Thinking Out Loud, Part V

A continuation of this ...

It doesn't really matter what the summer was like. There were two blissful weeks where I felt absolutely perfectly happy, as long as I didn't think about the future. I worked part-time at The Factory. Turned off caring about anything related to it and enjoyed the warm summer afternoons I got to spend with Woodstock - swimming in the backyard kiddie pool, mostly - in an attempt to beg her to tolerate water/bathing.

There was a 7-day period where I didn't work at all "between jobs" at The Factory and The Office. Grover had arrived, along with a friend of Himself's from Virginia, and I puttered and took the kids swimming and went to the zoo and rejoiced in life as a stay-at-home mom.

Himself remarked about the light in my eyes. The panic attacks that were coming almost daily decreased. I had only one.

The rest of the summer zoomed past too fast - the best laid plans went awry and summer ended with me feeling like I had gained so much early on and lost it in a flurry of moving, Himself's out-of-town trips and work schedule, my new (respectable and stable, if dull) job and Woodstock's dramatic foray into her first real illnesses.

Now it is fall. On the brink of winter's onslaught. This week marks my 1-year anniversary returning to work following Woodstock's birth. She is 1 year, 7 weeks old. I can feel the terror start to take over again. The anxious static in the background beginning to wake up after a lazy summer nap. I see myself slipping here and there - clinging to Woodstock, smelling her babyfine hair, holding her close to stave off the inevitable nightmares.

I've gone through weeks of insomnia, nightmares, nights where I can do nothing but drag my feet down the stairs and into bed - all the things that marked the post partum downward spiral.

This time, I'm fighting back with everything I can muster. I am walking, doing yoga, eating well, forcing time with friends, saying no when I know I can't handle something - even if it seems petty or awkward or, dare I say it, disobedient. On the advice of my former headshrinker, I am writing it out ... where it will be read. Not because it doesn't tear me up to have someone know what is going on inside my head, but because, in her words, "there has to be an accountability factor." I can't talk about it yet, out loud, so writing to an invisible audience is the remedy.

This time, there is a small support network of real-life people I see beyond my office or computer screen. "You need to make friends," everyone told me in my darkest moments. "You need to get out." I couldn't. I was paralyzed, crippled by the absolute inability to string together one coherent sentence without crumbling to fine dust in a spectacular display of snotty, tear-stained weakness. I felt as if I was hiding some terrible secret ... in reality, I was.

The change in employment, the passing of Woodstock's infancy (something I mourn daily - there are whole periods of time, weeks of her life, where I remember nothing but what I captured in no fewer than 300 photos of just Woodstock - as if I could cut out the darkness and just preserve the light), the move, the brief sunny respite in this desert at the top of the mountains all helped. I had something positive to talk about, something interesting to share. I began to read again - newspapers, books, anything I could get my hands on.

I got to know my next-door neighbor, we met a couple at a class we are taking, I forced myself to face the disasterous fallout from the weeks and months of not opening the mail or answering the phone. There is a plan in place. I am working to gain control of what I can and not caring about what I can't.

I am healing. Slowly, one day at a time, I am coming back to life.