❤️👨‍👧‍👦💜Mommy's Mental Health CHAPTER 57: Adulting, Grief, Motivation and Parenting❤️👨‍👧‍👦💜

I woke up this morning feeling like I'd been hit by a bus. No energy or motivation. I felt like this yesterday too, but didn't attribute it to my period, most logically, and got caught in a cycle of misery, guilt, and self-blame. I was totally ruminating.

After being brought a nice cup of coffee and a hot water bottle by my beautiful daughter @aimeludick this morning, I am feeling a lot better. She's at such a great age, where we can talk about things and be more honest about our feelings. I'm, so grateful she chose me to be her mom person. She's funny, she's focused, she's brave, she's responsible... and she grants me a little faith that maybe we're actually doing ok with this parenting thing...

So many of you know that the kids lost their biological mom last year and about three months later, I lost my dad. It's been... a lot to cope with. So much other stuff has happened since, that I have found very difficult to cope with and I have spent a lot of time chastising myself and being cruel and mean and expecting things from myself that I wouldn't expect from anyone else.

I was also hit with a massive wave of gratitude for @zakludick. He is only human after all, but he has carried the emotional, psychological, financial, parenting, and planning burdens of our household almost single-handedly since I fell apart last year.

Truthfully, I don't think I would have been able to hold down a job at all, even if I was physically ok. Just like someone needs sick leave to recover from surgery, it's equally important to do the same for mental trauma. I've just never had the time/ made the time/ felt safe enough/ had the support. I have been given the incredible gift of healing my love @zakludick. Thank you, babe.

I have been up and down with finding the right medications and my moods have been all over the place. I can only imagine how hard that would have been while trying to navigate new and strange uncomfortable levels of hormones while weaning onto the correct doses of new prescription medication to help me deal with my depression and anxiety and all the joyful things that come with them (like restless leg syndrome, waking up crying, lack of energy and insomnia, to name a few).

Then there's the back and knee injury which I can do nothing about. Which is frustrating AF and as I am sure you can imagine, is WONDEROUS for my mental health 🙄There have been nights where I have had no sleep at all and have found myself administering Voltaren suppositories, tramadol, and alprazolam through tears in the bathroom at 3am.

There's no way I would have been able to hold down an 8 to 5 job.

I'm so grateful for you babe.

In case I don't say it enough, thank you. for everything. But mostly for loving me and giving me time to heal.

Grief is a strange thing. You sort of want to put a time limit on it, or spend time looking at things like the 7 stages of grief as some kind of measurement of where you are in the healing process. The truth is, every person is different, every loss is different and I think holding yourself to any standard of how long you're supposed to grieve for is really harmful. Some days I'm ok, some days I'm really not, and I think that's ok...

It's been hard to navigate creatively as well. I have about 10 unfinished songs that I'd love to complete and perform with @jasperdick but I can;t find the motivation to pick up my guitar. I had @zakludick bring it upstairs last week in the hopes that if I wake up staring at it every day, I'll eventually get there. With my dad's death, I received the gift of losing my stage fright (thank god, because it was debilitating) but I have also lost some of my spark and a lot of my creativity. I hope that some of that will return to me.

Since I've reframed my way of thinking and stopped using myself as a punching bag, some amazing healing has been happening. And as a bonus, I am actually finding it easier to sleep. Sleep allows us to process and heal. Lying awake and freaking out about things I can't control was granting me no favors.

It's not a lot, but I'm glad that through the ups and downs, I'm starting to find a little peace.