Goodbye Christmas

Usually I can't wait to clear my house of all things Christmas. I mean, after a while, it gets in the way and turns into clutter instead of spots of Christmas cheer. But this year, not so much. I guess it has a lot to do with my state of mind. So it is with mixed feelings that I'm cleaning out the house. I'm not quite ready for Christmas to be over! Christmas music has not yet driven me insane, and I could eat another Christmas dinner :-).

Meanwhile though, duty is calling, and I have managed to get a bit of a handle on the new year. That includes buying a fresh new agenda and making some fun dates. Like going to the sauna with a good friend (and scoring some amazing coupons for it!). Or taking Renzo up on his offer of peace, quiet and curry. And being thankful for the positive feedback I received on my depressed state of mind.

Renzo gave me a book called The Road Less Travelled. The first sentence of the book is "Life is difficult". Somehow it seems like that one sentence was enough to galvanize me into some form of action. Because yes, life IS difficult in many ways. And guess what... I'm the only one who can do something about that.

My father took the effort to write a very encouraging personal e-mail in reply to my post. In it he mentioned the following quote.

Everyone of us faces the challenges of discovering the unusual, potentially limiting conditions of our lives, and then learning how to stop those conditions from disabling our spirits

Amen.

Depression

I heaved a sigh last night, when I was in the bathroom getting ready for bed. My husband asked me what was wrong. I answered and told him I had nothing to look forward to today. Nothing except cleaning the house and minding kids.

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.

Hopeful

I think I just might be clambering out of the depressive stage I have been in for a while. The last two weeks have been a lot better than the weeks before. I don't wake up with a knot in my stomach and dreading the day. I just wish I knew what it was that has made this change occur! It could be the B vitamines, the Ginseng, or the sunshine. All three of these started around the same time, so who knows?? If the sun stops shining and I feel bad again, then I guess my options will be reduced to two. But I'm not willing to stop taking the vitamins or Ginseng for fear of recurring negative feelings :-)
Depression sucks, let me tell you. It's pretty aweful waking up feeling so low and with so little energy. It's also a nasty thing to have as far as relationships go. Depressed people tend to suck the energy right out of others, leaving them feeling almost as bad! Not a good incentive for friendships or meaningful relationships. Luckily my husband has hung in there with me through my different fases and I do have friends who are sympathetic. And mostly my coping mechanism is to become kind of withdrawn and hide behind a book so I'm not even sure how many people notice that I'm out of sorts.
Anyway, hopefully I have reached the end of this depressed fase and I can now move on to a more optimistic world view. I have noticed that I'm looking forward to things and feeling hopeful again. Makes for a so much nicer life!!
Now I'm going to get myself up and at em as far as housework is concerned. We have company tonight, that's always a good motivator! The sun is shining, I'm dressed in a t-shirt with a kikoi wrapped around my waist, slippers on my feet, hair in a ponytail, 80's music is on, the kids are both gone so I can dust and clean and vacuum to my hearts content. And I feel happy enough to do some creative cooking and enjoy the process.
So help me hope that my optimism will keep growing!

Discouraged

Feeling just a tad discouraged today. Tristan possibly has another bleed in his thumb and really sore feet from playing soccer. It's a recurring problem, so I think I'll have to go get some medical advice. Not something I really feel up to as it will mean more medical appointments. Marinda called from Italy with a bad headache, poor girl. I'm feeling bad I can't be there to feed her aspirin and cuddle up to her until she falls asleep. And I had a "grit my teeth and hang on by my fingernails" kind of day despite the fact that the sun actually shone!
So I'll keep this short and hope tomorrow will be better.

Too tired to function

Does anybody else ever get that way? When just the simplest things are overwhelming? I have a lot of that lately. Right now it's the dishes. They're lying there washed and drained and I cannot find the energy to put them away. They are haunting me! And are keeping me from getting anything else done. Or maybe I shouldn't blame the poor dishes but take a good look at little old me who is going through a tough patch when anything at all seems to take too much effort.
Not a very uplifting post, this. And I have been hesitant about posting about this looming feeling of depression because I don't want all kinds of well-meant advice or a pity party. Send me a joke instead!

