:: i am right here ::

this weekend, i admitted some scary things.

except no. i didn't really. i admitted some very reasonable and understandable and normal things, but admitting them was scary.

it was scary because of what i feared it would make people think about me. and it was scary because of how it made me feel about myself.

i admitted that sometimes, especially when i'm having a hard time personally, like when i'm anxious, i feel like i:

shouldn't be a mom
don't know how to be a mom
don't enjoy being a mom
can't take care of my kids
can't even take care of myself
wasn't meant to be a mom

and my rational mind knows that this is stuff ALL MOMS FEEL. but my irrational brain feels like i am the worst possible person in the world, i am selfish, i am going to ruin my children and my marriage, i am broken, i am crazy, i will never feel better.

but of course none of this is true, at least not as long as i keep talking about it and keep rational about it. we moms, we LOVE our children, but we don't always love being with them, and why would we? they need us constantly. and even when they don't have physical needs, they have wants. they need us to feed them and clothe them, but they also need us to talk with them, play with them, nurture them, listen to them say the same things over and over and over. and we do it because we love them.

and it's so scary to say that we don't always like it because we don't want our kids to know. or we don't want our spouses to know. we don't want anyone to think we're unnatural or scary or a risk to ourselves or others.

as i sobbed and sobbed over the phone finally admitting to a surprised listener yesterday that i often don't like the day-to-day caregiving of being a mom, the person on the line asked me if i feel like my children have stolen my life from me. at first i thought, "yes, maybe that's it." but that's not quite how it is. rather, i feel like i have willingly given my life to them the way we all give ourselves to our kids. i just haven't known how to keep myself healthy and okay in the meantime.

i work at least 40 hours a week, but my kids are only in daycare 17 hours a week. often, especially lately, i take my kids to the studio with me, sitting them on the floor with a laptop and a movie and plying them with snacks, paper and pens, cardboard boxes, lunch. they are good when they're there and they look forward to it, but obviously it's hard. from water spills i have to clean up to the jelly footprints all over my floor from someone who stepped in her bagel and then walked all over the studio, it's hard. they need me and i need them. i need to take care of them. i need to look at the pictures they draw while they're sitting on my studio floor. i need to take them to see the dogs my studio mates keep. i like the idea of having them there with me, having them know their mom as a person in the world, having them see my work and be creative with me.

but the reality is that it's hard.

duh, right?

the trouble i have is that for as self-aware as i seem, i can be really clueless when it comes to my own mental health. it wasn't until i started back up with therapy recently to deal with my anxiety and panic attacks and a specific phobia i have that i realized that underneath it all, i'm really depressed. i'm a mess. i work and i take care of the kids and i do almost nothing else, least of all take care of me. i shower every other day, and only because my hair looks too awful if i go longer than that. i don't take walks anymore, even though taking walks is like breathing for me. i don't exercise. i don't hang out with my own friends (because i don't really have any of my own friends, honestly). i never just sit and veg. i don't read anymore. i often work until ten, watch one episode of a show with brian, and then play iPhone games until i fall asleep with the phone in my hand.

and the clueless part isn't just that i didn't realize how depressed and unhealthy i am. the clueless part is that i honestly 100% thought that my work was my break. i thought it was the thing i do for myself to stay centered and peaceful and mentally healthy. i thought it was the solitude i crave to feel whole and sane.

i thought that because four years ago when this all started, right around the time evan turned one and i had a complete breakdown and had to leave home for 11 days and put evan in full time day care for the next 8 months (until we moved home to rochester and i was home with him 100% of the time again), up up creative was my therapy. making things each day and putting them into the world was the only thing that got me through the long days with evan out of the house. i read books, wrote incessantly in a journal, walked around the OSU campus at will, and mostly i made things. quilts. necklaces. all manner of things. i felt normal and connected and grounded and slowly, i felt happy. or happier, maybe. i felt like a human being again.

and in the years that have followed i've grown up up creative (and now aper + pink) into a serious business. a growing, bustling, busy business. and it continues to be such an important part of my life and of my sense of self. i love working. i love building the business. i need it.

