Cake 'n stuff

The fourth generation boiled fruit cake recipe, pre icing... Grandmama and her boys... I am going to have to go back and delete all the nasty posts I've written about my mother and living with her, as my carcass gets huger by what feels like the minute and she just steps up to the plate and stands in on so many child-minding levels. Today was a good day. Much spent on the back verandah in the sunshine reading papers, watching the washing dry (nothing beats a good drying day), a bit of baking, more cleaning, and generally just hanging around. I look at that stunning picture of Bec and Prof offspring and all that comes to mind is shiny happy people. How joyous, content, comfortable do those kids look! I was talking to a very dear friend yesterday (I'm Godmother to her daugher who turned 4 yesterday) and she asked how "I'd been" this pregnancy. We both knew what she was talking about as both of us had been on the post-natal depression journey and actually spent a lot of the trip together. My problem - apart from the realisation I could label some bouts as PND whereas the rest of the time its just crapola depression - is that the darkness still pervades nearly all my early memories of Felix. And I'm not talking months, its really well into the threes before I can remember anything without it being tinged with angst, anger, frustration, stress, anxiety, anger, bleakness, trappedness, and so on. The whole thing was just stressorama. I've been 'good' this pregnancy, even moreso considering I only came off my latest round of happy pills by accident (ie, to lazy to get new script from GP so held out until shrink apt - then too lazy and no money to get script filled before thinking - I'm actually going OK - and then realising I was pregnant) in January. And as d-day draws (hopefully) ever closer, I know in my heart and in my head that I am in a much better place than I was when Felix came into our world, and I know I am much more attune to the triggers that should ring alarm bells for me this time around, and I'm also in a much more stable (ie regular income) setting that hopefully the biggest trigger of all (money) is not such under such a twitchy finger. The other major component - our beautiful Ogga Boy - is also a lot older. I still grieve over his lot in life virtually every day (a friend of mine with a daughter who has William's Syndrome and works in the area of genetic counselling calls having a child with a genetic disorder/special needs 'living grief' and that is really the best summation of it all. You get on with life, you treat them how you would have if nothing had been wrong, you laugh, you live, you love, but there is always always always an undercurrent of emotion, of pain, of worry, of grief, about this child and what will become of them) but at 7.5 the path ahead does not seem so fogged in as it did at 2. What Bec's post had reminded me to do is take pictures, lots of pictures. Because even on the worst of the worst days, there are smiles from these sproggets of ours that warm us to the core of our soul.