Monday Monday

Marinda is off to school. She's got exams this week, so she's really been doing her best to get some good grades. If she does well she'll probably be able to pass this school year. So I hope it works for her!
Tristan is another story. It's driving me to desperation. He's never been sick, aside from his hemofilia. But the last couple of weeks have been terribly with him feeling sickly a lot of the time with vague complaints of headaches, stomaches, lack of sleep and so forth and so on. And I can't figure out if there's really something physically wrong, or if he's not doing well at school, or if the move is affecting him or ..... I have to push and shove to get him out of bed a lot of mornings and if there's one way to get the day of to a brilliant terrific positive start, then that certainly is the way.... I'm not a morning person.
So here I am, on monday morning. Part of me is happy that I havn't started working on mondays yet so Tristan can stay at home and get some more sleep. Most of me is not knowing how to cope with this situation.

Cleaning House

I rediscovered today how much I hate housework. New rule in my life, limit myself to two hours of housework at most during a day!! Really, there's nothing quite as frustrating as endlessly vacuuming with a vacuum cleaner which is falling apart, dusting a house which will only get dusty again with an hour or two, washing dishes which pile up again behind your back, or cleaning up a room which will only get messed up again within a discouragingly short period of time.
Two hours I can handle, anything more and I start getting seriously grouchy, whiny (whiney, winey??... the mood, not the drink!!) and full of selfpity.
In my worst periods, during my depression, I couldn't do dishes for more than about two minutes. Doing dishes just automatically turned my mind to the miseries of life and I would end up feeling even more depressed than I already was. Or, out of pure frustration, I would break the dishes instead of washing them :-(
Thank goodness things aren't as bad anymore. But a limit to household chores sounds like a good idea to me. A way to remain sane and in a good mood. Why put myself into misery over some dust or a dirty toilet?

Reading

I love reading with a passion. If I'm honest, it's practically an obsession. During my depression I read books as if my life depended on it. In some aspects it may have. When I read I could escape from the life I was in and I felt ok for a while. As soon as I put my book down the world came crashing in with a vengeance. I read everywhere, anytime. And I mean everywhere! I've been known to read while riding a bike (the path was straight though, why should that be so weird??), and while baking pancakes (in the time it takes a pancake to turn brown, you can read about half a page ;-) So books are a form of escapism that I turn to when I feel a bit down, but they are also a form of reward because reading a good book is an immense pleasure. And that to me is an understatement!
In september I finally started keeping a list of books I've read. It turns out I read 23 books that month, including re-reading the whole Anne of Green Gables series (how I love those!). My husband claims I read diagonally instead of horizontally. It is a great blessing to be able to read fast, that's for sure.
I'm kind of bummed about my taste in books though. I would love to claim that I've read Jane Austen, and Dostojevsky and Shakespeare, or that I've read the Bible from cover to cover 20 times. But even though my taste in books is as varied as my taste in music, I usually go for a kind of quick fix. Nothing to hard or difficult for me unless I need to study it or really impress someone (and why should I bother with that?).
More about books another time, for now I need to run downstairs and get myself to work and my sonny boy to school.

(on vacation on a rainy day. Tristan with his PSP, Marinda watching TV, father in law with the newspaper, and me with a book)

Weight

Despite the fact that I wrote I have lost 15 kilos in the last year, weight still remains a HUGE issue in my life. It started during Marinda's pregnancy. I ate a lot then, partly because I was "eating for two" and naively thought I could get away with it, and partly to cover up a multitude of feelings that I was having.
After I gave birth to Marinda I was quite severely depressed for two years. I gained a lot of weight in that time and it became a really big deal. A big part of the years since then have been spent eating away a lot of issues instead of dealing with them.
That still happens to me regularly. I eat when I feel happy, eat when I feel sad, angry or dissappointed. Eating is very easy! One of the reasons that I finally managed to lose weight this time was because I got to the root of a certain issue and that finally helped me to get to grips with my weight as well.
I so wish that that would be end of my weight problem! Unfortunately it isn't. I still have to deal with myself, with who I am, and how I deal with things, and that means that sometimes I grab the candy, cookies, or whatever eatables are lying around the house and try to eat away the uncomfortable feeling that something is not quite right. Sometimes it seems a lot easier than actually dealing with the feelings. "Seems" is the key word in that last sentence!
Anyway, why I am writing this..... I'm not sure really. Probably because today was kind of hard because I saw a lot of bald kids, and because I saw where Hermans dream job is and I'm worried he won't get the job, because Marinda has been feeling sick for quite a while and I'm worried about her, because I'm tired of my job, and because I have PMS?
So now I've written it down, maybe I can keep myself from overeating the rest of the day!!