Jetlag

This is the only part of jetlag I like:It's 5am and I'm sitting by myself, drinking a coffee and waiting for the sun to rise. We're in Australia right now - did I mention this plan? Actually, I didn't, and I know I didn't, and I'll tell you why.   Last time we came out here, I tried the approach of Massive Overpreparation - I treated the whole plane-with-twins thing like a military campaign and it was a DISASTER. This time, I tried Deep Denial, where I pretended that we weren't coming until about five days before the trip, then shoved a bunch of stuff into bags and hoped for the best. That worked a lot better, judging by the fact that I wasn't crying or quivering or phoning divorce lawyers when we left the airport. Could be the change of approach (maybe), could be the fact that the children are now old enough to watch the Disney Jr channel on the plane for hours at a time (yes, probably that too) but maybe also that I had to compensate for the time difference by taking a whole extra dose of brain medicine while we were in the air (ding ding ding I think we have a winner).

Okay, that's two things I like about jetlag.

I'm not a morning person, at all, so this 5am quiet and wakefulness is a strange and beautiful thing to me. I'm pretty sure that 5am only exists in Australia, and then only for two or three days after we've landed. The light is beginning to leak out from behind the clouds - yes, it's cloudy here too, as cloudy as England, which does feel like some kind of monumental injustice. When one has to pay thousands of pounds to visit family in the southern hemisphere, one at least expects that the weather is going to be nice.

Things I always forget about this place, though: how much it does rain, actually, how fast the sun rises, how noisy the birds are, how quickly I become an unbearable version of myself when I'm staying with my parents. They've moved house since we were last here, and it feels strange. This place is approximately one hundred times nicer than their old house (for a start, I am no longer younger than the carpet) and it's hard to get used to. They designed and built this new house and it's lovely - lots of white, lots of high breezy ceilings, lots of shiny surfaces, lots of wooden floor. Turns out my mother really does have a talent for minimalist design, like she's been claiming all these years. It makes me wonder where my maximalism came from. I don't like clutter and I don't like disorder but I could never pull this kind of sleekness off. Where is the velvet? Why aren't any of the walls painted charcoal grey? The leopard-print ponyskin brogues I wore on the plane are still lying on the floor and they do look a little sad and out of place.

I have no idea why I just told you that. It's probably time to get another coffee.

While we're here, J and I are probably going to have a drive around and look at the areas of Brisbane where the Ethiopian / Eritrean community tends to cluster. We don't have any plans to move, but the perpetual possibility is always in the back of our minds - Jay's more strongly than mine, which surprises me. I wonder what it would really mean to bring up two Ethiopian children here. There certainly are a lot of white people here, that's for sure.  Would living in a different suburb make a difference? I don't know. Yesterday we took two very cranky jetlagged twins down to the park and spoke to precisely one person who immediately asked where they were from. My synapses were firing at very low speed by that time so I hadn't anywhere near formed my mouth to say Ethiopia before my mother said, firmly, England. Technically true, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't what he was asking. Once upon a time I wrote about being a conspicuous family in a big multicultural town. I suspect that being here would take it to a whole different level.

Yet there are things about being here that we love, that the children would love. I think they would happily never go home if it meant that they could spend every afternoon in their grandparents' pool. And I almost hate seeing family when I visit, because it reminds me how much I miss them, and I want to be part of their everyday lives and I'm not. But of course we would feel the other way if we didn't live near Jay's family in the UK. This three-continent-family thing is no joke.

The noisy birds are up. I quite like the straightforwardness of the way they are pretty much just yelling at each other. Here I am, other birds, I'm awake! Oh good, me too! And me! Let's wake up the humans by screeching as loud as we can! Okay!

I think I hear stirring downstairs. Yesterday, I got up at five and crept upstairs to be on my own like this but they were awake. Honestly, I nearly left them to fend for themselves - these first days are filled with people and an hour or so on my own makes all the difference - but my better self won out and instead we met the morning together, munching our bran flakes and waiting for the rest of the world to catch us up. They had lots of things to tell me - Hactually, mummy, hactually - and by the end I only resented a little bit the loss of this morning solace.

I'm glad they slept for longer today, though.

Maybe tomorrow I will do the same.

I Have Some Big News!

You guys? I've finished my book!

It still needs copyediting, layout, checking, footnoting, ISBN-ing, and all that extra stuff, but after seven drafts it's pretty much done. (About time, right?) Here's a mockup of the cover(this is only a rough layout - it will change) :

And there's the title. I could say more, but I'm a little bit out of words right now.

Umbilical

He wishes he had been born from my tummy - it's as simple as that.

I think he would get under my skin if he could. He tries to crawl under my shirt. He looks up at me and says Look, mummy, I in your tummy! 

 It makes me think of Nicodemus.

I let him do it - there must be some reason he keeps doing this -  but I make sure I talk a lot about pretending. Are you pretending to be in my tummy, Blue? 

He nods. He curls himself tightly up on my lap and says Look, Mummy, I have a 'tend umbilical cord! Now that's not a sentence you hear every day.

definitely too big for my tummy. 

