The anxiety cycle

sale2 by Roland Maier of Wolfrathausen, Germany courtesy stockXchng

We are exactly three weeks away from owning a house today, a fact that fills me with an inner joy so great that not even waking up with the Beastie Boys’ “Paul Revere” in my head (proof of the utter randomness factor of the human brain) can dim it. I would be remiss, however, if I did not admit that this same fact also fills me with a lot of anxiety, of the “can we really afford this?” variety, and that particular anxiety is tied to a very deep childhood fear of things falling apart.

Poverty was a very real threat for us growing up. When I was born my parents lived in my father’s parents’ home, and though they quickly found an apartment for us to live in by the time my sister Dianna was born, seventeen months after me, my father lost his job at the Postal Service and we ended up on welfare and in the projects in Staten Island by the time my little sister was born, right after I turned four years old. I believe it was this combination of stressors — losing his job while trying to provide for a suddenly large family along with the temptation of a younger woman coming back into his life whom he had been denied access to in his teenage years, having to go onto a welfare training program that secretly humiliated him, feeling that he had left the Marines like a coward when many of his friends were in Viet Nam dying — that resulted in my abuse and the abuse suffered by my sisters. After my mother left my father, we were on welfare assistance and lived in a trailer for several years until she re-married, and money was always out of reach, always worried about.

In fact, I’ve never lived in a home that belonged to me before. I’ve always lived in apartments and rental houses, or by another’s leave, and this will be the first house that is truly mine.

Tied deeply in the money worry that is always there for me is the fear of being betrayed. My earliest horror was being ripped from my home in the middle of the night, and it was my earliest remembered traumatic experience, a night I had nightmares about for years afterward because there was no warning. Later my stepfather habitually moved us year after year to different locations — I later found out, because my mother was afraid of my father finding out where we were — without warning us. Every year, it seemed, I would make friends and make commitments at my school for the next year — become the President of the FHA, one year; join the flag corps; commit to a Beta Club committee over the summer — but then have to quit all of those things because we were suddenly moving to the other side of the county, for no reason that I could see. I’d be continually uprooted, without warning. One day my mother would just come home and say, “Pack, we’re moving tomorrow.” And a truck would come the next day and we’d just be gone, like we had never lived there.

I was also often being told we suddenly could not afford something I’d been promised. I’d usually have to wait to buy something I needed anyway, because we could never afford anything, but often I’d find out we couldn’t afford it after all, usually after my stepfather bought a new car or went on a vacation to see his grandchildren, who didn’t know he was remarried to a woman with three children. When I got old enough to understand something about money, checking accounts, savings and credit, and started asking those questions, I was risking being hit in the mouth.

So who knew? I certainly did not know if we could afford anything, or how long we’d be staying, and I certainly never felt like anything I needed, let alone anything I desired, counted.

My worries, then, about money — about running out, as well as being lied to about it — are deep in my marrow and not easily extracted by my husband telling me to have faith, or that we can afford something at the end of the month, or the quarter, or whatever. And just because the mortgage company says we’re getting something at closing doesn’t make it so, according to the fear monster, the snake, coiled around my small intestine telling me that I’m never going to get that house because I never do get anything good. So I find myself needling my husband sometimes with my worry, and we occasionally get into snipes. Not fights. Richard and I never really fight, but we do get upset with one another occasionally, and usually it’s because I’m being stupid about money. We had a little snipe last night, and I try to apologize when I calm down, because I know where the nagging and needling comes from. It comes from my anxiety cycle. It comes from worrying that everything is going to fall apart. You’d think that knowing there is an actual house with an actual foundation, an actual roof, actual cabinets and flooring installed, and now an actual sidewalk poured in front of it would lessen that anxiety and make me less likely to get on that train again. But that cycle is not going to switch off even after the papers are signed.

All I can do is keep showing myself that the life I live now is true and I am not going to be betrayed anymore by anyone, and that Richard and I got here with our own two hands. Anxiety snake be damned. But he sings like a broken record. Just like a song stuck in your head that you wake up with, and don’t understand why.