Happy Mama Day

Testing…

In ten years

Originally uploaded by thordora

Bipolar and PMS-My personal Axis of Evil

The last few months have been unpleasant. 26 days of the month are normal, copacetic, happy, sometimes sorta down, tired days.

3-5 days of the month are not.

My natural state is one of fairly rapid cycling. I can, literally, go from giggling uncontrollably to crying in a minute. I’ve done this. I hate it. Mixed states are my favorite either-being agitated and manic, really not a great combination.

So lately, with my menstrual cycle being it’s usual insane clusterfuck, I haven’t been enjoying the accompanying swings. Vast swings. Yesterday I was peaceful getting a manicure, then panicked getting a pedicure, then wistful, the manic and happy dancing with the girls then sad and weepy, turning into full blown suicidal urges by 10pm. I kept hearing things and seeing things, flashes out the side of my eyes. I spent the day repeating “This isn’t real.”

My doctor claims it’s normal, and I believe she’s right. For years I’d have what we called “freakouts’, and they always coincided with that time of the month. I, in my paranoid state, always assumed it was Mogo’s way to not taking any blame. Now I know that isn’t the case.

It’s disorienting, because you think you’re ok. You feel ok, until you don’t, and suddenly the persecuted thoughts start, you start staring at yourself thinking you’re too fucking fat to live, you’re useless and it hurts to much and then suddenly you’re ok, like a tornado came and went and you’re laughing and you can’t believe you felt that way! except for the lingers delusion that something is going to go terribly terribly wrong.

The delusions I can handle. I have a grip on them, even though my doctor didn’t seem to care much when I mentioned them-maybe I didn’t make them clear to her. But these intermittent spurts of DIE DIE DIE I want to DIE! are a but much to handle, and they worry me. What if they linger long enough? What if the lithium stops working? What if the illness overcomes me and wins?

I shouldn’t fear as I do, but I can’t help it. Once you’re out of the storm, you cannot imagine going back in and surviving. Maybe if my manic periods were more satisfying, or longer, maybe then I’d not mind the thought. But they aren’t long enough to make anything feel good. They are short, and angry and brutal, and the depression always feels like it lasts for months anyway.

I want this to be easy. I want it to stay shut behind the lithium door and leave me be. But it won’t.

The agony and defeat of Barbie

Tonight, I did something I swore I would never do.

(And no, those of you with your minds in the gutter, it doesn’t involve that.)

I bought Rosalyn a Barbie.

Granted, it’s a fairy barbie, with wings, but it’s still very white, very slim and very un womanly.

She loves it.

Anyone who has known me for any period of time knows that I loathe Barbie dolls. I really do. Maybe it’s because my mother never let me have any. (Because I’d chew their feet off, some sort of oral stress relief thing, not because of any feminist leanings that I know of) Maybe it’s because they’re so girly I don’t know what to do. Maybe it’s because I don’t feel they present even a vaguely adequate example of what a woman should look like. Maybe I just hate the plastic.

But I’m also not someone who is going to stand in the way of what my daughters gravitate to. Rosalyn reached for that Barbie in the store tonight as she’s reached for Spiderman, dinky cars or little people in the past. She desired it-not to please me, or her sister, but because she wanted it.

Isn’t that our ultimate goal, to help our daughters decide, for themselves, what they want? Look at many of us-raised to please, raised to ask what others want before us, raised to put the needs and wants of others before us every single time. I want to break this pattern, and I imagine many of you want to as well. It’s rare that we stop and say No, generally because we limit the choices to appropriate ones anyway, leaving it up to them to decide what they’re interested in. That’s how I know Vivian would like some anatomy toys, and maybe a Microscope when she’s a bit older. That’s how I know that Rosalyn loves bubbles and suddenly, Barbies.

Yes, what Barbie stands for bothers me. But she didn’t pick skanky Barbie or “Fashion Model” Barbie. She picked a doll with pink hair she can comb and a pink skirt just like hers. She picked childhood. She picked butterfly wings and dreams. And that matters to me too.

I’m uncomfortable with it in my house, I am. But sitting watching Ros have a conversation with “Bahbie” as she brushed her hair-I’m very comfortable with that.

