Warning, lane departure!
This post was begun on 16.July, 2021. The words have sat, slowly festering, in my draft queue till this morning, when I decided to click through on all the drafts and make myself accountable to finishing them. I was shocked to see that this one was so...full. More than just a few scrambled words and notations. A full (incomplete) post.
And I cried as I read it. Because part of me is still there. The me of now is just the convenient shell of form and function, that I've covered all that mess up in. She is still me, and I am still her, and we are still just broken bits scraping along.
Here's what I wrote first:
I've been avoiding this page for months now. Steering far clear of all the white space and the demands of its blinking cursor. Staying in the "safe zone" where I don't have to acknowledge how disorderly the chaos in my head has gotten. Going through the motions...running on empty...too tired to think clearly.
Maybe that's it.
Maybe that's the problem.
Too tired to think clearly.
No clear thought. No organization of thought. No logic or reasoning or analysis.
I've been struggling since Henri was born.
The face of my eldest when he walked into the delivery room and heard the doctor say, "I can't stop the bleeding."
Those fears still take up room. Those moments of terror in freeze-frame images my mind flicks through at the slightest trigger.
I don't know that I'll ever be able to write them out and free myself of their weight. Every time I try, I feel like I can't breathe.
We brought him home into chaos. Our hard-earned homecoming absolutely destroyed by the cruelty of toxic family histrionics and coupled with pandemic lockdown. Sleepless and under attack those first days, I wept as I nursed him. My eldest son and my partner both watched me splinter and wondered who this stranger was. Post-partum took over...telling me they would be better off without me... telling me I should have bled out...telling me to take all the pills in our medicine cabinet one night. Self-preservation stopped me just short of that. I sat on the edge of the toilet, carefully putting each pill back into the correct bottle, overcome by tremors and silent tears. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep quiet that night in the bathroom and run my tongue over the scar from that wound as I write this now. Symbolic, that. Biting through my own flesh to make sure my self-loathing didn't disturb anyone else. This scar whose very existence is proof that I am capable of destroying myself but not of asking for help.
At my 6-week check-up, my questionnaire was flagged. So exhausted was I, that I'd actually filled out the answers truthfully instead of with some version of "I'm fine". I sat there, stoic on the outside and withering on the inside, as my midwife gently coaxed me to try medication. Even in that moment, railing internally at my failure and cursing my weakness. There, as she spoke softly to my broken heart, I wanted to disappear. To cease. To never have been.
My eldest was watching. To this day I think that's the only reason I actually followed up and took my prescription. After a few days, the edges blurred. Nothing cut quite as deep. Nothing was sharp or loud. Everything dulled. Everything grayed. There was no high...no low...no importance or impetus. I just floated in a cozy gray haze, going through the motions of motherhood without a care. Nothing penetrated the gray. Not fear or anger or joy or love. Henri nursed and napped, fussed and fretted, and I was but a dispassionate automaton. The daily pill just strong enough to silence every emotion.
Until it stopped working.
Several months in, my mind cleared just enough that I realized I was having near-constant anxiety attacks. Every morning walk ended in hives and racing heart. Trips to the grocers were terrifying. I clutched railings and armrests and froze mid-step. My mind went into hyper-drive...feeding me never-ending reels of worst-case scenarios at every turn. My alertness to detail (that I've always relied on) was suddenly both overwhelming and unreliable, creating danger from the most innocent sources. Daily life was terrifying. Every noise and shadow and shifting of light caused me to freeze. I could no longer trust my senses...or my brain to make sense of their input. I became angry. So exhausted by the constant pain of heightened stimuli that my defenses took over. I was suddenly spastic. My arms and legs reacting to sensory input before I could think. Tripping over my feet...crashing into furniture...spilling my coffee and rearing back from the sudden hot drip.
Somewhere, somehow...a moment of clarity. The pills! One days' realization that what I'd needed then, was the problem now. They'd done their job, wrapping me in bubble-wrap through my post-partum. Thank goodness for that! But I no longer needed them now. Bluntly put, that gray fog bubble wrap that had kept me safe during the worst of it was now blunting my senses so much that they were becoming hyperactive to break through. I was like an exposed nerve, reacting to every bit of sensory input as though under attack.
So, I stopped. Finished the week out and said, "No more!".
But the hair-trigger response my body had developed in that time remained. I find myself, even now, having to "talk myself down" from my fear responses when we're in traffic, or when I see a bee, or when there's an unexpected sound. And I hate it. I hate that I'm still so reactive. It's physically painful- the muscles spasming up and knotting. It's exhausting-the rush of adrenaline and resulting low blood sugar. It makes me feel weak and broken all over again.
While I waded through post-partum and meds, the stressors only increased. The two-weeks of distance learning that started right after we came home from the hospital extended into the end of the school year. My eldest, a high-schooler, was suddenly home 24/7 because of the lockdown. Our small apartment shrank day by day, as I tried to keep a newborn quiet during the hours of remote learning. Zoom-school meant a constant presence of computer camera in the main part of our home, which hampered every natural response of early motherhood. I snuck around the outer corners of rooms, trying to find private spots to nurse and eat and nap. I couldn't help but feel embarrassed when the camera caught my post-partum-pudge on display as I fled past. I couldn't help but feel I was failing my eldest son in not being able to offer him a separate place in which to do his schoolwork. I couldn't help but compare myself now to myself of years ago, when I was a new mother to my first baby and had all the normality of a pre-Covid birth and homecoming.
Comparison. Oh, that took over as well. I found myself forever falling short. He didn't sleep except for power naps? My fault somehow for not being able to comfort him down properly. Nursing problems? Mine to address and suffer through bouts of mastitis for. Reflux? My diet, obviously. His lip and tongue tie? Something I should be able to work around. All of it my doing and my undoing. All of it not going as smoothly as it had...or as I remembered it...or mis-remembered it from when I'd had my first. 17 years later and failing at what I thought I'd so easily done before. 17 years of fervent hopes dashed in the reality of my failures.
Even my body was betraying me. The weight accrued in pregnancy failing to shed off as it had once so easily and quickly done. Insomnia at an all-time high.
Continued...
Some 16 months later here, having found this post I don't really remember writing, and shocked that I was brave enough at one point to do so. Not brave enough to post it and send those words out into the world, of course. But somehow brave enough to sit down and type out that ugly truth.
A repeated line. A repeated truth.
I continue to struggle. I continue to cycle through shame and rage...with myself. I haven't bounced back. I haven't rolled with the punches. I haven't adjusted, naturally or otherwise, to any of the changes of the last 2+ years with grace, or found new footing, or...or...or...
I haven't re-invented myself.
I haven't re-emerged as a new, better parent and person.
I haven't recovered.
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