My body clock is sounding an alarm: Your “five minutes” is up!

She enters the room, maintaining her comfortably slow pace.

“Okay, open your mouth, please.”

Finally!

I smile, happy to oblige.

There is a long pause.

I shake my head slightly and try to speak: “I can’t open.”

In my brain I can hear myself enunciate each word clearly, but my ears detect only a gurgling noise, followed by a choked cry. I feel my eyes widen in panic.

She picks up on my non-verbal cues and pats my arm gently.

“Yes, you can. Just pull them apart.”

And I do.

“Oh! But I thought they were stuck.”

“A lot of people think that,” she reassures me.

I wonder what causes this delusion.  Is it a side effect of the topical anesthetic? Perhaps she is just being kind because I’m a nervous wreck.  Looking up to assess her motives, I see that she is waiting patiently for me to leave.

“You’re all finished for now. We’ll call you when the permanent crown comes in.”

I’m getting a crown, but I don’t feel particularly regal.  I suspect that some drool has escaped my numb lips and is headed for my chin, maintaining its comfortably slow pace.

I push myself out of the chair, feeling a vague ache in my lower back.  How long was it, really? Long enough to make my back sore; long enough that my jaw will be stiff for hours after the Novocain wears off.

She escorts me to the door. “Do you want some Advil?”

And I do.

But I tell her, “No, thanks. I’ll take some at home.”

Is she delusional? How can I swallow a pill if I can’t feel my mouth?!

Driving home, I marvel at the trick my brain played on the rest of my skull.  I was utterly convinced that my jaw—clenched on the gooey substance used to take impressions—was sealed shut.  My anxiety became my reality.

Reaching up from the steering wheel, I rub the side of my face, which is still quite numb from the Novocain.

I just wanted to make sure it was still there.

walter.deviantart.com

* * * * * * *

I love to listen to music and I have pretty eclectic taste.  Although not a fan of country, rap or “screamo,” I enjoy and appreciate the work of individual artists in any genre.  Occasionally, when I hear a relatively unknown artist featured on NPR, I download his or her latest song to my iPod.  I especially revel in sharing these discoveries with my teenage daughters.  You know, so they will see how cool I am…until this recent incident, I thought I was a cool mom.

I am driving the Mom Van one morning—taking my two younger children to school—when my 14 year old daughter asks if she can play music. She sits beside me—in the passenger seat that is also DJ’s mission control—and plugs in her iPod.

“You know,” she says casually, as she scrolls through her playlist, “that you downloaded the explicit version of that Mumford & Sons song.”

I bristle at her accusation. I always check the iTunes description for “explicit language” warnings.

“Which song is that?” I ask in my most innocent tone. The van is cruising along, but I am stalling.

“Little Lion Man.  It drops the F-bomb in the chorus,” she chides me, clearly enjoying her role in this morning’s drama.

My 10 year old son stifles a laugh—a guffaw, really—from his seat in the back row of the Mom Van.  Usually he complains that he can’t hear us talking, but he doesn’t miss a word of this exchange.

I run through the lyrics in my head: “I really f*@$!ed it up this time, didn’t I my dear?”

Yes, I did.  Swiftly, I choose a new strategy and launch my cross-examination.

“Is it on your iPod?! Has your brother listened to it?!”

“Don’t worry,” she replies calmly. “He just changes it to ‘I really messed it up’ when he sings it.”

“Yeah, it’s not big deal,” my son agrees. Then he adds, “We’ve heard you say that word plenty of times.”

I glance in the rearview mirror to see my little lion man’s widening grin.

“Well, we need to delete that song.” I smile and attempt to regain my composure. “We can see if there’s a radio version.”

This is unlikely.  Mumford & Sons are alternative and British; and they are VERY cool.

It’s clear to me now that I’m NOT a cool mom.  I’m not sure I’m a competent mom. Among my many mistakes is my occasional use of profanity, even when I know that my children may be within earshot.

Best parenting lesson I learned from my kids:  They listen to my words as carefully as they do any song lyrics.

As we pull into the carpool line, I wonder if Mumford kisses his Mom with that mouth. I unplug my daughter’s iPod as they exit the Mom Van and NPR’s Morning Edition fills the space around me.  Maybe I’ll learn something on the ride home, too.

When I was younger, I didn’t worry about the effects of my worrying.  But as I got older, I began to listen to what other people were saying:

“You’ll be all gray,” my mom warned me.

