July has swung and out of my life like a barrel of deranged monkeys.
The summer has brought with it its normal assortment of holidays, camping, day camps and unrelenting dashing about the province. It shouldn't feel this busy but it does.
The main difference between this summer and previous summers for our family is that this is the first summer that we have had to arrange out of the house child care. What that means, for me, is that bagged lunches and rushing out in the morning do not cease. A weeklong holiday on the island was not, like most good holidays, very restful. Instead, we needed a holiday from our holiday and we came home to a heat wave and a bunch of deadlines.
The word overwhelmed comes up a lot in my life. For me, it is a feeling of isolation and inadequacy and the incredibly, real feeling that I cannot get everything I need to do, done. It happens. This is modern parenting: anxiety, stress and a to-do list that is implausible.
How do I cope when I am feeling more down than usual?
I try to exercise to make sure that I am getting positive endorphins, I nap when I am trying to write my thesis because writing makes me tired, I try to laugh and play with my kids as much as I can in the few hours of the day that we have together.
I also maintain my anti-depressant medication. Now being on medication is generally not something that is admitted in polite conversation but the fact of the matter is that most of the people that I know either are, or have been on, anti-depressants of some variety in their lifetime.
I am on a low-dose, slow-release serotonin booster that I have been on for a few years. I started taking medication because I was going through a rough patch mentally and I found that I was coming home exhausted at the end of the day and couldn't seem to get off the couch.
A few weeks after I started taking the medication and after some excellent therapy, I started to notice a difference. I was not cured - meds do not cure, they treat depression. What the medication allowed me to do was to start getting off the couch.Not every day, but some of them.
I could come home after work, eat dinner, play with the kids and do a load of laundry. Eventually, things began to feel more normal and I started moving more and pulled out of the worst of the funk I was in. Some days, are good, some days are bad and it is unrealistic to think that everything will be sunshine and rainbows every day. I am sharing my story to let other people know that they are not the only ones who do not have everything together all of the time.
I have a lot of balls in the air right now and I am not a very good juggler. Luckily, there are a lot of really great people in my life to help carry some of the balls.For all of the other people out there who are having a hard time climbing out of the rut or trying to hold all your balls in the air, hang in there.
You are not alone.