but the "make a few things and put them in an etsy shop" beginnings of four years ago are a far cry from what things are like now, and somehow i failed to notice how much more time, energy, and work that business requires now.

and there's a second kid now, of course, too.

and here i am again, totally lost. i have given everything -- happily, often, and almost always willingly -- until i've come up dry and aching from the drought.

and then on top of all of that i've tormented myself about feeling this way. i've tried to ignore it. i've told myself how easy my life is, how much harder it can be. how much harder it is for other people.

my sister in law told me a couple of months ago about a friend of hers who started working full time after her kids were born and stopped after they had both gone off to first grade and were in school all day. she just knew she couldn't mother them all day long. my exact words were, "good for her. you have to know yourself." i one million percent believe that. i think that woman is amazing and that her kids are lucky.

but somehow when i even think of the same thing for us here, i cry. i feel like i have failed.

i wanted to stay home with my kids. i want to. but i can't. i don't know why but i just can't. and that feels so bad. it feels like acid in my veins. i don't know how to take care of them and still take care of me. i thought i was doing it but i was wrong.

but you know what? fuck it, that's what. fuck this idea of mine that there was one way to do it and i've done it wrong. fuck the idea that each decision i make is a permanent decision and that it will have permanent consequences. fuck being scared that my kids won't know how much i love them. you can't be around me and not know how much i love those two little red heads. how much i admire them. how proud i am of them.

it's hard because i know that right now, i need extra time. it's like i've been giving myself a penny each day instead of a dollar and so now i need to give myself a buck fifty each day for awhile until i'm on evener ground. i think i went into this thinking, "maybe i could give myself two pennies a day and eventually i'll make it all up." but that's ridiculous. that's not working.

today i let brian take the kids for a hike without me. i considered going because i didn't want to reinforce my depression and anxiety by avoiding an outing with them. it was a very logical reason to go. i didn't want to avoid them. i didn't want to stay at home and cry or sulk or be anxious.

but instead i let them go and decided that staying home didn't have to be about avoiding them but could be about looking for me.

so here i am.

:: not a cry for help, a cry for change ::

life here at la maison green continues to be stressful. circumstances continue to suck, sometimes just a little, sometimes more than that, and sometimes a hell of a fucking lot. there have been big stresses and littler ones. some that have swept in quick and fierce and some that have simmered, simmered, simmered.

back on my medication for anxiety, i find i am less apt to have panic attacks now than i was a month ago, which is good. but now i'm finding warnings creeping into other parts of my life: i wake with tension headaches, for one; my left knee hurts, which makes my left calf muscle hurt, which in compensating for has made my left hip hurt, and that in turn has left me with a weird pain in my left foot. it's totally and completely ridiculous.

it's affecting brian, too. he gave himself a concussion a few weeks ago (silly, freakish accident involving a cupboard door and a two year old under foot, but still, it seems to be both a cause of the stress at our house and a symptom of it). and now he's the only 30-something i've ever heard diagnosed with shingles (the adult resurgence of chicken pox, which usually doesn't strike until you are in your 50s or 60s, if then).

our bodies are telling us that our life is too much for us right now. they are screaming at us to figure something out.

and yet we're able to look around and find people all around us who are in worse circumstances than we are in. we're surrounded by people struggling against greater foes than we are, facing less sleep, fighting stronger viruses and ailments.

i see these people, and i talk to these friends, and i give myself an "it could be worse" and a "life is hard" and i remind myself that for millennia people have known these things. life is suffering. isn't this literally buddhism's first noble truth?

i say this over and over to myself. life is hard. it's supposed to be hard. who told you it was going to be easy? your life isn't even that hard. it could be worse. after all, my kids are healthy. my marriage is good. no one in the family currently has cancer. we have a house and two cars that run. we have so many blessings we probably can't count them all. so i repeat the chorus to myself: life is supposed to be hard. it could be worse.