“Try not to worry; it raises your cortisol levels,” my doctor advised.

“There’s no point in worrying about things you can’t control,” my spouse espoused.

I knew they were right, so I taught myself a new approach to worrying. I found ways to calm my mind, to free myself of anxiety.  I take time each day to let go of negative thoughts as I concentrate on my breathing. I even programmed my cell phone with a gratitude alarm—soothing harp music reminds me to focus on the many blessings in my life.

Until last week, I was satisfied with my progress.

Then I learned a new piece of data from the field of Positive Psychology, and it has me questioning my fundamental assumption about worrying. Apparently, when we worry the brain releases endorphins.  These neurotransmitters—which are also produced when we exercise, eat spicy food and engage in sexual activity—give us a sense of power or well-being.  From the perspective of evolutionary biology, it makes sense that we react to stressful situations with a heightened sense of strength: a so-called “endorphin rush” would have protected us from being eaten by predators on the savannah millions of years ago. While it seems counter-intuitive, it may be true that worrying actually make us feel better.

I hesitate to write this, because I am not sure I understand it. I consulted my friend, a neuropsychologist, to research the matter more fully and she has reassured me that the science makes sense, at least with regard to short-term worrying.  People who suffer from chronic anxiety, however, are likely not enjoying an endorphin rush or its attendant sense of well-being.  Different people respond differently to worrying.

My learned response is to acknowledge my worries and then dispense with them.  I believe this approach has given me mastery over my worrier brain.  I have no scientific evidence to support this claim, though I have enough gray hair to prove that I’ve been working on it for a while.

Moving forward, I will continue to adjust my ballast against the everyday worries that inevitably creep into my brain.  In doing so, I will be more aware that I must also counter the biological thrill of worrying.  And maybe I’ll allow myself a few moments to feel the endorphin rush; to be happier about worrying.

I join the herd of commuters and visitors climbing the stairs from the platform to the lower concourse, and I can hear jazz music being played on a keyboard: Gabriel Aldort leans forward into the microphone and his husky voice fills the room. It takes me a few beats to realize that he has switched to a Billy Joel song. I picture the album cover in my mind, and lean against the pillar to enjoy the melody and the memory.

He takes a short break to chat with a transit cop, and I round the pillar to get a closer look at his set-up. His keyboard cover, open on the floor in front of him, is quickly filling with singles and a few fives. There is a photo of an infant, and next to it a sign indicating that he is an MTA Arts for Transit musician.

A woman moves over to make room for me on the bench, and I sit to savor my coffee and several songs. He is better than any musician I’ve heard playing in train stations. Grateful for his music, which has transported me from Grand Central Station to the bedroom of my teen years, I raise my phone to snap this photo:

He nods slightly and then moves into the bridge of Elton John’s “Your Song.” This is not the city I remember. Like Gabriel’s music, it is an improvement on the original.

My prayers went something like this:

I was reading Stephen Mitchell’s adaptation of Psalm 90 when I arrived at one of my favorite biblical verses: “Teach us how short our time is; let us know it in the depths of our souls.”  I felt tears stinging at the back of my eyes, but that wasn’t strange at all.  This often happens when I read Psalms, especially Psalm 90.

I thought about my mantra of middle age. Time really is going by more quickly now.

Then I thought about where I was last year on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.  I was finishing up revisions of a reflection that I had written after hearing Arnold Whitaker’s address to the Walton High School sophomore class.

My thoughts strayed from the Walton High School auditorium–where I had been sitting next to my then-sixteen-year-old daughter–to our apartment in Riverdale.  It was what the Real Estate agents called a Junior 4. Her bedroom was a small alcove off the kitchen that had been converted into the fourth room in the apartment. She was fussy in the evenings and never wanted to go to bed.  At nap times, the babysitter used to sing lullabies, songs that had traveled across an ocean from her native Ireland to my native New York City.  I sang Yiddish lullabies and, when they didn’t do the trick, I would play the Irish Rovers CD and sing along softly as we danced slowly around the apartment.

My arms began to ache from the memory, although they held only a thin volume of Psalms.

This is how my prayers to honor the memory of the victims of the Holocaust became a mash-up of Psalm 90 and an Irish lullaby:

“Show us how precious each day is; teach us to be fully here.”

“Some heartaches I don’t doubt,
life’s sure to dish us out.
We’ll beat the lot and that is what
life’s all about.
Whatever may come true,
ahead for me and you -
Some day it all will be
Memories.”