby crying with hunger while her dad searches the shops for milk, when ours has more than enough, is just as great a tragedy as if it were the other way around. I know that every baby is a precious miracle; that every life lost too soon is a gaping hole in the fabric of our collective self; that every doctor and nurse and ambulance driver must be given a fighting chance against this thing, and through the threads that connect me to them and to every other person, I have a job to do as well. As a human, I can’t ignore the maths: if I meet my buddies for lunch while I’m ‘working from home’, if I infect two people and they infect four more and they infect eight more after that, in three month’s time, the number of cases we can trace back to my harmless jaunt will be over half a million. At a conservative estimate of mortality rate, 26,000 pairs of gasping lungs will have taken their last breath because of me**. That’s exponential growth baby. It’s a real bitch.
Except it doesn’t work like that, because even if I’m a dick, most people aren’t. If everyone was a slave to their most animal needs all the time, there wouldn’t be a functioning society to save from destruction in the first place. For every fanatical stockpiler, bedding down on tins of baked beans and hand sanitiser, there are twenty other right-thinking humans delivering groceries to their neighbours in isolation. For every wally in an I’m-not-worried badge, cramming into their local boozer to lick the faces of strangers and cough all over the zero-hours-contract barman, there are a hundred others staying home, washing their hands, reminding themselves that violence is not the answer as husbands and housemates drive them into the arms of the emergency booze stockpile. I have to believe that. To a virus, we are only bodies, just hosts, simple piles of biology no different to the animals we think it came from. To beat it, we will prove that we are so much more***.
*Not her real name
**This mathematical model is oversimplified but so, it seems, are the Government’s, so at least I’m in good company
***And if we don’t, we’re all fucked
Originally published at http://millennialmothers.guide on March 20, 2020.
