Little Lamb

"That's a special little girl you have."

This from a friend of the family who has called to check in on us. And by us, I mostly mean me. I'm doing a fantastic job of leading the world at large to believe I'm handling Mom's death gracefully, but there are a handful of intuitive people, friends of my mother's, mostly, who know the bond we had and know how it was at the end, who call me from time to time to make sure I'm not crouched in a corner with exposed wrists and a packet of razor blades.

When anyone asks me how I'm doing, I feel like Han Solo at the intercom on the Death Star. Everything's perfectly alright now. We're fine. We're all fine here now, thank you. How are you? And then I blast the intergalactic PA system, because clearly I'm not fine and I don't want Imperial company.

And inevitably, after whoever is calling me that day finds out that I am still hanging on to the ledge and have not yet let go, she asks me about Ainsley. And I pause, because how Ainsley is doing is a really fantastic question.

She did wonderfully at the funeral. She played "Amazing Grace" on the guitar and even though the entire room starting sniffing while she played  it (let's not kid ourselves; the communal weeping is the entire point of "Amazing Grace" at a funeral), she kept herself together with a preternatural poise. During the entire experience, Ainsley has not shed a tear. It has caused me both worry and frustration; I have a hard time believing she's not devastated over the loss of a woman who loved her beyond reason and who was a huge part of her everyday life. And the part of me who has wept nearly every minute I've found myself alone in my house the past 3 weeks is almost angry that she isn't wearing her heart on a tear-and snot-covered sleeve.

I see small signs, though, of her grief. Little things that, if I look too long, make my soul hurt. Like when she comes down the stairs every morning carrying the little stuffed lamb that someone gave Mom while she was in the hospital. Or like this morning, when I caught her reflection in the rear-view mirror, carefully stroking the tiny gold angel pendant that was the last necklace my mother wore and which has now become hers.

They are subtle signs that behind that resilience that children have, that ability to continue to seek joy and embrace fun shortly after a death, she hurts. And occasionally, but not as often as her non-stoic mother would like, she fesses up.

Ainsley competed in a regional speech competition last weekend and, to our surprise, advanced to state. This is fairly surprising for a child who talks so quietly in everyday conversation that I have to ask her to repeat herself 5 or 6 times and still sometimes have to nod and hope that I didn't just agree to buy her a pony.

I found myself in an inexplicable funk shortly after we got home from the competition; the day loomed large ahead of me and free time is currently not my friend. I watched Ainsley and Jason frolic around the house, laughing and having fun. I thought of how very proud Mom would be of her "baby." Of what a beautiful girl she has become. Of how very fully she lives her life. My heart became even heavier thinking that "Mamaw" was not going to be a part of this life anymore.

"Oh, Ainsley," I sighed later that night, when it was just the two of us getting clean and ready for bed. "I really miss your Mamaw tonight. If she were still here, she would be so proud of you today."

"I know. I thought of her when I first got up this morning and thought of her again right before I gave my speech."

"You did?"

"Yeah, I thought of her right before I started talking and decided I was going to do it for Mamaw."

The lump in my throat eventually went away, though it might have taken some tequila to dissolve it.

Yes, family friends. That is a very special little girl that I have.

Above Water

When I was a skinny little daredevil child, I regularly waited in long lines on hot, summer days to jump off of the high-dive at my local pool. The first time I jumped I was, naturally, scared as hell, but my friends made it look more like fun and less like death.

I'll never forget the nervous anticipation as the line took us up the long stairs to the platform. The number of people in front of me shrank as each person at the head of the line took a deep breath and leaped into the abyss. But there was always someone in front of me, a buffer, as it were, between myself and the deep blue unknown.

Until suddenly there wasn't.

I was alone on the platform, 10 feet above the water. It might as well have been 100 feet up for how very vulnerable I felt. I was wearing a Puritanly modest swim suit, but I felt utterly naked. It was just me and the humid Kentucky air. And very far below, so far my nearsighted eyes couldn't clearly make out the markings on the bottom, the clear, chlorinated, seemingly deadly pool.

It was my turn. So reluctantly, and with no one left to prepare me, I jumped.

This is exactly how I felt after the passing of my mother.

