A weekend

It's Monday morning and I'm alone in the house, cleaning. I'm on a bit of a roll, making some progress that might outlast the arrival of the kids in a few hours. It usually feels futile.

Last Thursday I got sick. Not "go to the hospital" sick although it can be hard to know that. It felt like croup, my chest full, cough deep. Do grown-ups get croup? When I felt the sickness creep into the corners I felt the alarm bells in my head. Get a sitter, they said. Don't try to take care of these kiddos when you feel like crap, they said. I dug deep and pushed forward because I am a slow learner.

By bedtime I was long past done. We'd had a mellow, TV-filled afternoon and everyone was pretty mellow. TV coma mellow. I thought bedtime would be easy and it wasn't and I lost it. I screamed at those sweet loves and scared them and felt like a shithead. I burst into tears, which scares some of them more than the yelling does. "Please stay in bed. I'm so tired. I don't feel good. Give me a break."

They kept creeping out to me, cowed but wanting to say one more thing, wanting to get one more doll. I never want anyone's posture to change because of my behavior. I don't want to scare, to intimidate, to try to control. But I felt the wave of exhaustion and rage building and pouring out of me before I could stop it. By that point it's too late anyway. I recognized the point I needed help long before that and I ignored it and then the yelling.

I went back to their room and sat with my back against the wall, mug of hot tea in my hand, rivers of hot tears pouring down my cheeks silently. They quietly fell asleep and I mourned the pain that I as the flawed, needy, sick person that I was and am can cause.

Friday morning I called my friend and asked if she could take the Bigs to school. Yes, she said. I called the babysitter and asked if she could take the kids after school. Yes, she said. I dozed on the couch with the Littles watching TV, waiting for their dad to pick them up and taken them to the pumpkin patch for the field trip they'd been eagerly awaiting for weeks. He came and they flew out of the room, jazzed. The front door closed, leaving me alone in the house, and I wept. All I'd wanted was to be alone to rest and when the solitude arrived so did the despair.

"I'm going to be alone forever. I'm going to be taking care of four kids by myself forever. I can't do this. This isn't what I wanted."

I knew I was in the dark place. I knew it was the sickness doing what it does, bringing me to my knees. I knew it wasn't the only truth but it felt like the one and only truest truth.

As Anne Lamott says I eventually picked up the heavy phone and started reaching out for help. Help me, I'm scared. Help me, I'm lonely. Help me, the shame is overtaking me. I yelled at my kids. I scared them. They'll be gone all weekend and I didn't send them off with love. Help me. I need help.

Help arrived, in reassuring words. An offer of physical help from my mom who would come the next morning. Understanding. Solidarity. Sympathy. Support. Help came and I could eventually fall asleep and start the process of getting better.

Friday night was the second night ever that I slept alone in the house. The silence of being alone is so different than the silence of being alone with my four beloved sleeping children a few rooms away. I left the microwave light on, even though it was just me, to shine as a bridge between this new life and my real life. My life as a mom when I'm so busy and so distracted that I don't have to face myself. I read and slept and fed myself and it was a mix of peaceful and lonely.

Saturday morning my mom came and held me. She walked the dog and cleaned the kitchen and offered to buy me the special, expensive food I need to help me get back on the eating plan I've fallen off of these last few weeks when I needed the most to be taking care of myself but when I put taking care of myself on the most distant burner available because it felt too hard. Her offer made me burst into tears, out of gratitude. And out of the shame that comes from needing so much help for so long. It was sweet to work side by side and get the house on the road to not being a total disaster. We didn't talk much and that was nice too.

She left and I spent the rest of the day alternating between sitting quietly and reading, resting and then working on a task. Everywhere I turn inside and outside this house there is a pile that begs to be dealt with. It exhausts me to see them and it exhausts me to deal with them. The mix of rest and work soothed me and by the evening I felt agitated, knowing I still needed rest and knowing I needed a change of scenery. I put on a cute outfit and a little make-up, drove the San Francisco with the intent of checking out LitCrawl. Instead I got a parking spot directly in front of my friend's house and stayed in all night, ordering my favorite Chinese food for delivery and watching a movie on the couch.

