The Cerebral Mum

Today was a good day. Big Sis let me wallow in the bath for two hours, a thing I miss being able to do terribly since becoming a mum. It gave me time to wake up, and time to read. I used to read whole books in the bath at least a couple of times a week. Having a shower just doesn’t cut it, not that having a shower is that much easier as a mum anyway. By the time he goes down for a nap, the day is half over.

And then I said to myself, We’ll go out for coffee, which sadly around here means McCafe. All other coffee machines are half an hour away. There’s not a big market for espresso when residents either spend all their dole money on drugs, booze and cigarettes or are nice, quiet folk, never seen on their neat front lawns but when they are taking their bins out.

So I got to read half the paper while Caspar demolished a raspberry friand. We should do that more often. There is nothing better than a newspaper and real coffee, out in the world in the morning. Unless you add Eggs Benedict and quiet company to the scenario. That is my idea of heaven. Even if it’s in a pretty average part of the world, it’s enough to make me feel like myself.

And then the sun came out and Caspar and I just had fun. I can’t even remember what we did now. But it was genuine, unadulterated fun.

It would be nice to think that just having a bath and a coffee would fix everything, but I know that even if I do just behave my way to feeling better, whatever is screwing with my head will just come back to bite me on the ass later. This might not be a perfect way to look at it but, personifying depression, making my head seem perfectly fine is just as much a tactical advantage for him as making my head seem scary and explosive. He is maintaining his existence. He knows he’s here for a reason and there is a little war going on; a psychological immunological challenge. He that annoying guest who doesn’t know when to leave, that annoying prankster who doesn’t know when to stop.

The truth is, it was nice to have a little space where my mind let the go of the things I need to do. But I still need to do those things. It’s a vicious cycle and I need to reverse the polarity of it.

Even just writing this now, that sick, overburdened sensation is returning, kicking hard against the idea that I deserved to do those things today when I have so much to get done; when I’ve turned Big Sis’ house into a disaster area, when the nappy bucket is overflowing, when calls haven’t been returned, when I’ve screwed up my university application and, most importantly, when my house is still standing derelict waiting for me to pack up all my shit and fix it up and sell it so that I can be out of debt and Big Sis can have her space back and Caspar can have the life he deserves.

I notice that I said Caspar, not Caspar and I. Obviously I don’t think I deserve it. Why not? Because it is there for the taking and all I have to do is do it. It really is that simple. Instead, I fail to do it, beat myself up, and fail some more. It’s not good.

Mr. D doesn’t get the fine distinction between building up some resources in order to get things done, and not getting things, so I have to fight him on that point. Calling him Mr. D probably takes away some of his credibility. That’s a start.

Slowly, slowly.

And then there is the other work to do; addressing all the other things in my head that got me to this point in the first place. They are harder to grab hold of and require me to withdraw from the real world and move in other realms. It is an unsolvable puzzle, having to do both of these things at once. I am pulled in two different directions trying to reach the same goal.

I’ve done a silly diagram of that too, and made up a silly name for it.

It’s funny, of all the things I’ve read in my life, I’ve never studied depression at all. But this is how I understand it. Chicken and Egg. Catch 22. So I tell myself that time out is work toward the goal, and tell myself that the tiniest practical achievement is a step toward the goal, and I tell myself that the most useless seeming thoughts, the non-thoughts even, are a step toward the goal. And that is all I can do. If something is in pieces, it needs to be fixed piece by piece. It is hard to do such intricate work, balanced on a wire, when the problem feels so large. And when you can’t think clearly.

It’s hard to know whether a good day is good, because Mr. D is always on your back. But can you really tell when Mr. D isn’t right? Can you really tell when the choices you make are right? Making time for yourself is good, but it carries with it the danger of procrastination, of drawing out the problem. Especially these days, when Because You’re Worth It is an advertising slogan propping up the most empty, self-deceiving way of living. How do I really know when I am deceiving myself? Self-doubt hurts.

Then again, self-doubt is good. Because when you lose yourself, your mind becomes rigid. It closes itself to new ways of looking at things. It closes itself to the possibility that you are wrong. And then it tells you you are wrong all the time, when your brain no longer has the elasticity to defend itself.

This is beginning to sound like an essay rather than my thoughts. I am trying to untangle them. Usually I write a working title when I start a post, and then change it at the end when I know what I have said. I think I’ll leave this one.

When is a good day good?

Like the stuff in my mind, when it comes to the stuff in my life, I have to accept the shadow of that reality as well. I mostly live with the head in the clouds, and I find a lot of things there worthwhile and meaningful. I prioritise them. But other things get missed along the way and it is a fine line between the clouds and the sand. Nothing is safe. Nothing is right. There are always things you have to choose between. I have to be careful. I have to be watchful. I have to find a way to differentiate between action and avoidance. Anything and everything has the possibility of being either.