I was a small child again, and it was my turn. No one was ahead of me, and I was alone over cold, unknown depths. Jason and I have lost all of our parents now; it's just us against the world, and no one is there to buffer our fall. We are next in line.

It happened so fast. One day I was visiting my mother in the hospital, listening to a hopeful oncologist. The next, we were told that something had gone wrong and that we needed to move my mother to hospice. Ultimately it was not the cancer itself, but the brutal regimen we had to choose to fight the cancer, that proved too hard for her body to take.

I had braced myself for the worst, because that is what I do. I listened attentively to my mother a week before she died when she went over her desired funeral arrangements with me, even though I kept telling her she was going to make it, because I knew that relentless optimism and denial do not, by themselves, cure leukemia. I knew what she wanted, I knew she didn't want to suffer, and I knew she was leaving us days before anyone else seemed to know. But nothing prepared me for the feeling of complete loneliness I felt in the hour after her death, sitting alone in a hospice conference room, wanting to make all the necessary phone calls before heading home to begin grieving with my husband and child.

But I did the same thing the brave little girl I used to be did on the high dive that day--I jumped.

Despite the fact that I've lost Jason's stepfather and mother and my own father, there was just so very much I didn't know about handling my mother's death. I thought I knew what I was in for. Yet you can't possibly know until you're at the end of the platform.

I had no idea how many times I would start to pick up the phone to ask her a question about her own arrangements, or for a friend's phone number I simply could not find.

I had no idea how calm I could be, how businesslike, when getting a call from the funeral director the day of the visitation asking me a macabre and technical question about the appearance of my mother's body for the family hour. How horrifyingly easy it was in the end to separate my responsibilities as funeral planner from my emotions as grieving daughter.

I had no idea that I could cry so much I felt dehydrated for the better part of a week.

I had no idea how much harder it would be to get through a death without my mother crying with me.

Mom told me years ago, after Jason lost his grandmother, how her heart ached for anyone who lost a mother. She told me you never really get over it, and nothing is ever the same again. She was so sad for Jason's mom. I prayed at the time that it would be a long, long time before Jason or I experienced this.

It was not nearly long enough.

I know that healing will come. I know because it has to. My life will never be the same again; I am now a parent-less person, and that's a game-changing title. But I am a parent myself, and Ainsley needs me now more than ever. Our little family just got smaller, and I need to mom up to fill the gaping void left by the death of a person who used to say that, though she loved her two daughters beyond reason, felt "there's just something special about Ainsley."

I look at her, our precious, only child, and feel bad for her in so many ways. For someday it will be her turn. She will find herself standing on the platform, the head of the line.

And like those before her, she will have no choice but to jump.

Calling

There is nothing, and I mean nothing, that I hate worse than talking on the telephone.

Clearing a shower drain of decomposed hair is a close second, but it's still second. Thank God for Facebook, email, and text messaging so that I rarely have to actually pick up a phone to see how a friend is doing, or confirm weekend plans, or share information about how awesome the kid is to far-away family members.

And of course, since my mom's cancer diagnosis, I've spent most of my precious little free time on the phone.

My sister, bless her heart, passed along all telephone-notification duties to me while we were sitting at Mom's bedside the night she was admitted. She's older, and she's bossy, and before I could say "No," she had volunteered me for the one job I didn't want. No matter; for a variety of reasons, Mom's friends have chosen to seek me out, anyway. Believe it or not, dear readers, but people find me approachable. Yeah, I know. I don't get it, either.

I knew this was coming. The night my dad died, I was the only one able to form complete, coherent sentences. Grief has a way of not hitting me until well after the fact. Plus, I am a Responsibility Champion. True story. I have that title on one of my favorite coffee mugs, so it must be accurate. I do not allow myself the luxury of a nervous breakdown until all my chores are finished, because I want to enjoy the nervous breakdown, and I can't do that when I'm worried that I never did get my bathroom cleaned. So, being the responsible one, between the hours of 3am and 5am on the night my father passed away, I broke the news to his brothers, his sister, his best friend, and to various friends of the family who we knew would pull through for my mom at first light. This is my role in my family during deathly crises, to speak in a calm voice while everyone around me sobs. My sobbing waits until hours after the funeral, when the kid's in bed, and Jason hands me a beer, and I know all my responsibilities have ended.

