Thursday, June 12, 2014

My Two Year Gluten Free, Post Partum, Hiatus

     I can't believe it's been two years since I've posted on this blog. Gasp! This means that my daughter is almost two! You see, the new baby kind of through a wrench into the idea of blogging for awhile. Not only that, but about a month after she was born my husband returned from paternity leave only to return home sick. Very sick. He took an additional month off of work because every time he ate he got violently ill. Terrible gastrointestinal symptoms, fatigue, nausea. He once described it to me as being stabbed in the stomach repeatedly for several hours. It was terrible and terrifying. He spent the afternoon of our daughter's baptism laying in bed while I did my best to entertain friends and family. We were brought to our knees in prayer, fearing the worst.
     His doctor's couldn't find anything wrong.  There were scans, scopes, blood tests, and after several weeks we were still left without any answers. Finally, after a little bit of research, we decided to take gluten out of his diet. Voila! He was much better. Only it wasn't so much like "Voila. " It was more  like don't eat this, don't eat that, can't cook this, can't order that. Here I was with an infant and two other kids to feed and I now had to figure out this whole mess of gluten free-ness.  It was like a bad dream. I was stressed, he was stressed, (no more bread, pastries, and worst of all no more beer!) and the kids were feeling our stress. Now add another factor into this terrible equation: at about month 6 baby blues were not going away.I found myself crying, raging, flipping out, and drowning in anxiety over the most ridiculous things. I've struggled before with feeling blue, maybe even teetered along the edge of depressed or anxious, but this was like nothing I'd ever experienced! I loved my kids to pieces, absolutely adored my precious baby girl, but I had to come to terms with the fact that I was pretty much making myself and my entire family miserable. This was when I went to my doctor and got diagnosed with post par-tum depression. I was put on medication and just like "Voila," I felt much better.
    These factors, and the fact that life just got plain old hectic, are why I stopped blogging. I needed time off. I needed time to figure things out. I needed to change the way we ate, the way we did dinner, and the way I did life. Unfortunately my depression has not gone away now that my daughter is two. After a few attempts of trying to "wean" myself off of the medication I have found that this is probably going to be a life-long  medical issue for me.  Now I know there are probably those individuals, even in my own circles that would jump to the ignorant conclusion that "if she had a better prayer life," or "if she walked closer with God," than this depression would leave me. My response: That's a load of crap. I believe that God knows every part of me. For some reason, this is part of my journey. I have the hope that someday I will be healed, and I fully believe that my God can heal me! But it is ignorant to take myself of medication for a chemical imbalance that I cannot control.
      So happily, healthfully, I enter into a new direction for my blog (maybe it will continue, maybe it won't.) Welcome to Musings from my Messy (& Gluten Free) Kitchen. Hopefully I can entertain you with a few palatable recipes that my family loves.

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