I've Lost Her! Oh, Wait, No She's With Mom

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A stepmother panic happens to me fairly often. I am somewhere alone and suddenly a wave of sheer panic comes over me when I think Where is the little one?! Did I lose her? Did I forget her somewhere! Then I stop everything and calm myself down when I remember that she's with her mother.

This first happened to me when she was very tiny and I was in a store and would hear little girls about her age that sounded like her and think it was her, lost somewhere in the store. Now days I panic that I forgot to pick her up from school any time I get really engrossed in a project on a school day. When I rush in to look at the clock I realized it's still two hours before school gets out as I try to get my heart rate back down to a livable beats per minute range.

Every weekend morning she is visiting her mom I expect her to come into my room and she doesn't and I get worried and then remember she's not here. I am here alone. Every time I hear noise from another room I think it's her. Sunday morning I panicked trying to figure out where she was, what day it was and where she was supposed to be. Then again, I realized and had to destress myself.

I'm curious to know whether this happens to lots of other stepmoms. I did have a cousin tell me it happens to her with her own biological children, so I figure I'm not alone. But there is a strangeness to being a mom and having a child some days and not others, don't you think? Has this happened to you? How do you deal with it?