When the little angel was a baby, we lived in This Old House. If you're new here, you may not know that This Old House was a beautiful Arts & Crafts with a screened-in porch in the Waldo neighborhood of Kansas City. It was built in 1921. It had push-button light switches that sometimes threw sparks, it was not ducted for air conditioning (making my home office nearly unbearable in the summer) and it had decorative metal grates with holes big enough to pass my fist through, lovely as they were.

While in the throes of postpartum something, I became convinced that snakes could climb up through from the leaky, Silence-of-the-Lambs basement through the ductwork and slither out the very large grate holes into my daughter's bedroom. Every time I looked at those grates, I had to push the thoughts away, but it was hard. It was so hard. These thoughts, I now know, are called intrusive thoughts, and they are closely associated with anxiety disorder, OCD, eating disorders, and psychosis. I still have them from time to time, but they are much lessened after medication and meditation and all manner of my managing-my-anxiety-disorder daily rituals.

I feel a kinship with Stephen King. Here is a man who must suffer, as I do, from intrusive thoughts.

I first read PET SEMETARY in high school, and then I thought it was a horror novel. I've been rereading it this week, and I now understand it is a book about grief. A parent's grief.

I got the ebook copy, and there is a foreward in this version written by King in 2000, in which he admits something very similar to what happened to Gage in the book happened to his own son (almost) when his own son was two. He wrote:

"But a part of my mind has never escaped from that gruesome what if: Suppose I hadn't caught him? Or suppose he had fallen in the middle of the road instead of on the edge of it? I think you can see why I found the book which rose out of these incidents so distressing. I simply took existing elements and threw in that one terrible what if. Put another way, I found myself not just thinking the unthinkable, but writing it down."

What would King have done with my grate snakes?

And what is a parent to do with the fear that comes of losing a child through any manner of preventable horrors? What would we do, what lengths would we be willing to go, if we thought we could (fix them) protect them from everything?

When my girl was two, a co-worker told me about a little girl he knew who swallowed a great deal of water while learning to swim and dry-drowned. I didn't know such a thing existed, and I immediately suffered a solid week of nightmares and became terrified of letting my daughter in the water, even as I was insisting she learn to swim. This week, she's at horse camp learning to walk and trot and canter, even bareback, and each night as I lie in bed next to her as she drifts off to sleep, my mind tries to send pictures of all the awful accidents that happen in barns, even though I myself owned a horse for three years in my childhood and took almost exclusive rights to the hard and personal care of him, picking his hooves and brushing him without tying him up and walking carefully around his back away from the hooves that could go misplaced even though that dear, sweet horse would never hurt anyone intentionally. As much as I loved my horse, and as much as I love to swim, I've never lost a healthy respect for either large animals or water, as my brain easily produces full-on, Scorcese-directed mind movies of all the horrible ways to die dealing with either. 

I've learned at 40 that the best way to deal with intrusive thoughts is to bat them away like horseflies. Letting them rest even a minute allows them to bite and gather until the only way to break free is to flail in the most embarrassing and overwrought way when I can't take it for one more minute. I've had minor breakdowns from my intrusive thoughts probably a dozen times over the course of my life, and it's never been pretty. I'm not proud of how I've turned my fear into anger and stabbed out at those around me. I'm trying to learn to handle them better. My intrusive thoughts are merely the worst possible course of what if, and a life well lived is a life spent in the now, breathing deeply and remembering that no matter what, I can get through it, and it probably won't even happen. I can't worry about the bad thing happening until it does. The ironic thing is that sometimes when the bad thing happens, it's a relief, because there's no more anticipation of the bad thing; there's only dealing with it.

I think that I can make these decisions, because I have to in order to manage my anxiety disorder. The truth, though, is that our subsconscious minds decide things, and then our frontal lobes take credit for them. A study done in 2000 found:

Participants in the study were asked to make a decision about whether they would use their left hand or their right hand to press a lever.  By using fMRI scans of the brain’s activity, the researchers knew the participant’s decision by analysing the activity in the frontopolar cortex of the brain.  This information about the participant’s decision was available up to seven seconds before the participant had “made” a conscious decision.  The researchers used the information from the scans, to predict with success, the 36 participant’s decisions before they had consciously made them!

