“Let’s go on a roadtrip” they said…

You know how sometimes you get an idea and you know it’s going to blow up in your face, but there is a small chance it might actually work out splendidly and that small chance is enough to make you go for it?  Also known as a ‘<enter activity here> they said, it’ll be fun they said’ moment.  Well, we had us one of those on Tuesday; it went a little something like this:

“So where is the Hawke’s Bay game on Saturday?”
“Napier”
“Hmm, we could go… take all the kids, make a day of it!”
“We could…”
“We should…”
“We really should!”
“Let’s do it!”
*excited giggling ensues*

Us in October 2012, our first trip to Napier

On Wednesday ‘make a day of it‘ turned into ‘we could always stay the night‘.
This morning after a friends invitation to stay, ‘could stay the night‘ turned into ‘we will stay the night‘.
… and there is the potential for it to turn into two nights.

Yeap.  We, of [supposedly] sound mind are taking our four lovely (read: crazy) children on a 3 hour roadtrip to watch some rugby and explore Napier.  For a whole weekend.  A whole week.end. Whooooooole weekend.

Napier is a very special place for Lauriel and I – it is the first place we went away to together on a roadtrip – and I love that we’re going to have a chance to share it with our children.

I remember as a kid it was always so exciting to know we were going away for a weekend, especially if it was somewhere we didn’t often go (for us that place was Christchurch, Dunedin or Queenstown)… and I want our kids to have that same excitement!  Eloise is already extremely excited about going – and if you have a tween or teen, you’ll know what a joy it is to see them excited about something; especially something related to spending time with you!  Gabrielle and Aidan are also excited… to the extent they have decided they’re going to get up at 5.30am so we can leave as soon as humanly possible.  Emersyn is Emersyn.  As long as we are there, as long as Eloise is there, she is happy.

At the game we went to on our Napier trip

The kids don’t know that we are now leaving tomorrow as our original plan was to leave on Saturday morning.  Okay, this is going to result in tears from Gabrielle (how dare we make her miss a day of school?!) but I’m sure she will get over it by the time we are at McDonalds having breakfast *rolls eyes* (yeah, I stupidly promised McD’s as a treat for breakfast).

I’m not too sure what we’re going to do in Napier, but one thing is for sure, we’ll be checking out the Skeinz shop!  I hear there is a magical bin there that I simply have to check out!  Speaking of knitting, because Lauriel is doing the driving I will be able to do lots of knitting on the trip there and back!  Might even be able to get my niece’s Unadorned knit over that time!

Okay.  I said the kids are excited, but really… I am bloody excited.  I cannot wait to get away with my beautiful family for a whole weekend… it’s been so long since Lauriel and I went away and even longer since we went away with the kiddos.

On a more serious note: this is going to be a big test for my anxiety.  As I’ve posted before, one of my major anxiety issues is with being a passenger in a car driving long distances.  I am feeling a lot more relaxed about it than I would have this time a year ago and am actually considering emailing my psychologist to let him know just how far out of my comfort zone I’m stepping.  Sure, it might be a different story tomorrow morning, but all I know is I can do this and I will do this.

UPDATE: this is now a full weekend trip…. two nights away it is!

Not THAT type of hooker

What can I say, I love a good play on words!

I started this blog for two reasons.  First of all, I want to share my experience with anxiety and depression. I have suffered from both for around 12 years now, the depression was triggered by a pregnancy loss (a termination to be more honest), while the anxiety was triggered by my beautiful nephew dying of SIDS when he was four months old.  Then there were the traumatic Christchurch earthquakes in 2010/2011.  THAT was really what set me off.

For a long time the depression would come and go, but the anxiety has always been relatively constant.  I was a single parent for six-ish years, and I think this forced me to ignore the depression, to sweep it under the ‘too hard’ mat and hope it would go away.  I convinced myself it had, but I realise now I was in denial.  It took the love of a beautiful, funny, wonderful woman (Lauriel) for me to get out of denial and start to accept my depression was more existant than I believed. 

It seems stupid, doesn’t it.  Meet an amazing woman, fall in love, move in together, get married, start the rest of my life… and fall into a deep depression.  It confused me for a long time.  I didn’t understand why I was suffering so badly when in reality I was the happiest I had been in… well, forever.  It was as if there was two of me.  Depressed Emma and blissfully happy Emma.  Over the past year things got worse and ‘depressed Emma’ became more prevalent than ‘blissfully happy Emma’… I was still happy, but there was this persistant fog, this horrible cloud that just wouldn’t lift, no matter how happy I felt in the other part of my brain.

Things came to a head about four months ago.  I had a breakdown in the shower.  I got out, sat on the bed and cried.  And cried.  And cried.  And cried.  I was numb.  I couldn’t feel anything.  I couldn’t think.  All I could do was cry.  Lauriel informed me we were going to the doctor, and I didn’t say no.  Like a child I let her get me dressed, get me out of the house, walk me into the medical centre, walk me through to the nurse, walk me through to the doctor, walk me through to the pharmacy.

Ninety minutes and a three month supply of Fluoxetine later, we went home.

I started seeing a psychologist not long after that, and finally feel as if I am starting to get on top of my depression and anxiety, though I doubt either will ever be gone.  I recently had my third appointment with my psychologist and he told me he is proud of the progress I made. 

Most days I think he is right, I have made great progress.  But then there are days where I feel like I am right back at step one.

Oh yea.  The second reason for starting this blog.

Crochet!

One of the worst aspects of my anxiety is I am terrified of being a passenger in a car on a long trip.  Around town, fine.  Onto the State Highway?  No fucking way.  We had a birthday party to attend in June and I had a major anxiety attack before we left.  Crying, shaking, imagining crash scenario after crash scenario.  Lauriel eventually said we didn’t have to go, but I KNEW we had to.  I KNEW that I had to push on through and that I had to test myself.  My psychologist had spoken to me only days earlier about exposure being the most effective form of treating anxiety. 

Lauriel broke the day into small chunks for me.  First off all I was to concentrate on getting dressed.  Then having breakfast.  Then getting ready to go.  She had me choose a book to take.  She suggested I take my crochet.  I decided it wasn’t a bad idea, but doubted I would be able to concentrate on it.  We got in the car.  I did up my seatbelt.  Lauriel started the car.  We were off.

I started crocheting immediately.  Know what?  I didn’t take my eyes off my crochet until two minutes before we reached our destination.  A WHOLE trip had passed by without any anxiety.  There were no freak outs, there were no crash scenarios racing through my head.  I concentrated on my crochet and that was it.

It was then that I realised crochet was something I could do to calm mysef, to focus myself, to divert my attention away from whatever it was I was fixating on (along with being afraid of being a passenger, I also convince myself on a very regular basis that I’m dying of some horrible disease).  Crochet almost became my saviour… well, after my wife anyway.

I have a few hard months coming up with various dates which have bad connotations… so I have decided I am going to make a blanket for our bed.  It is going to be huge.  I am doing granny squares that are little and to make the blanket big enough for our bed, it is going to require 484 granny squares.  

My plan is that when things get tough mentally/emotionally, after talking it through with Lauriel, I will pick up my hook and start working on the blanket.  I might get a couple of squares out of the way and feel okay, I might end up at it all night. 

This blog isn’t going to be all depression and anxiety though, I also plan to share the good stuff, because part of what I have learnt in the last four months is the importance of appreciating the small stuff.  Cliché as hell, but incredibly important.  Who knows, maybe I will do a daily ‘3 things I am grateful for’ post.  I probably won’t.  But maybe I will.