Escape, Part 2
April 5, 2011 by ·
[See part 1 of this story here.]
Checking into a hotel is normally a fairly simple process. Except when your brain has had a spaz and screws you over in the process.
This night in a hotel was courtesy a gift card I got for Christmas 2009 and hadn’t used yet. (I know, dumb. You’re welcome to slap me.) I looked at two websites in trying to find the hotel’s reservation number – the first was a hotel booking site and the second – the one I wanted – was the hotel’s site. I found the number and called to book the room, giving the friendly man on the other end of the line my credit card number when he asked for it to hold the room. At no time during this conversation did he say he was going to charge the card or that it was non-refundable. <Insert ominous music here>
I discovered my brain spaz when I told the woman at reception I’d be paying with the gift card. She informed me the room was prepaid through another company so I couldn’t use it.
I distinctly remember looking at the hotel booking site and discarding it. I distinctly remember looking at the hotel’s site – the branding, the hotel features, the drop-down menu with the property I was looking for. I have no idea how I screwed it up but this was absolutely the last thing I needed. I didn’t want to have to argue about it. I didn’t want to have to sort it out. And I didn’t want to suck it up and just pay for the room and use the gift card later.
I called the company and informed them I didn’t realize I was booking through another company, that I never agreed to have my card charged and that I certainly didn’t agree to – in fact, wasn’t informed about – a non-refundable booking. The oh-so-helpful response? “But it’s non-refundable.”
Force down panic, repeat story. Demonstrate full will of a mama struggling to hold her shit together instead of completely losing it in a hotel lobby: “I DON’T CARE. FIX IT NOW.”
Last weekend was just too much. What was originally intended to be a nice break had become, truly, an escape. I need to go somewhere and close the door behind me and not talk to anyone. I need to figure out what’s going on in my head that’s allowing these waves to keep crashing over me, totally unexpectedly. I need him to fix it.
He fixes it.
The woman at reception must sense I’m on the edge, because she upgrades me to a room with a king bed and a harbour view. And then, embarrassingly, I do start to cry.
Once I get into the room things are better. I drink Coke with ice in a wine glass and that alone makes me feel like I’m somewhere else. I read a bit, write a bit, breathe a bit. I listen to music. When I’m feeling more calm, I throw on my workout gear and get sweaty. I pull up one workout on my computer and when that’s done I do another one. Exercise is a sure thing, every time, and when I’m done I feel like me again.
The rest of the night was heaven – a carpet picnic, a hot shower, pajamas and cozy socks. A conversation with a dear friend who called to make sure I was okay on my own. A delicious chocolate dessert while I sat at the desk looking out at the lights coming on around the harbour. A solid sleep in a bed with fluffy covers and puffy pillows.
I am grateful for this. I am. I can afford to do this for a night and I have a husband who is not only supportive, he tells me to go. I have a laptop I can take so I can read and write and stay connected.
I sat there that night and took deep breaths and felt that gratitude wash over me. But behind it the usual tension was still there – a tightness in my shoulders, a twitchy foot and a brow that remained furrowed so that in the morning I woke up with what appeared to be a permanent crease in my forehead.
The events of Saturday, including a call to the psychiatrist at 10 at night, led me to what I sincerely hope is rock bottom. Things cannot continue like this – it’s been over two years. Almost three. I’ve taken so many steps that seem like the right ones and it doesn’t feel like it’s getting better.
Maybe this new medication will kick in (please oh please) and things will start to improve. But it’s clear to me now that I need to take charge of this. I need to do something different. I need to do something more.
So that’s what I’m going to do. As of this morning, the wheels are in motion. Stay tuned.
Labels and Lightbulbs
April 1, 2011 by ·
[Warning: some pieces of this post might be triggers for some people. Good idea not to read if that might be the case for you.]
The vocabulary associated with postpartum depression is vast. There are so many facets to this illness I never knew about, even after I accepted this as what I was dealing with and started to learn more.
As I came across many of these issues I thought, “That doesn’t apply to me.”
Anxiety
When I was a teenager, our house was broken into. Whoever it was came in through the garage and, as I remember it, only rummaged around the lower floor. Took a few things they came across and some stuff, including a small amount of cash, from my brother’s bedroom.
It freaked me out.
My room at the time was on the top floor of our house, and my bed was positioned under a window. Lying on my pillow, I could look straight up and see the window behind my curtains. Each night for months (years?) I lay there for a long time before falling asleep, breath held, staring at that window expecting someone to climb through it. (One night my cat came in the window on the other side of my room. Between the time I saw the curtains move and the moment her padded feet hit the floor, I think I just about overdosed from panic-induced adrenaline.)
A couple of months ago, when talking about medication because what I was on wasn’t working, my counsellor warned that one of the other options is typically associated with an increase in anxiety.
“That’s fine. Anxiety is not a problem for me,” I said.
The lightbulb hadn’t come on yet.
Intrusive thoughts
We moved into our current house eight years ago. As soon as you walk in the door there’s a staircase leading to the upper floor. More nights than I can count I’ve lain in bed, paralyzed with fear that someone would come up the stairs and kill us. I can picture it – a dark shape, illuminated by the street lights from outside, walking quietly up the stairs. In my head I can actually picture this happening.
