I have post traumatic stress sydrome from my childhood, so my anxiety is managed through shear will. It has been worse since having children - period.

I live in two worlds, like Jekyl and Hyde. By day I am a confident, educated, empowered woman in control of my life and I am content and happy. By night I live a fear riddled existance. It starts as I drift off to sleep with endless violent nightmares. My dreams, and subconcious thoughts are always negative and out of control. As I wake each morning I climb out of more nightmares. If I am woken early, or woken when I am dreaming I can recall horrific dreams but prefer not to. I have lived with this for YEARS. All of my nightmares are about death, death of my children in particular.

In my sleep I have desperately attempted to rescue my children in an upside down car that has flipped into the water and I rarely if ever save them. I have pulled them from burning buildings, searched for them and found them frozen white in abandoned freezers, I have run them over accidentaly in the car and sat on the drive way screaming as they have blood pouring out their ears and eyes, I have wrestled with strangers that disappear into the crowd taking my baby, and have found them accidentaly smothered, and knocked off their bikes by passing trucks off the road. In my nightmares I turn up to school to collect them and they are not there and no one has seen them all day despite me knowing they were dropped off. They have been in head on car accidents, fallen off bridges, fallen off rooves, attacked by dogs in the park........ I have walked down thousands of hospital corridors to have doctors shake their heads and break the news to me as I collapse in a heap. I have only 5 children, but I have been to hundreds of funerals, all theirs, in my dreams... This I live with, this I have every night and why I hate going to bed most nights.

I am better now, but in the day I used to panic if I could not see the children. Or know exactly where they are and who they are with. I can now let my kids go with friends for the day. Or entrust them to others, and I am alright about Breezsha being away from me providing she has a charged cell phone. I am still unable to let my children go with anyone if there is swimming involved. If they are swimming I have to be there. When I was 9 I saved my 7 year old sisters life in a swimming pool, and I girlfriend lost her two year old son to a drowing accident. I sat by his coffin all my sences soaking up the image of him pale, still, beautiful, but dead and it burned into my head.

The freakshow existance is fed my the news media. I watch the tv news and images of death and ways to die bury themselves in my head and then I relive them in my nightmares. After the Asian Tsunami's I had weeks of dead baby in the waves in my head. Screaming women and panicing parents. I was unable to watch the Beslan images but I still caught enough for it to be added to my video library in my head. Bombs, blood, knives, accidents, burning, asphixia, overdose, abduction, suicide, running with scissors, walking over thin ice that collapses in the centre of a pond. I can not get to my son as he struggles to get out of the water and I cant get to him as his breathing seizes up and he slips under the water. Endless, endless, endless death and burials, bodies, cremations...

I have not been able to stop thinking about Steve Irwin and his family. Steve was a particular favourite of ours anyhow. But my ****ed up head has absorbed and fixated on their greif. It feeds my fascination and subconscious mind so that I shall be quite tormented for months I imagine.

So - has an autistic dx made my anxiety worse? I dont think so.