Changes Are A Coming

My firstborn graduated from high school in May.  This is something both very exciting and exquisitely bittersweet all at once.  Our bird is flying the nest.  It's such a cliche but it's my cliche now, up close and personal.   I have worked really, really hard to make it the best nest possible.  I made an intention very early on in regards to my offspring to be emotionally present for them.  I didn't even know what that meant, I just knew I needed to be emotionally connected.  I ended up looking at patterns in my life and worked to change the ones that weren't helpful.  I wanted my girls to know, I was on their side, and had their back and they could talk to me.  Every human being longs to have connection with someone who sees them and hears them...just as they are even if they are not on the same page. 

What I didn't expect was along the way, I would learn how to care for my own self. 

I am learning how to do be present for myself, to listen to the divine intuition that is a magnificent guide for how to proceed.  It can be just a small flicker of a thought that registers for but a second, and I have learned over time...LISTEN TO IT.  Lean into it. 

In my head, I very much want my eldest daughter to gain her independence as she moves six hours away but for my heart, this departure has been unfathomable for years.   Watching a movie or tv scene of the drop off at college has ripped me to pieces. 

So now it's our turn. 

From the very beginning, to bring Riley into the world, we struggled.  It was a two year journey which included horrendous fertility treatments.   We finally succeeded, and then we brought our bundle of joy home and I went off the deep end.  My postpartum depression was not only unbearable sadness but relentless anxiety.  Anxiousness permeated every thought and decision and it was never ending.  It was a very rough few months and the pictures where I smiled betrayed what was really going on.  There are moments of time that are hardened in my mind as the worst of my life and it was during this period.  

I eventually sought help and began coming out of it.  (I didn't know how to clearly communicate and ask for help) The first night of taking an anti-depressant was one of those.  I didn't sleep at all (which was already a problem) and for hours truly thought that I was going to have to be hospitalized and the baby was going to be taken away. 

The pervasive loneliness, isolation and feelings of losing my mind slowly lessened but it has stayed with me.  When I think of that time, the pain is easily brought to the surface. 

As a baby, Riley was my constant and the learning of unconditional love.  It was the two of us twenty four hours a day, seven days a week with George popping in every now and then.   I was her meal ticket and it seemed to never end.  She looked to me for everything and I wanted to learn how to do "that."  In the beginning I faked smiled and singsonged through it.  And over the years through much hard work,  the fake smile became genuine.  With therapy, I began learning who I was, how to be in the moment, and how to feel everything that came my way.  I learned that feelings are not who I am, and they are energy that will flow if you allow them.  

The letting the energy flow has been one of the hardest skills to learn. 

In this past year, I'm learning with some very intense therapy to be caring and nurturing towards all my deeply seeded parts of pain and anxiety.   I am going back and addressing times of trauma that are imprinted in my soul.  Trauma doesn't have to be a horrific one time event.  It is something that gets trapped in your psyche because you did not know how to handle the situation at hand.  And each person handles the same life situations differently.   In therapy, long forgotten scenes pop in my mind that made a lasting impression.  These times are the foundation for my emotional muscle memory.  This is what I act out of every day.   "The Body Keeps The Score" book by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk has been one of my sources to understand how deeply embedded events in our lives end up affecting us for life. 

Some of those moments I can still picture in my head from our old house are when Riley was a baby and I felt utterly helpless, alone and teetering on the brink.  Over and over and over again, I didn't think I was going to survive.  Through my therapist, I am processing these times with all the skills that I have now.  It is a reconciling that I never knew I needed but has been so powerful.  Slowly these feelings don't terrify me as they did in the past. 

But now...my eldest is venturing off.  The child inside of me feels like she will be overwhelmed and decimated by this loss, if I label it a loss.   I am grieving her evolving to a new stage of life and I know I am not alone.  She will still need me, but it is in a new and different way than the last eighteen years.  She will not be in our home.  She will not be in my physical presence everyday and her room will be empty.  

{Time out for crying.}  

 The pain energy will move through, the crying jags will recede. Life will change and we will adjust.  At times, this summer, as we don't see things eye to eye, I have moments where I think, oh my gosh, yes, it's time and then I quickly move back to, I am going to miss her like the dickens. 

On her end, my eldest is both excited and scared as well. Coming out of the crazy pandemic which rocked
her last two years of high school and Italy trip (!) this structure loving girl is ready to establish a new routine in her new place.  She is discombobulated once again and has lots to do to get ready to move on.  She needs my help.  It turns my stomach sometimes as I engage in college virtual seminars and then I talk to the scared part and it passes.  I am working to be present for her as much as possible while tending to my own needs.  It's not pretty at all and it's not photogenic. 