Knowing that this is who I am, I sucked it up and called Mom's sole surviving sibling and her large circle of cousins, nieces, friends, and neighbors. And it was, without a doubt, one of the hardest hours of my life to date.

No one ever takes the news that someone they love has cancer the way you think they should. The ones I thought would cry were stoic and in shock. The ones I thought would be strong and offer help cried openly and had no words to offer. The common thread I heard over and over, with only slight variation, was, "But she can't die. I love her so much."

I have yet to form a good response to this.


Since that first day, I have been on the phone more than I've been off it. Every day is a different day for someone who is fighting leukemia, so her status changes more than Kentucky weather in springtime. Which is to say, more than daily.

When I'm not calling, people are calling me. And I take the call, no matter what I'm doing. Because I know every call is someone who loves my mother, who cannot visit her in the hospital because her immune system is wiped out, who cannot call her in her room because she is so often sleeping or trying to catch her breath. The irony is that it's my mother who is the great telephone communicator in good times; the woman spends HOURS a night using the only social media she's ever cared to learn. I have never called her, in the years since she got call waiting, when I was not the second person she was trying to have a phone conversation with.

But she cannot do that now, so I am her voice. A somewhat reluctant voice, but a voice nonetheless.

I will continue to have a close love-hate relationship with my phone until she gets better. And I know that there is a chance that she will not beat leukemia, and I will once again find myself in the kitchen of the house I grew up in, being the calm voice that delivers bad news while those around me begin to grieve.

And when this storm has passed, I know I will still have to make the occasional phone call. But loved ones, take note: my first choice from here on out will always be text.

And Then This Happens

You know how it is. It's Thursday, you're doing fine, going along, living your life, setting the alarm on your iPhone to get Jon Stewart tickets as soon as they go on sale for the night he comes to your city, wondering what craft brew you might get at the growler station on Friday night, and your phone rings.

And at the other end is someone who tells you your mother is in the hospital because her doctor thinks she has acute myeloid leukemia. And then two days later the bone marrow biopsy confirms that the doctor was right. Suddenly, everything you thought you knew about the fairness of life has been thrown out the window.

So, yeah, that happened. As you can imagine, I'm feeling a wide variety of things right now, including, but not limited to, blind rage against whatever forces conspired to allow my father, myself, the second love of my mother's life, and now my mother to all get (and in 2 of the above cases, die of) cancer. It seems like a bit much for one family.

Needless to say, I will not exactly be swimming in free time over the next months. I would tell you the prognosis, but it's fairly depressing, and I am pretending not to know. Really, I don't; a lot of how this goes depends on how much she wants to fight.

I may be blogging from time to time, as I will need to do some things to maintain both sanity and some semblance of normalcy. But I would imagine I will be on hiatus for a while.

Please keep my family in your thoughts. As my mother would say, we have a long row to hoe.

Faith, Shaken and Stirred

The church was on fire.

Not literally. But there was a heat and energy I simply could not comprehend, and I was just as afraid as if there were actual flames at the pulpit. Women in floral-print cotton dresses fanned themselves in the late-spring heat and waved their hands to the sky, many speaking in a language that was not exactly English. It was going on midnight, I was tired, and the scene I was witnessing showed no signs of stopping on that April Saturday when I went to my first, and last, Pentecostal revival. I was only ten, but I knew: my mother's faith was not going to be my faith. Her faith was scary.

That was her last revival, too. My mother was a fervent believer, but only a sporadic church-goer. The revival had been the suggestion of a friend, and Mom went, hoping to feel God's presence in her life, which had been a rather bleak existence while we lived in Knox County. When the revival ended, in the wee hours of a muggy morning, we did not speak much of it and we did not go to that church again. Instead, I talked to her about the bible stories I was reading in a book my grandmother bought for me from some travelling Jehovah's Witnesses and we prayed together when we felt we needed some extra help. And that's pretty much how things went for us for years: we tried different churches at the suggestion of our friends, either together or separately; we came up with a laundry list of reasons why we didn't like those churches; we slept in on Sunday mornings and simply talked to each other about God and prayed for each other instead. I loved my God with my whole heart but I did not need a church to tell me how to live a good life.

