Worry

Patiently Waiting

/ Ann Coleman / 113 Comments

I’ve never been a patient person.  Waiting is not my strong point, no matter what I happen to be waiting for.  If I’m looking forward to something good, then I want it to happen right now, this very second.  Even if I’m dreading something, I’d much rather just hurry up and get it over with, sooner rather than later.  Unfortunately, there are times in my life where I don’t really have a choice, and I find myself having to wait with as much patience as I possibly can.

A few weeks ago, my husband had a scheduled surgery that was supposed to result in a three to five-day hospital stay.  The surgery went well, but his recovery didn’t, and he ended up spending over ten days in the hospital due to minor complications.  I wish I could say that I always handled the situation with patience and grace, but that would be a lie.  What I actually did was worry a lot, feel sorry for myself and even sorrier for my husband, and in general wake up each morning thinking, “PLEASE let today be the day that he finally gets to come home.”

It was a long ten days, but I did learn a few things about myself in the process, not the least of which is that I would make a truly awful nurse.  I’ve always been a bit of a klutz, but repeatedly tripping over various tubes that are actually connected to a patient is never a good thing, and neither is forgetting to unhook the IV pole before helping him go for a walk in the hallway.  Also, it’s a good idea to wind the chord of the nurse call button around the bed railings, because otherwise it falls off the bed every time you adjust the blankets…and then you have to keep telling the nurse station that you didn’t really mean to call them.

Luckily, I also learned some more useful lessons during my husband’s recovery, and the main one was that when I have no choice, I really can manage to wait patiently for things to get better.  Although I’ve always been nervous in hospitals (I never even like visiting a patient), I actually became accustomed to the routine and stopped having to look away from any procedure that involved blood or other body fluids.  I spent hours sitting quietly in the corner, reading a book while my husband slept, and actually became quite friendly with some of the nurses.  It’s amazing what we can endure when we have to, and I do think it helps to be reminded of that from time to time.

Of course I would have much rather my husband’s hospital stay hadn’t lasted quite so long, and to have spared him that trauma and both of us that worry.  But I like to think that the next time I’m waiting for something I desperately want right now, that I’ll remember there’s a reserve of strength and patience in each of us, just waiting for us to tap into it. And that when we do, we’ll have everything we we need to tide us over until the hard times are over….

It’s Personal

/ Ann Coleman / 103 Comments

Sometimes I worry about my grandchildren.  Not because there’s anything wrong with them, because there isn’t.  In my eyes, they’re both perfect and I seriously doubt if anything is going to change my opinion about that. (If grandmothers can’t provide unconditional love and acceptance, then what’s the point in having them?)  It’s just that every now and then, like most parents and grandparents, I find myself worrying about exactly what kind of world they’re going to be living in when they grow up.

There are always plenty of big issues to worry about, and goodness knows we have enough of them these days, but I’m talking more about the little things.  Because the world is changing so quickly, and sometimes I wonder if that means that the next generation is going to miss out on so much that I grew up believing was important.  I realize that cursive writing, the ability to read a map, make change, and do basic research any way other than looking it up on Google or asking Alexa are all fading away, and I can live with that.  (Although I think that relying too much on one source for all your information is never a good thing.)  But I was also raised with the belief that I had a right to personal privacy, and I do worry that privacy is a concept that is fast becoming extinct.

It’s not just that all our internet activity is being monitored, stored and sold to the highest bidder.  Or even that most households now have a virtual assistant (like Alexa) which has to be listening all the time in order to know when to respond to us.  (Remember when almost every spy movie involved finding the “bug” that the enemy had planted in the hero’s house?  Now we plant them ourselves, and pay for it.)  But I can’t help thinking that children who have grown up having so much of their personal life being played out on-line aren’t going to have the faintest concept of what privacy even is.

I’ve heard the argument that people who have nothing to hide shouldn’t worry about a lack of privacy, but I don’t buy it.  Privacy isn’t about hiding our faults and sins.  It’s about being in control of what parts of our lives we choose to share with others, and what parts we choose not to share.  And I don’t like the idea of that choice being taken away.

