call for backup - Farewell Stranger

Just Say the Word

May 16, 2013 By Robin 14 Comments

Everyone needs help once in a while.

My kids have been sick and my husband’s away and a couple of meals would really help.

But asking for help is hard.

Some days are really long and I could use a play date so my kids and I aren’t in each others’ faces all the time.

I’m lucky to be part of a group of women where this isn’t a problem.

My dad needs help and I can’t get there for a few days. Can someone help him?

Need help? Ask for help. Several will respond.

I just had surgery and I need someone to drive my oldest to school tomorrow.

Notice someone struggling? Nominate her for help. Spread the love.

Some baking would be lovely.

It doesn’t have to be big things. Sometimes the little things are what we need most.

Ask for help. Offer help.

We all need help sometimes.

I feel incredibly lucky to have found a group of friends here from whom I can ask for help when needed and offer help when asked. It really is a blessing and I wish that for everyone.

Filed Under: Happy things Tagged With: call for back-up, community, gratitude, spreading the love

Grey Skies and Runaway Trains

April 7, 2013 By Robin 25 Comments

It rained yesterday.

We don’t get a lot of rain here. We get snow, which is mostly accompanied by brilliant sunshine, but grey skies are rare. It’s one of the reasons I love living here.

Last week spring made a valiant effort to overtake winter. The sun shone, the temperature rose, and the mounds of snow by the sides of the roads melted. I was living in the sunshine and loving it. But over the last few days the skies have turned grey.

Click for image source

Life is not always sunny, of course. But for me it has been sunny more often than not, and I’ve been able to pause in those catch-your-breath moments and really soak it in. But my ability to see the sun can disappear as quickly as the sun itself.

I don’t function when I don’t get enough sleep, and I’m not getting enough sleep. And I’m losing hope that I will suddenly, miraculously start getting enough. After a long week followed by a couple of rough nights, the rain entered my life yesterday – both literally and metaphorically.

I’ve been here before and I know exactly where this sleep deprivation road leads. And I have no desire to take that path again. I don’t want to feel that way and I don’t want to have to say, Actually, it happened again the second time too.

I want, with every fibre of my being, to be able to push the emergency button and make this runaway train stop. But I’m feeling the desperation an engineer must feel when he knows the train is going to hit something in the tracks. It’s there, it’s in front of me, and the momentum feels like too much right now. It’s bigger than me and I’m not in control of the outcome.

I was hoping today would be better, but instead I woke up to snow. It’s time to hit the brakes.

Wish me luck.

Filed Under: Postpartum depression Tagged With: admissions, call for back-up, meltdown, sleep

2:40 a.m.

April 2, 2013 By Robin 26 Comments

“Goodnight,” I say, kissing him. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Then a whispered plea. Please sleep.

The chances of him sleeping from this 2:40 a.m. tuck-in until morning are next to none. The chances of him sleeping until 5 a.m. are…okay. I give it even odds. But he’s not likely to get to even 6 a.m. before waking up.

Which means I’m going to be waking up. Again.

I haven’t had more than four hours of sleep in a row since the beginning of October. And that’s rare. Really rare. Sometimes I get three in a row (more often lately – fingers crossed) but too often it’s two hours between wake-ups, or two and a half if I’m lucky.

As we enter this sixth month with Ethan, I now know with much greater certainty that sleep deprivation was a huge contributor to my PPD with Connor. I look back and wish we had done something different, but I honestly don’t know what that would have been. We tried everything.

We tried a night of bottles so I could sleep when Connor was three months old, after which he refused to take a bottle for months as if punishing me for wanting to sleep. It was after that option was taken away—that one thing that would let me sleep sometimes instead of having to feed him—that I started to feel like I was going to die. From exhaustion. From desperation. From despair.

I don’t have that issue this time, thank goodness. I started to feel those same feelings of being desperate for sleep, thinking about it all the time, wondering how long it will last this time, and I asked for help. I can’t do it again, and luckily I have a husband who’s at home and can get up with the kids in the mornings so I can sleep just a little bit more.

So I’m not desperate. I’m not in despair.

I am feeling it, though. I stood in front of a shelf in the grocery store last week for at least 10 minutes before I was able to choose an item and put it in my cart. My brain just wasn’t processing.

I’m clumsy. I walk into things a lot and am always sporting a bruise or three. My synapses just aren’t connecting.

I stood in front of the toaster the other day waiting for it to pop and then realized I hadn’t put any bread in. The next day I managed to make toast for myself, but then without thinking I cut it into four squares the way Connor likes it. My neurons are firing, but perhaps not quite in the right order. (But that’s okay; toast in little squares is actually pretty good.)

I spend a lot of time looking at Ethan these days. I’m soaking him in. Breathing in his smell and imprinting the rolls of his thighs on my fingers. I want to remember what his baby laugh sounds like and appreciate the gift of watching a person learn to navigate the world. He will be our last baby and there are many things about that fact that leave me a bit teary.

But the lack of sleep isn’t one of them. When my brain rebels against wakefulness and my eyelids refuse to stay open I remember: It’s the last time. I won’t have to do this again.

I want it to be over, this quest for sleep over which I have no real control.

But at least I know this: It’s the last time.

