Depression redux

I let myself forget to take my pills every day. Maybe I'd take them every 36 hours. Maybe every other day. I was still taking them, but I let myself slide. And I did it because I want to believe that I don't need them.

I was wrong.

It started small--there would be days that I found myself getting frustrated more easily, snapping a little more. But it wasn't that bad. It was still better.

I meant to call and get the refill, but I got busy. I couldn't get five minutes on the phone. Then the weekend came and the doctor was no longer in.

I did call. Monday, just before lunch. But it was too late.

I don't know if it was the confluence of events on a particularly bad day or if I just saw it as bad because I was no longer viewing it through the filter of anti-depressants. But I found myself going down that road again.

Frustrated, hopeless, angry.

I yelled a Noah for something so minor. And while I was yelling the sane person in my head asked me what the hell I was doing.

That's how I know that things have gone to far. When the voice of reason is powerless to control my actions. When my boys look at me while I lash out, the depth of the wounds I am creating showing on their tender faces.

J.R. came home, and I left--to give myself a break, to give my children a break, and to break the seal on a new bottle of pills.

I opened them as I pulled away from the pharmacy, my hand shaking like an addict desperate for a fix. Comical in my frenzy.

I couldn't get all the damn cotton out as I tried to leave the parking lot. At the first stop light, I returned the bottle, laboriously fished out the wad cotton, and while trying to extract a pill so I could face my family knowing I was medicated, managed to almost drop three.

I may as well have been trying to chase down my winning lottery ticket as it blew away the way I scrambled after those three pills.

I don't like things this way.

I don't like waiting over an hour in the doctor's office each month for her to spend 30 seconds giving me permission to keep taking the pills.

I don't like thinking that my world view is altered by a filter of prescription medication.

I don't like believing that the only way I can be a bearable wife and mother is to take pills that alter my brain chemistry.

I let myself believe that this is just one symptom among many of my PCOS, though I have yet to find a doctor near me who knows as much as the books I read on the subject and can tell me for sure. But believing that lets me believe that someday I'll find the doctor who can help me deal with this properly. And that lets me believe that someday, things won't be this way.

This isn't to say I'm not doing better. That the last six months haven't brought vast improvement to our life. I am. They have.

I no longer think about getting in the car and driving until I won't be found. I don't scour Google for information on how to adopt a false identity, how my husband and boys can escape this life. I read bedtime stories again and play games after bathtime instead of wondering how I will make it through another day of the same thing.

So many things are different, better. But they are different because of a pill, not because of me.

That part is hard to accept. It is hard to reconcile who I am, who the pills make me, and who I want to be.

For now, I just keep putting one foot in front of the other. I find peace in the things that have changed for the better. And I find hope in the thought that eventually the steps that I take won't be illuminated by something I find in a bottle.