Kate calls me regularly to vent. She rants to me from her kitchen while Skype allows me the visual thrashing of her arms and gnashing of her teeth. My daughter’s life, like most of ours, is stressful. She has just begun a new school year in a classroom brimming with hopeful and hopelessly dependent first graders, and on top of that she and her husband bought a new lab puppy over the summer. I tell her that no amount of Prilosec is going to assuage the acid reflux she suffers as long as she cannot quiet her mind.
We discuss how, in fact, medical science has determined that one cannot separate mental and emotional health from physical well-being. Each of us has suffered the bodily reaction to stress, for instance; most everyone has felt her heart race while enduring a panic attack running late to an important meeting at work or a promise to a small child waiting on the curb. She understands it while racing home during her meager lunch hour to let little Abby out of her crate or when facing a parent whose child cannot control himself in the classroom.