sculptural genius

I know every mom thinks their kid is a prodigy in some area, and I don't think that's a bad thing. Everyone needs a fan, right? Well, I've just been blown away by the stuff A is producing here at home. He spends literally hours with his modeling clay, with--seriously!--no pushing or suggestion from me. Sometimes I ask, "don't you want to go outside and play?" "No, I'm finishing this sculpture," he says. Okay...

Yesterday he had me image-searching pictures of fish skeletons, shark skeletons, t-rex skeletons, bat skeletons, and human skeletons. Each one he'd ask me to draw a picture of, and then he'd make the skeleton from looking at the picture. I told him that all skeletons have a skull, a spine attached, and some sort of rib cage, and that most mammals also have pelvis bones, arm and leg bones. Basic anatomy for a 4-year-old, you know, just stuff kids talk about on the day-to-day. Here's what he came up with:

*sigh*

Interesting.

a chihuahua and a pack of Newports

If you've been keeping up with my blog, you'll know that I've been fighting melancholy and/or depression for a while. It's a fact of life, part of my family inheritance as much as musical talent, religious fervor, creativity, and good cooking skills have been passed on. It's the other side of the family coin, so to speak. Because of that history, though, I've been very reticent to try any sort of pharmaceutical solution to the problem. My main defense of that position is my late grandmother, whom we called Nanny.

I did not really know Nanny, even though I spent time with her when I was growing up, and even stayed at her strange house on the Eastern Shore on occasion. Nanny lived alone, and had a truly hideous, bad-tempered rat of a dog named Lisa for company. Lisa had the run of the house, could relieve herself wherever she liked, and noisily ate cooked chicken every day from a little bowl near the radio stand in the kitchen. Patsy Cline was always on the radio, some Country-Western station, and the breakfast nook had a lazy-Susan filled with odds and ends, including little triangular blue pills with a V on them. V is for Valium, kids.

The local doctor was apparently not concerned that my grandmother had been steadily taking these little pills for about 3 decades. Indeed, Nanny wasn't concerned either. She really could not be concerned about much of anything save the dog, the TV, and cigarettes. She'd sit, staring at the TV, cigarette in her trembling hand, and come out of her reverie to make tuna casserole or run the bath for me, or walk the brick path to the mailbox for her Avon catalogs.

I could say that in those benighted times, women's health was so mysterious, and blanketed over with male-dominated medicine's assumptions about weakness, "hysteria," irrationality and over-emotionalism. In fact, many of these women probably had malfunctioning thyroids, forced hysterectomies without hormone replacement after childbirth, and just the plain gamut of unseemly emotions that women have always had, but men feel are out of place in our modern times. Honestly though, with all the developments we have made in medicine and psychology, it really seems to me that women's medicine remains largely mysterious. New disorders are discovered, but they really aren't new at all--they are just things for which women had been dismissed as crazy and now have a legitimate medical name.

One of those new disorders is what I think might be causing many of my issues: PMDD, pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder. It's like PMS but more extreme. It feels kindof shameful to talk about PMS, since it's pretty much a joke byword for being a bitch. So PMDD is like, ooh, she's an uber bitch then, watch out! The symptoms line up pretty well with me, with an added dose of family melancholy, so I went to my doctor and told him about it. The response was not surprising.

In the past few years, when I have gone for checkups or for completely unrelated causes, I have mentioned feeling low occasionally, and almost before the words are out of my mouth, the doctors have recommended an anti-depressant. "There are some really effective ones now," they say. "You should really consider it." It's as easy to get these pills as it is to receive God's grace, it seems. There was never a suggestion that perhaps counseling could address these feelings, or the fact that therapy is recommended along with anti-depressants so that one is not merely putting a pill-shaped bandaid on emotional traumas that require selective surgery. Studies have proven that the meds and cognitive behavioral therapy really do a great deal to alleviate depression together. I know this, but I don't think a lot of people who go in to their own doctors know this as well. It costs more to go to therapy, even though in the long run the improvement is much more significant.

Up until two weeks ago, I have said no thanks to these easy offers of anti-depressants. I used them once before, when panic attacks kept me from going about my daily life, and these pills were a pair of crutches for a broken leg; they were obviously necessary to treat the malady, or I would just not go to work at all. In this new situation, though, I have vacillated for it seems like years on whether or not to try them again, what it means personally to cave in to the considerable pressure to mess around with my brain chemistry.

I will spare you the lists of pros and cons, the hemming and hawing I've gone through over what to do, to just sum it up with this: I wonder what does it mean for my identity--does it change who I am essentially, to take medication that changes my moods, my chemical makeup? Is it worth suffering a bit more than the average person, when suffering has done so much to shape my spiritual life, my understanding of the world, my creativity? That suffering has also probably cost me days and weeks of potential productivity, though, sluggishly going through life at half-speed and wasting precious time. The pros and cons feel equal to me at this point, and I have decided that no, medication is not forever--it does not need to become a life sentence, nor would it be impossible to stop taking it if I feel like the new self is completely foreign to who I really am. What, really, do I have do lose here?

