Who’ll Stop the Rain

In my experience, few endeavors have less effect than telling a worrier not to worry, as the years I’ve lost to fruitless anxiety demonstrate.  Apparently, I needn’t worry that I’m alone, however, as Googling the word produces 391,000,000 hits.  We are a world of worriers.

Yet as my friend, the writer Robert Hughes, points out, “I think everybody can say with Montaigne, ‘My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.’”

Concurring with this assessment, though, seldom prevents me from clouding days with one worry or another, my list of what ifs and potential calamities far-reaching and often irrational.  It’s become such a part of me I hardly consider trying to change.

A recent bout with my most familiar nemesis led me to consider, though: could I at least try to embrace a less fatalistic approach, to consider the wisdom of annoying but accurate platitudes like, “Worry is like walking around with an umbrella waiting for it to rain”?

Such an apt simile, after all.  Rain, and the damage it may cause, is one of my most visceral fears.  It’s unstoppable, beyond human control, potentially ruinous.  The menacing possibilities my imagination can conjure are boundless where rain is concerned.  As a co-worker unwittingly reinforced, “Water always finds a way in!”

My phobia reached its peak in the spring of 2014, following a grueling winter of near-record cold and snowfall, the back of which every Chicagoan longed to see.  Everyone except me, that is.  The promise of spring promised me only the melting of the massive snowbanks directly into the basement of my charming but porous 90-year-old home.  I worried about the watery consequences incessantly, for weeks on end.

Given how infrequently we’ve had more than a few trickles in the 14 years we’ve lived here, even I recognized this obsession as absurd.  I couldn’t stop myself, though.  The leaky episodes we had experienced kept me watchful, wary, filled with dread whenever rain was foretold.

That spring was lost to me, my anxiety gathering like the whopping, snow-melting storm forecasters gleefully predicted for a Thursday in early April.  I’d prepared as best I could: old towels lined trouble spots, rags and buckets were near to hand.  Home from work after the day-long deluge, I braced myself at the top of the basement stairs, Odysseus facing a hostile, enemy-strewn shore.

“Be strong, saith my heart;” I recited bravely, “I am a soldier; I have seen worse sights than this.”

*****

We all have fears, real and imagined, some of which we allow to cripple us. My friend Marla Davishoff, a talented therapist, assures me I’m not alone in this particular fear; many people, women especially, feel anxiety around water and their homes. Perhaps it involves the instinct to protect our nests, our flocks.  I can scarcely recall my temperament before adulthood brought responsibility beyond my own narrow concerns, beyond caring for myself alone.  Have I really been this nervous my whole life, this irrational about problems that, while tiresome, are most certainly not the end of the world?  Whatever damage our house may sustain, we have the resources to fix it, however inconvenient that may be.  Yet when the familiar panic creeps in, I chide myself in vain: “What’s the worst that can happen?”  Plenty, my anxious mind replies.

Such frivolous worry, of course, is also just a tad self-centric, cowardly, even.  How selfish to waste so much energy on foolish fears as society reels with more sobering concerns, while I, in fact, have more serious concerns myself.  Real, life-altering concerns.

For years I thought controlling at least my physical environment would help quell the chaos of autism, the daily upset and fear, the desperate need to help my son without knowing how.  I’ve justified, too, my phobias as necessary stand-ins for the vast intangibles that have shrouded our lives since Daniel’s diagnosis, staving off a flood of legitimate, long-term worry too serious and heartbreaking to absorb.  Worry needs an outlet somewhere; how much easier to shoot rabidly at identifiable targets than the elusive, mercurial enemy that has shaped my son’s life, and my own?

For me, and many parents like me, diagnosis of profound disability in our children skews our image of a rational, predictable world.  Life “working out for the best” becomes a naive, unjustified banality, rhetoric like “What’s the worst that can happen?” scant reassurance when your child’s future, his whole existence, is at stake.

I know powerlessness now, that circumstances exist beyond my control despite pleas and prayers and promises; that love alone is not healer enough; that some losses will never be redeemed.  Autism stole Daniel’s life the day he was born, the fullness of normal experience he should have had lost to fate, or chance, or an arbitrary bestowing I’ll never comprehend.

He appears content these days.  In many ways he is thriving.  But I know all that he is missing.  I can’t abandon the worry over what his heart holds, the unexpressed dreams he may harbor that will never be fulfilled.  He is blessed with health and energy and curiosity, a family that loves him, yet he faces a lifetime of inequitable challenges through no fault of his own.  This truth is as sure as rain.  It will always find a way in.  Yet I keep trying to stem the tide.

I wonder if I’m on the right track about any of this, if these insights are really just a convoluted excuse for behavior that’s merely habitual, perversely comforting even as it cripples me.  Have the years of doubt and concern, of questions and faltering, imperfect solutions, warped me so indelibly that I no longer know how to live without worry?

I guess I needn’t worry over the why.  The possibility of change, my fledgling yearning for it and the hard work it involves, is concern enough for now.

******

As you may have guessed, our basement didn’t flood two years ago.  A few rogue rivulets escaped my towel barriers, easily wiped away.  I wasted that whole spring for nothing, fretting away moment after moment, hour after hour, until a whole season had passed, over an event that never occurred.

A few months ago we had the drain tiles in our basement replaced.  It was an expensive undertaking, postponed for years until my daughter was through graduate school and Daniel’s residential placement was, at least for now, secure.  Just after Christmas we added a backup sump pump system, to protect us even during power failures.  Marla optimistically predicts that these improvements will lay my water worries to rest, once and for all.

I was huddled on our screened porch a few weeks ago while the four cats we care for ate the breakfast I provide them each morning.  Andy’s allergies prevent us from bringing them inside, but our porch has been their home base for six years, and we’ve made it their sanctuary.

Sipping my coffee, I reflected that it will be months, perhaps years, before I descend the basement stairs without trepidation at what might be seeping across the floor, but I’ll be working on it, one step at a time.

This hopeful moment was punctuated by a piece of ceiling plaster falling on my head.

The porch roof seems to have developed a weak spot.

My time in the deep end over this new threat passed more quickly than you might imagine, more in proportion to the relative gravity of the problem.  A roofer was called.  A temporary fix was installed, protecting our porch and our cats, until we can address the issue come spring.

I’ve got this.

Not yet a soldier, but standing fast.

This time, at least.