How Sadness Can Create a String Quartet in A Single Day

Yesterday was a sad day. Sometimes I just have those. I know a lot of people do. When I get one, I can’t always pinpoint the trigger, but if I can that’s helpful because I can put it in context and process it. If I can’t figure it out though, like if I can just feel sadness in my blood as a chemical that for some unknown reason decides to course through my system on a given day, I just have to weather it. I used to focus on it more and it got a better hold of me. Now I try things to cope with the sadness. 

​For instance, I made sure I went swimming yesterday. Usually that helps. But after I swam about a half mile, it was still there. When I came home, I fixed a nice coffee for myself and went to my desk with it to write. Sometimes that is comforting, a warm mug of joe, especially on a cloudy overcast day like yesterday. Spending time being thankful for what I have helps puts things in perspective and even brings peace and some relief from the depression. Currently, I’m in a tough push to get the last book of my trilogy out, plus I promised myself I’d blog everyday for a year, plus I have a contract for a freelance job, and we’re going out of town for a week soon and I have to figure out how to manage all these things around that. All that overwhelms me at times. When I look behind me and ahead of me and all I see are 6:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. work days, mostly by myself at my desk, mostly pushing through even when I hurt from my stupid fibromyalgia and have a hard time sitting upright in my chair, so I take more meds and my mind goes foggy and I spend too long staring at a sentence trying to figure out what it says, that’s when I have a hard time fighting off the sadness. Those are tough months to keep slogging through.
 
There was a time when I had too many sad days in a row and so my doctor put me on an antidepressant. The stuff worked. It made me manic. My kids were eight. Up until that point I’d been reasonable enough to realize that I should only dream about what if my kids could play the violin like I do. When they were three we did a little stint of Suzuki but then I came to my senses. It didn’t take too many times of four toddlers holding 1/32 sized violins and trying to keep them from breaking them while trying to teach them to play on them before I realized I was actually insane and we put them away and decided it was a nice thought but no thanks. One or two of them could play golf when they got to high school. Maybe. But then I took a few of the pills and I forgot why we’d put them away. When you’re manic and you’re a violinist and you just happen to have four kids at the same time, you can’t help but look at them one day sitting around the lunch table and say to yourself, Now there’s a string quartet waiting to happen if I ever saw one. In one afternoon, I got on the internet and made some of my first online purchases by ordering a viola and a little tiny cello. It’s amazing what you can find on the internet when you’re home too long and when you’re manic. We already had two small violins because Jason and his brother took violin lessons in elementary school and we had those two matching violins at our house. Within a few days, the boxes arrived and I tuned them up and we had our first lessons.
 
I’m not sure now how I decided who would play what. I guess I went by their personalities. Pierce was the quiet introspective one—deep, thoughtful, and didn’t need all the attention—so it just seemed right he would be a violist, the harmonist with the rich mellow strains. Molly and Charlie were both like first born children (they were actually third and fourth, but when it’s all in two minutes, who’s counting?) and had many of the characteristics found in first born kids. So it seemed natural to me they’d be the violinists. Spencer, being the smallest, just seemed right to be on cello. I don’t know, maybe I just liked the juxtaposition of the two. Maybe I wanted to give him a bigger voice.
 
With an enormous amount of help from Neenee (my sister Cynthia) we got them up and running. We had just enough momentum that when I had to quit my antidepressants, they kept going. As it turned out, I didn’t tolerate the pills too well. With my mania, I did way too much. That didn’t go well with my fibromyalgia, and all my parts started to rebel. My pain grew worse and it was hard to keep up with even normal things, let alone manic brainstorms to change the course of my children’s lives. Though I wasn’t sad with the pills, my body wasn’t happy.
 
Today is cloudy again, and I can already identify a trigger in my morning that isn’t going to be easy to cope with. Plus my body hurts and it’s hard to sit up and type. But I have a novel to finish, and a freelance job I’m grateful for, and my blog for today is almost finished, and I’m going to go make a nice hot cup of coffee and get a little breakfast. And I’m going to be thankful that I can flip a switch and get electricity to do all of this, and thankful for the other multitude of things I have to be thankful for, and the day will go on and peace is here, and it’s going to be a productive day.