Filed Under: Hard things, Postpartum depression Tagged With: call for back-up, sleep

No Joy

April 25, 2012 By Robin 27 Comments

I kept waiting for my first trimester to be over so I’d stop feeling sick and start experiencing the euphoric energy I’d felt the first time.

That energy never came; I only became more and more fatigued as the pregnancy progressed. I started to develop insomnia so bad that I’d only sleep two or three hours a night. The lack of sleep started to get to me; my moods fluctuated wildly, and I had to quit my part-time editing job due to complete apathy towards the work.

These are not my words, and yet this is my story. I just didn’t know it until I read it.

You may have gathered from yesterday’s post that things are slightly less than peachy here. I’ve been struggling for a while, but I thought it was just the natural progression of having moved away from family and friends and settling (or not) into whatever’s next. It was a new job and a longer commute and wondering where certain things are after our move. It was a pregnancy and a reduction in my med dose and a subsequent bump back up when that didn’t work. It was a small boy who’s almost four and all the challenges that come with that.

Except that’s not all it is.

The excerpt above is from a post called Robbed of the Joy of Pregnancy by Alexis Lesa on Postpartum Progress. Something lurking at the back of my brain took me to the antenatal depression tag on that site over the weekend, where I read one post and then another. And then I came to that one.

I know this is an issue for me. I just didn’t know it. It was an issue during my pregnancy with Connor too. I even did a Google search for antenatal depression, thought “huh” and then moved on. And was surprised when I got postpartum depression. (It’s okay – you can roll your eyes.)

The only thing in the above quote that I’m not experiencing is insomnia. I’m having the usual pregnancy-related trouble sleeping, but for the last few weeks I could happily have slept all the time. And, to be frank, some days I did. Wanting to stay in bed all the time is usually a huge light bulb for me, but I put a blanket over that light bulb and went back to sleep.

The thing is, though, that once I read that post the light burned bright again. I confessed to the problem to my #PPDChat group and a very dear (real life) friend of mine started looking up resources for me in this new city. She found a counsellor and a women’s mental health clinic and that was really all I needed to get me back on the right path.

Could I have searched those things out myself?

Yes.

No.

Yes, I’m on a first-name basis with Google. No, when the ground is coming up at me I don’t have the resources to find resources.

But I do have people who will do that for me, as long as I can muster up the courage to ask.

Image credit: GregRob on Flickr

Filed Under: Hard things, Pregnancy Tagged With: admissions, antenatal depression, call for back-up, depression, meltdown, telling the truth

Sliding Towards Happy

March 8, 2012 By Robin 38 Comments

I suppose it’s natural that after selling one’s house and quitting one’s job and moving to another city away from one’s parents (one’s main source of support) that one would eventually come to a point where things feel somewhat less than hunky dory.

Or that’s my experience, anyway.

A few weeks ago a good friend asked how the transition was going and whether it had been at all hard. “Not at all,” I told him. “I don’t feel like I’ve even looked back.”

I’m one of those people who likes change. I love new places and new things and anything that gets me away from the stagnant ordinary. I get bored way too easily.

I’m also one of those people who doesn’t like to lose what’s overly familiar and who ticks along best with a routine.

These two ways of being are not mutually exclusive. They’re also not the perfect recipe for existential equilibrium.

Throw in stubborn and a dose of high standards and I’m pretty much screwed.

Things were going really well and I hadn’t at all questioned our decision to do this. However…I mentioned that I lowered my anti-depressant dose about three weeks ago. I did that for all sorts of reasons, and in large part because I don’t want to be dependent on this medication anymore. But I am.

I blame the ramping-up period of getting on to this medication for my breakdown earlier this year. Turns out coming off is no picnic either.

I knew within a week or so that coming off wasn’t a good idea. But once you’re in the crap, you kind of don’t want to lose the withdrawal days you’ve already invested, you know? So I kept going with the lower dose, praying that it would even out and I’d find myself again.

I didn’t.

I’m now at the end of week two of being sick with this horrible cold that’s going around. I missed a bunch of work last week and found myself very glad for the excuse of illness that allowed me to stay in bed a bit more than usual. Wanting to stay in bed is never a good sign for me. But it’s one that’s so easy to ignore. What is not easy to ignore, however, is having a record-breaking fight with your husband. In a restaurant. In front of your son.

Oy.

For a minute it felt like we were right back to the horrible state we were in a couple of years ago, except this time we were in it after having made a major decision that left us in a totally new world. Totally stuck, in other words.

It was awful. This past weekend was awful.

But my husband, bless him, was able to ask me if having lowered my medication dose was perhaps not such a good idea, and I was able to rail and say No, it’s not and but I don’t want to be on it and I’m scared.

And then I upped the dose again.

It has been immediately, noticeably better. Which, frankly, pisses me off. I will resent this medication for the rest of my life, whether I ever come off it or not. (I know, not a constructive way to feel, but there you go.)

But I suppose better is good and good is better than wanting to run away into the mountains and hope nobody notices you’re gone.

So that’s where things stand. The whole lot of suck from earlier this week is gone—or temporarily beaten back, anyway—and I feel like I can cope again. And maybe when I get over being sick I’ll be able to look a little farther afield and find my happy again.

Speaking of happy, I was recently visited by the Fairy Hobmother. He – yes, he’s a he – has generously sponsored this post, and for that I am grateful. Be sure to visit him at Appliances Online (and tell him I said hi!).