Ebb and Flow

When Decca was born I was caught in a severe bout of depression, much worse than anything I've had in years.  Jules had just started declining in function, he had his first speech therapy appointment at the house when she was three days old in the room next door to where I'd birthed them both.  I never had been a terribly fearful person until that day.  Now I had these two kids, their father had nearly walked out on us during Decca's birth and I wasn't certain he was going to stick around, my son was losing his speech and stopped looking at us, and this poor tiny baby was completely dependent on me for food and water and maintenance.  If that wasn't enough to overwhelm, my stomach started to hurt, bad.

Somehow I got it in my mind that my symptoms could only be consistent with metastatic cancer.  I'd lie in bed nursing Decca and cry wondering who was going to be there for her when I was dead in a few years, maybe less.  And how sad it was going to be that Jules wouldn't have any really clear memories of me, if he weren't completely impaired by the time he was an adult, if he became and adult.  The pain got worse and worse, for weeks.  Finally I couldn't take it anymore and I actually went to the GI doc, and there was blood in my bowel.  That was it, I knew I was dying.  I have no recollection of who actually took care of the kids when I had my scope, but I was amazed that it was an ulcer, recurring.  Yes, that's right, it was an ulcer I'd had once before seven or eight years ago, and it still managed to take me by surprise that I wasn't dying.  The fact that I was fat I had attributed to giving birth near weeks back, but then someone finally asked if I'd had any problems with my thyroid and drew a level.  A smidge of synthroid made me functional again, my stomach was finally working, I felt better, and I had not one free minute to be depressed.  All my energy went to not killing Jules as he was not sleeping (he actually would sleep for three hours and then be up for three hours, that lasted two weeks and I did think about killing us all) and keeping Decca alive and something like sane.

We tried different therapies, different doctors, nothing was coming up with any consistent answers or a plan.  Then in May he had another regression and I could just feel him slipping away. Thats when I took the kids to Baltimore and Jules started at Johns Hopkins.  His treatment team was great, he made really good progress, I didn't have to deal with their dad, but I was with them 24/7 no breaks except for one morning a week when I went to Slainte to watch a soccer game with PJ.  I didn't have the time or the inclination to look at my life, I just managed crisis to crisis.  But it gave me something to fill my head with.

Now, Jules is in school, Decca is big enough to enjoy the playroom at the club I've just joined and I'm working out three times a week.  I did this in part to combat my maudlin tendencies, studies show that regular exercise and direct sunlight during the day are as good for symptoms as medication.  But I've noticed that it's not had a positive effect on me, mental health wise.  I find myself turning up my iphone as loud as I can because I don't want 30 minutes in a row to think about the way things are right now.  I just can't face the choices I need to make, from the simple (what program are we going to use to try and teach Jules to write) to the profound (am I going to try and have another girl so Decca won't have to care for him alone after I'm gone).  My head is just not up to the task and I have no idea what will get me there.

The Stars Have Lost Their Mother

The best thing about depression is the blanket it throws over your life.  No time to get your house in order, or make any difficult decisions, or work through complex problems, when it’s all you can do to get one foot in front of the other and you’ve got no energy. 

I resent my current mental health.  I almost said I resent my health, but once you see few friends die of horrible, painful illnesses, you won’t do that again.  But I do resent my relative mental health.  I think I didn’t refill my synthroid for three weeks, not because I was worried about the fifty bucks (which I was), but because I just wanted to pull the blanket over my head and hit the snooze button on my life for a few more weeks. 

It’s easier, sometimes, to cope if you don’t really get happy and sad just feels normal.  Today is a great example.  Jules has been doing really well at school.  He’s had some ups and downs, but overall he’s exceeded all my expectations.  I’ve finally allowed myself to get sort of hopeful that we could lose the paraprofessional and maybe, maybe some day he’d just be a kid in school.  Well we started scaling her back.  This morning, before the para arrived, he was screaming and pretending to hit people and one of the parents got so freaked that she took her kid home instead of dropping him off. 

Fuck me, I’m just devastated.  His long-suffering, lovely, teacher is doing everything in her power to calm me down in reassuring voicemails and texts (I had the temerity to think Decca had a right to a life and was in the pool with her when this all went down.) 

She’s a mess.  I feel like I have two only children.  The experience of mothering her is so incredibly different from mothering Jules I truly feel like I’ve never done this before.  She’s taken to calling her father by his first name, and she’s obsessed with losing me.  Every animal is “sad” because it’s lost it’s mother.  Inanimate objects are not immune.  We were getting out of the car a few nights ago.  It was moonless and black and when she looked up there were thousands of stars in view.  “Dey sad. . . dey los dey mama”  and looked right in my eyes.  I don’t know if pushing my forehead into her neck and throatily chanting “I love you, I love you, I love you, and you are never going to lose me” over and over helped any.

Off to have the dreaded conference with Jule's teacher.

Open Letter

An open letter to the repressed prig on the elliptical trainer next to mine:

The act of bobbing my head with my eyes half closed and a stupid smile on my face while listening to the Pogues on my headphones was not intended to fuck your day up in any way.  Apparently, you did not get the memo. The impulse to glare at me when you thought I couldn’t see you and then look out the window really fast when I turned my head comes from the same place in your psyche that says even if you just lie there like a corpse while he fucks you, you’re still doing him a favor.  So I’m sorry if all the joy has been sapped from you life and the only achievement you have to cling to is that you weigh the same as when you graduated high school, but maybe if you listened to more infectious music and didn’t mind so much when others enjoyed themselves in your proximity, you wouldn’t scowl so much.  Which, by the way, is giving you brow lines, you might want to look into botox. 

I hate how truly parochial this town is.  The physical beauty, Gary’s good job, the low cost of living, good schools for Noam, is all great, but there is this awful sense of “this is how things are done, honey, straighten up and get in line, or else”  I don’t see the diversity that Baltimore or Chicago had.  I would say I was romanticizing it, but I just got back and I miss Cath and Sue and PJ and Earl and Kerim every day.  And Angell I miss you more, because you were here and we had each other. 

 And to the shrew on the elliptical trainer, a physics class might also be in order.  Light travels in straight lines until it meets an object, that’s why I can fucking see you in the window.  

The Abandonment of Facebook

I had a rule.  It was a simple rule.  I would join facebook only if I kept my "friends" list to people who were actually my friends, and just happened to live in other cities.  As a part time resident of Baltimore, who's closest friends are there and in Charlotte, it seemed to make sense.  Time zone issues, life issues, we just couldn't seem to get it together between texting and voicemail.  It didn't.  I'm friends with my aunt, and my kids speech language pathologist, his old teachers.  When someone wants to "friend" you (lord, do I long for the days when that was a noun) it's rude to demure.  So fuck it, I can be as pointless and profane as I like and not send my dear sweet auntie to her grave a second sooner than necessary.  And this has spellcheck.  I don't know why I don't just keep a journal, somehow this seems to have more of a cathartic kick to it and fills some not-so-latent exhibitionism.  And these days, I'm all about the catharsis, apparently I'm not enough of an exhibitionist to put my name to it.  So welcome, gentle reader, I hope this can provide some source of edification or amusement to you.