Wednesday
Feb012012
Monday
Jan302012
Just because I'm smiling doesn't mean I'm happy.
01.30.2012
There was a particular day in October, a Sunday it had to have been, because only on Sunday’s is Jennifer also home when the kids go down for a nap. My daughter could not be soothed. She was so very tired. But instead of falling off to sleep at nap time, she was crying uncontrollably because of…well…everything. Everything like her pajamas weren’t just so and she couldn’t find her certain bunny, and the air molecules were moving in the wrong direction. To a three year old, these things are her world, even if only to shake her fist at that world to say that she is the ruler of it.
She wanted me to lay by her but wanted me out of her room. When I got up to leave, she cried and kicked louder as I reached for the door. So I returned to her bedside as she asked and then she said go away. I offered a compromise: I will lie down on the floor until you fall asleep. Okay, she said through sobs and stuttered breaths. But hold my hand, she said. And she looked over the edge of the bed to make sure I was there, as if my touch wasn’t sufficient, make sure I was there in the right place, her right place, she had to see that my body was there. And that’s how she fell asleep. I burrowed my head into the carpet, my arm stretched upward to the edge of her bed, holding my daughter’s hand, and began crying. Crying because it had taken twenty minutes of inconsolable for her to fall asleep and then only because she cried herself there and not because I had given her comfort. Crying because all that feeling she felt filled the room and I breathed it in and I felt as helpless as she did.
When I knew she was asleep, I made my way downstairs. Most Sundays, we nap while the kids are napping. Except this time, when I put my head to the pillow, I just kept crying. And I didn’t stop for hours. I was overwhelmed not by Harper, but by the weight of my world going dark.
******
I felt myself slipping in the summer. We were in the throws of selling our home, preparing to buy another, wrought with the tension of a relationship pulled in different directions with little opportunity to reconnect. There were days that I couldn't bring myself to get in the car to pick up the kids after school. I wasn’t sleeping well and couldn’t turn off the To Do list in my head. I pressed forward. I can just-take-a-deep-breathe my way and rationalize my way out of just about anything, but in mid-August, an upper respiratory infection knocked the wind out of me, and then I ignored it, and then I ended up with pneumonia, and then a month later I was diagnosed with severe asthma.
It’s hard to ignore yourself when you can’t breathe.
*******
There are angels among us.
There is the friend who graciously agreed to make meals for our children in the first week of our renovation. And then for another two weeks when we still had no kitchen and I was in the depths of depression. And then another week when a family member took ill and it turned our lives upside down. Again. A month she made our kids’ lunches and delivered them to the classroom and took their lunch kits home each day so that I could put my energies into surviving.
There was the family that brought us three days of food the Monday after thanksgiving. I don’t know the family. I just know that they’re in my mother’s of multiples group and they drove nearly thirty miles to get to our house from theirs.
There has been our contractor, who one day I walked into the house, the day I requested two weeks off from work to get things straightened out, was on the floor in the laundry room rewiring vents and outlets so that the washer and dryer would be the way I wanted them to. Though he knew nothing of my personal struggles, my eyes welled up with tears and I thanked him for taking care of me, of us.
There has been our friend and interior design consultant who showed up when I needed her most, handled the movers, brought bedding to the house for us to choose from, sent me photos of lighting and other accessories, and generally did the shopping for us when decisions were made.
There have been two good friends who have served us unconditionally, spontaneously, meticulously, with all their hearts, with their time that could have been spent elsewhere. And they have loved on our children as their own, even at times having them for a sleepover, or joining us for family dinner on a Tuesday night.
And there has been Jennifer, who has been a rock when I have been water rushing over, who has been my strength, the strength of our family, picking up my pieces, even as she has been blindsided by cancer on her side of the family.
There have been weeks when I wasn’t sure I would make it, and the only reason I did was because there were people who carried my burdens so that I would have the strength to get through the day.
Kindness can be so overwhelming in the best kind of way.
*******
How does it feel, my therapist asked, the darkness. Sometimes it feels heavy and cold and windy like a coastal fog on an early winter day, the kind that gets in your bones and stays for hours. Sometimes it feels like electricity, pulsing beneath my skin moving about my body in an unpredictable way. Sometimes it feels like a tornado whose funnel begins in my chest and crashes through my insides destroying everything in its path while on the outside I am a calm and sunny day. Sometimes it feels like I am in an ocean, treading water with a soaking wet blanket over me, no shore in sight. Sometimes it just feels so sad and overwhelming and I get anxious because I don't like to feel sad or overhwhelmed and it all takes my breath away because there's nothing I can pinpoint. Sometimes it feels like I am a kite, wanting so much for the line to be cut so that I can be carried away by the wind, but I know that that string is my tether to this world, string made of my children and my spouse, and my family, and if it is cut, then they fall. The kite would fall too, I know that.
*******
So here we are, six months since free fall, and I’ve got an amazing handful of friends who have been through the thinnest of times, two amazing kids, and my rock, Jennifer. Oh, and an amazing therapist, a patient psychiatrist, and some meds. Between allergies, asthma, and depression, I’m a walking pharmacy.
I’ve vacillated between disclosing my struggles and not saying anything at all, but I figure what the hell. I very well could not be alive had I tried to go it alone, had I not opened up to others, had I not accepted help and love and prayers. I write this as a reminder that I am not alone.
You are not alone.
We are not alone.
Sunday
Jan292012
Friday
Jan202012
