Zen and Separation Anxiety

By Megan Riggs

My baby was one year old when I was diagnosed. It came as a shock, though I had been having symptoms for about three weeks at the time of my diagnosis. I was tired, but what parent of a co-sleeping, nursing one-year-old isn’t? It was easy to brush off. It would pass, somehow I would catch up on sleep. But it got worse. I felt weak. It was like my muscles were atrophying right off my body.

I conceded that it was more than just parenting fatigue and made an appointment to have blood work done. The day after my appointment, a doctor from the clinic called with the results of my blood work. “You need to go to the emergency room,” he instructed. I stood at the stove moving onions and bell peppers and ground turkey around in a skillet. “Your blood work shows pancytopenia. It looks like leukemia.”

“I’m cooking dinner right now,” I replied, “and then I have to get my kids in bed. Can I just come into the clinic in the morning?”

Instead, my husband packed the kids in the car and drove me to the emergency room. I stood in the rain and waved goodbye through the back windows. My one-year-old played with a toy in her carseat, my older kids were hunched over in the back reading by the glow of the dome lights. I’m not even sure if they saw me. I told my husband to go grab some dinner since ours had burned on the stove while I was on the phone, and that I would call him when I was ready to be picked up.

Almost a month later, I called my husband to pick me up. I had been diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia, a rare and aggressive cancer with a low survival rate and average age of diagnosis almost twice my own age. My leukemia was abnormal - “we’re in uncharted territory,” my doctor told me. I was one of a kind, special; this was not what I wanted to hear from a specialized medical team at a nationally-ranked cancer center with a robust research arm. “This is my life now,” I told myself. “It just is.”

I emerged from the dark hallways of treatment and trauma slowly. My children, now older, had been sequestered at home for fear of them bringing home even a cold, which could land me in the ICU. They were scared, angry, their lives shaken beyond their capacity to understand. My husband, who had worked and cared for children and driven me to appointments looked tired, more gray than he had only months before. I was weak, my head bald and skin sallow, my brain unfamiliar, unreliable.

When my baby turned three, I signed her up for the same preschool my older kids had gone to, hoping she would enjoy it just as much as they had. I was looking forward to her having fun, and to having more focused homeschooling time with my ten year old. She cried.

She cried every day at drop-off and every night at bedtime, begging me to promise not to take her back to her “little school”. She cried when she woke up, and when we had lunch, and on the way to school. She didn’t want me to leave her. She wanted to know where I was.

“It’s just separation anxiety,” the teachers told me. “You have to just let them process through it. She’ll be fine. Just don’t make a big thing and she’ll find something to distract her.”

The distraction never came. She was not adjusting. I negotiated with the school to let me stay in the coat room with her until she was ready to go into the classroom on her own. Then to let me drop her off but remain in my car in the parking lot. Then it was back to sitting in the coat room with her. Finally I accepted that this was not normal separation anxiety. She was experiencing abandonment. She was reliving my multiple disappearances and extended absences each time I dropped her off.

I was devastated by how long it took me to realize this, how many days I had tried to convince her to go back to the place she saw as dangerous, how many times I had dropped her off and (eventually) left her there, alone.

I called a child psychologist. I wanted to help support her through these feelings and get her - eventually - to the point that she could be dropped off. I didn’t have a timeline, I just needed her to feel safe. I needed advice. “It’s not your fault, but she is being re-traumatized each time you leave her, making it harder and harder for her to go to school each day,” the psychologist told me. “She doesn’t remember you being in the hospital, but her nervous system remembers, and right now her nervous system is overriding everything else.”

I withdrew from the “little school” and enrolled in the local co-op. Although I was only required to work one day a week, I stayed every day. It was now “our little school”. I had become a forty-two year old preschooler.

My husband had to pick up a lot of slack around the house again because I spent my days at preschool. The time that I was spending away was time I couldn’t teach my ten year old or unload the dishwasher or switch the laundry or do any of the other things I would have done with that time. It felt unsustainable to live like this. Life had become so chaotic after treatment and even more now that I was a preschooler. I rarely got to talk to my husband except about logistics. There was always a child vying for my attention, needing something. I was doing my best, but I was less capable than I had been before. My brain had been damaged by the chemo, I suffered time blindness and confusion and couldn’t keep track of things. I had to live with this stranger in my head and this strange new life.

My three year old still panicked when I needed to get gas, crying “I don’t want to go to the gas station, I don’t like it when I can’t see you!” She followed me around the house like a shadow, not wanting to let me out of her sight. If she did find herself occupied away from me, a sudden realization of solitude would dawn and she would call for me, tears in her eyes and her voice. “She has a totally valid reason to feel anxious. It’s not my fault, it’s no one’s fault. It just is,” I told myself over and over again. “It just is.”