Category: Laundry

What’s in your Closet?

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My closet is full to the brim. An over flowing mess of clothing, mine, my daughters and my husbands. There are evening gowns to sweatshirts, crocks that are not mine to high heels I’ve never warn. Hat boxes, bin full of purses, kids art work, did I mention a dresser? Lots of boots that don’t fit (too big) and a get rid of bin full again. The laundry is always over flowing out the basket it’s shared with the baby and my daughter. Pictures that are not hung up, things in boxes that I have no idea what’s in them. Piles to keep. Piles to get rid of and a Halloween Bin with angel wings, wigs and costumes from ten years ago. Some days all the clutter is organized and I can play dress up easily. Most days though the clutter is overflowing out of the closet door. And most days I shut the door and go about my day.

I wanted to paint this picture for you because this is what postpartum depression looks like. I’ve been struggling with it now for 2.5 years. Ever since I had my last baby boy. I had it with my first son 9 years ago but I didn’t really understand what it was and we had some circumstances that kind of hid it from the world. My family knew but I was in denial. How I coped the first time… I shut the closet door and went back to work. Eventually the feelings subsided and I got distracted enough to push the the feelings down so they were a distant memory. This time around not so much.

Postpartum is not one dimensional. It is 4 dimensional. The formal definition for postpartum is this:

  1. Depression suffered by a mother following childbirth, typically arising from the combination of hormonal changes, psychological adjustment to motherhood, and fatigue. -Oxford Dictionary Online
  2. Postpartum depression may be mistaken for baby blues at first — but the signs and symptoms are more intense and last longer, and may eventually interfere with your ability to care for your baby and handle other daily tasks. Symptoms usually develop within the first few weeks after giving birth, but may begin earlier ― during pregnancy ― or later — up to a year after birth.

Postpartum depression signs and symptoms may include:

  • Depressed mood or severe mood swings
  • Excessive crying
  • Difficulty bonding with your baby
  • Withdrawing from family and friends
  • Loss of appetite or eating much more than usual
  • Inability to sleep (insomnia) or sleeping too much
  • Overwhelming fatigue or loss of energy
  • Reduced interest and pleasure in activities you used to enjoy
  • Intense irritability and anger
  • Fear that you’re not a good mother
  • Hopelessness
  • Feelings of worthlessness, shame, guilt or inadequacy
  • Diminished ability to think clearly, concentrate or make decisions
  • Restlessness
  • Severe anxiety and panic attacks
  • Thoughts of harming yourself or your baby
  • Recurrent thoughts of death or suicide

Untreated, postpartum depression may last for many months or longer. – mayoclinic.org

So now that I have given you a glimpse of what this is let me get down to business. Coming out of the closet is not easy. The best part about it is the door. I shut the door on the condition of my head. Truth be told my thoughts are as disorganized as the closet. Dirty because I don’t say nice things about my self. Feelings, anxiety, and anger all shoved in to various boxes and bags to be dealt with later. ” Outta sight, Outta mind.” This is no way to tackle the problem. We that are suffering have to come to terms with what is happening. We have to say out loud that we are having a hard time. So easier said than done.

At first it looks like your tired. Because you are. Juggling no sleep and feedings are crazy. You play it off and everything seems good. The schedule is developing. Then out of no where you are mad as hell at everything from the dogs barking at the door after being out side for 5 minutes to the bowls on the counter not rinsed out, the over flowing laundry bin to every little thing spinning you out. You are so dizzy from the spin that you cannot find your center. You can’t figure out up from down, side from side. The tears  flow like a damn breaking.  The downward spiral into the mind hits rock bottom.

I am really bad to shut down completely.  I will stay inside my head and not come out.  I will barely speak to anyone, and the second I want to cry I go, you guessed it…TO THE CLOSET!!!  Yes hide in the room that is cluttered and disorganized.  Being this way only feeds your mind with your inner monologue of being mean, calling your self crazy, then bring on the guilt, because you don’t feel strong enough to fight this feeling and then you feel bad for yourself because now every one suffers and then you feel bad about everyone suffering because you cannot be the rock you are supposed to be and before you know it you have done it.  You have been mean to your self and your spirit.  and you feel guilty about that. 

Everyone feels it at home.  Especially my husband and my kids.  He could say something or do something that normally wouldn’t bother me and before I know it, my feelings are hurt, I don’t feel good enough and of course I am running to the closet to cry. Mean while my husband is left feeling completely helpless because I cannot articulate why I just freaked out on something so trivial.   The kids hate seeing me cry most of all.  I try to tell them that I am having an “off” day and its okay to cry, but in reality, I feel like someone has locked the closet door on the outside and wont let me out.  One day the darkness was so bad it took me all day to get out of the house.  I made it to the car with a plan: the store. I made it to the end of the road and then around the block, and finally I was able to get to the store. IT TOOK ALL DAY!!! mega accomplishment!

