Gripping Fear’s Tail

Experiences in life are teachers of future behavior. The behavior is based on a positive or negative moment, and maybe sometimes both. For me, I had a car accident in an extremely heavy rainstorm during a late evening (I was unable to see past halfway down my car’s hood, and did not realize I was on the right shoulder until I saw the abandoned car in front of me) over twenty-five years ago which created an intense phobia of driving in steady rain, especially after dusk. Ironically I can drive in snowy conditions, but heavy rain? Nope.nope.NOPE. Fortunately in the past twenty years I have been easing myself into driving with those conditions because of personal motivations and medication. If I had not been sick with SlytherBun’s buggy cold, I would have driven out last Friday to see a dear friend during Labor Day weekend. In this case for driving six hours into a foggy rainstorm, love for my friend had a grip on fear’s tail, but sickness reeled me into staying put. I consider that a win in my book of phobias and anxieties.

As a stay-at-home mom, I am grateful for the time spent with SlytherBun. Since she began pre-Kindergarten on Tuesday, I have been tackling the fears new mothers could have. Most of those fears stem from whether she sneezes into her elbow, says “Please” and “Thank you” and listens to her teachers. You can imagine my gut reaction at hearing Tuesday afternoon from her bus driver and driver’s assistant that she was disruptive by refusing to stay seated and sit with her feet as expected. As she and I walked home, I asked questions about her day as if I were on a sales call trying to glean information from a potential customer (Aslan Training!). My fears of her possibly bad behavior grew as I heard her answers to the point that I contacted BFF to discuss what to do. I ended up leaving a message on her teacher’s voice mailbox which asked for her to call me back if SB had indeed been disruptive. Her teacher did call back the next day. Not only did the bus driver say anything negative to her about SlytherBun, but the teacher also assured my worried self that my daughter was behaving as any normal four year-old would. Another tail gripped FTW!

Lastly I write about another fear that is work-related: meeting deadlines. The sample piece I am knitting for Kathleen Dames in Juniper Moon Farm‘s Findley Dappled is almost finished for Knitting Fever Inc., and I am hoppily on track. Whenever I am presented with a set date to meet, I knit a swatch to determine how to match the gauge and then work a portion of the project to calculate how many inches to work per day in order to finish a week before the deadline. Having that number in my head allows 7 days of non-knitting days such as sickness or emergencies. Do you have any tricks in meeting your fears? =:8