the trouble is, my very core just can't accept this. life may be hard, and yes it can certainly be worse than this, but to me, when circumstances get this bad and the stress mounts this high and our bodies yell out to us that things just ain't right, to me this is when you need to step back, reassess, and change something. accommodate the suffering, maybe. find a way to care less about it, perhaps. or maybe just give the suffering more room to breathe -- take away the things that compound the suffering. make life easier.

because i'm very open about my anxiety and depression, i find that people often come to me about it. i get a lot of emails, even some phone calls. this shit is widespread, my friends. many many of us experience it, sometimes acutely, sometimes indefinitely. and as you know i'm the first one to admit (and advocate for the fact) that sometimes, you just need help in the form of medications. but i also completely believe that these times of discomfort, pain, fear, anxiety, sadness -- these are our bodies' ways of saying CHANGE THINGS THE FUCK UP OR ELSE.

i'm in a place now where i'm just not sure what form the change needs to take. it's so much more complicated to change a family's life than to change a single person's. but my kids are still happy and seemingly unaffected yet by the chaos their parents find themselves embroiled in, and i want to keep it that way. i want to get us back out of the fire so that we can get back to not suffering all the time even when circumstances are bad.

:: attacks ::

when i wrote last weekend about how work hasn't been helping me through my anxiety lately, i think i may have suggested somehow that my anxiety is itself work-related.

it is definitely not.

it's the result of a series of very personal crises that all occurred in the span of approximately a week.

i never used to have these sometimes weeks-long debilitating anxiety attacks. before i had kids i would get the occasional short-lived irrational panic surge that might course through my veins for maybe 15 minutes tops.

now i get anxiety that inhabits me and lives inside here for weeks. this is my third bout with this in less than four years, and the fact that it keeps happening both scares me and pisses me off.

the frustrating thing about it is that it really does come in these little explosions, all at once and with no warning. an event will trigger the initial anxiety attack and suddenly my entire body will be flooded with stress that feels like poison. slowly over days i lose the ability to eat, and then to sleep. i can't be around my kids. i become unable to function. twice now i've even had to go on sedatives to help me get through the toughest part.

but when the attack finally wanes, i'm fine. fine-fine-fine. fine for a while.

some women hate their thighs, or their hips, or their stomachs. some hate the backs of their arms or their profiles in a photograph.

this anxiety is the thing i hate about myself. i hate that it's in me. i hate that i can't control it. i hate that it makes things so difficult for my husband and my kids and all the relatives and babysitters who help us out. i hate that i have to be medicated for it. i hate that it's probably hereditary. i hate that it makes me feel weak. that it makes me avoid stress. i hate that it makes me uncomfortable with my family. i hate that when i'm in the middle of it i feel like i will never-never-ever get out of it. i hate that even if it's not caused by my children, they're a part of it. i hate that it makes me avoid them.

what if this continues to happen to me three times every four years? what if it starts to happen more often? what if one time the anxiety does settle in and never leaves?

these are the things my frenzied brain wonders, of course. my calmer self knows that the previous bouts have ended and so will this one. it knows that each time this has happened i've learned something about my anxiety from it.

but still: it's scary.

:: 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? ]

:: ants are to thoughts as... ::

{ from nellee100's flickr photostream. also featured in my creative commons pool. }

it's not often i say this, but i'm feeling a bit at a loss for words lately. i've got lots of thoughts marching through my brain like an ant army marching through its farm, but they're struggling to find their way out.

last week was my first week home with both kids all week (brian's time off from work had to end sometime, i guess, whether i wanted it to or not). it went fine and all, but it left me feeling sort of unfine and i can't really figure out what to do about that. i think my brain power is being so diverted to that task that i'm having a bit of trouble coming up with words and all.

me, the wordiest of wordy girls. it's strange.

its nice having you here, though. something about the act of sitting here at the computer to try to come up with something to say to you helps coax a few words out here and there. makes me feel a little bit more normal.