And all was well until I went to college, took a Philosophy of Religion class, and realized I didn't know what the hell I believed any more.

It was a lively class. I learned that several of my new college friends were agnostic, a term I had never heard before but which, when explained, made a lot of sense. It was wise, I thought, to admit that you don't know if God exists. Perfectly sane and reasonable.

And then I sat alone at my desk in the wee hours of the morning and found myself trying to write a paper arguing whether or not the arguments in a book we read called Atheism: The Case Against God were valid,  and my own not knowing made me feel the exact opposite of sane and reasonable.

As I wrote myself in circles, discussing something I had just learned about called Occam's Razor without really discussing it, in that way college freshmen are wont to do, I saw my mother's disapproving face. I was basically saying the arguments in the book were valid, and I had nothing to come back on except that I believed in God because I just DID, damn it, and there was my lovely Christian mother shaking her head every time I closed my eyes to clear my head.

There were several camps in the discussions we'd had in class about this book. There were the Believers, with the most vocal among them being a guy who started every single comment he made with, "I always thought that..." He had been taught well in Sunday School, and he was sticking to every lesson he had ever learned about faith in his church basement. I admired him for this, because I was sore afraid of the other camp: the Non-Believers. They were the first people I had ever heard who openly admitted to not believing in a higher power of any sort. This even went beyond the Baha'i girl I knew at Governor's Scholars, who had totally rocked my WASP world. Their arguments against God were grounded in logic and reason and science, things I had previously been a really big fan of, but which I found myself hating ever so slightly because some in the class made it seem I had to choose between those things and God. And God and I, we had been pretty close up to that point.

Another camp were my agnostic friends, and they could argue from both sides because they didn't really have a dog in that fight. I sat with them and just nodded every time they opened their mouths, and hoped that by doing so the professor wouldn't actually call on me to have an opinion of my own. Because I was a part of the last camp: the quiet few who were so overwhelmed by all this passionate open-mindedness that we avoided eye contact with the teacher and thanked God/Supreme Being/Earth Goddess/Nothing that this was only a six-week course.

The night I hit my spiritual rock-bottom alone in my room writing my take-home final essay, I resigned myself to my new status: I couldn't find a logically false argument in the book called A Case Against God and therefore I was an atheist. (That shaky logic right there is why I didn't take another philosophy class in college.) I was about ready to call my mom and break this devastating news when I ran into a classmate, an upperclassman I had met through Jason's new fraternity, in the computer lab. He listened to several minutes of my spiritual existential angst and offered to take me to Spivey's, a 24-hour dive that specialized in hangover food for the very brave. He encouraged me to get the cheese sticks with my burger, listened to me beat myself up over my paper, told me not to give up on my faith just yet, and let me in on a surprising secret:

Our professor was an esteemed member of the congregation of the local Presbyterian church. The one right on campus.

Well. I would have bet money, based on what the good Doctor had said during class arguments, that he was on the Non-Believer side of the room. It occurred to me that maybe he was just trying to get those of us brought up in tent revivals, who had been taught that the Bible was the infallible word of God and that all truths were contained within, who had never actually met anyone who did not believe in the supremacy of the Judeo-Christian God, to...think. To actually sit down, hear the other side, and come up with a reason for our faith besides, "I always thought that..." and "Because my mother told me so."

What, exactly, DO you think about God? I asked myself. I know you want to believe. So do it. Write this final. Make an argument. And then let's put this whole thing behind us and continue to only go to church on Easter Sunday like all the other lazy Christians in your family.

Yet I went back to the lab, cracked my tired knuckles, and continued to write that I had to sort of agree with the author of the book because I could find no solid reason not to agree with him. Because it was 3am, I was tired, and I just wanted to pass the class and go home on break.

We filed into the classroom to turn in our finals and have one last class. I had come to peace with my struggles with the following statement, which I had thought right before my pre-dawn nap but had not put on paper:

I believe in God, a Supreme Being, something that surrounds us and penetrates us and binds us together--you know, like The Force. But I don't really know why. It's not because my mom does, or because I was raised that way. I believe...because I want to believe. And it's not logical. And it's not scientific. But I feel it's there. And that's faith--believing when everything and everyone around you points in the other direction. Because you have felt things you, personally, cannot explain otherwise. I could be wrong, though, so I will never push my beliefs on another and I will respect everyone's point of view. With God/Supreme Being/Earth Mother/Nothing as my witness, I shall never discuss religion again.

