Mothering Through Anxiety

Amelia Bentrup shares her struggle with anxiety in parenting and discusses how she’s learning to let go and trust God. 

August 22, 2006 is a day I will never forget. It is the day my oldest daughter was possibly kidnapped. It was the Feast of the Queenship of Mary. We had been at a church celebration with my parents, and everything was winding down. My parents, my two daughters, and I were the only people left in the church. We were about to leave to go home when I decided to take my second daughter into the bathroom for a quick diaper change. I told my oldest daughter, who was four years old at the time, to wait outside the bathroom for me.

We were only in the bathroom for a few minutes, but when I came out, my oldest daughter was gone. Gone. She was nowhere in the church. She was nowhere outside the church. She had completely disappeared.

After extensively searching the church and outdoor grounds, my dad decided to walk down the street a bit. He found my daughter about two blocks away from the church, walking down the street with a strange man. The man said he had found her crying in the parking lot and thought she lived in a certain house and was taking her there.

What his true intentions were, we have no idea. Perhaps that was the truth. Perhaps it was not. What we do know that is that in a span of less than ten minutes, she had walked outside of the church by herself on the wrong side of where our cars were parked, thought we had left her, started crying, and in a matter of minutes, a stranger found her, and she walked off with him — getting two blocks away.

To say this was a terrifying experience is an understatement. However, for most of these past 20 years, I had pushed it to the back of my mind. After all, nothing bad really happened. Mostly, I just made sure to keep a closer eye on my children when in public. Recently, though, this pushed-back anxiety has been resurfacing.

New Neighborhood, Old Anxiety

Around eight months ago, our family moved to a new city and a new neighborhood in which we have wonderful neighborhood children who play with our children. This is a new experience for our family. In all the other places we have lived, we didn’t really know our neighbors, and our children never had friends in the neighborhood. Now they do, which is amazing and awesome, but also leads to more parenting decisions.

My youngest daughter will be ten this summer, and being the social butterfly that she is, she wants nothing more than freedom to walk to friends’ houses and play with the neighborhood children, which is wonderful. For the first time in my mothering experience, we live in a neighborhood where this is possible. I routinely see children that are likely still in single-digit ages walking home from school alone or walking by themselves. In our neighborhood, children seem to have more freedom than I am used to.

This new living situation is really stretching my mothering comfort level. Every time my children play outside, I find myself anxiously watching through the windows and checking on them repeatedly. I’m not good at letting go. I have this overwhelming fear of them just disappearing ... the same way my oldest did almost 20 years ago. While I want my children to spend hours a day outdoors and play with friends, I also want to keep them safely tucked inside where I know where they always are. It feels like a constant pull between letting go and holding back.

Even our Blessed Mother Felt Anxiety

I often think that Mary must have felt the same way.

After three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions, and all who heard him were astounded at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him, they were astonished, and his mother said to him, “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety." And he said to them, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he said to them. He went down with them and came to Nazareth and was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart. (Luke 2: 46-51)

After all, Mary and Joseph lost Jesus in the temple for three days! I only lost my daughter in church for ten minutes. Was it harder for Mary to let go after that? Did she get back home and immediately go online and research GPS trackers on the internet? I guess only modern mothers can do that. How much harder it must have been to have lost a child in a time before modern technology. How much greater her suffering must have been.

One verse I keep coming back to is that “his mother kept all these things in her heart.” Maybe anxiety is just part of the human maternal condition? Maybe anxiety over our children is a gift God gave us to help keep them safe? Maybe God gave mothers the ability to anticipate and worry over what might go wrong as a protective method to keep our children safe. And if the Blessed Mother felt anxiety when Jesus was missing, then we can take comfort in the fact that anxiety is not sinful.

Prayer, Trust, and Gratitude

So how do we mother through anxiety? How do we anticipate and prepare for the worst without letting it paralyze us or hold our children back? Prayer and trust. God loves our children even more than we do. June is the month of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. We can entrust our children to Jesus’s Heart.

We can pray for discernment and wisdom about when to hold back and when to let go. Letting my children play outside with friends is infinitely healthier and better for their development than keeping them cooped up inside on screens. We can take reasonable steps for protection, such as setting boundaries and rules and having safeguards in place while still giving them freedom at an age-appropriate level.

We can also thank God for our children and the anxiety we have over them. How many times has that anxiety kept them safe and out of harm’s way? How many times have we listened to that little voice in the back of our head telling us to go check on a child — and have managed to avert disaster?

But sometimes we can’t avoid disasters. Sometimes bad things happen despite our anxiety. I take comfort in knowing that God gives us grace for our situation, not our imagination. God will give us the grace to get through whatever situation we are in when we are in it, not the situation we imagine in our head.

There is comfort in knowing that anxiety is normal, and even our Blessed Mother felt it. Once I realized that life isn’t supported to be easy, it actually became easier to deal with anxiety and difficulty. When I stopped fighting anxiety and started accepting it and praying through it, my anxiety actually lessened.

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Copyright 2026 Amelia Bentrup
Images: Canva