Writing Club Part 1

I’ve always been captivated by my daughters eyes.  They have taught me lessons of God, Heaven, and Life that I believe could not have been learned elsewhere.

On this particular day, my two daughters and I lounged in the nursery, cooped up from the summer’s deadly heat.  My oldest daughter walked around in just her diaper.  Her usual attire.  She carried all of her dolls and stuffed animals into the other room to scatter sporadically.  After she finished I assumed she would grab the baskets full of clean laundry and move them into another room.  She would then throw the clean attire up into the air, shout “it’s amazing”, and let them fall on her face like we do with the grass and fallen leaves in our front yard. 

My youngest daughter had just woken up from a nap.  She was still crawling around her bed, sucking on the bars, and talking sweet baby talk to herself.  I lay on the ground next to her crib with the familiar tightness in my chest.  It was a feeling I had become all too familiar with since becoming a mom. 

I tried to cover the discomfort within me by carefully deciding what paint color should replace the bright blue that now covered the walls.  Why did I ever pick that color?  I’m sure once I told my husband that I was painting the room again he would make fun of me for decreasing the square footage in our home.  Despite the teasing I would receive from my husband I decided on a creamy yellow to cover the walls.  The decision didn’t take away the tightness growing stronger in my chest.  What if I tried to decide what to hang up on the bare walls?  What if I finally dressed myself for the day?  What if I browsed the internet for creative ideas? No, No, and No.  None of these activities helped my anxiety in the past.  Why would they help now?  I decided to just stare at the ceiling and find different shapes within the texture.  Maybe thinking about nothing will make me feel nothing. 

I struggle with postpartum depression.  On a scale from 1 to 5, I’ve diagnosed myself as a 3.  I would feel great amounts of anxiety and numbness but always felt like I had a small amount of control over it.  Control in the sense that I didn’t require medicine.  I also had a husband who kept my mind in check and who didn’t freak out at my crazy thoughts.  To put it simply it took a lot of work to be happy.  Too much work when I had a healthy family, a comfortable home, and a stable job that allowed me to be home with my girls.  To make matters worse I felt extremely detached from my daughters.  There was numbness there when I took care of them and it made me feel guilty.  I knew I loved them but my depression threw up a wall that I sometimes couldn’t climb. 

                As I laid there staring at the ceiling I gazed over at my daughter staring down on me from her crib.  I stood up and started talking to her.  As I spoke to her her eyes caught mine and fixed my gaze.  She stared at me for what seemed like hours.  As she did so I realized she had no reason to look away.  She had no insecurities or regrets that would cause her to fidget or look elsewhere.  I found her confidence liberating and vowed to have that purity and strength return within myself.  The tightness in my chest softened and was replaced with warmth that told me everything was going to be ok.  It told me that my sweet daughters and I had limitless potential.  It taught me of a loving God who was the only one with the ability to take away my pain.  No paint color or creative project could do that for me.  I felt blessed that my daughter was an instrument in teaching me of his love.  The five seconds her eyes held mine gave me strength.  I immediately took her out of her crib and held her in my arms.  I kissed her chubby cheeks and tickled her side forcing out a squeal.  She nuzzled into my chest and we walked off to find her sister probably hiding in the laundry scattered around the room.  I couldn’t help feeling the rest of the day that my daughters were not just a physical extension of me but that their eyes were the windows to my soul.