Barbie pain-do you have it too?

skimming the stream of days

I get so busy sometimes that it’s hard to breathe, hard to stop and remember that it’s a beautiful day outside and the sun is shining and the leaves are finally stretching their arms and legs out to me. I get so busy with the mundane, the reports and the pivots, the diapers and the dinners. So many variables, until you round the corner near the school, and hear the sounds of hundreds of frogs, echoing across the neighbourhood, their love songs not to Alfred, but to each other, to spring, to the first morning of a hundred such mornings, foggy and musty and covered in wet tears of happy and warmth.

 

We circle the pond, carefully, searching for these frogs, my feet staggering near the edge, remembering far too many incidents that ruined far too many pairs of new shoes, that swamp smell never leaving them. I mutter about bringing garbage bags next time, wondering why the school never cleaned, removing at least the plastic if not the frothy scum on the water. I wonder if the frogs have multiple eyes or legs. I wonder why people can’t clean up their own mess, ever it seems. The hockey ball is forgivable-the 3 empty jugs of laundry soap-not so much.

We find no frogs-I find a tree. A tree that’s new and clean and gleaming in the early evening twilight. It’s nubby and round and altogether reminiscent of being a little girl. New and rounded on the edges. I’m fascinated by it, the greenery, the almostness of it, teetering. Like it was holding it’s breath.

We walk home, busy life forgotten, to do lists stored in outlook, laundry mostly done. The girls slow as we near the house, streetlight by streetlight appearing and the sun falls farther in the sky.  Rosalyn asks for what may have been the last time ever “See Mommy?” andI hold her hand tighter, feel her silky cool fingers wrap around mine as Vivian dances in the night with her father.

It’s all so nubby and new.

(Title taken from Bewitched Playground by David Rivard)

Iron HOLY CRAP THAT ROCKED! Man

Run. Don’t walk. RUN and go watch Iron Man.

Fucking awesome. Totally fucking awesome. I can’t even use a normal adjective it was so good.

The added benefit of Robert Downey Jr. in tank tops has NOTHING to do with my opinion. Nothing at all.

Even Gwenyth Paltrow seemed to be acting instead of moping. And I can’t stand her…

 

oh so good….

Fine Motor Skills, here I come.

Fine Motor Skills, here I come.

Originally uploaded by thordora

Why is it that no other parent has mentioned the sheer quiet inducing bliss that BEADS are?

After picking up the odd bead on the sidewalk now and again, I broke down and bought a bad of mixed beads at Wal-Mart. I figured they’d play for a few moments, and that would be it.

Oh no. Hells no. They LOVE these things. A ball of twine and a 5$ bag of plastic beads. All’s quiet on the eastern front. Plus, you can also have the kids make relatives “necklaces”. I have no idea if they’ll wear them, but it’s still kinda cool. The crowning moment was watching my soon to be 70 year old father making a small necklace for Rosalyn. So they amuse seniors as well.

Next 3 year old birthday a friend has-they’re getting beads. Parents be damn.

“this is the wavelength which connects us with dead men and the dawning of new beings not yet come to light. “

On the bus I pass a bridge with that unfortunate year chiseled into it’s side.

1989.

The year things stopped.

As always when faced with that year, I’m amazed. That something began when something else ended. That something was lasting. That someone was born, even on the day she left us. I stare hard at the bridge, wondering what blessed it with creation.

Irrational I know. But I can hardly be the only person who counts lost years, the years hence in things, in births, in incredulous “how can someone born then be ready for university?”

It doesn’t seem a lifetime already. Wasn’t it just 2000 a minute ago? Wasn’t I just in high school, dropping out of university a year ago? Weren’t those trees just planted, the lawn tended?

Shouldn’t everything else have stopped as well?

That’s what slaps me most of all. The fence that year provides, the utter confusion at the fact that while everything came to a shattering halt for me that year, other people moved on. While I changed, when I was changed, others simply continued, unaware, living. I gawk because I forget that while my life has been centered around a loss, other’s haven’t been, or have perhaps, and I just can’t see it.

