...a little bit of this, and a little bit of that...
...a journey through my ups and downs...
Finally! I was beginning to worry (only slightly) when all the other babies were giggling and gurgling and being charming and engaging at six weeks, and mine was only sleeping and flatulating (and screaming).
He smiles! And his eyes twinkle. And I’m smitten more and more. He glows in the dark, too.
Happy Halloween!
I used to think depression was a character flaw, and that one had merely to change one’s mind and just SNAP OUT OF IT, already. You know, just GET OVER IT. Decide to be happy. Let that glass be half full.
I’m not so sure any more.
Because it occurred to me last night that I’m depressed. Again. And it sneaked up on me.
I realized that I’ve been overeating for days, if not weeks. I noticed that although it was a glorious sunny day, the kind of crisp autumn day I love best, with a bright blue sky, fresh crisp air, and multitudes of changing colors in the leaves on the trees everywhere I look, I couldn’t find a smile. And I watched myself, as if it were an out of body experience, scolding my nearly four-year-old, and wondering who that woman was simultaneously shaking my head and saying that’s not the kind of person I want to be.
I found myself entertaining the thought of returning to Zoloft, because it took the edge off and gave me that buffer in which it wouldn’t occur to me to eat something unless I was actually hungry, and shielded me from immediately considering the things that Gadget says and does as assinine, and gave me that small wedge of time to process the goings on of my young child and handle him in a more kind and loving manner. I went so far as to consult Doctor Internet as to the long term effects, as in decades or a lifetime long term, of the drug, and as well, the effects while lactating. Long term, because I have to say I’m kidding myself if I think I’m going to go through any major changes in character, if the past thirty years are any indication.
Long term withdrawal side effects are frightening. I’ve read several accounts of zapping. Electrical zapping sensations in one’s brain. Not for me! And some of the drug does pass through to the milk, so I don’t want to be feeding this to my babe. And will the drug continue to work at a low dose for years on end? I don’t want to be gradually increasing and increasing and find myself on a slippery slope in an even more precarious position.
Depression defies reason, and reason is how I find comfort. Given an explanation, I can package something up neatly and put it away.
How I wish I understood depression! I’m coming to terms with accepting that it is a beast that’s bigger than just the act of changing my mind, but I don’t want to, because it makes a sort of sense that it be something that’s just messed up in my mind, and if only I would clean out those thoughts –voila, all would be well.
And yes, I can list several things to justify some melancholy:
I had a different attitude about depression back then. I thought more strongly that people can just decide to get over it, get over themselves, cut the drama king or drama queen scene. He was a diagnosed bipolar sufferer. And he was doing well. His life was turning around. There seemed to be light at the end of the tunnel. And then he blew his brains out.
It defies explanation. There are no answers. Nor will there ever be, other than that he is finally at peace, and wrestles no more with that which held him captive. People may be quick to judge, and say biting things like there is no forgiveness for taking one’s own life, especially when there are children, but dare I say these people might not have walked a mile, let alone a step, in the shoes of one under the grasp of depression. They can’t possibly understand. And who can? It’s beyond comprehension.
I don’t ever want to find myself anywhere near where he was, and I don’t think I have any inclinations toward bipolar disorder, but obviously I have depression of a kind, and I think it’s time that I acknowledge that it may not be a simple matter of self-discipline and snapping myself out of it.
Because I have countless more things to be exceedingly grateful and joyful for (my beautiful boys, my family, my home, my job, freedom, and so much more), than things which I have to bring me down, it makes almost no sense why the joys wouldn’t fill my world with sunshine and blast out the darkness of the downs. And yet they don’t.
So I need to do something about it. Because life is a gift, and it is fleeting. Every moment spent out of joy is a moment of something beautiful wasted.
The question is, what do I do?
(I’m already snuggling my delicious little boy, and yes, it helps, but no, not completely.)
(I feel like I should ‘slap myself up the side of my head’.)
I’ve had thoughts milling about that I was considering writing about, but at this point all I have is a quagmire and the best thing to do would be to get some rest, and let sleep bring on its healing restoration, and hopefully with the dawn I’ll have a better grasp.
I might not be feeling so irritated that it’s past midnight and BB is still awake. Irritated that he doesn’t obey when he’s asked to go to bed, irritated that if a bed time is to be enforced, it appears that it’s entirely up to me to make it happen. Irritated that I tried to go to bed over two hours ago, knowing full well I’d need to pump around midnight, and that in getting some rest ahead of time, I might have a chance at not feeling like a trainwreck in the morning when I need to be working. Irritated that all the time passed, and still he’s awake, and I can’t postpone it any longer and absolutely must pump NOW, but in so doing, will give him yet more cause to force himself to stay awake.
