I woke up on Friday to a barrage of tweets for one of my fellow #PPDChat mamas and immediately knew something had happened. Something good.
Our dear friend Pam reached out earlier this week on Twitter and Band Back Together for help. I’ll admit – the depth of her despair freaked me out. I spent a whole lot of time tweeting, sending DMs, and replying to her post. I just needed to do something. Anything. And it felt like it wasn’t enough.
Pam isn’t the only one I’ve desperately wanted to help. If I had any aptitude for inventions I would invent a tele-porter so I could go and see these beautiful mamas when they need a hug. I can’t fix these problems for them – each of us has to work at that ourselves. But a big part of being able to do that is having support. And that is something I can provide, even if that hug is just virtual.
So that’s what I did for Pam – sent hugs and love and support. And then I stalked her Twitter stream, because when someone’s in crisis it’s hard not to do that. I also had the #PPDChat stream open in Tweetdeck and it was constantly scrolling with new tweets, almost all of them directed at Pam. It was like watching a wave of love roll up the screen.
I’ve written about #PPDChat before. It’s an amazing and beautiful thing, and it saved me on a few occasions over the last few months when I needed help RIGHT NOW. It’s so powerful I don’t even know how to put it into words. We have a private Facebook group, which is a great place to share some of the stuff we don’t want in our Twitter streams. But often when one of us needs someone we go to Twitter because we know, without a doubt, that there’s always someone there. We can call on that army, even in the middle of the night, and someone – another mama who can’t sleep or someone in another time zone – will answer. It has never failed me.
It didn’t fail Pam, either. She got that love and it got her through.
So Friday morning, when I saw the #PPDChat stream fill up again with tweets for her, I smiled. She did what she needed to do – she’s going for help, and we’re all going with her.
I don’t have a tele-porter, so I couldn’t get to Pam to give her a hug before she walked through the hospital doors. But the events of this week made me realize that I don’t need to panic about not having some weird device to get me there. (It would probably splinch me anyway.)
We are enough.
Our love is enough.
Our words – our virtual hugs – are enough to save a life.
The Be Enough Me link-up is especially powerful right now – for one month, starting Aug. 22, Bellflower Books is sponsoring us to provide memory books for women fighting breast cancer. Details here – please write about your Be Enough Me feeling and come and link up!
