Single Married Widowed Divorced

He was glad meds restored my brain chemistry. But why?

by Mel Miskimen

I’ve been diagnosed with chronic depression and to make things even more interesting, Generalized Anxiety Disorder. The diagnosis came after I had a breakdown of sorts after 9-11 – finally, what Sister Mary Marcelline predicted back in the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis had come to fruition – we had been attacked. 

And, in those worrisome days after the WTC collapsed, I thought, “Okay. This is it. World War 3. Start stockpiling. Get duct tape. Cower.” I was certain that the other shoe would drop and when it did, I would be annihilated.

I stayed in my basement. Or bed. I couldn’t do anything. Thinking, talking. Bathing. Why wash my hair, when I would be gassed?

And then, during a series of never-ending news briefings, my 15-year-old daughter suggested that maybe I should call the phone number for the mental health hotline that scrolled underneath Peter Jennings.

Long story short, I called, and the nice person on the phone said that I should seriously consider seeking professional help, which I did, and because of that, after several talk therapy sessions, where I talked about my feelings of never being good enough, my post-partum depression that seemed to go on and on and on, that sinking-into-a-black-hole feeling I could never get out of, my thoughts of death – not suicide, per se, that I would never do because it would have taken too much energy – my inability to get out of bed, my thoughts of nothingness, etc., it was suggested that I go on medication.

I was reluctant. I thought, “Boy are you weak! You can’t even pull yourself out of what ever this is by yourself? You need pills? Loser!”

But, I knew what life was like without them, and . . . it pretty much sucked, so what the hell?

It couldn’t have been 5 days that I noticed a difference. I felt like the day was full of possibilities. I felt unburdened. I felt a tiny bit of sadness, that I had waited so long . . . and, I felt angry at my parents, my teachers, my husband. Hadn’t they known? Didn’t they see me suffering? How come they didn’t take me somewhere to get help ‘way back when? I remembered being in the kitchen, leaning  over the counter, my 3-year-old son clinging to my knee cap, my husband asked me what was wrong, “I’ve got this feeling of doom coming. A blackness. Like my soul is being sucked out of my body,” I said. 

“Uh huh,” he said as he poured himself a glass of water and went back to watching TV.

Okay, so that was then. I’m better now. Prozac is a wonderful thing. But, I still have the feeling, that no one gets it, this thing called Depression. 

Like, the other night, I was watching a PBS special called, Out of the Shadows, all about people’s battles with this disease, when my husband wandered through on his way to the bathroom. He stopped for a minute to tell me how proud he was of our son’s report card.

“Um, I need you to be proud of me,” I said.

“I am. All the time. You are a good writer,” he said.

“Yeah, thanks. But . . . no, I need you to be proud of me that I got professional help and crawled out of the black sink hole of Depression, because I don’t think you really get what it’s like to live every day with a feeling of nothingness, like living is just too hard, like I used to feel that I didn’t deserve to breathe.”

He looked at me, like he was really thinking about what to say, hoping maybe that he would say the right thing? 

“No, I couldn’t know what it was like. I only knew what it was like to live with you and . . . I am glad you got help. No, I’m glad that the help you got helped, because . . .”

“Because?”

“Well, because, if you hadn’t gotten help, then, I wouldn’t be here.”

“You wouldn’t be here? I wouldn’t be here, because, I’d probably would have killed myself.”

“No, see, I would have left. I wouldn’t have stuck around.” He got up and went back to Law and Order.

Huh? He would have just left me? Taken the kids? What?! He wouldn’t have tried to figure this out? Looked me in my vapid eyes and said, “Honey, you need help and I’m here to take you to see a doctor.”

This did not bode well. He was glad that the meds restored my brain chemistry, because he could think about other things, like work? 

Are my feelings hurt? Uh, yeah. Does this bother me? Uh, yeah. Does it surprise me? Unfortunately, no. 

Mel Miskimen is the author of "Cop's Kid"

Marital Status in the News: April 8, 2008

The 12 Biggest Reasons we Fight Over Finances
By MP Dunleavey
MSN.com

EXCERPT: The world can be divided into those who believe in saving for retirement and those who believe in the Retirement Fairy. If you're married to the latter type, it can be difficult to imagine your future together. As one 401(k)'d friend of mine noted, after admitting that she tends to "boil over" at her husband's lack of future planning: "You're afraid your spouse is going to end up on a park bench."

The Next Survivor Series

Six married men will be dropped on an island with one car and 3 kids each for six weeks.

Each kid will play two sports and either take music or dance classes.

There is no fast food.

Each man must take care of his 3 kids; keep his assigned house clean, correct all homework, and complete science projects, cook, do laundry, and pay a list of "pretend" bills with not enough money. In addition, each man will have to budget in money for groceries each week.

Each man must remember the birthdays of all their friends and relatives, and send cards out on time.

Each man must also take each child to a doctor's appointment, a dentist appointment and a haircut appointment. He must make one unscheduled and inconvenient visit per child to the Urgent Care.

He must also make cookies or cupcakes for a social function.

Each man will be responsible for decorating his own assigned house, planting flowers outside and keeping it presentable at all times.

The men will only have access to television when the kids are asleep and all chores are done.

The men must shave their legs, wear makeup daily, adorn himself with jewelry, wear uncomfortable yet stylish shoes, keep fingernails polished and eyebrows groomed.

