Help Yourself

“If you do become depressed there are several things you can do to help yourself and make the illness as short-lived as possible.”*

I read this in a book preparing women for pregnancy and childbirth. It is meant well. It introduces a section on self-care and avoiding or alleviating depression (including medical help), which goes on to dispel the myth of the ‘perfect mother’, but the tone of this statement rankled me.

Self-advocacy, expectation, and positive outlook do play an important role in mental health, but they only go so far.

If a woman is clinically depressed, no amount of happy thoughts will pull her out. No amount of pampering will soothe her. Strong and mighty though she may be, bent but not broken, she still needs more. Some sort of medical and/or therapeutic intervention.

Statements like this perpetuate the feeling of failure that women suffering from mental illness already feel. That there is something they failed to do, some step they missed or didn’t push hard enough to save themselves. To embrace life and joy. And the idea that they’ve prolonged their misery by not making it as ‘short-lived as possible’ – argh!

Maybe I’m just cranky because it didn’t work for me. I know I’m reading this not as an objective observer or researcher, but as a severely chipped shoulder. But a lot of the literature I’ve found reads like it’s written by someone who’s too objective, like someone who views depression as a clear-cut, easily addressed condition.

Like someone who’s never been there.

* from I’m Pregnant by Lesley Regan, MD; no disrespect to the author, this post represents my own subjective opinion on the topic.

anxiety, Mental Health, motherhood

Mental Intervention

What was I thinking having three kids?

I mean, I love them, but who went and told them they could have their own social lives?

My life has turned into a maelstrom of meetings and play dates, educational outings and activities, birthday parties and sleepovers. Add that to my own [limited] social calendar and my outta-mind anxiety is over the top.

A dear friend once commented that a fellow mother reentered the real world more smoothly and earlier than I, perhaps because she came from a large family and was better equipped to juggle multiple responsibilities at once. She was busting my beans for being incommunicado for most of my child’s infancy, but it stung. Because I was an only child, I sucked at balancing the many demands of life? More so, I think it hurt because it hinted at my inability to cope. In a subconscious effort at self-preservation, I had compartmentalized my life to its limit. The new job of mothering was so all-consuming, I shut out all other demands like the airlock of a submarine to prevent an all-out deluge.

Nine years later, I feel myself pulling back, anticipating catastrophe as life – mine in relation to the swirling schedules around me – ramps up big time. Can I truly not handle all we’ve taken on? Or is my anxiety creating a problem before it’s even – or will – begun/in? I think my struggle is a direct result of my anxiety and not from a need to learn to say no.

It could also be the stubborn mule in me that hates change putting on the brakes. My family no longer exclusively rolls as one unit. The oldest is here, the middle is there, the youngest is home with Daddy while I run errands. Going to the grocery store by myself and buying Christmas gifts without acting like an art smuggler to keep them away from prying eyes is a luxury – but our family life feels so disjointed lately. Times of transition are not my friend.

Another friend once left me a message – somewhere between the two points on today’s timeline – that I couldn’t just stop answering the phone because I was stressed out. It amazed me that she could see me more clearly than I could see myself. When I finally did talk to her, she made me laugh and at least temporarily forget my troubles.

I need some sort of mental intervention now. If only I could enact one myself.

Children, Identity, motherhood, parenting

Good Imagination for a Mother

Dinner at our house can be a little trying. That is, if you’d like to eat without acquiring indigestion, without running to the kitchen after two bites to refill the glasses of milk the wee ones finished in 2.5 seconds, leaving no room in their tender bellies for the food they wouldn’t eat anyway because it has green stuff on it – but I digress. (See Dinner with Kids for further clarification)

In an attempt to keep them at the table for longer than the 0.5 seconds they usually last after finishing their milk, I bought packs of cocktail napkins (at the discount store) with conversation starters on them. We started with the jokes and riddles. Even funnier than the corny jokes was my middle daughter’s uncanny knack at figuring out the punch lines. Hmmm . . . perhaps that’s why she wanted to pass out the napkins. After a few nights of that, we graduated to life’s important questions. If you could invite any one – living or dead – to dinner, who would it be? Again, the middle stole the show – and my heart – when she replied, without missing a beat, Grandma Julie, my beloved grandmother and her namesake whom she never met.

from seasonedkitchen.com

Another night, we had to reveal which superpower we would want as a superhero. I piped up with my response first. “That’s easy, definitely flying.” Like with a cape? Flapping your wings like a bird? “No, just with my arms out as I floated above the trees.” My answer came easily because I automatically remembered my most favorite dreams – those where I soar above the tops of the trees and roofs of neighbor’s houses behind my childhood home. The psychological conclusions one can glean from this dream are fodder for perhaps a whole series of posts, but the upshot today is what my oldest daughter said with a look of impressed surprise on her face.

