Rock Bottom

Or at least I hope it is, because I'd hate to be feeling much worse than this. 

I feel that 'PND' is just 3 letters that we string along and throw around in my house and it hasn't come to mean much.  I am now at the point where I can't think straight.  This is not an exaggeration.  I literally can not think clearly.  I am having trouble remembering to eat.  I am having trouble deciding what to eat when I am hungry.  I want to sleep all the time.  I am miserable.  I do something and a second later can not remember that I've done it.  I am miserable more than 80% of the time.  I am tense, I am out of it.  I am very, very spacey.  I walk around feeling light headed.  I can't have a long conversation because I can't even follow it.  I get stuck mid sentence because I can't remember what I was going to say next - or what I had just finished saying for that matter.  I smile at the kids, but the smile doesn't reach my heart.  I no longer even cry.  The tears won't even come.  I go around and around in my head.  I feel like nothing can touch my heart.  I am anxious about the kids, checking on them repeatedly.  For the past 2 weeks I keep going through the day feeling like I've forgotten something so I check to make sure both boys are in the car with me before I head out.  I am drowning.  I need help.

The problem is that I look fine.  That I do get things done.  That my kids are so happy.  That I seem to struggle sometimes but other times, everything seems just fine.  I think this is the problem with being so strong and capable.  I do just get through it, but I am actually dying inside.

I can tell you when it started to get bad again.  My grandmother died.  I mean I was obviously already finding it hard - but I think that before this happened, it was mostly the basic struggle of a mum with 2 young kids. It was hard but I did cope.  At some point 'coping' became 'merely existing' and that's when I started thinking, hmm.. I'm a bit unhappy really.  The second blow was the thought of taking my older son out of daycare, wehre he goes 2 days a week.  My idea.  I wasn't happy with the situation there.  Suddenly my husband and I started talking about not having him in care at all and slowly the dread of this started building in me.  I mean I was coping, but barely.  I started talking to my husband about getting a nanny to help me because I knew I couldn't do it all on my own.  Then the issue of money came up and I started to feel like it was a waste to pay someone else to help with the kids when I am a stay at home mum.  So, feeling guilty, I started looking for other ways to make money.  I thought well I'll try to start up the business I've always wanted to start, to contribute, since I am lacking in my capibility to do my share of things (taking care of the boys).  I felt that since I couldn't do it on my own and needed help, I'd better come up with a way to make up financially so that I could have that help. 

Then things started snowballing.  All of a sudden it was going to be me off to work, working full time, and we were going to buy a beach house with the extra money and life would be perfect.  And I believed that for a few days.  Then I stopped believing it.  Then I felt like I couldn't reel my husband back in.  That he had all these new hopes and dreams and suddenly I was going to be able to do my part again and pull my weight and be an awesome earner and stop being a whiney, complaining person that lacked the basic ability to just stay home and look after her kids.  I mean, how aweosme a job, stay home and just sit around all day.  How come  I can't do it?!  So I felt like I had to do something to contribute.  In the meantime we sold our house and I felt like I was the only one who still wanted to take care of the house we were still living in. 

Then my baby started getting more demanding.  He needed attention now and wouldn't just sit quietly in a chair so I no longer had my 'days off' (when my older son was in daycare) to either rest or get things done.  Then my older son got sick with a virus, my husband and I were both run down.  My husband was up all hours and I knew I couldn't ask him to do more than he was already doing.  There just wasn't time in his day.  Or energy.  I'd already had some pretty hard blows having to take my baby to the hospitals for tests for a kidney problem they picked up when I was pregnant during an ultrasound.  Then he got quite sick with a related infection.  I had to be in hospital with him and bring my older son with me.  He's only 2 so I worried about how he'd fair being couped up in a hospital all day.  We coped.  I managed.  But I didn't manage.  I was struggling.  But still, I 'looked' fine and everyone saw me taking care of things.  I wasn't.  I'm not.  I'm struggling.  I'm losing the struggle.

Any of these things on their own would be enough to bring most people to their knees.  I am strong.  I am resiliant.  I have a good husband.  I lasted a long time.  But I'm not lasting any more.

I don't know what I need.  You can't ask a drowning person what help they need because they can't talk to you.  You just need to dive in and save them.  Or call the lifeguard. 

I think 'well this isn't fair - my husband didn't sign up for this'.  But I retaliate in my own head saying I didn't sign up for this either.

I don't know where to go from here.  I just need to say how dire this situation is.  I need to get this off my chest.  Sure I look fine.  But I'm  not fine.  I would be happy if I could even be somewhere in the neighbourhood of fine.