When Her Color Fades

Prologue

As I lay there in bed next to my sleeping four year old, thoughts raced wildly through my head. I must have snoozed my alarm 10 times before I was finally able to pull myself up out of bed. Depression was hitting me hard and I struggled to gather up enough willpower to get moving. Just the thought of having to get up drained me of the little energy I had, but I had no choice.

I reluctantly dragged myself out of my warm little nest of blankets on the edge of the bed and stood there for a minute. Bones cracked and popped, dull aches and sharp pains covered my body, and dizziness hit me like a brick. I stumbled around in the dark trying to find my glasses and slippers. I couldn't remember where I placed them the night before, as usual. I slowly walked through the messy, clutter-filled house that I had been neglecting to clean for the last few days, and began getting my other children ready for school. As I waded through toys and dirty laundry gathering up backpacks, jackets, and shoes that her kids exploded all over their house, I couldn't help but think about how much I have changed over the years. This thought had crept into my mind before, but it hadn't hit me as hard as it was in that moment. While mindlessly going through my daily morning routine I thought about how full of life I used to be, and that now I just felt like an empty gray shell of my former self.

Someone very dear to me once told me when they were going through a rough time that they felt as if they were on "auto-pilot" and just going through the motions. That is exactly how I was feeling and had felt that way for a long time. I knew when I had a family that there would be routine and things would get a bit stale sometimes, and I was totally prepared for that. What I wasn't prepared for was feeling completely numb while doing all of those things. All of those thoughts led to more thoughts and furthered my questions about myself. Thoughts about my past, how things used to be, and my past mental health. Good and bad memories alike started flooding into my head like water from a broken dam. While some of those memories began to pop up in my head I couldn't help but think "What happened to me? Where did it all go wrong? I just want to go back to normal."

While I continued getting the kids ready to go as I was deep in thought, my husband pulled me back to reality for a moment. Michael calls my attention to the kitchen, and I quickly realize from the tone of his voice that he wasn't beckoning me in there to say good morning. He picked up his coffee pot from the stove top, put it by his head, and shook it a little to signify that it was empty.  The rattling noise it was making was grating on my ears, and I couldn't help but cringe. His eyes squinted, brows furrowed, and jaw clenched as he stared at me from across the room, and I immediately knew I was in trouble for something. During all of the usual morning chaos, I had forgotten to clean out Michael's percolator and start a pot of coffee for him. I sighed, slumped my shoulders, and tried to calm him down before things escalated. I quickly apologized for my mistake and tried to explain that I had simply forgotten about it because I was so busy getting the kids ready for school. However, my apology did not suffice, and he began his explosive rant despite my best efforts to prevent it. Accusations were hurled at me left and right, and I wasn't sure how to respond to it all. He yelled at me that I didn't care about him, always put everyone else before him, and paid no attention to his needs. He then complained that I was behaving the same way I did the year before, and no matter what I responded with he did not believe me. I knew that there was no winning, so I simply gave up and stopped trying to defend myself. I continued to apologize, and tried to cut the argument short so the children were not late. Feeling defeated, unappreciated, and angry on top of everything else I was dealing with that morning, all I wanted to do was crawl back into bed and sleep the day away.

After getting the kids and Michael out the door, I let out a sigh of relief, walked to my bedroom, and slumped down in my chair in front of my laptop. I debated on crawling back into  bed and sleeping some more, but decided not to. My heart was racing quite fast and felt as if it was going to pound out of my chest, so I brought out my blood pressure cuff and pulse monitor to make sure everything was ok. I had a few drinks of water while I waited for the monitor to finish and tried to relax. After a few minutes of sitting there in silence trying to breathe my way through an anxiety attack, my heart calmed and I no longer felt like it was going to fly out of my chest.  I quickly found myself lost in thought again and began to contemplate why my life turned out the way that it did. Was it a single event that triggered the crippling depression I had, or was it a long chain of events that spanned over the course of my life? Did the people I was closest to contribute to it or was this all on me? As someone from one of my favorite movies once said "It's always best to start from the beginning" and that's exactly where this story kicks off.