When the phone rings and you hear a familiar voice, the voice of someone you love, but not the one you usually speak with, you know…
You know that voice has something serious to say that you don’t want to hear, but he has to say it, and you have to hear it. You know. You don’t know what to say, and you don’t know what to do, so you say I love you and you say goodbye. And your heart feels a particular anguish for him, because you know he has more calls to make, and you know what that’s like. You’ve been in those shoes before.
And you wonder how it could possibly be, as you go about doing the things that you must do this day, as you do every other day; feeding the family, doing the dishes, washing the bedding for the fifth time this week, soothing the crying baby, expressing the milk.
And you cry a little, and try to explain to an almost four year old the concept of loss, when he’s seen far too much movie violence to understand what’s final and what is not.
And you wonder again how it could possibly be, when you’ve just seen her, and she was as she always is, smiling, gentle, kind, warm, and full of love. How could it possibly be? She was the first visitor when the baby was born. She held him in her arms. We hugged, we looked deeply into each others’ eyes and hearts, we said I love you.
And days later, only days, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and not two months later, she is gone. How can it possibly be?
Rest in peace, Sweet One, dear Humble Seeker. Rest in Peace.
After thinking a bit more about that last post, the words that come to mind are vulture and predator.
I think I will leave the foreclosures and defaults to some other opportunistic people. It’s not for me.
Those late night infomercials can be so captivating. You, yes you, could be rich, with NO MONEY DOWN! You, yes you, could buy a house like this for less than ten thousand dollars. You! People JUST LIKE YOU.
It all seems too good to be true, but they certainly do spark one’s imagination. Think of it, being able to buy a home for so little, and not being mortgaged to the gills from now until eternity. Such fodder for dreamland. If only.
If it’s so easy, why isn’t everyone doing it?
One can do some research and learn that the information being sold by these infomercial services is generally public information, and to be very wary of those behind the infomercials. That being said, I’ve been looking, the old-fashioned way, without subscribing to one of the fanciful web sites, and I’ve found a few properties that I’m interested in. These are properties in which the owners have failed to pay their real-estate taxes, and if the money isn’t coughed up by the prescribed date, the homes go to auction. The FAQs state that it is actually rare for a home to go to auction, and that the owners most often find a way to scrounge up the funds at the eleventh hour. There are also plenty of ‘buyer beware’ warnings, and all sales are final.
While part of me is giddy with the thought of the possibility of buying a house for as little as the back-taxes owed, another part of me is suspicious of the whole scenario. It just doesn’t seem right. Who would let a multi-hundred thousand dollar investment go for less than ten or twenty thousand dollars? There is an unpleasant smell to this mix. The hidden expense which is the cost of exploitation. Exploitation of imaginary sweet and elderly non-English speaking people.
I say this because I noticed that the owners of the properties I’m interested in have Asian names. This then begs the question as to whether they actually know they are in default. I picture sweet little elderly people who don’t read or speak English, not knowing how to tell the tax bill from all the other junk mail that arrives on a daily basis.
This isn’t to say that Asian people are not savvy. I myself am part Asian. A BADASS [squared, even].
A+B*A*D+(A*S*S)^2
And most of the Asian or Asian-descent people I know are sharp as tacks, to say the least. Even so, what is the story behind these tax negligencies?
It feels like maybe there’s bad juju in pursuing this avenue. Personal gain at another’s expense. Is that the bottom line? If so, I’m not comfortable with that. But then again, does that make me a fool, to throw away a perfectly good and incredible opportunity?
I don’t swim well with sharks. But I’d love to own a home, outright, in a better school district.
Torn. Do I waste any further time and energy on this possibility, or listen to the nagging suspicious voice in the back of my head and scrap it here and now.
There’s nothing like the smell of home baked bread. I’m a novice, and will hopefully eventually master a low carb loaf, but for now the diabetes has abated (generally it’s not something that abates, but the sugars have been in blissfully remarkable control after the placenta went its way, and now I can have a warm slice of delicious bread without wreaking havoc on the control systems) — deep breath, this is still one sentence — I thought I’d try a full-fledged high carb recipe.