Although, we do talk about umbilical cords a lot in this house. It came about because of Pink - she is crazy about her belly button. She gazes at it lovingly and pats it gently, like a kitten. Often, she sidles up to me, dips her head and looks up at me coyly through her giraffe-lashes.  Mummy, can you talk about my belly button again? 



We have a whole established patter about this. Here's how it goes:

When you were a baby, before you were born, you grew in your birthmummy's tummy and was it just you?(Noooooooo!)

That's right, it was Pink AND Blue growing in there together, because you are . ..(Twins!) 

And what happened when you were in her tummy? Did you get hungry? (No!)

Well what did you eat? Could you drink milk when you were in her tummy? (Nooooooo! I had a Bilical Cord!)

That's right! You got your food through a special tube called an umbilical cord, and when your birthmummy ate food, some of it turned into food for you. And  you got bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and then you got SO big that you wouldn't fit inside any more and you had to be born. 
And when you were born, the doctor said: these babies don't need an umbilical cord any more, they are born babies! They can drink milk now!  So he went  (SNIP!)(Dramatic scissor actions at this point, of course)

And then in a little while the rest of your umbilical cord fell off and what was left behind? (MY BELLY BUTTON!)

That's right! That's how you got your belly button! So when you see your belly button, you can remember about how your birthmummy kept you safe and gave you all the food you needed when you were in her tummy. (Teachable moment or what? High five, Mummy, I've been telling myself. My children are going to be so well adjusted about their adoption).

She loves, loves hearing about herself as a baby, and this is her favourite story. But these days, she barely lets me get to the end before telling me and then Mummy and Daddy came and got me and we went home on a Neroplane and now we are a FAMILY! 

Ummmmm, yeah, I guess we did, but that is totally not the point here, Pink.  This is supposed to be a story about the umbilical cord, not the Neroplane. Did you not get the memo about the teachable moment? But at the moment, she wants to get to the Neroplane as quickly as possible.

I don't want her to skip forward quickly. I don't want him hiding under my shirt. This is slightly surprising to me. I thought maybe I would.

I always thought that it would be me who had to remember not to pretend that they came from my body. I always thought it would be that way. But no, it's them who want to gloss over what came before and pretend there was never anything except for this, the four of us.

Pink doesn't seem particularly sad about what came first, just not that interested. But Blue hurts.

Maybe one day that hurt will become I wish I had stayed with her. But right now it manifests itself as I wish I had always been with you. I'm astonished to find that this is as painful to witness as the other one would be. My boy wishes that I had been there with him, and I wasn't. Never mind the physical impossibility of what he wants - he wishes I had been there, and I wasn't.

I believe wholeheartedly that an attitude of openness in adoption is always better than the alternative. But I didn't realise this openness would be so painful for them - and especially for him - at this developmental stage. Right now, I think he would honestly prefer not to know that he is adopted. He would prefer that we were all complicit in his fantasies. Why am I surprised by this? As a adult, I have had to work and work at having an attitude of openheartedness towards my children's other family, their early history, their other selves. I don't think that children are naturally open-hearted; I think children crave exclusivity. He has no desire to be part of two families, and why should he? I wonder if sometimes we adults superimpose our own understanding of what they should want onto how they actually feel. After all, they are only three. How can they possibly understand any of this? I am eleven times that and sometimes I don't.

He knows that he came from anther woman's body, but he doesn't want it to be true. He wants to make it go away. I think he's waiting for the day when I will cave in and say only joking, Blue! You weren't adopted You were always mine! 

He wishes that we had been joined by a real umbilical cord. Do I wish that? Not really, but I wish I could take away this layer of sadness from my sunshiny boy.

He wishes he had been born from my tummy - it's as simple as that.

It Doesn't Seem To Matter How Many Times I Explain It...

They just keep letting the pigeon drive the bus.


 
This is probably their favourite book at the moment. Actually, okay, it's mine, but since they can't read yet it amounts to the same thing.

New bedroom, by the way - Jay has FINALLY finished his 18-month-long attic renovation project. We spent all of last week making an entire new bed in our kitchen (what can I say - it seemed like a good idea at the time) and we've moved in even though the room has no bedside lights, no wardrobes, no side tables, actually no other furniture at all - just a bed and some carpet. The whole thing was such an ordeal (Jay did 95% of the renovation himself, and we had a fixed deadline of ten people sleeping in our tiny house last weekend) that all we've done since it finished is sit under the duvet and read stories. And watch youtube. There are worse ways to live, though, right?

To Three or Not To Three: I Like Doing Other Things, Too

What kind of person does it make me if I would rather shut myself away and write a book than raise another child?

Because sometimes I would rather do that. Hey, sometimes I would rather do that than raise the children I already have. They wear me out. They have hit the Whys, and they have hit them hard. I really thought that people complained too much about the whole why thing: after all, what could be more of a privilege than explaining the world to my two little treasures, thought 2011-me? HA HA HA, says 2013-me.

