When will it end? When you stop asking.
Here’s a cool website with a glossary of text messaging acronyms. Every 8- to 28-year-old knows these already. You may not need it, except to make sense of what I’ve written here. DRIB.
Since I put my cell phone on pay-as-you-go, I’ve seen the actual price of idle chatter. Texting costs even more, so I don’t need to learn the language. I don’t need to text. I don’t even need a phone.
I love it when I find one less thing. Finding three less things makes me feel rich!
Today I want to write about PPD. Post partum depression. And all the other kinds of PPD. Last week the economist Paul Krugman diagnosed one aspect of our big sickness as post-partisan depression. It’s part of the larger post political depression and post prosperity, privilege, privatized, Pollyanna, Pottery Barn depression. Even reading this may give you post-post depression. DBEYR.
Seems like everything in life is post-something else, and nearly all of it is depressing. Someone far more ordinary than me once observed this truth and called it, of all things, noble! BTDTGTS!
Recently I said as much to a friend and mother. “Every mother has PPD. I don’t see any other way.” In some cases, PPD is medically diagnosed and treated as such, in other cases, not. I say it is universal not to make less of it, but to make more of it. Motherhood is a profound spiritual transformation. It is a passage that shatters your physical self, emotional self and psychological self, and thereby your total self image. Your every idea of self. Poof! To say it is depressing is to say it mildly. We are, in PPD, dead mothers walking. NUFF.
“Do some women handle it better?” my friend wondered. Boy, it sure seems so, but seeming doesn’t make it so.
My wish is that no one handles it. Or rather, that we handle it not by handling it, but by inching forward to the other side, taking all the hands and help we need, letting go of all the old ideas that constitute our pre-partum delusions of what we are. Only then can we be completely reborn. Yes, just as we feared, our children are the instruments of our self-destruction! CRTLA.
Is there an afterlife? AAMOF, it’s right here. But I’m not certain that I’m over my PPD. I’m pretty sure I’m still suffering from it, and making everyone else suffer along with me.
On that emoticon, :-)))))
It will be over when the Dow goes down to 5,000. DAMHIKT.