:: print. cut. resolve. ::

i'm back, and this time i come bearing gifts:

free. printable. resolution lists. download them here.

each list measures around 4" by 6" so you can print them out, write down your goals (let's keep it to two or less, eh? give ourselves a chance?), and then stick them on your fridge, your bulletin board, your mirror, or in the front of your journal or calendar: right where you can see them (and remember them).

it may sound strange for me to admit it, but the top contenders for my resolution (a few years back i promised myself i'd only make one resolution each year and that it would be something i'd enjoy achieving rather than dread facing) are these: to be more vain, or to be more selfish.

to me these are really two different sides of the same coin. they're both borne of the understanding that i need to put myself just a little bit higher on the priority list. now that i've got two kids (holy crap! when did that happen? i've got kids multiple now?) and a business i'm busting my ass to grow (to put it eloquently) i just think that 2010 is going to be a crucial taking-care-of-myself year.

what are you resolving to do in 2010?

:: by me for me ::

i sat knitting in my psychologists's office the other day. when he came out he asked, a little surprised, "you're a knitter?" and the thing is, apparently now i am. there's something about knitting (and, incidentally, watching crime shows (CSI, law and order, without a trace)) that soothes my anxiety and depression like nothing else. who knows. something about the rhythm, the way it requires concentration but also allows me to zone out. i used to find knitting stressful but this recent brain-hormone-mess-whatever has taken me and knitting to some new place.

so anyway, the newest thing on my needles isn't for the baby. it's not a christmas gift. it's a present for me. i'm calling it the flat belly sweater because it's a sweater for me for after the baby's born. not that my belly will be flat right away, but it won't be basketballish anymore, and that will be nice.

very nice.

i was 12 inches into this sweater last week when i had to rip it all out. the pattern is designed with negative ease (meaning the finished garment for your size will actually be smaller than your actual measurements so that it will be fitted) and i'm okay with the fitted look but i decided that right after the baby's born i might want something with a little more room. so now i'm almost back to where i was. i hope to have it done by thanksgiving. when it's done i'll post pics, although i won't be modeling it for awhile.

:: solitude ::

original image (found here) is from kevindooley's flickr photostream.
i added the quotation, which i found here.

::

this week i've been working on a little theory about my depression, or maybe a theory about what it's going to take to climb out of it and stay out for good.

i sat down earlier this week and started a two-part list: enjoyments, hobbies, and coping mechanisms i relied on before i had a child; and enjoyments, hobbies, and coping mechanisms i rely on now. i also thought about how my days used to be structured versus how they're structured now.

and it hit me: i need solitude. i need it every single day. every single item on my "before i had a child" list was something i used to do alone. go to the gym (alone). read. write. take long daily walks. since childhood i've been someone who needs her me-time in order to be able to face the day.

i've always known i was an introvert. when i did that myers-briggs test in high school it was absolutely no surprise to me to find my first letter was an i and not an e. i mean look at me: i like to sew, to knit, to read. i love taking long walks. all of my most favorite hobbies are things you usually do alone. this has never meant that i don't enjoy social interaction or that i don't need it everyday, too. i do, on both counts. it has just always meant that social interaction drains my battery, and somewhat rapidly depending on the company, while solitude recharges me.

and living with a toddler is like 13 straight hours of social interaction. every single day.

i found the quote above here, and it made such perfect sense to me from where i stand right here, right now. when i'm depressed, yes, i feel lonely. i am not myself. i don't know how to find myself. i need to be around people, but not just any people: i need to be around people who know me. but being around people isn't going to be the solution, at least not for me. going out into the world every day may be a distraction, and it may be good for me in doses. but i think the way out of this is going to be by finding ways to be alone, quiet, thoughtful, and peaceful every single day. ways to bring back my solo walks when i can. ways to recharge. ways to encourage evan to let me recharge, maybe, and ways to get some time without him.

there's more to the theory, but this is my favorite part. it's the part that makes me feel hopeful.

:: emerging for a short post ::

i'm feeling all crossroadsy. i guess that's part of this whole depression thing. i find myself sitting here contemplating my life and i just don't know which way to go. i'm not a change lover, and in fact i kind of hate change, but i feel myself needing a change.

but what?

hmm...