So about a week ago, I started taking a very popular anti-depressant along with medication that regulates those pesky PMDD hormone levels. So far I am not sure how I feel, literally. My brain feels a little scattered, squirrely, and last week I had a day or two that scared the hell out of me--I was so apathetic. All I needed were Nanny's trusty props and a dim room to complete the generational picture, something that filled me with dread. The saving grace was that I had an awareness of the apathy, and not just a catatonic stuopor; as long as I am concerned about doing the right thing, the meds have not completely taken over. If I ever get to the point where I could give a crap one way or another, that is the time to back off and live with the melancholy me instead of the automaton space cadet. But those feelings have not resurfaced and I'm giving it a month to get balanced in my body. After that, I think I can make a more rational assessment and go on from there.

I honestly don't know what to expect. People who have taken anti-depressants don't describe the exact feelings so much, just that they feel better, they can cope, they have more energy perhaps. Some don't, some are tired, some become it seems, shadow-versions of themselves. It feels like I need as much faith in this solution as I do to pray, maybe more.

cool things

Here are some long overdue photos of projects I've worked on, and a most excellent christmas present from my best friend...First, a super-happy work bag from my best friend J. She's a tremendous dressmaker, and had some adorable heart fabric to make this very roomy bag. It's lined in a deep blue, with handmade handles too! Cheers, J, I love it!
The weirdest thing I've worked on in a long time are these sneakers. I went to get some walking shoes for my treadmill workouts, and all they had in my size were bright white, Nurse Ratchet shoes. So I figured they'd be a good blank canvas for some sharpie marker fun. I used a piece of Japanese chirigami paper as inspiration for all the patterns, and now I actually like wearing the sneakers.And introducing...Koi Hooks! I have almost worked out all the kinks for production of these crochet hooks made of sculpey. So far, they have been very time-consuming and difficult, but they stand up well to wear and tear when they're cured properly. Not all will have this fish-scale effect, but they look cool. Each has been carved by hand and polished and sanded to a satiny shine. I am planning, once I have a good number of them, to sell these at a new local yarn shop, called Spinster Yarns and Fibers! The owner of the shop, Andrea, is super nice, spins her own yarn, and has asked me to be the crochet teacher for the shop. I am truly excited about it, and I would love for you all to come check it out! I'm planning to teach beginner's crochet and also an intermediate class for people who have the basics down. The shop is in the basement of my favorite cafe/bookstore, The Red Canoe. It's a great place to grab a coffee, check out some fun books, and chat with the friends who inevitably stop by. It is Smalltimore, anyhow.

mixed bag

Here are some things I'm thinking about.

• adding injury to injury: Fema trailers have been found to be hazardous to health, as they have dangerous levels of formaldehyde, a known carcinogen. Can't these f-ups do anything? Anything at all? I think about Katrina survivors who lost everything in the same way I think about WWII veterans and Vietnam Vets (especially POW's). They have a free pass, and no amount of courtesy and generosity is too much. If they go apeshit, well no wonder, and God help them, but we better do everything in our power to make their lives better and give them a safe place to live. It's a crime and a national shame. We have the best country in the world, but honestly that's not saying much in this area.
  
• last night D and I had an exquisite dinner at the Chameleon Cafe. My friend B and her husband started the cafe about 8 years ago, and I am a little chagrined that I have not gone there to eat more than a handful of times. After last night, I plan to be a more frequent visitor. We had a cheese plate of flavor-packed cheeses--I know nothing about describing cheeses, but I know cheese plates have soft, medium, and hard with some sort of fruit accompaniment. The medium cheese D described as everything he loves about Crazy Bread, concentrated in one bite of the cheese. If you know him, this is a huge compliment (when we were dating, crazy bread was the perfect meal to devour in his car and talk about everything under the sun, plus it's mega-cheap). My entree was a pork tenderloin with a glaze and hollandaise sauce over potatoes and gorgeous broccoli-like veggies. It was perfect. The other white meat never tasted so good. The experience really felt like going to a museum to me, when you're used to wandering around the "framed art" section of Ikea.
  
• 5 years ago: the blizzard of 03. According to my friend C, one of 12 women I knew who got pregnant around the same time, it wasn't just snow falling. That fall was very busy in maternity wards!
• Madeleine L'Engle. I have found over the years that the perfect book comes up at just the right moment. This time, it was Circle of Quiet, the first of a series of journals L'Engle wrote and published in the seventies. She reflects on all kinds of things, from creativity and teaching children, to her own struggles as a writer and mother. I have copied down a few paragraphs that have been immensely comforting lately:

  The various pressures of twentieth-century living have made it almost impossible for the young mother with preschool children to have any solitude. During the long drag of years before our youngest child went to school, my love for my family and my need to write were in acute conflict. The problem was really that I put two things first. My husband and children came first. So did my writing. Bump.

