Dark Days of the past

In 1998, I was a young mother. 28 with three small children. After two boys I should have been happy and excited to have my little porcelain doll daughter, but instead I was terrified. The therapist told me that I shouldn't feel any more overwhelmed to be a role model for a daughter, because I have already been teaching my sons how to view women. Great. She also tells me that I should look in my childhood to find the roots of my problems. Seek out my parents mistakes. Somehow that doesn't reassure me that I can be a good mother either. Our sessions didn't continue for very long.



I have never been easy to get along with. I am moody, irritable, a worrier. So if my post partum emotions were a little intense, it still didn't seem that much worse than usual. Ten years later, the details have blurred, some perhaps too dark to see, some blocked out in self-preservation, most memories just faded by time. I do remember fighting (about the pies, of all things!) with my in-laws when they came for . . . either Thanksgiving or Christmas. There were some Saturdays where I couldn't drag myself from bed, and spent the day crying. Church was one of the hardest parts -- pretending for three long hours that everything was okay, because I couldn't admit that it wasn't. There were many days that were just pretty much normal, though everything felt harder, and sort of clouded over.

I remember the feeling that by the end of each day, my children had consumed me -- sucked everything right out of me, and left me a pile of dry bones.

And I distictly remember the dark of night, awake, and changing diapers, with cold light slicing across the changing table, lifting my little angel, and whispering, "don't be like me. . . don't be like me . . . "

My husband first realized that something was truly wrong in the first week of January. He was desperate to get the Christmas decorations put away, and I couldn't pull myself together to get it done. He confronted me, begging me to work on it, saying that he would do it himself, only he knew that he wouldn't be able to do it to my exacting standards. Packing away the Christmas decorations is one area in which I am a perfectionist. Everything is carefully wrapped, boxes are labelled. But I remember that year, looking around, and realizing that I did not care. I felt so dead inside that I couldn't feel anything about these precious memories anymore. And I could not imagine another Christmas. The future was so black, I just couldn't see that far.