:: Better Then ::

my students, when i taught college english in ohio, struggled with then and than. i was told it was a midwest thing -- a colloquial quirk of language in which "then" is used to mean either then or than. i'm not 100% sure i believe it except for how common it was to come across blank stares when i tried to make the correction.

but here my headline is correct. not better THAN but better THEN. i was feeling a bit better. then i wasn't. yesterday was hard, this morning even harder. i find myself leaning on my family and my husband's family, which really helps, but i'm still struggling to find a source of strength within me.

i know from experience that it will come, but it's hard waiting it out.

i do keep hoping that something creative will come of all this. i'm super inspired by this shop right now. i wish i could afford to buy the whale print above for my husband, because it's true. without him i'd be lost right now. and in fact when i'm not with him i often feel lost. when he gets home at night and asks how i'm feeling i almost always just say, "better now."

it's nice to have that.

:: I Can't Stop Making Things ::

my postpartum depression after evan was born is how this whole up up creative business started: i couldn't stop making things. and now here we are again. it's like some kind of primal urge. feel bad, busy your hands?

i don't claim to understand it.



the good news is that evan and the baby are really going to benefit. this week i made a tie for evan and i'm finishing knitting the baby the cutest knitted pants ever made.

(these are just previews; i'll post a better pic of the pants when they're finished and i'll post a picture of evan wearing his tie at my sister's wedding next weekend, where he will be the most handsome kid and probably the only one wearing an honest-to-god tie and not some clip on piecce of ugliness. but then i'm biased.)

:: she said ::

{ from me to you. you can download the original pdf, which is 8.5" by 8.5", here. }

it's happening. i'm going back on my zoloft. i didn't want to, but i had promised myself when i went off it that if i needed to go back on i would. and when i started feeling crappy i gave myself a month to see if i could pull out of it.

my deadline was september 15th. i worked really hard, used my feelgood list and got more exercise and tried to cultivate an attitude of excitement and wonder.

but here i am.

my doc's advice was this: sometimes, it doesn't matter how hard you try. sometimes, it's organic. sometimes, it's inside. sometimes, you just need help.

so here we go.

:: i'm a winner, dontcha know? ::

i'm twenty-six weeks pregnant today, and man oh man am i all over the emotional map these days. i wasn't like this when i was pregnant with evan and because of the postpartum depression with him i'm of course going off on all these mental tangents that end with me in a heap on the floor or me in a hospital on a 3-day psych hold. there are days when i think, "i am not going to be able to handle this. i am going to die from this. i am going to become one of those moms who has to stick her kids in front of the TV all day because she can't handle anything else." there are days when i'll be sitting with evan and we're doing our daily life kinds of stuff and i'll just burst into tears because it seems so hard.

but then other times i'm completely fine and washing dishes is bringing me some kind of weird joy and peace and i'm all la la maybe let's have four kids or maybe five.

like i said: all over the map.

so yesterday was a day when i was all those things in one day. i cried in the morning, was fine most of the day, spent the early afternoon in a mild panic for no apparent reason, and was ornery at dinner time.

and then at 9 or so i found out i'd won this print (pictured above) from laura george and i wanted to dance a jig. at the time, it felt like a cosmic hand reaching down to say hey, julie, even if you feel like a total mental case you're doing everything right. it felt like reassurance.

plus i really, really like free things, particularly when they're lovely and handmade and something i would have bought anyway.

i'm thinking that when i've got a little extra cash coming in, maybe when y'all do your holiday shopping at up up, the shop, i might go back for one of these:

don't i kind of sort of need that?

