Moody Blues

My Blogger’s block has morphed into Stitcher’s block. Dammit.

I’ve been trying to frame a post for ages now… months. A post to try and explain how I’ve been feeling this past year.

I haven’t felt fully ‘engaged’ with my life, for some time. That sounds odd, I think. But I’m not sure how else to put it. Looking back, I think things fell of the rails somewhere back before last October. About the time I realised Niamh wasn’t going to just start sleeping anytime soon. Suddenly, all the things I had to do/wanted to do were mounting up, and just the feeling of having a never-ending ‘to-do’ list was having a ‘don’t do’ effect on me – I began to feel paralysed with anxiety. By the feeling of not having enough time. As a result, I began to achieve very little at all. The lead up to Christmas was the worst, I remember feeling as if I would never make it – in hindsight, I did a bunch of Christmassy/crafty stuff with Finn, and maybe the problem was feeling like I had to do more, instead of actually just sitting still to enjoy what we did have time for.

I did wonder for a while whether I had very mild postnatal depression. Possibly I did(/do). I don’t think I’m particularly alarmed by this, or consider that intervention was(/is) necessary, rather it just feels like a downturn in life’s rollercoaster. A fairly long, drawn out downturn, I grant you.

Some weeks this year have been better than others. Niamh has been sleeping much, much better now since March/April. But still, many weeks, I look back over and can’t recall doing much other than clothing, feeding and entertaining two hard-to-please kids. My enthusiasm for stitching/sewing/gardening/blogging waxes and wanes with the good and bad weeks. (This week is not a great week for another reason – I started it out with Strep throat, and the antibiotics I’m on are treating me to some less-than-pleasant side-effects :yuk: )

So, uh… that’s my cards on the table, as it were. This is not something I would ordinarily throw out to the whole www-iverse. It has just reached the point where I was either going to say something or pull the plug on the blog, and I decided I didn’t want to lose the blog. Not just yet. Also, I apologize to my friends on whose blogs I have been seen less and less lately. I have been reading, not always with my full attention, and I don’t always manage to come over and comment. Sorry ’bout that. I’m still around, I still love you 🙂

PS. The pic above? That’s something I did achieve this week – my first attempt at the no-knead bread recipe that swept blogland earlier in the year. Not bad looking, huh? The inside was not as perfect as the out, but still, it disappeared in a day.