Tag Archives: anxiety

Living, Mental Illness

The Hairy Crumb

Do you remember when you were a child and your mother seemed so neat and tidy, so put together? She would whip the house into shape in no time. Flit about the house each morning, making beds, washing breakfast dishes, hanging clean laundry to dry in the sun.

You knew she did it, but it never occurred to you how. You never weighed the drudgery of the tasks, the tedious amounts of effort that went into the seemingly effortless job she did.

Did the tasks weigh on her the way they do you? Another item added to the to-do list adding one more stone upon your chest. The never-ending monotony of it threatening to suffocate you like a toppled tower of laundry. The disarray around you making you feel like a failure.

The hairy crumb on the floor taking on a life of its own, sucking the life out of yours spiraling out of control.

Keeping house probably didn’t send your mother into the existential angst of a panic attack. Not because she emulated June Cleaver, but because she was not (is not) ruled by anxiety. She would not take on more than she could chew. And if she did pack her calendar, she’d know how to prioritize to make it all work. She did not suffer from the irrational desire for physical orderliness as a means of reining in her mental and emotional chaos.

Or maybe you’re seeing your mother through the eyes of a child – a superhero who can do all effortlessly and heroically. Perhaps not unlike your own children see you. Only you’re pretty sure you never saw her sitting on the floor, hands hovering near her heart, tense and twitching, physically trying to push. the. demands. away.

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Humor, Living

Cause and Effect

Wondering if you are a foodie?  Shop at Wal-Mart and see if you don’t come out frustrated.

Wondering if you should have children?  Borrow three children and take them along with you to Wal-Mart.

Wondering if you still struggle with anxiety and/or irritability?  Take your own three children along with you to Wal-Mart.

Not sure whether that neon blue frosting on your child’s cupcake is artificially flavored and colored?   Watch for pond slime diarrhea the next day.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

For every aisle of frozen fish fillet, there is the gaping hole of fresh bunches of cilantro.

For every idealistic preggo or wistful grandma, there is a mother clinging just barely to this edge of sanity.

For every woman struggling for balance, there is one thrown out of whack by hooligans hanging off her shopping cart.

For every over-zealous and genetically engineered diet choice, there is a revolting bowel movement.

No shit.

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Living, Maternal Health Month

Unintentional Hiatus

 

My month-long series on maternal mental health ran up to the end on a high-note. It organically happened that I took Sundays off (which happened last year, too, I believe) and I missed one Monday. But the second to the last day of the month led into a multi-day outdoor assault – my own family’s feet on the rocky outcroppings of a letter-boxing trail and my husband and I splitting wood like the lesser versions of Paul Bunyan that we are – keeping me away from blogging for much longer than I anticipated.

Shouldn’t have been a big deal, missing that last day of the month, right? Wouldn’t have been – save my anal-retentive perfectionist tendencies and overbearing need to summarize. I couldn’t post any inane essay on my pre-series schedule before concluding the series. And life was ratcheting up, not allowing me to sit and form any cohesive set of thoughts.

My youngest’s preschool program finished for the year, also ending those blessed two and three-quarter hours of writing time twice a week. Some of it had also become crush tortilla chips while surfing the web after writing time, but it was alone time nonetheless.

image from Peggy Lampman

image from Peggy Lampman

Perhaps the biggest challenge to my settled psyche, however, is the change in schedule itself. I can hear the words of my wise LICSW repeating in my head, telling me the beginnings and endings of school years are transitional times for everyone in the household. I still try to tell myself it’s no big deal, but apparently it is. Yes, we’ll all be liberated from hectic mornings and rigid schedules, but we’ll all have to get used to spending all day everyday with each other. None of us will have freedom from each other. No alone time. No individual activities. No uninterrupted playtime with friends – be it other children or corn chips.

Then it started raining. I half-heartedly set myself to chipping away at the piles of laundry and dishes that had accumulated whilst we frolicked with sharpened woodland tools outside. And I went and read this amazing – in its content, expression, and ability to scare the bejeezus out of me – article about motherhood that messed with my already fragile state of juju (which may, in fact, become the starting point for the summary posthumous post of my series).

So I’m here. In some state of transition. But aren’t we all. God damn walking the tightrope/balancing life again. Isn’t there just some set state of equilibrium I can have installed in my inner ear?

 

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Maternal Health Month, Maternal Health Month 2014, may is maternal mental health month

Playing the Odds

 

We always hope that our child will get the best characteristics from that special person we partnered with and ourselves. A winning combination. We hope that the less desirable pieces of ourselves will be filtered out in the next generation. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen.

