I can feel my depression returning, or rather can hear it walking with heavier steps through the hallways since it’s never really been gone.
Two days ago, in preparation for a home inspection, I piled all of my pump parts in a small bowl in my sink and removed the large stand where they typically dry. Somehow it felt intimate to have the inspector photograph such things, although when the inspectors came the next day they accidentally walked in on me with my boob hanging out as I nursed Lila in her bedroom.
Slowly some things are returning to a pre-pregnancy state. We have our bed back, after a pest infestation and various iterations of slob (mattress without headboard, mattress with metal frame, king bedframe with queen mattress, and now king bedframe with a loaner king mattress since our delivery continues to be delayed).
This pest infestation has unsettled me as it would any anxious person, but it’s preyed on my worst tendencies. When I read online that certain measures might be taken in a full-blown infestation (Ryan found only one bug, by the way), I began taking them in all of the rooms of our house. Our washer and dryer were running for almost three days straight. I began to inspect every piece of fuzz, no matter how small — and still do. If I found a tiny curled up desiccated carcass I’d put it in my palm, turn it over, inspect it, take a picture to zoom enhance, try to count the legs, and eventually flush it away so I couldn’t return to examine it further later.
Ryan has just sent me a text that Lila is awake and I’m needed. You get the point. I was thinking today that Elena is very artistic, perhaps she’ll be an artist; and then I had a fleeting thought that I, too, wanted to be an artist when I was young, that I used to be able to put words together in a way that some told me was artistic. I would spend hours writing, notebooks upon notebooks, and then hours and hours at the computer. Now I’m lucky to get out fifteen minutes about a pest infestation. You see how I swung for the fences, slowly unspooling the narrative, unsuspecting that I’d have only this limited time to process this rather mundane moment from our lives that has nevertheless managed to unhinge me.
Add to this: worries that Elena isn’t social at school, Lila’s fitful sleeping, my dad’s kidney transplant…well, you get the point.
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