Grief is transparent. We can walk through it, talk to it, make love to it. But it’s still there, like the air we breathe, the air sticky sweet around us on a summer night. I can’t see it hovering, unless I look, unless I stop and take the time to see that everyone, or nearly everyone has a year branded in the space above them-1989 or 2005 or 1974. But it shimmers so, becomes fairy like so much so that you barely hear it’s giggle above the tears, you barely see her for the stoicness of her owner. You have to see, really see, and ask, really ask. Then it becomes clear, the words tumbling free.

“I lost….They died….I hurt….I miss…..”

The human condition, right? Suffering, pain, grief. Joy being so sparse and brief sometimes. We should adjust and move on, get over it.

Get over the label grief brands us with, a date seared into our brains. Get over the alteration of ourselves, us at our core beings. We are changed by death, something shaved off the sides. You’re never the same. Your giggles turn to bubbles as if you’re underwater and lost. Your hopes fade into the sides of buildings which are there until they aren’t, and you notice in passing, 3 years later. Bridges and age of majority dates take new meaning.

Everything you should have, suddenly has new meaning, or no meaning.

Spring is supposed to be about renewal, about celebrating an opening earth, warm and welcoming. But for several of us, for different reasons, it’s not. Spring has a shadow behind it,  a mystery reminder that what giveth also taketh. That newness is only at the expense of last year’s left over crop. For some the ache is new, throbbing, still leaking sap. For others, myself, it’s an old wound that aches from time to time, but is mostly healed. Each of us those, is irrevocably branded by these events.

We’ll forever watch the sidewalks for our loved ones, stare out of the corner of our eyes for they who look like someone should. But it won’t be them. It will never be them.

*****************************

As a teenager, I dreamt I was chasing my mother through a store, her back to me, her blue purple coat standing out against the endless bottle of shampoo. Around and around racks we went, my voice calling for her, echoing back at me. She refused to turn and acknowledge me, and allowed me to chase her instead.

She disappeared from my sight, leaving me wailing and defeated.

 

“Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis–once that crisis can be recognized and understood. “

Maybe he’s right.

Maybe the anxiety I hold watching the news is eating me up, slowly without notice.

Food Crisis. Water Crisis. Peak Oil.

Another plastic bag flutters past my eye, outside the window, while walking I crush bottles and butts with my feet, the cold stench of oil and exhaust fills my lungs. There seem to be fewer birds.

Someone waters his lawn on a cloudy rainy day.

Car after car pass me, empty but for their driver. The bus goes by, also empty but for the driver.

I clench my Sigg bottle and reusable shopping bags closer to my heart, talismans, or perhaps sword and shield. I cough.

***********************************

Is there anything I can do? I mean really do? I bitch and moan about self involved individuals who don’t put any effort into efficiencies or saving some pollution, but does it matter when even our governments don’t seem to want to encourage businesses to do the same? Until they pump some cash into transit instead of creating new suburbs on the outskirts of towns, eating up farmland, will my small car free existence mean anything?

These things keep me up at night. The thought that in 2 years, we might be rioting for food. The thought that most people don’t even realize this is happening in other countries right now. The fear that water will become as gold, and that we won’t know how to purify our own.

We buy local, but we’re also Canadian. Do we go without so very much, or pay 6$ for a head of broccoli in midwinter?

I am driven by these fears, these paranoia’s, and I’m hard pressed to tell what is true paranoia, and what is driven by the disease in my head. I’m used to having end of the world scenario’s playing in my head-even as a little girl I’d secretly think, far in the back of my brain, that I would someday save the world, I was the chosen one. I would kick ass and conquer all. The world would end.

I am driven by the scared voice in my head telling me the sky is falling. And I wonder, am I helping, or hindering? Is there any point in my attempts to change the things and people around me when the true causes are much, much bigger than I.

Now, with children, these fears take on a new hue. Vibrancy, urgency, all the “cy” things you can think of. The worries are fresh and real now, subdued perhaps with the blessing of being born in Canada. But this doesn’t stop my desire for books about canning and winter farming, doesn’t keep me from wanting to stock up on survival supplies.

What part is teh crazy, and what part is good sense? Are we being frightened unnecessarily, or is there a storm brewing that might take many of us, many of our children?