Our second daughter was an easy baby. She ate well. She slept well once she discovered her thumb. She rolled with the punches of a dual-sibling household. Her laugh came easily as did her socialization. We labeled her gregarious and thought for sure she’d be comfortable in any social situation as she grew.

Partway through her year of preschool, she began complaining about going. No one likes me. No one plays with me. Kindergarten followed with more of the same, with daily fights of shoe, sock, and shirt selection – one of which ruffled me so much I slid into a tree one snowy morning. This year, it intensified, with afternoons added to the agenda. Denial of a specific snack or a disagreement with one of her sisters would send her reeling. Over-the-top anger. Violent outbursts. Negative self-narrative.

My husband and I tried extra cuddles and attention, positive reinforcement, avoided giving such outbursts attention . . . it only seemed to escalate. It was not a fun time, to say the least. What finally pierced my heart was when she began with self-harming statements.

I’m just going to throw myself out the window and break my head.

It would be better if I just died.

How would you feel then?

I doubted whether my first grader had horribly morbid intentions. I sensed it was a more dramatic way to express inexpressible incredibly pissed-off feelings (which was later confirmed by the school psychologist) and that she didn’t fully understand the gravity of her declarations. BUT – and a big one – I’ve read and heard enough about mental illness to know you never take such statements lightly. And I’m a former English/Language Arts teacher, used to evaluating journals and writing pieces where many such revelations come out in school. Teachers and school personnel have strict protocols to follow surrounding such language – even if it’s erring on the side of caution.

What scared me most about these statements was that they reminded me so very much of my own running narrative born of postpartum depression: I hate my life. Just kill me now.

Had my child inherited the very worst part of me, the part from which I truly hoped she and her sisters would be free? In tense conversations after the children went to bed and my husband and I tried to find a solution to this seemingly impossible one, I said, You know why I’m paranoid, right? He did. Though he’s never seen me as such, he knows I think of myself as broken, flawed, and that my worst fear is that it affects the children. What if she’s got what I have? This fear hadn’t fully formed itself in my soul until those words issued from her mouth, but then it blossomed exponentially. We agreed to make an appointment with the school psychologist.

Fortuitously, the school psychologist’s curriculum already brought her into the first grade classroom discussing identification and expression of feelings. Ironic. Perhaps my anxious little bean hadn’t progressed far enough into the curriculum, but my concerns meshed nicely with the goals of the program. The school psychologist helped us extend and reinforce what they’d been discussing in the classroom in our home.

It wasn’t an instant fix. Though it started with a great amount of enthusiasm, a week into our initiatives had my daughter ripping up the yellow diamond of construction paper listing her triggers (you know, the warning zone meant to make her more aware of them in order to cut them off at the pass). In her calm moments, she could tell you exactly what bothered her. When she was seeing red, there was no talking her down until she’d run herself out. Closer to the end of the year now, I hear her using more of the language from the school program on her own. It makes me happy to see her acknowledging ‘rock brain’ moments and telling said rock to get lost.

And that, I think, is the memory and lesson I choose to take away from this year. For all the machinations I took this year, in the end, it was she who enacted the change. She has the power to determine her own destiny. She is not a mini-me, though she looks an awful lot like I did as a child. She isn’t my clone, complete with my anxious tendencies. After all, she inherited her father’s temper, too. 😉 She is a unique individual who will create her own unique solutions for any problem she encounters.

Being aware of how my genetic make-up may influence the presentation of her behaviors is good to keep in the back of my mind, but it shouldn’t be in the forefront.  Using what I learned in my struggles to create a support system for her only makes sense and compassionate parenting, but it’s not a self-fulfilling prophecy.  She is a certain percentage of me, a certain percentage of her father, but she’s 100% herself.

 

a onesie gifted to us by a dear friend

a onesie gifted to us by a dear friend

 

Related Posts:

Vantage Point

You Got Some ‘Splainin to Do

 

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Maternal Health Month, Maternal Health Month 2014, may is maternal mental health month

A Child Registers Who’s Raising Him

 

“But a child is a sensitive instrument. You can hide the factual truth from a child, but you can’t blanket influence. Your agitation will out, and over time it will mold your child’s temperament as surely as water wears at rock. It was not until I was nearly twenty, deep into my own way with anxiety, that my mother spoke to me explicitly about her anxiety and the grief it caused her. But by that time she essentially talking to herself. I’d become her. It wasn’t merely genetics. It was the million little signals: the jolting movements, the curious fears, the subtle avoidances, the panic behind the eyes, the terror behind the hugs, the tremor in the caresses. It was the monkey. A child registers who’s raising him.”