This is a public blog, and I make every effort to be completely honest when I’m writing it.  I’m very open about my thoughts and feeling on the topics I write about in each post.  But there are aspects of my life that I choose not to write about, and that’s usually because I’m either respecting someone else’s privacy or protecting my own.  Not every single thing we do, think, or say needs to be for public consumption and the inevitable judgement that comes with it.

Of course a certain amount of sharing ourselves with others is a good thing, and all healthy relationships are based on that.  But I believe that what we share, and who we share it with, should always be our own personal choice.

Mind the Gap

/ Ann Coleman / 46 Comments

I have a long list of things I would like to change about myself, and I’m not just talking about my physical appearance.  I would love to have a good singing voice, and not to be quite so afraid of heights, and I wish that I had a better memory, especially for names.  But if I could change just one thing about myself, I would choose to stop worrying so much.  Because the fact is that I worry pretty much all the time, about almost everything.  And it doesn’t do me one bit of good, because the stuff I worry about rarely happens, and the bad things that happen in my life are usually things I didn’t see coming at all.

A few weeks ago, my husband and I spent the weekend with our family at my brother-in-law’s lake house, and on our first night there, we all piled into his boat for a “sunset cruise” which we enjoyed very much.  It was dark when we returned to the dock, and my brother-in-law warned us all to be careful stepping out of the boat because the dock could rock a bit.

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Being me, I immediately worried that I would drop my cell phone in the lake, and so I clutched it tightly as I carefully put my right foot on the deck.  Thankful that I had been able to maintain my balance, I quickly swung my left foot out and placed it, inadvertently, in a gap between the two parts of the dock.  My foot and lower leg plunged into the water, but my fall was stopped abruptly and painfully by my upper thigh, which was too big to fit through the gap.  It was the first time in my life that I was actually thankful for my chubby thighs.

I had worried that I would drop my cell phone (which I had brought along so I could take pictures of the lake) in the water, and that didn’t happen.  Even as I was suspended with one foot on the dock and the other foot in the lake, I still managed to hang on to my phone. It never crossed my mind that I might actually put my foot through a gap in the dock, even though that’s exactly what did happen.   Once again, I had wasted a lot of emotional energy worrying about all the wrong things.

That’s why I am making a very dedicated effort to stop worrying so much.  It’s not that I’m going to pretend that everything is always going to be fine and that nothing bad will ever happen, because I know better than that.  All of us have hard times in life, and all of us will experience our share of accidents and tragedies.  But constantly worrying about what could go wrong does nothing to prevent bad things from happening, and only serves to put too much focus on the negative aspects of life.

So I think what I need to do is learn to take sensible precautions, (such as the “mind the gap” signs I saw on the Irish Railway, warning passengers to beware of the gap between the train cars and the platform), but stop obsessing about every single thing that could possibly go wrong in any given situation.  Because life is too short and precious to waste it worrying about what might go wrong, when I could be enjoying all that is going so very right.

Vacation Fun

/ Ann Coleman / 12 Comments

480My husband and I are hoping to take a trip to Florida in a couple of weeks, as a way to celebrate his 60th birthday and to unwind from the whirlwind of our daughter’s recent wedding. Our plan is to spend the week doing exactly what we want to do, when we want to do it, which means we will probably spend lots of time walking the beach, collecting shells, and eating way too much food.  Once we get there, it should be very relaxing.  And that’s a good thing, because I know from long experience that getting there will be anything but relaxing.

We’re planning to fly to Florida, which is stressful enough all by itself.  I’m old enough to remember the days when flying was actually fun–a special treat for special occasions.  We even dressed up a bit before we went to the airport.  But these days, between the necessary security measures and the tiny seats on crowded planes, flying is more like visiting someone in jail and then boarding a Greyhound bus. And I swear I have seen some people in the airport wearing pajamas.

But in my family, the stress begins long before we even get to the airport.  My husband and I are both terrific worriers, and I have come to realize that one of my husband’s main worries in life is missing his plane.  The night before we leave for a trip, we usually go to bed rather late, what with all the packing, last minute instructions for dog and house sitter, etc.  Throughout the night, we wake up at least once an hour from the worry that we might oversleep (because it really is possible that the alarm clock could pick that particular night to break down).