Still, I think today was a good day.

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Eve tagged me for a meme. It the usual deal - answer the questions, pass it on. So I’m going to do it all Jung-like, as Eve did, and just say the first things that pop into my head. I have no choice about it because I only have a few minutes before Cas gets sick of the Jolly Jumper.

7 Random Things About Me

(Hey, they’re not called MeMe’s for nothing…)

1. I need to get a new prescription for my glasses. I’d rather have laser surgery.
2. I wore lipstick yesterday. That shouldn’t have been an event. I shall now add wearing lipstick to my daily to-do list.
3. I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair.
4. I used to like clomping around in my male friends’ oversized work boots. I think I’d still like doing that, given the opportunity. I have conquered my habit of stealing their fat socks, though. I think. (Perhaps this is more Freudian, rather than Jungian. You figure it out.)
5. I have a tendency to walk into lamp posts. (Is that Sartrean?) One New Year’s Eve I even managed to break a rib at work simply by carrying a food platter into a wall. I proceeded to drink my way through the rest of my shift, which ended with a brawl and a fired manager and a promotion for me.
6. When I was little, I got caught in the seatbelt when I got out of the car and my father drove off and ran over my foot. I was very brave when I was taken to the hospital and while I had my foot x-rayed. I was very brave until the doctor told me that I didn’t need crutches. Then I cried my poor little heart out.
7. And speaking of Sartre; my great-grandmother’s uncle was Albert Schweitzer, whose cousin was Sartre’s mother. I’ve never figured out what that means, genealogically speaking. My nth cousin in the nth degree?

I’m supposed to tag 7 people of course, but that presupposes I have 7 friends, with blogs, who haven’t already been tagged. Joh? Rosemary? If anyone wants a little free link-love, let me know.

I’ll be back tonight. Today is a good day.

Yes, one of those practical things. I’ve never been good at the practical things. I said to myself when I started this journey that I would try to eat well, try to take in some sun, go to bed before midnight and conquer one little task a day. It’s now midnight, and I’m not hungry, but I’ve only just realised that all I had to eat today was the other half of Caspar’s cheese and vegemite sandwich. I’m pretty sure that’s not healthy. I had two glasses of milk though. Does that count? I don’t think so.

I need to pay attention to the physical things. I need to have breakfast. I need to not stay here for another hour, just to write I don’t even know what, even though I want to. Because that would be no more balanced than today’s food intake. Errgh. I shall force myself to go to bed. And in the morning, I shall force myself to make having breakfast a priority. If that is the only task I conquer for the day it will be a job well done.

I think Caspar must be having a growth spurt. It’s only 1:14pm and he’s already gone done for his second nap. In spite of it looking like her would be done to just one nap a day soon, it’s now gone back up to 3. Or perhaps I’m just not as “present” for him and he’s bored and having no fun. I don’t think that’s it though. I think that really would be a self-pitying, un-motherlike thought.

Well, maybe not un-motherlike. Mothers worry. Mothers try to do what’s best and there is never a real answer to that. I think we’re fine, though. I know I don’t have the energy and zest that I would like, and if that was going to be some lifetime thing I think that would upset me. But I don’t think that it is a lifetime thing. I don’t I am scarring him for life because I am sad right now. And I do my best to keep our days busy for him. Or busy enough. I still enjoy him. He still makes my heart light up. Right now, the light is a little dim, but it is a light nonetheless. So it’s okay.

He probably has become a little more demanding than usual in the last few days, which is evidence that he is very aware that I am not as focussed as usual, but he is such an easy, placid boy that it is not unbearable. It is not making me feel more stressed or pressured or overwhelmed. It is not making me feel like a failure. And that’s good.

Really, it’s just a reminder when I drift into my head to snap out of it, to be in the day as best I can. Knowing that there are many mothers out there suffering depression whose depression is tied up with their young children, I think that I am fortunate that mine is not. At some stage, I guess, I will have to consider how becoming a mother has effected me, my psyche, because I need to question everything I think I know. My thinking has become rigid. I think I have less capacity for empathy at the moment. I think I have become judgemental.

But when I do examine it, although I think I will still feel as i do now, that our relationship is an easy one, that he is a wonderful human being, and that I am a good mother for him. That I have the resources to make good choices, that I have the capacity to love him as needs to be loved. That it is easy to love him. I do not have the same expectations of perfection for my child or for me as a mother that I seem to have for myself alone, or for other people. Those expectations for “them” - that nebulous, imaginary “them” - need to go.

