Blip

May 23, 2013 by ·

You know how sometimes you talk to your psychiatrist about developing a plan to wean off your anti-depressants but then you find yourself making another appointment to talk about how that’s not a good idea? And it’s because you’re getting mad at stupid things too often and you find yourself crying over silly things enough that you’re developing an intimate relationship with soggy Kleenex? When that happens, instead of a plan to decrease your dosage you come out with a prescription for a new medication to add on top of your existing anti-depressant.

Or at least that’s what happened to me.

I am…disheartened about this. I’m also terrified to start a new medication (and, admittedly, a bit stubborn because I DON’T WANT TO HAVE TO) so I’ve had it for two days and haven’t managed to actually take it yet. Maybe tonight.

I don’t really know what else to say about this yet, but I wrote a post on my Yummy Mummy Club blog that was meant to be poignant but ended up just being sad, so I feel like I need to put this out there.

Sometimes there are just too many tears at bedtime. (And other times too. But hopefully not for long.)

 

Filed Under: Hard things · Tagged With: , , ,

Farewell to 2012 in Photos: Link-up

December 27, 2012 by ·

We had a great Christmas but I’m glad it’s over, you know? I’m ready to plug away on the stuff I want to work on instead of being consumed by the madness of a deadline most other people are working towards as well.

But before I get too deep into new projects it’s time to look back.

I love this time of year for all the lists of top moments, big news stories and all that wrap-up-the-year stuff. So why not do our own? I did this photo retrospective last year and it was a great exercise in looking at just how much had happened in a year.

Having put together this post for this year, I can say I think 2012 was equally full of unexpected stuff. We had a baby, my brother and sister-in-law had twins, and my parents actually moved out here. I didn’t do as much adventuring or travelling as I had hoped, but we were blessed with so much other good stuff instead. Hard and sad stuff, too, but we’ve got what we need to get through it.

Want to join me for your own year in review? Pick one picture for each month of the year (or do a photo dump – whatever you like!). Then grab the button (code is in the right sidebar), post, and link up with me to say farewell to 2012 in photos.


 
The link-up will be live from December 28 through January 4. On January 5, one linker will be randomly chosen to receive a package from Little Love Media that includes a blog evaluation report and a blog strategy. (Thanks again, Alison!)

Let’s do this.

January

In January we had just moved to Calgary and we were embracing winter. I had chosen “vibrant” as my one word for 2012 and I wanted to really get out and enjoy our new city and all it offers. We went skiing and skating, and the picture above was at the Lake Louise Ice Festival. Awesome month (that also included the beginning of something else awesome, but more about that when we get to October).

February

 

In February we were settling in, and quite well overall, but we were starting to really miss having my parents close by and Connor really missed Grandma.

March

 

March was mostly just March. Except that at the end of the month we lost Michael.

April

April was about motherhood. It was quiet moments and acceptance and Very Serious Conversations.

May


In May I was pregnant. ALL THE TIME. (And perhaps a bit obsessed about certain aspects of it.) To distract myself from the constant morning sickness I started thinking about names and came across this gem from when I was pregnant with Connor.

June

 

In June I still wasn’t feeling quite right. I was struggling with depression and sad after we found out we weren’t having a girl. But Connor turned four, and watching him turn into a little person in a way he really hadn’t been before was pretty cool.

July

In July I was still working on finding my way, but I think the best drama of the month resulted in this.

(I got the ring fixed, by the way.)

August

In August I was still thoroughly in pregnancy hell. It was hot, I was tired, and I had just had enough. But that was the month something clicked for me with Connor. It had been a long time coming, and it’s something I still remember. (I don’t always achieve the motherhood equivalent of Zen, but my awareness is there and that’s huge.)

September

September was all about getting ready to have a baby. I started mat leave in the middle of the month, we finished Ethan’s nursery and I spent some time thinking about (and preparing for) giving birth. And good thing, too…

October

…because in October this beautiful boy came into the world.

And it was good.

November

In November I was tired. But I spent a lot of time cuddling a baby, and it was good.

December

winter moon

And that brings us to the end of another year. December has been a good month, and different in a good way from the rest of the year. I feel like I enjoyed things more and took time to appreciate the goodness and opportunity around me. A nice feeling to take with me into the next year, don’t you think?

What was 2012 about for you?

 



Filed Under: Photos · Tagged With: , , , , ,

Dishes

September 19, 2012 by ·

Mundane is normal. Normal is good.

It’s the normal things I stop doing when things aren’t going well. The dishes languish, rinsed but not clean. The clutter in the house adds to the clutter in my mind.

I like puttering. It gives me a chance to think and to reflect and to feel in control. But none of those things is appealing when things aren’t going well. I don’t want to think and so I leave the dishes, my sullied thoughts glomming onto the detritus of dinner.

Lately my dishes are clean.

Clean dishes are normal. And normal is good.

