Out of the Haze

Hi. It’s been a while.

For the last, oh, two years I’ve mostly used this blog as a place to provide milestone updates about my kids. Truthfully, the last couple of years have been hard. After Ian’s birth, I struggled with post-partum depression, lost my job (unrelated to the PPD), and started over in a brand new job that meant a total lifestyle shift for my family. My husband started a new job as well, which also meant another total lifestyle shift for all of us.

I went from being full-time work-from-home to having a long commute and long hours. I was less able to be present for my family, less able to take care of my home. And as my husband started in his new job, we moved into total survival mode, just trying to get the kids from point A to point B and making sure everyone was fed and our house wasn’t utterly falling apart. Which, by the way, we also managed a down-to-the-studs renovation of our kitchen and dining room in this time period, so for a while our house was literally falling apart.

It’s been a lot.

I recently started a new job, though, with a stronger emphasis on work-life balance, as well as a personal sense that I need to set and enforce my boundaries so I can take care of my personal life. While I’m still dealing with depression, it has lessened the further I get from Ian’s birth and the hormonal upheaval I experienced in its wake. I am working hard to make more time and space for myself, finding my way back to the things that in the lowest points of my PPD I was unable to do.

So I’m trying to exercise more–daily walks and yoga at least 4 times/week–and get back into writing about my life and experiences, which has always been the best way for me to make sense of my emotions and whatever situation I find myself in. My goal is to write at least once a week, and I’ll probably talk a lot about yoga and walking and mindfulness and my family and children although in a less specific way, mostly because as they get older, I feel like my children’s stories are less and less mine to tell. I have a backlog of things I want to talk about, too, things that I wanted to write about over the last couple of years but that were too raw and painful for me to touch on or that somehow felt unsafe in my already-vulnerable space.

Here we are. Out of the haze and bringing my inner life into sharper focus.

Photo by Benjamin Voros on Unsplash