*******************************

Do you worry? Do you read the news and wonder what next, how, why, what can we do? Or are you blissfully unaware, a state I wish I could achieve sometimes? Or do you have a solution, a something tangible to do to change something, anything right now?

Are you just as confused as I seem to be…..

third time the charm?

Kristin left the following comment on my “I cannot handle being a mother anymore” post

Hi Ladies I haven’t been here in a while now, I have been going through some prety hard times lately. In october i found out that i was pregnant with my third baby!!! It was NOT planned and needless to say i was not happy at all!! Abortion was not an option either. I hadve just turned 40 and the thought of starting all over with another baby realy freaks me out actually i hate the thought of it i found myself very angry all the time there were even times where i wished i would just miscarrie then it would be ok but that never happened and now i am almost 8 months and i am soo scared of what is going to happen once the baby is born.

I already have 2 girls 5 and 3 and this one is a boy which i have to admit i was upset about i never wanted to have boys so when i was told that it was a boy i became even more depressed. My husband is ecstatic about having a third but i am just miseable. Has anyone out there had a siimilar experience? If so i would to know how you dealt with it and did your opinion change once you saw your baby? I am so depressed all the time that i feel sick to my stomach and i am not sleeping well at all i really could use some advice. everybody keeps telling me that all this will cahnge once the baby is born that i will just be soo happy and wonder how i could of ever not wanted him.

But im afraid that once hes born i will be even more depressed and that i will just be miserable and hate my life and that it will eventually effect my pretty perfect marriage i just cant feel good about it not to mention thta i am not looking forward to the c section again so please anyone please help with some advice and encouragment i really could use some thanks for listening.

I’m sure she would appreciate any help or advice we could offer.

My two cents Kristin? You need some alone time, and a good therapist to hash this stuff out with. I felt the same way when pregnant with Rosalyn, and spent most of the first year having trouble connecting with her (I hardly remember her as a baby) Some of this is because of my illness, and some because I really didn’t want her, as much as it pains me to say.

You are not the only woman to feel this, so please do not feel ashamed.

The ongoing why the hell can’t I breathe right saga….

I’m getting tired of hearing my doctor try and pin everything on anxiety.

I’ve been having trouble breathing, on and off, since mid February. It came on without any cause so far as I can tell, and lasted well over 3 weeks. It went away. It came back. It went away and is now coming back again.

We did chest X-Rays, I’ve tried inhalers and acid reflux medication and ulcer medication. Nothing. We did blood work an EKG and Ativan, nothing.

Nothing helps. This irritating issue goes away on it’s own, comes back when it pleases. It seems to be vaguely connected to what I eat-I eat too much or too crappy, I bloat and the sick cycle starts again.

Now he’s talking about anxiety again, and how he thought trying an antidepressant might help.

HELL NO.

I would feel anxious, wouldn’t I? I would feel like I used to, terrified and secretly worked up about everything? I would know, right?

He also mentioned possible IBS, maybe Celiac disease, and his own bafflement. Hence his falling back on anxiety, the good ole catch all. Can’t find something actually wrong with you? Must be teh crazy.

I am usually more than willing to accept that, but not this time. I feel no anxiety over anything in my life, aside from occasional work stress, I’m not stressed out.

He wants me to do a stress test anyway.

I didn’t even get around to mentioning the fact that my periods have gone insane. So I’m hoping my PAP comes back clear.

I’m just tired of not knowing, of worrying when this will come back and stay for however long it stays. Feeling like you’re suffocating for weeks on end just ain’t cool.

Crank Pot

I am unbelievable foul today. I’m tired, I’m fighting with the scratch in my throat and I’d much rather be curled up in a coffee shop rereading Jane Eyre for the 100th time. And oh the people around me. This is NOT a people day. I’m tired of people, especially people talking nonsense about the TV and whining about gas prices.

Sorry people I have ZERO sympathy on the gas prices for cars. I know too many people who have set their lifestyle according to their vehicle instead of setting a reasonable one according to accessibility. We manage it, and manage it well, as can many people in a city setting. So the whining-NOT COOL. I’m not being all superior but really, stop living in places so bloody removed from everything. Stop gasping at me for walking 4kms to work. Stop being part of the problem, kwim?