  …there were times when for at least a full minute I thought of following Gauguin: I needed a desert island, and time to write.

  Well, somehow or other, like a lot of other women who have quite deliberately and happily chosen to be mothers, and work at another vocation as well, I did manage to get a lot of writing done. But during that decade when I was in my thirties, I couldn’t sell anything. If a writer says he doesn’t care whether he is published or not, I don’t believe him. I care. Undoubtedly I care too much. But we do not write for ourselves alone. I write about what concerns me, and I want to share my concerns. I want what I write to be read. Every rejection slip…was like the rejection of me, myself, and certainly of my amour-propre. I learned all kinds of essential lessons during those years of rejection, and I’m glad to have had them, but I wouldn’t want to have to go through them again.

  ….

  All during the decade of my thirties…I went through spasms of guilt because I spent so much time writing, because I wasn’t like a good New England housewife and mother. When I scrubbed the kitchen floor, the family cheered. I couldn’t make a decent pie crust. I always managed to get something red in with the white laundry in the washing machine, so that everybody wore streaky pink underwear. And with all the hours I spent writing, I was still not pulling my own weight financially.

  …

  I had to write. I had no choice in the matter. It was not up to me to say I would stop, because I could not. It didn’t matter how small or inadequate my talent.

hmmmm

read this. what do you think? The timing is quite good, though a little disturbing.

I'm not in bed! bully for me!

Ok so I am mega tired this morning. Our carpool friend came earlier than usual, and I managed to stuff about 3 bites of cereal into my son's stupefied gullet before I took him out to the car. As I fumbled with the car seat's many tangled straps (every car seat has them, and they're ALL different) my friend's kids were prattling at the top of their voices about awesome plastic rings they had, with spiderman, superman, and snowflakes. They were so excited, and I managed a half-mumbled "wow, that'sreallycoolseeyousoonIloveyou" with my eyes half closed.

This afternoon, I can predict what will await me after I pick the boys up: A will be bursting out of his skin to tell me everything he was thinking about at the moment--some of it related to school, some so random that it could only have come from his father's side of the family (D assumes I have telepathy sometimes, and will continue a conversation he's been having with me in his head and then look at me like I'm crazy for not knowing of what he speaks). The other little boy will be excited for a minute or two, and then we'll start driving and he will go silent. By the time I get him home, he will be as conked-out as I am right now; still awake, but only in the eyelids.

There you have it, the glorious difference between a morning person and a non-morning person.

It's really a shame that schools favor morning people. I always thought my pre-11 AM students were getting a raw deal, as my already thin patience was so much easier to test in those first classes. And when I was pregnant and teaching, there was the added joy of seeing my green face while painfully trying to sound excited about teaching perspective and shading and all that. At least it made my leaving more bearable. Their new art teacher is a guy, and I'm pretty sure he's a morning person too.

finding the path through mordor

Lately--scratch that--most of my life, I have lived with some level of melancholy, or depression, or blahs, pessimism, anxiety, despair, or general funk (he's a cranky one, that General Funk). Break out the thesaurus, then: ennui, poor spirits, lowness, mourning for I know not what. It is what has often shaped my view of life, given me insight, crippled me, inspired me, and paradoxically, shown me the miraculous love of God. Most of the time it's just a little bit of funk, nor have the really bad times been so persistent as to incapacitate me more than once or twice.

I'm spending time thinking through these feelings, and am going soon to a few specialists to see if there's some underlying thing that has been missing--hormonal?--biochemical?--spiritual? I sure hope they find something, because just going back to therapy, as nice as my counselor is, is just not a fun way to spend my free time. Hashing through wounds that I thought were nicely scabbed over, opening the stuffed closets of my mind; though instructive, these things take enormous amounts of energy and leave me feeling like a peeled nerve on a sidewalk.

