Cereal for Dinner

There is darkness creeping in. I have felt it hanging out around the raggedy edges of my well-being for a while now and have tried defending myself from the incursions of its slippery cold tentacles.

Shifting emotions render me incapable of trusting my own reactions to the mundane. A slight injustice might trigger rage, which I try to quell by clamping down tightly the space between my heart and throat. Yet some bursts through and I must move through space in an attempt to dissipate its power. The smell of Rice-a-Roni from a neighbors kitchen as it filters down to me, standing alone in the dark, elicits an embarrassing upwelling of sadness and longing.

I had high hopes for the aftermath of the paxil withdrawal. Hopes that I would be one of the people who find themselves stronger, happier, more stable than ever before once they kicked. So far, this is not the way things have played out for me. After a brief first act starring energy and happiness that I never quite trusted, the numbness, the distraction, the apathy have all returned to center stage.
I don't worry about this so much for myself as I do for my family. For Dan who wants nothing more than to have me back as the me that was me before things started crumbling. And for my kids. I don't want them to know this person.

When I think about my children and how this could affect them, I think about various books or movies where a child's recollection of living with a mentally ill mother are narrated. It goes a little something like this...

"When Mummy would have her spells, she would take to her bed for days. She liked it to be dark and she would play the same melancholy songs over and over on the record player. In the evenings, after we had finished our supper and had our bath, we would be allowed to visit Mummy in her bed. She would cuddle us close and put her nose in our hair and tell us we were the most darling children in all the world. Sometimes she would read to us from one of the magazines that she kept at her bedside, and sometimes she would tell us stories of when she was a little girl and performed in the ballet. My brother and I would try our best to mind our manners, and we asked her lots of questions so she would keep talking in that dreamy far-away voice she used. Eventually, though, I would say something fresh or my brother would rumple the bed-clothes with his wiggling and Mummy would start to cry. She would cry and cry and hug us and cry and Daddy would have to come and take us away."

I made that up. Its not nearly as dramatic as all that over here, but the point remains that I don't want my children to have even their own versions of these sorts of memories. Memories of a mother who was lost and labile.

I have to get a handle on this before it comes to that.