Blog? What Blog?

one step/one step/i stop/i take
one breath/one breath/warm sun
above/white snow/below
i breathe/i take/one step/one step
-Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer,
"CLIMBING THE RIDGE"

Do I have a blog? A place where I recount the often rambling happenings in my family? Really?
Now that I have successfully procrastinated blogging about the holidays, the new year, skiing, Gary's birthday, my new job, Haiti and the orphan crisis, I am too overwhelmed to know where to begin. So instead, I will try to begin from the best place I can...today.
But perhaps it is best to account for why I have not blogged so feverishly as I have in the past:

I had a strange and actually somewhat terrifying realization on December 6. If only my life really was a great as it looks on my blog...or in my Facebook status. But when I looked into the mirror on that particular Sunday evening, what I faced was a woman, a mother, a wife, who was silently struggling with clinical depression for a very long time. Why it hits, suddenly, so hard and fast is something that I still do not understand. Having been 'mistreated' for the past several years with a rather pathetic dose of medication, I became diluted by the thought that this flat, sad, disengaged feeling was just my personality. But now, I am learning to realize that feeling was like a heavy, itchy, uncomfortable wool blanket that had become much too heavy.
Why share this? Mostly because I feel like it is something that needs to be said out loud. Under the weighted blankets of depression is a very lonely, silent, scary place to be. Throwing off those covers is almost just as difficult. I am now faced with looking back on the many memories I have from so many years and wonder what I missed. Can I remember my wedding day with joy instead of criticism? Can I journey back to the first days I was home with my newborn girl and find happiness and not fear? Is it possible to remember China and the months after bringing HannaMei home without the inevitable confusion and panic that colored those precious moments? And more recently, the evenings hiding behind a glass of wine or disappearing from the world through naps that were hours long and yet never long enough. This all needs to be shared, because maybe there is someone else out there, or someone who knows someone, who can't get out from under those covers alone. They may be a child, a teenager, a friend, a sister, a mother. For them, to be surrounded by people who love them and still feel so very alone is hard to understand; for you and for them. It is a spiral that will start slow, but the spinning will hasten.
So, out in front of everyone, I am starting this year by saying, "never again'; whatever it takes to not be in that place again. Through the wonderful miracles of my husband, my family, my God, the proper medication and compassionate counsel, the lights are getting brighter in my world. My world is beginning to grow again. Change is the one thing I fear the most. But, as has been said, it is the only thing to count on...because it will come. But I must go after it. Make the effort. And now, everyday, I do.