Yet, this is THE new learning curve.   Both/and.  Both being present for her AND myself. 

We can do hard things.  We have done hard things and we can do them again. 

We will both survive, and thrive and there may be dips and valleys along the way, but that is life. 

Namaste. 

Ode To The Bravery of Carrie Fisher (not necessarily Princess Leia)

Can 2016 get any worse?  There was a joke about hiding Betty White away.  So many entertainers have died, Prince and George Michael are gone.  I really didn't know David Bowie but I liked what he had to say as a person. But I really loved what Carrie Fisher had to say.   And now she is gone and she was only 60!  I'm forty-eight and that gives me pause.  What if I never say or do what I was meant to because I am too scared of what people will think.

The author, Anne Lamott said this...
…Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you’re 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written; or you didn’t go swimming in warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen. Repent just means to change direction—and NOT to be said by someone who is waggling their forefinger at you. Repentance is a blessing. Pick a new direction, one you wouldn’t mind ending up at, and aim for that. Shoot the moon.

(It thrills me that repent means to change direction and she mentions that's it's not wagging a finger in someone's face.  It's a blessing not a judgment.  I've never had that wonderful connotation of that word and I've started to rewire the definition in my head.)

Back to Carrie Fisher.  I know I watched Star Wars long ago but that is not what stuck with me about her.  The movie Postcards from The Edge stuck so I read the book.  And then I read Surrender the Pink and Wishful Drinking.  I just added The Princess Diarist to my hold's list on Overdrive.   Yesterday, I watched the "Wishful Drinking" special again On Demand.  The diagram of her family was hilarious.

It must have been in the 2008 book, Wishful Drinking, what she said about living with bi-polar:   "At times, being bipolar can be an all-consuming challenge, requiring a lot of stamina and even more courage, so if you're living with this illness and functioning at all, it's something to be proud of, not ashamed of.  They should issue medals along with the steady stream of medication."

That resonated with me so deeply and clinched me as a fan.  I suffered terribly with Postpartum depression and anxiety after my first child.  It was the hardest thing I have ever gone through.  I felt so very alone and there were so many days, weeks,  and sometimes just a moment felt like a struggle.  Making it through an hour was sometimes way too much to comprehend.   I was so alone and felt so hopeless with a helpless infant who needed me, just me.  It was the lowest of lows and the anxiety and the crying were endless.  (Mine and Riley's!)  It took me months to understand that I needed to take an anti-depressant to get back on track.  And it took at least a year to begin to feel like myself again.  The hiccup was that the first night I took an anti-depressant, it lit me up even higher with anxiety than I already was experiencing.   I didn't sleep a wink and I thought that they were going to have to lock me away because I couldn't sleep nor could I function anymore.  I can recall the terror of that period instantly and that night permanently and forever scarred me.  In hindsight, I  should have taken an anti-anxiety along with the anti-depressant until my body adjusted to the anti-depressant.   That bout with PPD changed my life and started me on the journey I am now on.

I can't imagine living with a daily struggle of bipolar that is so merciless that leads to electric-shock therapy.  But you have to do what you have to do.  One can overcome so many odds.

When I read that passage in Wishful Drinking, I thought, oh my gosh, yes!  Instead of looking down on people with mental illness, they really should be applauded because it can be an ongoing, daily, sometimes hourly struggle.  And Carrie Fisher said this out loud!!  Wow!  Bravo!  Through the pages of a book, it made me feel not so alone for what I had gone through.  Sometimes, a connection can be made by reading a book, and now it can be online.

I will miss her wit and her courage and seeing her dog, Gary. I will miss that she stood up for herself and body image for many of us when they shamed her for not looking like her 19 year old self in a bikini.  Carrie wrote about the despair of mental illness but also made it funny.  Princess Leia was a formidable opponent, but it is Carrie Fisher who was the bravest bad ass to me.   Someone who speaks up for those who have no voice.   RIP Carrie Fisher.  You are gone too soon.
Namaste.

Can I Run From These Feelings Any Faster?

Earlier this morning, feelings were sitting on my chest.  Discomfort.

Aaaargggghhhhh.

 (If you've read any of my blogs this is my running THEME and I want to flee the discomfort as soon as I'm aware of it's presence - like a snake in my house type of fleeing)

Feelings are just energy.  They are a normal part of life.  It has been a continual process for me to learn how to cope when the discomfort arises.  I know, I truly know in my head,  I need to be curious and welcoming to the energy and not fight it, and the energy will flow. It can be a day, or a few hours, or just minutes.  And if it's a major life upheaval, it shows up repeatedly for a period of time.

