Hey, framily. Life is a lot right now, isn’t it? If you’re feeling that heaviness, you’re not alone. The news has been hard this week, especially for those of us with depression and anxiety and mental illness in our medical histories. People like me. People like a lot of my friends. Maybe even people like you….
PPA
The Social Media Narrative of Motherhood: How the Internet Responds to Tragedy
[This post may be triggering for some readers. YMMV.] It seems the media has been rife with stories of mothers who have harmed or fatally wounded their children this week. The social media narrative surrounding it all is about to make me crazy. A mom in Texas shot her daughters during a “family meeting” because…
Why I Climb | Climb Out of the Darkness 2016
We’re FOUR DAYS AWAY from the 2016 Climb Out of the Darkness. Four days away from the third year in a row where I’ll join postpartum depression survivors, locally and globally, to raise awareness of an illness which will affect 1 in 7 moms. If you want to know why I climb, there’s little else…
Climb Out of the Darkness 2015
Last year, on the longest day of the year, I climbed a mountain. Stone Mountain, to be exact. It wasn’t Everest, but it felt like it. I thought about quitting half way up. I wanted to turn around and walk back down the mountain, content to have gone as far as I could, not caring…
Ain’t No Mountain High Enough: Climb Out of the Darkness
I will never forget the relief I felt the first time someone looked at me and said “Miranda, you’re depressed. This is depression.” In that moment, my moods, the sadness, anger, rage, all of it, had a place. Slowly, with therapy, dedication to getting better, and through the twists of fate which started me on…
Climb Out Of the Darkness 2014
It’s time to Climb Out of the Darkness in Atlanta, y’all. 1 in 7 mothers will suffer from a perinatal mood and anxiety disorder. And that’s only the number of moms who actually seek help. Because of the stigma associated with mental illness, and with postpartum mental illness in particular, and because of the lack…
No More Bootstraps
I saw a meme floating around Facebook this morning that sort of gut-punched me. It said “Pretending to be happy when you’re in pain is just an example of how strong you are as a person.” People. I’m about to get a little ranty. Hold on to your hats. As someone who has battled both…
Looking for me? I’m at the Mama’s Comfort Camp.
I know I’ve mentioned before that the internet helped me through my PPD/A. Within days of logging on Twitter for the first time, I found the #PPDChat and from there I found more and more women like me. Women who were suffering or had suffered and survived and lived to tell the tale. One of…
Cracks in the armor
There are cracks in my Mama armor right now. Some of the cracks are smaller than others, but they are all cracks just the same. They are brought on by night after night of not enough sleep. From having no down-time to decompress. By meeting the demands of a needy 3 year old, and good…
The thing about those days
So Sunday was one of those days. Wednesday was one of those days. Joshua has stopped napping rather abruptly but still desperately needs to nap based on his behavior and because of this no-more-napping, those days are happening more often than I’d like to admit. Except I just admitted that and admitting that is half…