I thought the whys  would be along the lines of 'Mummy, why do I need to hold your hand when I cross the road?' And of course, the answer would be both honest and loving: So you don't get squished, my little angel.

I didn't realise the questions would be not just incessant but unanswerable:Mummy, WHY can't you find my gloves?' /Because I'm a terrible housekeeper, my sweetheart. 'Mummy, WHY do we only have red jam?' / Because Daddy did the shopping and Daddy has no culinary imagination, precious darling  'Mummy, WHY you wearing those clothes?' / Because I like them... I think... hey, what's wrong with these clothes? You're too young to be criticising my clothes!   Mummy, WHY does Nathaniel have a big house but we only have a small house? / Errrrrrrrr.....)

Today, it was even stupider. One of my children requires constant verbal interaction: 'Mummy, look at my feet! Can you see my feet!' (yes I can). 'Oh look, Mummy, THE QUEEN' (that's right, honey, that's a statue of Queen Victoria I think'') and then "Mummy! We are climbing the stairs!" and while I'm trying to think of the appropriate response to that, the other one chimes in with "Mummy, why are we climbing the stairs?"

Why... hang on... what? I have no answer for that, except because we have to. So many of their questions have no response except that's just the way things are, honey; I don't know, I guess that's culturally determined; I have no idea, why DO we bother with cleaning?I'm pretty sure it's all just a chasing after the wind. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. There really is no meaning to so much of what we do, it turns out, when every single thing is interrogated. Mummy is officially weary of it all. It's like living in the book of Ecclesiastes over here.

They are delightful, but they are tiring. And they use me up. I want to do other things too but they need me all the time. For the times I am home with them, they are my job. And when they are asleep I have to do all the things I didn't get a chance to do when they were awake. It's a never ending treadmill. (See here. None of this has changed).

I know that if we added another child to our family, the tiny bit of time that I have left in my life to do things that I actually - gasp - want to do would shrink to be even tinier than it already is. The tiny portion of my brain that remains to me as mine alone feels so small already. I hate that I have so little time to do things that fill me up, as a person - the things that recharge me. I want more time to be creative, in ways both big and mundane. I that this is no less selfish for being an educated sort of selfishness. I know how privileged it is to be yearning for things that are right at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but that's what I'm yearning for.

I mean, some of the time that's what I'm yearning for. Because other days, I ask myself: What kind of person does it make me if I would rather watch TV than raise another child?

Because really, that's no less true than the other stuff. I just want a break, sometimes. Why would I make things harder, faster, busier?

The best description of parenthood I've ever heard is: Lots of joy; not a lot of fun. That's the tradeoff. That's the opportunity cost. We trade one sort of pleasure for another. To be a parent, to do parenting, means sacrificing time that could otherwise be used for other things. I won't get my thirties twice. And I love being a mother, but this really is a real sacrifice. If the joy / fun thing looks like an easy win to you, looks like an equation with a payoff that tends to infinity, I think that you are really underrating how awesome fun can be.

I haven't read a novel all month. I would never, ever have believed that could be true of me.

The other day, I lay on the floor with them and we built roads out of their blocks. I built some tunnels for Blue's trains and he started using them as bridges for a family of imaginary snails, imaginary snails that I hadn't met before and haven't met since. As it was happening, I realised that he would never remember this. He will never remember the day we spend building a block bridge to take his snails to safety.

And I grumpily thought what's the point and then I realised that I will remember this. Days like this are much more a gift to me than to them. When this has all faded into a subconscious childhood blur for them, I will be the one who remembers him, his small pudgy hands, his tiny body, the look of intense concentration on his face, the way he compliments me without quite knowing how to do it: "Oh wow, Mummy, I love your hairs! They look really... similar!" 

I treasure these days. There is so much joy. Why would I not do all this again?

I love them so much. I love being with them.

But I like doing other things, too.

Let's Make This Happen, Girl

Here is a video of me trying to teach the twins my favourite song: 

(yes, I make them sing. They'll be glad one day. Also - listen to the end. Is he talented or what? For once I'm not being sarcastic). 

The song is this one: Something Good Can Work, by Two Door Cinema Club. I love this song so much. Really, really so much - I love this song more than the Beliebers love Justin is how much. It's so upbeat, and I am not naturally upbeat - In fact, I have a special category on spotify called 'upbeat' that I created pretty much just to contain this song. Some days, the fourteen year old vocalist in this song is nicer to me than anybody in my real life. On those days, I use this song as my life coach - I turn it up loud, and getting the children dressed, sing along: Let's make this happen, girl!  Then, working on attachment stuff with my kids: We're going to show the world that something good can work!  and working on finishing my book: It can work for yoooooou, and you know that it will. Will it? 

I feel like I need the encouragement. Lately I came across this video, and it's pretty much the best thing I've ever seen so I'm going to sit here for a while so you can watch that, or at least put it on your 'watch later' list - you'll be glad, I promise. 

