January 16. My husband is interviewing for jobs. It’s a welcome development after he was unexpectedly laid off at the end of 2023, the culmination of an already awful year. And yet I’m somehow more anxious after he advances to the next round of interviews than I was when he had no leads at all.
The problem, for me, is that each opportunity presents a new potential future unfolding for us, and I don’t do well with multiple potential futures. Give me a few possibilities and I’m fine, but the more the unknowns proliferate, the more the gears of my mind will try to grind out an answer. I lie awake at night, unable to control their whirring.
Does he take the safe office job with the decent salary and opportunity for growth in the company, where he’d work late and have a nearly two-hour commute—throwing me back into solo-parenting every weeknight (plus occasional Saturdays)?
Would he make enough that we could splurge on a “mother’s helper” to come one night a week, to help keep me from losing my shit? (Why in 2024 do we still call them mother’s helpers? Why are moms still disproportionately the ones needing this kind of help?)
I try to resist picking up my phone, knowing that it will only lead to making lists and spreadsheets that pull me further from the sleep I so desperately need. I take deep breaths and picture stepping off the roller coaster of my thoughts, then watching them continue their frantic ride without me. But the knowledge that my phone is there next to me, in the drawer of my nightstand, burns a hole in my brain. I open the drawer and start tapping out calculations, comparisons, questions, as he tosses and turns next to me.
Does he pursue the job nearby and get a bigger salary with more responsibility and unpredictable hours, in a stodgy environment that I know would hurt his soul? How much time would I still spend solo? Is it a big enough company that he could get job protection if he ever took family leave?
Does he move into a field where he has less experience, with a lower salary but a decent bonus and better prospects down the line—plus the ability to work from home? Does the savings in commuting costs make up for the difference in wages? How does the bonus factor in?
I’m not even the one who’s interviewing, and yet I spend days in these quandaries, undersleeping and over-investing in imagined lives I know we’ll never lead.
Where’s the line between interdependence and codependency?
Unsurprisingly, my IBS is flaring up. Anxiety and lack of sleep have always made my gut rumble and my throat burn, but this is on a whole other level. It feels like a deep, jagged canyon has opened up in my center, tumbling down to a roiling ocean below.
I’m often so bloated that I have to unbutton my jeans anytime I sit down, although I’ve deliberately sized up and the waistband is loose when I put them on in the morning. Yes, I could wear leggings or sweatpants, but it’s winter in the Northeast and I need something to ward off the biting winds on daycare drop-offs and pickups. Jeans are the only pants in my wardrobe that fit the bill.
I try to keep the open zipper hidden by long sweatshirts; if my daughter ever catches a glimpse, she doesn’t hesitate to point it out. “Mama, your button!” I flash back to my own childhood, when I did the same thing to my mom, at an older age and in a harsher tone—rolling my eyes and shaking my head with embarrassment at the sight of her unzipped fly peeking out from under her shirt.
I silently apologize to her, aware now that the real shame belongs to an industry which, in more than 30 years, still hasn’t managed to make jeans that accommodate bellies like ours. Fluctuating bellies. Birthing bellies. Irritable bellies. Human bellies. They’re treated like personal failings that we’re solely responsible for correcting, reversing, erasing. And if we can’t, then we’re doomed to be forever furtive in our attempts to accommodate them.
What if we don’t want to erase them? Where are the “performance fabrics” that give our abdomens ample room to expand and contract, without constricting or bunching? And why do even my stretchy jeans feel like they have some kind of corset-y compression fabric in the midsection?
You might wonder what I’m doing nutrition-wise to manage all this digestive distress. Am I cutting out processed foods? Avoiding gluten and dairy? Upping my weekly consumption of plants? Going plant-based entirely?
Fifteen years ago, I likely would have done all of the above—and my relationship with food would have become even more disordered than it already was back then. But not anymore. Today I’m not changing my eating because I know that food isn’t the problem in the first place.
The real issue—the “root cause” of my digestive troubles, the one left by Occam’s razor when all the other wellness-culture BS is cut away—is the stress. To “trust my gut” is to recognize how stress is impacting me, and not to let hyped-up ideas about gut health take hold.
I haven’t always felt this way. I used to get furious when doctors suggested my problems were due to stress, rather than to some physical cause like a food intolerance. And it’s true that not everything can be chalked up to stress. Some symptoms have a different cause.
Sometimes it is a food allergy. Sometimes it’s a tumor. Sometimes it’s disordered eating wreaking havoc on our guts.
But sometimes, after we’ve gone to countless doctors and done multiple tests to rule out other causes, it turns out that the source of our digestive troubles is (at least in part) the pressure and anxiety that so many of us live with in this culture, day in and day out.
As skeptical as I am of all the hype about the gut-brain axis—specifically the increasingly strident claims that the gut microbiome determines our mental health—I’m also intimately familiar with the fact that our digestive systems often respond to stress by shutting down.
So, how do we handle digestive distress that’s triggered by stress, without getting pulled down wellness-culture rabbit holes—particularly if we have a history of disordered eating? I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I have learned a few things from navigating these issues both personally and professionally over the years. Here are 9 questions that I’ve found helpful to ask when dealing with a flareup.
