The big reveal

My sister said to me last night, "When it's good, it's really good.  But when it's bad, I know she hasn't taken her medication."  She wasn't talking about me.  But she very well could have been.  I started this blog because I needed a way to sort out all I was feeling in this new country with all its issues and limitations, as well as its beauty and offer of escapism.  It has been easy to share stories about the monkeys and the bugs and the creatures that freak me out.  It has even been easy to talk about my marriage and my children and my hopes for all of us.  It has made people smile and laugh and think about their own lives, I hope.  My circumstances have been made more difficult by the post partum depression that wracked me and floored me for over a year.  A feeling of loss and abandonment made more crippling by the fact that I truly was lost here in Barbados and did feel abandoned by everything I knew to be true in the world.
The girls and I arrived here in the dead of night on August 7th, 2009 and it was stifling hot.  I was at least 15 pounds overweight, had endured endless nights of a colicky baby and demanding toddler who felt as confused as I was, and I was still not sure how we had come to the decision to relocate.  Of course I knew, but I was tired and cranky and had just had a baby three months earlier!  The monkeys, open floor plan of the house that let anything in, the heat, the sun, the lack of amenities that I had grown used to due to a life as a spoiled American girl just twisted my already tired brain. 

Didier was gone for 10, 12, 14 hours at a time, trying to get a kitchen that had gone without a chef for 5 months together, and a hotel that had gone without true leadership for years.  I sympathized.  I sympathized with everyone really--my overworked husband, my tired, scared, mosquito-bitten children.  There had been no time for myself.  None.  We knew no one, didn't know anything about this place and spent much of those first months in our own bubbles trying to breathe let alone communicate or share with each other.  Then the craziness started.

I dared speak the word, but I knew what it was.  I wept openly every day.  Was scared to death of something happening to the girls in the garden.  Had a terrorizing fear of driving the car.  Only got out of bed so the girls would not think they had a crazy mother, which I believe they suspected already anyhow.  My biggest fear was the girls living a childhood with a mother they could not connect to or trust, so I threw myself into their lives, giving them no chance to feel abandoned, ignored, unimportant.  We read stories, drew pictures, went for walks, went swimming, had dance parties and tea parties, played in the paddling pool.  I kissed them good night every night and told them I loved no one more than them.  I answered every cry in the middle of the night and made silly faces when they seemed hurt or down.

I rubbed Didier's back and got pissed at the people at work who let him down.  I talked with him about the troubles at work, made sure he got to visit the sea on his days off.  Let him sleep later every morning and took the girls out of his hearing range so he truly could continue to sleep.  I hoped for answers to his struggles here and tried to be supportive where I could.

So here we are now.  Post partum has paved the way for a more amorphous type of depression.  When it's good, it's really good...and I write about how much we love one another and how we are trying in the struggle to maintain.  I see the beauty in the island and truly believe we can live this last year here happily.  But when it's bad, you'd never know...because I keep smiling, but it's bad.  More to come...


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