It's like being a superhero...but not.

For me, depression often manifests itself in extreme irritability. So sometimes, it's like having incredibly heightened senses. Not the cool superhero heightened senses that allows you to hear old ladies screaming for help miles away, but the kind of heightened senses that magnify every irritating thing in your life a million times over. When I brush my hair after getting out of the shower, it feels like my entire head is bruised. Every tug at a tangle is excruciatingly painful. When K2 runs down the hall while K3 is napping, it's like a herd of elephants is stampeding through my old, shaky house. When K1 laughs at an inane knock-knock joke she's told me a million times, it's like she's screaming into my ear. When I am trying to get all 3 kids to the car in the morning the cold feels like needles piercing every uncovered part of my skin. When we're eating dinner I can hear everyone chewing their food like they're inside my head. Everything that happens in my day feels like an attack, and I am constantly trying to ward off the blows.

It's like...

I'm constantly trying to explain depression, mostly to myself. I go through the day with a running dialogue in my head trying to explain what's wrong. I never do it very well, or to my satisfaction, so I keep trying. It always starts out with, It's like...

I kind of feel about describing depression like I feel about travel photography. Stick with me on this. When I travel, I don't take pictures unless they have me and/or my traveling companions in them. When I travelled to Turkey with my sister, she was constantly taking pictures of our surroundings. The beautiful, other-worldly rock formations in Cappadocia, the Aya Sophia, the Blue Mosque, Nemrut Dagi at sunrise. It didn't make any sense to me. Buy a postcard I thought to myself. How can a picture that you take capture these things as good as or better than a professional photographer?!*

In other words, in both travel photography and writing about depression, someone else always seems to do it better, so why bother? I have read some descriptions of what it feels like to be depressed that made me want to make photocopies and hand it out to everyone I've ever met and say, SEE!! This is what I've been trying to tell you!

A description that always comes back to me when I'm in my darket places is one by Tracy Thompson (author of The Beast and The Ghost in the House). She says that depression is like "a psychic freight train of roaring despair". This one particularly resonates with me because sometimes I can hear the freight train coming. I'm doing fine for a little while, be it minutes, days, or weeks, when all of the sudden I hear a distant whistle. I feel the ground start to rumble. I close my eyes and know it's coming, and there's nothing I can do to stop it. I want to get away, but I'm tied to the tracks. And what sucks about being a mom is that my husband and kids are tied down with me. All I can do is wait as the rumbling gets louder and louder and the ground shakes more and more. And then it hits.

Another unbelievably eloquent quote I just stumbled on through the miracle of Google. Psychcentral.com made a list in 2007 of the top blogs about depression, and one of them was a blog called Save Your Sanity for Later by a girl named Erika who describes depression this way:

Being severely depressed is having things in your brain randomly light on fire. If you’re severely depressed, these fires happen so frequently that all you have time to do is run around trying to get the fires to go out. Sometimes you have water for the fires, sometimes all you can do is try to light a backfire. Sometimes nothing works, and you want to die. Sometimes nothing works, and you live. You can’t tell what’s going to happen, but you can’t ignore the fires because they’re FIRES. You have to put them out. Trying to get back to normal is like building a house. To build a house, you need blueprints, materials, labor, and know-how/experience. I have some of these things, but not all at the same time. And all my experience is in putting out fires. Not building.”

Amazing, right? The above quote pretty much makes me want to give up on the whole blog-writing thing because it says it better than I could ever hope to.

But here's the thing about travel photography. When you take a picture of something, it's a picture of something that you were there to see. That picture of the Aya Sophia that my sister took? It's gorgeous. And it's the Aya Sophia that we saw, that day, that will never be the same. It's special because we were there to see it in a way that no one else will ever see it.

I guess it's the same way with feelings. While Erika and Tracy Thompson describe depression in a way that is achingly familiar, it's not EXACTLY what it feels like for me. Only I can explain exactly what it feels like for me to be a mom and depressed. So I'm going to try and get over my insecurities and give it a shot. Actually, many shots, as they come to me. Here goes.

