Pandemics and Depression are Common Bedfellows

 The pandemic has caused many people to struggle with mental health, primarily anxiety and depression.  Everyone is scared, sad, touch-starved, struggling to make ends meet, all the things that go along with this dumpster fire of a year.  Even my husband, who has never had mental health issues (and in fact has trouble relating to them), is definitely experiencing some depression.  I've experienced a resurgence of my depression, and it's taking a different form than it ever has.

Typically, my depression comes out as anger and irritability.  This year, I've encountered those as well as changes in appetite and sleep patterns, which have never been things I struggled with before.  I've also attained a level of apathy and lack of motivation that I always thought was a myth.  My children roller skate in the house.  I don't care.  My 10-year-old hoards candy in his bedroom.  I don't care.  I have no clean clothes.  I don't care.  There's no food in the house.  I don't care.  Christmas shopping has been a total nightmare, even though I did it all online.  And now that all the gifts are here, I wonder how much I would have to pay someone to wrap them for me.  I have completely lost touch with my wardrobe.  I wear scrubs at work (one less decision to make), and when I come home I take a shower (at least I still do that!) and put on my pajamas.  At 3:00 in the afternoon.

I'm retreating.  I'm isolating.  I'm hiding.  All signs of bad brain action.  Honestly, the hardest thing about this whole situation has been forcing myself to do the things I need to do.  There are days when all I can do is go to work and go home.  No laundry, no errands, dinner ordered in.  I have a very autonomous job, and most days it's up to me to get things done on my own schedule.  Most of the time I like that, but right now I kind of need someone to hang over my shoulder and remind me to do things.  I mean, things other than sit at my desk and play Candy Crush.

Everything takes so much energy, so much strength, so much work.

People think depression is being sad or despondent.  For some people it is.  But it's also lack of motivation, lack of pleasure in things you used to love, the inability to prioritize or make decisions.  I increased the dose of my antidepressant, and that helped some, but mostly I've just been putting one foot in front of the other, trudging forward, hoping it will pay off one day.  And hoping that when this all ends, and we all go back out to the world, it won't linger.

Because the thing is, it's normal to be depressed right now.  I'd be a little weirded out if I weren't.  It's not normal to continue to be depressed when the circumstances change and we get back to living.  I've realized how many of the things I did were coping mechanisms for this same depression.  Now that they've been taken away, I see why I did them.  They got me out of the house and out of my head.  They allowed me to interact with people and be social.  They allowed me to have something to ground myself.

Every now and then my husband will randomly ask if I'm okay.  I always tell him I am, while simultaneously wondering why he's asking.  Last night I realized that he asks that because he really doesn't know.  I've retreated so far into myself, began listening to my own internal monologue so much, that I often don't talk.  So the days blend together, one after the other, all the same, and I just keep plodding.  Hoping something will change.  Hoping something will break.  Imagining... what?  What will the world be like when we all surface again?  I like to think we all learned something about how to relate to each other, how to be kind to each other, how to see things in a new way.  But I know humanity.  American humanity in particular.  We're very resistant to change and learning.  We don't learn from our past experiences, which is why history really does repeat itself.

One thing I know for sure: I'm not the only one.  In fact, for perhaps the first time in history, mental health is affecting more people than not.  I have a group of friends, we call ourselves the Crazy Moms Club.  We all have issues with anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, body image, you name it.  All of our husbands are what we like to call neurotypical, meaning they don't have mental health issues at all.  We are all abundantly thankful for our "normal" husbands because they give us perspective.  They tell us when we're being crazy.  They pick up extra slack around the house when we don't have the energy.  They remind us to feed the children.  And when we get together, our conversation almost always revolves around the difficulties we face being moms with mental health issues.  Some people may say it's commiserating.  Maybe it is.  But it's also therapy.  It reminds us we're not alone.  We get ideas on how to cope.  We remind each other of our worth.  I love those Crazy Moms.  But right now, we can't get together.  We can (and do) FaceTime or Zoom, but anyone with kids knows how that goes.  You spend half the time talking to your friends, and half the time dealing with the kids.  It's less helpful that way.  But what else are we supposed to do in these times?  So we grit our teeth and move forward.

This will all be over someday.

Our Adoption in Progress

We accepted Frankie and Jasmine into our home because the social worker told us it was low-risk, meaning it was unlikely the birthparents would get the children back.