These thoughts got worse after Connor was born because his room is the first you come to at the top of the stairs. Anyone coming up the stairs would get to him before us. When he first started sleeping with us at night, I breathed more easily knowing he was at least somewhere I could see him.
I recently read a post at The Lorix Chronicles about intrusive thoughts. I sat in front of my computer in stunned silence.
Oh.
OCD
I’m not a neat freak by anyone’s standards, but I like to putter. It calms me. When the house is filled with noisy, bouncy toddler and my brain is filled with, “I can’t do this. It’s too much. I’m not cut out for this. It’s never going to get better,” I vacuum. Methodically, back and forth, the vacuum forming faint lines in the carpet.
I don’t know if this can actually be categorized as OCD. It’s not an obsession that’s relieved by a compulsion – something repetitive and, to a degree, uncontrollable. But it is about control. The stuff I can’t control takes over my brain and I fight back by tackling something I can control, even if that something is crumbs.
Depression
I’ve never struggled with depression.
Except… Oh wait. There was that time in the last semester of my first year of university when I spent a lot of time in bed. A LOT. I stayed there and didn’t want to get up, though I didn’t think much of it at the time.
Then when I was in my 20s, I got sick of feeling sad and hopeless all the time and started logging things. What I ate, exercise, weather – you name it, I put it into a carefully crafted spreadsheet, and it was all mapped against my mood. Eventually the sum of the things that made me feel better – getting enough exercise, sunlight, eating well – led me to feel better overall.
Until I sought help for PPD I’d never been diagnosed with depression. Never even had a conversation with a doctor about it. I always hated that label. Oddly, though, I remember being asked to fill out a self-identification form for a previous job. “Are you a visible minority?” No. “Are you Aboriginal?” No. “Do you have a disability?” A very small voice in my head piped up. “Does depression count?” I knew it was there, though I was never willing to admit it. (I checked no.)
The light bulb about anxiety and OCD-like tendencies switched on a couple of weeks ago in the middle of a meltdown. I told my husband it’s dawned on me that I’ve been dealing with this stuff almost as long as I can remember.
His response: “No shit.”
He’s always considered me sort of OCD, apparently. Well. How do you like that? I wish someone had told me.
I’ve recently started to acknowledge my past episodes of depression in conversations with doctors and counsellors, but it wasn’t until I talked about it with the psychiatrist a couple of weeks ago that I really began to accept this as a part of who I am.
The realization about intrusive thoughts was a lightning bolt that just hit me last weekend.
My counsellor and I spent most of my session this week talking about all this and she gave me some resources to deal with it. Only a few days later, I can now catch these thoughts. “Why are you thinking that? Do you think that’s true?” The answers aren’t right yet: “I don’t know. No, I guess not, not really. But what if… And maybe it is true. And I’m just not good at… I CAN’T TAKE THE CRUMBS ANYMORE!” It’s a work in progress.
One thing that helps is that I’ve named these things now. I’ve allowed themselves to attach them to me. No, better – I’ve attached them to myself.
I don’t know what it means, exactly, but it feels like a step in the right direction.
The Power of #PPDChat
March 30, 2011 by ·
Most Monday evenings, I play my disengaged mother card, turn on Dora, and surf Twitter while we eat dinner. It’s not that I’m so addicted I can’t set it aside for an hour. It’s that Monday night is when #ppdchat happens.
I discovered this community fairly early on in my mama-tweeting days (which is to say January of this year) and it’s incredible. I’m never surprised at the support strangers are willing to provide each other, but there is something about this community that is extra special.
One thing in particular that makes it so is the way the hash tag pops up outside the chat. Sometimes it’s used to draw the PPD community’s attention to a recent blog post. Sometimes it’s used to share a moment in the life of a PPD mom. And sometimes it’s a rallying cry.
That happened the other day when I saw a post from a mom of three, whose newest is about three weeks old. She’s having a rough time and her blog post was clearly a brain dump of desperation and a cry for help at the same time. I commented and then tweeted it using the #ppdchat hash tag and encouraged others to have her back. And they did.
Within minutes, several other people had commented. It was retweeted a number of times too. It made my heart swell to see moms who know what it’s like jumping in to provide a little virtual support. I could just imagine her reaction to getting a bunch of new comments on a post that was a couple of days old. At the end of the night I looked at the blog again and she had commented. She, clearly, was overwhelmed by the support. Sometimes all it takes to survive another day is knowing you’re not the only one who feels that way.
Mission accomplished. (And then today, the very lovely Leighann from Multitasking Mumma took up the call and posted another, quite heartbreaking, post from this same blogger. The love is spreading.)
I love the strength in that hash tag, but the real power comes from the chat itself. Led by Lauren from My Postpartum Voice, it happens twice on Mondays. Sometimes I feel like I need it. Sometimes I feel like it’s just a nice little prop of support. And sometimes I start tweeting away and end up crying.