During one of the six weeks, the men will have to endure severe abdominal cramps, back aches, and have extreme, unexplained mood swings but never once complain or slow down from other duties.

They must attend weekly school meetings, church, and find time at least once to spend the afternoon at the park or a similar setting.

They will need to read a book and then pray with the children each night and in the morning, feed them, dress them, brush their teeth and comb their hair by 7:00 am.

A test will be given at the end of the six weeks, and each father will be required to know all of the following information: each child's birthday, height, weight, shoe size, clothes size and doctor's name. Also the child's weight at birth, length, time of birth, and length of labor, each child's favorite color, middle name, favorite snack, favorite song, favorite drink, favorite toy, biggest fear and what they want to be when they grow up.

The kids vote them off the island based on performance. The last man wins only if...he still has enough energy to be intimate with his spouse at a moment's notice.

If the last man does win, he can play the game over and over and over again for the next 18-25 years eventually earning the right to be called Mother!

11 Tips on Getting More Efficiency Out of Women Employees

11 Tips on Getting More Efficiency Out of Women Employees

This 1943 magazine article offers employers such tips as:
• pick young married women (they’re more responsible than singles)
• husky girls are more efficient than slim ones
• older women who have never held a job are fussy and cantankerous
• retain a physician to reveal if potential employee has female weaknesses

Andy, Revisited

by Mel Miskimen

Oh. My. God.

There he was. At the ward table, getting his ballot. Damn he looked good. It had been 30 years since I had seen him and he had aged well – Harrison Ford-well.

It was two weeks ago. I was a poll worker, registering new voters. It was mid-morning and there were no other electors, except for . . . him. I didn’t even know that he lived in my district! The last I had heard about him was that he had moved to Thailand or was it Taiwan? (somewhere tropical and third worldly). He was working with a relief-type agency. He made being cause-y so . . . sexy.

He chit-chatted with the ladies who handed him his ballot. He turned. We made eye-contact.

“Andy!” I said, thanking God that I put on make-up.
He gave me a long look. He must have been remembering . . . .
We were 23 and worked at a park with an outdoor pool over the summers. It was a stupid job – selling concessions, maintaining the locker rooms (which weren’t really rooms, since the locker area had no roof), keeping the patrons safe from foot fungus. The pay was lousy, but my tan was great.

Of the guys who worked there, Andy was numero uno on the girls’ Who-I’d-Do list. He was tall, lean, tan, hair touched by the sun, he rode a motorcycle, he had that kind of body that was fit in a I-don’t-try-too-hard-to-be-fit kind of way. And, he always had a girlfriend.

So, I was really surprised when I ran into him in the student union that spring semester. He had transferred. Was single. And invited me to a party!
I wore my form-fitting black turtle neck and my show-off-my-butt jeans. Back then, I was very weight conscious – I weighed myself everyday. I counted calories. I measured my portions. If the bathroom scale edged past 112 pounds, it was time to panic. I had long blond hair. Not really. My real hair would have been a mousy brown, but . . . you know what they said about blondes.

Andy and I “hooked up” as they say in today’s vernacular. He was a great kisser. A good dancer! And then we went back to his upper flat. Andy, Andy, Andy!

He stood in front of the rickety folding table. My voter registration cards in a neat pile. He said nothing.

Maybe his memory needed a nudge.
“Johnson Pool? . . . 1975? . . .,” I said.
Nope. It wasn’t registering.

I named names of people we had worked with – real characters, that no one could forget. I brought up instances of near firings, reprimands, long lunches, the time the authorities found all that pot growing in the woods near the statue of Thomas Jefferson.

Again, nothing.

“It’s me! Mel!” I said.

He nodded. Not in the affirmative. Then he shrugged and proceeded to cast his ballot.

“I’m an idiot!” I said to the ancient Hmong lady as she filled out her new voter card via translator. She looked at me and smiled. Nice grill.

Had he sustained some kind of head trauma that caused him to have no memory of our sexcapades?

Or . . . maybe the sex wasn’t that great. Maybe his moans and groans weren’t about pleasure, but about frustration and dissatisfaction. Or . . . maybe I let myself go to the point of being unrecognizable?

Oh. Crap.

The polling place filled with eager, new voters and I didn’t have time to wallow. I did that after the polls closed in the privacy of my own bathroom mirror.

Yeah, my face had gotten looser. I pulled it back two inches. There. All I have to do was walk around with my hands like this and I’ll look 30 years younger. Well . . . sort of.
When Andy and I were, you know, doing IT, I wore contacts.

I couldn’t wear them anymore (trifocals) and Lasik surgery was totally out of the question – my corneas are the only thing on me that are too thin.

My breasts? Back then, the girls were free and easy. I used to get by without wearing a bra. Now? I’m well into menopause. The girls need a garment with structural engineering.

It took me a couple of days – thank God, Oprah had several make-over shows! – to get beyond the self-loathing. You know what? The blond hair. The 22 inch waist . . . that wasn’t me. And the methods I had to go through to maintain that version of me, were, extreme, took too much energy and time and were borderline abusive and oh, so fake.

I’m average. Height. Weight. Hair color. Nothing wrong with that. So, I guess I haven’t let myself go, I’ve let myself be.

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Listen in as three Midwest women gather around the dining room table to talk about issues related to marital status. Click here to be directed to the Single Married Widowed Divorced Podcast.