You're depressed, he said.
– You think?
What I do know is that any form of passion for life seems to have flown right out the window. In the back of my head I'm writing posts filled with frustration and rage. Over those posts a layer of guilt is pasted. Guilt for feeling the way I do. For wanting to take escape.
I'm not tired of life perse, I'm tired of THIS life. I have visions of freedom, of doing my own thing, of not being worn down by the continual presence of spoken and unspoken demands. Demands on my time, my attention, my capabilities. They eat at me, leaving behind an empty shell with nothing left to give.
I don't like this me. Don't like feeling this way. Frantically I try to place my life in perspective. I have a home, a husband who loves me, kids who love me, friends and family who care.
But it doesn't help. So then my old friend guilt returns to me and tells me I'm ungrateful and should be ashamed.
When we moved, I hoped we had entered a new phase of our lives. A phase in which love would reign in our family, new beginnings could be made and a new life could be started. Instead I find myself weighted down by unmet expectations. By hopes that have been trodden on, dreams that have not come true. We are who we are, and we packed ourselves as well as our household when we came here. Dysfunction didn't get put out with the trash, it travelled right with us, and it's weaving its insidious way into our family as I write.
And I am incapable of stopping it.
There are always two ways of looking at things. Is your cup half empty or half full? What words do you chose when you tell somebody how you're doing? What words do you chose when you write? It's all in the presentation. You decide what to bring to the foreground, and what to leave unmentioned.
I want to mention the unmentionable. I want to uncover my dark side, get the demons out of my closet, from underneath my bed, put into words the depth of desperation that sometimes clutches at my soul.
I don't need platitudes. I don't need to hear it's the weather.
What I do need to hear is that this is ok. That I'm not a bad mother or a bad wife for feeling the way I do. I need to know that I am loved, even when I tell you about the nasty part of me. And I need to be given room. Room to be me, not someone elses idea of me.
Maybe then I'll be able to see what I have, instead of what I don't.
The last three weeks have been spent looking for peppermint candy canes. A couple of years ago I discovered them in a candy store and started the tradition of hanging them in our Christmas tree. A very undutch thing to do, let me tell you! Since then candy canes have taken over the stores, but nowhere are they peppermint! It's all strawberry and rainbow and bubblegum and what have you.
