toddler life and anxiety meds.

hello to those of you out there in this world of anonymous blogging. it's been a long, long time. my daughter is now almost TWO years old, and it is so hard to believe. time is a such a thief. perhaps this time period has just kept me too busy to dwell on my mother as much. or maybe i'm really good at avoiding thinking about her. 

its been almost two years since my last post and i feel as if i don't have much to offer the world in writing. i have a daily routine where I work my insane job with long hours, and cherish the hour or so each morning I get to see my child. being a working mother is the hardest thing i've ever done in my life - and i am in awe of the parents who willingly stay home each day to be a caretaker. it is all so much work, and so tiring. my daughter is just amazing. the entire world is in her eyes! she is funny, and joyful, and exuberant, and confident, and beautiful, and determined. every moment with her is better than the next, and i am in love in such a different way. 

(how, oh how, could my mother abandon me?  

the older i get, the more confused i get.) 

the more recent development, i guess, is that i had gotten to a crippling level of anxiety. i had spent the first year of her life carefully trying to keep us all safe from covid, even though i work somewhere with high probability of exposure. in january, despite all my best efforts, she brought it home from day care. and my husband developed a heart issue a few weeks later after we both caught it. it was devastating and scary. i didn't cope very well.

it has been a crushing level of stress.

so when i had my physical this past march, i was honest with my doctor. i had gotten to the point where i couldn't focus at work. everything made me angry. i wanted to sleep all day or not at all. i wasn't enjoying my time with my family because i was so busy worrying about everything. i was crying over nothing and everything. i was, quite simply, a hot mess. even more so than i remember being in those days a million years ago when i started this blog.

and my doctor said - "girl, you don't have to struggle with this alone. let me prescribe something to help!" 

maybe its the child-of-a-mentally-ill-parent thing, but i struggled to say yes. there was a brief moment where i felt... defeated. like i hadn't done enough to keep myself well. like my father, who had spent my entire childhood watching me for symptoms, had failed. 

but then i remembered my daughter. and how i was acting around her some days. so i said "ok. i'll try it." 

all i can say, weeks later now, is that i shouldn't have waited this long. the same thoughts come up, the same worries come up, but now they just dissipate in the rain and it doesn't feel like fight or flight. i can breathe. i can function.

so whoever, and wherever you are, speak up to your doctor about how you're feeling. i should've been the poster child for being honest with a doctor about my mental health, but i was hiding it. or lying to myself.

i wish i hadn't waited this long. don't you wait if you need help. there are so many resources out there and you aren't alone!! and i'm still here. tired, mommy-brained out, but here.

I'm a mother now.

My last post was so sad. It feels very foreign to me reading it back now. 

My daughter is here. She was born in the evening and climbed up my breast the minute they placed her there, ready to see my face just as much I was wanted to see hers. She held my finger and looked at everything - me, my husband, the room, the doctor. She was incredibly aware of the world and couldn't wait to be a part of it. Even now, 4 and a half months later, she has the worst case of FOMO I've ever seen. What a joy and a gift.

I haven't written about it at all since her birth, so please indulge me here. The practice of writing and journaling was once a daily affair for me. I've missed it.

No one had prepared me for the guttural, animal-like instinct that takes over during childbirth. I guess I had romanticized it based on movies. My mother had never told me about anything, and my father's answers about her time with birth was that she could withstand an incredible amount of pain, didn't need an epidural, and shooed him back home over night while she recovered only to fight to leave the hospital 24 hours after I was born. (Superwoman, indeed.) Now that I've been through the experience, I've added new differences between me and my mother to the catalog. I handled most of the birth without the epidural because it wore off halfway through, but it kicked back in for pushing (THANK YOU LORD.) I couldn't imagine my husband leaving me during the night there. And I would've stayed another day if they had let me, mostly because its a pandemic and we knew we wouldn't have help once we got home and the ability to send the baby to the nursery was sooooo lovely.

But the process of learning to breastfeed was traumatic. It was really hard. She wouldn't latch, and it was a struggle from the very first minute. Here again I thought of my mother, who used to tell me I was "allergic" to her and couldn't breastfeed. My father has since explained that she just didn't want to deal with breastfeeding me and put me on formula about a month in. Maybe that's why it was important to me to figure out - and we did. Five traumatic weeks of having an LC come to my house in PPE in a pandemic to help me and my baby learn. Five weeks of her screaming at my nipple and refusing the breast. Five weeks until she gave it another try and figured it out and made us both relax about it finally. Every time I nurse my daughter, I see a long line of women in my family history and our connection, and it makes me feel so... whole. Like belonging to something bigger than myself. I feel so right in the world, but also so sad for my mother. Perhaps that why our bond wasn't strong enough to get her the help she needed. I may never know. But I'm grateful my daughter figured out how to latch and build that bond with me. 