It's like trying to defuse a bomb. While a fire rages around you. And a the fire alarm is going off. And children are screaming. People are huddling around you, jostling you, telling you to hurry up and defuse the bomb. You learned how to defuse this bomb once in the past, but you can't concentrate enough in all the chaos to remember how to do it. You're concentrating SO HARD, and you know that everything depends on you being able to do it.

This description is how I feel when I'm in my kitchen trying to make dinner. The kids might be happy for the moment, quietly (or not so quietly) playing in the living room. But I know it could end at any moment, the crying will start and I still just need a few more minutes to get dinner in the oven. To me, I'm in the fire, defusing the bomb. To my 9-year-old daughter, it looks like a peaceful afternoon and I'm calmly occupied with making dinner. So when she asks me an innocent question like: Mom, what are we having for dinner, and I turn around screaming: Can you just wait a SECOND?!? it doesn't make a lot of sense to her. But if you saw what I saw: the bomb, the fire, the screaming, my answer would make a lot more sense.

Here's another one, just because I just finished watching The Return of the King**:

It's like when Frodo and Sam are trying to make it up Mount Doom to finally destroy The Ring. The Ring looks like just a normal ring, right? If you weren't carrying it, you wouldn't know what a horrible, heavy burden it is, slowly taking over Frodo's mind. The audience (who has been watching the movie for what seems like years and is super sick of Frodo and his whining, and his creepy shiny eyes, but that's another rant altogether) wants to scream GOOOOOOOOOOOO already!!! The top of the mountain is so close!! Just run! But he can't. The ring is weighing him down, making every step painful and the next seem impossible. The simple task of walking, as easy as it looks from the outside, is just too much to accomplish.

So there. My first two attempts. There will be many more. I'd love to hear some other "It's like..."'s from my imaginary readers. If anyone ever stumbles across this blog I'd love to hear what it's like for you to be depressed. You can e-mail it to me at crazymama4115@gmail.com or put it in the comments section and I'll publish them here under future "It's like..."'s.

*I should say that my sister came back from Turkey with some truly beautiful pictures. She is an amazing photographer.

**Lest you think I am a science-fiction, fantasy watching freak (not that there's anything wrong with that) I have to say that this was all my husband's idea. He got a vasectomy last week and has had a bad recovery. Of course, since this was all my idea, he has blamed the loss of his manhood on me, and I have attempted to make it up to him by letting him choose what movie to watch during his recovery. I thought we would be going to see the final Harry Potter in the theaters (which would be painful enough for me as it is) but instead he chose the DIRECTOR'S EXTENDED VERSION of all the Lord of the Rings movies. Sweet baby Jesus, those movies are long. I secretly enjoyed them.

How time flies...

So much for keeping a detailed account of my feelings to see if my therapy worked. It's been just over a year since my last post, and I can't begin to recount in detail everything that has happened. So I'll just sum it up and get back to whining.

I had Kid #3 (henceforth to be referred to as K3) in May. It was a girl, and I spent the nine months leading up to her birth in terror for no reason at all. She is the easiest baby that ever was. From the day she was born, she has been nothing but agreeable and sleepy, the two things I love most in people whose day-to-day care I am responsible for. She slept through the night at 6 weeks. A few days into her life, while we twiddled our thumbs in the hospital waiting for her to wake up to eat, my husband described her perfectly:

She's like the Christ child, but better, because she doesn't attract any weird gypsies.

K2 is now just over 2. While in my disclaimer I stated that she was healthy, that turns out not to be entirely true. Shortly after my last post, she got a diaper rash that wouldn't go away. After trying multiple remedies, we took her to a pediatric dermatologist who diagnosed her with psoriasis. Now reader, you may be like me and think, "Psoriasis, that's not so bad. A little dry, itchy skin, right? Like eczema." If that were only the case. What started as a red diaper rash that wouldn't go away became a raised, red, itchy, scabby rash that covered her entire body. She screamed in agony every time she started to urinate. She woke up three, four, five times a night screaming in pain. Her head became covered in scaly scabs that my husband described as "what dragon skin would look like if we knew what dragon skin looked like" (!?!?!?). We had to shave her head to get the medication on it, which made her look like a burn victim on chemotherapy. People stared in public. At library story hour parents snatched their children away when K2 got near them, lest they catch her flesh-eating disease. And here's some pictures to show you why they were totally justified:




Yikes, right? So we went through months of topical steroids and treatments until we finally got her on a systemic medication that has worked wonders. She takes it once a week and within a few weeks she was totally clear and I stopped crying every time I looked at her or thought of what prom was going to be like with dragon skin. The medication is kind of scary stuff, it used to be used for chemotherapy but now treats psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. She has to get liver tests every couple months, and she might go off of it in the future to see if it comes back or if she's in remission, but for now we're just thankful that it's working.

K1 is 9 and gets more and more like a teenager every day. Attitude, attitude, attitude. That's all I have to say about that.

In terms of my depression, three things happened.

One. Spring rolled around. I've said it before and I'll say it again. The cold sucks. Winter sucks. The sun setting at 5 pm sucks. I've noticed this cycle in my life before. Right around October or November, life goes from painful but bearable to agonizingly painful and unbearable. I think the end is near, or hope it is, and all of the sudden it's March and I think maybe I can trudge through. The same things happened this year. So I'm thinking that I have some definite seasonal affective disorder stuff going on.

Two. The baby was born and was the Christ Child. See above. While I spent hours with K2 trying to get her to go to sleep by swaddling her, holding her just so in the pitch black with a sound machine going full blast on white noise and a hair dryer on in my other hand, K3 just gives a polite yawn and drifts off. A sleeping baby will do wonders for your mental health.

Three. I went on Adderall.

I know, I know, it's not for depression, right? I went to a psychiatrist when I was in college who thought that I displayed symptoms of ADD and prescribed Adderall and it worked wonders for me. I had energy (it IS speed, after all), I got stuff done, I was focused, etc. Then I graduated, switched health insurance, and my new psychiatrist said, "You're depressed. Adderall isn't for depression. Here's some Wellbutrin." Wellbutrin didn't do anything, but I took it for over a year. No results. My latest psychiatrist said if it works, do it, and put me back on Adderall after I was done breast feeding K3 (which is another guilt-laden story for another post.) It is truly a miracle drug. My love affair with Adderall and my internal struggle about whether or not I should be on it deserve a post of their own, which I will do soon.

Despite the miracle-working power of Adderall, I still have some major depression issues that mostly show themselves in the form of EXTREME irritability. On most days it's not so bad, but there are still some days that I wake up and can almost see the big, black raincloud over my head. Those days suck.

I'm going to keep blogging. I'm not sure if it'll be about being a mom whose depressed, or just about a mom that isn't all "Being a mommy is the best thing that ever happened to me!".

For now, I'm caught up. For real this time, I plan on posting at LEAST three times a week. And maybe, just maybe, I'll post this somewhere so that someone might actually read it.

Better and better...

So I've already fallen behind in my blogging after a grand total of 1 post. It's been a particularly gruesome week or two in the Crazy Mama household. It started with the baby waking up at 3 in the morning a couple weeks ago. She had a temperature of 102.5, and as we were administering tylenol, the 8 year old woke up and wandered down the hall, burning up with a fever of 101.5.

Now I'm the type to give them both some tylenol/motrin, send them to bed, and go back to sleep myself, or else sit up with them while silently cursing the cesspool of germs that is the elementary school. My husband is the more cautious type, and after a thorough examination decides that the baby is breathing funny and we need to call the ask-a-nurse line that comes with our insurance. So I play along, and as soon as I hear him tell the lady reading the script on the other end of the line that the baby is breathing strangely, I know that in typical CYA fashion, she is going to tell us to take the baby to the emergency room. Sure enough, she does. I roll my eyes and say there is no reason for us to take her in, but my husband calls our pediatrician and tells her the issue, and of course the pediatrician, groggy from being awoken at what is now 4 am, tells us to take her in as well.