I spent the past few years, intimately learning to let the feelings flow.  More than thirteen years ago, I shut down my feelings after a terrible bout of postpartum depression.   The PPD started a few months before childbirth and ran for the entire year after. It was such a depth of sadness, pain and anxiety and I NEVER wanted to go THERE again.   At times, I felt the struggle to live through each moment.  Along with the sadness, anxious thoughts never stopped in my head. I can visualize one particular Saturday morning with George and I could not make up my mind about going to Target for a shopping run.  It was an endless loop:  "Can I go?", "Will the baby get hungry?" "Will I need to breastfeed?"  "I really need to get out the house" "George can help" "This is the only day he can help" "I can't go, it's too much" and then it started over. And all of the questions repeated endlesssly.  It was utterly draining.

God bless George.  I didn't tell him everything.  It was a very isolating and lonely existence.  It was the loneliest I had ever felt in my life.

So I unconsciously stopped feeling.  And that's not good either.  You can't just stop the so-called negative emotions, you also stop the pleasurable ones as well.  I have had to learn how to have fun again.  And that seems cra cra, but oh so true.

What I'm awakening to, is that what comes with those feelings are thoughts. Now that I'm not so scared of the feelings, I'm seeing that thoughts go through my head SIMULTANEOUSLY with the flow of emotions.  Those thoughts tell me something is wrong with me.

What comes first, the thought or the feeling?  The chicken or the egg? It doesn't matter, I have some rewiring to do.  I just saw things more clearly this morning.

I got a little more curious because I knew the sadness would flow.  And that's when I caught my thoughts going into a rabbit hole.

The thoughts are part of a story I tell myself that is also on loop.  We all have stories about ourselves whether they are true or not.  That voice in my head says I am not enough. Unless one has graduated from Mindfulness - at an Eckhart Tolle level, the thoughts are there.   The work I have to do is to rewrite the story that I tell myself.  I have to question the thoughts that pop up in my head and ask, is this true?  If this person does not accept me, does that mean I'm not worthy?  If my dress size is considered plus size, am I worthy?  Even though my house is not neat and I lose my patience with my kids or my husband, am I worthy?  The questions are endless and oh so personal for each one of us.   Career, job, material things, health, accepting anyone in our life for who they are, spiritual journey, on and on.  If we think we are not worthy, until this, whatever THIS is, occurs, we tell ourselves that we are not enough.

I know I am worthy, as each person who is alive is worthy.

I know deep down, I am love at my core. I know also that I have a faulty loop.  So I shall work on questioning and rewiring.  And eventually I will spend less time on this, and more time on loving.

Namaste.

Letting Go Tom Cruise Take My Breath Away (for just a moment)

Oh, how I loved Top Gun.  I caught it on cable yesterday just in time for the volleyball scene.

Yes, that volleyball scene.

Lucky me!!

This is one of my favorite memories of movie watching in the 80's.  I don't remember who I was with or where I watched it but I so enjoyed watching these guys jump, dive and high five especially Slider.  (I had to IMDB him to see what he has been up to...) And is it a coincidence that my husband has a resemblance to Iceman...  Hmmm.  This scene  as well as Jake standing by the car in "Sixteen Candles," Morris Day and The Time singing The Bird in "Purple Rain" and way too many moments of "Bull Durham"are cemented in my brain from high school and college as pure happiness.

Yet in the last years, I have had a hard time watching anything with Tom Cruise in it that I loved before - and there were many.  Cocktail anyone?  It's amazing how even bad movies can be good when you are a teenager.    Tom disappointed me so with his rant against Brooke Shields and anti-depressants.  I was actually enraged.  As a person who really suffered with postpartum depression, his belief system and platform infuriated me. Yet I am beginning to mellow.    I almost changed the channel but then decided why not watch it.  I looked it up just now, it's been seven years since his rant on the Today Show.  And Tom still looks unhinged in the footage.

Watching "Top Gun" nearly thirty years later is amusing.  In hindsight, I can see that Tom was a little too cocky for me.  Some moments of dialogue make me want to cringe.  But how can you turn your back on some awesome Kenny Loggins' soundtracks?!  At my ripe age, Viper has even gotten more attractive.  How did that happen?

