Hands shaking, limbs twitching, cells, veins vibrating, blood boiling.
Breath ragged, tears prickling, sobs wracking.
The physical shell spins
The mind reels
Emotions swarm and swamp
Even the calm between the swells a sad, dead place.
There is no taking a bow.
The dance is never over.
The dervish whirls and twirls herself into a tizzy.
from Abundance Created Together
Less than 500 words of writing
Eyes closing
One hour and twenty minutes worth of recaptured sleep
Salty, savory snacks
Humorous programming
Mindless knitting
Are my muscles spasm-ing or atrophying?
Is this self-care or lethargy?
A day of needed slacking or anhedonia?
Sometimes it’s hard to tell.
I remember peeling off the cocoon of my bulky winter jacket one of the first times I came here.
Perching nervously on the edge of one of these same chairs.
Feeling completely vulnerable and exposed.
Wanting desperately for someone to mold me back together – yet not touch me. Not look at me. Not judge me.
For my weaknesses, my failures, my inability to just be.
It’s been awhile. But I’m back. And so are all the same feelings.
And speaking of inconvenient policies:
“’So what new stuff are you going to plant in the garden, Mom?’ I ask.
‘Plant?’ Mom says. She looks out at the yard and shrugs.
‘How about if we make a list? Marcy said it was good for you to make lists and cross things off. When you first got home, you made lists.’ I stand up to go get some paper and a pencil. I want Mom thinking violets, daffodils, tulips, bright colors flashing in her brain.
‘Thinking about spring tires me out, Chirp,’ Mom says.
‘But in May we can pick lilacs!’ I say. ‘We love picking lilacs.’
Mom reaches for my hand. ‘Just sit with me, honey.’
I sit back down.
I need to stay patient with Mom, especially since her new psychiatrist just told her that he thinks her depression is chronic, which means it will never completely go away. She’s been depressed at different times in her life and will probably always struggle with it. That’s news she needed like a hole in the head just two weeks after gettting home.
Three black-capped chickadees play follow-the-leader around the rhododendron bush. I can’t tell if Mom’s watching them.
‘You don’t have to pick lilacs,’ I say. ‘You can just keep me company when I pick them.’
Mom puts her arm around me and squeezes tight. When I look at her face, tears are streaming down.
‘Listen, Chirpie,’ she says, brushing the tears away like they’re pesty no-see-ums. ‘I need to tell you something important, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘You’re a really special girl. A beautiful, strong, special, special girl. You know that, right?’ She’s gripping my arm.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Good,’ she says. ‘It’s important.’ She lets go of my arm. She rests her hand on my knee. ‘When I was a girl, my mother loved to tell me what was wrong with me. I made no sense to her at all.’ Mom stares out at nothing. ‘Luftmensch.‘
‘Luftmensch?‘
‘It’s a Yiddish word. It means a dreamer. From my mother, the worst thing a person could be.’
‘But didn’t she like some things about you?’
Mom doesn’t answer for a long time. Finally she says, ‘My hair. My mother liked my hair.’
Wind whips across the yard. The grass shivers.
I touch Mom’s hair, but she doesn’t look at me.
‘She didn’t love me,’ Mom says quietly. ‘That’s just the simple, hard truth.’
A crow screeches, and all three chickadees take off into the air at the exact same time.
‘Wow!’ I say.
Please, Mom. Please, Mom. Notice.
‘Wow,’ Mom says, with a little smile.
We watch the chickadees until they disappear into the trees.
‘Lilacs are my favorite flower,’ Mom says.
‘I love them,’ I say
‘Me too,’ she says.
‘They smell so good.’
‘Like sweetness and light, Chirpie.’
I put my hand in Mom’s pocket. She reaches in and holds my hand. It’s sweetness and light, our hands together in her warm pocket.
— from Nest by Esther Ehrlich
The hours that stretched between late afternoon and evening yesterday were tough.
I hustled my three girls off the bus and into the car, rushing off into the next installment of the ‘passport debacle’ (I may pen a frustrating short story of the same title). They were tired, hot, sticky, hungry, and probably would’ve had to pee if they weren’t so dehydrated from the high temperatures. After toting them through two venues and experiencing botched passport attempts (adding to the overall debacle), they hooted and hollered, spat and pinched the whole ride home. Home. The place where I got to give my husband a quick smooch, eat a hamburger right off the grill as I set the table for the sit-down dinner the rest of my family would be enjoying while I rushed off to a curriculum night at the school. School. The place that was boarded up tight because the curriculum night is, in fact, tonight. I got back in the car and thanked my lucky stars that I’d loaded Led Zeppelin II in the CD player so I wouldn’t go out of my ever-living mind. I promptly popped a bottle of beer when I got home and joined my husband on the porch. Trying to recount my frustration and agitation to him, I was repeatedly interrupted by our cherubs, one of whom snagged a butterfly net over my cranium, God bless her.