The next phase of my depression was the anxiety of going places and talking to people.  It was so overwhelming I found myself  dressing all in black to hide, head down avoiding looking at people in the eye for fear I would burst in to tears and have a good old melt down in the store and that poor person I laid my “dirty laundry” on is shell shocked.  It took a while to swallow the pain, but what good does that do? Just gives people the wrong impression.  Then if I could manage a conversation, I would keep it short and inevitably they would ask, “are you okay? you look tired. ” My favorite cover up for “you look like shit. ” I wouldn’t get to offended because it wasn’t far from the truth.

In the early stages of this postpartum depression, my stepmother dies.  Some of you know she was more than just a stepmom, she was a second mom.  She was really my best friend in all the world.  So lets recap: Have a long pregnancy, give birth, on top of the world, baby blues start, depression worsens, mother dies.  Yeah, lets add grief to this mix.  Now you think that closet is okay, its not.  The dirty laundry piles higher, the clean clothes now lay on top of the dirty pile, the boxes are overflowing the art work is falling off the shelf and there in lies the destruction. Now the closet seems smaller than ever.  Trapped.  But no one knows this.  Only me.  I put on the strong woman, strong daughter, strong mom, strong wife, strong sister, strong business owner outfits and hats everyday till her funeral.  I even wrote her Eulogy.  Who does that on depression?

Anyway, after some doc visits, getting a personal trainer, letting grief play out, getting on a anti-depressants so that I could at least not be so hot and cold, I could function but the postpartum was still there.  It just morphed into something worse.  It became grey.  I was going through every day motions, no ups or downs, just mundane.  Less than a year later after her death, I finally cracked.  A bad incident with a customer and fighting with everyone on everything I was a short visit away from staying in a home for people who need to psychologically cope.  I was ready to leave my family business, find a job else where and start over.  But the reality was the closet still was not clean.  My mind was just trying to do that fight or flight thing.  The closet was still full of junk, messy disorganized just in a different way.  I continued to struggle until finally after a year and half, I finally decided to face my depression head on.  I made a med change, I made a diet change, I went back to work doing what I loved.  I attempted to start cleaning out the closet.

like anything in life, it takes work, its not easy, it gets worse before it gets better.  I spent days on my closet throwing things away, clearing the clothes, shoes and putting a new dresser in, all in the attempt to cleanse the mind, free it from anger, isolation, self loathing.  It was okay for a bit.  Today its a mess again, overflowing in laundry, the top shelves are not cleaned off yet.  Still lots to throw away and part with.  Dreaming of a closet organizer thinking if I just install it, it will solve all my problems….Hahahaha Not! I just have to continue to work on cleaning out the things I don’t need on daily basis.  Not let my inner monologue tell me it’s so bad, how could I have done this and start down the path of not being kind to my self.  Getting stronger requires habit, requires showing up, doing and being okay with not being perfect or getting “right now syndrome.” That whole thing you think it needs to be done now attitude. Recovery takes time, forgiving yourself, finding the spirit again takes time, knowing who I am again, takes time.

Right now, the dog pees in my closet (insert hand to forehead emoji). My daughter left popcorn in the closet (don’t ask) and we had a mouse deposit presents all over the place. Just to name a few things happening in the closet… all about the perspective. So between those two things, gotta stay strong, continue to clean, over come the obstacles in my way and be okay with not having the pintrest perfect closet and (mind)!  There are some really amazing treasures buried deep with in the closet! When I clean it up we should all be super surprised by what we uncover. Till then…

My Hibiscus

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So for almost a year I have been taking care of this hibiscus that I bought for my husband last year. Last summer it had the most beautiful blooms and was just a gorgeous plant. By fall time I didn’t get it planted in the ground and I was kicking my self for being stupid and not doing what I should have done. So I did what anyone would do… I repotted the plant and brought it inside to try and salvage.

The kids asked me “why are you bringing the plant in to the house?” “it’s dead!!!” I’m sure my husband was wondering the same thing but he was kind and let me do my thing. It sat on my kitchen counter tucked between my liquor cabinet and the regular cabinet where I watered it once a week. By Christmas there seemed to be no hope in sight for this little pitiful tree. I even hung lights and the kids homemade ornaments on it. Talk about Charlie Brown Tree! Through the lights and the ornaments, I watered. By the time Christmas arrived it started a little off shoot of greenery!!!! I couldn’t believe it! It literally was a Christmas miracle.

I continued my watering efforts all through winter and the spring time. A couple of times it was touch and go. Another off shoot sprang out and then it looked as if it might bloom but the buds fell off. As soon as it started to get warm I placed the plant out side where she had been watered almost every day either by rain or by hose. Through my efforts she stared to sprout everywhere. New life and leaves began to grow out every where in the new trunk that had formed all through winter. It was a beautiful sight. Just yesterday I noticed that one of the three buds was flowering and it was going to bloom! I was secretly proud that I didn’t kill this plant! That it had come back!

