Tag Archives: Survival

anxiety, Living, motherhood, parenting

Same $*@#, Different Day

There are times when I wake up in the morning and don’t know what day it is.  It takes my mind a minute to focus and remember.  I can blame a lot of this on lack of sleep.  My body feeling like its packed inside a bag of cotton balls, it’s no wonder my head is foggy.  But I think most of it has to do with the repetitive nature of my days.

Don’t get me wrong – I love routines.  I actually get a bit batty without them.  Anxious people like me do not like the unexpected (except surprise gifts on Mother’s Day – much to my husband’s chagrin).  I’m much better at fitting everything in if I have a set list of objectives and time frames within which to do them.

I’m thinking you can wear routines out though.  Without variety, you ain’t got no spice, right?  And life right now is looking pretty bland.  It’s the first week off winter vacation.  The weather’s cold, actually wet and snowy for once this year, the kids (and I) struggling to get back into the groove of wake-ups, waffle-making, lunch-packing, teeth-brushing, coat-wrestling, out-the-door running.

This morning, Thursday, I woke up saying, Thank God I don’t have to go anywhere besides drop-off and pick-up.  Four days into the week, I’m already so beat-down, I could barely crawl into my sweats.

I suppose I could approach this the way Bill Murray did in Groundhog Day, righting all the wrongs the second, third, fourth time around.  I could go to bed earlier tonight so I wake up somewhat refreshed.  I could make Bella’s lunch after dinner so I don’t have to scramble in the morning.  I could plan something new and different for tomorrow to break the monotony.  But in real life, unlike the movies, we don’t always get the moral of the story.

Sometimes we get so worn down in our ruts that we can’t see up over the rim.  And we wake up in the morning to the same day, essentially, because we’re dealing with the same shit.

But I’m thinking maybe this is nature’s way of getting us to embrace change.  We get so sick of ourselves and the monotony that we’re thrown off the track and forced to forge a new one.

It’s times like this that I find the pages in my cookbooks that aren’t yet dog-eared.  I purge all that clothing I’ve been meaning to give to good will.  I seek out friends that I’ve been meaning to make plans with.  I try some long-forgotten yoga pose.  I stretch muscles I’d forgotten I had.

All of life is cyclical.  Like the tides and the lunar cycle, today and its attendant shit are bound to come around again.  But in between, there will be moments of shock and awe and the sublime.  I’ll just have to remember not to get caught out too far when the tide comes back in.

So I’m sure I’ll find something exciting to get me through this low point.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll wake up and remember what day it is.  Until then, you’ll have to excuse me, I have another load of laundry to do.

Standard
postpartum depression, Recovery

No Salt in this Wound

There really is no point to a saltine – except for the salt, of course.

For some reason, as many other kids, I loved them when I was little.  I think it had more to do with trying to stand it upright in between my top and bottom teeth or shoving it in my mouth in one bite rather than any great gastronomic pleasure.  I didn’t return to them until I carried whole sleeves of them around with me during my bouts of morning sickness three times over.  That’s the telltale sign of a pregnancy, isn’t it?  The white, crinkly cellophane pulled open at the seam, the stack of perfectly pointed squares cascading out into the open, and hopefully, into your belly to quell the ravaging beast that threatens to ruin every waking moment – not just those in the morning.  A friend’s mother says that she hasn’t touched a saltine since her pregnancy over thirty years ago.  I can’t say I blame her.  It is not a pleasant connotation when that’s your last memory.

So, imagine my surprise, when I found myself chowing down on them as I rushed to an appointment in the car.  So light and insubstantial, I was flying through the sleeve with reckless abandon – actually just savoring the salt and waiting for some sort of gratification from the mush that the enriched flour had turned to in my mouth.  I had bought them for the kids, but running late and low on fuel, I needed a quick and easy – if not satisfying – snack.

After I’d downed a quarter of the sleeve, the sharp bite of the salt searing into my tongue, I realized what I was doing.  I was eating saltines!  After a miserable last pregnancy, I avoided at any costs anything that reminded me of those memories that made me shudder.  I gave away all my maternity clothes with great aplomb.  I threw out the sitz baths and lanolin left in the house.  A wicked pack rat, I even sorted through and shredded all paperwork from the hospital.  Saltines fell into this category.  I didn’t fling them out my window, a crazed cracker hail sending birds flying, I just didn’t even think of pulling a box off the grocery store shelf.

In one conversation with my therapist in that first year of recovery, I explained how I felt as if I were grieving a death.  I marked each familiar date, each holiday, each anniversary of some hard memory – noting it, like the rung of a ladder I had to climb to get up and out of this hole.  ‘Okay, I’ve made it past that one,’ I’d say.  I’d survive one set of negative memories at a time and start to wipe them away with new ones.

It wasn’t easy and I knew I wasn’t suffering the same grief as someone who had actually lost a loved one, but, as my therapist so astutely pointed out, I was suffering a loss – the death of my life as I had known it.  Things were totally – in some ways, irrevocably – different.  It was time to move forward with the positive and with this new knowledge and see what would happen.  Life certainly wasn’t over – it was just different.

As was the action of eating a saltine.  I wasn’t a kid crushing one into my mouth as I cavorted on the beach with my parents.  I wasn’t a desperately nauseous woman at the mercy of her upset stomach (and those damn hormones).  I was an adaptable survivor who could do simple tasks again without the crippling connotations once associated with them.

Saltines have never tasted so good.

Standard