It was pain
Sunny days and rain
I knew you’d feel the same things

The Kid and I have a little dance we do every morning.

Before the sun rises, he wakes up with rustling limbs and yawns and stretches that turn into requests for the iPad and long monologues (all of this while The Husband and Little Brother sleep in the next room because every night, TK sneaks into ours and he and TH swap places because if they didn’t, LB would awaken at 3 am with shouts of “Daddy? DADDY!” much like the Etrade baby). And I dig in next to his warmth for a few minutes before I get out of bed and slide into my workout clothes. The dance begins.

“No! Stay! Just for today,” he says.

“You know I’d rather be here with you,” I tell him.

“So stay!”

I’ve stayed before. But mostly, I go, trudging upstairs and outside, into the darkness and onto the running path, even as I feel pulled like the blanket TK and LB play tug o’ war with daily. I stood in the scalding shower this morning after one of those runs, wondering how it’s possible for my body to run one minute and want to collapse the next, why I’m always tired even when I’m moving, and I think this is it: there’s not a moment in the life of a mother when she doesn’t feel pulled in at least two directions, if not more. And this, this is exhausting.

Also exhausting are the morning (and afternoon…and evening) fights the boys get into over things like “he looked at me” or “he laughed at me” or “he got a bigger cookie.” They echo the fights that The Sis and I had growing up, which leads me to believe they are primal and unavoidable, and maybe that’s why they grate at me so powerfully, why they make me want to scream–I’ve been in one or another of these fights my whole life. They lead to moments of regret after school drop-offs, rehashing the morning in my head and wondering where I could have been more patient and kind. Wondering if “you two are going to drive me crazy” is an honest admission or a ticket to their future therapy.

But then there are the moments that wash all that away: TK calling me “sweetheart Mommy;” or when they ask me what the best part of my day was and I tell them it was when I picked them up and they were so happy to see me and LB says, “We’ll always be happy to see you.” They’re young enough to think that’s true, and I’m delusional enough to try to make it so.

And even when they’re not pushing and pulling me, when they’re in bed asleep or off at school and it’s just me, I’m pushed and pulled by my own shit, by the inner waves set off by anxiety: paranoia about friend groups, questions about whether that cough was part of a seasonal cold or something grimmer; whether I’m being available enough to TH in our marriage; the guilt of parenting that comes with not being patient or teaching or making the most of every damn moment. These waves send me out to sea and back to shore again; one day I’m flat and the world is grey and the next I’m bopping around and it’s in colour.

It strikes me that having anxiety and/or depression is much like being immunosuppressed: a big part of the problem is that the body has a hard time recognising them as foreign invaders. Because when it does–when my mind finally notices the difference between them and reality–I can breathe, and the sea is once again blue.

And I know that none of this would be so hard, or painful, or wonderful, or would even exist, if it weren’t for the fact that I am connected: to sanity, to people, to this world around us, full as it is of rain and sun and grey and colours, just like the overcast skies that clouded our walk to school yesterday before we ran into friends who pointed up at the rainbow arching above us.