Then we get up bright and early, rush through our morning showers, throw our suitcases in the car and head for the airport.  On the drive there, my husband curses at every single red light and mutters dark comments under his breath about all the other people who are inconsiderate enough to be out driving on the streets when we have a plane to catch.  When we finally reach the airport, he drops me off at the curb to check in our two huge and heavy suitcases by myself while he parks the car, because “it’s quicker that way.”

We usually meet up again at the security line, where he spends the whole time trying to estimate how long it will take us to get through the security check point and whether or not we will have to run for our gate once we are through it.  He removes his belt, shoes, and watch while waiting in line just to save time.  And once we are finally through security, we anxiously check the departure time for our flight and realize we have at least two hours to kill before boarding time.  That’s when I buy a magazine and a Diet Coke and settle in for a nice long wait.  It’s our vacation routine, and I know better than to complain about it.

IMG_0703Because I know there is a reason for my husband’s madness.  Once we scheduled a vacation to Florida on January 1st, and our flight was supposed to leave at 8:45 in the morning.  That was the one time I actually tried to talk my husband into waiting a bit before we went to the airport, because I figured very few other people were going to be flying early on the morning after New Year’s Eve.  Luckily, I lost that argument, because when we arrived at the airport at 6:15 in the morning, we were greeted by the sight of a check-in line that stretched out the door, and a security line that snaked back and forth across the lobby three times.

As we stood in line, people all around us were complaining about how they were missing their flights, but we, for once, were calm.  We knew we had gotten there early enough to easily make our flight, despite the long lines.  My husband was vindicated, and I was confident that I would have time to buy my Diet Coke once we got through security.  Sometimes excessive worrying pays off.

Planning Ahead?

/ Ann Coleman / 23 Comments

IMG_0291As anyone who has ever met me knows, I am really, really, good at worrying. For me, worrying is almost as natural as breathing, and for the most part, if I’m breathing, I’m also worrying about something.  So I knew that when my daughter got engaged, I was going to have to make an honest effort to just go along with her decisions, to simply dig in and do the work that is required to pull off a wedding these days and try my very best to trust that things would all work out.

I’ve been making a very conscious effort not to think about all the things that could possibly go wrong, which is my usual approach to just about everything.  I know that sounds awfully negative, but it’s really not.  My theory is that if I have anticipated a possible problem and already figured out a solution, or at least an acceptable reaction to the problem, then I don’t have to think about it anymore.  Because if the problem happens, I already know what I’m going to do about it.  Still, I knew my habit of obsessing over potential problems was going to drive my daughter, her fiancé and my husband all crazy so I tried very hard not to do it, and mostly succeeded.

IMG_0297So that might explain why I wasn’t as prepared for this, the week before the big wedding, as I would normally have been.  When a representative from the church called yesterday to say that our minister had been called out of town for a family emergency and wouldn’t be able to do the wedding, I didn’t have another minister already in mind who could do the service.  (Luckily, they did.)  And when my husband called early this morning to say that when he called the limo service to verify where they are taking the bridal party for their after-wedding photos and got a recording saying that the phone number was no longer in service, I had no back up plan handy.  And when my daughter texted me a little later to let me know that the dentist just told her she needs to have a root canal tomorrow and asked what I thought she should do, I had to fight the urge to tell her to call her father and do whatever he advised.

Now I know that the odds are very high that everything will all work out just fine.  The problem with the limo service was simply with the phone system, and they didn’t really go out of business three days before the wedding and two days after we made the final payment.  My daughter is going to a very good dental specialist and I’m sure the procedure will actually make her feel much better, as who wants to get married with a sore tooth?   And the church’s Wedding Coordinator has been in close touch, assuring me that he will make sure everything goes well during the ceremony.

I still think that I would have handled the problems that have arisen in the last forty-eight hours a little bit better if I had followed my usual routine of thinking of all the things that could possibly go wrong with the wedding and had already identified some solutions.  My system of planning for potential problems (also known as worrying) may not be everyone’s cup of tea.  But I have reached the point in my life where I realize that it’s what works for me.