My Blogger’s block has morphed into Stitcher’s block. Dammit.
I’ve been trying to frame a post for ages now… months. A post to try and explain how I’ve been feeling this past year.
I haven’t felt fully ‘engaged’ with my life, for some time. That sounds odd, I think. But I’m not sure how else to put it. Looking back, I think things fell of the rails somewhere back before last October. About the time I realised Niamh wasn’t going to just start sleeping anytime soon. Suddenly, all the things I had to do/wanted to do were mounting up, and just the feeling of having a never-ending ‘to-do’ list was having a ‘don’t do’ effect on me – I began to feel paralysed with anxiety. By the feeling of not having enough time. As a result, I began to achieve very little at all. The lead up to Christmas was the worst, I remember feeling as if I would never make it – in hindsight, I did a bunch of Christmassy/crafty stuff with Finn, and maybe the problem was feeling like I had to do more, instead of actually just sitting still to enjoy what we did have time for.
I did wonder for a while whether I had very mild postnatal depression. Possibly I did(/do). I don’t think I’m particularly alarmed by this, or consider that intervention was(/is) necessary, rather it just feels like a downturn in life’s rollercoaster. A fairly long, drawn out downturn, I grant you.
Some weeks this year have been better than others. Niamh has been sleeping much, much better now since March/April. But still, many weeks, I look back over and can’t recall doing much other than clothing, feeding and entertaining two hard-to-please kids. My enthusiasm for stitching/sewing/gardening/blogging waxes and wanes with the good and bad weeks. (This week is not a great week for another reason – I started it out with Strep throat, and the antibiotics I’m on are treating me to some less-than-pleasant side-effects :yuk: )
So, uh… that’s my cards on the table, as it were. This is not something I would ordinarily throw out to the whole www-iverse. It has just reached the point where I was either going to say something or pull the plug on the blog, and I decided I didn’t want to lose the blog. Not just yet. Also, I apologize to my friends on whose blogs I have been seen less and less lately. I have been reading, not always with my full attention, and I don’t always manage to come over and comment. Sorry ’bout that. I’m still around, I still love you ๐
PS. The pic above? That’s something I did achieve this week – my first attempt at the no-knead bread recipe that swept blogland earlier in the year. Not bad looking, huh? The inside was not as perfect as the out, but still, it disappeared in a day.
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Whoa! This post really hits home with me, today especially. I was just laying there nursing the baby thinking eerily similar thoughts. I am told that it gets better…. If you want to chat, let me know.
((hugs))
: )
P.S. Love the red pot. Is it Le Creuset?
I remember those days (and weeks, and months). Still have them on occasion, in fact. Just don’t let it get worse without seeking some kind of help, okay? I don’t mean meds necessarily (I would have refused them), but you do need to at least tell someone if it gets worse. I thought I had a “mild” case of PPD. It was only many months later when I came “out of the fog” that I realized what truly bad shape I was in and that it was much more a moderate to severe case and I should have sought help. Lots and lots of hugs, and I’m here if you ever need to talk (or someone to just listen). Love, E (BTW, the bread looks amazing!)
I too remember those days. My baby wouldn’t sleep, my toddler wouldn’t sleep and all I wanted to do was get some sleep.
I remember visiting the doctor to find out why neither of my girls were sleeping and that visited turned out to be the best thing I’d ever done. He didn’t give me drugs or anything but we talked and I went back once a week and just talked about stuff. Amazing how just having a sympathetic person to talk to can really help – especially when they have the training to suggest methods you can use to help ease the burden.
Good luck and I hope you get some good solid nights of sleep and time for you soon.
Weren’t you taught by the expert of experts, to just keep plodding along, don’t say anything until you reach screaming point, and just keep taking on more and more stuff and think you are a bad person if you can’t cope with it all?
XXX and OOO Mum
I know how you feel, but for differing reasons that you know of……keep focussing on today and tomorrow and making thos best of those days….and TRY not to stress about it too much and if you feel like you need it, ask for help….even if you get someone to look after Niamh for a couple of hours so YOU can sleep!
Also, thanks so much for the little package I received today – it’s beautiful I am so stoked…I will post a piccie tomorrow on my blog. Unwrapping it made my day!