I grow very tired of the office environment. Thankfully, I’m usually able to get myself somewhere with limited contact, but not always. It’s not so much the people as it is the insipid conversations. Last time I heard a conversation about reality TV? About 10 minutes ago. Last time I heard one about books? uh…..yeah. Too far back to remember.

See? FOUL. I don’t usually ever talk about work, but today I’m tired and cranky enough to do so.

I kept myself busy yesterday, until I realized it didn’t matter. Time has finally softened the blow to a soft kiss. I muttered my usual benediction to my mother as I fell off to sleep, I miss you, I still love you, but all and all, life moves on, as it should.

Anymore it just reminds me how fucking terrified I am of dying young, dying on my daughters, leaving them adrift and afloat. Learning to not anticipate the worst, it’s hard. It’s like relearning how to walk, trying to dispel that hovering cloud. Most days, I can. But other days-it’s a voice always in my head. Cherish what you have. Enjoy it, hold it. It could be gone.

Maybe it’s not so much morbid as it is just good preparation.

I’m cranky.

Nineteen

2 days.

I can place myself in my mother’s shoes. Watching the grass spring into place from the picture window in the front of the house from her vantage point on the borrowed hospital bed. The legs of which dig divots into the plush carpet that will take 2 weeks to fully disappear. Her breath won’t remain in the house that long.

I can hardly remember the last two days, merged as they were into the days that came before. The emergency ambulance rides, the hasty packing, me slipped to the side, quiet so no one would notice. I hardly remember our family as a foursome, as a team, together, as we were meant to be. There was a crack in that picture already, a crack dug deep with cancer and hopelessness and dreams.

My memories, like Mad’s, are sparse, but thankfully, I have a few that are golden. The crackling late afternoon light pouring in the side windows as I tried on new clothes at 6 or 7. Chocolate covered fingers in the kitchen, licking the bowl, watching my mother bake and cook and feed the people who would come to feed up, the stereotypical casseroles splayed across our doorstep, cards attached, pieces of tape on the bottom of the cheap ceramics with names, “Brenda”, “Mrs Bishop”. Driving to Kingston in her blue car, holding in the nausea, not wanting the Pepto Bismo that would make it all the more worse.

I remember her hand, and mine it it. A downtown street, a sunny warm summer morning, her soft sandals slapping her feet, her dress swinging. Stopping to talk. Stopping to talk. A warm muffin and ginger ale at the cafeteria in the store my father ran, the laughter of a group of women as they talk above my head.

The warmth of her hand, the strength of it. The softness, the yielding, the smell of her hand creme, the Charlie on her neck.

I don’t remember hugging my mother, or kissing my mother. She wasn’t affectionate that way, not that I can remember. But lord, she was lovely. She was womanly and graceful and strong and sweet, in her way. She was kind.

In the summer, we’d sit on the front step, await the squirrels who would inevitably come to her, who would climb on her shoulders, snatching peanuts from her breast pocket, the breast that would eventually come off and be replaced with a facsimile I would play with. She never worried that they would bite her.

“Sit still and they’ll be gentle” she’d remind me.

And it was true.

She loved to laugh. She loved to prank. From kinking the hose until I’d stand over it so she could let loose the water then, to sitting in the front row at mass, marking the sermon with friends to rapping on the wall, making me believe in witches, she had a devilish sense of humor.

I think of these things instead of the 2 days before. Instead of the cold dampness of the stairs I sat on. Instead of the panic and fear and terror that ran through our house, circled the voices telling me the just go to school, rang through my head when I was pulled out during spelling by one of her Priests, taken to a car to silently watch the highway with my brother as we drove to what we knew was inevitable.

I shall think of none of these things. I shall think of my mother as the woman who loved me, who craved me, who wanted me. The woman who loved her little girl, who taught her that glasses can sing, who taught her that strength isn’t only measured in muscles. I will think of my mother who my first born is named after, in part. I will think of my mother as the vibrant woman introduced me to Hitchcock as a child, yet refused to let me read Frankenstein.

My mother, Dianne Joanne Marie, has been dead 19 years 2 days from now. And I miss her still, as I always will.

