At 4:37 a.m. I woke up to my mind jumping from thought to thought. As I lay there trying to go back to sleep there was a loud bang in the house. It had snowed all day and was very cold so I thought a water pipe may have frozen & burst in the basement under my bed. I had unhooked the garden hoses over a month ago and insulated the area so this was really unlikely but it just shows you how a black dog seizes on any little thing and turns it to the negative. The bang was probably some part of the house settling or my dog in another part of the house knocking over something.

As anxiety crept into my sleepy head, I tried to be mindful of my breathing and let go of the anxious thoughts of water flooding in my basement. Feeling my belly rise and fall several thoughts intruded and distracted me from the breath.

The nature of our minds is to jump around a lot. Even more so when your black dog is snoring beside you in bed. One thought leads to another that leads to another . . . and on & on. Sometimes the thoughts are connected by a rational thread. Other times there’s no clear connection at all and yet they move seamlessly from common worries like the transmission on my truck or why hasn’t my son returned my call?, to sad thoughts of missing my mom & daughter and finally back to my rising belly when I realized my mind had wandered.

If I’m drowsy enough, dream imagery creeps in. Imagine being in limbo between wakefulness and sleep, so you have some sense of awareness, yet you experience dream-like states. It’s like you’re hallucinating from a drug trip. Years ago right after my divorce when my black dog was at its worst, a doctor prescribed Prozac. One of the effects it had was to keep me awake in this semi dream-like state. I was tired and wanted to sleep but the Prozac kept me just barely awake but still ‘asleep’ enough that I would see all sorts of patterns twirling around and morphing into other patterns or animals. It didn’t make for a good night’s sleep. The doctor assured me it was “hypnagogic imagery” and thus harmless. I already felt I was in enough of a quasi dream-like state when awake so I quit taking the meds.

I did manage to go back to sleep for another hour or so and woke up a little less tired than I thought I might be. A little sleep is better than no sleep but sometimes I think interrupted sleep is worse. During the course of the day I found myself growing more dissatisfied & irritated. In the past I’ve discovered a connection between moods and anniversaries of one kind or another. For a few years after my divorce I would get in a black mood in November. It was in November that my divorce happened and my life changed forever.
This year the anniversary my black dog was celebrating was the first Christmas since my mom has died. Yesterday I was supposed to go to my sister’s house out in the country to help make Christmas cookies. You would think it would be a pleasant enough experience to look forward to, but the thought of having to put on a happy face and ignore the little idiosyncrasies of my family wasn’t appealing . . . and then I felt worse for not wanting to be around my family. After all, I have my share of quirks and my family puts up with me.

In the end I decided it really wasn’t about me and that I would go for my dad’s sake. As nice as the house is where he lives, it’s still a locked facility and he sees the same people everyday so a change of pace would be welcome. Going would be for him and that helped make it more palatable.

The hard part came when I found my irritation had hitched a ride and was flaring up when little insignificant things happened. Like when my 4 year old niece pitched a fit because the cookie she decorated wasn’t perfect or because her mitten didn’t fit right when she wanted to play in the snow - hardly surprising for a child to act childish but there it was. Or take my older brother. He has issues like everyone else but I find it very hard to sympathize with him when he’s only been to see our father once in the last 8 months despite living less than 30 minutes away. So when I take dad to a family function and my brother fawns a little over him (”Dad if I’d known you were going to be here I would have brought you some candy!”). . . I find it very disingenuous. I know he’s trying to assuage his guilt and that he’s apparently just not emotionally able to handle seeing our dad deteriorate and that keeps him away, but I find it challenging to not be pissed at him.

Re-reading the above I’m a little embarrassed at how trivial it all seems yet my feelings are what they are. The important thing for me is to realize that they are not me. The clouds in the sky are not the sky. They are a part of being human and a part of these blues we all deal with and like the clouds, they’ll pass. Some days it’s kind of like living out in the country with a dog or cat that likes to bring little dead animals up to your back door with a “Look at what I brought you!” look on their face. This black dog brings up a little mangled corpse called “petty irritation” and you no more get that wrapped in a plastic bag and put in the trash when you turn around to find it’s brought you another . . . and another. Some days are just like that. If we practice mindfulness, of letting go of our ‘doing’ minds and purposefully focus on ‘being’ - just experiencing life as it is without judging it or thinking it to death; then over time the clouds of irritation dissipate.

When I found myself getting irritated I excused myself for a little bit and went in the other room where a game was playing on t.v. and read through a few magazines & catalogs. I did find a book called “Why Daughters Need Fathers” and that made me a little sad but then it ocurred to me that was a part of why I felt out of sorts. My sister had her daughter and grand-daughters there and I felt I may never have that experience. Of course I have no way of knowing what the future has in mind for me and my daughter or son, but the black dog thinks it knows your future and that future is always bleak.

This realization didn’t make it all better but it did make it more bearable and it was one of those days where that would have to be good enough.

On the way home I focused on just being with my dad. He kept asking how far it was to home and I kept answering him. When he would say how glad he was that I was driving as he had no idea of where we were. I would tell him I was glad to do it for him. When I asked him if he’d had a good time and he said, “I had a wonderful time!” it made all the clouds of petty frustrations dissolve into nothing.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 12:56 pm and is filed under family, mindfulness, sleep.