When there is a string of bad days, I get scared. How much time do I have before everything falls apart? Will I be alone with my daughter when the walls start to crack and crumble, when the roof splits in two, when the sky rushes in to crush me with bad weather?
There is no feeling worse than this: your own children are not safe with you.
I met with a therapist today. Not a psychiatrist - a therapist, and specifically one specializing in cognitive-behavioral therapy. What CBT is, essentially: an intensive, results-geared 12-18 week course of therapy during which you learn specific techniques that you can use to better cope with your anxiety (or depression, or whatever it is that brought you in).
I sat down on the therapist's couch next to a little machine bubbling lavender-scented steam into the air and gave him my best "Look at how happy and okay I am!" smile (because, as everyone knows, the most important part of therapy is convincing your therapist you totally don't need it. ...Right?). He asked me why I was there, and even though I knew this was a pretty unhelpful way to begin the session, I told him the truth: that I didn't know.
It really was true; these days, I feel more or less...fine. Great, actually. My anxiety is under control; my insomnia has virtually disappeared. I'm stressed about various things, of course, but they feel like things I probably "should" be stressed about, like travel and mortgage payments and such. I only booked the appointment in the first place because the psychiatrist who I see about once a month to check in on my medication suggested it, and so while I paid for that day's appointment at the reception desk I also scheduled a new one with his colleague. And then all of a sudden it was a month later and there I was: sitting in a therapist's office and talking about feelings.
One of the hardest things about parenting - for me, anyway - has been listening to this constant refrain, everywhere I go:
"Enjoy every minute. It goes so fast."
Are you a parent? You know exactly what I'm talking about.
Grey Knit Hat (for women) | Smile Hat (for kids)
I was playing around with lighting and props for a shoot I have coming up, and took these test photos, and...I don't know, I just thought they came out well, so I wanted to show them to you. Sometimes it's nice to just look at a pretty photograph of flowers and pom poms.
On my drive down to LA, I started listening to a podcast - Elizabeth Gilbert's Magic Lessons, in which she discusses the process of exploring (and hopefully unleashing) your creativity. (I'm aware that this does not appear to have anything at all to do with the aforementioned flowers and hats, but bear with me, because I do have a point here.)
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Six weeks after my daughter was born, an email landed in my inbox that sounded like it had come from the inside of my own head. A reader, J, wrote to me that she was pregnant with her second baby, and that she was excited, of course...but also scared. Scared of how her life was going to change - rewind from the calm of the toddler era to the madness of the infant period - and scared that her relationship with her first baby would be...not lost, but dimmed somehow. Pushed aside.
Her email was such a relief to me to receive, because I understood it completely. I had struggled so much with these fears myself and experienced such enormous guilt about them that...I guess it just helped to know that others felt exactly as I did.
