Emerging: Mi Cultura..Mi Jornada-My Culture..My Journey

Sunday, May 29, 2005

From the Darkness...

There have been many significant incidents in my life, the most special being the birth of each of my three children. Today, I choose to write about an incident that many don’t normally speak or write about. Some would give it the antiquated term; melancholies, others in today’s society call it depression.

A short five-week look into the life of a Latina and her battle with depression.

Week 1: I have been feeling very tired lately, and pretty dissatisfied with things in general. I can’t seem to find pleasure in the things I love to do. The sewing, cooking, gardening and just plain going out seem like such a chore. I know something is wrong, but what?

Week 2: I talked to my husband about how I’m feeling; he didn’t seem to understand. He seems to think I’m just being lazy. I am losing my appetite, and sleeping is something I’m forgetting how to do. I can’t get out bed. My kid’s look at me with a question in their eyes, I can’t face them so I just hide in my room again. I try to get up and do something around the house, I feel awful that I didn’t have the energy to do it so I hide longer.

Week 3: I tried to explain to my husband again the things I am feeling. I asked if he could help me figure out what is wrong. “You’re just being lazy and you need to get a life!” Those were my husband’s words to me; I guess I am just being lazy! I can’t eat, can’t sleep, yet I stay in bed all day long. I’m beginning to lose my hair! I had huge clumps of it in the shower drain when I washed my hair. I cried and cried! Could it be cancer? Is that why I am not eating or sleeping? Is that why I’ve lost all this weight? I wish we had medical insurance so I cold go see a doctor! Lord, please help me find out what is wrong with me.

Week 4: I just want to die! When I have been able to sleep, and I open my eyes all I think is; “why another day Lord?” Why didn’t you take me while I wasn’t looking? I have become terrified of going out! The kids want me to go out but I can’t. I can’t breath; I feel the world is going to crash in on me. I don’t even seem to take pleasure in having my children anymore. I must be an unfit mother! So my husband repeatedly says to me. My husband has gotten worse in his verbal abuse, of course it makes me angry! After the anger is spent though, I feel worse, maybe I am a mess just as he says I am?

Week 5: The less I do the worse I feel. I feel totally alone in this; I haven’t asked my children for help. How do you ask for help with something that you don’t understand yourself? My husband has completely turned his back on me. Now all he can say is that I am crazy and imagining things; it’s all in my head. I think if I ask him to leave he will realize that what I need from him is his support, unconditional love, and understanding. I need to hear him say that I am okay, that WE will weather this storm as we have countless others; it never happened. He chose to leave.

Things went from bad to worse. My husband leaving me I thought was my undoing. I just wanted to curl up and die. I very nearly did, by my own hand. Keep in mind that by this time my mind had basically become atrophied. I couldn’t feed myself; I couldn’t even walk without assistance. When I say that my children had to dress me as if I were a one-year old is not an exaggeration, it is a fact, one I am not proud of, but one that became a defining moment in my life. Allow me to expand on why this was such a significant incident in my life, and why it was my defining moment.


It seems my children knew far more about what I was going through than even I did. My children took over. The day after their father left, my kids took it upon themselves to make me better. No, not entirely, but you’d be surprised at how much it helped to hear someone giving you positive feedback as opposed to negative. What turned this around for me? Was it having my middle child combing my hair or my oldest child dressing me? Perhaps it was watching my youngest sitting at the foot of my bed and reading to me even if I wasn’t paying attention? No, none of the above, it was the final awakening. It was the realization that the Lord had seen fit to loan me these three wonderful children.

My children brought me out of a world of helplessness and darkness. Once I started to feel better, and was not so afraid to go out anymore, thanks to my children; I decided I was going to find out all I could about what I was going through. I read a small article that related the top five illnesses affecting Latina women. It was not an in-depth review of these illnesses but it was enough to push me to look further. The one illness the article spoke of was Depression, and why Latina women are more prone to suffer from it. I could clearly see myself in that article; it was speaking of me, my life.

Today, I am an on-going survivor of this illness. There are many ways of combating this illness, medication, counseling, and/or a combination of both. Should you see little signs of yourself in this, by no means disregard them. I hope that I can pay forward what my children did for me, and that this serves as someone else’s defining moment in what could very well become a significant incident in their lives.
This Emergence Ocurred at , 6:17 PM

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