anxiety, Children, May is Mental Health Month, Mental Health, motherhood

Crash and Burn

My five year-old was invited to a classmate’s birthday party at the bowling alley.

The day dawned rainy and miserable. She had stayed up late the night before. Her grandparents brought donuts for breakfast. She was so amped up, I think she had burned through her reserves before we even got in the car.

She excitedly greeted her classmates, donned her bowling shoes, and added her name to the scorecard when we arrived, but two turns down the lane, she gave up. “I don’t know how to play,” she complained. Then she spotted the arcade games. Cut from the same cloth as her father, she gravitated toward the motorcycle that swayed side to side as its driver maneuvered the flat terrain of the screen.

We had a seemingly needless discussion about why we were at the bowling alley: to visit and celebrate with her friend, the birthday girl.

The behavior that followed defied all logic – unless you take into account the lack of rest, the lack of energy resulting from sugary foods, the lack of barometric pressure that was doing something to her brain and skull.

By the time we said goodbye to the guest of honor and her mother, she was a sniveling mess grasping onto me for dear life.

“Oh no, what’s wrong? Is she okay?” the mother asked. I think she was concerned she was hurt – and also that she hadn’t had a good time at the party she’d hosted.

“Oh, she’s fine. She’s just crashing and burning,” I said.

“I know how you feel,” said the mother with an exasperated look.

Indeed, I’d watched her try to catch her breath throughout the party as five year-olds pooled around her legs. ‘Herding cats’ was the phrase that came to mind as I watched them try to adhere to bowling procedure. As she tried to coordinate with the staff to get lunch on the table for all these kitties, I overheard her tell her husband to ‘do something’.

I recognized in her all my telltale signs of anxiety bubbling up. The throwing of hands in the air. The curt responses. The barked commands. Looking around you as if you’ll see the one thing that will calm the chaos.

I wasn’t supposed to notice. I wasn’t supposed to hear the slightly heated exchange between she and her husband. But I didn’t judge. Instead, it roused me to action.

For once, I wasn’t the one crashing and burning, but since I certainly had been there, I did what I thought I might appreciate when I was. I grabbed a pitcher of soda and refilled cups. I moved said pitcher when I was afraid the birthday girl’s unwrapping might upend it. I tried to assist the kitties at my end of the table with cutting of food, getting of napkins, etc. I tried to make her laugh and get her out of her own mind, which no doubt was swirling and sucking her in.

I don’t know her that well. I don’t have any right to assume what she needs. But I know what it’s like to crash and burn. And I know I’d appreciate it if someone slowed my descent even just a little.

As for my five year-old, after scowling into middle distance on the thirty-minute ride home and sulking for a bit once there, she finally snapped out of it. The familiar surroundings of home and routine and a good night’s sleep resurrected her good mood.

I guess we all just need care and attention to thrive – or at least not end in a fiery inferno.

anxiety, Identity, Living, May is Mental Health Month, Mental Health, postpartum depression

The Blue Chicken or the Anxiety Egg?

Which came first?

It’s the proverbial question.

Did my anxiety beget my depression? Or am I worried how things will turn out because of my depression?

Worry-wort. My own worst enemy. Always running things through my head. So sensitive. Beating a dead horse. All of these are terms used to describe me at one time or another.

I do have a tendency to perseverate. I can’t let things go. I worry them like a dog with a bone that is impervious to bite marks. It’s not productive. It’s not reassuring. It’s a form of torment actually.

In college, after my roommate had left for the weekend, I would lie on my top bunk and stare out the window, wondering why I couldn’t go out and round up new friends as easily as everyone else seemed to be doing. I would watch the sun set, thinking how alone I was.

As August neared its end one year, I bought a thin volume entitled, Why Are You Worrying? As the cashier plugged my purchase into the register, he asked, “Are you a teacher?’ He said he’d bought the same book at the start of a school year once too. While he may have bought the book for the same reasons I did, no self-help book could help me turn off the worry. I triangulated every possible scenario in the classroom; how I would put out fires, cut off conflicts at the knees before they stood up, squash rebellion before it started. But you can’t plan for every permutation. The very nature of education is the X factor.

And this nervous nature – is that what plunged me into depression when life became so overwhelming as a mother of three? I couldn’t control anything, didn’t understand and couldn’t fix the feelings I was having, and felt really crappy as a result.

