Day 51- ornery

I am listening to my happy mix right now.  Music i listened to writing papers, lesson planning, studying what have you in sunny places in Charlottesville where beauty and life and peace abounded.  A place I wasn't pregnant.

There's a NYC mom blog  out there who recently posted about post-weaning depression.  It was a post to help her find closure, and it brought up some really good points about what pregnancy, breastfeeding, and weaning does to a woman's body. Child bearing is rough. Hormones throw a lot out of whack in addition to all the physical changes. I like to think of it as a cruel form of torture made to punish women  for Eve's sins. Okay, that is liberally paraphrased from Genesis 3, but how else do you explain how awful pregnancy is unless you spin it as making up for Eve's conning Adam into eating that apple and letting sin enter into the world? If only whacky hormones that can send you to the depths of despair were the only thing about pregnancy that caused torture... there are so many.

One such torture that comes about in pregnancy for me is the state of permanent orneriness I endure for ten months. Nothing is good enough for me, everything doesn't measure up, and it all comes from the fact that i feel rotten. Someday I will find medical literature to prove my claim to physical depression versus mental depression- while my mental faculties are rather negative in thought, i feel like there's not a chemical imbalance, but a physiological one. And that causes me to turn into a 90 year old cranky person. i don't want to be around people, i don't want to eat because nothing looks appetizing, or if it does it is sure to disappoint, and I make laundry lists of what is wrong with the world.

Not pleasant any way you spin it. Trying to find a happy heart. You know, the joy of the Lord is my strength. But it is very hard to come by. And I cry a lot. And feel sick. And dislike everything around me. And I know it is pregnancy and it will pass, but it is hard to see the forest for the trees. I consider this some sort of season that Ecclesiastes talks about. A season to be upbeat, a season to be miserable. A season to laugh, a season to cry. A season to be in the tip top of shape, a season to feel horrible unwell and that you body hates you.  A season to suffer.  and maybe if the fate of the early christian church weighed on my shoulders, I too could find joy in suffering. but paul and a lot of the apostles weren't women, were they? i'm sure they would have written other helpful things if they had been...