Asking for help

This morning I went with my Mum to see the counsellor that she'd seen a few times when things had got a bit too much after she and my Dad parted company. We made the appointment a couple of months ago at a point when I was feeling very concerned about David, worried about my dad and Adam's mum and had begun to feel very much like I had when Tom was very young and Adam had been traveling every second week and I had ended up on anti-depressants for a while.

I'm a little less immediately worried about David at the moment, but everything else is pretty much unchanged and my mood has truly sucked of late. I've felt stuck. Unreasonably teary. Easily angered. Disconnected. Unable to cope with stresses that I would normally take in my stride. I look at my life and think "My life? It's pretty damn good really. So why do I feel so fucking awful?!" I don't think I've been much fun to live with recently, either for Adam or the kids. I do a lot of apologising for my state of mind. Definitely time to ask for some help.

So I came away from the appointment this morning with a recommendation for someone to take David to see for help with his anxiety, a whole bunch of useful ideas for managing Adam's mum's alcoholism and dementia issues, a request for a nice long list of blood tests for myself to take along to the pathologist, a script for the same anti-depressants that I'd had before (and had done the trick before) and a further appointment for myself with another psychiatrist in the same practice. (Sadly I can't keep seeing Mum's doctor, who was OMG just wonderful, because she's winding down her private practice.)

Mum and I then went to Open Day at the school. We were too late to see Tom playing his flute in the band because we went over-time at the doctor's but we saw Caitlin in the Senior Dance group and in the Choir. Classrooms were visited, lunch was eaten, library books were donated. Then, because we also hadn't had time on the way back from the doctor's to drop by my house for me to pick up my car, and Mum had left early to meet up with friends, the kids and I walked home in the sunshine. Which was nice.

Tonight I cooked a rather awesome even-if-I-do-say-so-myself Thai red chicken curry for dinner and Adam asked if I wanted to open a bottle of wine. One of the reasons I don't usually drink during the week is that when I'm tired all it takes is a glass or two to leave me feeling very woozy indeed and once that happens you can kiss goodbye any hope of me doing anything useful. So I felt I needed some outside input into the decision making process:

My tweeps are enablers:

I forgot to take a before picture, and I'd like to point out that Adam helped with the cellar decluttering, here's the almost after pic:

While I was finishing off that particular decluttering task Adam was downstairs helping Caitlin clean up her room. There are no before pics of that either so it may not be obvious from these shots that anything was achieved at all. But perhaps if I tell you I haven't actually seen that carpet in many weeks you'll have some idea.

Tomorrow, vacuuming!