February - Back on Track

Having introduced myself to the world and discovered that anyone can comment on my blog (although thrillingly/disappointingly no one has yet) I've taken a few days to really think about how I'm going to organise this blog and how I'm going to report about the things I'm up to. While each month will hold a special goal or challenge and there will be posts relating to that challenge, I'm sure that once I get a bit of momentum I won't be able to shut up and you'll no doubt be seeing a lot more random posts completely unrelated to the flavour of the month. Me being me I imagine that a lot of those random posts will be interesting little diatribes about the quality of the driving inflicted on me by other road users.

But before we get carried away - some information on the monthly challenges. I already have a few ideas for the first couple of months but as we get going, feel free to issue your own challenges. Before you type “try shutting up” let me assure you that the blog will continue. I’d also very much appreciate it if we could be clear that what I want are challenges aimed at broadening my horizons – not dares that will land me in jail or cost me my marriage.

To the first month…in order to understand the first month, you need to understand a little bit more about my current situation. My husband is coming out of about a year's worth of depression. It has been, frankly, one of the hardest periods in my life because as anyone who has experienced depression will tell you - some of the side effects are that you lose all your energy, you shut down and stop communicating although, if provoked (which can be as simple as saying, “hey are you going to get up today?”) you can muster enough rage to lash out...usually at the person you feel most safe with (otherwise known as the person who loves you most and least needs to hear it).

This means that for about a year I've been running the house by myself, looking after and organising not only the kids but my hubby and getting either the cold shoulder or a screaming match out of my frustrated partner for my efforts. Our lives have become the fodder of very black sitcoms that no one would watch because, frankly, it's just not funny.

Towards the end of the year, as he got a grip on the beast, Charles realised that what he needed was a big holiday from work and, basically, a fresh start. So he decided to take long service leave and then he decided that we needed to move house. To cut a very long story short I found myself with a baby who was only a few months old renovating our old house to sell, while moving us to our new house...over Christmas time. Hindsight is of course 20/20 and I must have been mad to agree to all of this. And I did agree, and I don't blame him, and I love our new house...let’s just say that the timing could have been better.

As I finally got towards the end of it all Charles decided that we wouldn't use a real estate agent to sell the old place because they cost so much. Instead, he would list it on AllHomes (the only place for ACT real estate to be seen) and sell the house himself. Shortly after placing our ad, his leave ended and I found myself packing the kids into the car, driving to the old place, strapping James into a backpack and preparing the house for viewers in the 40+ summer heat on an almost daily basis. So in the end it was really me that had to sell it too.

The upshot of all of it is that my life has fallen apart. I am tired all the time, my body has been sore all over for about two months now and at one point I found myself locking myself in my bedroom because my little girl did something that accidentally hurt her baby brother and for just two seconds I was going to hurt her very badly. This was the point where I finally admitted that while Charles had come cleanly out of depression - I'd gone head-long down the rabbit hole. I honestly don't know why this shocked me. If you're going to get up to feed a baby three times a night and then try and do 8-10 hours of physical labour a day before coming home and trying to keep a household going you're going to need either quite a lot of drugs or a very long lie down in the dark.

Having had depression 10 years ago I am (usually) quite adept at avoiding it. I see the warning signs, I put down the hammer/paintbrush/etc, step away and take it easy for a while and I'm fine. Only this time there were two mortgages and a house that needed to be sold so I (stupidly) pushed through and look where I am now.

Hmmm.

My doctor is quick to point out that drugs are a band aid. All they do is give you the energy to do some of the hard work to get better. Don't do the work and you'll be stuck in this rut forever. And the work is? Well you have to address the underlying issue and eat, exercise and sleep regularly if you want to beat it. Either that or you become a Scientologist and then you don't believe that depression exists and presumably it will just evaporate leaving you to bask in the glory of having at least one thing in common with Tom Cruise. I have decided not to become a Scientologist (more on this later, I'm sure). I have also chosen not to take drugs because I think I can pull out of it on my own and because I am still breastfeeding James. The doc has warned me that by continuing to breastfeed I have to expect that recovery will be slower because I will have less energy. A lot longer because baby James is less like a baby and more like a toddler in a baby suit.

Do I have a point? Yes, I'm getting there. The first month's challenge will be about getting on top of the new house and establishing a routine to help me overcome the depression. At the moment the new house looks like it was ransacked by an army of looters and then bombed to cover their tracks. We eat takeaway or microwaved food more nights than not (apart from James who has his food cooked in advance and frozen) and apart from the physical work of carting around the littlies, there's not a lot of scheduled activity that you could call “exercise”.

So this month the challenge is threefold;

1.) Get the house looking normal and maintain it.

2.) Get all of our diets back on track. This means no takeaway and no junk food. For me this also means taking a pharmacy of vitamins.

3.) Get back into exercising regularly and not by swinging a hammer.

Some of the things I do this month will set me up for next month’s challenge. Next month will all be about increasing my fitness and losing weight. I can’t do that this month because, let’s face it, with the amount of weight I’m carrying at the moment my knees would last about as long as a water balloon in a thumb tack factory if I tried anything remotely bouncy.

When we get there physical activity/weight loss month will involve attempting a series of different cardio activities. And for those of you that like audience participation – yes, you can put your votes in now and I’ll try it out and write a blog entry about how it went. I also plan to do some things this month to set me up for April – which will be “pretty is as pretty does” month. I’ll let you think about what that might be all about for a little bit. More on that soon – suffice to say that April might be the most challenging month of all…so I have to lay the foundations now. Tune in tomorrow people for day one of “Back on Track” month.

Peace-

Tool Chick