Inertia

It's March and I love March.  Selfishly, because my birthday is in March, but it isn't just that.  It's that March holds so much promise.  Promise of warmth, daylight, tulips, baseball, basketball.  Even if it snows or is cold, you can at least see the end of winter coming, so you can reassure yourself help is on the way.  It's Women's History Month and that's kind of nice.  Girl Scout cookies are around.  Sometimes we get Easter and since Easter is now less about Jesus and more about candy, we get candy too.  March is just a delight.
Since it's all about me, at least in these pages, last March was a horrible March for me.  After getting worse and worse and then plateauing so we could enjoy the holidays together, my mom had gotten worse again.  For real this time, in that there was no turning back.  There was no hope for improvement, just hope for more time, and even that, we knew, was severely limited.

And, as I've asked before, what do you hope for when you feel like there's no hope?  Hope for more time - time that's potentially painful and uncomfortable for someone you love?  Hope that when the inevitable happens you can handle it?

Last year at this time, I was bracing for my birthday as I was, quite frankly, refusing to celebrate.  I felt anxious and scared and worried, and everything opposite from what you're supposed to feel.  My mother was in the hospital and couldn't be a part of any celebration.  It just didn't feel right to be, you know, getting older when the person who brought me into this world wouldn't be there.  She had been there for every birthday before that, so it just struck me as really wrong and really uncomfortable - and even than that, her absence defined what the future would look like.  I knew that she wouldn't see me turn another year older, and I think part of me wanted to stop the clock and not let my birthday happen because if I allowed it, I was accepting the new normal.  And I wasn't about to go down without a fight.

My mother sent flowers from her hospital bed - and called me and sang Happy Birthday, a message that, as soon as she passed, I scrambled to ensure would live on forever, asking friends to help me save them with other voicemails I had saved.  I had deliberately not answered the phone every time she had called the past few months so I would be sure to have a record of her voice.

Despite my best efforts, I got older anyway.   I got older and I got depressed.  I had never really been depressed before.  Anxious, sure, always.  But depression had been something I had been fortunate enough to not really experience.  I felt like on the other side of this sadness there was just more sadness, worse sadness, and I wanted no part of it.

I've been open here that at times I wasn't sure about the point of, well, everything.  But in my experience it didn't feel violent or urgent, it felt more like, "What does this matter?"  Kind of like one of those songs that you hear everywhere but you're not really sure what the name of it is or who sings it but it's just everywhere and you don't like it or dislike it, you just acknowledge it, "This song again?"  People ask if I was depressed enough to have actually done something to harm myself and I answer honestly that I really don't know.  I like to think not, but all I can say for sure is that I didn't and that's enough.  And I'm glad.

And somehow it was enough to get me through the next year.   Some days were better than others.  Some days were really really bad.  Some days were actually good.  All days have been contained tears of some kind and I'm not sure if they'll ever stop but I'm not sure if I want them to.

As I approach another birthday (weren't we just here?), I do so with a lot anxiety and trepidation and sadness, but I also have the gift of hope.  It's a gift I gave myself because I went through the thing I feared the most, and here I am, if certainly not on the other side of it just yet, at least the ball is further down the field.

And, even more positively, I'm feeling restless and less inert.  It's exciting and terrifying at the same time.  For years I dismissed any unhappiness about where I am in life with a metaphorical slap across the face.  Let's not do this now, shall we?  We have plenty to do right here.  I felt trapped by circumstance - and it was comforting and reassuring.  And I could blame people and things other than myself.  I'm unhappy, but it's not my fault.  Thanks a lot, GOD.

But now I feel ready - wait, readier, let's not go that far - to see where the road - or maybe roads - lead.

Maybe they lead right back to where I am, and if so, that would be just fine.  But I have to explore a little bit and it's scary, so, you know, baby steps.  This object has been at rest far too long.

In other words, happy birthday to me.