Or is it viewing life through the dark glasses of depression that makes me see the shadows of worry in every corner?

It’s all tumbled together in the dryer at the highest setting anyway.

The only ‘good’ thing about all of it is that what I thought was a flaw on my part, a weakness, an inability to achieve, connect, push myself, believe in myself, is really anxiety. I’m not this wimpy, pathetic, sad sack. I have an excuse! A reason, a rationalization, a disease. Good for me!

So chicken or egg – it’s all part of the cycle of life. All I can do is try not to get scrambled.

anxiety, Living, May is Mental Health Month, Mental Health

Self-Aware

Has a massage ever brought you to tears?

Tears that spring out of nowhere at the release of tension you didn’t even know you had.

The line between physical and psychic stress often blurs.

We often operate at such a high level of continuous stress that it doesn’t even register unless we disturb the flow.

A few months ago, my father and I attended Tai Chi classes. It was something he had wanted to try for quite some time. I found a class offered at the community center in my town and we went. I was used to the gentle flow of yoga, which the instructor told me is a cousin to Tai Chi, but this required an even higher level of calm and restraint. With my high-strung, perpetually-on-a-treadmill ways, it was a stretch of a different kind. I told myself to slow down as my cloud hands swept across the room, but it was something long since foreign to my body.

At one of the sessions, our teacher led us through a meditation we’d never done before. I didn’t know how relaxed I could get without lying prostrate on the floor, but I dutifully took my breaths and moved my hands – and started to cry.

It was not a bad day. I did not feel overly stressed, anxious, or upset. And yet, once I allowed my body and mind to slow, the pressure slack, the excess overflowed.

I wanted to kiss this little old lady for releasing my five elements.

But I need to channel my own little old lady. I cannot look outside for inner contentment. I must make the time to stretch in the morning, to adjust my posture, to make a mental scan of my body and release the tension.

I need to be more self-aware and body-aware so that a small chink in the dam doesn’t lead to a crazy rush of water I didn’t even know was collecting. It shouldn’t take a breach to make me notice the physical, mental, and emotional stress I’m holding.

My mental and physical health should be about maintenance, not damage control.

Living, May is Mental Health Month, Mental Health, motherhood, postpartum depression, Recovery

Wisdom in a Cup of Tea

My friend is always sending me notes saying she wishes we could share a cup of tea. Or she’ll e-mail and say we need to schedule a phone call with a simultaneous cup of tea. She’s someone who would darken my door every afternoon for tea and sympathy if I weren’t in her kitchen first. If she didn’t live 585.9 miles away that is.

When we met in a charming seaside town midway between our homes for a spa weekend well into my third pregnancy, she said nothing of the fact that I couldn’t relax, that I was cynical, that something seemed ‘off’. Instead, she gave me a mug to celebrate the impending addition to my family that said, “For this child I have prayed.” When I told her what a sham I felt like because I hadn’t prayed for this child; that [she] had been gifted to me undeservingly, she said, ‘well, you’re going to pray for her now and when [she]’s here, aren’t you?’ So matter-of-fact, so trusting, so unfailing in her regard for me as a person, a mother.

And when that something stayed ‘off’ far past labor and delivery, she gently and honestly broke the news to me, a headline I’d written but couldn’t read. She’d been featured in a similar newsreel only a short time earlier. She knew the signs, saw the struggles that someone who hadn’t been through them might have missed. I gave her a firsthand account of postpartum depression without knowing what I was describing. She saw herself in me.

And she saved me.

She listened to the horrible thoughts I couldn’t share with anyone else for fear they’d find out what a despicable mother I was. She became a sounding board for all the worries running through my head. She was my font of information on all things postpartum. It was she who finally convinced me I needed to get help. It was she who urged me to remove the stigma I’d attached to medication. It was she who helped me see I wasn’t the only one who’d ever felt like a failure as a mother, a weak human being, a seriously flawed individual clinging to the sharp edge of a cliff.

Still, I fought her for a good part of the way. I didn’t want to see myself in the mirror she was holding up to me. I didn’t want the help she offered because it meant giving in.

But she didn’t give up on me.

She told me the things I didn’t want to hear – and kept doing so until I listened – because she wanted to help me. She forced me to get the help I needed. She didn’t want to see me suffer the same fate she did; she loved me so much, she wanted to shield me from it.

