#also also i did trip in front of the house on friday the 13th (yesterday) and sprain my ankle (ow) but i think that was general clumsiness

[savethepinecones]

Frost fireside spice!

frost: if you could give some advice to your younger self, what would you say?

i would probably say that its never wrong to stand up for yourself. i probably couldve used a lot of advice at different points lol but i think this would have been relevant at most times.

fireside: if you had your dream wardrobe, what would it look like?

oh man this is kinda tricky tbh. a lot of black for sure lol. probably more chunky sweaters for the winter. a couple pairs of platform shoes. maybe some shorts that arent just jeans i chopped up when they got too short lol. a real leather jacket or two would be awesome.

spice: have you ever encountered a house that you believe to be haunted?

ooh this is a good question. the short answer is kind of? the longer answer is that i definitely had a couple experiences at my moms house when i was younger but i dont think anything was necessarily attached to the house. there was a faint handprint on my bedroom wall that wouldnt go away and was way to big to have been made by anyone who was living there but thats the most house specific thing. the other experiences i had i think were more just things passing through. i got the impression it was a high traffic area. i dont think ive shared these stories on here before so i might expand on this stuff a bit at some point if anyone wants to hear about it

also at the place im living rn every once in a while my stepdad will comment that he heard someone making a lot of noise upstairs when i was the only one home all day and was in my room the whole time and ive noticed that its always in october when this happens but idk if thats anything. the thing that makes me think its potentially spooky is that hes hard of hearing so like it would have to be pretty loud for him to notice but i never hear it and its certainly not me making the noise.

also also when i was a kid the local theater that was made when the town was first built got reopened and that place was hella haunted. my mom was in a lot of plays there and the owner of the place had some kids my age that i was pretty close to for a while so i heard a lot of stories although i never experienced much myself. i did play murder in the dark in the costume room in the attic once after a play but thats unrelated lol

thanks for the ask! i really enjoyed answering these 🧡

[farmtastic-blog]

7.13.18

Friday the 13th. Both kids were up at 5 a.m. today, which is a bit of a deviation from the norm. Luckily Mitchell is home today and took the morning shift. He almost always does. Because mornings are hard for me. Because depression.

This past week was a real blue-ribbon shit show.

It started Sunday morning. I knew Mitchell had to leave for a business trip that day—his first since Eloise was born—but I thought he didn’t have to leave until later in the day. When I came to, Audie was in my bed watching a show on the iPad and Mitchell was already in business attire, making his final laps through the house before departing.

I panicked. Not only because his departure was apparently imminent, but because I was at an extreme depressive low and didn’t want to be left alone with both the kids. It was too much for me. I heard the front door open and I ripped myself out of bed (that is the only way to describe what it feels like to force yourself to do anything when the depression is so bad you can’t move). I stumbled into the living room in tears—reeking from not showering for days—and I played the last card I had. I begged. I begged him not to go, not for my sake but for the sake of the two children who deserved better than I would be able to give them over the next two days while he was away.

I begged. I cried and pleaded. He went anyway. As he walked down to the car, I was at such a loss, so desperate to be seen, that I pressed both my hands against the front window. He drove away.

And the next two days were precisely as awful as I thought they’d be, with one minor exception. I don’t know how I managed it, but I got both kids and all our shit in the car and drove us to Evansville. At least we could have a change of scenery and be left utterly alone to fend for ourselves in a new city. Mom and dad were away on a trip but had told us we were welcome to crash at the house while they were traveling. Mitchell called Noah, who agreed to come stay at the house with us so we wouldn’t be alone. The first night, his girlfriend Taylor even came to slumber party with all of us That was the minor exception to the trip being as bad as I thought it would. The first night we were in Evansville the kids went down for bed easily (later that night things were a nightmare, but for the first few hours it was smooth sailing), then Noah, Taylor and I enjoyed some wine, conversation, and video games. I went to bed around 11:30 or 11:45 p.m.

As it would turn out, I would get somewhere around three hours of sleep that night total, which pretty much destroyed me for the next day. The next couple of days, actually.