– from Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety by Daniel Smith

 

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Maternal Health Month, Maternal Health Month 2014, may is maternal mental health month

Debbie Downer

 

So I’m kind of selfish. I struggle with depression (read: not always a bag of laughs). I sometimes get lost in the vortex of my anxious thoughts.

Perfect candidate for motherhood, right?

When one writes a mental health blog while suffering from said mental illness and in the midst of mothering, it’s hard to write a post that doesn’t make it sound like you hate your job and/or children.

For the record, I don’t.

I love my children.

My mother told me that I must be doing something right because they [the children] adore me. I replied, Well, they won’t have an overinflated sense of ego, that’s for sure.

How much do we put away? How much rubs off on them? How much can you vent/piss/moan/complain on posts and not have people call family services, Samaritan lifelines, EMTs, etc.?

I don’t know how much this blog is my release valve or an incubator for my negative thoughts. Scratch that. They’re there anyway. It’s like denying the existence of the devil.

I wonder how much I look like an agitated, anxious, depressed mother on the outside. Or if no one knows. No one can see. I wonder how many of us are walking around wearing a camouflage coat. It may the woman sitting right next to you. It may be the face staring back at you from the mirror.

Is it possible to separate our maladies from the little being that grew inside us? Will they be able to thrive outside that shadow?

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Living, May is Mental Health Month, Mental Health, Recovery

Getting from “I can’t” to “I’ve GOT this”

“We have to let go of what the world wants us to hang onto and hold onto what the world wants us to let go of.”

The wise deacon who gave the homily this Sunday morning spoke these words.
But how do we operate within this paradox?
Why is it always about balance?
How much of it is our attitude and how much is our chemical make-up?
What miracles will ‘heal’ us if we believe?
This post raised similar questions.

Admin's avatarOff Duty Mom

I have struggled for most of my adult life with borderline depression and probably a little anxiety, too.  These things, however, have not existed in real life like I would have imagined they would.

cryingI had previously figured that depression was reserved for people who had SOMETHING to be sad about.  And those poor saps wouldn’t be able to get out of bed each morning.  They would cry constantly.  They would probably resort to maniacal meth usage, would wear all-black and would get swoopy haircuts, but would ultimately not really wash or style their hair much, anyway.

I figured that people who had anxiety would be nervous wrecks 100% of the time, would talk really fast, drink too much coffee, talk incessantly about governmental conspiracy theories, and would be all twitchy and weird.

Most of that stuff is dead wrong.  For me, at least.  Except, I could get into a…

View original post 696 more words

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Identity, Poetry

Disconnect

Head vs. heart

Exhaustion vs. anxious energy

Joy vs. misery

Difficult situations rolling like water from a duck’s back; simple acts eliciting freak-outs

Distraction/perseveration

Longing, lacking,

cup overflowing

Confusion, crystalline pain

The grounding grasp of tiny clasp,

The constricting clutch of oh-so-much

 

Synergy, synthesis, integration – somewhere out in the ether.

I’m dying to meet Her.

disconnect

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Living, Technology

Incommunicado

Being unavailable, unreachable, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Tomorrow afternoon marks a week we’ll have been in our new home.  Only three people know our new phone number.  Only two bill collectors have found us.  I’ve been on Facebook once and haven’t logged onto WordPress at all – let alone post!

Today as I walked home from retrieving the girls at their new bus stop, I felt that my necessary reentry to the world was coming.  Inevitable.  I can only use the boxes around me as an excuse for so long.  Though I still do not have anything hanging in my closet because I don’t feel I’ve sufficiently de-furballed it (their special cat friend left me many presents).  I still do not have things packed into the bathroom cabinets because I haven’t disinfected them yet.  I still don’t have routines and patterns and familiar places to put things.

But the world does not care.  The world will not let me milk this life-change for all it is worth like the sleepy, hazy period that is life with a newborn.  Eventually I’ll have to answer the phone.  Eventually the beep of a text message will wake me from my reverie.  Eventually I will while away an entire evening checking for updates, statuses, and pictures of cute kids.

And while I’m dead-tired and sick of putting the kids to bed and starting another round of housecleaning, I haven’t missed checking multiple e-mail accounts and social media accounts and staying in constant contact.  I got a lovely snail mail correspondence from a dear friend.  Two wonderful friends of mine brought a ‘housewarming’ lunch.  And legions of family and friends trooped in to help us set up our new home.

Funny how we seemed to survive before we were attached to technology.

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