Wemberly Worried

People who don’t spend a major amount of time with her don’t understand how anxious and negative Pippa can be. They don’t see it because when she’s in a place that she likes with lots of things to distract her and away from the routine of home it almost ceases to exist. She’s dragging Oma and Opa outside to play in the newly fallen snow. She’s choosing fabric scraps in the sewing room or playing hide and seek in a house where it’s a decent challenge or watching Teen Titans Go, which she never gets to watch at home. She’s playing with the toys that only live at Muppet and Grumpy’s house and are therefore special. She’s sledding or walking in the woods or talking to the woman who rides her horses up and down their dirt road.

But at night when the excitement of the day wears off or she’s worn out from keeping it together at school all day, she worries. A lot. She worries about things that might happen and about things that she’s already been told won’t happen. She worries about things that might have happened, but didn’t actually happen, and if she took 30 seconds to think about it she’d see that for herself.

A couple days ago she was working on a big coloring page before school. Anika was working on her own set of them, so I put Pippa’s away so Ani wouldn’t color on it accidentally or leave it on the floor where the dog could step on it. When she got home, she didn’t see it where she left it. I told her I put it away. Instead of actually listening to what I said, she freaked out that her sister must’ve taken it and thrown it out. She was in full- on panic mode. I had to tell her three times that I put it away with the rest of the coloring pages before she actually looked for herself.

Yesterday she asked me if she could get a raise in her allowance in exchange for chores. Well, her allowance is currently just that. An allowance. And therefore untied to any chores. She does have chores, but they’re things I call “you live here” chores, like making her bed, picking up her toys, feeding the dog, and clearing the table. And being not even 6 yet, there’s not a ton of chores that she can do independently that might be worth an extra dollar. So I thought about it for a while and decided that if she wanted to earn an extra dollar each week she could use a damp rag to wipe down the shelves, coffee table, end tables, and TV stand to keep them free of dust. Not hard, but she’d have to put in a bit of effort to move things and put them back. Certainly worth a dollar when you’re 5. She thought that sounded like a great plan and was looking forward to being able to save her money a little faster.

Cut to 5:30 this morning when she woke me up with a quiver little voice on the edge of tears that she wants to go back to the old way and not do the dusting. Okay, fine, then she won’t get the extra money. No big deal. She proceeded to continue worrying about it for another 45 minutes in her room after I put her back to bed. She came back to discuss it again. And again.

My mother in law is making her a new quilt. She also made the old quilt. Now, Pippa specifically requested a wolf theme, chose the pattern, and has chosen all the fabrics MIL in using to make this quilt. The only input I’ve suggested is using wool batting instead of cotton for extra warmth because Pippa has roughy 0% body fat and gets cold at night when she finally stops moving, especially when she’s sick. Suddenly Pippa doesn’t want a new quilt, she wants the old quilt. Okay, you can keep the old quilt and have the new one too. Nope, that’s not a good enough answer. She has to worry over it for the rest of time. In fact, she’ll bring it up randomly when she seems to be feeling a bit down, as if she’s trying to feel worse because she gets into that negative thinking groove and her brain just dredges up every bad feeling she’s ever had. It’s exhausting.

The odd thing is that she often has no problem letting things go. If I sit down with her and tell her we need to go through toys to donate, she’ll choose things that I actually think she’d miss in a day or two. But god forbid I suggest getting rid of a pair of pants with holes in them that are too short anyway (::cough cough:: exactly what’s going to happen when I point out the holes in the 3-year-old leggings she’s wearing today).

And that’s why no one else sees what Alan and I see. They don’t see her hoarding things. They don’t see the panic in her eyes when I suggest she might want to take down some of her drawings on the wall to make way for new ones. They never see that. They don’t understand that it takes half an hour to get her to bed some nights because we have to talk her through some imagined event and coax her back into our nightly routine of hunting the good. I don’t know what to do because we’re already doing everything. I ask her how big her worry is and how big she *wants* her worry to be and she will actually tell me that she wants it to be big. What do I even do with that? Alan is literally trained to teach resiliency skills to soldiers and families and even he’s at a loss.

My next step is a referral to a child psychiatrist. She actually had one, but it was over an hour away and they wanted her to go twice a week. I need to get the girls switched to a pediatrician we actually live near so our referrals will be near us too, but we had to wait until after Tricare switched over to its new system. I hate how miserable she always seems to be. And I hate that I can’t fix it for her.

~Liz