I think that when I speak about the world and social issues I am careful with my words. I don’t make accusations or use ad hominums to bolster my opinion. But I think that somewhere in me there is some sense of self-righteousness that takes away the good part of doing that.

And now it is 1:42pm. And he’s is crying to get up. Just a little nap. So off I go to be in his day.

I think I am too drained to write. So I’m just starting. I don’t know what will come out. This might be it.

Unsurprisingly, I have become weepy since starting on this course. Weepy of the stupidest things. Yesterday Big Sis was going down the street and I asked her to pick something up for me. I gave her my money and she said, “Fuck, it’s all silver”. So I cried. Today my mobile phone rang and I didn’t want to answer it and I cried. I haven’t checked my voicemail for 2 weeks. I should check my voicemail. I hate voicemail. I think I’ll delete voicemail. But that would involve me using the phone.

I don’t know what I am talking about.

I’ll start again.

Today, I made lunch for Caspar and me and I wanted to eat together while we watched a dvd. I couldn’t find it and that upset me. Big Sis was using her computer so I couldn’t burn one. So I tried to find something else but none of the real dvds would work. My dvd player only likes .avi files. So that upset me. And Caspar had eaten half his lunch without me while I flapped around feeling broken because it seemed so little ask, just to watch a dvd. I cannot organise myself. I feel confused. My lunch was cold. I didn’t even want it anymore. Then Big Sis came out with a burned copy but she wasn’t sure it was the right one and I tried to organise my thoughts and figure it out but she just backed away as fast as she could while I struggled for words, distressed over nothing.

She doesn’t handle other people’s emotions well, my Big Sis. She shuts down. She gets out of there. She knows this and I know this. But that closed door left me feeling wrecked for hours. Rejected. Nobody can deal with me. Nobody will be around me as I am. Nobody will help me. Why does everyone leave.

Later, we talked. And I cried because I can’t seem to do anything else. And she is there for me and isn’t rejecting me. And I know that she tries her best to make room for what is going on. And we both know that no-one can fix me anyway. “That’s the depression talking,” she says when I try to explain how I feel. I feel abandoned. I feel like a child.

She is not kind to my friends. She has no respect for the people who say that they’ll call or say that they’ll visit or say that we’ll catch up some time. “They’re not your friends,” she says. There is truth in that, maybe. I make excuses for them.

I have other friends. Better friends, but they are far away. I don’t have the energy for gargantuan efforts to see them briefly. I want to be around people. Just daily people. Who talk in nothings. Nobody shares my nothings.

How silly and inconsequential this seems. I would like to stop crying now.

I have a counselling appointment for the 22nd. The woman who called asked me questions, took down my doctor’s name, my pension number, my Medicare number. I truly hope she is not the counsellor, she had an awful, harsh voice, even though there was nothing wrong with her tone.

I wanted to think about the clock, and what that meant. I don’t understand the clock. I feel like I should put backlinks in these posts so what I am talking about makes some kind of sense. I don’t have the energy for that. Making sense is not the purpose. I should put a note on the sidebar, maybe, for strange visitors.

The clock. The clock makes no sense to me. A clock I hated, that made me feel burdened and overwhelmed, that would make sense. But a clock that stopped me in my tracks, that made me want it to be the first thing I saw when I woke up? I read somewhere that a clock can be a mandala, a symbol of the self, but I am struggling to read at the moment. I cannot concentrate. I skip whole passages, whole pages.

I think I need to work out why, at my lowest lowest point, my cry is always that “Nobody ever takes care of me.” I think that is true and untrue. I think that is true and untrue for everyone. Why do I reduce to that little girl voice? I’m going out the back to eat worms?

I thought I should read about The Orphan archetype but I don’t have all my books. And the web is useless. I think Jung is really helpful, but he does attract the crazies. And he’s not easy. Everything gets simplified and misinterpreted. Jung is buried very deep in the psyche of the internet. I can’t find it.

And my eyes are stinging. And I am tired. And I am stupid. And I want so much to write something useful to myself and this all seems so useless. I don’t think I will read it. I will just post it. I’ll read what I said tomorrow. I guess nothing is useless.

I am trying to extricate all the puzzle pieces.

I am thinking about archetypes and the shadow and the ego and the persona and I cannot entangle one from the other, if I even recognise them at all. I have an inkling that my masculine side, a strength I grew, has gained too tight a grip on me. I feel, but I feel in principle. I feel and express those feelings rationally. I manage them. As I write this, it doesn’t seem like a bad thing to me. I wonder if it is?