Let me know if you need anything
xxx
I pop by to read your blog from time to time, and always enjoy when you do post. As a mom with 3 boys, the youngest two being 2 1/2 and 4 1/2, I can sympathize with the never-ending exhaustion and plethora of child-tending chores. ๐
And I completely related to what you said about enthusiasm waxing and waning depending on whether the week is going along well or miserably. heh.
It’s a good thing we don’t understand what the books and friends and mothers mean when they talk about these things, before we have children, or the human race would vanish. LOL
I think we all know what you feel. I’m a working mom with 3 kids (2 boys: a strong willed one and a stubborn 2 years ) and a very sweet and smart girl. My 2 years old started is terrible twos by refusing to sleep : he screamed extremely loud . We live in an apartment complex so you can imagine how it was … When you are tired, a screaming baby is more than you can bear. I succeeded by being very firm to have him go back to his old habits of falling asleep by himself. (even though he falls asleep at 10 , 10.30 pm every night (the good thing is : he doesn’t cry anymore ….)
Your girl will grow up, will become more independent. She just need time .It’s good you can talk about how you feel: then you can see things differently.
hugs to you !!!
First off…that bread looks very tasty. Hmmm I can smell it coming out of the oven…
I have been in a (what I call) funk for a while. I am prone to bouts of depression. I feel your “pain”. Maybe you should have a talk with a doctor and see what that person says. It can’t hurt, it could potentially be the help you need. I hope you get to feeling better…Claudia
Mmm, that bread looks yummy!
I think you are very brave to admit this in your blog. I can totally associate with everthing you’ve said, and I too have been wondering if it is PND. You’ve put into words just exactly how I have been feeling. I don’t really know what to say to help, or what to suggest to do (if I knew I’d do it myself too) but just to let you know you’re not alone.
Do you feel sometimes that you’re not really enjoyed as much of Niamh’s early months as you should have because you’re too miserable to appreciate it? Then feel even more unhappy when you realise you’ll never get that time back? I know I do. If you want to chat honey, you have my email and we can be miserable together (hugs).
So been there, and agree with your other commenters that I didn’t realise how bad it all was till I was out of the fog (my baby started sleeping regularly when she was closer to 2 than 3). Suddenly I woke up because I felt like I had had enough sleep and not because of crying (wow hey?), thinking about what I would like to do that day (not how many of the things on the to do list I would not be achieving…), felt excited by the future and the possibilities for life. I realised these things had been totally missing from my life and with them joy and patience and optimism and connectedness.
I’m not going to tell you I have answers because what works for each of us is different but I can say that in hindsight this is what I feel I wish I had done differently. I hope they encourage you to seek some kind of reconnection with your life.
1. Gotten help to get my baby to sleep. Absolutely and totally this is number one. I have already decided which residential sleep program I will be going to if baby 2 doesn’t sleep! For me (and according to the latest research over 50% of depressed mothers) all other burdens are bearable when you have had enough sleep. There is no need to endure this problem alone. Even if your baby cannot be made to sleep you can be alleviated of some of the burden. My partner and I agreed before we had no 2 that we would do whatever it took to get the sleep thing working. Let me say that again. What ever it takes.
2. Recognised that feeling like things are hard is not the same as feeling unhappy. Everyone warned me that having a baby wouldn’t be easy and so feeling bad seemed like a natural consequence. It isn’t. Even on really hard days now I know I’m OK and I feel confident that what is hard will pass and tomorrow may well be a pearler of a day. I also am on the lookout for signs that it isn’t OK.
Listened to my own feeling that I had lost joy and a sense of possibility for the future before it came to seem normal. When I got it back I realised how incredibly deeply I’d missed it and how terribly important it is and how easy it is to normalise feeling crappy. The slow grind away of what’s really good about life is easy to miss until you realise all you got left is bones.
3. Drawn a line in the sand about when it wasn’t going OK and shared that as a must solve problem. This is not a personal failing or an admission of guilt or a blame for anyone else, it’s just a statement of fact that I have taken all I can take and I now have a problem of too great a burden that I need to solve.
4. Recognised that any change would have been good change and had an open mind. I finally took a big risk and went overseas for 6 months and in totally unexpected ways the change solved our problems. Up until then I was really stuck in wanting to follow my instincts – even though they kept leading me to a bad place!
Sorry – what a rave!! I really feel for you, I remember it well.
And the bread looks great ๐
Hugs to you, Mel. I can’t say that I know what you are going through, but I can relate to an extended period of feeling down and off-kilter. Hang in there!
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