I loved it - she's talking about YouTube, but there's so much truth in there about how we interact with all kinds of content that other people create - and then how the creators interact with our interactions - it's made me think a lot about how I read, as well as how I write. (And it's a whole lot more interesting than that summary makes it sound). I liked the part about American Idol, particularly. And then she got to the end and said that she wasn't actually scared about creating things and I just thought - wow. Way to go. I wish I could say the same. And I didn't realise, until I realised it, but I've been having some big-time Fear about finishing this book. I'm not quite done yet and there have been some legitimate reasons (some editing stuff, some life stuff) but I don't think that's really the issue. I'm on draft four point five, and surely it's got to be time to say goodbye soon, but  I keep getting snagged on some uncomfortable things - mostly, why would I want to put this horrible (and true) version of myself out into the world? Frankly, I'm terrified. I feel really vulnerable about people I know reading it, and judging me for what's inside me- and also vulnerable on a more prosaic level because I'm worried it's a big pile of £$*^& and wow, nobody wants to know that about the thing they've been working on for the last two years, do they?

This is not a writing blog - I try not to get too boring about book stuff here but this is really beginning to bother me. I know that there's no point writing anything personal unless it is fierce and honest and real. If people are interested in process, they'll read something informative, and I have no claim to having any information to pass on. My aim, I guess, it let people know what the whole thing felt like, from my perspective. Nobody is going to pay ten dollars to read 'we did some stuff and it was moderately difficult and now I'm moderately pleased we survived'. Snoozefest. It's got to be honest, or there's no point. If we want to have stilted conversations where we censor everything real and pretend to be better people than we really are, we can go to our high school reunions. I don't think there's any point writing that kind of stuff down. And I don't mind blogging honestly, because I could delete it all if I wanted to, but putting things in print feels like maybe a terrible, huge mistake. I want to be honest, I want to be brave, but I don't feel any of those things, I just feel like a scared little girly. A scared little girly or a sad old lady, an old lady who turns to teenage songs for inspiration and courage.

But you've got to take what you can get, right? I play this song for Pink quite often when we are on our own (so okay, almost never) and we call it 'Girls' Music'. As well as learning to sing it, I'm trying to teach her to say 'Let's make this happen, girl!' partly because I want her to be more upbeat than me, and partly because it makes me laugh.

I need to keep saying my favourite line over to myself, talking to myself in the third person like the truly functional human being that I am: Let's make this happen, girl. I want to finish this thing. I am going to finish this thing. So I made another poster for myself and you can have it too, if you like:

So that's me. What about you? What do you need to make happen?

The Difference Between Children and Cats

Earlier this week I was in Paris (which was fun) and then later in the week I caught some kind of cut-price bubonic plague (which was not fun). All that to say, there hasn't been much going through my head recently except first champagne and then mucus. (Not simultaneously, because that would be gross).

So I've really only had one thought lately, and here it is.

Pink is at that very didactic stage where she has to explain everything, very clearly, to everyone who will listen. Her favourite right now (which I love, don't get me wrong) is that we are in a family. She says this many times a day. She points at me, saying you, and me, and Daddy, and Blue, we are all a family! And then she always says AND THE CAT! The cat is in the family!  

old, but one of my favourites

If this is true, the family isn't looking so good at the moment. I'm ashamed to say that we have a really badly behaved cat. His main vice is that he looooves to be on tables and countertops:  licking our food, drinking the milk from our breakfast bowls and shedding his hair all over the surfaces where I prepare food. It's not pretty. It's a little embarrassing, when other people see it (or realise they've just eaten something that was a little hairier than they expected). I do try to make him get down - mostly by shouting get down, cat! from halfway across the room, which works about as well as you'd expect. Mostly, I just let him get on with it. It's easier to let him misbehave and then clean up the mess later. I'm sure there are things that I could be doing to stop him, but I don't, because I don't really care. I mean, I care, but, you know, I don't really care. 

I'm ashamed to say that sometimes I also have really badly behaved children. Their main vice, I suppose, is that they are three, and they want to be boss. It's not pretty. It's a little embarrassing, when other people see it (and I broke my no-crying-in-the-supermarket-for-a-year streak a few days ago when a nasty old lady told me you need to control your children as Blue shouted I waaaaaaaaaaaant to gooooooooooooooo toooooo a CAFE! over and over again. What cosmopolitan tantrums. How delightful. Not).   I do try to manage their behaviour, of course. Nobody wants be the eye of that particular cyclone. But he didn't get his way, and he was the recipient of one of our standard were you trying to be the boss? / yes /are you the boss / no / who is the boss/ mummy and daddy are the boss /  is it your job to be in charge / no / what is your job / to be obedient and polite / were you obedient what do you need to say to mummy ... etc, etc etc routines once we got home. Which, for the record, I'm pretty sure I could do in my sleep.

None of that is fun. I am so tired of it. To be honest, often, I would rather let him misbehave and clean up the mess later.

