A hand to hold

Depression is an odd thing.  It creeps up on you in the oddest places and at the oddest times.  It can leave you sitting with your hands folded in your lap for hours, wanting to get up and do things but unable to leave your chair. 

There's the memory of the last times too - the drugs and the counseling.  The workbooks on self esteem and the fight against a body that turned the drugs into fat making it a spiral down into the darkest places.  And the vow you would never let that happen again.  But there it is.  Waiting for you in the quiet moments when you least expect it.

Oh, there’s life.  There’s the ability to get kids to school and lunches made.  There are smiles and laughter and long snuggles on the couch with your children.  There is the ability to sit at your desk at work, answer the phone and complete your work projects.   

But when it's quiet, the weeks the kids are away and your friends are all busy, depression is the quiet draw of your bed.  Just to lie down - wondering what you'd need to do to completely wrap things up and turn them over so you could turn them over - nothing would be lost. What would need to get done to just be able to disappear.  Knowing if you did, no one would notice you were gone for the longest time.

But you know you could never do that to your kids.  You remember your vow never to go back on the drugs and you know you have to just figure it out on your own.  You remember the feeling of their hands in yours when you walk together.  And from somewhere deeper down than the dark you find the strength to get out of bed for now.  For them.  So that they have your hand to hold.  But maybe more importantly sometimes, so that you have theirs.