When life is pretty good, normal activities are fine and I am content, the melancholy is far below the surface. Like when you're in a quiet house but you know the TV is on somewhere. "You're feeling low," a little voice says. I respond politely, "No, you are mistaken." "I'm still here, you know, if you need me," it says. That's about 25 percent of my days.
Other times it's like Venice during the floods. The water's right there, it's not too deep, and the city has helpfully provided a raised boardwalk across the piazza for the populace. Dreary, yes, and liable to slip into the polluted shallows*, but there is still a way forward with some clarity. I'd rather be indoors than on the path, but I know that St. Mark's Cathedral(**) is at the end. That's about 45 percent of the time for me.
*my friend has talked about falling into the Baltimore harbor/bay and getting "Baids" from the funk therein. Blehhhh! So grody!
**When I visited St. Mark's in college, I described it to D as "walking around inside a gold nugget." I was thoroughly sick of churches by that time, so I'm sure I'd be more charitable if I visited again.
About once a month, the melancholy is more like an active lava flow (all kinds of gross inferences can be drawn from that). One could theoretically walk across the black parts, but a throbbing undercurrent of molten rock is waiting to bubble up through the delicate shell. Those days I spend gingerly picking my way across, fearful of going forward--of going anywhere at all, but knowing the longer I stay there, the more precarious my footing.

The lava days are especially dangerous, as almost anything can bubble up from my past, rational or not, to condemn me (the latest example: the time in 5th grade when I voted for myself as Dorothy in my class' Wizard of Oz play. Having only 16 people in my class was a definite hindrance to anonymity. I felt bad for being so egotistical, but I also knew I was the best person to do it). Identity questions and guilt over fundamental decisions are also a plague. So: my main job is motherhood (I guess?), but I will die if I do not spend significant amounts of time creating--anything, writing, sculpting, painting, crocheting. Housekeeping concurrently fills me with loathing and condemnation for avoiding it. Guilt follows each decision, as the decision to write means I'm neglecting my child, the decision to take A to a kiddie place means my brain is going fallow, etc... I do not pretend that any of this is rational, reasonable, or gracious. That's what makes it so insidious. What kind of idiot sits around thinking about stupid crap they did in 5th grade, that may or may not even have been bad to begin with? Ah, but I do. It's what D calls emotional judo. Bow to the master.

The worst stage of melancholy, which is really full-blown severe depression, I'd like to call the Mordor Walk. If you haven't read/seen Lord of the Rings, well go read it for Pete's sake. What's your problem? Sam and Frodo have a mission to destroy the ring by getting through Sauron's land --Mordor, and casting the ring into the fire of Mount Doom. It really looks stupid to write that, and I don't know how Tolkein got through without snickering, or maybe he was one of those really literal nerds who don't understand sarcasm. Well there it is. Mordor is a hateful land, full of evil things, and guarded at one end by a monstrous spider named Shelob. Frodo and Sam go through her lair, which is full of impenetrable, palpable darkness. Tolkein describes the depth of that darkness, with the overpowering smell of decaying filth, and says "all senses were cut off save that of smell, and that remained only for their torment." Or something like that. Like changing a diaper in the dark. Only sheer will and supernatural assistance got them through.

You don't need to be a genius to see the parallels with depression. I have been fortunate to only have experienced this last one a handful of times. Very bleak times, indeed.

One of those times was after the birth of my son. Besides the trauma of that experience (and I can use the word trauma very literally here), there were a lot--I mean a LOT--of other things going on physically, or rather, a lot of things that should have been going on but weren't. All those factors drove me into a fog I had never experienced before. By some miracle, or again an act of sheer will, I managed to have an art show or two, and run the gallery for my church, and a few other things too. But initially, I considered the day a resounding success if I hadn't sobbed uncontrollably and managed to feed A as much as he needed (which was a boatload, the little piglet). Forget doing dishes, cleaning anything at all, getting groceries, doing errands. Eventually I could go to one place a day without major exhaustion. The thought of going anywhere filled me with dread; not from fear, but from all the mental effort of planning our outings and the physical demands of lugging the carseat and stroller, diaper bag, and piglet, and knowing he'd have a massive blowout or be ravenous the minute we stepped into Target. I felt like I was going crazy, like I was a complete wimp for not being able to cope with easy things that new moms did every day. I conveniently forgot that most new moms had at least some blood in their veins and functioning thyroids, and I really didn't see their day-to-day emotions and struggles either. I was too tired to experience rational thought.

Isolation is he biggest weapon in depression's arsenal. The person feels alone, has no energy to do things that would require being with others, and then the cycle perpetuates itself and spirals into even more isolation. It's almost impossible to not be isolated when you have a new baby, it's wintertime, and your own body has sabotaged itself. Now I know the truth about the isolation fog, and can evaluate those times in light of the facts. I have experienced healing of the trauma, healing in my body, and the healing that comes with time. I have not forgotten the events by any means, but revisiting them does not send me into a tailspin like it did.

So many of my friends are having babies again, or adopting again, or having a baby for the first time (I can think of at least 8 right now), I can't help but compare my experience to theirs. It's bittersweet; the fact that these moms are doing so well is a huge comfort to me. At the same time I can't help but wonder if things had gone smoothly for me, if my body had not revolted against me, what that would have been like. I can't really imagine it another way, but I am happy that my little piglet has grown to be such a terrific little person, whether or not his mommy is fighting with General Funk.