This morning, we were eating our breakfast and I was still plague-weary and the cat was making more of a nuisance of himself than usual and I sort of half-waved a hand in his direction and groaned and then just let him be. And then Pink did something she isn't allowed to and had to apologise straight away and I realised that it must be hard for them, sometimes, seeing the cat get away with all kinds of nonsense while they spend their days in preschooler bootcamp. (They do get a lot of love, honestly. And they rarely have to bathe, so it's not all tough around here). 

And I realised why they get - why they need to get - such different sides of me. I can parent my cat to suit my own convenience, but I need to parent my children to produce character. I need to discipline my children now so that they will learn self-discipline for adulthood. I owe it to the world to moderate their behaviour, and I owe it to them to shape their character. They aren't in this family for my benefit, unlike my cat.

And I knew this- of course I knew this, and I've said these kinds of things to myself in a hundred different ways many times before today. But right now I have a particularly vivid picture of how I don't want my children to turn out. I don't want to be letting them slop all over the world's countertops. I will clean up their mess now - I will make excuses for them - I will pretend that they aren't doing anything wrong, but one day they may want to drink metaphorical milk out of the metaphorical world's metaphorical cereal bowl, and dagnabbit I mustn't let them.  One day they'll be out on their own without me and they are going to be facing down that bowl full of someone else's milk and they have to be able to choose not to lap at it - and they will have to be equipped to make their own self-disciplined choices because I won't be there to tug on their collars. Metaphorically speaking, of course. My children don't wear collars.

So. Tiring, yes it is. And next time I have the choice of dealing with something or letting it slide, I need to remind myself - get your head back in the game, Claudia. Parent your children now for character later. Don't treat them like a cat.

Twenty Seven Short Thoughts About Chemistry

This is the post where I do a follow-up on what I wrote just over a year ago about being depressed,  and then a few days later about getting medicated. I'm still taking the medicine, and I'm feeling fine. Okay, that's the short version; if you want the long version, please keep reading. I want to share a bit of what I've learned, a bit of what it has been like, walking through the last year as Chemical Claudia. I'm going to do this as 'short thoughts', a bit like this post, because that seems the most straightforward.

 First thing to say: 
Depression is different for everybody. But you knew that, right?

Want to know one thing
about depression that is probably true for everybody? Depression is undoubtedly the most boring thing in the world. Really, truly, SO boring. Is there anything more stultifying than being stuck inside your own critical mind? I used to think that it would have some kind of toxic glamour, but ugh - no way. I think this is one of the reasons that depressed people often sleep so much - being awake and depressed is just so dull. . 

So Dull. 
Dull, dull, dull. Depression isn't funny at all. At least, it's not funny when other people, people who don't know what they're talking about, make jokes about Prozac, as if living under a dark cloud and struggling so much that you need to alter your own brain chemistry is something amusing. It's not amusing. It's terrifying and humiliating and it feels like the ground is dropping away. In the thick of the worst bit, I lost my sense of humour entirely. I always find myself thinking you would not be so amused if you knew what it felt like and then I get offended because I think they are laughing at me and my problems and honestly, who enjoys that? Also, as I said - no sense of humour.

Except When It's Hilarious. 
Sometimes when Jay asks me to do something I don't want to, I look at him sadly and say I can't do that, it's too hard for me. Don't you know I'm Depressed? and then we both have a good laugh. Also, when people bug us and we think they are being irrational, we hand out imaginary doses of my brain medicine as some kind of code for how messed up they were. So: He was totally flying off the handle; he needs ten milligrams of Celexa for sure. Or That woman is so dysfunctional - I'd put her straight onto forty.  We get to laugh about this because we've earned the right. We get to laugh with, not at. Big difference.

For the record, I only make jokes about depression and anxiety, and only the relatively mild kind that I had / have/ am having /will have. I am acutely aware that I have no idea what it must be like to struggle more than that, to reach a point where you can't function, to not be helped by treatment.  I hope I never earn the right to make jokes about that.

And really, even to Jay,
I don't like to talk about depression very much at all, to be honest. Day to day, it's not a big deal. Hardly anybody in my real life knows about this issue in my life. It's not that I'm ashamed (although of course, I am ashamed) but I just don't really see why they need to know. I've had enough depressed friends to know that people start looking at you, start talking to you differently if they know you are depressed. Although personally, I always hear a capital. Nobody ever tells me that so-and-so is depressed - instead, they are always Depressed. I didn't want to be that person. I don't want to be that person.

The irony is, of course:
I'm much happier now that I'm officially depressed than I was before I had a diagnosis.

It's all down to the medicine. 
I've been incredibly lucky, and I know it. The day - the very day - I started taking brain medicine, I started to feel much better. It was like turning on a light switch. It was like stepping out of December and into June. This eased some (okay, almost all) of the uncertainty I was feeling about getting medicated. If my brain responded so quickly to a physical treatment - a drug - then it was obvious (to me) that I really had some kind of chemical imbalance and that meant the whole situation wasn't my fault. It made me feel more like I was sick than I was insane. And this made me feel good because hey, I might be slightly mentally ill but I'm not crazy.