Sunday morning I woke up early and slipped out of the house with my dog. We walked the quiet, cool streets of the city to Blue Bottle on Linden Street. My city soothed me, as she always does. I love the feeling of being alone surrounded by people. I love all the human interactions I have, each and every time I'm in San Francisco. They are brief but there is something about them that makes me so happy. "Good morning. Cute dog." Smiles. Acknowledgement. Community. Camaraderie. Contentment. I took deep breaths, breathing in the feeling of being me, a me I recognize and love. I talked to a beloved college friend and that filled me up. I looked and listened, appreciating the colors and the familiarity of these streets. The memories they hold.

I took a different route back to my friend's house and ended up walking past murals painted on plywood barriers across the street from Alamo Square park, down the block from the Painted Ladies. I admired the art and felt grateful for the impulse and need to create art. A block later I slowed down, across the street from the huge, rambling Victorian I lived in back in 2003--the year I turned twenty-five. The year I started working in organ donation. Four adults sat on the front steps, drinking and hanging out in their pajamas. It was clear they were still going from the night before, not starting a new day. I hesitated, staring at them and they started staring back. Feeling shy but feeling like me I crossed the street. They stopped talking, curious.

"I used to live here," I said.

The smiles came. "No way. What room?" Testing me, maybe.

"The big one by the kitchen," I said. Now the smiles got bigger.

We talked about the great parties in that house, one of which was still going. "Come in!" they said.

So many smiles, so many memories, so many little stories of their lives there and mine. I moved out a only a couple years before one of them moved in--we wondered how many degrees of separation it would take us to link our tenancies. Real conversation with strangers. One of my favorite things.

I turned to leave, walking down the hardwood hallway pointing to the doors. This was my office, where I allocated organs for transplant alone at my computer in the middle of the night. I touched the bathroom door and smiled. And in here I had one of the best kisses of my life.

Life. Change. Memories. Possibility. The dark places. The hopeful places. The sweet, sweet beauty and grace that comes so often hand in hand with seemingly unbearable exhaustion and pain. What a strange, amazing design it is to be human.

Depression

In honor of Mental Health Day, which was yesterday, I add some words. This was written a few months ago and does describe my current mental state.

Coming out of a depression is like taking deep sips of the clearest air. Like drinking the purest, coldest water--the icy water out of Arthur's red Igloo cooler at soccer practice. Ideas and insights pour into my mind unchecked. I can't get to the page fast enough. Some of it is relief at no longer being in the pit. In the darkness. And some of it is the other face of the beastly angel that is my mind, the joyful extreme. I earn it because I pay the heavy pile of stolen coins, the anguish of being deep inside a painful brain that lies to me and won't let me out until its time.

My depression came on two weeks ago, most likely because I got sick. Those two things almost always go together. I got sick and that made me scared--scared about being sick when I'm alone with the kids. Scared because when I get sick my body shuts me down and I can barely get out of the chair. Scared because I turn a lot of resources inward, trying to recognize whether I'm sick enough to need to go get checked out or whether the muscle memory of being sick fires the panic buttons inside me and I'm really just regular sick.

Depression for me is wearing poop-colored glasses. I hate where I live. I can't think of anyone I actually want to be with, even as I remind myself of all the people who love me and accept me who would happily take my call. I can only see the things I don't like about myself, even as I'm trying to soothe myself saying "These are the mean voices. This is not the truth. This is the darkness and it won't last forever."

I got a little bit better physically and my mood lifted a bit too, which made it harder to be plunged back down the next day. Oh. Still here? Fuck.

I balance my physiological health with my mental health. The isolation is bad. The loneliness is crushing. But I don't want to go out. I don't want to talk. I don't want to spend the energy it will take to be around people.

I have never been suicidal and I don't think I ever will be, mostly because this life was given to me by a young woman when she died 18 years ago. It's my gift. It's my responsibility. It's my honor to be here. And there are times when I sit in my own head and beg "Do I have to keep being this person? Does it have to be this hard? Isn't there something I can do to make it better?" It's why I avoid meditation, afraid that in the quiet I will tip into the abyss and not come out again.

People tell me I'm too hard on myself and I now understand that to be true, even when I'm not depressed. I am healing that part of myself, slowly and steadily. And because of my yoga practice, my spiritual practice, my sacred movement and sacred sisterhood at The Practice I remember to find my breath. To tell myself, I have this breath. And this next one. Can I stay here, in the pain and the darkness, knowing it will not be forever? Yes.