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Why?
An ongoing issue for me in dealing with my first, and subsequent miscarriages, was the desire to understand why it had happened. I was dumbfounded to hear my doctors say, “We don’t investigate miscarriages until you’ve had three.” Reeling from my first loss, it was hard for me to imagine multiplying that pain by three before anyone would throw me a lifeline…
Room to Maneuver
Decades ago, I had a neighbor with an RV - a big one. He would park it in a narrow corner of his back yard. It looked like an impossibly tight squeeze, and it very nearly was. I would watch him parking from my kitchen window, and learned his secret, a very simple one - patience. . . .
Seeing Past the Windshield
Don’t get so caught up in the obstructions immediately in front of you that you fail to focus on where you are going.
The winter after our second child was born was a challenging one for our family. We had naively imagined that after my husband completed his master’s degree, our greatest difficulty would lie in choosing between job offers. Instead, we found ourselves back in our home city, where my husband cobbled together a couple of low-paying jobs into a six-day work week that provided something of a livable income. We had one car, and a workplace that was impossible to reach by transit . . . .
Who Is My Depression?
“I think of it as a little child that needs comforting.”
One of my teen-aged children taught me a valuable lesson about mental illness. We were together in a counselling session. As we often do when discussing all sorts of illnesses, the counsellor had been using metaphors of conflict. We “fight” a cold, we “battle” cancer; and similarly, the counsellor, in an effort to motivate my teen, was asking them to “confront” and “combat” the anxiety that was severely limiting their growth and enjoyment of life.
“I don’t like to think of my anxiety as an enemy,” my teen said.
It’s Not Your Job To Decide
Years ago, I attended a presentation by a man who worked in investigations of child sexual assault. The purpose of his presentation was simple: teach us what to do if we ever heard a child disclose that they had been assaulted. (In a nutshell: call the authorities. Don’t ask the child any more questions, because you might compromise a police investigation.)
I had a question for our presenter. I cringe to admit I asked this, but I did, and I needed to hear the answer.
“Suppose I get a disclosure from a child with a history of lying,” I asked, “How do I know whether or not to take it seriously?”
What Is My Depression?
What is depression? It is an illness, not an identity.
Looking back I know I’ve been dealing with depression since at least my thirteenth Christmas, a day when I cried myself to sleep in a haze of sadness that descended from nowhere. I loved Christmas; nothing had occurred to disappoint me; there was no reason at all for the despair that engulfed me. There were more days like that to come.
I remember a year and a half into my time at university (pertinently, just after Christmas vacation had ended), running upstairs . . . .
Between 2005 and 2008, I lost four tiny babies to miscarriage. In an effort to help others who may be experiencing similar losses, I want to share the story of that journey. If you click on the title above, and then follow the “Next in Miscarriage Journey” links at the bottom of each post, you can read through my story sequentially.