What does that mean for someone with intrusive thoughts? What is really more frightening than imagining you've lost the ability to control your own mind? In PET SEMETARY, as Louis Creed drives to his son's grave to do you-know-what, he thinks:

"He supposed he had known that he would do that, but what harm? None."

Because, of course, subconsciously he'd already decided to hop on the Micmac Indian train and ride it to the end of the line.

Brain research is fascinating, but it also brings into question the moral compass, free will and how easy it would be to slip into distressing thought patterns. I know, in my rational mind, and I'm sure I knew then, that it would be really hard if not impossible for a snake to climb up two stories of slick ductwork, and quite frankly, if a snake wanted to eat my baby, all it would have to do is climb the stairs. Heaven knows the basement door didn't really shut. That my brain conjured this elaborate lie out of turn-of-the-century grates still amazes me.

But then it doesn't.

Writers observe things, details. Details make the story interesting. But they also lead to the what ifs, and sometimes those thoughts are better off dead. 

In preparing to write this post honoring my friend and activist/entrepreneur, Katherine Stone of Postpartum Progress, I searched my gmail, which has also archived my old hotmail account, to see when we first found each other. I dug up an email from Katherine dated April 15, 2009, which would've been a few weeks after my daughter's fifth birthday and about a year after I started getting help and taking medication for my anxiety disorder. Katherine wrote:

This Mother's Day - Sunday, May 10 -- Postpartum Progress will host its first annual Mother's Day Rally for Moms' Mental Health.  Each hour, on the hour, for 24 hours straight I will post a different "Letter to New Moms" written by survivors of and experts on perinatal mood and anxiety disorders.

That email signified just one of Katherine's countless efforts to make moms suffering from mental illness feel more normal. I did write that post, and Katherine and I have written for one another on the subject of maternal mental health again and again, knowing we can prop each other and even strangers up over the miles with our voices. 

The first time I remember clearly having a long conversation with Katherine in person was at Type A Mom in 2010. She was a little intimidating with her long, red hair and tall, lanky self and these totally adorable sparkly heels, which she later said her kids bought her. The kids and the shoes stuck, because it's important to remember even people who present as physically beautiful and loomingly tall and effortlessly stylish are people with insecurities and doubts. It's easy to meet people at blogging conferences and think they are perfect, but nobody is perfect, and everyone has her struggles. Katherine embodies that dichotomy for me.

Here is this person who looks completely pulled together but who is so willing to share her pain in order to make the rest of us sitting around in our yoga pants and flipflops feel human again. For that, Katherine, I salute you.

Last year, while covering the Olympics at BlogHer, I had to come up with a group of bloggers who fought for their dreams, and the very first person I thought of was Katherine, who said:

I always felt I needed to do something meaningful with my life but continually struggled to figure out what it was. Then I was struck with postpartum depression and I had this gut reaction – the kind that nags at you that you can only ignore for so long until you must act – that I needed to help other women. It's hard to imagine something so awful could lead you to your avocation, but it pushed me toward focusing my life on being a voice for suffering pregnant and new mothers.

It's been my great pleasure and honor to watch Katherine over the years blossom and grow and fight to become the owner of the most widely-read blog on PPD in the world. Thank you, Katherine, for all that you do. You are amazing. Congratulations on ten years at Postpartum Progress.

I was just looking at Twitter and saw a link to Alison Gresik's post on the night she almost went crazy. I wasn't planning to post today, but then I read this:

We were nearly home when I tried to make up for how pissy I’d been. This is not about you, it’s about me, I said.

And that’s when Shawn got really angry.

How dare you get this upset and then say it’s not about me? It’s impossible for me to tell the difference, and it’ll certainly be impossible for a child to tell the difference. You can’t keep doing this.