While I was visiting Suse, I over-indulged in her delicious bread for the duration of my stay. She bakes a consistent loaf (sometimes several times a week), and whips it out with barely a blink of the eye, tossing the ingredients together from memory. It’s an impressive thing to behold.
She’s kindly taken the trouble to extract the recipe from the confines of her remarkable mind, and my first attempt turned out quite well. I am pleased. BB even liked it, and he’s become a finicky little boy. I used the crushed vitamin C tablet as an improver alternative, and I think I might use less salt next time.
Here is the recipe, used with implied/assumed permission:
a smidge under 400ml tap temperature water (390ml I think)
2 tablespoons oil (canola or something mild)
2 teaspoons salt
3 tablespoons sugar
2 cups white flour
2 cups wholemeal flour
throw in some seeds (poppy, sesame, sunflower, linseed etc)
2 1/2 tablespoons milk powder
1 teaspoon bread improver (optional – makes it rise better but be careful to get a natural one, many of them are chock full of numbers and chemicals. For an alternative crush up a vitamin C tablet)
2 teaspoons yeastbread machine: wholemeal setting, 1kg size loaf, takes about 3 1/2 hours to bake.
slather with butter and ENJOY
And just like that, maternity leave is over.
Look at you, Mister Eight Weeks Old Today!
Where did the time go? I don’t think I squeezed in enough snuggles and cuddles and smoochies and hugs. I think I spent too much time doing housework and not enough time sleeping. I could have done better. I could have (and should have) played more, instead of being wrapped up in the business of mothering — harping, snapping, reprimanding, disciplining, and completely losing my patience with BB, pumping, feeding, bathing, consoling. How do I remind myself, and actually get myself, to play more? How do I put the blinders on, to hide the myriad things that are calling to be done, and just concentrate on the moment that is a delicious little bundle of boyness?
And now it’s back to the frazzle dazzle working mom’s routine, so it’s all that much more important to magnify those moments of baby yumminess.
In retrospect, the first day back wasn’t so bad. I think we’re going to be okay. After a nap, that is.
(Hello again, Gorgeous Boy!)
Counting today, I have three week days of leave remaining, and I find myself teetering on the brink of anxiety. So there are things that I try to remind myself:
This helps me put things in perspective, when I begin to panic, wondering where the time has gone and find that my days are consumed with mostly mundane things, and that soon I will have to add to each day several hours of computer working time. It’s not that I won’t have time for all that I have now. I will just have to rearrange the manner in which I do things. I spend a good amount of time each day pumping, and concurrently on the computer. Soon I’ll be doing bona fide work during much of this time, so that should have little impact to the overall picture. I’ll just be adding a few more hours to this.
Rather than be anxious and wistful that my leave is coming to an end, I should stop and smell the roses. I should see the forest and the trees. I should savor the teeny tiny snuggly baby times, because they are fleeting.
That being said, I love the middle of the night feedings the best. My precious LB is mostly asleep and not fighting himself or me, and takes the bottle with little or no fuss. When I pick him up he draws his little legs up to his body like a froggie, and I snuggle him close and listen to his funny rythmic feeding sounds, which are somewhere between a very softly braying donkey and a very softly honking goose. I need to capture that sound! Rather than try to sleep through the night, I’ve decided to do a pumping session between 2 and 4 a.m., as I’ve learned that there tends to be more milk during this time. I feed him prior to pumping, so I’m awake enough to savor the time, aware of the smile on my face as I hear those funny sounds and feel the warmth of his tiny body snuggled close to mine. It’s a magical, fleeting time that I treasure to the utmost.
As for everything else, I must try not to panic. There is time for all of it. It’s just life being lived.
Look at you, seven weeks old, in your six month snuggly and your brother, 3-3/4 years old in his size 6 jeans. The two of you are giants. Giants, I say! I’m a bit sad having to put away your 3 month clothes already.
BB is much more excited by the appearance of the jungle, at this point. But you will surely like it soon. It has so many fun and interesting things to explore. It’s a gift from your auntie C and uncle D, and it sure is neat!
You remind me of Kramer, from Seinfeld, in this picture. Your hair cracks me up, and I mean that in the nicest way.
Have I told you lately that I think you’re gorgeous and I want to gobble you up? Oh? I did? Well, I’m going to cover those cheeks in kisses, then. Right NOW!!
p.s. I’m sorry I called you Mister Screams A Lot today when I didn’t hear the phone ring and missed an important message from my work by nearly three hours. I’m still going to gobble you up!
