I am sorry he is going through this agian! I will be praying!

Excellent post, Rache. I feel for you. Much love and prayers for you both.

This is not a question I'd raise with LT (well, I would, if I were a kid his age, but not as an adult) but I did get a bit curious - and I'll bring it up here because it's the kind of thing smart nine-going-on-ten year olds ask, and if you've answered me, you have one ready for him.

When I was LT's age, I certainly knew quite a bit about nine-year-old girls whose anxiety was not soothed by mothers who rubbed their backs and spoke calming words, because those mothers had been ripped away and herded into gas ovens. And the anxious nine-year-old girls were eventually herded into those ovens themselves, or died of typhus like Anne Frank, or if they were very lucky survived and got to try to put their lives back together with no knowledge of whether anyone they knew had survived. (Substitute your own atrocities here; that's just the one I knew most about when I was nine.)

How do you reconcile that with being taken care of in the way that's perfect forever? (When I say "how do you..." I don't mean to imply that you can't, I mean how do you personally? You don't need to tell me - but you may need to tell LT one day, if he asks. And it's one of those things I think evey adult needs to work out for themselves.) Do you put God Himself on trial, as at least one Jewish Bet Din (religious court) did, for allowing such things to happen? Do you say it's entirely due to the blessing of free will, and that humans abuse it and God is saddened by the abuse of His Gift? (This would be close to my own view.) Do you say (I suspect this is closest to yours) that Heaven is forever, and so suffering may be caused by humans here on Earth but it's for a time that's infinitely small compared to forever?

Sorry to get all doom and gloom on you; you just got me wondering.

Excellent question, Paula. Actually my answer would be a combination of your latter two. Yes, all the horrible awful things that happen to people exist because we have free will, and atrocities (along with beautiful, wonderful things) are the inevitable result of that. However, as people who have trust in God and believe in eternity with Him, we can take comfort in the belief that what is here is really brief in comparison to the scope of eternity, and that things we don't understand, may NEVER understand with our finite minds, make sense to God. Even if they grieve Him, which I'm sure a lot of them do.

I'd thought a bit about if he might have some underlying cause for his anxiety, along the lines of something he'd read or the like, but he really is not exposed much at this point to current events, and the difficulties of life in ancient civilizations -- his major area of current reading interest -- seem distant enough to probably not be the problem. As I said, though, I do wonder. I was not an overly anxious child myself. I do, however, remember being terribly worried about nuclear war. My brother was old and wise (2 1/2 years older than I am) and I would ask him to tell me again and again how the Russians wouldn't bomb us, because we're not by a city, and if they DID bomb a city, we would only get a teeny tiny bit of radiation and we'd be fine. He made up a little object lesson for me, and I would literally ask him to repeat it or at least discuss it whenever I felt afraid -- "Toney, tell me again about the big pile of sand that is the radiation in San Francisco and the one grain of sand for us." (and this was just in the early 80's; imagine if I'd lived during the era of duck-and-cover drills and the Cuban Missile Crisis and all that).

I think you are doing a great job with his anxiety. You are taking it seriously. I went to my parents around that age. 9 or 10. I was so anxious about my house burning down, among other things. They pretty much laughed it off and did nothing about my fears. they thought I was being just silly. that hurt alot. You might not be able to get rid of all his anxiety, but he knows you are there for him. And that is wonderful

You guys didn't do duck and cover drills in elementary school? Maybe we did because we lived near a major metropolitan area. I was horribly frightened of nuclear war. It didn't help that my mother MADE me watch The Day After - a terribly graphic and realistic (Ie., no happy ending) disaster flick that showed what it would be like if we did in fact go to war in that fashion. My parents also poo-pooed my anxiety and yelled at me if I got out of bed for it.

Perhaps it was the fact that nobody helped me that taught me to help myself...I dunno. I kind of wish I had more support as a child...Maybe it wouldn't have taken drug addiction, promiscuity and random acts of rebellion to teach me to take care of myself. So, I'm glad you take it seriously with LT.

Coming from the fanatical BAC my mother was (And I by no means am trivializing becoming a BAC, my mom was CAH-RAZY), I also had SEVERE Hadephobia. My sleep was always tormented by dreams of the devil and being abandoned by God. No matter how much I was taught that God loved me and wanted me to be happy I believed in my heart that I would never be THAT good...That God may love everyone else, but He'd never love ME like that. I was evil and sinful and horrible. I grew up believing that and to this day I still kind of do.