4 Pink Pills

 

Pretend for a minute that I’m holding 4 pills in my palm, 4 pale pink capsules containing the salt Li, 4 pale pink solutions to a problem that has plagued me for a long time.

I was scared to death of this drug, this innocuous looking pill, this wonder of our world, it’s inexplicable reason for ending the terror of bipolar in some people, in many people. I ran from it faster than I run from most.

It’s hard to look back at the me before this pretty pink friend. As Mogo and I talked, and he spoke of the relief of not worrying, day after day about me, and the freedom of not trying to hold down a swinging pendulum, I started thinking about my brain without this drug, this salty dog. The difference, I remarked, is like one day sitting in a screaming concert full of a million fans, all yelling at once while you try and do needlework, and the next day, being in a quiet, white room with only the sound of your breathing for company.

It’s that different. It’s that much Calgon take me away relief.

*************************************

When I was 17 or so, I returned to my original high school, a small catholic school in eastern Ontario. I had moved back in with my father as I understood something in a rare moment of clarity during a year of what I can only describe as highly manic behaviour. I knew that I had a choice-I could go down the road to nowhere, or I could try and claw back into a normal life. I chose my father, and normal.

I made friends with a boy, we’ll call him Marc. At first, everything was fine. We had fun, we joked around, he was fun and interesting to be around. He read a lot, and much of it was similar stuff. We had the same friends. We drove around, hung out, did drugs, had your normal teenage experience.

Marc and I developed a weird relationship-as far as I knew, and he told me, he was bisexual, but leaning at the time more towards guys. Typical teenage stuff right? Trying to place you identity. To an outsider, we seemed to have a “couple” vibe-people remarked that to me at the time, and each time I denied it. I had no real desire for the guy. Just a strong, almost loving friendship. We were close.

Marc was also bipolar.

I remember going with him to appointments at the mental hospital (and there was one where I went to school-I remember some guy escaping with an axe once-that wasn’t cool. I think it’s closed now) and him telling me about how useless his doctor was, and how he could get any drug he wanted but none of them helped. He even showed me the lithium, the lithium he hated from that first day he put it into his mouth.

Not understanding the disorder at the time, and likely wanting to distance myself from it since I had a vague understanding of what was and was not happening in my brain, I didn’t understand what was happening with Marc. He went one day from being happy and fun to the next day being sadistic and mean. He’d delight in saying horrible mean things to everyone around him, just to watch what happened. He’d shut you out, then let you back in again if you showed your devotion.

And we just lapped it up. It seems strange now, in hindsight, the pull this guy had. He was nothing to look at, but there was something about him I can’t even explain. Something compelling.

I found it strange, but was so locked in that what was happening didn’t even seem like a form of emotional abuse. It just seemed…normal. Not strange.

He’d rail at me about his pills, how they were making him crazy, how they weren’t happy and how he stopped taking them a few weeks after he started. He was enraged, and I tried to comfort him, tried to hold him, make him feel better.

That’s when he slapped me clear across the face.

I had never been hit like that in my life. I’ve been punched, but within context, or hit accidentally, but never, in a moment when I wasn’t defending myself, have I been hit like that.

I can still remember it. I can still remember just staring at him from the floor, and bracing myself for me. I can still feel the hated passivity that rose in my, the inability to fight against him. I felt helpless before him, and I couldn’t even figure out why.

If I didn’t move for a moment, if I didn’t speak, I figured it would blow over. I couldn’t stop the tears though.

He snapped out of it, and I watched the hate pour off his face as he bent to help me up, apologizing and apologizing. Never again he repeated Never again.

I told him to take his pills. He said it was the pills that made him like that.

What did I know?

Of course, things weren’t the same after that. I was scared of him, plain and simple. There was a glint in his eye I couldn’t place or understand. I was bigger than him, likely stronger than him, but I feared him. I feared him because I couldn’t anticipate him. I watched his rage burn through him for no reason at all, and lash out at me. I could never let my guard down.

Our phone calls went from being fun gentle calls to ones berating me. If I was having a bad day, zero support. I’d feel worse after speaking with him, yet compelled to call him. I felt suffocated, my chest constricted. I felt trapped, and scared and I couldn’t talk about it to anyone. No one would get it.