I'm not sure what side of the line my imaginary readers fall on, but in my family you only go to the emergency room if you are also transporting a limb that is on ice so that it can be re-attached. My husband is the better-safe-than-sorry type, and in my opinion goes to the doctor WAY TOO MUCH. But what am I going to do when TWO medical professionals tell us to take the baby in? When my husband is staring at me with a look that says, "Why don't you love our baby?" When he is telling me about all these cases of swine flu where the kids said they didn't feel well and then WOKE UP DEAD!!!! (If that's even possible). So I don't want to be the one responsible for some medical disaster, so I pack myself up and take the baby to the emergency room. Side note: the lovely, clean, suburban hospital located about 10 minutes from us is apparently not good enough for our pediatrician, who treats us like we're taking the baby to a tribal elder for an amulet when we tell her that's where we are going. Instead, she tells us to take her into the city to the huge, urban emergency room.

I want to stop here and just say why I am against going to the emergency room AT ALL COSTS. It's not just that I'm lazy. Which I am. Unbelievably lazy. But it's also because it seems to me that 99% of the time you take your kid into the doctor or the emergency room, one of two things happens, and sometimes both. The child who looked near death about five minutes before arrival will start giggling and smiling at everyone in sight, and all coughing/wheezing/fever/spurting blood will miraculously heal itself and the doctor will look at you like you are insane when you insist that it looked REALLY bad a few minutes ago. Or the doctor will tell you that it's a common cold and there's nothing they can do besides recommend fluids and rest. Meanwhile, you have sat in the emergency room waiting room for approximately two hours with a whole host of the most disease ridden, coughing, oozing human beings on the planet, and while your child was probably just fine upon entering the emergency room, they probably have the ebola virus now.

So these things all happened to me. I entered an emergency room filled with people lining the walls, sleeping on the floors, hacking up lungs and spewing germs everywhere. Luckily, I got in to see the doctor in record breaking time, maybe five minutes of waiting. Unluckily, the ushered me into a curtained cubicle and instructed me to put the baby onto a crib that upon further examination, I swear to God, had sheets with some other kid's snot on them. Then the doctor came in and examined the baby while the baby played the poster child for perfect health. She then told me that the baby had the common cold. She said they could test for the flu, but it wouldn't really matter since the treatment was the same as a cold, fluids and rest and fever reducing medicines. I thanked her, kicked myself in the ass, and left.

The next day I take both kids in to their regular pediatrician to ask about my older daughter's chronic cough, for which she is prescribed allergy medication. We discuss the baby, the doctor agrees with the ER that there is no reason to test for flu.

Fast forward a couple days, after both kids are fever free and seem to be feeling better. We go to a lovely Halloween party at a neighbors with a lot of other kids from the neighborhood. The next night, the baby spikes a fever and won't stop crying. We take her into Nighttime Pediatrics, and the doctor there tests for flu, tells us it's positive, and then tells us that IF IT HAD BEEN CAUGHT EARLIER he would prescribe Tamiflu, which would have helped her get over it sooner.

What. The. Fuck. I want the ER doctor, my pediatrician, and this guy at Nighttime Pediatrics to all get together in a room and argue it out in front of me, because I have no idea what just happened and why there were so many different opinions here. As it was, I was too exhausted to even question it.

Suffice it to say, the baby also had a double ear infection from the congestion. I got put on tamiflu by my midwives since I'm pregnant and the baby tested positive for the flu, and they assumed it was swine flu (perhaps another reason they should have tested her?) All of this lasted a while, during which I slept about two hours uninterrupted at a time and was pretty much on the verge of a psychotic break. Add to that the fact that my germ-infested children infected all the kids at the Halloween party and most of them were out sick for some portion of the next week.

Then, as the kids were getting better, I load them up into the car one morning to take my older daughter to school. I back up directly into the side of my next door neighbors brand new car. Like doesn't even have a real license plate new. For no reason at all. It's like she materialized out of nowhere, even though for this accident to happen she had to be pulling out of the space next to me AS I WAS GETTING INTO MY CAR. If I needed any more proof that I am the most self-absorbed person in the world, there it is.

She was very sweet about it, though, and didn't call CPS despite the fact that the only logical conclusion she could draw was that I was a raging drunk or terminally stupid.