In a rare moment of calm, I said to him, life would be so much easier if we hadn’t had them.
That’s one of those statements you know you probably shouldn’t say out loud; that you know was a mistake as soon as you see your spouse’s face.
In his ever-present magnamity in the face of my melancholy, he replied, but we wouldn’t have the joy, either.
I know, you’re right, I sheepishly yet grudgingly replied. Still, my days the last week or so have been fine – until I have to get them off the bus.
And then – not with a lightning bolt, but with a gradual blossoming like a-bomb footage on slow mo – I realized that I’d have had depression anyway – with or without them. If left to my own devices, depression would’ve snuck in in the quiet moments, seeped through the cracks of career dissatisfaction, cycles of stress and PMS, self-loathing and pity.
Life with three little people is insane. It would be so easy to pin my struggles on them. It’s hard to see anything else, to even draw a spare breath. And the tenor of my life with them did seem to kickstart whatever this alternate mental atmosphere I’m living in is – but in that one absurdly clear and dissonant moment, I saw my struggle, my illness, my self for what it is.
That doesn’t make it any easier to raise three littles in the midst of all that. But it makes it easier not to resent them and their needs. And to love myself – faults and all.
So this was my day today.
My Depression: The Up and Down and Up of It by Elizabeth Swados
Thankfully, not the actual experience of depression, but the viewing of this documentary. Or maybe the fact that watching a thirty-minute documentary is all I did hints that the black cloud of depression is looming, but we’ll call the sleeping and loafing I did the rest of the day self-care. Waking from my two disjointed yet extended naps on our decaying couch, I grabbed a tall glassed concoction of green tea, seltzer, and pomegranate juice and a bag of tortilla chips. Agog at the television viewing options sans kids, I scanned the documentaries’ list on HBOGo. Politics? I didn’t feel like crunching on the facts. War-torn countries? I didn’t want to feel the despair. Alzheimers? I didn’t want to cry the tears and face my fears. Depression? Why not?
Seems like an antithetical choice given my desire to relax and detach, but in the ever-present search for dissection and understanding of the insidious diseases of the mental health variety, I am drawn to all things depression – things done well, that is. And My Depression: The Ups and Downs of It by Elizabeth Swados, is.
The cartoony quality and upbeat music initially threw me off. The narration of an overview of living with depression, voiced by Sigourney Weaver, seemed too bubbly or glossy for me. Then, I realized, it wasn’t necessarily for me, someone who lives with depression; it serves as a great introductory primer to those who don’t deal with depression, who have no clue what it’s like under that deep, dark cloud.
And deep and dark is certainly where things turn when, overcome by seemingly insurmountable odds, Elizabeth’s animated avatar is paid a visit by a ghoulish skeletal guy, voiced by Steve Buscemi, in an ice cream truck named the Suicide Mobile.
But Elizabeth prevails. Somehow, the human spirit pushes that dark cloud away enough so she can get help – in the form of self-help and love, medication, and therapy. A particularly striking image is when she doesn’t feel visible or worthy or at all at home in the world, her therapist literally brings her back to life by wrapping her in the warm embrace of a blanket.
My Depression was a little hard to watch. Initially, because I’d already lived the story, knew the plot line – and ultimately, because it hit so close to home. For a brief documentary, it covers a lot of psychic ground – and a topic that needs covering in the worst way; for, the dark cloud of depression covers a lot more people than we know.
* Click the image above to link to a trailer of the documentary
“And there were very likely people who thought one could not interpret men’s feelings by the cars they drove.
But when they moved onto the street, Ove drove a Saab 96 and Rune a Volvo 244. After the accident Ove bought a Saab 95 so he’d have space for Sonja’s wheelchair. That same year Rune bought a Volvo 245 to have space for a stroller. Three years later Sonja got a more modern wheelchair and Ove bought a hatchback, a Saab 900. Rune bought a Volvo 265 because Anita had started talking about having another child.
Then Ove bought two more Saab 900s and after that his first Saab 9000. Rune bought a Volvo 265 and eventually a Volvo 745 station wagon. But no more children came. One evening, Sonja came home and told Ove that Anita had been to the doctor.
And a week later a Volvo 740 stood parked in Rune’s garage. The sedan model.
Ove saw it when he washed his Saab. In the evening Rune found a half bottle of whiskey outside his door. They never spoke about it.
Maybe their sorrow over children that never came should have brought the two men closer. But sorrow is unreliable in that way. When people don’t share it there’s a good chance that it will drive them apart instead.