Yet finally, someone did. A new friend came into my life, observed what was happening, and told me flat out it was basically abuse, and it didn’t matter what was wrong with him, what pills he was taking for what or how they were affecting him. He was toxic.

With her behind me, I screwed up the courage to rid my life of him. I can still feel the anxiety in my gut when I called him from her house at the expected time and purged him from my life. The circles my stomach was making. The fear and the near relief, all at once.

And with that, he was gone.

*****************************************

I feared Lithium since then. I feared that I would become the monster he was becoming, the terror. I couldn’t separate the bipolar from the drug, I didn’t understand that his imbalance had nothing to do with Lithium itself. It was him, the manic swings, the rage he couldn’t control. I know that rage now, I’ve felt it’s embrace, and it’s coldly attractive. But ultimately destructive. If not for the Lithium, I would be him, the him that was, the creatures we call evil.

I live the aftermath that is unchecked bipolar. I never got to the point where I was a true threat to anyone other than myself. But I felt that capacity in myself, the roaring, empty void, the spastic need to lash. I began to understand Marc. Not forgive-I will never forgive him for the lesson in trust he gave me. But I understand now why I take my little pink pills every day without fail.

I see those reasons in the faces of the people I love, everyday. I struggle for those faces some days, knowing I swallow those drugs as much for them as for me. Maybe Marc never saw those reasons, maybe he didn’t truly have them. Maybe his parents left him alone in the basement far too often.

I’ll never know. My fear and anger still lives for him-I couldn’t bear to accept him on Facebook, and even the friend request sent pangs of pain through my chest. He likely doesn’t even know what he did, or remember.

If only I hadn’t feared so badly.

Petition for the Mother’s Act.

Dear Bloggers and PPD Awareness Advocates:
 
I’ve been asked to post the following link on my site. It is an online petition to support passage of The Melanie Blocker Stokes MOTHERS Act. A companion bill passed in the House of Representatives last fall to a nearly unanimous bipartisan vote! Democratic Senators Obama and Clinton both support this legislation along with Republican Senators including Olympia Snowe of Maine. Please help us gain our target goal of 100,000 signatures for this petition.

As a mother who has suffered PPD, and who has had depression and instability throughout a pregnancy, which turned into a life threatening situation for my and my child and who ended up being diagnosed Bipolar, this bill means a lot to me, even as a Canadian. I took no pills during my mostly alone recovery, and never wanted any. All I ever wanted was what this bill wants to give-funding to help educate medical providers and put the funds in place for resources to help. The thought of any friends of mine in the US suffering alone with PPD saddens me.
 
After just one week, we have generated 10,000 and the petition will remain active throughout May, during which time it will be marked up for review. This bill calls for research to help determine the etiology and best treatments for perinatal mood disorders which will affect 800,000 women next year… and this figure does NOT include women whose babies are stillborn, miscarriage or other vulnerabilities such as adoptive parents, single parents.. stakeholders for this legislation are anyone who has ever been a mother or a child!!

URGENT REQUEST

We Need Your Help Now!
We Must Speak Out in Full Support of
Postpartum Depression (PPD) Legislation NOW.

Click here to Connect and be Counted!
You may have heard the complaints on the internet lately; asking readers to block passage of legislation to help new mothers and their families cope with postpartum depression. The House and Senate both have legislation - H.R. 20 and S. 1375 - that some mistakenly believe is a conspiracy to push new mothers to take medication.

Tell that to the more than 800,000 women who will develop a diagnosable postpartum mood disorder this year! This does not include the 7.5% of women who will develop major depression during pregnancy.

How disappointing! Those who are speaking out against the Melanie Blocker-Stokes Postpartum Depression Research and Care Act obviously know little to nothing about this legislation. Some are even saying that Melanie Blocker-Stokes, who took her own life after suffering this illness, was simply just sad.
This could not be farther from the truth! Ask her mother, Carol Blocker, who has dedicated her life to the passage of this protective legislation named in honor of her daughter.

This legislation does NOT recommend drugs, require drugs, or endorse drugs.

