Little bits of smile in a cup of sad

We’re going through this again.

I fall into bed at night exhausted. I wake up feeling heavy. Am I grieving? I don’t know since no one close to me as ever died. But someone doesn’t have to die for there to be grief, I’ve been told. In my case, it’s my hopes, my ideals, that are going up in smoke, and since I’m rather idealistic, there’s a pretty thick cloud of smoke.

Do all parents feel secretly, at their very cores, that they are failures? Do they look at their children and feel a crushing sadness?

I’m tired of talking about it, tired of explaining, tired of thinking, tired of trying to figure it all out. My eyes leak water; I’m wrung out, limp and soggy.

Things will get better. It got better the last time, and it got better the time before that. We’re talking to doctors (not that they really know anything—by all appearances, they’re just experts at the guessing game) and adjusting the meds. We’re looking for ways to be better parents, trying to do our best to meet needs that I’m afraid we’ll never be able to meet. I want to fix things. I want to make this yuckiness go away forever, but that might not be an option for us.

When my life is like this I don’t cook, I don’t write, and I don’t smile all that much.

Seriously though (ha!), there have been some funny moments. Once was when this silly man donned some fancy hair. I laughed out loud; I couldn’t help myself. He was very pleased with himself, too.


Another time was when my mother accidentally dumped her freshly-baked shoofly pie out of the pie pan and onto the stove top. She laughed uproariously—what else is there to do?—and scooped the pie back into the pan.


It was delicious. So delicious, in fact, that I might start dumping all my gooey-hot shoofly pies upside-down on the stove. We’ll call the new dessert Shoofly Pie Dump.

One Year Ago: Grace's Gingerbread, and other crazy-busy stuff.