She goes on to explain how her brain took that and spiraled it into suicidal thinking, and then the next morning pulled it together to face a challenge that to someone not afflicted with mental illness might seem like nothing: taking a broken car to a mechanic.

I understand.

Last week in the midst of all the Hillary Adams beating post comments, I felt my anxiety starting to rev out of control. I had just a visceral reaction to that video. I also have noticed that since I went off The Pill a few years ago that my moods are getting more extreme at times, more like they were when I was in high school and college. 

The morning after I put up the post, I took Petunia to the vet. Petunia hates the vet. She got wrapped in a towel there once when I wasn't there and ever since then she needs to be sedated to go and will still hiss and try to bite anyone, even me, who approaches her when she's there. She has to wear a bonnet that keeps her from being able to see or bite, and even so, she tries to bite. The vet is trying to desensitize her, so she sat and talked to me for what felt like hours while Petunia trembled and growled and hissed in my arms. Finally, she started talking to me about cleaning Petunia's teeth and the anxiety peaked and I started to cry. I wasn't making any noise, but the hot tears were just rushing down my cheeks and there was nothing, NOTHING I could do about it. 

"You're really upset, aren't you?" the vet asked. 

"I've had a hard week. I'd like to go home." I thought about trying to explain anything to this woman and realized it would be pointless. I knew it would be a while before I could stop crying, even as I understood intellectually that I wasn't really that upset about cleaning Petunia's teeth or even Hillary Adams, who is now 23 and years removed from that horrifying beating. Hillary Adams was a trigger, Petunia's growling was a trigger, just in the past Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 and my daughter's conference with her talented and gifted teacher in which the same tears ran down my face as I asked the teacher to let me know if she sensed too much perfectionism in my daughter, that perfectionism went with anxiety and eating disorders for me and I really hoped my girl wouldn't ever sit in front of a kind teacher who doesn't really know her and embarrass herself by bawling when nothing at all is wrong.

That's the thing, though -- when you have anxiety, nothing need be wrong. Life itself can feel pretty insurmountable, even as you recognize there is nothing wrong. Cats go to vets, cars need to be fixed -- it's not the end of the world. 

But the part of Alison's post that really got me was the part about husbands and kids not being able to tell the difference between your being mad at them or at yourself or at nothing at all but displaying this emotion that makes no sense. I've tried to insulate my daughter as much as I can from my anxiety, but when you live with people, it can be hard. Especially when you're alone with them as much as I'm alone with my girl. As a result of seeing me cry sometimes for no reason and telling her hey, it's not you, I'm  just sad and sometimes I get sad and I don't know why, hold on, I'll stop in a minute, I hope she is kind to herself if she ever cries for no reason. I want to make the world perfect for her but I know that I can't and actually I shouldn't, because if I did, she wouldn't know her own strength. She wouldn't learn to self-soothe. Just as I would tell her these things if I had a twitch or Turret's or some other behavior I couldn't necessarily control that might look alarming. 

I've stopped beating myself up for irrational crying. It doesn't happen every day -- it doesn't happen now as often as it did when she was a baby and I was really messed up. When it happens, I try to do things I know will help. I sleep. I exercise really hard. I write. I read a lot. I take hot baths. And I let myself cry, because it does seem like there's something in there that needs to get flushed, and maybe the crying flushes it. Often I'll feel perfectly fine hours later and I know that is confusing to the people around me. The truth is that when that sort of crying or anger happens, it's not actually based on anything other than my brain. It's different from when I cry because something someone dies or because I know I hurt someone. I make noise when I cry like that. This crying -- it's just like a faucet. 