What it does is:
Encourage the Department of Health and Human Services to expand the research into the causes of postpartum conditions and find treatments.
Establish a national public awareness campaign to increase awareness and knowledge of PPD and psychosis.
Make grants available for programs that develop and offer essential services to women with PPD.
Even if you have already done so, please take the time to let your representatives in Washington know that you support this vital legislation. Help counter the misinformation they are currently receiving!

Click here to Connect and Be Counted!

One Person Can Make a Difference.

Feed Issues?

I subscribe to my feed to keep an eye on it (and to avoid having what Gwen had occur happen to me)

If any of you are reading this on a feed, please let me know if things are appearing as usual. Or just say Hi, period.

“The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.”

“How are you”

“I’m fine”

“Feeling ok?”

“Um-hm.”

My stomach in knots, my mind screaming to tell the truth, talk about what was really happening in my life. My mouth stayed numb, drawn, sewn.

My truth, from an early age, was guarded by reality, consequences, pain. You’re told not to tell about this event, that know one will believe where those hands have been, that they’ll think you’re lying. You’re encouraged to not give an honest answer when they ask how you are after your world has dissolved. No one listens when you write letters telling them how your father is drinking and (between the lines, just you and me) you’re scared and alone and facing a world that believes him weak and lesser.

Don’t say it.

Don’t tell anyone.

Cover it up. Make it pretty.

Shhhhh. Hush child.

****************************************************

Truth should be a very easy thing to attain, should it not? We tell ourselves that we want honest children, but daily they might witness us lying to a salesman, to our partners, to them even. They witness our omissions, our wants for ease, the things we just don’t talk about, and they learn.

They learn silence. They learn deceit.

I’ve never been a fan of lying. As much as I can avoid it, I do. It’s just not the right thing to do, not for me in many cases. If pressed, I follow my mother’s golden rule-if you can’t say something nice, shut up.

Truth for me IS simple. Uncomfortable, yes at times it is. But it’s real.

I’ve spent years wondering about memories. Are my memories truth, or are they nothing but faded stories, nightmares I’ve told myself. With no one to bounce the truth off, is it still truth, or figment? Is it real, or dream? Did it happen? Did things happen?

Truth makes events real. They make the hurts real, they validate us.

The truth can also be love, create love. If I cannot voice my feelings, my deep love to my husband, it feels lessened for all it’s hidden. It blooms in the light truth does.

It blooms with a need to be spoken.

*****************************************

All my life I’ve had a hatred for the inane social niceties of the greeting, specifically the “How are you” part. It is not a genuine inquiry-it’s a stock phrase which is meaningless. No one wants to hear “well, I’m really depressed and I have a nasty corn on my foot-you?”, so why do we ask? What non-truth are we reaching for?

If I ask, I actually want to know. Not that most can tell the difference. But it matters to me.

This is a response to:Julie’s Hump Day Hummer….”

 

In lieu of content…

how about you listen to what I’m working to today….

Sea Lion-Feist (I believe this is a cover)

Atlas-Battles (and SQUEE I might get to go see these guys this summer!)

Ears Ring-Rainer Maria

Talula-Tori Amos

Martha Served-I Hate Sally

 

Meh in the Sun.

criss crossing beams

of light

simmer across my face

dull morning afire.

 

on my back, heated lizards

crawling lazily slow me

pausing I look up

all is possible. All is now.

 

feet scratch trails on concrete

dirt scrambles for purchase beneath

distracted steps.

 

*********************************

It’s hard to want to talk about things lately. Which isn’t to say there’s nothing to talk about-there is. I’m just weary of it this week, finding something to say, trying. I just don’t care right now. Yes, earth day, yes horrible things happening to everyone, yes yes yes.

The sun is shining outside my window and I can’t go play. Right now, that’s the biggest crime.

And I don’t feel all that well. I have these weird heavy headaches no matter what I do or don’t do, like the back of my head is congested. My feet hurt from having crappy shoes, and now I can’t walk to work until I get new ones. Sigh. Even trying to save money I have to spend it. Money I don’t really have for good shoes-likely I’ll just get another pair of Chucks and wait for them to fall apart in a year since I destroy shoes. I like walking in the morning. It wakes me up and makes me feel better.

Meh. I’m just whiny today and bored for want of something to write. Maybe later.

Oh Noes! Oprah is teh devil!