Like one little ember breathing the life of fire into thick layers of dry leaves, heating nest into flame, then flame into fire so is this depression within me. A dull yet smoldering sense of discontentment sits as dark clouds about mountain peaks, heavy and threatening. Everything is automatic; a suffocating familiarity snuffs out the smallest of joys.
Pulling myself off the cold flat bed as they rouse, I potty her, change him, and send them to a show. I cook, cut and serve, cleaning and wiping, and cleaning and wiping. I empty and fill, empty and fill the dishwasher. I launder and fold the clothes, return them to drawers, recover them from floors to launder and fold, return, recover, launder and fold. I am their merry pole as they lay claim to my person dancing about me, climbing atop me; they bicker over my lap and snuggle up against me, regardless of my desperate need for space and autonomy. I intervene as if caught in a looping routine in their quarrels on the days wherein the mere life of the other offends them and I repetitively interrupt their clever machinations on days wherein they are thick as thieves. Be consistent, be consistent, be consistent … I am consistent though the consistency strangles me. “No hitting, off the table, don’t push, down from the eves … it’s time out and yes, I heard you … all thirty seven times … about the god-forsaken juice.”
Daddy’s offer to let me out of my cage for an hour or so each night is not enough to bring about a self I recognize: limp hair, dry skin, and thin grey eyes on empty and overdrive is the she who stares back at me. I miss the old me, the me golden from sun kissed hikes deep into the hills. That was the me, giddy on whimsy, feeding solely on my heart’s desires; that she who was me took to flight and soared. She was so bold in her cheer and fresh eye. Kind and vast with her down to earth wisdoms about transcendence, she was, in retrospect, so sweetly blind in her world wherein there lived the space for enlightenment. She would tell the me of today that my life is the result of the choices I’ve made. Powerful in her freedom, she would reveal, as if it were the magic ticket, that I have the power to reconstruct my life by drawing better boundaries and maintaining better balance. She would then wink with a confident smile before skipping out to yelp at the moon. She is the me, naïve and well meaning, but she is not a mom and she has yet to surrender everything she is for the life of her young. Running wild, she has yet to bind herself with sons and daughters willingly and ruefully the same.
There is but a third me, sure in the path of parenthood. Great in my guardianship, this me leads. She often takes leaps of faith over great canyons, cubs on her back, with breathtaking ease. She is cunning and skillful, survivor and savior. However, she too remains evasive. Gone after fervent battles with fever over the vulnerable life of her babes, she is sapped and depleted. Thus, she retreats too vapid to lick the wounds and too willing to let the infection of exhaustion seep in, seep in, seep in. And so I am in this depression. Words of love and loving fanfare from sisters and spouse are life preservers cast beyond reach. The core belief that all will cycle back around and that my heart will pick up speed and soar again lays as dormant as spring seeds under the wet blanket of wintertime. Instead, I go about as a thing usurped and conquered, the rumble of revolution too distant to hear and the call of former, stronger selves too muted to move me.
