Wednesday, March 21, 2007

It's 3pm --- Do You Know Where Your Leg Is?

I've started the program at the hospital this week. Already I'm learning/relearning things that may eventually help ... but there is always 3:00pm. One of our running jokes was always that we were at our worst emotionally and intellectually after 3pm, so that reminder is always a little knife. But I leave group and head home and the next thing I know the pain and the tears are overflowing. I can't begin to describe the hopelessness and despair I feel. There is nothing to replace what I've lost. Nothing but bills and furnace problems and shame and humiliation about my financial situation ... responsibilities and duties and months of this awful pain and nothing to look forward to or offer any meaning or hope. I see everything through the lens of this relationship and/or what I've lost -- and I mean everything. Weather. Streets. Houses. Strangers on the street. This physical/psychological/emotional pain is so overwhelming I'd chew off my leg to escape it, and I am getting so angry at people who don't seem to get it. I'm becoming childish in my pain; petulant and demanding and I can't seem to help myself. As if I don't have enough issues causing me pain these days, here comes "No One Takes Me Seriously." Am I painting myself into a corner where I have to kill myself just to prove that I meant it when I said I COULD NOT take this pain anymore? That I refused to be soothed and placated with empty words and platitudes? I'm so sick and tired of being sick and tired. And hurting. And I can't help but believe (as the paragon of emotional health that I am these days) that I was tricked into surviving this last month as some cruel joke ... that I believed the people who said it would get better and I should have just ended everything in February as I had originally thought instead of being a patsy. Again.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

an unexpected gift ...

The one person who's been overlooked in this whole mess is my poor eight year old daughter. Within the space of two weeks, she lost Steve, the weekend trips to his house, his kids, the life we were building together -- and gained a mother who is shaky and crying and completely shattered. She's started asking to contact her father again -- which she never did as long as Steve was in her life. She even wanted to contact his former girlfriend, with whom she had been very close before that relationship ended last summer. One of her daycare "grandparents" went into the hospital which necessitated a shift in that part of her routine ... and then we went home to help out the folks after Mom had her hip replaced.

Ailing grandparents ... absentee parents and parental surrogates ... basket case mother ... house chaos ... the poor kid.

She went through a bad patch right around the time the thing with Steve collapsed, and at out parent-teacher conference yesterday, both her teacher and I remarked at how out-of-character it was for her. I had an "aha" moment -- duh, but I am REALLY slow on the uptake these days -- and wondered aloud if the incidents had any relation to all the upheaval in her life at that time.

Luckily, her teacher is an absolute gem, and has offered to give Nora the chance to talk through and process her feelings about all these changes, if she wants to. I don't want to create a problem where none exists, but Nora really should have a grownup that she can talk to about how all this feels, and she's so protective of me, I'm not the one to do it. Not to mention that I would fall apart and cry and make a hash of the whole thing.

Then as we wrapped it up, her teacher told me she was praying for us in this time, and I burst into tears again, but of gratitude.

I'm still not willing to concede this life is worth living, but I can recognize an unexpected gift when it's offered me ...

Monday, March 12, 2007

"I Never Knew What To Expect"

Feb. 26, 2007 issue - Tammi Landry, 36, loves movies—but not "Father of the Bride." It reminds her of all the ways her own painful childhood didn't measure up. Five years ago, Landry's father, a police officer in Indiana, killed himself. It was devastating for the mother of two young sons, but not a shock. Even as a little girl, she sensed something was wrong. "I never knew what to expect," says Landry, who lives in suburban Detroit. "One day, I'm at the center of his world, and the next day, he could be distant, uninterested. All hell could break loose because I left a towel on the bathroom floor." Landry realizes now that her father suffered from undiagnosed depression. "He was a man, a cop," she says. "There was never any asking for help."
Depressed parents like Landry's father often leave a legacy of fear and anxiety—emotions forged in childhood that can linger a lifetime. Reflecting on her family history after her brother's suicide, Julie Totten, founder of Families for Depression Awareness, realized that her father had been depressed for years. In one recent study at Columbia University, researchers found that rates of anxiety disorders and depression were three times as high among the adult children of depressed parents as they were among people whose parents were not depressed. Adult children of depressed parents also reported about five times the rate of cardiovascular disease—a sign that emotional disorders affect more than mood. Even kids who manage to succeed socially often struggle at home to care for their parents or younger siblings. "Depression has an entire family dynamic," says Myrna Weissman, the lead researcher in the Columbia study. A predisposition to mood disorders may be inherited, and researchers still haven't teased out how much of a child's problem can be traced to genes and how much to growing up with an unstable or unresponsive parent. They do know that even the youngest children are vulnerable. Babies of depressed mothers, for example, are particularly at risk because infants learn to communicate through their mothers' responses. An apathetic mother sets up a child for a lifetime of social and emotional problems.
But thanks to new research, an unhappy ending is not inevitable. Weissman's team found that many children improved after their parents were treated. At the beginning of her study of 151 depressed mothers and their children, about half the youngsters had a history of psychiatric disorders and a third were suffering from mental-health problems. The mothers were all put on an antidepressant. (The kids were not treated as part of the study, but a few were under medical care.) The recovery rate for kids with mental-health problems whose mothers' depression lifted was nearly three times that of similar kids whose mothers did not respond to treatment.
It took Landry years to face her past. After her father's suicide, she and her husband divorced. That sent her into therapy, where she finally got help. She currently takes medication for anxiety and is doing well but, aware of genetic susceptibilities, she watches her 4-year-old son closely."He wants to be good at everything," she says. "He's so hard on himself. I would do whatever it takes to make sure he's OK." She's already doing the most important thing she can do for him: taking care of herself.
With Joan Raymond
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.

Friday, March 9, 2007

... people go mad if they think too much ...

On the one hand, I'm doing everything in my power to STOP thinking these days.

On the other, I could make a pretty convicing case that I'm already mad; and not just mad, descending into depths of depression I never dreamed existed.

Just when you think you've seen everything, right?

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