I guess this is one of the reasons why, 
if I ever do need to talk about medication,  I never talk about antidepressants; I always talk about 'brain medicine'. It makes me feel more like a rational person undergoing a necessary course of treatment, and less like a bratty spoiled housewife who just can't handle that not everything in her life is absolutely perfect, booooooo hooooooooo. Because obviously, the bratty spoiled housewife on Prozac is enough of a cultural trope that I still despise her even when I am her. Or am not her. I'd like to believe I'm not her.

you know, like the human equivalent of this. 

Is she one of the reasons why some people find it so hard to ask for treatment?
And by some people, of course, I mean me. Which is worse? Being Depression Girl, who can barely lift up her head to say hello and cries alone in the bathroom? Or being Antidepressant Girl, who can't handle reality and has failed so badly at  managing her life that she has to take drugs to feel happy? I didn't want to be either of those people. It's like when I offer my children a choice between two options, hoping that will trick them into thinking they have some agency in their lives, and they give me the angry face that means I don't want to use the red toothbrush OR the green toothbrush! I don't want to brush my teeth at all, idiot! That's how I was feeling. I don't want to be Depressed Person, or Antidepressant Person. I don't want to be here at all, idiot.

Yet I have eventually come to realise
that I really shouldn't be ashamed of depression. Depression is not a character flaw. It's just a thing that happens.

However, I have also had to face the fact
that depression revealed a whole lot of very real character flaws that I already had. Depression made me sad, and that's okay, but sadness made me selfish and worse and that's not okay. This is where things get extremely messy for Christians, I think. I don't know very many Christians who are able to talk sensibly and sympathetically about how to deal with depression - how to manage the tricky relationship between what's going on in your head and what's going on in your heart. I know that Pre-Chemcial Claudia was becoming extremely, unsustainably self-centred. I was not able to do anything for anybody else, ever - I was so trapped inside my own head, it was all I could do to make it through the day. I could never help anyone, I could never be there for anyone, I could never encourage anyone. I was not growing any spiritual fruit. That wasn't helping anybody. Feeling bad about going to the doctor made it harder for me to live as a Christian, not easier, and I don't think that did anybody any favours.  But I can't really untangle the head issues, the heart issues and the chemistry issues in myself, so why should I expect other people to know what to say? Like I've already said, usually I just don't tell people. I think that makes things easier for everyone.

I did feel bad about going to the doctor.
Fortunately, on the Myers-Briggs personality typing, I'm a Thinker, not a Feeler. That doesn't mean I have no feelings (would that it were so!) but that when I make decisions, I value logic more than the other, squishier stuff. This can be a blessing or a curse but I this situation I think it was a blessing. I had always thought depression was feeling sad about nothing, but I was able to recognise a pattern  in myself, and realise: Claudia, you are reacting to genuine stressors but you are reacting to them too much. I drew a little mental graph with stress on the bottom and reaction on the top and realised that y= at least 2x, maybe 3x, and then after a certain point, where a normal person would still be fine, just zoomed straight off to infinity. This is not a graph belonging to a brain that is working properly, thought I. I needed that sort of empirical push to realise that something was properly wrong, that all these sad, hard days weren't just a string of coincidences.

That maybe makes it sound easy 
to decide to ask for help once I got all empirical about it, but it wasn't easy. I didn't know if I needed to. After all, it's not like there's an on/off switch for being depressed. It's a spectrum - of course it's a spectrum. We all have good days and bad days. I think it's genuinely difficult to know when you are struggling with something real and when you are just being a princess. Who knows where feeling down becomes a proper mood disorder? Who knows when to pull out the diagnostic criteria and start making notes?

No, it wasn't easy at all.
Maybe it depends on what kind of person; who you are. For me, I don't feel like my arms and my legs are really me. If they stopped working, it would be annoying, but it wouldn't make me question who I am. It didn't feel like that when I realised that I couldn't really trust my brain any more. The thought that I might need some kind of medical intervention to fix my brain was flat-out terrifying. If I can't trust my brain - what does that mean? Who is this 'me' that can't trust my brain? Aren't I my brain?

Was the depression me?
Or was the part of me that was fighting back the real me? I wish it was just the second, but really, I know it's both. We are both me -  the irrational sadness, and the struggle against the irrational sadness. Depression was an unwelcome guest in my head but its become something that I have to fold into how I view myself, and ultimately this makes me much more able to separate how I'm feeling (because I know that might not be reliable) from what I know to be true. While I was pretending it wasn't there - while I was pretending I was fine - the world looked like a pretty gloomy place. It seemed to me that I was the only one who had this terrible clarity, who knew how bad things really were, and that everyone else (everyone who wasn't miserable) was either lying or blind.

Really, I think it was a ton of fun to be married to me during that period.
Jay is a lucky, lucky guy.It was probably also a whole lot of fun being my kid. Although, to be honest, I think Jay got much more of a raw deal than they did, and that's why he gets to make the depression jokes now. I would use myself up on them all day and then cry on the sofa in the evenings and demand that he bring me wine.