I think that for me to enjoy life to the fullest now,  I have to let go of everyone else having the same opinion as me or allowing myself to be close to someone with a different political or theological mindset.  I use to be so uncomfortable and off put when someone had a different opinion as me and now that is fading.  I was distressed  because I didn't feel like it was okay to have my own opinion much less OWN it fully.  Now that I am feeling more secure in my skin and self worth is rising, it is easier and easier to allow others to be themselves (AND more importantly for me to be me!)  It's a work in progress.

So now I can let Tom Cruise take my breath away for just a little while reveling in the 80's and it will all be o-kay.

Namaste.

A few tears on the yoga mat

I have been practicing yoga in a class setting once a week, this is my goal. One day I would like to do more but for now, this is what I can manage. I keep learning more and more about myself through yoga (you would think I would know enough by now, right?). Lately, towards the end of the yoga session, I feel emotions well up in me and I feel the need to cry. Some might think this is a bad thing, for me it is a wonderful thing. Yoga releases "stuff" bottled up and in the twists, and turns, and positions and breathing, emotions are released, as well as toxins. The first time it happened, I was wondering what was going on and now I embrace it. I tend to forget it may happen and bam, there it is. My therapist says that therapy and yoga go hand in hand. I mentioned it to one of the yoga teachers and she said, oh yes, it happens.

For several years, I did not release my emotions. It goes back to the period of infertility that was followed by birth and then postpartum depression. I cried most nearly every day during the two years it took to get pregnant. Some days, I cried off and on all day when there was a bad result and there were a lot of bad results. For those who don't know, it was an awful period full of angst, uncertainty, turmoil, and all of this was then aided by hormone injections. I endured shot after shot, transvaginal ultrasound after transvaginal ultrasound, blood draws out the wazoo, fighting with insurance companies and doctors, waiting for test results, waiting a month or two until we could try again and lots and lots of crying. On top of that was doctor ordered sex (when sex was still on the table - we worked up to the "cup" in the second year). How romantic!? and not what you pictured in wanting to start a family. But we did finally achieve pregnancy, (after one miscarriage) and my beloved first child was born, who I love with my whole being. (And the second child too, who was a miracle in her own right as well, coming naturally!!) And then....I fall into a deep, dark, isolating hopeless depression that scared the bejesus out of me. I understand now, it actually started during the pregnancy, as I was so anxious and worried about EVERYTHING. Anxiety can be a huge part of postpartum depression.

I cried a lot during her first year of life, and especially those first months BUT I worked really, really, really hard not to show it to her (or others really, it is very, very shaming) I put on a smile and I sang to her but it was really, really, really hard. I see video and I'm smiling and saying her name over and over again but what I remember vividly is the overwhelming despair. After I recovered, I did NOT want to cry anymore, EVER. Perhaps this is when I learned to eat my way though emotional uncomfortableness and I'm still doing it. I have gained a grasp on it and it doesn't occur as much as it had been but it is a slow process. Habits are very hard to change. There are many uncomfortable emotions I need to release and let go of and yoga, therapy and writing this blog are all fantastic for me. Thank you for reading and thank you for the occasional comment. Especially you Jana! I know some of you read and don't comment as well. I appreciate your patronage! I'm wiping away the tears and moving on.

My baby turned 4

Mallory is now 4. She has been waiting for months for her birthday. Everyday she has been asking, "Is today my birthday?" and this started maybe back in June. This second child and baby of our family is four years old. Wow. Yes, time is flying, and I wrote about that before.

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I went back and looked at her baby pictures and looking at pictures of babies or especially seeing a baby in person, takes me back almost immediately to a dark place. It doesn't matter how cute they are. Babies give me an immediate anxiety, and then I work through it in my head and then pretend that I love babies the way you are supposed to. I have the exact opposite reaction of most people. I DO have post traumatic stress from my postpartum depression. I see babies, I think, crying, sleep deprivation, more and more crying and that's not the baby. That was a little joke there, he he he. I'm thinking one day I will get to the point that I can joke about the experience but it so profoundly affected my life and how I parented in the beginning that it's still not funny and I still haven't worked my way through it.

I also have to accept that it was SEVEN years ago...my personality was maybe not that off from what it would have been had I not been in that dark, lonely, isolated pit of despair and maybe it didn't affect me as much as I thought it did. Or maybe I just have to let it go and move on. I bet that is what you are hoping for. I want to as well but these feelings are still here. It was traumatic I think especially in conjuction with the long struggle to get pregnant. I realized in looking back and talking to the social worker that I had the anxiety before I actually gave birth, and that is not uncommon either from what I learned.