When I look at her, I see my own childhood through a completely different lens. Surely, my mother and I must have had these moments too... laying in bed together, her nursing, me playing with her hair. Bathing her in the sink. Watching my husband teach her how to stick out her tongue and make her giggle during diaper changes. (I could write an entire novel based on my husband's dad instincts, and how much I've fallen in love with him all over again.) Rocking her in my arms before bed. Picking out her outfits, and doting on her new discoveries of feet and her reflection in a mirror. 

How did my mother go from this period of love and mother-daughter bonding to willingly giving up our relationship just to stay off her medication? I am struggling more and more with understanding her. Before it had made sense. She told me the drugs made her feel dead inside and she'd rather feel something than nothing. I understood that. But to choose that over her relationship with me is more confusing than ever. Perhaps she really didn't make the choice the way I have imagined it these last 15 years. Perhaps the illness made her feel like she didn't have a choice, and it was her life over mine. Perhaps she didn't realize the choice I was forcing her to make. Either way, I cannot imagine ever choosing ANYTHING over my daughter. 

Every night, and every morning since she's come home from the hospital, I have leaned into her ear and whispered the same thing:

"Mama loves you. Mama loves you so much. Mama loves you more than anything."

I mean it. There is nothing I wouldn't give or do for her. 

...so why couldn't my mother do the same?

i'm still here.

It's been a long time. Many, many years at this point, which surprises me. Does anyone still even read this blog?

If I were to delve a little more deeply into why I haven't been writing, I'm sure that the usual answers would come up: I'm actually happy. I've been internalizing too much. I've been leaving my feelings at arms length, or ignoring them completely. How do I catch you up? What do I even write about right now?

My mother. It all comes back to my mother, and where we are now. Which is the same place we were. She is still off meds, still stalking me online, still a shadow in my life that comes and goes. This period of time after my wedding has been new and wonderful and heartbreaking in so many ways. Because after marriage, you start to want children. I've always wanted children, but now there's an urgency. I'm 37. I'm not getting any younger.

Exactly one year ago, I was pregnant. It was Mother's Day 2019. We had practically just found out, and the immediate family knew. Everyone wished me a happy Mother's Day, which made me insane because I'm Jewish. You don't do that... it's bad luck.

I couldn't believe it had finally happened - we had been trying for over a year. A year of heartbreak every single fucking month. If anyone out there has struggled with pregnancy, you know exactly what I mean. We had gotten to the point that my doctor had sent us off to a fertility doctor, and we had found out exactly how much money it was going to cost us to have a baby. My weight was a huge concern, along with my age, and the tests that they had done made us concerned about it actually happening without an egg donor. At literally the last possible second, we conceived naturally. It was a miracle. It was crazy.

It was too good to last. We lost the baby at the end of June.

So how does this all tie back to my mother? Well, I didn't know what a miscarriage really meant. I didn't get the full picture. The details and the business of losing a baby at 9 weeks are emotionally draining, but it was the physical affects that left me speechless. And I wanted my mother. I wanted to know if she had been as afraid as I had been that whole time. I wanted someone to take care of me. My husband and his mother were amazing. They held me up the entire time, and put me back together again. It was a messy, horrible and painful time, and once again I was reminded how lucky I was to be married to my husband.

My father also somehow stepped up and into my recovery. He moved near us a few months before that, and it's been incredible to have him so close. He came over almost every day while I lay on the couch trying to not fall apart again. He tried to remember my mother's health history with pregnancy. He did his best.

And I healed. Physically. I tried again. And miracle of miracles, we got pregnant again. I'm now 2 months away from meeting my child during a fucking pandemic. There are so many other feelings to unpack but I think I'll leave it for another day.

My mother's absence from the most painful experience of my life was harsh. But the older I get, the more I realize that there are other people in my life that absolutely stepped in and held me together. If I can get through a miscarriage without her, I know sure as shit I can get through a birth without her.

