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.
