R posted this on his own blog a few weeks ago, and I figured I’d link to it here.  It’s about what happens when our kids notice that we’re not all the same.  Enjoy!

Was it because it’s a Monday?  Or because it’s mid-August and everyone is ready for the heat to subside?  I don’t know why, but as they say tritely, “It was one of those days.”

This folks, is a picture of Holden enjoying a vanilla milkshake, mere seconds before throwing up all over himself, the table, the chair, me, the stroller, and the patio at our local florist/ice cream parlor (yes, all of your floral needs can be met while licking a peanut butter cup ice cream cone):

It came out of nowhere.  H had been fine all morning.  Before lunch, I took both kids with me to the chiropractor so I could get my hips adjusted.  I’ve been having a lot of hip pain lately, partly from having loose joints and ligaments post-pregnancy, and partly from sleeping on a very old mattress that needs replacing.  (yes, my dreams of running a 10K in September have been dashed by my chiropractor, who says I need to scale back on my running).  Ok, not great news especially because the little bit of exercise I am getting is what is keeping me going….but I’ll manage, right?  So I continue with my day.  I take the boys to the library, then go home and fix them lunch.  I make Holden pasta, and he eats TWO bowls.  While this is happening, (and I am not paying any attention to how much H is eating), E basically screams for an hour because his gums are giving him pain.  I finally get him calmed down enough to sleep for 30 minutes, and when he wakes up, H is ready to try the new ice cream parlor he’s been dying to go to all summer.  We go….and H takes two tiny sips of milkshake.  And then vomit happens.  I ended up tossing both of our shakes in the trash, because with such a mess on my hands, I couldn’t manage to pack up our treats to eat later.  I cleaned up the table and chair with E’s burp cloth, packed my screaming baby and my vomit-covered preschooler into the hot car, and then ran inside to the florist to explain that my son had vomited everywhere, that I had tried to clean it up myself, that I was sorry, and that they should probably break out the garden hose to finish the job.

Yuck.

So now feeling thoroughly embarrassed (and smelling a little sour), I drive my unhappy children back to the house, where I bathed and nursed them, and feel thankful that at least Holden’s pricey new summer shoes are machine-washable.

If my last post left you feeling confused and bewildered, let me explain.  I’ve not been in the best place, but I’m working hard to get past it all.  Some of you know, and some of you don’t know, that my mother has been very sick for several years.  She has had puzzling neurological problems that have been progressive and thoroughly debilitating.  And it became obvious to me when she stayed with us after Emery’s birth, just how profound and extensive her disabilities now are.  She has begun the process of meeting with specialists at Johns Hopkins to nail down a diagnosis.  She won’t know for sure what she is dealing with until November.  But the diagnosis that they are leaning towards is a chronic, progressive neurodegenerative condition for which there is no cure.  And it is hereditary.  Her sister has been wheelchair-bound for decades, and now my mom is on that same path.  I am terrified of eventually having the same problems, and I’m heartbroken at the possibility that my children might have to deal with this as well.  My mom lives in WV, with my dad, and relies on him exclusively for her care, as she doesn’t drive anymore and has a difficult time getting around.  But now my dad might be sick with a different chronic, progressive neurodegenerative disease.  I don’t know the particulars about my dad’s situation yet, but I plan on learning more at the end of the month when I drive to WV with my two boys.  It’s a 13-hour drive without stops.  With breaks for nursing, potty, stretching the legs, etc., I’m sure it  will be a very long journey indeed.  But I’m fairly certain this is a journey I must make, to check on my dad for myself.  I need to have some frank, difficult conversations with him.  And I need my parents to get their legal affairs in order so that I know what their wishes are when it comes down to it.

Most of this mess exploded in the weeks following Emery’s birth.  Those were hard weeks for me.  Seeing my mom struggle to get around our house.  Seeing Holden outright reject my mom’s offers to read him stories because he doesn’t want to hear her voice (her speech is affected by her condition).  It was painful to be a part of this.  Also during this time, (when Emery was 3 weeks old), R had a brief stint in the local emergency room for extreme abdominal pain.  He was there for a full day, and as it turns out, he was so stressed that he was in physical pain.  So over the next few days, I was running errands to the pharmacy, going to the grocery store, taking my broken car to the mechanic, hoping that my newborn was fine in my absence.  My mom couldn’t help with the errands since she doesn’t drive, so I ended up doing everything on my own.  I ran myself ragged, and by the time I stopped to catch my breath, I looked down, and Emery was no longer a newborn.  I somehow missed that entire time.  I felt like a wet nurse, not a mother.  I felt like everyone needed me and I didn’t have enough of myself to go around.

It’s occurred to me since then that I don’t know how to ask for help when I need it.  I remember my midwife called me during this time to check in, and I was really good at convincing her (and myself) that I was fine and I could handle everything.  She told me to call on others to help.  But I don’t know how to do that.  I don’t even know what I would ask other people to do.  So I just did everything myself.

