Friday, November 1, 2013

Beginnings

This blog actually started two years ago as my modified NaNoWriMo project the year I found I was pregnant. I was so overwhelmed with thoughts and feelings about pregnancy and impending motherhood. I thought NaNo would be a good time to write a series of short essays about it, but as is typical for me and NaNo, I lost steam rather quickly. As my son has turned from an infant into a toddler, though, I found I still have tons of thoughts and feelings that seem like they'd be best expressed through an outlet like this. 

At the same time, like so many other people I want to make fun of the whole phenomenon of "Mommy Blogs" and yet, I've really enjoyed reading some of them. Now that I'm a mom I don't seem to have time to keep up with anybody in particular, but I'll often binge on a good blog whenever I come across one. So I'm starting this blog, again on November 1 as a sort of public NaNo project (although I'm not publicizing it at all at this point).

To start I thought I'd share a piece I started two years ago, but have since reworked a little.

I’ve always been a cryer, but in the year before I found out I was pregnant, Kyle & I went through a lot of changes that were not positive and my crying became a problem, or more accurately, my crying became a symptom of a problem. I was depressed. When one little piece of bad news sent me into uncontrollable sobs for the rest of the day, I should have known something was wrong, but that’s the thing about depression. It’s so all-consuming and isolating that you don’t have the perspective to realize that what you’re feeling is not normal. Instead you’re so focused on yourself that you think that what’s wrong is that you’re weak, not that there’s a treatable chemical imbalance in your brain. You think that you've failed everyone and that maybe if you just tried harder then you’d be good enough and you’d stop feeling these overwhelmingly bad feelings that you’re just too embarrassed to tell anyone about.


Anyway, a few months before I became pregnant, I started being treated for depression. Luckily, once the medicine finally got into my system, this proved to be a very treatable problem. It didn't hurt that the changes coming at us started becoming positive.

But the thing that was weird through this recovery period was that I stopped crying completely. For the girl who was made fun of in grade school for crying all the time, this might have been a refreshing change, but at the same time it felt really unnatural. I cry about everything - good and bad - so crying about nothing had me worried that I wasn't feeling anything. When I mentioned this to my doctor, she said that meant it was time to decrease my dosage. 


Shortly after this, I found out I was pregnant. I don't know if you know this, but pregnant women tend to be quite emotional. For someone like me who has some baggage about crying too much, this could have been really embarrassing, and later on in my pregnancy it was, but after weeks of numbness, preceded by months of depression I was ecstatic the first day I started sobbing uncontrollably on my way to work because I was so excited about the baby growing in my belly.

That didn't mean that I didn't worry in the back of mind for a long time every time I had another (often hormone-fueled) cry that I wouldn't be able to stop, that what started as a sappy emotional cry over the wonderfulness of the miracle of life would take a dark turn into a pity party about my utter worthlessness as a human being. But it didn't.

I was still definitely crazy, but a roller coastery hormone fueled ride through happy and sad cries instead of a one-way descent into depression. I definitely cried for sad reasons. Pregnancy came with a lot of frustrations - frustration at being too big for my pants, but not big enough for maternity pants; frustration at not knowing what my starving but finicky stomach would actually allow me to eat; frustration at just how exhausted I felt all the time, no matter how many naps I took.

And there were the new parent freak out cries, worrying that I wouldn't be able to provide for my baby, that I wouldn't be ready, that something would go wrong, but these were vague panicky fears and everytime I tried to name them, I'd calm down and see that I was just overwhelmed by the number of changes coming my way and that when I thought about the details I'd see that I was doing what I could to prepare and that for some of it I would just have to trust that things would turn out okay.

I marveled at how panic and frustration didn't turn into personal attacks. I dealt with trials as they came, and while hormones seemed to add an extra level of panic to things, once I took a deep breath and thought things through I was always able to calm down and work things out.

Which generally led to me crying tears of thankfulness that my brain was healed and working properly again. Mood swings are typical for a pregnant woman and I reveled in them because it meant that I was me again. I could feel things, both good and bad. I hadn't realized, until I lost the ability to feel anything, how much I missed the ability to feel everything. It made me almost not mind the random bursting into tears at inopportune moments.

When I had my next follow up with the doctor who had prescribed the antidepressant, she said that I could stop taking the pills altogether if I'd continued to feel alright. I happily reported to her that I was crying again, and now they were happy tears just as often as sad ones.

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