This morning I woke up feeling down and broken. I’ve been struggling with work and personal stuff for the last couple of weeks and to top it all off I finally get Aunt Flow and she has not been nice at all. She decided to wait like 7 weeks to show. To say I wasn’t wondering if my husbands procedure had some crazy genetic anomaly and I was that 1%… I would have been lying to you all! Well anyway back to my hibiscus…

I get out of bed and collect my self to take my son to Football. He even knows that I am not alright… I hand him my keys and told him he was driving. He was okay with that. I open the door and there she is!!! Bright red beautifulness! The hibiscus bloomed! The day has been grey from the start. Rainy and misty and there she was in full bloom.

I guess the point to this story is simple really… Continue to water your garden of life. Continue to work on you. Have the will and determination to press on even if your family or friends think you are nuts. Sometimes it just takes longer to bloom after you’ve shed your leaves and flowers and you are left with no cover. Some of us know you are beautiful because your roots are strong and we understand that you needed some more time to strengthen those roots!

Bloom Baby! Bloom!

Life’s Laundry Pile

As I sit here folding laundry it occurred to me that that life is like laundry… Sometimes its clean, sometimes its dirty and sometimes its in chaos.  It could be folded neatly, hung beautifully like in the all pictures dedicated to organizing a closet.  Or it can be in heaping piles hiding away in the closet, dirty and stained.  Our Laundry life paints a pretty good picture of our own internal battles that we struggle with every day.

I love how one minute every piece of clothing can be sorted, hung, organized neatly put away and in the fleeting next moment the clothes are all over the floor drooping out the basket. Piles on the top of the washer and drier.  Piles in the closet.   My daughters socks are in ever corner of the house and between every cushion of the couch.  To add to it she can never seem to find the laundry baskets, or the washing machine. Her dirties end up all over the floor in every room of the house, shirt over there, underwear attached to pants over there and if we are lucky, her underpants might make it to the washer, most of the time if I don’t get them picked up in time, my chocolate lab finds them delicious and eats them.  Yes he has a fetish.

My baby’s dirty clothes end up on top of my clean shirt that laid down to hang up but I got side tracked and now the wet soiled clothes have literately  pooped on my favorite clean shirt.  My husband washes his daily because of work, but not before they end up on the side of the bed not making it to the hamper in the least.  But he washes them.  My teenager…I should not get started here.  Everyone knows how that goes.  My teenager has more clothes than my daughters, my husbands and mine; it seems his clothes spend more time on the floor of his bathroom.  The clean ones spend even more time unfolded,  slung across the floor with no hope of ever finding their way to a drawer or a hanger.   I have two other children that do however manage to get their dirty clothes in their baskets with pride every time and they still have matching pairs of socks.  There is a glimmer of hope.   I just looked in my closet (the whole reason I am writing this post) and thought to myself… I have not seen a pile that high in ten years  (single life habits).  I went way back on this one!  I am still shaking my head.

I have a sign hanging above my laundry room entrance: LAUNDRY: Sorting out life one load at a time.  Lord have mercy there is more wisdom in this one saying then I ever thought possible.  Here I am sitting at the kitchen table, my pile of clean laundry dumped on the table, catching up and it hits me that life like laundry.  Its clean one minute, dirty the next, and we spend so much time washing, drying, hanging, folding putting it away all for it to get dirty again.  It just like life, some times we get so backed up that we feel overwhelmed, sometimes we are so good at just doing it everyday (god bless those people)  that it makes you shine as bright as the sun, and some of us can never find the joy in the clean clothes because we know the impending doom of whats to come anyway.

Every day is a delicate balance.  The dirty piles equal being overwhelmed, the clean neat piles are equal to happiness.  The urgency to get caught up is where the balance tips between clean and dirty.  The balance is in the “follow through.”  We tend to get so caught up in the ‘tackling’ that we forget to try and balance it out with a simple easy mantra to follow… “a load a day keeps the lorazepam away”… of course there always that fleeting moment when you want to toss it all out the back door pour gasoline on it and light that shit on fire.  Sometimes facing it “tackling” it, is just what we have to do with life.  One load, one problem at a time.  We have to tackle the hard stuff when its coming at us full force and other time times we make the field goal with ease.  No matter what we have to do it every day.  We have to face the world every day.

The struggle between doing it and facing it are harder for some than others.  We have to find balance in our lives knowing that we will be facing the laundry piles every day whether we want to or not.  The sunrises and the sun sets.  The Sun is shining above the clouds… I just heard that recently and its so true.  Just because it seems grey during the day, that bright warm star is still there.  So as my daunting task of laundry presses on, as it will everyday that I wear clothes to be washed, I will too.  I will wash, I will fold, I will hang the clothes.  I will do it on days I don’t fell like doing it.  I will ask for help in doing it.  I will try not to be so damn miserable doing it.  I will FINISH one load at time, and continue on to the next!  Just hang in there laundry doers!

If I win the lottery I will hire someone full time to service my laundry.  End of story.