This past Monday, we got into a discussion about being perfect and both how hard that is and how hard it is to let it go. I struggle with that every day. Not in attempting to be perfect, because lord knows I’m good at avoiding all sorts of things I should do, but beating myself up because I’m not. I really need to embrace the idea of “good enough”. (What is good enough, anyway?)
There were three of us that really got into this line of thinking and we all admitted to it being an issue. Then one very beautiful mama tweeted this:
“I’ve been where you are, to the point of thinking that if I can’t be perfect I should die.”
Oh, honey. I’ve been there. Am there still, sometimes. More often than I care to admit, actually. I know that place – every street, every alley, every park bench. I moved in a couple of years ago and when I realized all my mail was being forwarded I tried to get out. But I can’t. I’m still a year-round resident and I can’t seem to figure out how to get home.
Now, lest anyone freak out, I’m not actually suicidal. But I’m going to be frank: sometimes, still, I don’t know what the point of this whole life thing is.
But at the end of every #ppdchat, Lauren tweets this:
“Don’t forget that help is only a tweet away these days – you are not alone in this. #ppdchat”
Which is, sometimes, the most helpful tweet of all. Because being where I am, in What’s the Point World, can be a scary place to be. I have talked to very, very few people about this. Two, maybe. And while I think they understand, it’s not the same as knowing I’m not the only one who feels this way.
I’ve heard other PPD survivors say that “X” (which is usually something beyond their normal support system) saved their lives. I’ve never been that close to the edge, but if I were I know that X = #ppdchat for me. I might not need it to save my life, but it’s definitely saving my sanity.
[I cheated a little bit and wrote about my favourite hash tag. That’s allowed, right?!]
The Battle at Bedtime
March 28, 2011 by ·
He’s so small.
He’s refusing to sleep in his own bed because he wants his mama. This is how it goes these days – and I can’t really blame him because he’s so small – so I agree to tuck him into mine.
He snuggles under the covers, head on pillow. Round cheeks, fuzzy hair, soft lashes. I see how small he is and how quickly this stage will go by. I can absolutely understand why he would want me to lie with him while he goes to sleep. That makes sense to me – as a person and a mother. His mother. And yet I’m lying there with my teeth clenched so tight my jaw is starting to hurt.
There are some nights when I just don’t have it in me. He resists the routine at every stage, squawking and stomping and running away. Laughing because he thinks he’s funny and he knows I think he’s not. He slams doors and throws things and I feel my ability to cope drain away.
When he’s finally in bed, he takes a while to be still. He’s like a butterfly, flitting from flower to flower trying to find just the right spot. He rolls over, pulls the covers up, pushes them away. He snuggles into me, then flops right out of the bed and announces, with conviction, that he’s not interested in going to sleep.
I start with ultimatums, but before long I’m begging.
Please lie down. Please, please go to sleep.
I’m begging a two-year-old to sleep, despite months and months and years of evidence that this is in no way effective. That it serves no purpose except to highlight my inadequacy and remove all hope that this will become a peaceful process.
When he finally settles and asks for a cuddle, my first response is an emphatic, “No!” I need to get out of here. I need to…do something else. I can’t. I just can’t.
And I immediately feel awful. Awful. What kind of mother says no to a cuddle at bedtime? Besides, I know I’m going to give in.
Some nights this cuddle time is my absolute greatest joy. Some nights I would give everything to freeze time and lie there with him. My son. My baby. He has his spot – his back curled right into my chest, his head tucked under my chin. During those times I can feel his breathing – his chest rising and falling, his breath on my arm – and everything about it is peace.
Those good nights outnumber the bad. But, oh, the bad. When it’s not going well and I don’t have it in me I simply cannot summon that peace. We’ve had bedtime battles with this child since he was an infant. A very small, very screamy infant. One night when he was two or three months old it took us five hours – FIVE HOURS – to get him to calm down and go to sleep. When he was finally asleep I called my parents and told them to bring whiskey. “For you or for him?” my mother asked. Both. Definitely both.
We clearly needed to do something different, but two years later we haven’t really figured out what that is. Some nights he’s fine, but most of the time bedtime is not easy. And on those nights I start to think he’s actually going to kill me.
We have the same routine every night and he knows what to expect. He says he’s tired and wants to go to sleep. Stories are usually fine, but lately I use the toothpaste test to know if the rest of the routine is going to go well: if I end up with toothpaste on me – wiped on me, spat at me, thrown at me – that’s not a good sign.
I’m sure my frustration and anxiety about this process transfer to him and get him all hopped up when he’s supposed to be calming down, but I don’t know how to change that. I’m willing to give up the battle – he can sleep in my bed, though that doesn’t necessarily make it easier to get him to go to sleep. It just avoids the screaming. It means I’ll sleep better than if he were in his own bed, but it doesn’t mean I’ll sleep well. But after over two years of this battle, my husband and I know when we’re not going to win and we concede defeat.
The bedtime battle always eventually ends – for one night, at least – but I feel like there are so many other parts to this war.
[Side note: Just when I was trying to decide if it was productive to post this my iTunes mix jumped to Pink. I told you…she’s following me.]
