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.