Mommy Interrupted

I made an important decision last week. After being away for seven years, I went back to see a psychologist. I’d been “threatening” S.O. with it for a while—testing the waters to see what he thought when I was really trying to figure out what I thought about the idea. The final straw? I remember driving S.O. and A. to their work/preschool drop offs. S.O. was talking with me about something and he asked me a question, something simple.

And I just couldn’t process it. I mean, I heard the words but my brain just wasn’t there. In its place was this heavy fog and I couldn’t see through it. After that I concluded (for the gagillionth time) that life is too short to not take an opportunity to be a better person. A healthier person. A better wife, mommy, daughter, sister, friend.

I’ve been making a lot of jokes over the last couple of years about PMS and being ADD and it finally dawned on me that maybe I should stop trying to make people laugh about my behavior and start listening to myself. So, I made an appointment and drove to the city I work in (there was no way in hell I would see a shrink where I live…)

The out-of-town shrink is interesting. He seems like the type that might dress up as a Klingon and go to Star Trek conferences in Vegas during the summer. Seriously. Dark blue plaid shirt, Slightly disheveled hair, a fairly neat beard and almost untied shoelaces. He scribbled furiously as I told him about my “issues,” filling up blank pieces of paper with notes and, as each filled, depositing the pages face down on the floor by his feet. I told him about the blue moccasins that I started but never finished, about feeling sad, about my perfectionistic and procrastinatory tendencies. I told him that I worried about early onset Alzheimer’s and he thought that was pretty funny. He asked me if I ever had to do something over and over again, like wash my hands and if I'd ever had serious thoughts about killing anyone. I thought that was pretty funny (I almost said that I wanted to strangle my imaginary friend that kept asking me if I turned off the iron, but I figured that would be in bad taste).

At the end of the conversation he gave me some homework—scales for depression, anxiety, ADD. Like a good student, I did them right away. The ADD scale had to be filled out by me and S.O. I was a bit worried about that, but he took it that night and filled it out right away. Cool.

I guess I can add “adventures in mental health” to the list of things that this blog is about.