Where is My Spoonful of Sugar?

I had a horrific nightmare last night.  I wish I could say it was the worst I've had in years, but it's more like it was the worst I've had in weeks.  And as you might expect, they've all featured my newest, greatest fear: that of Neeps dying- specifically through some fault of my own.

So I wake up from this most recent nightmare (in which I was screaming because you can't be in that much emotional pain and not let some of it out) to the darkness of my bedroom, with my husband sleeping on one side of me and my son grunting away fitfully on the other: both safe, both breathing, both fine.  And yet I can't escape the emotional impact of that dream; it's crushing my chest like a physical weight, squeezing tears from the corners of my eyes.  And the thought falls over me like a heavy blanket that I can't fight my way free of;

What's the point of loving anything, when it makes you so vulnerable to suffering?

Now, this is not exactly a new thought in the life of O, but it's the first time it's descended so forcefully in well over a decade.  It's something I'd thought I'd put to rest- but now the stakes are so much higher.  I do eventually manage to go back to sleep, but when I wake up for the day, the gray blanket is still there.

It's no surprise, really.  I could feel Depression creeping up this past week, in fact it officially Arrived yesterday, but I was so exhausted that I didn't take any of my Preventative Measures.  I didn't want to.  I didn't care.  The tiny voice in the back of my head had been saying for a few days, "If you don't take your medicine (ie, physical activity and outdoor time) you're going to get sick," but I had been ignoring it.  And so now, today, as I wandered around alternating between devastated and deadened, that voice got a little sterner and said, "If you don't take your medicine, you're not going to get better."  And also Nathan noticed my mood and stepped in.

Thus, full of numbness (expect for the part that was full of resentment) I did my fucking yoga.  I ate my fucking breakfast.  I took a fucking shower.  I took a gods damned walk.  I didn't allow myself to dwell on the fact that I've trapped myself well and proper by bringing a helpless infant into the world.  An infant who will cut my heart out by dying young, or whose heart I will cut out by doing the same.  An infant I will fail over and over again, especially if I can't even be trusted to do the things I need to do to stay healthy.

No, I was obviously very successful in not allowing myself to dwell on anything like that.

The thing is, I really do feel better.  Not good, but better.  And I know it's because my "medicine" is working.  And I know that, in a day or two, it will pass, and I won't really even remember it being bad at all.  I'll think that I can surely take a couple days off from healthy habits.

But I can't.