I wrote this excerpt not very long ago, a part of a post I did not finish which meant to make a comparison between Big Sis’ and my way of dealing with strong emotion…

My mind works in a way that conceptualises, intellectualises my emotions. My emotions are filtered cerebrally. I am not without passion though, and if my emotions pass through these filters (clearing the debris of petty, narcissistic, self-aggrandising or self-destructive ones hopefully) I express them. The principle I work on is this: It is either important enough to be addressed or it isn’t important enough to hold on to.

Obviously, this kind of negotiation within myself involves trying to determine the motivations of the person I am responding to as much as trying to understand my own. In any given situation, another’s intentions or needs may be more important, even if my feelings are justified. For me, relationships are an endless cycle of these types of negotiations. I have no expectation that people should always behave toward me in a way that suits my needs, but I chose to act when a line is crossed. My intention is not necessarily to change the other person’s behaviour; it is to make them aware of how their behaviour effects me. At worst, I then learn that they don’t care. At best, I succeed in communicating.

Is there something wrong in my thinking? I think perhaps it is that “thinking” has too tight a grip on me, that my filtering system is making parts of me feel voiceless.

The possibility of that is painful. Because I think (I cannot stop saying I think…) that this rational strength, this reasonableness, was the boon I brought back the last time I went into the dark wood. How awful that I have corrupted it. Just… how awful.

I have to ask myself, all those years ago, did I not grow at all? Did I just change modalities?

Last night, when I wrote the word connection, something I wrote in my novel came to my mind, but I could not find it to quote. As I was searching, I realised how unpalatable my protagonist seemed to me - although I love her. I realised that I did not want to reveal her here, in this context. I realised that she engendered shame in me. As a literary character, I am proud of her. How does she stand in relation to me?

The shadow embodies all that is repressed, pushed aside, locked up, forgotten-not only the seven deadly sins, but also the introvert’s extraversion, the intuitive’s sensing side, the thinker’s feeling function, and the emotional person’s thinking side. The shadow contains what we left behind in childhood, our wishes, and our dreams. _{The Third Eve}

Once, I considered her character a shadow, and I learned from her as I began to write her story. She is a far, far from evolved person. She struggles with her identity as a woman, a daughter; she seeks power and is destructive toward men, she drives one man to suicide, aborting her child, acting out in opposition to the mythology of her childhood. She is the Shadow in control.

I’m sure in the beginning, I identified with her in some ways. After all, she came from within me. She did not appear out of thin air. I remember that not long after I gave those first few passages to my boyfriend to read, our relationship began to circle the drain. I always thought the two events were connected.

She frightened him.

It was obvious at the time that she frightened him. That he felt emasculated by it. I made strong arguments about the distinction between a character and an author, yet his visceral response remained. Perhaps his instincts were correct. When I look back at that relationship, I see a story being acted out. I played the fey maiden needing to be saved, and he played the role not, as he thought, of the knight in shining armour, but of my loyal page.

I used him as a mirror to show me my Self as beautiful. I used him to make me feel safe and with that safety, I grew. My growth shifted the power structure in that strange play of ours, until he was faced with the untenable fact that his role was not the one which supported his ego. So childish was our bond; it could not be sustained.

But where did that Shadow go? The one who was first beautiful, then strong, then frightening? I think I danced with her for years. Perhaps I never really incorporated her. Perhaps I just chose parts of her that I could shape at will. With my rational mind. If so, perhaps she is roaring again.

Perhaps my “protagonist” can provide me some clue as to what is going on beneath the surface of my world. I don’t like that now, in my virginal state as Mother, I will need to dig symbolically into my relationship with the masculine. But I think it is that screaming Lilith and that remnant Persephone who have been restrained for too long.

Maybe. I wonder how clearly I’m seeing. Everything is blurred. Dark and blurred. I think my eyes are white. I think I am blind.

STORY

Blindman, will you be my lover
will you love all that you can see
will you be my analyst, my piano-ist
and unlock the shape of me

I thought it was you who sat at my head
held my mind in your white-vice eyes
and called me child

I thought it was you who kept me fed
drank my tears and never told lies
and called me child

Blindman, will you be my lover
will you love all that you can see
will you be my analyst, my piano-ist
and unlock the shape of me

I wanted it to be you who made me forget
who lost my age in a glass palace cage
and called me child

Blindman, will you be my lover
will you love all that you can see
will you be my analyst, my piano-ist
help me dance across the keys
and unlock the shape of me

And a voice says…
I saw you once upon a time
when your skin was still green
and your hair was still gold
and I cradled my voice in the
flame of your hair but I
can’t untell you child…

My head is held
I can’t untell you child
My head is held
I can’t untell you child
Call me child
I can’t untell you…

I need a blind man.

[Original Lyrics - 199?]