:: ah, summer... ::

[ photo credit at end of post. so i can explain. click on the image to go to the source.]

dude, there is just something about me and summer. june, july, and august. i want to like them, i do all my very best pretending to like them. but something happens in summer that just turns my insides to bumblebees and my thoughts to fears.

the first summer it happened was two summers ago. postpartum holy-crap-anxiety and depression, they said.

then last summer when it happened again, i was pregnant. same hormones, different timing in relation to the expulsion of baby from body.

and this summer i suppose it could always be chalked up to having just had a baby. but at this point, i'm pointing all ten fingers agitatedly at summer, which sucks because i'd much rather blame the postpartum hormones. there will be a time in my life when i am not aswim in just-had-a-baby, but there will never be a time in my life when there is no summer.

or at least for all our sakes i hope that's true.

it's annoying and stupid and complicated. it's like the trauma of two total breakdowns (the first was worse than the second, but not by much i wouldn't say) has now become one of the factors creating my anxiety.

i'm anxious about being anxious? or no! about having been anxious.

over the last two years i've definitely learned some tricks. i know how to sit with my anxiety better. how not to let it snowball. how to wait for it to pass the way you might wait for a marching band to pass in the parade. hell, i've learned to know it's anxiety i'm feeling and not something else. that's a pretty big deal.

i still feel like it is acutely related to my children even as it has absolutely nothing to do with them. perhaps what i mean to say is that it is acutely related to parenting although not at all because of my kids. there's just something about parenting that makes avoiding fears impossible. something about it that forces you to learn to sit with things that are uncomfortable, even as doing so can sometimes make you all the more uncomfortable.

oh who knows what it is. all i know is i never used to have this relationship with summer, and now i do, and even though i wouldn't want to go back, i would very much like to move on.

[ the photo is by alicia bock, and it's for sale in her etsy shop. it's called "the last days of summer" which is why i chose it. think of it as my little dash of optimism in a sort of crisis-ridden post. and enjoy, because it's also quite pretty, eh? ]