I feel my strength every day lately.

an entire year has flown by.

i've thought about writing and then not writing. or forgetting. or not wanting to delve too into my own mind over such a year.

it's strange to think about how much can happen in just a year. it looks like such a short amount of time on a calendar.

after the last post, my boyfriend moved in with me. before i knew it, we were engaged. and even sooner after that, we were married. just like that. a blink of an eye. and everything felt so perfectly timed. when i think about the year, it just comes as adjectives. amazing. whirlwind. romantic. happy. lucky. loved. different.

very different.

i'm still not sure how or why i get to live this life with the most perfect man. but i do, and he's mine, and i never have to give him up, until the good lord separates us. if anyone had told me that i would get to keep him, i would have held on even tighter convinced that something would happen to take him away. i'm still terrified he'll just go away. or get tired of me. or realize i'm really not his dream. i am so careful to lock away the part of me that deals with my mother... the side of me that sometimes just weeps, and aches in places that i can't describe properly. the side of me that makes me feel utterly alone, even if i'm physically not alone.

today was my birthday. i had to work, and he did everything right. he made me breakfast, and took me to lunch, and sent me flowers, and made me dinner. and i laid in his arms at bedtime, and just unraveled about my mother for a solid 30 minutes. he was sleepy, and saying the right things, and falling asleep, but i couldn't stand the restlessness. so now i'm up, and sitting here writing in the hopes it will get her out of mind and i'll sleep at some point. he's snoring in the other room, and i'm crying over my mother.

where do i even begin? this snow globe of bullshit swimming in my head right now is so frustrating, and familiar. and annoying. i thought i was past it.

i am jealous of other women in my life and their mothers.
i am jealous of his sister, and her relationship with her mother, and i tell myself that i'll never have that with her. that she doesn't want that with me.
i am jealous of my brother's wife, and her relationship with her mother.
i am jealous of all of them.

i will never have it. i will try to have children someday, and have to be alone in it. i will not have a mother to help me, like they all have. and i resent it. and i hate it. and it terrifies the shit out of me.

i've carefully created families within my friendships, and i latch onto my aunts and my cousins and my friends like they can fill this void. but they can't. they're a cheap replacement for something i will never regain, and i hate it.

i hate her for this. i hate her for not being strong enough. for not loving me enough to just stay on the fucking medication and do the hard work of living with mental illness. she chose paranoia and voices and mental immobilization over loving and caring for me, and i will never be able to forgive her.

and fuck it all, i miss her. more than a decade of this, and i still can't get over the simple fact that she's gone. and i won't replace her.

fuck. FUCK. i hate her for this. i hate me for being this upset over it, tonight of all nights.

i'm stronger than this, dammit.

The round sky goes on minding its business.

Your absence is inconspicuous;

Nobody can tell what I lack.

–Sylvia Plath, “Parliament Hill Fields”

her sister died.

my mother's sister and i had a troubled relationship. i loved her so much as a child - she was the "cool" aunt. she had the nice house, and the good snacks, and her kids were the same age as me and my brother. she was the one who let me sleep over, and had the pool in the backyard.

i got a phone call in mid-october that she had been in a serious car accident and suffered a brain clot in her brain. the whole thing was so surreal. i didn't believe it was as bad as they told me, and held out hope, even as she clinged to life in a medical coma. she couldn't die. she just couldn't. she was 61, and a new grandmother, and she was always there. always. a pain in my ass, but always there.

a few days later, she was gone, just like that. the bleeding in her brain hadn't stopped, and her children had to make the decision to let her go. the same day, i had tickets to go out of the country on a vacation that was pre-paid and couldn't be rebooked. i did the dick move and went on the trip. i knew it meant i would miss the funeral, and i tried to cope with that fact. you see, i'm always the one in family to do the right thing. i am usually the first one to cancel all the plans and go help. it felt awful to not do that this time.

but this was so complicated.

this woman, this aunt, whom i loved so much as a child, had hurt me so deeply as an adult. i've written about her on this blog before - she was the one who scolded me for not keeping in touch with my mother (even as she had an order of protection.) the one who helped my mother "kidnap" my brother and i the night before our parent's custody decision was announced by the judge. the one who constantly berated me for my weight and for always being single. she made me feel like shit pretty much every time i saw her. and we hadn't spoken in almost a year.

but i wept. oh how i wept for her.

i couldn't decide at the time if it was for her, for her kids, for me, or for my mother. you see, her kids didn't want my mother to know. she hasn't been in touch with my aunt for years, and the concern was that telling my mother would cause some sort of reaction. no one wants to deal with my mother. no one.