:: can't get over ::

there was an episode of grey's anatomy, i think it was, that featured a woman who'd had four heart attacks (or something) on the exact same date over the course of many years. turns out it was the date that her next door neighbor slash secret lover of years had died. she had never realized the correlation or the significance until her seattle grace doc pointed it out to her.

amazing what the body remembers even when the brain does its very best to forget.

and then there's me. i am the keeper of dates. i'm the rememberer of events past. and it's not really a cognitive thing. i actually easily forget birthdays and other dates like which five days brian is going to be out of town in august. it's more like i have a special center in my brain that is in charge of keeping ties to my own emotional past.

and usually the way that center files emotional data is by date.

i remember the date of my first kiss ever (february 7th, 1991) and can faithfully reconstruct on a mental calendar the entire beginning of my relationship with brian from the days of our first dates to the night he finally kissed me to the first time i ever saw him naked. on june 29th of this year i had the nagging feeling that the date was significant and i eventually remembered that it was at one point evan's due date (that was later changed to july 4th, he was born june 25th).

so it astounds me that i somehow missed a huge anniversary.

if you follow me on twitter you know that on tuesday morning i woke up to pee (damn pregnant uterus) at 3:26 and never did fall back asleep. at 5 a.m. i finally got up. at 6:30, just before the house started waking, i was suddenly and forcefully ill.

it lasted through the day, growing worse as the day grew longer. thankfully evan was with his grandparents because i felt horrible. at times i found myself inexplicably sobbing in between bouts of getting sick.

at 6:00 at night, i had to start packing us up for a trip to the adirondacks the next day, and somehow i remained well enough all night to get the laundry done and the clothing packed. i got my orders ready to send out in the morning.

in the midst of all the busy-ness, i realized: it was july 7th. the day of my total breakdown last year. the day i stood crying in the kitchen of our ohio condo and told brian i needed my mommy. the day my mom hopped in her car and drove 400 miles to help me. the day i saw my doctor, started on antidepressants. the day i found myself gripped with fear: of the shower, of taking walks, of lying on my right side.

i know i'm doing so much better and all but jeez. how in EARTH could i have missed this anniversary? how could i not have anticipated it the way i anticipate other "bad" date memories? how could i not have prepared myself for how i might feel on july 7th.

in the days since i sort of find myself reeling a bit, trying to get my feet back under me. trying to figure out how i feel about what happened this week. trying to reflect, maybe. trying to figure out how a date passing can leave me in this memory hangover, sitting here feeling like something inside me is different than it was on monday before the big bad anniversary snuck up on me.

our bodies and minds astound me. i can't get over how they work. i can't get over how inextricably linked they are.

and apparently i can't totally get over having forgotten this scary anniversary.

:: Wanna Know Something Good? ::

do ya?

i'm feeling pretty great these last couple of weeks. i'm feeling pretty much like myself. evan's twoness is trying at times, of course, and i can't stop thinking about houses, but i'm handling it a-ok. i'm so glad about that.

all of this was confirmed for me yesterday when i met with my new therapist. she's a social worker i'm going to meet with once a month or so as needed until the baby comes. we're working on a prevention plan.

anyway, it was our first meeting and as we talked about my life a year ago when i was in crisis and my life now, i just realized how different things are. with my life. with me. with my ability to cope. with my inner turmoil. i told her about leaving my ph.d. program. i told her about moving home. i told her about house hunting. i told her about the second baby. i told her about joining the mommy group. and i felt so powerful. i felt so empowered is maybe the better way to say it. i felt like yeah, sure, stressors will always be stressors. yeah, sure, there'll be bad days. yeah, sure, having a two year old and being pregnant with another is both exhausting and sometimes scary. but i'm ahead of it. i have learned to sit out here in front of it and assess it. watch it. stay on top of it. keep it from getting too big or too scary or too hard to talk about. i have learned that putting off decisions i know i'm going to make anyway only makes me more miserable.

i did tell her about my new-found over-attention to my moods and reactions, and she said it's probably not such a bad thing but that maybe i should try to keep the obsessive self-reflection to once a week. one day when i take a few minutes to review the week and think about how it went. and i'm okay with trying that.

as for the prevention plan, she also recommended carving out more time for me-just-me. i admitted that i spend all my supposed me-time now doing work for the shop, and she challenged me to try to find some time each day when i can do something that's not mothering and not wife-ing and decidedly not working.

we'll see how that goes. i know something'll have to give somewhere to make this happen. wish it could be eating oreos that i could give up, but oreos and pregnancy are just two things that go together in this body of mine. i actually dreamt about them during my nap yesterday.

sigh. oreos.