Of course, speaking of my kids,
One of the things I worried about when asking for help was that it would destroy any chances we had of adopting in the future. It went like this: Oh, I feel so sad   -----> being this sad makes me such a terrible mother -----> nobody normal could be this bad of a mother ----->I think I must be depressed ----> if I admit to being depressed, they'll never let me adopt another child -----> no more children! That makes me feel sad! ---->oh, I feel so sad ----> being this sad makes me a terrible mother and so on ad nauseam; ad infinitum. I really worried that going to the doctor about my mood would mean that I was burning all my adoption bridges forever.

I'm someone who always lives with one eye on regret management:
I never want to do anything now that I might hate myself for later. (When I was a teenager, I never even got an interesting haircut because I didn't want to look silly in photos in decades to come. True story). So the thought of cutting out our chances for another child in the future because I was struggling in the present was almost unbearable. (In the UK, this is definitely a real concern).But in the end, I realised that it was more important to prioritise what I needed now above some vague possible future risk. (I'm sure this was always obvious to everybody but me, but it wasn't obvious to me at all).

I mentioned this concern - cutting ourself out of future adoptions -to one of the doctors who gives me my repeat prescriptions every month or so.  I got halfway through the sentence about this and she cut me off - not rudely, just emphatically - and said if that happens, you send your social worker STRAIGHT to see me. And I haven't really worried about it since. Incidentally, I usually dress up to go to the doctor for my prescriptions. I feel like it's important to look smokin' hot and in control. I want to make it clear that they might be writing me a prescription for this stuff but I am a fabulous person, an in-control person, to whom this strange thing, this depression, has happened -  not the other sort of depressed person -  you know, someone who is really that way, fundamentally that way. (See? Stigma. Even from me).

I do understand, by the way,
why social services wouldn't choose to to place a vulnerable child with someone who was actively depressed. I'm going to stretch an already overused image here and say that emotional and mental health is like oxygen. You know how in plane crashes, you need to put on your own oxygen mask before you help a child to put on theirs? If a parent is having significant struggles with their own mood, they are not in a good position to do good parenting, especially if they are trying to parent a new child with attachment challenges. I understand that. But for me, being on the medication I'm on is like wearing my oxygen mask. It means I'm okay - really - and as capable as ever at helping my children to grow and develop. I need to remember to take some medicine in the morning, but apart from that, my life looks pretty much like anybody else's.

Of course, I guess that having been in this situation once
means that I am greater risk of depression again. Statistically, this is true, and who knows - it might be worse next time, which would stink all around. I get that some social workers would think this makes our family a bad bet for another child.  They need to deal in risks and probablies because nobody ever really knows what will happen in the future, and I understand that.

Maybe they are right, I don't know.
But what I certainly know, after this last year or so, is that this stuff can happen to anybody at any time. Nobody is at zero risk of finding themselves down the bottom of the mental illness pit, clawing frantically at the sides and thinking how did this happen to ME? And in that situation, I had the choice of admitting something was wrong and asking for help or toughing it out. On paper, the version of me that toughed it out and never got medicated looks like a better potential adoptive parent because I would have no history of depression. But personally, I think that walking in to the doctor's surgery and asking for brain medicine is the bravest and smartest thing I've ever done (and that's saying something, because I have done a LOT of brave and smart things in my life. Joking, people, joking. See, depression is hilarious). Anyway, I would rather place a child with the version of me who asked for help - and is now coping pretty much fine - than the version of me that needed the same help but never got over herself enough to actually ask for it.

But of course, I may be biased.

I suspect most of you would agree with me, though. Logically, I think it's an impenetrable argument. But getting the stamp of a diagnosis still has a lot of stigma, and on days when I'm not feeling very robust I worry what would happen if people at work / church / the rest of my life all knew. Most of them would be fine but I know that some people's view of me would change; I know that because they've told me about other people with mental health struggles, with much clucking of tongues and shaking of heads. Of course, at that point, I know that I should say 'hey! That's me you're talking about there, too!' but mostly I'm not smart or brave enough to do that. I did it once and it did not go well; I watched my stock with that person crash to the floor before my eyes. I pretty much got whiplash as they reversed their opinion of me. I know that I shouldn't care about the opinion of a person who is that prejudiced, but I think that part of being human means I do care, even if I wish I didn't. I understand that lots of people don't understand that depression is a real and involuntary thing. I know that is true, and I'm okay with it. I mean, I'm not okay with it but I've made a strategic decision that my life is complicated enough - you know, just living it - without getting too uptight about stuff I can't change. (And if that's not a mentally healthy attitude, I don't know what is! Where's my third kid, social services???) Anyway - back to keeping my mouth shut.