but my aunt was always the one who explained her to me. no one knew my mother quite like her, and somehow in my mind, i had always assumed she would be there as my mother aged and my brother and i had to make decisions about her. now she's gone, and i have no idea what she would have told me.

i wish i had asked her more questions. asked her for more stories to get to know my mother better by proxy. i should have called her more often. i should have... i should have...

even now, a month later, it doesn't feel real. her birthday and my birthday are two days apart, and she always called me. it's hard to imagine her not calling this year. i took it for granted she would always be there. it makes me feel more alone in this burden of my mother's illness.

healing takes a lot of time

i've been working on a project where i am archiving all of my family's photos. it's been intense - a journey through their lives from the 1890s up until now. i just got through the end of the 70's, and it took me 7 months to work up the nerve to really start scanning the year of my parent's marriage. seeing photos of them together is still weird and it leaves me wondering more and more about what my mother was like back then. it's so much easier to imagine my father in his late 20's. my mother is such a more difficult puzzle to put together.

she was so beautiful, and young, and fresh. these photos don't remind me at all of the woman i knew as a child or as an adult now. it's so obvious that my father loved her to distraction. how hard it must have been for him too...

mental illness is such a beast. it steals the ones you love so completely if they go untreated. i would have loved to know this woman in the photos - i bet she was amazing.

but that's the thing about photos right? they only capture the good and the great moments. they rarely catch the beast within, or the fights i knew my parents had. photos can lie.

mother's day #10 without her.

i've survived the day.

slowly, over a lot of years, this feeling of survival has become more difficult to detect. 10 years ago, when we were in the middle of her spiral and her eventual (and sadly temporary) incarceration, it was raw rage. grief. sadness. i couldn't make it through the day without drinking or going fetal on the bed for the afternoon.

over the years, it's taken different paths. i'd work the entire day just to keep myself busy. i'd spend it with my grandmother, who spent decades filling in for my mother in my life. the last few years have been the "easiest", i guess. i've found it harder to remember exactly how many years it's been since i've seen her, or how long it's been since we had a conversation.

but i know this is absolutely mother's day #10 without her.

it's so strange to watch people's Facebook messages on mother's day. it's hard for us motherless daughters. maybe if i had kids of my own, i wouldn't hate this fucking holiday, but i don't. i have nothing to distract me other than the thought that i'm a heck of a cat momma, and my employees are my kids in many ways. my job has been my sanctuary for all these years, and today i wasn't there.

no, today was a different routine.

i spent mother's day with my boyfriend and his mother. i bought her a bracelet. i couldn't help myself. it was the first time in a decade where i felt like i had someone to do that for. (looking back on this, i should've sent my grandmother a card. tomorrow.) i was almost giddy about it. this overwhelming thought of, "i have someone to celebrate this year!" and even though she is not my mother-in-law (yet, at least) and we still don't know each other well, she has taken me into her arms and hugged me so hard that i almost cried. she has texted to see how i'm feeling, and made me feel like a part of her family. and every bone in my body is just praying so hard that someday i will actually be her daughter-in-law. i had always hoped that someday i'd meet the right guy, and that he'd have a mother that i could love as my own. i know that i have. i am so in love with him, and all i dream about anymore is our lives together.

i'm so terrified it will all go away again. i'm praying so hard that they never go away.

i made it through most of the day without talking about my mother. my boyfriend brought it up and i shrugged it off defensively, as i usually do. we took a nap in the afternoon, and he had me in his arms, and i started crying but he didn't notice (thank goodness.) i didn't want to explain why. it was a private thought. it was a moment i will always remember - because i felt so safe, so lucky, so happy, and so heartbroken over her.

look at how strong i am. look at how much i've grown in 10 years. would she even recognize me? would i recognize her?

this guilt just never goes away.

my brother put up a photo of his wife and mother-in-law today and said that they were the most important mothers in his world. isn't it funny how we both have latched on to our significant other's moms? not funny. not the right word. i can't even put into words how unfair it seems to me. we have been cheated out of a life with our mother, and the fact that we do everything we can to fill that void with women who mean something to us just shows how hurt we are. hurt little kids missing their mommy.

i wonder what she did today. who she was with. did she go out, or stay in? i have no idea. i don't really want to know.

i just want my boyfriend here and his arms around me so i can feel safe again. i don't feel safe right now. i feel scared and lonely and sad. i can't believe it's been 10 whole years. it feels like a lifetime.

being motherless - not by death, but by choice - is a special kind of torture, and it just never seems to heal up right.