I’ve not been myself since Emery was born.  Bonding with him has been slow, but it’s coming along.  I feel anger (not at my kids) but at myself and others in my family.  I have anxiety and constant intrusive thoughts that I am going to accidentally leave Emery somewhere.  Whenever I am driving somewhere in the car, I look over my shoulder at least 5 times to reassure myself that he’s safely buckled into his seat.  I can’t shake the feeling that I’m leaving him behind.  Whenever I hear a noise, I startle, assuming one of my kids has fallen or hurt themselves badly.  I keep thinking that something awful is going to happen.

But something awful has happened already.  Despite my best efforts and all of my training, I know that this is postpartum depression.  As a psychologist, I know that depression isn’t just about the person who stays inside all day, crying.  That’s not the situation I am dealing with here—I still get out of the house, I still put on a smile, I do the chores, and shower daily.  I exercise.  I do these things because I don’t want it to get to the point where I am immobilized by this.  I refuse to let this control my life.  Even though I am completely overwhelmed with the challenges facing my parents and the sorts of news that I’ll have to encounter in the coming months and years, I am still picking myself up every day and trying to do what’s right for myself and my boys.  The anxiety and intrusive thoughts have been telltale signs.  Having my parents and my children at the pinnacle of their need for me AT THE SAME TIME is an absolute fucking nightmare.  Who do I help first?  Who doesn’t get help?  Is this my life telling me AGAIN that I will never have room for my career to flourish?  These questions are consuming, and they are constant.

So, if you aren’t hearing from me, or if I’m acting weird, if I’m drinking too much, exercising too much, and laughing too little, don’t take offense.  Know that depression is about grief, and grief has its own half-life.  I will be OK again, one day.

We have a massive wood pile in our backyard that was not-so-generously left to us by the previous owners of our house.  Or I should say, we *had* a massive wood pile.  Over the past several months, I’ve managed to clear every last piece of wood from our property.  The wood was rotten, even 3 years ago when we first moved in, and as it turned out, was of no use to us in our woodburning fireplace.  Some days I would wait for some sunshine and for Emery to settle into a nap, I’d don heavy work gloves, and start loading the logs (and stumps) onto a tarp, drag the tarp to my car, load my trunk with rotten wood, and haul it to the town’s compost heap.  I did this once each week, almost every week.  This past week, my neighbor saw me struggling with this task and loaned me his wheelbarrow, and allowed me to take the last of the wood into the overgrown area at the back of his property.  “It helps to have the right tools,” he said.  The logs were crumbling into bits and pieces of wet, soft, organic matter, which peppered the area around the wood pile.  Some of the logs were flecked with chartreuse fungi, and all of them were pitted with the holes and burrows of countless arthropod and annelid.  When I would throw the logs into the wheelbarrow, they’d almost always split in half on impact, their rotten innards spilling like deciduous carrion.  The insides were practically hollow, with even less integrity than their pock-marked exteriors.  Load after load of rotten logs, I’d dump into the woods behind our neighbor’s house.  The logs, which likely once came from the same tree, were now splitting into shards of rot as the weight of one log propelled the substance of its neighbor into the atmosphere as dust, a particulate revulsion.  There was rot everywhere around me, and when I returned to the site where our wood pile once stood, there was a pile of rodent droppings at least an inch thick, inhabited by these grotesque, circular, almost translucent maggots that were half the size of my fist.  I was so repulsed by all of this.  That I had to carry this rot, this decay, behind our home, hide it in the woods and pretend like it didn’t exist.  The shedding of time into dank, moldy debris that cannot be resurrected by dendrochronology; you lose your skin and you are exposed, and pretty soon, you are broken down by everything around you.  What is left of us as we are stripped away?  What is revealed of us, as things are shed (or lost)?  Are we rotten and hollow, soft and yielding on the inside?  When we lose something of ourselves are we merely unmasking the rotten core that has always been inside, or are we changed somehow, into something else entirely?

Emery had his 2-month check-up today.  He is now in the 99th percentile for height at 25.5 inches, and the 87th percentile for weight at just over 15 lbs.  He’s growing well, is happy, and is doing all of the exciting things that young babies do—like coo, kick, flail his arms, smile, show curiosity, and follow people with his gaze.  He also had his first round of vaccinations today.  As he was reclining on the table about to get his shots, he was smiling at me and the nurse, to which the nurse exclaimed, “Oh, I wish he was a little more serious right now, because I’m going to feel really bad when I wipe that smile off his face with these shots!”  Of course he cried after his shots, but he settled down pretty quickly, and all in all, he’s handled the whole ordeal pretty well.  He went to sleep very peacefully tonight, and doesn’t appear to have developed a fever in response to the vaccines.  It’s crazy to think that he won’t be a baby by this time next year—that he will be a walking, talking, little boy.  The idea of it is exciting—to know that he will grow up into a neat little person before our very eyes.  But I’d be lying if I also didn’t admit that the idea of it stings a little—that our baby won’t be a baby forever, that his babyhood seems to be slipping through my fingers.  How do we savor these moments?  And how do we capture them so we can return to them whenever we need reminders of how precious and beautiful our lives are?

I am trying to learn how.