moosh in indy.

Ah, gosh. Thanksgiving. The biggest most forgotten holiday of our culture.

If I were a holiday I would want to be Thanksgiving.

Just think of the patience and love Thanksgiving has. As soon as we all come out of candy coma on November 1st the Christmas trees are out and the “FA LA LA LA LA-ing” is all up in Thanskgiving’s business. But Thanksgiving is still there.

Thanksgiving doesn’t even care that we take take take and fall asleep before it’s through.

Thanksgiving loves us. Even though we don’t give Thanksgiving all the credit it deserves.

So here’s to being more like Thanksgiving, patient, steadfast, constant, modest and not jealous of that whore Christmas. (Well if it is, it doesn’t show it, and that’s a quality I’d do well to learn.)

Want the cheesy list of cheese that I’m thankful for? I really need to for my own good since I’ve been a wallowing ball of misery because I miss my husband so badly.

Ooh, when I start thinking about it, there’s so many things I’m grateful for. Gosh, I do a fantastic job of making myself miserable with missing my husband because there are countless blessings in my life. I have a healthy, funny, wicked smart and adorable kid. I have a husband who is just the bee’s knees in so many ways. I have a family who thinks I’m awesome, I think they’re pretty awesome too. I have friends, REAL friends, not just those fair-weather kind. I’m healthy, I have one of those bright shiny futures, I have talents, I have good teeth.

And to any of you who are reading this-THANK YOU. This blog has pulled me out of dark caverns when I needed it most, and the fact that you’re still here, either out in the open or lurking has soothed my troubled heart on more than one occasion.  I started this blog as a way to keep my family and friends updated on the fruit of my loins while we were in the wasteland wonderland of Indiana and it’s turned into one of the greatest things I could have ever done for myself.

That you’re all here to share it with me makes me so thankful.

the moosh needs a tishme, the little toad went and got sick. OH, BUT I’M SO GRATEFUL THAT I HAVE THE MEANS AND ABILITY TO CARE FOR HER.

To think, I almost complained on Thanksgiving.

I wish all of you peace, love, happiness and gratitude.

And I wish my husband were here.

But I’m grateful he’s working his tail off back in Indiana.

You know, for us. Thankful, thankful, thankful.

 I overdosed on prescription medication when I was seven months pregnant.

On purpose.

I didn’t want to be pregnant anymore. Pregnancy was (literally) killing me. I hadn’t eaten more than a half cup of food at a sitting in seven months. Ninety percent of what went into my mouth came back out. Every muscle in my body ached from dry heaving. My throat was constantly scratchy from vomiting up bile. Every smell was toxic.

And no one believed that I truly was sick.

One woman told me I was eating the wrong kind of crackers. Other people said I was being over-dramatic. Several people thought I was faking. Cody thought I was a wimp.

I didn’t even know if I wanted a kid all that much, I mentally could not get myself excited about having a baby.

The depression built gradually (I am bipolar). I told myself to go to sleep and I’d feel better in the morning. One morning I didn’t feel better, I felt worse. I called into work, got a glass of water and took well over a dozen pills, plus Zofran and a sleeping pill, so I could fall asleep while it happened and not vomit up all that I had just taken.

Cody found me an hour later.

I don’t remember much of the next 12 hours. I woke up in an ER, monitors and sensors all over my body.

And Cody was sitting by my side. Completely helpless to what his wife had tried to do to his baby.

A social worker came in and told me I would be going to a different hospital for some inpatient monitoring. And that I would be going there by ambulance.

I realized while I was lying on the gurney that I was being buzzed into an area of the hospital I had never been in before. I smelled cigarette smoke.

The only reason to smell cigarette smoke inside a hospital is if the people inside aren’t allowed outside.

That’s when I realized I was in the psych ward.

I was wheeled down a quiet hall to a sterile room. My shoelaces were taken, and I was told to wait for a nurse who would read me the rules.

The rules went something like “if you don’t eat, we have ways of making you eat, if you don’t listen to us we have ways of making you listen.” And then I was told the visiting hours.

Visiting hours. An hour a day. I’d only get to see Cody an hour a day.

Cody was allowed to come in, bring me a few things from home and say goodbye.

And then I was left all alone. Alone except for the nurses that checked in on me every hour.

I wasn’t allowed to sleep with the door closed. A woman woke up screaming in the middle of the night about killing her husband.

I have never been so scared.

I had an OB, an OB nurse, a nutritionist, a psychiatrist, a therapist, a pediatrician a social worker and a perinatologist that checked in on me regularly. I had to go to three group therapy sessions a day and two private sessions a day. There was an arts and crafts hour where doctors took notes on how each patient interacted with each other.

