Aliza off the deep end

Well, I just put Aliza to bed. It took around 20 minutes longer than normal. It's because in the morning, her dad, brothers and I leave for Chicago and she'll be staying here with Grandpa. She'll have a grand time. He'll take her out to eat and shopping and probably spoil her. She'll get to have way more fun and freedom than she gets with all of us here.

But being separated from us causes her great anxiety and I can't help but think, as I watch her sobbing and hysterical over the possibility that she might have a nightmare while I'm gone and grandpa won't know how to help her - just one of the many "what ifs" we've entertained in the last half hour - that it's too much. This is beyond normal anxiety.

She piles one thing on top of another. There's also the fact that grandpa might not be able to help her with her homework, even though I tried to convince her that her grandpa is probably smarter than her dad and I both (sorry, hon). Then there's this book report. She has to do one every week, and having to completely finish a whole chapter book and answer pages and pages of questions about that book, every single week, is pretty overwhelming for her. I told her once if she didn't like a book that it was okay to put it aside and start another one, to sort of take the pressure off, but now she can't find any book she cares enough about to finish at all.

She has a lot of homework anxiety. Getting it all done and done right is important to her. Little Type A kid.

If she has time to think about it, there's a million little things I help her with that she worried about handling, while I'm gone. And no amount of promises of presents brought back from our trip, or assurances that I will call her several times, makes her feel better.

And this hysteria happens every time we go to Chicago without her. If her dad stays home with her it's a little better, because he knows her routine. But if neither of us is there, she goes off the deep end. Tonight I told her that tomorrow after school maybe grandpa could take her to a bookstore so she could look for a new book to do this week's report on, and she burst into tears and cried "I don't want tomorrow to come!"

Is all this normal anxiety? Or is this Fragile X carrier anxiety?