“You have a good imagination for a mother.”

I think that says perhaps more about my existence right now than my thwarted desires of dreams. All sorts of high-falutin’, politically feminist, empowering responses came to mind, but I simply said thank you and took it as the compliment I’m sure she meant it as.

What a strange psychological experiment parenting is – for all parties involved. I suppose mind-expanding conversation – even if they need be started with paper squares we smear across our faces – is one way to navigate the maze and see the different paths available. If not, there are always our dreams and unbridled imagination – even for moms.

Living, parenting, Perspective

Heaven or Hell

This is heavenly.

That was the thought and feeling that flooded through every part of my body as I sat under a grove of trees a few miles from the shoreline yesterday.

I was with two women I didn’t know particularly well, my children playing with five other children, only two of which they knew particularly well – but so go play dates when you join a new group, I suppose. At least I could relish the gorgeous weather and spot for what it was. A quintessential coastal breeze in the shade of old growth trees. An hour of my three children not waylaying each other and my own ear drums and patience.

How odd, then, that conversing with these two women, watching our children twirl and loop around us, that I made the decision to love my life.

I’d asked them the ages of their children, which led to a clarification of grade levels just completed, and then, a conversation debating the merits of forcing kindergarten for children with birthdays on the cusp of the cut-off and/or waiting an additional year. I’ve had this conversation countless times the last few years, starting with other people’s children all the way to my own four year-old. It’s never cut and dry and the anguish is always apparent on the parent’s face – that they might somehow harm their child’s entire educational career for the sake of a start nine months too early or late.

But that’s not what this post is about.

I’ve come to terms with our family’s decision to keep our precious little pea home another year for the sake of six lousy days.

It’s the nature of that additional year that this conversation affected. The nature of life now.

There will come a day when I have to work outside the home. When I won’t be able to see my babies at 10 AM just because. When I won’t be able to sit at a park with virtual strangers/possible friends and discuss issues for the age and stage we’re all at.

There will always be dishes and laundry. There will always be exhaustion. There will always be the guilt of the unwritten chapter lurking somewhere behind the keyboard. It will always take more energy and effort to pack the kid(s) and all their crap up and go on an outing than it will to stay home.

But there won’t be the brush of feathery grass on the backs of my thighs. The rustle of wind through green leaves. Legs long and lithe, short and compact, darting and weaving. The call and answer of hide and seek. The heavy weight of a tired child solid against my side.

We travel through this world from start to finish regardless. It is totally within our determination to make it heaven or hell.

image from wallpaperscraft.com

Living, Perspective

Framing the Scene

I always thought of the shadowed lines drawn by the slats of blinds to be something out of film noir. They always brought my mind back to the darkened auditorium of college, watching Double Indemnity and looking for clues of deception and danger within the frame.

This morning they make angles askew, geometric light patterns. Faint shadows paled by bright sunlight. Dull, flat gray; luminous white back lit by soft yellow.

How ironic that time of day,
quality of light,
the way your eyes flip the image, the brain perceives soft or sinister,
can totally change the mood, your mood.
The way you’ll approach the situation, the day.

It’s really all in the lens we choose to peer through.

Image from James Woodward

Living, Perspective

No Longer Negative Space

The way light shows through the gaps in a loose stone wall.

Unless you approach at a certain angle, you miss the open spaces – circles, angles, different shapes brilliantly back-lit. Looking down, it’s a solid mass. Standing even with it, a barrier of boulders. If you get down on your belly, study it head-on, the passageways are there. Light spills through the windows of opportunity, possibility. Against the bright backdrop, even the cold, dense masses of each individual stone etch beautiful silhouettes.

But you only see the relief if you look from a certain perspective.

On the level.

With a discerning eye.

Bringing the bright background into crystalline focus, letting the dark foreground fade into a fuzzy blur.

photo from an article by Joe Silvia

Identity, Living, Poetry

How Low Can You Go?

My head keeps butting up against expectation

No amount of plying with my pronged horns can make it go away

Some holes poked, but never enough to tear the fabric,
to crumble the wall,
topple the tower

I can peep through the hole, see the happy people on the other side

Those who can see their blessings
who are pleasantly surprised by the unexpected
those overwhelmed by the ordinary, everyday miracle

Setting the bar is fine
but those who only try to go over
are always left in limbo

Legacy, Living

Things That Need to Be Said

I have a relative who says things she shouldn’t.

She says the things you don’t want to hear.

The things that make you uncomfortable, that turn the mirror back on yourself in a most unappealing manner.

