meltdown Archives - Page 2 of 6 -

Grey Skies and Runaway Trains

April 7, 2013 by Farewell Stranger ·

It rained yesterday.

We don’t get a lot of rain here. We get snow, which is mostly accompanied by brilliant sunshine, but grey skies are rare. It’s one of the reasons I love living here.

Last week spring made a valiant effort to overtake winter. The sun shone, the temperature rose, and the mounds of snow by the sides of the roads melted. I was living in the sunshine and loving it. But over the last few days the skies have turned grey.

Click for image source

Life is not always sunny, of course. But for me it has been sunny more often than not, and I’ve been able to pause in those catch-your-breath moments and really soak it in. But my ability to see the sun can disappear as quickly as the sun itself.

I don’t function when I don’t get enough sleep, and I’m not getting enough sleep. And I’m losing hope that I will suddenly, miraculously start getting enough. After a long week followed by a couple of rough nights, the rain entered my life yesterday – both literally and metaphorically.

I’ve been here before and I know exactly where this sleep deprivation road leads. And I have no desire to take that path again. I don’t want to feel that way and I don’t want to have to say, Actually, it happened again the second time too.

I want, with every fibre of my being, to be able to push the emergency button and make this runaway train stop. But I’m feeling the desperation an engineer must feel when he knows the train is going to hit something in the tracks. It’s there, it’s in front of me, and the momentum feels like too much right now. It’s bigger than me and I’m not in control of the outcome.

I was hoping today would be better, but instead I woke up to snow. It’s time to hit the brakes.

Wish me luck.

Filed Under: Postpartum depression · Tagged With: admissions, call for back-up, meltdown, sleep

Time Will Tell

September 24, 2012 by Farewell Stranger ·

Image credit: tamburix on Flickr

My head is not quiet.

Two days ago it was quiet, or relatively so. With three weeks to go before my due date I was living in a surreal space. I know what’s to come (more or less) but I was having a hard time believing it’s coming so soon.

Having a second baby is a weird experience. Before my first was born I was anxious, though just how anxious I didn’t actually realize at the time. I was still lost in that first-time-mom fog of dreaming about sweet babies and sighs and soft blankets. Because you don’t know, do you? You can never really know what it’s like to have a new baby until you get there yourself.

This time I know what it’s like, and yet not really. What will it be like with two? How will I be? Is it going to be okay?For the past several weeks I’ve been more focused on meeting this new little being than I have been about how he’s going to get here and what will happen in the days and weeks and months after. I feel like I know this child already – the one who likes to stick his feet in my ribs, the one who gets hiccups a lot, the one who dances when I eat something sweet, which are all things Connor never really did. I’m trying to picture him – his hair, his cheeks, his fingers. Will he look like his brother? Will he have my eyes?

And then on Saturday night I woke up around midnight having contractions. They were the mild Braxton Hicks type, slow but rhythmic, and unlike anything this mama who’s never laboured before has experienced. I thought, Hi! Are you getting ready to come? and Good. We can do this together.

Then on Sunday morning I got cranky. At first I blamed my efforts to play around with design (never a good thing) and then I retreated upstairs for a bit.

And then I couldn’t breathe.

I’m not ready, I thought. We don’t have the hospital bag packed and the car seat isn’t installed and we haven’t figured out where we’re going to store the receiving blankets. We need to get the windshield replaced. The dog needs to go to the groomer. We need more freezer meals!

The list I had made the night before suddenly seemed overwhelming and despite being organized I felt ill-prepared. I let that feeling of the list, the list drown out the little voice in my head that was telling me that’s not what this is about.

But I don’t want to think about that.

Like a big girl, I did think about it and realized I was having an anxiety attack. Yes, we have more stuff to do. No, none of it is critical – the hospital bag is half ready and we can chuck the rest in if we need to, and the car seat can be installed quickly. But I’m not ready.

I need to think more about this whole birth process (more on that in another post) and I need to sit with my thoughts for a while. This baby might be as challenging as Connor was. I might not cope this time either. It might be better or worse, happier or harder, but I need to internalize the knowing that ultimately it will be okay.

It will be okay.

So I took a deep breath, let the anxiety in and acknowledged its presence, then watched it leave. I don’t know what the next day will bring, or the next three weeks, or the next three months. Whatever happens will happen, and it will happen on its own schedule.

I’m not ready, but I don’t have to be.

It will be okay.

Loosely based on the current prompt at Just.Be.Enough: “Now what?” We’ve got a giveaway happening with this one – come join us!

And linked up with:

UPDATE: This post is featured on BlogHer Moms today – I’m honoured!

Filed Under: Be enough me, Pregnancy · Tagged With: admissions, anxiety, meltdown

Four going on 16

August 2, 2012 by Farewell Stranger ·

Earlier this week while we were getting Connor ready to go to day camp I grabbed his hat and plopped it on his head. He immediately whipped it off and turned it around so that it was on his head backwards. He actually looked pretty cute, especially with the bit of hair sticking out the front, so I told him I wanted to take a picture of him.

This is what I got:

He just turned four. At least I think he did. Either that or we’ve had some sort of time warp and this is my teenager.

It does sort of feel like a glimpse of the future. (Oh, this kid is definitely going to define his own style as he gets older.) I mean, what’s with the face? He’s gone from doing that cheesy grin – scrunched eyes and big, all-teeth smile – to this. Backwards hat, menacing look, tongue out. And a Lego police car retrofitted with extra-wide wheels and a spear. All attitude, baby.

Is it because we buy him Lego with bad guys? Is he influenced by subtle messages in kids’ TV shows?

Nah. I think it’s just because he’s four going on 16.

My only consolation is that the day after this when I tried to drop him off at day camp he wouldn’t go. He rubbed my wrist as we went in the door and then wanted me to pick him up. While we waited to go in he buried his face in my skirt and then sat on my lap and hid his face in my neck. I got him as far as the sign-in door but that was it. He would NOT go in. He cried and cried and asked to go home, and this went on until I finally decided not to force it and we left. That was the first time we’ve ever had a problem getting him to go somewhere without us. Oh sure, he’s been nervous and a bit shy at times, but he’s never outright refused to go. (And then the next day he trotted right in there like the meltdown of the century had never happened.)

Forget 16. He’s four going on…four. And I kind of like him that way.

Filed Under: Conversations with Connor, Motherhood · Tagged With: meltdown, photos, toddlers are weird

Lost, v2

June 6, 2012 by Farewell Stranger ·

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.

Image credit: ~jjjohn~ on Flickr

Filed Under: Hard things, Postpartum depression · Tagged With: admissions, antenatal depression, depression, meltdown

No Joy

April 25, 2012 by Farewell Stranger ·

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.