It's time to ask for help

It's Monday morning.

Who likes Mondays? When my boys where little I loved them because it meant school and although that came with its own set of challenges it was a welcome break after a weekend of being together all the time.

I long for those days when things were hard but predictable. I had a handle on their behaviour and rocked parenting them most days. That feels like a life time ago.

Now do I not only have no control over what is happening in our lives I am also stuck in a loop of depression and despair that I can't seem to break no matter how hard I try.

It has been happening for a long time, the constant sad and negative self talk has been slipping into my days. The tape that plays in my head that tells me I'm worthless, a bad parent, not good enough no longer seems to have a stop button. There is a pause and I might get through a few hours or even a day but before long the pause pops up and it plays again and again.

The constant tape playing coupled with a day last week that quite frankly scared the crap out of me has me waiting at this exact moment for a doctor's appointment so that I can get some anti-depressants because it's time. I can't continue to have days where I think that actually running away from my life or driving my car into something solid at fast speeds is some how an appropriate solution to getting through this.

Last week the tape in my head went from its regular set of statements to one that was suggesting various extreme things none of which were a reasonable plan. I felt so much like just disappearing from the earth would solve all my problems and as I sat silently sobbing feet away from my husband who was watching TV I was scared that the ideas in my head would become my reality.

I went to therapy last week and was honest about how hard it is to function everyday right now and within an hour of leaving I had called the doctor. Not because anyone told me I had to but because I felt like that was the best course of action given the current status of my life.

I have been here before, I have walked this road and 20 years ago when I was clinically depressed and actively suicidal the meds I was on helped and took the extreme edge off of dealing with full time  university, full time work and dealing with my own trauma story which had been largely repressed until I was 21.

I was thinking about that in the car yesterday, I remembered and started to manage my own trauma in the fall of 1998 and in the fall of 2018 my kids disclosed the trauma that they had been surviving in our home for much of their childhoods. 20 years is a long time and so much has changed in my life since then. I had no idea this is what my life would look like then, this was not my plan.

This was the road I planned to be on and yet here I am and so I must find a way to continue to walk because their really are not any other options.