This One’s a Nail-Biter

I was always an anxious child. My parents were probably most acutely aware of this when I was keeping them up at night, consumed by worry and unable to sleep. They might have been aware of it when I went through a phase during which I could not watch any movie that involved even mild suspense (I couldn’t eat for a week after watching an early television miniseries about the Titanic). I was middle-aged before I connected the years of gastrointestinal issues I suffered as a tween and young teen (we didn’t use the word tween, then) with anxiety; at the time, I endured endless rounds of barium milkshakes and X-rays, an adult-strength prescription for Tagamet, and a lot of missed school.

Nobody diagnosed children with anxiety, back then.

Another symptom that was viewed more as a bad habit than a sign of a mental health disorder, and that vexed my mother more than any of the above, was that I chewed my nails.

It drove her crazy; she tried everything to get me to stop. Well, not everything; for some reason, she stopped short of the bad-tasting nail polish some moms used. Nothing worked; maybe she thought that wouldn’t work, either. Mostly she ended up nagging me endlessly not to chew my fingernails.

I never had more than the ragged edge of a nail anywhere on either hand.

Nowadays, of course, we do diagnose children with anxiety, and treat it with a number of behavioral, therapeutic and medicinal strategies. There’s a genetic component to it, so it shouldn’t be any real surprise that my own daughter deals with severe anxiety.

But as C.S. Lewis said of Narnia, “Things never happen the same way twice.” Everyone’s experience of anxiety is just a little different. For some, it may be a sweat-soaked, heart-racing panic attack; for others, chronic fatigue or persistent inability to concentrate. Like me, my daughter has issues with sleeplessness; unlike me, I have never known her to be unable to swallow, or to suffer crippling chronic abdominal pain.

And she does not chew her nails.

In fact, it is the one childhood anxiety symptom that I carried into adulthood. The anxiety, I largely mastered and managed; the nail-biting became what it had mimicked all along: a bad habit, and hard to break. I tried on my own, but even the weekly manicures that I tried for a time didn’t stop me; they just made the problem more visible and obvious.

Like my mother before her, my daughter determined to break me of it. She used the exact same tactic my mom always favored: she nagged me relentlessly about it.

A couple of outside factors probably helped; I started taking vitamin D supplements, on the advice of my doctor, and my nails became stronger almost immediately. I started wearing rubber gloves to wash dishes, which also seemed to help. But anytime I was chewing over a problem, I would likely as not discover that I was also chewing my nails.

If Cora caught me, she slapped at my hands and scolded.

This time, it worked.

So now I am past middle-age, and for the first time in my life, I have fingernails. Strong, healthy pink-and-white fingernails. But I’ve never had them before, and I’m not used to working around them, so even though I’m kind of proud of them, they also kind of get on my nerves. I keep them trimmed really short.

I suppose it’s just one more thing to worry about.