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.

Five Forty Five.

On the bright side, I got in to the office at 7:00 a.m., and the CEO passed my office on his way to his, so total points.

Jennifer has the kids today while I vacation at the office. And she started off with a bang: a trip to the kolache restaurant in pajamas and masks. Go Matou!

I took on the role as unofficial team cheerleader which is to say that I went along the route and took pictures and said "y'all are doing great!", and then met up with the team for drinks and dinner.

There were some beautiful vistas along the way.

But the most beautiful sight was the thousands of people who donned unattractive shorts and rode miles and miles (and miles and miles) in order to raise funds to eradicate Multiple Sclerosis, a cruel and chronic, often disabling disease that attacks the central nervous system (which is made up of the brain, spinal cord, and optic nerves).

That silhouetted photo was of a woman as her husband passed by, her daughter in her arms waving. He was representing the United States armed forces.

The same team finished up, most of the team made up of disabled veterans. Who rode one hundred fifty miles. There was not a single person sitting as they crossed the finish line.

The kids had been with my mother in San Antonio, but I picked them up, just before nap time, so help me God, so we could be at the finish line together as their Matou crossed. I'm so glad we did.

It was fun being a tourist in my own hometown. Maybe next year, I'll actually ride.

One of my favorite bloggers is Sweet Juniper. I love him because he's totally the kind of guy I would have wanted to marry, you know, had I turned out straight. He's witty, artistic, smart (both because he was once a lawyer, and because he later had the smarts to leave the profession to be a stay at home dad), and he (and his wife) make cool stuff, like the dog wagon, and this pegasus costume.

So one day mid-summer, when I asked Mateo what he wanted to be for Halloween, and he answered "STARGAZER!", the name of the UNICORN he loves so much, the unicorn we had purchased for Harper as just compensation for Mateo getting some new train track pieces, and I said "You want to be a unicorn?" and he answered, "No, a pegasus!" which was what Harper now had, a hand-me-down from a coworker, I said OK! You'll Be A Stargazer Pegasus!"

Which meant that Ms. Everything Is A Competition also wanted to be a pegasus.

I mean, sure, Sweet Juniper didn't exactly have a tutorial, and sure, we were in the middle of showing and selling our home, but he had said that it only took a couple hours for a couple of nights and that the whole thing was less than $20.00. Dot. Dot. Dot.

The wings were made by hand-drawing a wing over nine (NINE!) sheets of 8.5" x 11" paper, then scaling (slightly) by measuring the kids' arm length so I would know where to place the handle for the flappable wings. SIDEBAR: A co-worker and I were talking a bit ago about how when we have super-mom moments, it's usually because we used a work hour (granted, our lunch hour) to do mom things and I said I'm actually using my lunch to blog about the pegasus costumes! And she's all, well don't forget to mention that you outsourced the cutting of your wings to me and it was 74 pieces of paper. So there it is. Except that it wasn't. As you can see in the photo. It was just nine. Using the drawing, I formed the wings with 16 gauge electric wire and then reinforced with 1/4 inch dowels and a shitload of electrical tape. I then attached the wings to a cardboard frame with tie-wraps.

On the other side, I created a 'backpack' formed of PVC pipe to hold the LED light battery boxes. Too much?

After that, I softened the wings by putting quilt batting throughout the wing skeletons,and wrapping them with cheesecloth. I re-measured the wings, and cut out 8 pieces of fabric in the shape of the wings, turning them inside out to attach loops (for the light string), and then slipped the "sock" over each wing. The fabric edges were adhered to the cardboard and PVC backpack with fabric glue before threading the lights through the loops and dropping the battery boxes into their pvc pocket. In order to keep the boxes from falling out, I fashioned an encasement out of the same fabric and put some velcro so the frame could be kept closed. I ran backpack straps of elastic through the top and bottom frames of the PVC. After that, it was a few long nights of fabric glueing, I don't know, something like twelve boas to each wing.

The pants I made from white fleece and I put elastic at the leg bottoms so that we could pull them up as shorts if Halloween ended up warm. For the tail, I bought two $0.19 lei's from a party goods store and attached them to the pants with a safety pin.

I knew neither of the kids would warm up to a hooded head, so I decided to measure their heads and make pegasus head hats out of cardboard and packing tape since we had plenty of that around. I didn't like the way the prototype turned out.

So I made some adjustments. Like three-dimensional ears. I then sewed two pieces of white felt together and glued the ends inside the cardboard hat. All the head details were made using felt and fabric glue.

One thing I found was that after the eyes and ears were on, it kinda just looked like a dog head. So I went out and bought some black felt to create a 'shadow' of the shape of a horse's jaw line, as well as the nose lines.

I also used black felt make hooves by placing the felt over a shoe, attaching with velcro at the back, and then cutting around the shoe to make a shoe cover hoof.

There are a million places in the process where I should have stopped. Like when the boas alone were more than Sweet Juniper's entire costume. Or when the time I had spent on the project exceeded "a couple of hours over a couple of nights" by a multiple of A LOT. Or, ok, yes, the battery operated LED lights. But whatever.I didn't do a tunic top or any front hooves, opting for white already-owned tees instead. These pegasus' would be bipeds.

Jennifer asked me at one point "What if they decide at the last minute they don't want to be a pegasus? Will it hurt your feelings?" And it was that moment that I admitted, out loud, that this was not about the kids anymore. Ooops!

It was fun night. We began our trick-our-treating with our annual tradition of stopping off at Pastor Marilyn's house. We went on to a do a street's worth of trick-or-treating before coming to our resting place at a friends home where the kids helped pass out candy to the kids, and the adults passed out wine to their parents. Hellooooo, Halloween!

By far, Halloween at Three has been the best one ever!

I was already slipping, even before the wall came down, and the dust flew up. And then two fairly significant illnesess among extended family members. Mix in some depression. No working kitchen for a month. There have been flashes of fabulous, but whooo boy! More to come soon. Like spending way too much time on the kids' halloween costumes and blaming another blogger for it.