Aggggghhhhh.

I'm reading a novel in which someone slips into deep depression, a real chemical low, can't-get-it-together depression.  I know I do not have that.  I have the blues, the funks, low-energy irritability.  I blame LA.  I know it's not entirely LA's fault.  But LA does have to bear some of the responsibility, with its sprawling spread-out-ness that makes it hard to see the ones you love, to create community, to feel a part of anything.  It's partly your fault, LA.  But not having lived anywhere else for the past 14 - fourteen! - years, it's hard to know what it'd be like elsewhere.  Sometimes I got the blues in New York in my 20s, in Massachusetts in my college years.  I lived in a state of teal and aqua and turquoise in New Jersey, but I was a teenager then.

One of the strange things about watching your child grow is that they start to have moods.  Like, real moods.  Not just those meltdown in the middle of the grocery store because you've taken them on one too many errands and they are hungry and tired and just need to throw themselves on the ground and wail.  I'm good with those.  S still has those types - the big, intense, and quickly over melts.  What I would call the healthy melts.  If you don't try to reign them in, they pass like an intense but brief tropical storm, like the afternoons when I lived in Costa Rica, when between the time you left your host family's house and arrived at the radical political science institute you'd be drenched and the sun would already be shining.  I like those kind of storms.

But now I sometimes see the blues.  Not a lot.  I have a happy kid, an active kid, a kid who brought home a book from the school library on Derek Jeter because "even though he's a Yankee, I really like him," and "he inspires me, mom, because he's like me.  He wanted to be a professional baseball player from the time he was my age!"  S has stopped worrying about the fact that there are no female professional baseball players.  She has over a decade to remedy that.  She starts Fall Ball Little League in two weeks.  Baseball.  In case you meet S, don't offer her "girls' softball" as an alternative.  S thinks softball is bullshit.

Mostly it's a lot of joy and interest and curiosity with flare-ups of frustration or exhaustion, but now and then there are blue days for her too.  And those are hard to weather.  No matter how much I believe in letting people have their feelings, in walking through the tough times, in not suppressing the struggles, damn is it hard to not try to "make" your child happy.  But I don't.  Mostly.  I listen.  I empathize.  I question, act curious, try to go deeper.  Sometimes I just say, "yeah, some days are like that, huh?"  And they pass.  Far more quickly than my blue periods.  I know (post-a-shitload-of-therapy) that part of why my blues hang around, my funks funk me out for longer than necessary, my body ends up achy and my brain fuzzy and my mood apathetic is that I fight them.  Higginses are troopers!  We don't have down times.  We present with a smile and we don't like complainers.  We see depression as weakness and lethargy as pathetic.  (Imagine my learning curve to become a therapist and find empathy for the real struggles of real people).  The Speers-Higgins clans are steeped in deep Puritan blood and the Puritan work ethic not only sees finding joy and fulfillment in your work as besides the point - it actually discards those concepts as devil's work.

And so I do blame LA.  And I blame New England.  For here I am, generations deep in the Plymouth Brethren 'you work because that's what you do' Puritanism, the 'don't expect much from life and you won't be disappointed, in fact occasionally you might be pleasantly surprised' motto of my parents (seriously, my mom just said that to me this weekend and I dry-heaved.  And it's not in a Buddhist way of being in the moment, but in this old pilgrim way of self-sacrifice and discomfort in the idea of pursuing dreams or taking risks.)

And while the old New England stock rattles around deep in my chest cavity, making my heart feel selfish for its desires; my groovy LA therapist tells me to put my hand over that heart, cradle that chest cavity, close my eyes, and ask it (my heart) what it wants.  "Get really quiet and listen for your heart's desire."  Yes!  Yes, my heart's desire.  In that big, white-carpeted, ocean-viewed office in Santa Monica.  Yes!  And then I walk out and call my mom to arrange our child-care schedule for the week and even without telling her about my therapy (because I'm not an idiot) I feel like a giant asshole for not only thinking that I have the right to follow my heart's desire, but even to have a therapist with a big white-carpeted office.  Self-indulgent.  Privileged.  Entitled.  These are very bad words.

Is my desire to return to Massachusetts a primal desire to return to the homeland?  Is it partly driven by a desire to stop living split in two?  Because the groovy-LA-follow-your-bliss-crystal shit doesn't sit right inside me, even as I have acid reflux from the New England Puritan crap.  But my friends who still live in Massachusetts have found a way to reject at least some of that without trying to replace it with an airy cultural philosophy that lacks context.  They are following at least some of their desires - they are musicians with day jobs who gig at night; they dj on weekends and are social workers by day; they gather together frequently without having to sit in hours of traffic on the 405 to see the people they love.

Today I am writing despite the blues.  For that I credit my family.  Higginses do not take to their beds for weeks or even days no matter how deep the shit feels.  I write on, I take a walk, I apply for jobs, I show up to run the workshop at school, train parents in Community Sharing so that the children in our school will learn how to talk about feelings and walk through them.  But I can't help but wonder what it would be like if I'd been allowed to have my meltdowns, go big and hard and furious, storm off to my room saying "life sucks" (without being shamed for it) and then return ten minutes later cleansed and ready to move on.  If I hadn't been made to feel that it was selfish to have a hard time.  I guess we'll see in several decades when S hits mid-life.  For now, I will take a walk.