Faking It

Finally today, my son returned to school; he'd been out the previous two days.  This morning he woke up and didn't cough for the first forty minutes or so, but that was a bit deceptive.  He had a vigorous attack of coughing, suddenly, and then I was so much on the fence about school, that I ended up keeping him home until 10 a.m.  He happily sat down at the picnic tables to eat his snack, after saying goodbye, so I thought he'd be fine...but at pickup he mentioned that something a bit traumatic had happened during the day; at one point during the Mad Science presentation they'd had in class, the smoke from an experiment had blown into his face and, according to him, caused him to cough, and he couldn't stop coughing for a long time.  I will have to ask his teacher for more details...I'm not a huge fan of what I've seen of Mad Science, an outfit that organizes "wild" science parties and things like that, all over the Bay Area...but my son was also eager to try one of the science experiments they demonstrated, so maybe it wasn't all bad.

Am so incredibly tired right now, as I write this (couldn't sleep more than three hours last night)...and, yes, still depressed.  Though it isn't hitting me like a sledgehammer today, as it did yesterday.  These days I'm just going through the motions of living--faking it, in other words--but sometimes that's enough to, well, lift morale a bit.  The faking went successfully in other words.

I know that things will settle down, eventually; that I'll finish the stories and send them out...but he's been out of school for two and a half days; I've been far too busy with school chores since winter break ended; and he'll have a three-day weekend again this weekend; and then there's another vacation week, February 15th through the 19th...I've got to finish the stories before then.

The only really nice thing that happened today (besides my son's very beautiful smile--not stemming from anything I did or said, just, his normal beatific smile, stemming from his exuberant, peaceful spirit), and a few wonderful things he said--besides my son, the only really nice thing that happened today, was a 4.2-mile jog (finally, after three days stuck at home, I could go jogging), on a new route, one that seems more peaceful and promising than the other two jogging routes I've usually used.  I didn't jog fast at all, but it didn't really matter.  And my depression definitely shifted after that. Instead of a 50-pound anvil it's maybe a 20-pounder now.