Today I turned my music on...

...And realized I haven't done that in probably 2 months.

Which is a very, very strange thing indeed. I typically listen to music 60-80% of the waking day. I've developed a deep love for music in the last few years and want to have it on all the time. It speaks to my writer's soul on so many levels. It inspires me. It takes the happiness I already feel and exalts it.

But I haven't done much writing either. That's perhaps the saddest thing of all. I've been pregnant. But I'm not anymore. I miscarried last week, and today I finally feel like "me" again. This pregnancy has been the most emotionally challenging pregnancy I have ever had. I don't know if it's because I've not been sick and therefore able to pay attention to how I feel emotionally rather than physically more, or if it was just that this pregnancy really was that... bipolar.

The truth is I've been miserable for months. I had to give myself a peptalk every day, trying to remember what it was like to be happy, fulfilled, not angry at everything. I tried to remind myself that I'd be happy again. I'd find that spark again. I just needed to endure the next year amid an uproar of hormones. I needed to just... endure. But to be honest, it was so HARD to remember what it was like to be happy. I couldn't remember the deep love and satisfaction I had been basking in prior to impregnation. I loved my husband before this, right? I didn't yell at my kids so much? I cared about making a difference and being a positive voice? I actually wanted to get out of bed? I actually used to wish it were possible that I could survive without sleep so I could just... spend more time being so dang happy, didn't I?

Don't feel sad for me--for my lost pregnancy. To tell you the truth, it was a huge relief to lose it because it just never felt right. I didn't look forward to the end of it other than as an escape from depression. I couldn't imagine the baby at the end, if that makes sense. I think I must have known along the way that it wasn't going to pan out.

Once I knew it was over I began to ask myself if now was the time to do this baby thing. See I made a promise not long after Keshet was born that if God would deliver us from our continual economic trials and make it so we could afford another baby, I'd have one. Even though I wanted to be done. I'd do this because I believe in sacrificing. And I felt and still feel like there is one more for us (that's a long story in itself). Sure enough, not a month after making that covenant, Brad came out to NoDak and our lives changed forever. It was like insta-prayer answer. So all this time we've been up here I've known I needed to have another child at some point. My goal was to fulfill my end of the bargain after my first book was out. And by golly I stuck to that goal.

After I miscarried and looked back on that hellish 2 months, I thought, Dear God, I don't think I can take going through that again right now. It felt as if I'd wasted months I could have been editing, marketing, working toward my other goal of establishing myself as a writer. Instead I spent the time trying to keep my head above depression.

So Brad gave me a blessing (which for the non-LDS folk is like having someone say a prayer over you and delivering personal revelation). Without mentioning to Brad my worries about trying to do this pregnancy thing again, part of the blessing included that I would be prompted when it was time to try again. And that in the meantime I should focus on my other obligations/goals. It was a huge weight lifted. I had felt somewhat the same way, but it's hard to know sometimes if what you're thinking is the same thing the Lord is thinking, especially if you want it so badly.

Aside from that nice reprieve, I've earned a deep compassion for those who suffer depression. I remember experiencing bouts of it with past pregnancies, but none so long-lasting. Day in and day out, knowing happiness is out there but being unable to find it or hold it longer than a moment. Being unable to really remember it properly. To feel like your mind is not your own. It's a deeply helpless feeling and it's that helplessness that brings the melancholy that settles in like a fog that won't lift. Everything that was once full of striking color now looks as if it's been overlaid in shades of bleak grey.

It was a tremendous relief to turn my music on today.


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