:: :: things i know and don't know :: ::

from camil tulcan's photostream, and available in the EPP creative commons group

what i resent most about the postpartum depression, the zoloft, coming off the zoloft, is that i have lost my sense of normal. not society-normal but me-normal. i have lost my inner compass. furthermore, i have developed an attendant need to second-guess every single emotion that flits through my poor, confused, hormonal brain.

i resent that i can't really tell how i'm doing right now. i'm moody, which i usually am not, but i'm also pregnant, which i also am usually not. so am i okay? am i not okay? and am i supposed to always feel okay? because i'm positive i didn't always feel okay before; i'm positive i often felt sad or confused or indignant. i'm positive i used to feel a frequent sense of, what? twenty-something angst?

i'm also positive that i was starting to outgrow that.

something inside me is saying, "hey, lady, you might not be doing so great right now" but then something inside me is also saying, "but hey! wait! who said you'd always be doing great?"

i do know that i'm not doing as well as i was a few months ago, but i also know that my life has changed a lot in the interim. is it fair to expect that i would still be feeling the same?

i thought i would know right away if i needed to go back on the zoloft or if i needed to talk to brian so that he could tell me to go back on the zoloft. i thought i'd know if i was feeling good or bad. but instead i'm feeling everything. i'm good and bad. i'm confused and scared and resentful. sometimes. and i'm stressed out. sometimes. we have two months until we're leaving my mom's house and we still haven't sold the condo in ohio. i know it's normal to be stressed out, but is my reaction to the stress normal? me-normal? am i coping okay? i don't freaking know.

i thought i would know.

:: :: yay! :: ::

{from torinodave72's Flickr photostream}

so is it controversial because you think i should have gotten off it the moment i found out i was pregnant, or because you think i should have gotten off before we even started trying to have a kid? or is it controversial because you think i should have stayed on?

whichever reason it may be controversial, i am off my zoloft. today was my first day without it, although i've been stepping down gradually and have been doing just fine. i have moments of anxiety or dread, but i know what they are now and i see them coming from so far away. i am learning to manage them. i am learning to name them so that they can disappear.

i was on the drugs for eleven months to the day, which is a total coincidence. it was longer than i initially expected, but for me it was the exact right amount of time. and to anyone out there in the middle of a complete breakdown like i was eleven months ago, let me reassure you: i'm glad i went on the drugs even though at the time i was both terrified of them and convinced that i didn't need to be medicated.

if i need them again i won't wait as long before i talk to my docs. i hope to stay off for the rest of my pregnancy, but as my OB advised, anxiety and depression have shown to have strong effects on the fetus, risks which may outweigh the possible risks of being on zoloft while pregnant. so we'll see. i just want to stay healthy. i just want to feel like myself.

right now i'm hopeful that i'll accomplish that without the zoloft.

yippee!

:: :: more on the rally :: ::

wow. i just started reading some of the letters at postpartum progress. you really need to get over there. it'll help you know and understand me better. it will help you know and understand all moms better.

{see post below for details}

:: :: mother's day rally for moms' mental health :: ::

today, instead of writing something here on my blog, i'm writing over at a katherine's blog. please head on over to postpartum progress to read my letter (and 23 other letters) to new moms.

i'm really proud to be participating in this online rally that started at midnight last night and runs until midnight tonight. the rally features open letters to new mothers on the importance of maternal health. one letter will be published each hour on the hour.

i don't know what time mine will be, but just head over and keep checking if you must. (oh, okay, i'll post a link here to my letter when it's published...)

and to all of you, HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!

:: :: meeting the mood :: ::

the common advice for dealing with anxiety is to relax, take deep breaths, etc. sometimes i find that lying on my back and breathing all the way into my diaphragm helps. but sometimes the thing that helps the most is meeting the mood. taking the anxiety and turning it into excitement or joy.

here's some of my best therapy. come, meet me in that place where you feel so happy you want to scream.