What is happening to me?
It was one of those warm, fall afternoons, not sunny, but still, the array of colors splattered on the trees across the pond dazzled.
On the TV, my son was watching the old movie, “The Trouble With Angels.” It was a 1966 comedy with Rosalind Russell and Haley Mills about life in a Catholic girls’ boarding school, where Mills is the determined troublemaker, and Russell is the equally formidable Mother Superior. It is a funny movie, especially if you had the nuns for teachers as I did, and one that we played now and again for comic relief.
I was sitting at my painting easel in the corner of the living room, near the window that looked out on the pond. By all accounts, it should have been a serene afternoon. At any time in the past, with a similar setup, it was. And today started that way. But then, it suddenly changed.
The longer the movie played, the more afraid I became. Dread, foreboding, and this overwhelming sense of …guilt…being in trouble…bad things about to happen, flooded through me.
I tried to shake it off. This is stupid, I remember thinking. I mean, what the hell was wrong? Yet the longer I sat there trying to paint, the more afraid I got.
Worse. I had never experienced anything like this before. I mean, sure, when I was a kid at home, and my father was raging. But I was a 51-year-old adult woman having a peaceful afternoon with my son in my own home. So what was I suddenly so afraid of?
I tried to summon all that rigid strength I’d always had at my fingertips, to quell the fear. I could always depend on being strong. But that day, for the first time in my life, that strength failed me. Shocked, I realized I had no control over the intensifying terror racing through my body.
All I could think was, What is happening to me?!
I didn’t say a word to anyone. Just gritted my teeth, kept painting, and hoped it would pass. Eventually it did ease. But, I felt “different,” afterwards. Like something had changed permanently within me, though I couldn’t explain what, and life was never going to be the same.
The experience left me shaken, because I couldn’t attribute it to any specific cause. If I didn’t know why something happened, how could I know it wouldn’t happen again? It challenged my sense of always being in control of myself and my choices. And I was always, “in control.”
I’d always been able to bull through anything, no matter what. Even if I was exhausted, scared, or whatever, I did it. To me, life challenges were simply mind over matter. My mind drove the bus, the body delivered. No questions asked, no excuses allowed.
But this time, I hadn’t been able to. Why? I was as surprised and upset by my failure to stop those fears as if I’d tried to move my leg and it wouldn’t respond.
I sat there, racking my brain, trying to figure out what had just happened. Life had been pretty calm and stable these last few years. I hadn’t even needed to see a therapist for quite a while.
Yes, I had started menopause, but so far the symptoms hadn’t been too bad or unusual. Some night sweats. More fatigue than I’d expected. Otherwise, just business as usual.
Even as I couldn’t explain it, I remember hoping it was a fluke that would never happen again. But, it was just the beginning of something that would never be the same again.
Midlife status
It was the fall of 2005. Our son was entering his senior year of high school, and I will admit I was feeling this sense of grief. It was the realization that life was about to undergo a major change. He would go off to college, and the years of intense busyness that had filled my life with tutors, transporting him places, school activities, helping with homework, everything that had been the norm for the last 18 years, were almost over. On the one hand, it would be a chance for me to explore new directions. On the other…after a bumpy start during his infancy, I had really loved being “Mom,” and I was going to miss it all.
Other things had recently changed, too. We lost our beloved dog, a small rescue poodle named Gracie. And that was heartbreaking.
Work was also in flux. After ten years of protecting thousands of people participating in hundreds of research studies, I decided I needed a break. So that summer, I stepped down from my work on the ethics board. That left me adrift. But I was burned out. I just couldn’t read another research study on yet another medical disease. I would just need to figure out something else. Maybe now I would have the chance to do some writing?
And friendships with women…they were as problematic as ever. I just couldn’t seem to make things work. While I’d gained an understanding of the issues at play in that earlier friendship that I’d ended, I was still not meshing well with my friends.
The tangled knot of friendship failures
I’d had a couple of close friends from an earlier job. But when I left that job, even though I tried to stay in touch, things changed over time. Also, and I can say this looking back, I was needy. Clingy. Afraid of being “abandoned.” Abandonment and trust were huge, unrecognized issues from my childhood. No one had ever been there to protect me, and love was a very conditional thing to be earned. So I was always seeking a friend who I could trust would never abandon me. A tall order, and usually, I was seeking it from a friend who was emotionally unavailable.