The vet's office manager called the next day to see if Petunia was okay and if I was okay. She's a nice person and I saw on her face and the vet's face that they thought something horrible had happened to me to cause such a reaction. I don't really want to get into it. I wish I hadn't had to take Petunia to the vet when I knew I was in high gear. But life doesn't stop just because you're anxious. I don't think it should. In order to have faith in myself that I am okay, I have to get in the car and take the cat to the vet even if I'm crying. I have to make my daughter dinner and do the laundry and go to work. And because I still do all those things, because I know the difference between real sadness and anxiety sadness, I feel okay about it. I know people in my life think I should get stronger drugs or go see a therapist again, but the truth is that it passes, I don't want to hurt myself or others, I know how to care for myself and I'm learning not to drag other people into my anxiety when it's happening -- it's best to go in a room and let it go, just like a headache or other type of chronic pain. People with mental illness live like this, just like people with diabetes live like this. You manage the pain. You take care of yourself as best you can. And you try not to freak out when it escalates -- you manage it back to a safe level. It's possible my antidepressant needs to be adjusted, and I can look into that, but here's the thing: There isn't a magic pill that I'll take that will make me wake up tomorrow with anyone else's brain. It will be my brain that will still try its old tricks and maybe we can stop a few more of the downloads of chemicals from coming through, but it will still try. There might be a pill that helps a little more, but we're managing this, not fixing it, and that is okay. I don't expect to never cry for no reason again. I expect to be able to cope effectively with it when I do and to make it stop as soon as possible.

I can't always control my triggers or my reactions, but I want the people I love to know I'm okay and I love them, but I don't know that I can be "fixed." I can manage this, and I'm trying very hard. 

This post is for Strong Start Day from Kat Stone at Postpartum Progress.

I remember Then. I remember waking up to the screams of my baby girl, another day. Stumbling through what felt like water, brushing the not-quite-sleep from my eyes, wondering how I would get through it.

When my daughter was born through about twenty-four months old, I was in the throes of what I now believe to be undiagnosed PPD.

If only I could've had a crystal ball to the Now, to when I would be doing a job I believed in, that used my skills to their utmost, in a house that would become my Forever Home, with neighbors who invited us to housewarming parties and bought my girl Halloween socks, and not the house that encompassed a leaky, Silence-of-the-Lambs basement and mice and ghetto birds whirling above us at all hours of the night.

I now see the exhaustion in my face.

I wish I could've talked to the me, Then, to tell her all about the me Now.

It's real. PPD is real.

And there is nothing that can comfort you when your brain is telling you it will never be better, that the pain will never go away, that the world as you know it will never return to normal.

It was a slow path away from the job to which I offered nothing and to which nothing was offered me, from the home office with no air condititioning, in which the atmosphere often reached ninety degrees with no solace, no comfort. A slow path from being told I was stupid and inept to a being told I gave writers a path, a gleam of hope. A slow path from three hours a day spent crying and googling sleep solutions to a happy, well adjusted seven-year-old who sits on my lap and rests her nose in my neck and tells me I am the best mommy in all the world.

I'm sure it was confusing and annoying to my love in life, who must've thought the happy, ambitious woman he married had disappered forever, leaving a whining puddle of goo in her wake.

That was the Then.

This is the Now.

I wish I could tell you some amazing story of renewal, a doctor that helped me. I didn't really have that. I had a slow path of waking up each morning and slowly seeing the light. When my daughter finally slept through the night around age four, I started to recover. When I got the therapy that actually made sense to me, my mind stopped waking me in the middle of the night, churning and refusing to go back to sleep. When I finally accepted that I needed some medication to relegate my inadequate brain chemicals, my inordinate influx of stress hormones, and I combined that with visualizations and meditation that enabled me to envision a life walking around walls instead of throwing my body against them, that became the Now.

I am happy.

I didn't think -- in the Then -- that I ever could be.

Again, here, I see emptiness.

