Emotional honesty.  This is the new challenge I’ve been working on. In out patient treatment, it seemed like  whatever the subject was that we were covering, in every class.  From self-esteem, to resentment, to boundaries, to cognitive behavioral therapy… every class always seemed to bring me to the same place, being emotionally honest… with myself AND others.  One of the wonderful teachers there, it seemed like whenever I had a question for what to do in a given situation.  She would look me right in the eyes and say, "Well, Shawna, that is when you need to choose walk in the truth." 

For me, that resonated.  I think so many times, I walk into a room pretty much knowing exactly what I think and how I feel, but then instead of owning it, I look around me and take a virtual temperature of everyone around me so that I can find just the right recipe of thoughts/feelings/emotions that are perfect for everyone else. Everyone else. 

Anyway…. sometimes here in blog land, I think I can do that too, I can think, "Wow, everyone was so positive about my last post – people want to see me feeling better"….

Before I know it I’m changing my tone. I’m coloring my days a little brighter. I’m telling you all about the fort I spent hours building for/with the boys (and I quote, "Whoa mom, you told us you were going to build a fort, but you didn’t tell use you were going to build the worlds most amazing fort EVER!!!").  Instead of telling you all about the heart break I’m feeling today about how much pain/frustration/saddness/exhaustion I see in the eyes of the people I love the most because we have been battling this depression beast for SIX months now, and although it is SO much better than it was at the end of May, there are still times that I’m worried, and times I know that g is still scared too.

I don’t want to say any of this out loud, I really want just continue to say -  "I’m feeling better and better!" because really for the most part I think that is the trend, and "oh we’re doing fine" because there are moments, lots of them, that we really honestly are.  But that isn’t my truth, not all of it.

Instead, I’m going say, that right now I’m sort of scared.  Scared that I’m never going to make up for lost time with my family.   Every night still the boys are asking me if I’m going to be here tomorrow, it is breaking my heart, and my poor husband is so tired.  I just wish I could make all these things right, only when I think about them too hard, sadness just overwhelms me.  I’m not capable yet of digesting all this emotionally, and sometimes when I ruminate too much over it all:  The hurt this mental illness has caused the people I love, the price my loved ones have paid.  Time… those months and months of my life composed of countless minutes that could have really meant something instead just treading water.  Just surviving… Literally. Sometimes when I try to think through all of that, it just won’t compute… I get cold, or I’ll get dizzy, or I’ll  get shaky… sometimes I even sort of zone out because my brain can’t seem to take it (left over defense mechanism from inpatient care perhaps?)

In the spirit of honesty, I’m a little shaky today. I’m highly frustrated with my limits, physical and   emotional.  Here I am, holding on tight, though, I’m not going anywhere.  I may be jittery, confused and seem a bit off kilter. I may feel weak and tired, but I KNOW I am pretty dang strong.  You know how I know?  Those countless minutes I was talking about, of treading water, surviving just hanging on…. I did that.  I made it through.  When I met people in treatment inpatient and out, and told them I’d been feeling suicidal since February they could not believe I’d made it so long, because if you know what it feels like to feel helpless and hopeless for real.  Then you understand what it takes to hold on. I made it through the worst, and I am feeling like living now…. Surely I can make it through the sadness, through the grieving for what I’ve loss, through the acceptance of what it means to be someone with major biological depression.  Surely I can make it through the steps it takes to get my life back.

In the spirit of honesty, THAT is what I want.  I want my life back, I want to make it better for my family, for everyone…. I want to just be better, I want to be myself again… but I first step to getting there… really getting there to the real me, is to walk in my truth.  Just like this.

Yesterday was the very last day I spent in the hospital. I mean, as I posted last, I came home from  inpatient treatment exactly 2 weeks ago, but since then I’ve been driving (or rather for the most part, getting driven) to the hospital for their psychiatric day treatment program.  Yesterday they officially wrote up my discharge paper work, gave me a little diploma rolled up in a ribbon and sent me away to get back to "normal" life… which I have to admit, is a bit nerve wracking.

I have been a stay at  home mom now for nine years, it was like a given for me, it didn’t seem to be something different.  Honestly I didn’t really think "this is something special" every day as I rolled out of bed bleary eyed, to the sound of my four little energetic morning people men.  It was just life.  This was my every day, and it was hard to really sit back and appreciate it for what it was, life.

Yesterday when I walked in the door after my last day of treatment, seeing my boys little faces light up as they saw me walk in the door, it just started to make what has always been ordinary seem more extraordinary.  I picked up my baby boy as he smiled and giggled and said "maaa! ma!," I kissed his little face (after he knocked me in the face with his toy, and I pried the weapon from his hands), and told him, "Mommy can stay home with you now, it’s you and me buddy."

Reece, who was right at my heels got so excited, "You mean you don’t have to leave anymore mom?!? You’re here with us to stay?"