Like every child needs a trusted adult, so every one of us needs a confidant, a friend in shining armor; in my case, a faithful warrior, devoted to the cause of saving my soul and that of my family. Someone who won’t give up on you even when you turn away because she’s showing you the dark side of yourself – even if you take it out on her. Someone who sees it through to the bitter end of your acceptance and seeking of help, the start of your journey to healing. Someone who uses her own empathic experience to lovingly see you through the darkest days of yours.

They talk about warrior moms. Moms who fight for their children, their needs, their causes. Moms who fight for themselves and their survival. There are moms who fight for those who stand beside them, who pick them up when they fall, who drag them along when they stumble. And it’s usually when we’re so bloody and battered, we can’t even think to ask for help, can’t even see we need it. These moms lift us up in the midst of their own struggles. They are the shining light on the hill. Without them, our own lights would be extinguished. All hail the friends, partners, mothers who battle for the survival and triumph of those face down in the trench.

I’d be nothing without mine.

Don’t be alone. Don’t do it on your own. Accept a little help from your friends.

Marriage, May is Mental Health Month, Mental Health, motherhood, parenting

They’re Baaaaaack

And what a hell of a reentry that was.

They came bearing packages, bags of laundry, and lots of noise. All of which happened to coincide with the whine of chainsaws and segments of tree thudding to the ground as we removed two more trees from our property.

The yard looks like a tornado came through, which I would think was totally fitting, if I wasn’t the one swirling around in its center.

Apparently there are findings that show people experience depression upon returning to their routine schedules after vacation. This weekend felt like the ultimate vacation. I was calm. I was peaceful. I was not done.

The moment they walked back in – in fact, even as I rushed around trying to finish things I knew I wouldn’t be able to when they came home – my stress level ratcheted up.

We showered them early because they had run around sticking to the tree sap and I looked at my husband at 6:13 PM and said, do we really have to wait over an hour to put them to bed? Whatever reserves I had built up over the weekend had been depleted in a few short hours.

One validating point: my father-in-law, when recounting how the weekend had gone, looked at me and said,

“I don’t know how you keep up with the three of them all day.”

Yes, it was a shallow victory because it just confirms how life-sucking they are. BUT – and this is a very big BUT – it means that there is not something wrong with me to find it challenging. It’s a normal, natural response that many people have apparently.

That doesn’t make it any easier to deal with on a day-to-day basis . . . but at least I know I’m not some freak of nature.

So, the take-away.

I like alone time.
I crave uninterrupted creative time.
I respond well to long, drawn-out, meandering shopping trips.
I thrill in the perfect flea market find for my home décor.
I eat like a pig who has found the trough for the first time when I can do so without distraction.
A new dress does a girl good.
Certain physical endeavors provide good stress relief 😉
I suck at carrying over these lessons to the everyday; reality, if you will.

But I have to figure something out. As I said when I lay in bed last night, in an exhausted stupor, ‘I love them. I need to find a way to like being with them.’

Whether it’s situational depression or what, that’s not something a mother is supposed to say.

Living, May is Mental Health Month, Mental Health

Hyperbole and a Half: Depression Part Two

Hyperbole and a Half: Depression Part Two.

An incredibly clear description of incredibly ambiguous feelings – with an amazing sense of humor.

Just one of the jewels!

Identity, Living, May is Mental Health Month, Mental Health, parenting

Christine Koh: Minimalist You: Self-Care Is Not Selfish

Christine Koh: Minimalist You: Self-Care Is Not Selfish.

My last post is a perfect segue to this, no? Ha!

Simply put, I suck at self-care. Obviously (if you read yesterday’s post!).

But I can’t function without it – which is why I struggle with mothering a lot.

Does that make me a failure as a mother or a person because I need it?

Last month, my youngest was sick. While her two older sisters were at school, she slept in bed. I wrote the whole time. I felt so alive, so rejuvenated. I had time to formulate thoughts, solutions, ideas for my writing, to move beyond the small task at hand. How excited I got and how invigorated I felt to face life and motherhood after that.

But that was tempered with a guilt. Why couldn’t I find joy in my children even without such creative time?

How do we care for ourselves when we don’t feel worthy of it?

Or when we don’t even have the energy for it? When depression drags you down so much that even getting out of bed takes too much energy, let alone getting dolled up and entering the world.

It truly is a vicious cycle.