It scares me to think how seriously depressed and anxious I was in the Then. I couldn't handle the normal ups and downs of life at all. Every red traffic light and misplaced set of keys became a major crisis, when they needn't have been. We moved here and I lost two cats in a row, one of whom had been my substitute baby for nine years, and that may seem like nothing to most people, but to me, when Sybil died, it was the end of my youth. It was the end of having a wubbie, a talisman. When my first cat died and my daughter was three and we had just moved to this town where I knew no one and couldn't even find the gas station without help, I was hanging on to life as I knew it with my fangs. Life was red in tooth and claw, and I honestly didn't know if I would enjoy it again.

My daughter was three.

It should've been over by then, right?

The brain is a strange organ. It regulates or lacks regulation of happiness. It tells you things will be all right or everything is going to hell in a handbasket, and regardless of you intellectual ability to realize it's all a crock of shit, you believe it. As my former psychologist used to remind me: The intellectual frontal lobe and the reptilian feeling brain are not actually connected all that well. You can understand intellectually that nothing is wrong and if your reptilian brain disagrees, then my friend: You.Are.Fucked.

There was a time, in the Then, that I thought I was. The writing didn't matter. The job didn't matter. Motherhood didn't matter. Nothing mattered but the hurt, and the dark, and the hours without sleep.

As I sat down to think about this post for my friend Kat Stone, whose daughter could be my daughter's twin sister, I realized how happy I really am in the Now. I love my husband, my daughter, my job, my writing, my family, my friends, my life. And with the exception of the job -- nothing has changed but my perception of it.

The mind is a powerful organ.

And sometimes, it is wrong.

If you cry when you read this, if you or a friend or sister is stuck in the Then, please encourage her to get help. Life is short. I wish I could've spent fewer years in the Then. I wish I could've spared my husband and child and family and friends the Me that was in the Then. I wish I could've spared myself the Then.

It was unnecessary.

I didn't learn anything other than it doesn't have to be that way.

Kat has dedicated her online life to supporting those who suffer from PPD. I sincerely wish I had known Kat in the Then. The entire time we've been friends I've been in the Now. But when she asked me to share my experience to raise awareness, I could only say yes.

Because you or someone you know might still be living in the Then.

I welcome all to the Now.

Kat's trying to raise $30k on Postpartum Progress to:

• Develop a compelling national awareness campaign for postpartum depression
• Create & distribute new and improved patient education materials for distribution by hospitals
• Translate our "plain mama English" information and support into Spanish and other languages

If only I'd had that instead of a free blanket in the hospital and a host of instructions for how I could scar my baby for life by doing things wrong. Kat says  only 15% of all women with perinatal mood and anxiety disorders ever receive professional treatment.

I certainly didn't, in the Then. How much more I understand about my brain and how it works and how it impacts not only me but all the people in my sphere. My little girl is a happier girl because I got help. She doesn't have to deal with a mommy who screams and cries every day like she did when she was 0-3.

I'm going to go donate. If you have had PPD or know anyone who has or even who can relate to what I've said here, please help out Kat, who's dedicated her life to helping women overcome what affected both her and me and countless other members of this community of women.

Let's live in the Now.

Hey, there! I wrote this post about connections between eating disorders and postpartum depression last week, but I didn't get the chance to tell you about it. Here's an excerpt:

Pregnancy brings on a lot of changes quickly -- both physical and mental. It's no surprise to me that women previously diagnosed with eating disorders are at a higher risk for postpartum depression, but recently Stephanie Zerwas of the University of North Carolina flipped it around and looked to see if women who came in for postpartum depression and anxiety had previously suffered from an eating disorder. Thirty-five percent of them had -- compared to seven or eight percent in the general population. Eating disorders, then, could be a risk factor for postpartum depression.

Stephanie is the associate research director of UNC's Eating Disorders Program. It comprises both research studies and treatment programs with inpatient, outpatient and partial hospitalization programs. Her special interest is eating disorders during pregnancy and postpartum. She and other researchers have studied 100,000 moms and babies in Norway, looking at moms who had eating disorders right before becoming pregnant and the later outcomes for both the moms and the kids.

Read the rest at BlogHer.com! Back tomorrow to tell you about last weekend's accidental home improvements.