Let me back up.

The county called us for a presentation of 2 children up for adoption. It was a sibling set, a boy and a girl, who had been in foster care for 5 months. They came to the attention of the county when the parents (mom 19 and dad 17) brought Jasmine to the hospital. They thought she was constipated, but she was actually starving to death. The doctors said that if they had waited one more day, she would have been dead. The children were taken and placed in foster care that day. The birthparents were convicted of felony endangerment and incarcerated. Since their release, the social worker has offered them use of county services from parenting classes, to GED courses, to counseling, all to gather evidence to support her decision not to allow the children back with parents who almost killed one of them.

A few family members stepped forward and were interested in adopting the children, but none of them could pass a background check. The birthparents have no support system or good example to follow. Mom is youngest of 7, a high school dropout whose siblings have all said she made her own bed. Dad is oldest of 9 (with one on the way) and for a while his mother was helping. When Jasmine was born she said she could no longer help out.

After our presentation, our case was transferred to a new social worker. Bureaucracy and all that. The new social worker believes everything is going well. The birthparents are learning what they're supposed to, seem to be benefitting, she feels the court will look favorably on returning these children to their home of origin where one of them almost died. The court has ordered that the birthparents get to visit for 4 hours a week with supervision, so once a week we take the kids to the CPS office and they visit. Because dad is a minor, there's a no-contact order between the birthparents so they have to do their visitation separately. That means 4 hours a week they visit at the CPS office.

There is a court date coming up in October where parental rights were supposed to be terminated. With the spin the new social worker (and her supervisor) are putting on this case, the most likely outcome is a 6-month extension and possible increase in visitation.

Meanwhile we have the kids in our home, caring for them, kissing their boo boos, reading them bedtime stories, taking them to Grandma's house, making sure they're fed, warm, cool, healthy, giving them love and discipline, all to have the court take them away in a year. Our adoption worker has offered us an out: the status of the case has changed, we can pull out if we want to. We never signed on to be a temporary home. But how can we do that? How can we send these children back? While they're here we know they're loved, cared-for, and safe. If we let them go, we know no such thing. And if the court wants us to give them up, they're going to have to take them.

When this all started, we were so confident. Sure these were the right kids. Sure the timing and the situation were right. Sure this was what God wanted for our family. We told everyone, they threw baby showers, we took time off work to help them settle in. Everything had gone so smoothly: we finished our paperwork quickly, we took our training, we passed our home inspection the first time, we were chosen from the pool in a month (unprecidented in our county). Why is it falling apart now? Why is there nothing we can do? Why did we get a social worker so willing to send these children back to a home with no support system, no opportunities, no consistency?

I feel very strongly that this is a test of our faith. The question is, how far will that test go? Will it work itself out and our reward will be to keep the children? Or, like Abraham, Moses's mother, and God Himself, will we be asked to give up our children? And if we are, and we pass that test, what's our reward? We've already been told once we wouldn't have biological children, will we be asked to give up having children at all? Don't we have rights here? Don't the children? The trite answer is that we have to be willing to do what's best for the children. I am. I don't believe sending these children back to parents who almost killed one of them and then went to jail for it is what's best for them. There is no one to represent the children in this case, except us, and our word has no credibility because of our natural (and understandable) bias.

All the same, I want desperately to testify in this case, or at least submit a statement to the court. I didn't when it started, but I do now. I want my voice, and the voice of my children, to be heard by the judge. I don't want to send them back to a more difficult life. I don't want to put them in the hands of convicted abusers. And as callous as this may sound, they can have more. They have the luxury of fertility and youth. We have had such luxuries taken from us.

I'm a little bit of a control freak, and I dislike having control not only lost but actively taken at every turn. My only hope now is to pray for a wise judge who will see the truth behind the legal mask. One who will know what's right and not what's legal. One who will see a family, and not a temporary solution. And I need to send this question out to the cosmos in the hopes that someone may see and offer some suggestion. I expect no answers from this avenue, which is part of why I wrote it. But perhaps someone will have an idea. If anyone knows any lawyers, social workers, or court advocates, send them my way. Have them drop me an e-mail. I need to build up my army. This is going to be one hell of a battle.

Once more into the breach, dear friends.