Delicate Places post

Even though it may seem nonsensical, I like this poem a lot. Unlike a cold or the flu, mental illness can linger for a long time.  It gets old fast.  You don't want to deal with it any more.  Your family doesn't want to deal with it any more.  What you want is to be 'normal' like everyone else around you who seems to be getting along okay.  After a while you start forcing yourself into the mold.  In some ways it can be good.  You find out you have inner strength you didn't know you had.  You can almost start to believe you really are better.

The trouble is, you really aren't better.  My daughter recently decribed it as walking on eggshells.  You've done such a great job of making things look fine, other people actually think you are fine.  But inside it's like you're making a huge ugly mess, living a lie, a very painful lie because you want so badly for everything to be okay.

That's what I was writing about.  I'd pushed the phasod too far.  Saving face had lost it's value, but I was also too tired of the problem to stop flubbing on through the mess.

It can take up to three years for a woman to fully recover from postpartem depression.  That's right.  Three Years.  The worst part, when I would become severely psychotic, have halluciations and strong desires to do violent things always lasted at least three months immediataely following the birth.  For most women severe psychotic postpartem depression doesn't occurr until their fourth or fifth child.  I'm the lucky oddball who got hit hard with child number one and it just kept getting worse until in the end, I decided it wasn't fair to the children I had for me to risk having any more kids, but that's another story.  You'll have to look for it later.