The professor finally came in and told us a story from some time he had spent in Africa studying tribal religions. This tribe teaches their children from a young age that the gods are out in the jungle, and that they are fearsome creatures. The children believe this because their parents and the elders all tell them so. Then, when the children come of age, the elders put on masks and costumes and take the children out into the jungle. They behave as the fearsome gods, and the children believe they are seeing their deities in all their awesome majesty.

And then the elders take their masks off, show that they've just been tribe members all along, and beat the crap out of the kids.

"I am afraid in this class I may have done this same thing to some of you," the professor said. He appeared to be almost crying. And he turned and left.

In retrospect, it's not surprising that I needed counseling that spring.

If I'm being completely honest, I still don't always know what I believe. On paper, I am a Catholic. After all those years of not knowing the nature of my own faith and having moments of agnosticism and something awfully close to atheism, I felt God's presence in a little Catholic church my sister, brother-in-law, and nephew attended. I converted and led quite a happy religious existence for several years.

But doubts do come, and the masks of the fearsome gods are stripped away, and I feel the sting of the elders' lashes against my spiritual backside.

It doesn't take much to rattle my faith. An example of Catholic hypocrisy here (you don't have to look real hard to find these, sadly), a "Where-was-God-when-this-happened" tragedy there. And I'm right back in that classroom, trying hard not to make eye contact with anybody.

Every so often, I come back to an online quiz a friend sent me several years ago that allegedly tells you what religion you truly are. I re-take it every time I have a crisis of faith. I've never expected Roman Catholic to be my first match; I love the serenity and beauty of the Catholic Mass, but only up to the point that the priest begins the homily by talking about the horrors of books in public school libraries that teach it's okay if Heather has two mommies. (True story. I know the church's stance on gay marriage, but do we have to attack school libraries while we're at it?) Yet my fairly consistent top-five religious matches make me wonder what, exactly, I am. Unitarian Universalist. Quaker. Buddhist. Even (gasp!) Neo-Pagan and New Age. Bring on the Yanni and Enya, kids. Apparently, I've gone granola.

Sunday night found me reluctantly going to a Vespers service, the first service I've been to since the homily that made me flush red with anger. The kid was asked to be a server, so off we went. It was a lovely service; there was no homily, just call-and-response and prayer and long moments of respectful silence led by the parish's newest priest, a Ugandan man whose speaking voice could bring peace to the Middle East. More of this, I thought, could get me firmly on the Believers side of the room. I like God best when people get out of His way.

And when the elders don't wear masks.

Moderate to Severe

The following is brought to you by the 60 Minutes piece I saw last Sunday about how antidepressants do not, according to science, actually work. It rocked my world, I must admit. And while I am not one to argue with science in most cases, I felt compelled to voice my dissent. Not because I believe their studies are patently false, but because I feel it's dangerous to attach more stigma than there already is to the diagnosis and treatment of depression. Telling someone it's all in their head and that getting better after a few months on Paxil is all a placebo effect may discourage young Kentucky co-eds from giving it a try, and that could actually be a fatal for those young Kentucky co-eds. I should know. I was one once.



Of course. Of course this is happening to me. Why wouldn't it?

I had come there for help. And instead I found myself being mildly assaulted in the waiting room by a very large resident who would not relax his vise grip on my hand and who kept telling me, in the way the serial killers in movies tell their victims, that I was so, so pretty. The kind, soft-voiced receptionist looked my way and nodded, picking up the phone. I hoped she got help before my unknown almost-assailant (I called him Lennie in my head, and pictured him asking about the rabbits) decided to put me in a choke hold, lest my first-ever therapy session begin with me dead. Oh, the irony.


It was easy to forget, in the brilliant pre-spring sunlight that I had been enjoying as it filtered into the powder-blue waiting room, how just a week before I had gone for a two-hour walk in a heavy, cold rain, wanting to die.

I was not adjusting to my new collegiate life very well. I had thought it was just homesickness when, after arriving back on campus after Christmas break, I had holed myself up in my dorm room and cried until I was sick. I had fought my parents for three months to be able to go away to school. Why then was I so sad to be living my own dream?