Maybe Ove never forgave Rune for having a son who he could not even get along with. Maybe Rune never forgave Ove for not being able to forgive him for it. Maybe neither of them forgave themselves for not being able to give the women they loved more than anything what they wanted more than anything. Rune and Anita’s lad grew up and cleared out of home as soon as he got the chance. And Rune went and bought a sporty BMW, one of those cars that only has space for two people and a handbag. Because now it was only him and Anita, as he told Sonja when they met in the parking area. ‘And one can’t drive a Volvo all of one’s life,’ he said with an attempt at a halfhearted smile. She could hear that he was trying to swallow his tears. And that was the moment when Ove realized that a part of Rune had given up forever. And for that maybe neither Ove nor Rune forgave him.
So there were certainly people who thought that feelings could not be judged by looking at cars. But they were wrong.”
– from A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
The universe works in mysterious ways.
There’s a reason for cliches such as this. In ways unexplained, people and circumstances are drawn together. In an affinity, a warm, glowing feeling that spreads with seemingly no foundation, conversations click, relationships made, journeys continued before we’d even realized they’d begun.
One such journey began in 2012, though I was not yet aware. As I typed the first tentative strokes birthing my blog in January of that year, Charlotte of Momaste went about her business a few mere miles down the road. One day seven months later, in a burst of breastfeeding genius, her blog was born. About a year later, I discovered the light and love and unabashed truth of her blog when its SPOT-ON post, Touched Out, was Freshly Pressed. She gave voice to the heretofore dysfunctional and guilt-inducing tendencies I’d been seeing in myself as a mother. I’d found a kindred spirit.
And then she posted a picture of the view from the end of her street. And I saw the same bay I could see out the window of the house I’d started my family in and just recently vacated; the same one, admittedly, I had an imperfect view of, too, but still reveled in mentioning. Not only were we from the same state, we been living in nearly the same zip code.
I felt even more of a kinship. I had a scaffold in which to place her ruminations and observations; a visual schema her scenes unfolded against, even if I wasn’t on the exact street.
We bandied about the idea of meeting for quite some time. Fellow bloggers can attest to the feelings of friendship engendered by genuine, heartfelt comments and the uncanny ability to pin pieces of your own gray matter on their own sites. Still, with our young families, no concrete sense of who each other was, and both suffering from anxiety and possible cases of social awkwardness, the time never presented itself, nor was never found, to meet.
Then I registered for a conference in Boston for survivors of postpartum depression. The excitement leading up to the real-time introductions at the conference led to whole lots of conferring online beforehand. If strangers were becoming friends for that, why not my other ppmad peeps? I reached out to Charlotte and floated the idea of traveling to Boston for the conference. That plan didn’t hash out either, but it created a real impetus for our meeting irl, as they say, which finally happened yesterday.
The thoughts going through my head as I drove to meet her were akin to what I’d imagine if I were in an episode of Catfish. My ten year-old daughter, in an annoying yet pride-provoking manner, had pointed out that there are dangerous people on the internet, you know. My mother relayed the message that my grandmother was very nervous and didn’t want me to go. I said I highly doubted this woman would turn out to be a 47 year-old male axe-murderer – not for the sake of a blog meet-up. Charlotte and I did do the awkward blind date eye-contact, avoidance, cut through the coffee house, then back out onto the deck greeting. She affirmed that yes, she was not a man and no, she did not think a 47 year-old axe-murdered would go to so much trouble writing blog posts to lure in a victim – particularly ones about breastfeeding.
That was the first of many laughs on this my first blind date with my first online friend meeting in the flesh.
We swapped stories about our kids, our spouses, our writing, our work, our struggles, disappointments, triumphs, and joys. Most rewardingly, we shared the same space – psychically and emotionally. The whole simpatico thing worked in person as well as it did online. While our stories differed in their twists and turns, we got it. There are as many differences as similarities, but we respect the journey each of us is on and support each other.
When Charlotte checked whether it was time to pick up her daughter, I realized I’d lost all track of it. While nearly two hours had spooled away, it felt as if we’d just started our conversation. I experienced almost the same feelings I’ve had when I realize I haven’t caught a friend up on the crush of things that’ve happened since our last visit – even though we face the stretch of time before our next one. And we had to get caught up from the beginning!
But there’s always the next cup of tea – or chai in this case (to which I will have to add copious amounts of milk if we visit the same place as it was mighty strong). There’s time for friendships to grow – online and in real time. And there’s the universe – that has already proven it’s got our backs in bringing us together.
Momaste, Charlotte: the mom in me so bows to the mom – and lovely human – in you.
Chopping Potatoes 