The Bottom

July 4th weekend - my last days of any semblance of functioning.  The baby and I ran away from home to visit family in Pitt.  So needed, so perfect, so ahhhhh.  I was a little scared to go away for the weekend without my husband.  Nights were really difficult for me to deal with the baby: if I couldn't get her back to sleep quickly...3...2...1 meltdown for mom.  I would yell, "why?!" and "what do you want from me" and inevitably start to cry about the baby hating me.  I began to understand how shaking baby syndrome could really happen, and that was terrifying.  Getting up at 5am to feed the baby and get ready for work made going to bed before 8 a reality, and still not enough.  I never really slept between the pain and feedings.  If my husband wasn't there to rock the baby back to sleep for me I don't know how I would have reacted.

For 3 days I didn't think about work or my home, the dogs or my obligations.  I visited and enjoyed my baby, truely enjoyed my darling, for the first time in a couple months.  She slept well...surprisingly...and we snuggled and played and neither of us had a meltdown the entire weekend.  I felt empowered and capable.  There's a lot to be said for the baby feeding off of the mother's emotions. 

I didn't want to go back home.  I was scared of pulling up to the house and running lost in my own levels of hell.  Most of all I didn't want to think about going into the office for 5 days for 8 hours each.  I knew I couldn't survive like this.  I have a high threshold for pain - think drilled teeth without novacaine - and this pain was off the charts.  There was no way to distinguish if the physical pain or mental pain superceeded the other or whether they merely fed one another.  In either case, my world took on a sinister darkness that no one seemed to comprehend: not my husband, not my family, not my friends, not my employer; I had only felt so alone once before in my life, and that was the day my father died. What good was crying in group or at the therapist doing?  What good were doctors if the tests they ran took too much time to diagnose and fix my physical ails?  What good was I as a mother if I couldn't function for my daughter?

My return to the office full time also coincided with another arrow - my mother announcing that her unemployment was running out, she still couldn't find a job, would be selling our home of 32 years, and moving to Pittsburgh.

Flatline.

Now to be fair I should have been happy for my mother.  She would be moving back to her childhood world, be close to her sister and the rest of her family, and afford to live more comfortably.  In my mind, however, that did not translate.  I couldn't accept that she would leave her first and only grandchild.  I couldn't accept that the comfort of my childhood home would vanish with a signature.  I felt betrayed.  I lost my father.  Then my family drifted apart.  Now my mother was abandoning me.  Yeah...the melodrama of my fractured mind began to play out a Wes Craven script.  There was no way to comfort me.  My mind taunted me with broken visions.  I could barely breathe. 

I grew up in a very greek, tight-knit family.  The family was all-important, and nothing came above or interferred.  We saw all our cousins weekly.  All the holidays were scenes from A Big Fat Greek Wedding.  And it was a sin to deviate from the family.  As a teen I fought against this way of life, always criticizing my father's ways as being un-American.  I believed that family would always be there, but the world outside the family was fleeting and I needed to chase those ideals or get left behind.  They were so different, so freeing, so not the family.  When my father passed I could never take back all that I lost with him because of my hellion days.  When my father passed the family didn't survive the shock.  And perhaps we felt some shame for taking it for granted.  The family never recovered.

Now that I am a mother I want the family for my little girl.  I want traditions and family every week and for her to know all her cousins as friends.  I want her to celebrate both her Greek and her German heritages.  With my mother moving and selling our family home my mind told me that the family had died.  I know, rationally, that it is my duty to maintain those family relationships for my daughter.  It is my responsibility to give her the family.  What I pine over is an old symbol, not a family's funeral.  But I can't get my mind to stay in that rational place...it runs away with horrible, hateful, fearful thoughts. 

My firey temper just let itself loose.  I hated everyone for not understanding.  I had daily, sometimes hourly, panic attacks.  No one, not even my husband, could break through my distress.  But I had to continue each day like I was trying, like I cared, like I was positive.  I failed all of the above:  rage, condesending, spiteful, resentful fury overwhelmed my battered emotions.  I lost myself and was on a path to self destruction.

My milk production began to suffer.  I made mistakes regularly.  I was forgetting even simple tasks both at home and at work.  I felt myself fall into my head and let the abyss guide me.