Three Little Birds
Cutting the Thread of Hereditary Anxiety
Growing up, my parents never really talked about the war in Lebanon. The gruesome details, the things they wished to forget. But there was something about the rationing of food and toilet paper, the increasing death toll and the shelter-in-place orders that made the pandemic reminiscent of the war.
My family has moved around a lot, so we don’t really have traditions that transcend the various cultures, continents and countries. But one thing that has always crossed all language barriers is our love for being “en famille.”
Yes, there was a backyard, more space and childcare, but to be with family was the main reason why my parents, my husband, our then 3-and-1 year-olds and two lab mixes gathered under the same roof to quarantine in the NYC suburbs. My parent’s house has served as a refuge no matter what shape I’m in. It is where my friends and I fled on 9/11, where my husband and I went when we miscarried, and now, it was where we all found ourselves, disheveled and disoriented.
On a somber Thursday evening one month into lockdown, we each wandered into the living room and plopped down on the couches. The Zoom calls had ended, the kids were soundly asleep in their cribs, and we could remove the brave faces to digest the events of the day. Unlike other nights, we didn’t turn on the news and sat quietly instead.
“All I could do was to sleep over you,” my mother began.
As we humbly listened, she shared how she covered me, two months old, and my brother, two years old, with her body under the dining room table to protect us from the shelling.
With each sip of Scotch, her story grew more generous with information and emotion.
In between bombs, the neighbors across the hall rushed over to tell her to hide in the bathroom, the only room without windows. Because my mother had stress-induced mastitis, she couldn’t breastfeed. To feed me, she would have had to cross the exposed living room to prepare a bottle in the kitchen, which was on the other side of the bathroom.
She chose to keep me hungry to keep me alive.
My mother laid in the bathtub until the blasts were so strong that she had no choice but to join the rest of the building, which had crammed into the first-floor apartment. She sat cross-legged in the middle of a room with me in her arms and my brother on her lap, surrounded by neighbors who absorbed the fragments of shattered glass on our behalf.
It is then that my grandparents arrived. They had heard our building was hit because we were in a direct line to the Hôtel-Dieu de France, the hospital the Syrians were targeting on the Christian side of the city.
“I felt God sent me angels,” she said of my Téta and Jeddo appearing through the gun smoke.
They ran in zigzags to try and fool the snipers enough to get us safely to their apartment, one of the first buildings in the “green light” that separated the Christian and Muslim areas.
As a 24-year-old female warrior, my mother took me and brother and boarded the last flight out of Beirut. She didn’t know how the rest was going to go. How my father, who was away on a business trip and didn’t have a way to get in touch with her, would find us. She didn’t have access to money or milk — only courage.
The moment the plane started to take off, she thanked the heavens above. She didn’t care she was embarking on a 20-hour journey from Beirut to Jordan to New York, changing airports from JFK to LGA, and on to Montréal alone with a newborn and a toddler.
“My kids were alive,” she sighed.
That night in quiet quarantine, I began to see I related to my role as a mother as primal — to keep my daughter and my son alive — the way my mom had done.
Before the pandemic, I was a perfectionist-turned-mom who believed in positive discipline, low sugar intake and limited screen time. I was incredibly patient, playful and present. I never lost my temper or raised my voice… at the kids.
As soon as the door would close behind my husband in the mornings and I was the only parent at home, a fear would come over me. It wasn’t because I needed the help, though that was certainly welcomed, it was because I wanted back up. I needed to know if my instincts failed me, they wouldn’t also fail my children.
During the day, I would coach top executives on how to be their most effective, to be responsible for their actions and reactions. We would work on being able to control the frequency in which our amygdala — fight, flight or freeze response — is hijacked.
At night, once the kids had gone to bed and all of the stress of the day caught up with me, I would have my own version of witching hour(s), when I would lash out to whoever was close enough not to run away and to love me anyway.
Parenting lived for me as a prolonged amygdala hijack and my kids’ safety controlled the trigger. My brain would convince me because my daughter was coughing, she was choking. Because my son fell, he fatally hit his head. Because I nearly drowned as a child, my kids would too.
I thought every parent of young kids constantly asked themselves “what would I do if [insert tragedy]?” Turns out, only people who suffer from catastrophic thinking and worst-case scenario planning do.
I found strange comfort in hearing my parents’ tragic story. They had survived, under much worse circumstances, and so could we.
I knew I was born in wartime, but I didn’t know the impact it had on me and my psyche. I didn’t know the whole story. And without all of the facts, the mind starts to fill in the gaps all on its own, sometimes with fears out of proportion to the threat.
I don’t remember hiding in windowless stairwells. But now I get claustrophobic when I play hide and go seek with my kids. My brother doesn’t remember hearing bombs outside. But now his heart skips a beat when he hears fireworks.
I knew I developed anxiety when I became a parent, but I didn’t know it could be hereditary. I didn’t know unless you intentionally eradicate it out of the gene pool, it is a trait that can sneakily get passed down.
I don’t remember at which point my light and bright little girl got weighed down by my perfectionism. But now I can see her trying to control the small things because the big things are out of her little hands. I can see how in control of her mood I am and how out of control I had been of my own.
I began to see that as the child of immigrant parents born in wartime and now raising young kids in a global pandemic, I was standing on a bridge between two generations, connected by inherited trauma and — if I didn’t intervene — two more lifetimes of anxiety.
I needed to do something before it was too late.
No matter how much we try, we can’t control whether we will inherit, experience or pass down trauma during our lifetime.
And what we resist, persists.
But what we can control is whether what happens becomes a catalyst, or a barrier, for success.
With courage and curiosity, I started to use the hardships to give me strength and the uncertainty to give me clarity.
I began looking at the current circumstances as an opportunity to slow down time and to speed up letting go.
To become a more conscious Mama because there are always little ears listening and brown eyes watching.
And if one quiet night, it occurs to my kids they have fears out of proportion to the threat, I will tell them all about how I was born in wartime, and they were raised in a pandemic.
I will tell them how, in every tragedy, to look for the heroes — like the healthcare workers for whom we clapped out of our window at 7 p.m. every night, the IT guy who added “show and tell” to his list of troubleshooting skillsets, the doorwoman who created a different make-believe game each time we came in and out of the lobby, the thousands of people who displayed rainbows on their windows or wrote uplifting chalk messages on sidewalks.
How, in an attempt to cut the thread of hereditary anxiety from our family tree, I intentionally made mistakes during arts and crafts so my little girl could see it was ok not to be perfect and made every effort to replace “be careful” with “here’s how to do it safely” as to not break my little boy’s carefree spirit.
How in each other, Mama and Dada found camaraderie in the insanity — like a tribe that transcended gender roles and marital woes.
How we played Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” on repeat because we all needed to know every little thing was going to be alright.
How we let them have too much screen time and eat too much junk food because we too, needed the escape and the comfort.
How we learned to take deep breaths or go to our “quiet corners” when it was all too much.
And most importantly, how we not only survived but we thrived, just like their Téta and Jeddo did, and they could too.
