{my topography}

Will the sun burn out?
What about when we die, will it burn out then?
Will our truck and our house still be here when we die?
Is Rudolf real?
Is there someone inside the computer that makes it do what you want it to do?
How did the baby get inside your tummy?

***
Anyone have any ideas how to answer the last one in particular? I told him I’d get back to him tomorrow…

Thank you all for being here and listening and filling my days with little shreds of wonder and kindness and encouragement.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The slender steepled finger on the clock moves into position at the twelve, the shorter one at eight, and I can feel tiredness seep into my pores like a rising tide. My body sinks into the faded tan cushions on the couch, tiredness making my legs at once jumpy and leaden. The cat curls against my back, her warm fur on my bare skin, her purr a metronome of comfort until I reach out and rub her fur the wrong way and she leaps up in a sudden aerial twist and lands softly on the floor.

I watch the hand on the clock move forward and listen to night gathering. The rain on the windows, the wood fire. I can feel myself out there somewhere at the peripheries of things, like a jellyfish that is present only in its own pulsing.

Someone mentioned depression in the comments to my last post. As in, maybe it’s the thing that’s been hanging around here, like a hungry cur at the back door. And of course she’s right.

There might have been a time when I would have argued that depression only haunts those that have it hiding in their genes like varicose veins; the blueprint for sorrow already stamped into the double helix of their life.

But now I know it is more like mold springing unbidden: on the bread left in the pantry a day too long; at the lip of the jar of marmalade preserves; behind the faucet that has been left to tap a soft staccato of drips into the basin; under the autumn pumpkins sitting fat and secretive on the ledge with their bellies rotting out. I know that for me it’s here now, blue and fuzzy, tainting perfectly good moments.

I might have once been terrified of this. Or ashamed. But the last few years have borne enough ache to teach me this: growth happens when the moments are bitter and slow, when night happens early at the edges of my soul. And also this: that morning comes again. That for me at least, this will not last. In my beet red core I have resilience. In me there is a swift restorative sap that tells me again and again to have trust in my life. I feel this surging even now, in the thick of restlessness and limbo and exhaustion.

Perhaps this makes my depression different than the kind that takes over a person entirely, ceaselessly eating away at the soul like a virus. Still, depression finds me and has found me now.

It follows the hands around the clock. It flutters at the frayed edges of exhaustion, on the hormonal tides of pregnancy and hunger. I see it in myself lately, and recognizing this feels a bit like finding a Polaroid of me in a shoebox and being unable to place the context or the time in which it was taken.

I know I need simple things that I’m not getting. I can see cause and effect. I need rest and rhythm and days that are less jam-packed and cluttered with other people’s needs. I need quiet and stories and live jazz and sunshine. I need running and lovemaking and the ability to breath without congestion. Some of these needs are things I can control right now, but many are things I cannot.

I have to work for the next three months and being pregnant in this context puts me at odds with the things that I need to feel whole. Being pregnant makes me introverted and fragile and susceptible to being sick. It makes me tender and sore spent at the end of the day. I can do nothing but feel like a little alien has invaded and wait it out; stringing together the moments of fluttering and increasingly rambunctious kicks in my belly like beads on an abacus. Three months more.

So yes, depression. Yes winter and pregnancy and over-tiredness. Yes it’s here now, and I still have three months ahead of me of this awkward and pathetic balancing act before I stop working and hibernate with my babe in the middle of a snowy landscape.

Somehow I’ll make it through. Somehow I’ll huddle in the palm of each day and wait to be handed by grace into the palm of the next. I’ll sip good chai tea, and watch how individual snowflakes gathering on the window panes are really all different. I’ll read poems that fill me up and watch my son draw maps. I’ll breath in the warmth of my husband’s skin and order Christmas presents by mail. And I’ll wait.

What about you? Does depression find you ever?

Does going to the doctor actually makes you better?

I mean this in the most innocent, unsarcastic way.

See the thing is I grew up with homeopathy and have, as an adult, veered towards for the most part. I like the route of least intervention. I like the idea of treating the whole person, rather than just a specific set of symptoms. I like the idea that your body can develop it’s on strong defenses to most ailments. And in general, I’ve experienced that it can…

And I’ve also experienced some rather negative encounters with traditional doctors who mostly seem to be prescription writers for antibiotics… (again, this is just my experience.) I’ve discovered from these encounters that a) I get righteous and horrific yeast infections the minute I take any kind of antibiotic and that b) the doctor’s solution is to then prescribe Diflucan which I am apparently violently allergic to (last time my lips burst out into blisters within hours of taking it and my chin and cheeks went numb.)

Not to mention, when I fell pregnant I thought I had a virus picked up in Spain so I went to my GP who told me she thought I had IBS. (Ick. Look that one up.) I sort of rolled my eyes and cocked my head and said, “any chance I could be pregnant?” to which she declared with much bravado, “Absolutely not.”

So you see why I’m a skeptic?

But now, well, I’m in a bit of a predicament.

I feel like my natural immune defense is not winning anymore against the tide of germs coming my way from school–twenty odd kids with germy hands and Strep and Pneumonia and everything else they’ve been passing around…plus whatever Bean has been bringing back from preschool (which has resulted in his first ever double ear infection.) I’ve kind of reached my limit in fact. I’ve been sick to varying degrees since September. And before that I had morning sickness… so basically I’ve been affected by some form of malaise for the past 6 months and it’s kindof affecting my will to do anything other than bury my head under several pillows and sob.

So I want to know: what do doctors actually do these days–other than prescribe antibiotics? Is there anything they can actually do to help me that will help as much as my mom stopping by to rub my feet and feeding me chicken soup?

Do you ‘believe’ in your doctor?

Tonight my orbit is the cat’s purr; my finger’s contact with the ENTER key, the space bar, alphabet twirling.

Tonight my orbit is my sick son, now asleep, before in tears simply because the day was too much.

Tonight my orbit is the roundness of my belly where kicks disrupt my thoughts, where space is at a premium now, and over which I pull new woolly sweaters.

Tonight my orbit is the circling of my thoughts, dogging each other, nose to tail; feeling like gradually I’ve lost touch with my creative self, allowed myself to sink deep into a dreamy no-mans land of day to day.

Tonight my orbit is the scattered disks thoughts about tomorrows plans; a thirst for fresh water, an eagerness for bed and a longing to feel right now, the warmth of my husband’s skin.