Carrie Fisher wrote in her latest autobiography about coping with mental illness. She said something to the tune that people that have mental illness need to be patted on the back instead of shamed. Do you know how much harder one has to work to survive on a daily basis with mental illness than a person who does not??? But instead the person can't talk about it at all because it's taboo, and shameful. You can't be proud of it. I asked my therapist why I want to talk about it in public, and get applauded for what I made it through. She thought perhaps it's our western society, which wants to be recognized for everything we do. The superbowl champions, Olympians, the Oscars, the MTV VMA awards, all major recognition for their accomplishments. Kanye can't accept that someone else wins an award. I want a pat on the back for surviving PPD. Kanye and I need to get over it and move on.


But I digress, we had a fabulous time celebrating my beautiful wonderful baby daughter's birthday. Yet, she's not a baby anymore. The flashbacks can cease. She is a thriving, smart, active, funny breath of fresh air. I'm grateful for her and her sister however we got here. Happy 4th Birthday Mallory!!

Happiness...

I promise I will begin to be less verbose as time goes by, I have so many ideas, topics swirling though my head right now and I've decided this is where I need to let them all out. At this moment I'm thinking about happiness. I use to think of myself as a "happy" person. And what I'm thinking about now is what does happy mean anyway?

I rolled through life and generally had a smile on my face, a sunny disposition and I never even had PMS!!! And then the "big stuff" hit the fan. The big stuff did not come until my thirties. In my twenties, I had relationships end that were devastating at the time, jobs that were not a good fit, bosses that were incredibly difficult and the like. Normal flow of life and easy rebounds. After I married, I moved way up north and experienced some mild depression in that I couldn't find a job in my field and my husband worked literally all the time and I was slow to make friends. Then we moved back to my hometown and tried to start a family. That didn't go well at all. It was the first time in my life when I tried to do something and couldn't achieve it. It was totally out of my hands and out of my control. I wasn't mad at God, but prayed for whatever was his will yet I desperately wanted to be a parent. I believed my whole life that I was going to be a mother one day.

During this 2 year period of trying to attain pregnancy, I cried all the time. Basically there wasn't a day that went by that there weren't tears. I was on a constant roller coaster of emotions related to hormones, blood tests, ultrasounds, failed attempts and the wonder of how will my dreams of becoming a mother come about. I did acheive pregnancy and finally became a first time mother. Then the most difficult phase of my life began. It was a slow descent into a major depressive episode that is also called postpartum depression. I have recovered from the depression but haven't gotten over the experience and my child is six years old. I am still coming to terms with what happened to me. As I said before I had never even had PMS before. I didn't even know what a mood swing was and then I had the motherload of all mood swings. It was the darkest, deepest, most isolated pit that lacked hope of any kind. And now I understand that hope is a very powerful emotion. I never want to go back there again. There are things that I do to this day to try to avoid going back to a depression, such as always going to bed and getting my sleep. I felt so alone, so isolated and there was a time where surviving an hour seemed like an eternity. There are worse places, situations to be in, but for me this was a major event that has left scars.

After having children, I now have PMS some months. This has scared the crap out of me because it feels like the mood swings will take over my personality again. I have to stop and realize that it is just a part of the cycle. It will pass. My social worker told me that I may have post traumatic stress from my Post Partum Depression. My husband rolls his eyes at that one but that's okay. Just realizing this makes it better.

So it seems that for several years, I was not happy. I was the opposite of "happy." Lately, I've been in a book study with my pastor and the book is, A New Earth, Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Eckhart Tolle. It is a very deep difficult read but extremely enlightening if you are open to it and the message that I have gotten out of it is, live each moment to the fullest. Enjoy the present moment. I have kids and this can go both ways, I choose to laugh at the three or six year old that is driving me bonkers and then loving those profound moments of their take on life.

Carnie Wilson was on Oprah's Monday show and spoke about happiness. And I so identified with what she said which was something like as soon as you say you're happy, then sadness was going to come right around the bend. And I add it will slap you up side the face. After I came out of the postpartum depression, and a couple of year later managed to have another baby (on our own) and no postpartum depression, then I had some family of origin issues rear their ugly head which again threw me for a big loop. I feel that there will always be difficult situations right around the bend, but what I'm learning is to embrace the positive within those negative situations. Embrace the small positives that are meaningful to me, the sun coming up, the flowers, my children, my husband, my friends, the sunrise, good food, a roof over my head, etc.,etc. Focusing on the positive and mourning the things that have caused pain and letting them go. Am I happy? I choose to ignore that question and say, I'm embracing the moments of joy and working towards having more of those however I can do that.