when I meet an old companion

I wake up to my daughter's smile, her face scrunched up in joy in the still-dark room, waiting for me to come and begin the day. My limbs feel unusually heavy, as though the room were made of water and I am trying to stay afloat as I swim towards the crib. I'm just tired, I tell myself, though a thought flickers that this is not an unfamiliar feeling.The sunshine freckles my skin as I plop down on the brown, dead grass of our backyard. It's slowly freckling too, green blades creeping in, as relentless as time itself. The sky is a harshly beautiful blue, my son is laughing and signing to me to "please come here," as he chases the big purple ball I've kicked to the end of the yard. I don't know how to get up and do it again. My daughter is sleeping next to me, her green frog pacifier tucked under her arm. I don't know how I can love them more. I don't know how I can keep moving.I stopped taking my antidepressant almost exactly a year ago, when June had first made her arrival known, the two pink lines greeting me after I washed my hands and already concluded we weren't pregnant. I lived tenderly on the edge for her first 12 weeks, awaiting a resounding hearbeat. I stopped my antidepressant, and as the nausea of weaning off Cymbalta gave way to the nausea of June's furious activity, her cells splitting and replicating and building, I told myself that the chapter was finished.But postpartum depression, I discover, is not a finished chapter of a finished book; it's a thread already bound to a thousand others, it is a stream flowing relentlessly to the river, to the sea. I want my life to come in discrete increments, one at a time, I want the neatness of pages that read only one way, left to right, put behind me once and forever.And somehow every metaphor, every analogy, every image I create when writing this is driven by something like movement, connection, the way that things wind through our lives in predictable and unexpected ways.I'll be honest. Writing this is hard for me. When June was born there was a small seed of triumph that hadn't yet been blown away by the wind. I believed I had conquered depression, even though conquering never felt like the right metaphor. I held my daughter and she breathed slow and lovely against my chest and I thought something was finished with everything she began.But the thread of post-partum depression runs through these days and I follow it into the shower, where I tell God I have nothing left for my children even though it's only 11am and there are hours left to fill. I follow it into the kitchen, where food is like a calculus problem my brain can't solve. I follow it onto the back porch, where the sun is still as warm as ever and my bones don't feel it reach them. And I pray, because I believe in prayer, but I don't know what to ask for. Depression doesn't feel to me like an accidental shadow I need God to rearrange. Depression doesn't seem like a mountain I am asking God to move out of my way so that I can proceed, as if the depression and I were not bound together, and there was a me and a depression and it was simply in my way, a temporary aberration.So I pray for God to give me the ability to swim it, to climb it, to move with and through it. I pray for God to make depression luminous with a light that has already conquered deeper darknesses. I pray for a way to build a bridge that is also a raft that is also a rope that is also a ladder that is also the next metaphor and its answer. I pray for God to make this a place of encounter. I pray for God to show up and accompany me through it, accompany my children and my husband and my friends and those whom my depression touches even in unseen ways.I pray for a fierce friendship with joy, for eyes that wake to a smiling girl and a jumping boy and for muscles that remember these attitudes even when my brain doesn't.This is not a finished chapter, or even a finished blog post. This is a step into the river, a traced outline in a tapestry. There is more to discovered. May Jesus walk into the midst of it.Love,hilary