Also: I feel sensitive 
about having said 'on days when I'm not feeling very robust'. It feels to me sometimes like I have two choices - give into this thing and be depressed or BEAT IT. You know, beat it with a big stick; give it no purchase in my life. I want to do that second thing but that's not how life works. It feels to me like if I'm going to be more than this I'm not allowed to have a bad day ever again, but that's stupid. We all have bad days. I still have bad days, sad days, mad days, days like we all do. In the olden days, I used to have a bad day and think 'Nuts! I'm having such a bad day! This stinks!' but it didn't bother me in any kind of existential way. Now, I find myself thinking 'I'm having such a bad day! Oh no, the depression is coming back. I need another 10 mg of brain medicine. How can I need more medicine? This is a disaster. Soon I'm going to hit the normal dosage ceiling. I'll have to get special approval to get more medicine. Then they'll say no and I won't cope and soon Jay won't be able to bear the sight of me and he'll kick me out of our house and keep the children and I'll be homeless and wandering along the highway alone, picking up trash and eating it'.  A bad day seems like a portent of disaster, like the end of the world. Which is funny because seeing it as a portent actually is a bad sign - hello, totally unamusing irony. This is the kind of situation where I'm learning to pay attention to my own stupid internal narrative and say: enough. No more catastrophising. It's really helpful, and the ability to actually do it is a huge difference between Chemical Claudia and Pre-Chemical Claudia.

We all have bad days. Honestly, I have no idea how bad your bad days are. I would hate it to seem like I somehow think that everyone who cries too much should go and get medicated, that I deserve some kind of medal. I'm not saying that. I'm really glad that I did it because I know I needed it, and all that was holding me back was stupidity. Your mileage may vary. Believe me when I say I know how lucky I was, too. Not everybody responds quickly (or at all) to medicine and I've never experienced that - it must be truly scary and I'm really sorry if anything I've written here makes anybody in that situation feel worse. I know how lucky I was and I don't take it for granted. And of course, I'm not stupid enough to recommend pumping your body full of chemicals unless you really do need it. (Unless they are cheese chemicals, of course, in which case BRING IT ON).

And now I'm at this point, a year on,
I don't think I'm ever going to be 'cured'. I don't think this is ever going to go away completely. Even when I'm fine (and honestly, I feel fine) I will probably always be looking over my shoulder a little bit, more aware of my moods, more aware of what might happen in my mind than I ever used to be.  It would be nice to be wrong, but If I'm waiting to suddenly feel cured, my question is always 'when is this going to go away?' Whereas I think a much better question is 'okay then, how can I best live with this? If it goes away while I'm busy doing other things, that's great - you know, like they always say to single girls about finding a boyfriend. It'll happen when you aren't looking for it! (Which I'm pretty sure is a lie).

So
This means learning to live with it without letting it own me. I'd be lying if I said that was always easy, but it's an awful lot easier than it was a year ago when I was trying to pretend it didn't exist.

I think that's enough about that. 
Like I said - contrary to how this may appear, I don't really like talking about this very much. And anyway - this princess has to go and polish her tiara.

Did You Ever See?

Let me tell you a little bit about my friend Megan.

I moved from Australia to England when I was 21, and Megan was the first person in England who was nice to me. For a long time, she was pretty much the only person in England who was nice to me. We were living in Cambridge, which was a pretty hard and unwelcoming place, and she met me on almost my first day and took me under her wing. Without her friendship I think I would probably have fallen entirely apart. Also, I would have had nobody whose door I could knock on far too late to cry about some stupid, inappropriate boy. She was (and is) one of the kindest people I have ever met, and one of the people who makes me laugh the most.  She is also the person who taught me (although she may not remember this) that sometimes breakfast cereal is okay for dinner, too. See? Kind, funny AND smart. I wish you knew her in real life; she's super-duper. She's one of the good ones.

She moved back to Scotland less than a year after we met, and I've missed her ever since. We hardly see each other (see above, re: she lives in Scotland) but she's never far from my mind. She is one of my few real-life friends who know about this blog, and I know that she secretly lurks on some of yours.

Anyway. Look at this little piece of perfection:

He's Megan's baby!   He's just come home this week after 5 weeks of special preemie care - Megan was due in February, but ended up having P in December, so he's now home about a month before he was due to make an appearance at all.  

Did you ever see a squishier, more delicious little snuggleupagus? I think he needs a cuddle from Claudia. Also, based on this picture, I'm pretty sure he is always angelically asleep and never cries. A baby this cute would never cry, right?

I'd been planning to visit Megan in January (ie, now)  - but now, obviously, more important things have intervened. I had hoped to see M, for the last time before the baby, do some excited squeeeeing and pass on a ton of useless, unwanted parenting advice.  But you beat me to the punch, P. I forgive you, though, because you are crazy-cute.

So anyway, I can't do this in person, so I'm going to do it here. Congratulations, Megan and A, on your perfect little son. And welcome to the world, baby P. I'm so glad you're here. I'm even more glad that you're home. Be good to your mother, boy.

This Is As Motivational As Things Get Around Here

I'm working on something meaningful for this newly pink space, honestly. In the meantime, this is what I made to give myself a much-needed New Year backside kicking. Just in case it's helpful to anybody else:

(Now, if only the sentiment could extend all the way to get off PHOTOSHOP and write, I'd be golden).