Other lists of fears I had include but are not limited to...Achluophobia, Aeroacrophobia (I'm now over that one!) Agateophobia (Not as much anymore), Agliophobia, Ankylophobia, Anthropophobia (This one was hard, but I think I'm finally over it!) Bacteriophobia, Claustrophobia (not exactly a fear as much as it is a massive discomfort). Well, sorry, I'll go now...lol.

Poor kid. Does his mind race and he just can't calm it down? Or is he scared? Because the racing-mind thing happens to me and I actually have something that works. I learned it from a roommate years ago that had insomnia issues. You have to force your brain to focus so it isn't flying off in a million directions. To do this, you just go through the alphabet and think of something that starts with each letter (I use cities in the US; LT may have a category he likes better, like maybe Star Wars stuff or something along those lines). It really does get your mind to wind down and stop worrying about all those million things you think about in the middle of the night. Might work for you, too. :)

It's funny, I recently read the blog of a young woman who was extremely afraid of something and she talked about how her parents used to pray with her when she was a little girl and afraid (in her case it was wolves). They would say, with her, “Things I'm scared of, go away, in Jesus' name, Amen.” And she talks about how grateful she is that her parents did that with her. She says "It may seem strange that my parents had me pray for the wolves to go away; since they knew that the danger of wolves attacking our home was virtually zero, it seems they might have comforted me with that. In fact, I vaguely remember them telling me that wolves could not possibly come, but it did not help. The prayer, which I imagined obtained the happy result of Jesus keeping us safe from the wolves, did, so I prayed it, night after night, with one or the other of my parents coaching me along. I imagined that God was protecting because I asked him to. And what I never realized, not then and not for many years afterward, was that while I prayed for “things I'm scared of” to go away, I was really praying for protection from the fear itself. How wise my parents were to help me do that."

I guess I am saying that, far from LT thinking you were freaky parents, he will probably appreciate what you did far more than you will ever know. Keep up the good work. Seriously.

How is LT now? Is he feeling better?

Deb, thanks for asking. He slept better last night -- went to bed a little late, at around 10:45 or so, but basically just lay there working on Awana and then listening to a Narnia book on CD until he fell asleep.

The Narnia book was his idea. T and I had thought to try music, specifically George Winston's gorgeous beautiful piano music that puts T to sleep by the third track on the CD. (It IS soothing, but not boring. Anyway.) But LT wanted to try a story on CD, so we got a few out of the library. That boy MUST have some noise on when he goes to sleep. We installed a fan that will pull heat from the front room if it's really warm out here, but we don't run that if it's NOT really warm out here because it'll make him colder. We tried a space heater with a fan but our electric bill almost doubled for the month. Usually I'll run the washer and dryer, which are right there by his room, but sometimes for whatever reason they're not going and now he likes the story better anyway.

{{{Rachel}}} I have an anxious child, too, and I relate completely to your reaction to your son's anxiety. Pass the Cookie Crush...

When I was his age, my mom worked nights and my dad was doing homework all evening. So when I went to bed he would turn the tv on. Just loud enough for me to hear. I could not get to sleep without that sound. I actually sleep better in the city with all the traffic noise.

Mary - the alphabet thing works for me too. I vary it - city names, fictional character names, first lines of poems or songs, whatever. (In fact I first got it from Madeleine L'Engle in _A Ring of Endless Light_, in which Vicky Austin uses poems int hat way.)

I wish I'd known it as a kid. I used to lay awake worrying about the house catching on fire. Being a logical type, I'd reassure myself that my great-grandmother was in her 80s and *she'd* never had a house catch on firs, so it couldn't be a likely or a common thing.

P.S. Rachel, I bet you have comparatively little trouble trusting God with your own dreads. But I also bet LT's unhappiness is a far bigger fear for you than your own and a thing that matters more to you. Which says a lot about parenthood, doesn't it?

And I'll leave the obvious analogy to Fatherhood for you to draw.

Hey sweet lady. How is everything? That alphabet thing sounds like a good idea. I need to try that! Also, when I was younger I couldn't sleep without music...Now I can't sleep if there is any kind of sound at all.

Dichroic, the fire thing is too funny -- I had a similar issue. When I was a kid and I would hear sirens, I would worry that it was MY HOUSE that was on fire and I didn't know it! How likely is that, really? I like your logic; good point on the 80 years fire-free. It's amazing how kids' minds work, isn't it?

I'm glad I'm not the only one who uses the alphabet thing. It really does work for me, most of the time.