Things got worse. As the cold, snowy winter passed, I found myself sleeping as much as I could, sometimes 12 hours a day. I had made new friends, but I had little interest in seeing them when class was out. I couldn't stand to see them laughing and happy when I was so deeply sad that my heart hurt. I tried exercise, going to the little gym on campus and lifting weights when it was too cold to walk my favorite route, to the old cemetery on the edge of town. Some days this helped and I felt the gloom lift. Other days it dragged me deeper into my black state of mind and I found myself wanting to lie down on top of a grave and fall asleep on the cold earth, uncaring whether or not I woke.

Please, God, just let me go to sleep and not wake up.

The lowest point came one Sunday night when winter fought with spring. Snow had mixed with rain and the rain won, falling down from a cold, cold sky. I couldn't sit still in my room. The walls were closing in. I felt trapped, lost, alone. I did not want to go home in defeat, just another student who had tried going away from home but who couldn't take it. And yet I did not want to stay. I did not even want to go on. So I left, without even a coat, and walked. I wanted to feel something, anything, out there in the rain. I did not feel cold. I did not feel scared. I came back numb and wondered how many Tylenol, the only drug I had at hand, I could take to not wake up in the morning.

The thought made me cry. Then it made me laugh. Tylenol? Really? That's the best you can do?  And then I woke up from whatever nightmare I had been in. I called Comp Care the next morning and felt empowered by my choice. Strong. Brave.

Until Lennie came along.

My captor began to rub the back of my hand in a way that reminded me of how we used to try to give each other indian burns as kids.

"You got a bo-friend?"

"Yes. Yes, I do. BIG bo-friend. Very tall." The receptionist was still on the phone, smiling assuredly at me, as if this sort of thing happened every day. Maybe it did. Our little drama had gotten the attention of the other patients in the waiting room, who were looking up from their People magazines. So much for trying to go unnoticed.

A door opened and a nurse called out to "David" to come back to see the doctor. David let go of me, and the nurse whispered that he was an inpatient at the attached "facility." I had no idea what that meant, but I was sobered by the thought that I might actually get committed here. I began to panic. I had seen One Few Over the Cuckoo's Nest and knew what happened at inpatient facilities. I was suddenly afraid I'd see a lot more of David.

Eventually they called my name. I was led into a room lit by soft lamp light where a small gray-haired woman shook my hand.

"What brings you here today?"

I wanted to impress this woman with my bravery. I had been thinking of some jokes on the walk there, just a few starters to show how smart and witty and self-aware I was about my own depression. I did everything shy of writing a script down on note cards to try to play the role of a tragically depressed college student convincingly and show that I could handle that label with grace and humor. I was even ready to improvise in regards to my mishap with David out in the waiting room. But before I could answer, I started to cry.

I told a complete stranger how I had been so sad that it physically hurt. How I couldn't imagine going on any longer if it didn't get better. How I had been feeling, if not suicidal, then definitely ambivalent about the whole living thing.

And when it was over, when this person I had only known for five minutes finally found an opening to speak, she simply handed me a tissue and said one of the most wonderful phrases in the English language, when spoken honestly and with sincerity:

"You're going to be okay. I'm here to help you."

I met with an honest-to-goodness shrink that day, a psychiatrist who evaluated my need for medication and sent me back to campus with sample packs of an antidepressant. I noticed he was wearing a gold Mickey Mouse watch and wondered if I should really take him seriously. I was given the phone number of a suicide prevention hotline just in case, and I almost let loose with a line I had heard Rodney Dangerfield say: I called suicide prevention, but they put me on hold! But it was neither the time nor the place, despite the Mickey Mouse watch.

I used my six free collegeiate Comp Care visits by the end of my freshman year. And used all six visits the next. I had to confess my need for medication to my mother, as once the free samples ran out I had to get my prescription filled with our insurance card. I thought she would be devastated; instead she was relieved. Apparently, I was the last to know that I had been moderately to severely depressed.

A wonderful thing happened. Two weeks after my eventful first visit with David and Dr. Mickey Mouse, lights suddenly seemed brighter. I smiled more. Food tasted better and I gained back some of the weight I hadn't even realized I had lost. When I went for a walk, it was because I wanted to enjoy the weather, not because I was running from something. The weight I had felt in my chest for ever so long lifted. I understood why "the light at the end of the tunnel" is such a popular expression.