Some patients had deep wounds that were stapled shut and bandaged, others had charcoal stains around their lips. I sat in my room most of the day staring down at the street I used to play on as a kid. Staring at all the people with normal lives, going about completely unaware that I was stuck there up alone.

It was the darkest, most miserable situation I have ever been in.  Humans shouldn’t be treated like that. If I learned nothing else while there for three days I learned that I never want to go back.

I couldn’t tell anyone where I had been, I was ashamed. No one likes a baby killer. Why would I ever admit to being one? But the people who did know finally believed me. Finally believed the hell it was being trapped inside my pregnant body.

I was ashamed of all of this until recently. I made a mistake. I’m human. And the Lord obviously wants to keep the moosh and me here or we would have had toe tags that cold day in September. There’s no logical medical reason why the moosh came out from that perfectly healthy. And for this I am grateful.

I am not ashamed now because I have a message, if someone says they’re not doing so well, please listen. I tried to tell someone that I was not well a week before this happened. They brushed it off as pregnancy hormones and sleepiness. I didn’t want to push, maybe it was just pregnancy after all. But that’s just my point, those who truly need your help will rarely shout for it. They will suffer silently hoping somebody, anybody will notice. Those who are truly hurting will not want to draw attention to themselves.

I didn’t want to be a burden or seen as a complainer. So I tried to figure it all out myself.

And I failed.

But I was blessed through my failure.

Not everyone is so lucky.

Until packing up and moving across the country when Cody graduated I had lived in the same five mile radius my entire life. What this means is that almost every memory, both good and bad, happened in this five mile radius. The same five mile radius in which I am currently staying. Cody asked my dad if he could marry me in this house. But I have also broke up with boyfriends in this house. I have had birthday parties here, I have passed out drunk in a backyard a few blocks away, I used to babysit the now tall and gangly teenagers that live across the street. I had my baby a few blocks away from the mall where I bought my first pair of heels. I spent nights in the hospital due to depression steps away from where I had my first kiss.

There are a lot of memories here.

And a lot of them hurt.

High school didn’t go so well for me. While the LDS religion is not (NOT, I promise) the majority, it is prevailent. And Utah has always had a feeling of  “us against them” regardless of which side you are on. (And I’ve been on both.) And rarely does either side see this the way I have been able to see it.

I was a wild child, that is obvious. My fellow wild buddies and I would swear off the goody goody Mormons, we stuck together in all our rebelliousness. Avoided their gathering places, avoided the things they liked to do. But I was always secretly envious, they had such a good time together, all without alcohol or drugs. But I was only invited once, and I was treated like an outsider the whole time.

Flash forward to to now. I have a dear friend who has been with me for what feels like forever. She has always lived in the “right” neighborhood and had the “right” friends. Her parents knew the “right” people and she did all the “right” things. GAH, how envious I was of her and that she had been born into the Utah “club”. She was going to grow up and follow in her parents footsteps, her kids would be another generation of the “cool” kids. They would never have to worry about unpopularity, vicious rumours or clawing their way to the top.

Or so it seemed.

Today at the park by her house in the neighborhood I wished I had always lived in we watched the next generation of the “cool” kids. (with their Biblical names, might I add) They were going to be “cool” by birthright, “cool” because of where their parents chose to buy their house. I told her that one of the reasons I didn’t want to come back to Utah is because we would be classified, stamped and sorted as soon as we crossed city limits.

“LDS. Lawyer. White. Children.” YOU. GO. HERE.

And “here” is not where I want to be. It’s hard to break a Utah mold. Very few people have done it. If any. And compared to most of the other women I would be “sorted” with, I would be considered “not Mormon enough.” Anyone who has never lived in Utah is confused at this point, but I swear to you it’s true. This state feels like one big competition. And I don’t want to play.

After I told her this I was worried that she would be disappointed in my opinion. She loves Utah.

But then she told me she had the same feeling of inadequacy. That she will never be “Mormon enough” to fit the mold that she has been given. It was a weight off my shoulders. One little confession from someone I’ve looked up to and always considered such a perfect example of an LDS member for as long as I can remember.

Utah is beautiful. Painfully beautiful in fact. Salt Lake is an amazing city, it is run well and is very well taken care of. But there’s so many people running around trying to shove the rest of us into our place while keeping themselves in bigger, newer, shinier, tighter, more expensive places than their neighbor that they’re kind of a buzz-kill to the natural beauty of this area.

I understand we get comfortable with whom we associate with the most.

But is it normal where you live to get so comfortable that everyone else feels left out?