It broke my heart in two. I guess I hadn’t really realized how much it means to them to have me here at home with them morning to night.  I mean I knew on a grand scale they missed me the week I was gone in inpatient care, but I think I’d forgotten how much day to day our little routine meant to all of us. However flawed the house was, and even though I was far from perfect as a mom, we have something special my boys and I.

Today is my first day home with my boys, my first full day as "mom" again, and at first I was scared to death, I mean there is nothing that says, "baby step" like having the lives of four little people in your hands.  But they aren’t just little people, they are MY SONS, and I’ve missed them desperately.  I feel this sudden urge to pull them all close to me and wrap us all in some sort of cocoon so that we don’t have to be apart at all, so that they know I don’t want to leave them ever. I want to feed them peanut butter and jelly  and watch all their mind numbing tv shows. I want to "play cars" even though I know it means just banging cars together repeatedly.  I want to read books with them and do an infinite number of simple arithmetic problems with them, I just want to be near them. Because I realize now how much I took that for grated… It was painfully hard to be away.

The kicker for me was this morning.  When I was pregnant with Tennyson, Gareth started saying bye to everyone in the house at the door before he left for school, and he joked that it would take so long when baby t was born.  The tradition has continued well past Tennyson being born and Gareth does this every single morning.  Well I think as my depression progressed and as Gareth got more and more stressed/worried about me he slowly stopped doing it, then I was gone for so long.  Well this morning, as Gareth is heading out the door, I hear a little voice coming from outside, "Bye mom, bye Owen, bye Reece, bye Tennyson."  I couldn’t help but tear up a little over my cup of coffee from the kitchen as I called back, "Bye Gareth!"

Normal life doesn’t seem quite so run of the mill right now.  The novelty of what I do here with my kids is something I can’t help but really cherish today.  Now I really need to get some snuggles.

I have been really quiet here on the blog since the surgery, but I know people have been wondering how I’ve been. Incase you don’t follow me on Facebook or didn’t hear it through the grapevine, I did get the final results on my thyroid from the lab that it was indeed a benign tumor (benign = no cancer).  

Instead of weeks of celebrating great news as you might think, I spent the next few weeks sinking deeper and deeper into the worst bout of depression I have seen yet, hopefully the worst I’ve seen ever (or as g said it can’t possible get worst because being suicidal is as bad as it can possibly feel).  Its no secret I’ve been battling depression this whole year, but after my thyroid surgery and a few weeks of recovery it just really spiraled out of control, and when all my thyroid tests were measuring normal it seemed like I just kept getting more and more off.  So it had to be the depression to blame.

I’m struggling to figure out how to put this all out there.  I really do want to here in a public forum because I really do believe that mental illness is exactly that, an illness and I think the stigma that comes along with it is really unwarranted.  I know the best way to fight the stigma is for those of us that have it to be honest about it, but to share ALL the details of all my story would be painfully hard in this one post (not to mention I can’t use a minimal amount of words to say anything!).  I’m also still sort of shell shocked, really working to get my story to words.  Besides, it is really still building right now… you know?  So, I will give you the basics, and then maybe from time to time pieces of my story that I want to put out there may just show up.

So yeah after a few really really REALLY long hard weeks, a very scary weekend, and an awful Monday… In an effort to retain some semblance of control and dignity, G and I went to the ER on Tuesday, and  I admitted myself because my suicidal thinking had gotten so out of control.  Now, I’ve felt suicidal for a while now honestly, but it was getting really so bad that I was losing my impulse control, and getting more and more urgent in my thinking.  I’ve learned since that the human mind really can’t bear to feel hopeless and helpless for very long, and I think mine had reached it’s limit.  Anyway, being in that ER room was seriously the scariest place I’ve been in my life, thank God for g, he was with me the the entire NINE hours we waited in the tiny little cell of a room in the "behavioral area" of the ER.  I have never been more afraid in my life.  But I survived it, and then after that I survived an ambulance ride to the Inpatient Unit, and then a 7 day stay in inpatient psychiatric care.

It was a strange, blurry, emotional time and there were more than a few moments I was really afraid, but it really did serve its purpose.  The psychiatrist there found the medication(s) that made me feel better, and really was convinced that my depression is biological in nature, meaning that it wasn’t triggered by a situation but rather it is and always will be in my genetics.  The other important purpose it served, is that I came home Tuesday night safe and sound… and here I am on Saturday still going strong… it was a safe place for me to be while I was at the deepest of deep as far as depression goes, and there I was safe.

Right now, I am in an outpatient program at the hospital Monday through Friday from 8-4 and g’s parents were kind enough to come out here to help us and stay with the kids since I am away during the days so we have the help we need. Other than that I’m just trying to focus and adjust to real life again… after being there for a week and well facing all of this, things just feel different, and I feel so detached and out of it… I’m trying to figure out how to settle down into the real world again…

For now though… I am here, and that means something more than it might have had I written a post like this a year ago.  The rest will come, for now I am just here.