But read this article and follow some or all of its tips. Self-care is worth it, whether we believe it – or in ourselves – or not. And if we don’t, it’s been proven that faking a smile actually lifts one’s spirits so fake that you enjoy that yoga class and maybe one day you will. (Quoth the reverend who needs to review the Ten Commandments 😉 )

May is Mental Health Month, Mental Health, motherhood

Happy Mother’s Day?

I’m trying really hard to make today’s post about mental health; something full of knowledge, experience, resources. But I also feel that, in chronicling my journey toward mental health – that is, out of depression – many of my posts have been depressing themselves. On this banner day of Mother’s Day, I feel like I should be all full of flowers and fairy dust.

I’m laying in bed, exhausted, freezing from the night sweat my hormones gifted me, snorking from an allergy attack that will most likely turn into a sinus infection, listening to the rain steadily thrum the window above my head.

And yet, I returned from the bathroom earlier to find two of my daughters lined up, positively vibrating with the creative joy they couldn’t wait to unleash in the form of scrolls and paintings and cards. The best gift, though, was my five year-old shaking and giggling, burying her head in my lap when I told her how much I liked her portrait of me. Her pride, her modesty, her shyness, her beatitude. My eyes welled up – and I realized Mother’s Day could end right there and I’d be whole.

It is the unexpected joy that is the best – especially in the midst of struggle. It is most certainly unexpected then, and therefore, even sweeter. As acute as the suffering is, the joy is crystalline clear.

I realize that life continues on a parallel, sometimes intersecting, track with depression. It cannot be separated out. But it also cannot crowd out all positive experience. Life happens despite it. Even happiness and poignant moments can happen in spite of it.

So Happy Mother’s Day. May you have a bright spot in the midst of your trials.

Identity, Living, May is Mental Health Month, Mental Health, Spirituality

Where Is My God When It Hurts?

Another great post from Cate Redell at Infinite Sadness . . . or Hope?

Her thoughts are what runs through many a tormented mind, I think, trying to figure out why its owner is suffering.

In the darkest days of my postpartum depression, I peered into every corner, lifted every heavy layer up, searching for some reason why this was happening to me; some redeeming seed I took take forward and grow into something useful.

God is not vengeful. I don’t think this was put upon me as punishment. I don’t think I deserve this.

But are there some lessons I can take from it?

I work extremely hard at controlling things, often to my own detriment. I am horrible at admitting I need or asking for help, much to my misery. I am a perfectionist, punishing myself with an impossible ideal.

When my world spun out of control, these were all things that were impossible to maintain.

And from my earliest days, God instilled in me a desire to help others. If even one person could learn from my suffering, would that be the reason for it? My ability to not lose faith and turn my trials into something positive?

In the end, it’s all about perspective and how we choose to react to what’s given us.

Cate’s post gets to the heart of that. Enjoy!

Infinite Sadness... or hope?

Last week I wrote about struggling to find hope in the midst of the chronic pain and fatigue of fibromyalgia (see Fatigued Hope). I admit I’m still battling this one. I don’t think there is a simple answer, yet I am frustrated by having previously written about hope, but not being able to find it to apply in this situation.

A number of people commented, in relation to that post, that I should perhaps look to my spiritual beliefs. Hence my question: where is my God when it hurts? The question is phrased as it is because I believe that spirituality is an individual thing, and as such where your God is when I hurt is not actually of much significance to me. It is in terms of how you might find comfort in your trials, but for me personally, it only about my perception of who my God…

View original post 1,215 more words

Living, May is Mental Health Month, Mental Health

Peace, Love, None of the Hair Grease

1 in 4 Americans live with a diagnosable mental illness – often in silence. 2/3 of all people with a mental illness won’t get the help they need or deserve due to stigma. Together with family and friends mental illness impacts us all, yet remains misunderstood and talked about behind closed doors.*

And yet, right in my own backyard, I am proud to say, is a fabulous organization taking monumental strides at destroying this phenomenon – and giving people peace of mind in the process.

PeaceLove Studios, the brainchild of Jeffrey Sparr, offers art workshops for people affected by mental illness in all its forms, creates apparel featuring the logo he’d like to become the symbol of mental health awareness and open dialogue, and a safe and positive place for those met with misunderstanding and fear to land.

The world could always use some more peace and love. Thankfully, there are people like the good folks at PeaceLove Studios to help spread it.

* information from the PeaceLove Studios website

Chopping Potatoes

and other metaphors for motherhood

Tag Archives: Mental Health