I've been on antidepressants several times in my life since weaning myself off of them once the immediate danger of my own self-demolition passed. Sometimes, they have worked for me. Sometimes, they have not. When I freaked my doctors out with my persistent gloom following Ainsley's birth, the drugs did nothing for me; I had a colicky infant and a little cancer thing going on that we didn't yet know about, all mixed up with some crazy post-partum hormone withdrawal, and I needed a 12-hour nap, not Zoloft. But when I felt myself starting to derail in the months following my father's death, when I could not sleep at night for an entire summer because I was convinced Death was outside just waiting for me to let my guard down, I turned again to a doctor who told me I would be okay and sent me out the door with a paper bag full of free samples. And I got better. And I've done well since without the help of any medications. But I know that depression is a war and there will be more battles.

I know people in my life who have struggled with it since I did the first time so long ago. If they choose to talk to me about it (and it can be so hard to talk about) I tell them there's no shame in medication, no shame in seeing someone, no shame in asking for help. No shame in admitting you're struggling. In fact, the only thing I find shameful is that there is still a stigma attached to it. That there are those who think we choose to be depressed and if we could just flip that switch with diet and exercise and prayer and ridding our bodies of Xenu that we could fix ourselves.

If only it were that easy.

So this goes out to anyone who has ever fought depression. Just know you are not alone. And you will get better, if you ask for help.

And I will be here, holding your hand. Gently, and not like David.

A Dozen

"Are they from your husband?"

"I sure hope so."

A pair of beaming office aides have just brought in a dozen red and white roses in a gorgeous be-ribboned vase. It's the first time I've had roses delivered to me at school since I was a student myself, a junior in high school, 21 years ago.

At 17, I was a hopeless romantic. I'd never been interested in just dating a string of boys and getting my heart broken; I wanted love. (But not like Bella Swan wanted love; I never would have gotten married and vamped without at least going to college first.) I needed a rock, a foundation, a lighthouse in the storm. And when I unexpectedly found these things in the tall guy who had been both rival and friend since 7th grade, I wanted everyone to know it.

Everyone knew it on Valentine's Day, 1991.

Jason and I had what I thought at the time was a long-distance relationship. That is to say, he went to a high-school 15 whole minutes away. Neither of us drove yet, so the miles that separated us felt like so much more than that. He had moved in with his mother and despite my pleading, been taken out of the high-school we were growing up in to go to an elite institution of secondary education. (It wasn't really elite, but it sure thought it was.) Yet by that Valentine's Day we had been together almost a year, and I no longer worried about all the time we spent apart. I was mature enough to see that if we sat next to each other every class, every day, we would have split up a long time before. I needed space, and so did he.

But I was immature enough that sometimes I wanted the judgemental It Girls to know that someone loved me, even though that someone wasn't around to engage in public displays of affection during class changes.

So when a student office aide knocked on the door of my English class with a long white box for me, I felt like the luckiest girl in the school. Inside were white roses and a card that made me blush. Not because it was frisky, but because it had the words "love" and "you" on it. There was no awkward waiting-for-the-other-person-to-say-it-first period with us; we started our relationship with "I love you." But that doesn't mean I ever took those words for granted.

History repeated itself today when another bouquet of white (mixed with red) roses found their way to me inside a different school building. Again, they were delivered by a teenage office aide. And just like before, I unwrapped the tissue paper from them in front of a group of high-school girls who said, "Aww..." when I blushed reading the card inside.

I had just been thinking about how different Valentine's Day is now that we're married with child. I usually cook because we don't want to deal with restaurant-on-a-holiday craziness. Sometimes Ainsley has swim practice or a piano lesson. By the time we get the kid fed, homeworked, and in bed, we barely have the energy to catch up on The Daily Show before falling asleep on the couch holding champagne flutes still half-full of Sam Adams. And really, I'm okay with all this.

Until I see my big vase of gorgeous roses sitting right out on the circulation desk in front of anyone who cares to look, and I feel 17 and hopelessly romantic all over again. That tall guy, I think I'll keep him.