Audie woke up in the night (I was sleeping in the room with his crib) so I brought him to bed with me. He kicked the living shit out of me for what felt like an eternity, then he rolled over and started to wake up. He told me he wanted to wake up and get out of bed. Thinking it must have been just slightly inconveniently early (transitioning to central time from eastern when we drive to Evansville sometimes has this effect), I rolled over to check the time on my phone.

2:45 a.m.

It was 2:45 a.m. and Audie wanted get up for the day. I told him it was the middle of the night at that it was still bedtime. He pitched a fit. Eventually I was able to convince him to drink some warm milk while I rocked him, then I got him back into his crib. This put us somewhere in the ballpark of 3:30 or 3:45 a.m.

So, depression. I have a horrible time getting back to sleep in the night no matter why I get woken up. So I laid there with painful, embarrassing, demeaning thoughts racing through my head unable to get back to sleep. Maybe 15 or 20 minutes passes, and Audie woke up again. I brought him back into my bed because I didn’t have the will power, or they physical capability, to do anything else. He tosses and turns and whines until 4:30 when he finally fell asleep again. But for me the damage was done. I was not getting back to sleep. I just laid there, half conscious and miserable to my core.

I looked at my phone and read accounts of women who have left their families, because that’s what I felt like doing in that moment. I fantasized about Mitchell walking in the door at home, picking up my purse and an overnight bag and walking out the door without a word. I thought about who I would call—for a job connection to make some sort of meager living enough to pay rent for the tiniest cheapest place I could find, for a couch to crash on in the meantime.

It was overwhelming as I laid there in the dark, even to think about everything it would take just for me to be laying in my own bed again in Bloomington. Just those thoughts crushed me.

We struggled through the next day, which included a failed visit to the Mesker Park Zoo. I’ve been curious and wanted to go ever since my first visit to Evansville 10 years ago, and when I finally got the chance? It was horrible and miserable and I went alone with a baby and a 2 year-old.

When we finally made it home from he horrible, terrible, no good, bad bad zoo visit, Audie napped. For less than an hour. I was dead inside.

The good news is that both kids slept much better the next night. I had a hangover from over exhaustion (who knew that one night of sleep wouldn’t make up for a completely missed night of sleep?). I had packed the car the night before, so once Eloise nursed that morning, I put them in their car seats and we pulled out for home. Thankfully, they both did pretty good on the drive. I was allowed to drive the pretty freeway with some John Mayer playing, pretending they weren’t both in the backseat. I was completely numb, if I’m honest. I didn’t even have specific thoughts. Just a chain of conscious mental misery streaming in through one side of my brain and proceeding out the other, like a long ribbon. If I focused too long on how beautiful the sunshine was streaming through the corn fields, how pretty the whispy clouds were across the broad blue sky, how little red barns punctuate the landscape every dozen or so miles, I would start to cry. Any amount of beauty, of mental relief, only brought into sharp focus how far out of my reach true respite is. So I only allowed myself fleeting glimpses of the landscape every now and again. I mostly just focused on the road. It afforded me a sense of going somewhere without the emotional trigger of natural beauty.

When Mitchell arrived home, I threw my brain into autopilot and checked the fuck out. I sat down on the couch where I stayed until the next morning. I hardly looked at him or spoke to him. He went to work the next day and I managed the kids, again, but he took the next day and today off. I’m still coasting in and out of auto pilot. I’m so burnt out I can’t think straight.

I called the OB’s office yesterday and asked for a prescription, which they called in for me. I also explained how long I’ve been waiting to see the PPD specialist they referred me to back in April and asked if they could make another referreal or offer a list of other practices I could call. Their response was precisely, “Just call around and go to whoever can see you first.”

What the hell? PPD is a complication of my pregnancy. How can they essentially say, “Good luck with it. Bye.” ? Does no one—not even physicians who specialize in maternal health—care about postpartum women? I cannot even begin to describe how disorienting that phone call was.

I took my first dose of Lexipro today. I hope it helps.