Rainy Gardens and Birthday Black & Blues

What is it about a birthday that opens up a cavern in my life? Still finding my way out of my most recent one. 

I thought I’d hit my stride again after a lot of things — parenthood and leaving my longtime teaching job and the pandemic and turning 40 and coming to terms with lifelong mental struggles that my band-aid coping strategies weren’t covering up anymore — really tripped me up over the past year or so. I recently started seeing a new therapist, and doing a lot of other things to show more care for myself. My husband calls it “deferred maintenance,” and it’s been grueling, but it’s given me some hope. 

My birthday, that embarrassing but very real trigger for all of my self-worth issues, showed me I can still stumble, and then that knowledge of my continued fallibility really threw me for a loop. Anyone who deals with mental health issues knows about that terrible feedback loop of secondary emotions, and I got really stuck in it. Guilt over getting depressed yet again, shame about shame, anger at sadness. Digging myself deeper and deeper.

Then the kid was up all night last night, and so were we, and he’s been up almost every night since August, and I wasn’t the kindest mother I could be this morning. He said he felt blue, and I didn’t know what he meant, and he said ‘sad is blue scared is black red is yelling’. Miss Bree at school taught him that, and I love her for it and hate myself for making him feel blue and I didn’t let him get out of the car at daycare until he felt green and yellow again but I was still feeling black and blue and red myself. 

So I came home and gardened in the hard fall rain, sopping wet, wet wool of my coat wafting its waxy smell into the air, mulch-browned hands and tangles of root. The native plant plugs I planted a month ago sending up green shoots—showing they’re game before retreating again for the winter. The mulch clumping in the rain, nodding flower heads shaking it off as I spread it, the creeping charlie I had no time to pull this season taunting me in the back garden as it finds its inexorable way. Rain running down my hair and my hands frigid in the fall air. 

My depression loves an event. A moment of exigency or extremity to pull me back into what’s in front of me when my head is full and heavy. And maybe it’s a bit of self-punishment too. A strong storm and a good sweat wrung me out, clear again. I still feel like shit, still feel like a bad mom and a not-enough writer and a not-enough woman and really the list could go on. But I’m moving forward anyway, climbing out of the cavern, accepting the sadness and the shame and deciding to do what I’ve set out to do anyway. 

And what’s that? I worked on it with my therapist and I’m happy to share. What I’ve set out to do is live by the values that will be my lodestar when I’m lost, my light to climb out of the craters my mental illness and trauma will probably always sink into my earth, viciously and randomly. Values like compassion, self-worth, and intimacy, growth and authenticity and the pursuit of excellence.

So today I’m quietly, on this corner of the internet, recommitting to those values, to the goals that will help me reach them: parenting my child with love, to being his umbrella, his warm cave, the place he can set out from into the world. Parenting myself the same way. Writing with truth and honesty and forging my words in the fire until they shine and shine and light my way, and others’ too.