“Worry brain, your mama’s so ugly, she makes onions cry!” I found myself saying after I got off the phone with my husband. I had to hang up the phone because I’d burst into tears, and now I was trying to beat back the anxiety that was consuming me. I’d read a book on helping children cope with anxiety that suggested we learn to mock the part of our brain that produces those irrational, anxious thoughts. As a feminist, sometimes I worry that I shouldn’t use ugly mama jokes on it, but then I remind myself that’s probably just my worry brain trying to get out of having its mama called ugly.

The company Mark works for is on shaky ground. There have been layoffs and the people he knows that have been let go have had a hard time finding new jobs. But I wasn’t worried about that. I was worried because he had a job interview. For a really good job. That pays a lot more than what he makes currently. Working in an industry he’s really interested in. And the interview went well. Crazy to be worried about that? The job is (gasp!) in another state. We’d have to move. And the thought of that level of change grips me with anxiety.

I started whirring right into a panicked overdrive, “Fine. I’ll just tell him he can go, but I’m staying here with the kids. I can’t believe he’d pick a job over us! And if we’re not there, he’ll probably just go on an incredible acting out spree. He’ll pretend he’s not married and have sex all over some new town. But I can’t move, can I? It took a year for Austen to be able to sleep through the night the last time we moved, and we stayed in the same area. We’d have to find new 12 Step meetings and new doctors and new friends and a whole new set of resources for Austen. And for crying out loud, we are a mixed race family and I look like a crazy bohemian. We can’t just move anywhere. People will burn crosses on our lawn and the neighbors will tear the Darwin fish off my car and kill us. We’re safe here. Everything is familiar here. Everything is under control here.”

That’s when I brought out the big guns and called my worry brain’s mama ugly. (I mean she had to be ugly. She was a big slimy brain, right?) Mark still has a job. He hasn’t lost his job. He hasn’t been offered a new job. Even if he were offered the job, we’d have time to discuss it and decide what’s right for our family. No need to try to soothe my anxiety by jumping on the computer and spend the next two hours doing Internet research on school districts a thousand miles away (although I was sorely tempted to), not when I can use my prodigious recovery skills to stay in the moment and tell myself ugly mama jokes instead.