What to Know
I know I’m not the only mom ever to think of the worst case scenarios, unprompted, when it comes to my kids. But apparently, that feeling, and those irrational but totally rational-feeling fears never go away. Just ask one mom who sent a text message that her adult daughter shared on TikTok. In the screenshot, the mom tells her daughter that she was worried when she didn’t hear back from her.
Sure, that’s all fine and well, but it’s what she said after that. The mom also told her daughter that she began to worry that her daughter was locked in her closet or “murdered by some serial killer.” She also shared fears about her daughter somehow falling into a sewer. So yeah, that postpartum anxiety we sometimes feel after having a baby? It never quite goes away.
Postpartum anxiety is kind of a way of life, even 20 years later.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, postpartum anxiety is nothing to scoff at. It includes prolonged worries after a baby is born or after adoption about the safety of the baby or child. Some of the telltale signs include avoiding public spaces out of fear of danger to yourself or your child, being afraid to sleep out of fear that your baby might stop breathing in their sleep, and experiencing intrusive thoughts of bad things that could happen.
In the TikTok, the adult daughter jokes about her mom’s fears for her, as an adult now. And as a mom myself who experienced very real postpartum anxiety, I can appreciate finding the humor now. Because sometimes, what else can you do to find some sort of way to laugh through to worry?
In the TikTok, the mom’s text when checking up on her daughter says, “OK just checking, tried to call a few times but it keeps going straight to your voicemail and then I started panicking thinking maybe somebody locked you in your closet on that crazy lock that’s outside the door, and then thought you probably were murdered by some serial killer, and then it ran through my mind that maybe you fell and you fell into the sewer and you were trapped down there, so thanks for texting back later. OK talk to you later, love you.”
Clearly, that was a talk-to-text scenario because of the rambling in the text message. But hey, we’ve all been there in terms of having the worst fears present themselves for us on behalf of our kids, regardless of their age.
One mom’s comment under the TikTok proved that when she wrote, “When my daughter went to college, she called every Sunday, except for one, and that Sunday, I called campus police to report a kidnapping. Anyway…She was just sleeping off a hangover.”
We are kind of all the same.
Another mom wrote, “Listen, my kids are 20 and 23 and if there’s sirens anywhere where I might hear them in town, I will immediately get texts from my children, ‘Mom it’s not me. I’m safe.’ So yeah, her thought process is dead on as far as I’m concerned.”
The mom who sent the text actually commented on the video herself to admit that she does worry about her daughter, but that her daughter understands her “freak outs” by now.
“So I’m her mom, she is an amazing daughter and she does call me all the time!!” The mom commented. “This isn’t my only freak out moment and she handles them so well. She knows I’m always coming from a place of love!! I love seeing how normal this is for so many moms out there!! The thoughts are intense at times.”