I had other friends who were good to me. But I didn’t seem to acknowledge them as much. I was like I needed to prove to myself that I could get love from someone who wasn’t interested in giving it.
Again, looking back, I realize it wasn’t just my problems that caused those failures. I sensed that the individuals had issues of their own at the time that had nothing to do with me. I was determined to “be there for them” and thought if I did that, they would love me. It was a pattern familiar to me from the past.
These days, I think that was a “Mom” thing. My whole childhood, I’d gone without Mom’s attention or support. Her love was unattainable. And I wanted it, but it was always withheld. She was emotionally unavailable.
So I think I found friends who were the same way. And like with Mom, I kept trying to “earn their love,” a futile and unhealthy endeavor. I was just oblivious to that truth yet.
The other thing operating in me was that I was convinced that I was the broken one. That others had it together, and had all the answers — to life in general, and for me in particular. I had no answers for me that I trusted. Deep down, I always believed the real truths were outside of me.
My father had always dictated what I was supposed to think and believe. Since I’d never been allowed to have my own opinions growing up, or encouraged to trust my own instincts, why would I trust my own thoughts now? So now, I was looking outside of me, to the people around me, for answers, acceptance, validation.
I was starting to recognize that I was too clingy and needy. But beyond that, I still didn’t understand what was driving it all. And if you don’t even recognize there’s a problem, you can’t begin to understand what’s causing it, much less figure out how to fix it.
So over the last few years, I’d lost one close friend, and seemed to be losing a current one. It seemed no matter what I tried, or did, or said, I just pushed them away. All I knew was that it hurt, I was confused, and I was pretty much fed up with even trying.
Marriage
The one area that seemed to be going well was my relationship with Ed. We’d managed to move beyond the issues from early in our marriage, and the tools we’d learned in the marriage classes were serving us well.
Also, we’d had time for some fun things in life. With his parents gone, and with no recent battles with mine, we could focus on enjoying our own lives. There were trips to places like Gettysburg, where we even rode the battlefield on horseback one time, bringing the history of that battlefield alive.
Other trips brought us back to the rocky New England coast, Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, and even some family get-togethers again that went uneventfully.
On a smaller scale, we loved to explore or discover odd things. On time it was exploring some backwoods areas near the Williamsburg airport to discover the overgrown 1950s Nike missile base command center, something only two history geeks could love. Or another time, it was searching online for what had happened to Toto, the dog in the 1930s movie, The Wizard of Oz. If you would like to know, check out my WordPress blog posts on the topic.
In any event, those years were a pure joy. Overall, our life together had settled into a more easy pace.
If there was one area where I still struggled with fears, it was when Ed had to travel for work. It was that fear of abandonment that drove that, and most especially, the fear that something would happen to him. I was terrified of losing him. He was my soul mate, best friend, and protector. I’d struggled with that phobia right from the beginning, and each trip, I just had to tough it out.
Where did I go?
After that episode while oil painting that day, those moments of intense fear started to rise now and then. I hated them. I couldn’t control them. I feared them.
I even remember having a full panic episode start up while at the movies with Ed one time. To this day I hate the movie, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” The whole premise of the movie — a baby being born old, and out of sync with other children, then growing younger as he aged — felt out of control and freaked me out.
Aside from the anxiety attacks, I was also becoming aware of a tremendous level of fatigue, probably due to menopause. All my life, I’d depended on being strong…took it for granted. Now, unable to muster energy for anything, I kept remembering that question from earlier in my life: “What happens when I’m not strong anymore?” And it terrified me. That was my defense shield against anything that might threaten me.
All I knew was that the “me” of all my life, seemed to have disappeared. I remember telling a friend of mine that I suddenly felt like a stranger to myself and kept wondering: “Where did I go?”
She just laughed, chalked it up to midlife, and assured me that it would go away. I wondered.
Changed forever
However, very shortly, something else would temporarily derail that question. In December, I was going to face the biggest crisis of my life, which was about to change forever.
Soul Mosaic 
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