wink     ; )

#2

Oh, and by the way, if you didn't already know, we've started the process of adopting our second child. We don't expect to bring her (we've requested a girl) home until summer of 2005, so it'll be a while yet.

getupgrrl writes the following about her gestational surrogacy:

It's not that I'm depressed or anxious or sad, because I'm not. It's just that this entire pregnancy feels very surreal to me, like a dream that I can't quite remember. I'm not pregnant. My body hasn't changed at all. I've had no morning sickness, no fatigue, no food cravings. My life has gone on as before. Well, I don't go to the hospital every morning dressed in easy-access sweatpants, that's true. But I still can't quite believe that I might actually end up with a child at the end of all this.

Those surreal feelings and the difficulty in believing that "I might actually end up with a child at the end of all this" resonate with me even though we are in completely different circumstances.

Depression

I lay limp and frozen
huddled in the corner of my mind
as the weight of vast emptiness,
openness and abyss crush me.

My depression is like agoraphobia. Abruptly everything that comforts me and cuddles me and cozies me falls away (gracefully quick) and there is nothing left but me and the void. Staring at each other. And I blink first.

I can feel it in my chest and my sinuses--the gasping, the welling tears--but the release never comes. My heart pounds but does not race; its beats are heavy and slow but I can feel them in my gut, in my fingertips, I can hear them in my ears while my vision pulses. I am not terrified; I have been claimed by both melancholy and despair.

My thoughts are siren voices, alluring and not at all my own. I am caught up among them and am washed into the madness of fever-sleep. Our special for tonight is incoherence on a bed of nightmares.

This is my life. One minute is pure routine. The next, my heartbeat is the only thing that I can hear or see or feel. Previous depressions have been sieges. This one is guerilla warfare.

(Three weeks down, who knows how many to go...)