Anxiety: A timeline

This weekend I was very anxious. My older two children were flying as unaccompanied minors on a flight from Adelaide to Melbourne for the first time. Here is a timeline of my anxiety which started on Saturday and ended last night.

Saturday morning:
Highly anxious. I was needing to book the tickets for my children and I was working out finances and actually going to book the tickets all the while coming up with various scenarios including:

• Realising I do not have the money for the tickets
• Having the money for the tickets but not having any seats left on the plane
• having seats left but not taking unaccompanied minors
• Flight centre suddenly closed and I couldn't book the tickets, despite checking online and seeing that it was open all day

What actually happened was I had enough money, went in to flight centre and a very nice man called Jesse happily booked the tickets for me. You would think I would learn from that and be perfectly calm and relaxed right? wrong.

Saturday Afternoon:
Was relieved for quite a while. I had the tickets and emailed my ex with the details. I had some lunch and forgot about it for a while, then I started to think about it again. The following thoughts came into my head during the afternoon:

• My ex would have a horrific car accident and my children would be seriously injured or worse
• There would be horrible traffic and my ex would be late and miss the check in deadline
• My kids would be terrified and refuse to get on the plane
• My ex would not take them to the airport
• My partner and I would be late to the airport and not be able to pick the kids up
• I would not be able to find where I needed to pick the kids up from

My ex told me everything was sorted and he would drive the kids to the airport the following day.

Saturday night:
My partner and I tried to relax and I actually did until I went to sleep. Then I had horrible nightmares of running around Melbourne airport, which was completely empty besides myself, which just would never happen, unable to find my kids.

Sunday Morning:
I was extremely anxious for the following reasons:

• I was impatiently and anxiously calmly and patiently awaiting 3pm when it would be time to leave for the airport
• I was absolutely certain my ex had not out them on the plane
• I was certain my kids refused to get on the plane

My ex messaged me and told me when he got to the airport and after writing a blog post and spending a lot of time on social media it was time to go. On the car trip I was very very anxious. The following thoughts crossed my mind:

• My ex hadn't really gone to the airport. He was only saying it.
• My kids had not gotten on the plane despite my ex telling me they were on the plane
• The plane would crash
• We would crash and not get to the airport
• We would get hopelessly lost and spend the rest of our lives driving around lost despite my partner knowing Melbourne pretty well and having a GPS.
• My kids would be terrified and have massive anxiety attacks on the plane

Once we got to the airport:
I was the most anxious when we were actually at the airport. We checked the arrivals board and saw the plane was due to land twenty minutes early, we had ten minutes to get to the gate. The problem started when we needed to go through security. There was a long line and I was sure we would be there for a long time. We got through very quickly and got to the gate with about five minutes to spare. The staff at the gate told me the kids would be the last ones off. Once the plane arrived I was sure they were not on the plane as I waited for about ten minutes millions of hours for all the other passengers to get off the plane. Then, finally, I saw them and relief spread throughout my body. I signed the form stating I had picked them up and we headed home. The relief was amazing.

I really hate anxiety.