Showing Up Anyway

On anxiety, fatherhood, and the difference between feeling absent and continuing to show up.

Ben was three when my glass overflowed, and five by the time the level had come down far enough for me to notice it had. That is the part of my anxiety I have found hardest to write about, not because those years were the worst of it in terms of symptoms, but because they were the years in which I quietly decided that I was failing at the one thing I most wanted to be good at.

The guilt did not announce itself as guilt. It arrived as a sort of low background comparison between the father I was being and the father I had been before, and the comparison went badly every single time. I had been someone who could sit on a floor and be entirely absorbed in whatever was happening on it, and now I was someone who sat on the same floor with a mind that had gone somewhere else without asking permission. I was in the room and I was not in the room, and I knew it while it was happening, which is the particular cruelty of the thing, because there is no version of you standing outside a bath time to point out that you have drifted; there is only you, halfway through a conversation about which bath toy is fastest, realising that you have not heard the last thirty seconds of it.

The loops

What was taking me away was rarely dramatic. It was the same handful of thoughts arriving in the same order, a work problem I had already turned over a hundred times, a sensation in my chest that needed checking again, a sentence I had said in a meeting that afternoon which I was now rewriting for an audience that had long since stopped listening. Hypervigilance does not need new material. It is perfectly happy to run the same footage on a loop, and it will do it while you are pouring shampoo into your hand, and it will do it while you are turning the pages of a book you know by heart.

So I would come downstairs afterwards having got through the evening, and instead of counting it as an evening I had got through, I would count it as an evening he had not really had. I was not present, I told myself. I am not showing up. He deserves better than a father who is only technically here.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to write that sentence as though I were being unfair to myself and knew it. I did not know it. At the time it felt like the plainest possible reading of the evidence, and if you had sat me down and asked me to argue the other side I could not have done it.

What actually happened

Here is what I have since had to accept, and it took a long time and Dan's help to accept it. Across those two years I did baths, and I did bedtime stories, and I did the songs and the water and the negotiating over one more chapter, more or less every night that I was in the house. I said I love you when I did not feel capable of feeling much of anything. I went to the things. I carried him up the stairs. On the evenings when I had nothing left I did it anyway, badly and mechanically, and the doing of it still happened.

The mechanism behind that is not flattering to me, and I think it is worth spelling out rather than dressing up. My wiring has always answered difficulty with effort, and my particular belief about worth meant that any suspicion I was failing at something produced a doubling down rather than a retreat. So when the thought arrived that I was failing Ben, what my system generated was a push in his direction, an instruction to mask what I was feeling and keep the routines intact at whatever cost, because letting them slip would have confirmed the verdict I was already terrified of. The guilt, in other words, was pushing me towards him rather than away, and the entire time I was reading it as proof of absence it was in fact producing presence.

I am not offering that as a technique. Masking is expensive and it poured a great deal into the glass, and I would not recommend anyone hold themselves together through a difficult period by sheer refusal to let it show. But it does mean that the story I was telling myself, the one in which I was slowly disappearing from my son's childhood, was not describing anything that was happening in the world. It was describing what it felt like from the inside of a nervous system that had decided everything was going wrong.

Nobody had noticed

The thing that finally moved this for me was not an insight, it was a series of fairly ordinary conversations. Once I had recovered enough to talk about that period, I started mentioning it to people in my orbit, half expecting them to say that they had wondered, or that they had seen me struggling and had not known how to raise it. Not one of them had. Nobody had realised anything was wrong. They remembered those years as unremarkable, and they remembered me as I had always been, and several of them were genuinely surprised.

I have turned that over a lot since. There is a version of it that is sad, because it says something about how invisible this can be and how many people are probably carrying it past us unnoticed right now. But there is another version that I have needed more, which is that the person I was so certain I had stopped being was, from every angle except my own, still there. The failing I was convinced was obvious to everyone was obvious to nobody, because it was not a failing, it was a feeling.

What I would tell you

If you are in the middle of this with a small child, and you are keeping a private tally of every evening you were not properly there, I would ask you to look at what you have actually done rather than what you have felt while doing it. Feelings are terrible witnesses in this state; they are being generated by a system that has already concluded you are failing and is gathering support for its case. Your actions are better evidence. Did you do the bath. Did you read the book. Did you say the words even though they cost you something to say. That is the record, and the record is not what your anxiety is telling you it is.

And please do not punish yourself for the drifting, because the drifting is a symptom and punishment has never once resolved a symptom. All the guilt did for me was pour more into a glass that was already spilling over, which made the loops worse, which made the drifting worse. Being kinder to myself was not indulgence, it was the only intervention available to me that did not make the problem larger.

I still do not know what Ben will remember of those years, and I have stopped needing to. What I know is that he was read to, and bathed, and told he was loved, by someone who was frightened and tired and did it anyway. I spent two years marking myself down for that. I would like anyone else doing the same to mark themselves up.

← Writing · Andy Bridson