In a discussion of summer vacations and friends’ doings, I mentioned that some friends had taken their families to Disney. We lamented the hot weather in Florida this time of year and how trying it must be. I said it would be trying at any time of year with my youngest being only three. If I experienced sensory overload and exhaustion at the dawn to dusk days of Disney, I would have to wait until my children were older before I subjected them to its amusing assaults. I jokingly shared my observation I’d shared with my husband and kids: that I was fourteen years old before I had my first visit to Disney so I was in no rush to get my own much younger kids there anytime soon. If I had to wait, they could wait.

And that’s when my grandmother dropped her bomb.

There are children in the world who don’t have enough to eat and here we are worrying about what’s the right age to take our children to Disney.

Nothing like the perspective of an eighty-four year old woman to smack you back in your place.

I hadn’t been lamenting my fate. I hadn’t been saying my children desperately deserved a trip to Disney, but the poor dears weren’t old enough. Hell, if anything, I was glad they weren’t the ‘right’ age so I didn’t have to go through the whole ordeal. I don’t see Disney as an obligatory childhood right of passage. In America, it’s just something a lot of people do and it’s part of our societal subconscious (again, thank you to the ever-pervasive Disney marketing).

But my grandmother was right.

I’d like to think her comment was not directed solely at me. That it was just an astute observation of the irony of what many call ‘first world problems’.

But it cut to the quick.

In one concise sentence, she cut the wheat from the chaff and crystallized what should be our priorities. In a world where families can spend thousands of dollars for over-the-top entertainment, others’ can’t afford food for one day. In a world where I worry about the stress of an over packed summer schedule, there are mothers who worry if they’ll make it through the week.

I didn’t like what she had to say because it made me feel guilty. But guilt is usually born of some seed of truth deep within our gut.

My grandmother wasn’t trying to nurture that seed. She was simply speaking her mind in the privileged way that a long life has earned for her. In her eight decades, spanning two centuries, she’s seen a multitude of changes, not all of them good. In her evening ruminations, she discovers a perspective the rest of us can’t necessarily see – or don’t because of the frenetic pace of our lives.

I have a relative who says the things that need to be said, things she’s been waiting her whole life to say.

Identity, motherhood, postpartum depression

Losing Suction

It’s been a rough few days (weeks?). I wish there was a good reason why – that might make it better, or understandable anyway – but there’s not. I’m just miserable for no good reason. Irritable because I have angst. Angst-ridden because I have hormones and a crippling sense of self-awareness? (Thank you, Virgo)

There have been days I have camped out with my laptop for hours. Stared out the window waiting for the light to change. Held myself because it was the only thing to do.

And then the strains of PBS children’s programming came to me.

The minutes and hours marked by Arthur and Thomas, Maya and Miguel rather than numbers.

And I knew I should move. I knew I should engage. I should scoop up that little wonder of a child and take her out into the world.

One day, we did. We traipsed around the yard, trekked to the mailbox, tried to imagine the garden in full bloom. But the mailbox was empty and spring was still a ways off.

Yesterday, we shut off all electronic devices and ate lunch together. We sat side by side, but I buried my nose in some manner of printed matter.

Today, we compared notes on the types of yogurt we ate; she turning her nose up at my Greek with honey, me trying to convince her she ate blue banana. green guava. purple passion.

The silly word games I remember playing with my first baby when I was a first time mama.

Learning colors through the culinary.

Exploring math while masticating.

And for the first time in a long time, my sense memory elicited a positive response. Bubbles of laughter reminding me that I know how to do this. I know how to make it fun. I know how to enjoy it.

All it takes to make it enjoyable is a little more effort. An invitation to join me as I move about my day. A question here, a comment there. Inclusion. When all I’ve been is insular.

I’ve so needed space for me, I’ve been pulling back. But all I’ve done is created a vacuum, a void they notice and try all the more vehemently to cross. Perhaps if I reach across the void, giving them what they need, I will get what I want.

Joy and peace of mind.

Being able to lay my head on the pillow at night knowing I’ve done my best and not feeling guilty at the time I set aside for myself.

There’s no sense doing a job you hate. And there’s no reason to make mothering more onerous than it is. That wouldn’t just create a vacuum; that would suck.

Living, Poetry, Spirituality, Writing

Crystalline

The country road I drove down this morning looked magical.

A feathered path down its middle where the few cars had passed.

A vortex of flakes pulling me through the windshield.

Boulders, trees, leaves touched by a light dusting.

The magic messed with by industrial orange dump trucks spewing their salt,

but reemerging in a parking lot, of all places.

A perfectly formed star pulled from the sky and placed on the fleece forest of my glove.

Another and another.

In relief against the black rubber strip of my car,

the honey colored curls of my daughter,

the harsh, manipulative world we live in.

A tiny reminder of

the awesome, wondrously made world we sometimes forget we live in.

Chopping Potatoes

and other metaphors for motherhood

Tag Archives: Perspective