Then, I started vomitting a couple days ago and couldn't stop. Stomach bug? Reaction to the Tamiflu? Morning sickness? Who knows. But it sucked. Big time.

So that leaves me with a lot of excuses why I haven't blogged, and I still haven't even gone into how my first therapist appointment went. Maybe I'll write about that tomorrow.

One more thing: I guess that I should give my kids some sort of names so that I'm not constantly describing them. I would like to think this blog is anonymous, so I guess I'll just call them Kid #1 (K1 for short) and Kid #2 (K2).

DISCLAIMER

Wow. I can't believe I'm writing a blog. And a blog about depression at that. My husband, who is always thinking up money making ideas for me, suggested that I start a maternal depression blog awhile ago. Whenever I thought about it, I pictured a commercial for fibromyalgia medication I saw once. It was an old woman, and she tells us that she's going to read us a page from her, and I'm not kidding here, FIBROMYALGIA JOURNAL. And then she does. And she's all, "Oh the pain, so tender to the touch, yada yada yada."* Surely a blog about depression would be just as seemingly pathetic, boring, and self-indulgent. And what would I write that anyone would want to read?

"Today I'm sad."
"Today I'm so sad I just want to lay in bed all day."
"Why is life so hard?"
"Why me?"
"I wish I didn't have to get up today."



Then I read a book called The Ghost in the House by Tracy Thompson. Tracy Thompson is a woman who suffers from severe depression. In her book, she quotes from a bunch of women who are mothers and have depression, and as I read the book, I sobbed with relief at reading my own feelings put into words by other people. So maybe this blog will do the same thing for someone else. Or maybe it'll go viral and make me a million dollars. Not that I am web-savvy enough to understand what "going viral" means, or how going viral would translate into cold, hard, US currency being transferred to my checking account.

First, I want to issue a disclaimer. I think this is necessary because I certainly don't want people to think that I think my feelings or behavior are reasonable, normal, or excusable. Here is a list of the things I know for a fact make me a very, very, very lucky woman:

1) I am happily married to a wonderful man who puts up with all of my nonsense without complaint, bathes the baby every night, and AT LEAST twice a day asks me in a sweet tone of voice what he can do to help me.

2) I have a healthy, sweet, eerily compliant eight-year-old daughter.

3) I have a healthy, funny 1-year-old who sleeps through the night, takes 2 naps a day, and plays by herself on the floor for minutes at a time.

4) I am about 2 months pregnant with my 3rd child, and I have gotten pregnant all 3 times without any medical intervention. (In fact, with the 1st and 3rd, in spite of poorly executed birth control methods.)

5) My husband has a good job that allows me to stay at home with my kids, go to the doctor when I need to, get pedicures every once in a while, and order pizza when I don't feel like cooking.

6) I have wonderful parents who live close enough to babysit my kids whenever I ask, and who are constantly doing things for me like coming over and building shelves in my utility room (my dad) and recovering my dining room chairs (my mom).

So I get it people. I was recently flamed to a crisp on a message board for saying I was depressed, as if people think I don't get how lucky I am. Let me say one more time, loud and clear:

I GET IT.

This is why it's called crazy, people. There is no reason at all for me to be sad. I should wake up every morning with the birds chirping around my head. But I don't. I cry myself to sleep almost every night because the next day looms before me. I cringe when I hear my kids call me because I know they need something from me. I drag myself through every day counting the minutes until I can sleep again. The list goes on and on. I know it doesn't make sense, but I don't know how to fix it.

Hence the second reason for the blog. Today I called a mental health professional that was recommended to me by my midwife. This will be maybe the 5th or 6th time I have sought help from some form of mental health professional since I was about 18. Sometimes I've been on meds, sometimes it's just therapy. The end result has always been the same. I've never been sure what works and what doesn't. I'm hoping that by keeping a detailed account of my feelings I'll be able to objectively measure whether whatever I'm trying to do is working. Hope it works, and sorry in advance for all the writhing.


* For the record, I have nothing against people with fibromyalgia. I think it was mostly that the lady in this commercial really reminded me of a controlling, prissy art teacher I had in high school.