As you may have noticed from my recent silence here, my writing isn’t coming together much lately. Or maybe it’s that I’m choosing to play and to sleep instead of choosing to write. In any case, I got a bit stuck. So when Velvet Verbosity suggested I try the 100 word challenge, I scoffed. “I don’t have time to write 100 words,” I told her (with a nod to Mark Twain). And then I decided it was worth a shot. And this is what came out in response to the current prompt – Doing the dishes.

 

I’ve also got a (previously written) post up on Just.Be.Enough today. Do you feel bad about feeding your kids McDonald’s? Join me in my McShame.

Filed Under: Happy things · Tagged With: , , ,

Lost, v2

June 6, 2012 by ·

I sat on a tire swing at a playground the other day. As I rocked back and forth, I watched them – four other families we gather with every week so our kids can play soccer together. The parents sat on the grass at the end of the evening chatting while the kids let off their last bits of steam on the playground nearby. I just sat, the links of the chain wrestling the pieces of my spine for position. It was uncomfortable. My back, my pregnant belly, the tears stinging my eyes. It was all uncomfortable.

I’ve known these families for a long time, or the parents anyway. The children are new to me. And to Connor. “They’re not my best friends,” he said one day, hiding in a pine tree instead of joining in with the running and ball kicking.

I know, I thought. They’re not my best friends either. 

They are friends, though – some of them formerly very good friends, others less well known but just the sort of people one would hope to get to know upon moving to a new city. But I looked at these formerly-very-good friends and thought, I don’t see myself in them anymore.

I don’t see myself in much of anything anymore. “You haven’t really been yourself since Connor was born,” my husband said to me one day as we talked to my (new) doctor about medication. No, I said. Is he right? I thought.

Haven’t I been?

I haven’t been.

Maybe others who have struggled will help me understand. Did I not recover? And what does that even mean? Does that not involve going back to who we were before? Is that how anything in life works when there was a before?

However it (in theory) works, I am not the same as before. At a fundamental level, I am a different person. At a DNA level, if that were possible, which it’s not, but for as changed as I feel it might as well be.

We went to my parents’ house a couple of weeks ago to sort through boxes in the basement. As we pulled out long-forgotten treasures and my siblings re-lived our school days I watched. I didn’t recognize the girl who lived through those times and those treasures with them, just as I didn’t recognize her in old friends at the park. I don’t know where she is anymore, and what’s worse, I don’t know what happened to her.

She’s just gone, apparently.

Last year I said farewell to the stranger in me, and I thought that would make things better. But what I didn’t notice at the time was that she seems to have taken the girl I used to be with her.

The girl I used to be is lost.

And there’s no milk carton for that.

car-buried-on-beach

Image credit: ~jjjohn~ on Flickr

Filed Under: Hard things, Postpartum depression · Tagged With: , , ,

No Joy

April 25, 2012 by ·

I kept waiting for my first trimester to be over so I’d stop feeling sick and start experiencing the euphoric energy I’d felt the first time.

That energy never came; I only became more and more fatigued as the pregnancy progressed. I started to develop insomnia so bad that I’d only sleep two or three hours a night. The lack of sleep started to get to me; my moods fluctuated wildly, and I had to quit my part-time editing job due to complete apathy towards the work.

These are not my words, and yet this is my story. I just didn’t know it until I read it.

You may have gathered from yesterday’s post that things are slightly less than peachy here. I’ve been struggling for a while, but I thought it was just the natural progression of having moved away from family and friends and settling (or not) into whatever’s next. It was a new job and a longer commute and wondering where certain things are after our move. It was a pregnancy and a reduction in my med dose and a subsequent bump back up when that didn’t work. It was a small boy who’s almost four and all the challenges that come with that.

Except that’s not all it is.

The excerpt above is from a post called Robbed of the Joy of Pregnancy by Alexis Lesa on Postpartum Progress. Something lurking at the back of my brain took me to the antenatal depression tag on that site over the weekend, where I read one post and then another. And then I came to that one.

I know this is an issue for me. I just didn’t know it. It was an issue during my pregnancy with Connor too. I even did a Google search for antenatal depression, thought “huh” and then moved on. And was surprised when I got postpartum depression. (It’s okay – you can roll your eyes.)

The only thing in the above quote that I’m not experiencing is insomnia. I’m having the usual pregnancy-related trouble sleeping, but for the last few weeks I could happily have slept all the time. And, to be frank, some days I did. Wanting to stay in bed all the time is usually a huge light bulb for me, but I put a blanket over that light bulb and went back to sleep.

The thing is, though, that once I read that post the light burned bright again. I confessed to the problem to my #PPDChat group and a very dear (real life) friend of mine started looking up resources for me in this new city. She found a counsellor and a women’s mental health clinic and that was really all I needed to get me back on the right path.

Could I have searched those things out myself?

Yes.

No.

Yes, I’m on a first-name basis with Google. No, when the ground is coming up at me I don’t have the resources to find resources.

But I do have people who will do that for me, as long as I can muster up the courage to ask.

tree-sunrise

Image credit: GregRob on Flickr

 

Filed Under: Hard things, Pregnancy · Tagged With: , , , , ,
« Previous Page
Next Page »