"Why does your face always look so sad, mommy?"
What a question to hear from my daughter, Anna, as I helped her get ready for bed one night. I was taken aback by how sweetly she asked and with such depth of concern. There I was with this simple yet terribly honest question lingering in the air.
What was most sobering about it all was that it was true. My face had felt permanently unable to smile for months. The stress of transitions to a new city and job had finally undone me, and my sensitive 7 year-old could see it. It was her tender little voice that night that pushed me towards finally taking steps towards getting well.
I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression a few short weeks after that poignant conversation with Anna. I started the journey of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds along with a sweet yet pushy therapist who helped me deal with some dark shadows in my life and story. It was brutal at times, yet I would always remind myself that the alternative was just more of the same emptiness, which had dominated all of me in this last season. I wanted to be able to get out from the suffocating fog that had become my home. My kids needed me.
It was during this time that I ran across a devotional connected to Ignatian spirituality, which talked about the fog of depression and the need to "Remember moments of consolation when God seemed close to you, and reenact them in your mind, even though you are tempted to dismiss them."
Consolation within this stream of Christianity is all about asking yourself where and when during your days you sensed God's nearness. As I reflected on that, I realized I felt most consistently connected to God when I was fully present with my kids, catching fleeting moments of joy when they danced around in our backyard or when we all laid in the grass together tired yet content to simply be with one another. This used to be the way I experienced the Lord on a daily basis, yet depression had clouded out all the beauty in those times for me.
So I took these words of consolation to heart, and I reenacted those moments in my mind for the sake of re-awakening my sleeping self. When I would be with my kids feeling nothing but the crushing numbness of my depression I would fight to remind myself that even if my whole being couldn't experience the moment with my girls, somewhere in me was a person who did. She just needed more time to heal, apparently.
What strikes me now as I look back on that whole year of struggle was that as God would have it, my daughter was not only the primary person in my life that led me to face my depression, she was also the one who helped me fight my way out of it as I struggled to get back my life over the following months.
I remember one random day, being with her and her sister, pushing them simultaneously on swings at our park, and for the first time in what seemed like forever I felt again that sense of God presence which had was once been so familiar to me as a mom. It was my first glimpse into how God was still there, and he was healing me, even if it was slowly. The fog would lift just enough sometimes to let me see, and this would keep me moving forward in fierce hope that life would eventually feel like life again.
As a parent, I so often feel the weight of my job to raise my children to love God and others with all of who they are. I take the stewardship of motherhood so seriously that I forget God wants to raise me too. In fact, he will use these precious little people in my day in and day out life to do just that in me. I am loved well by a good father through the kids he created and gave to me, And I hope that leads me to a greater love to give right back to them. Because the fog can be so thick in my life that only the tiny hands of an empathetic 7 year-old can break through it. And for that truth I am so very grateful.
Photo Credit: Nihan Aydin
Originally Published 8/19/2015
