I like to say: when you have a baby, you automatically grow extra guilt and worry glands. At least that’s what happened for me. And whenever I make that statement I get a fairly uniform response from other mothers: “Oh my gosh, yes!” So that is my scientific study demonstrating the proof of my statement.

Maybe, it’s my personality, but the worry weighed on me most heavily as I entered motherhood. After I got that positive pregnancy test, I worried about miscarriage. When I was done worrying about miscarriage, I worried about SIDS. Forty-eight hours into our darling, colicky, sleepless first-born’s life (having concluded there was no way this baby was dying of SIDS), I worried he would never learn to sleep by himself. Once we survived infancy, I worried he’d get leukemia and die in childhood, or survive childhood only to ruin his body with drugs as a teenager, or live to adulthood and have a child… who died of SIDS. And at that point, I realized: this could go on forever; I have got to get a handle on this.

But how to… that was the question. No one could comfort me that my child’s future did not hold any of those painful possibilities. Knowing the chances were low was no help to my anxious brain. Because all those crises happen to ordinary people just like you and me. Some of you know this pain, personally.

But I discovered a way to slow my racing thoughts. Here’s what worked for me. For everyone who receives a leukemia diagnosis, I reasoned, there is a period of time where the leukemia is in their body, and nobody knows about it. That is unavoidable. And what would I do, I asked myself, if I somehow knew that in two, five, ten years, my child was going to die of leukemia? What would I do…today? Would I haul him off the hospital for testing? Would I litter his childhood with doctor visits, trying to catch the leukemia at the first possible chance? No, I wouldn’t. You know what I would do? I would hug him. I would say I love you. I would read that book… for the sixth time in one sitting. I would make him another peanut butter sandwich even though he just gave his last one to the dog. I would start aggressively doing all the things he loves that would be out of reach or more cumbersome once his immune system was compromised by treatment—like playing in the mud, and building sand castles, and jumping in puddles. I would take more time to do the things I would miss doing with him once he was gone. And so, in a strange way, my anxiety helped me to become a more loving mother. Thank you, anxiety, thank you for that.

And here’s to destigmatizing mental illness, one story at a time.