Today marks a year that we’ve lived in our “new” house. I’ve decided that I should officially stop calling it our new house, hence the quotation marks. I’m fighting an awful cold, as are a couple of my children, and we spent much of today on the sofa. As I flipped through the channels, I kept thinking back to a year ago, and contrasting what a different day today was than last December 27th! Four huge truckloads of stuff, and the last one wasn’t unloaded until nearly midnight. The kids were on Christmas break, and the weeks that followed were downright chaotic. It’s hard having bored kids underfoot while trying to unpack. It was nice to look around my cozy house today – even littered with new toys from Christmas, it’s a much different scene than it was a year ago.

Two thousand and nine was a tough year in a lot of ways. It was such a year of change for our family, with the new house and new schools. Even when change is for the better, it’s so difficult to go through it. And unfortunately for myself, I spent much of the year feeling like I wasn’t changing for the better. So many times, I felt like I couldn’t find my way. I wanted our house to instantly feel like home to me, to feel like the sanctuary our old home was, and to feel uniquely ours, the way our old home did. Of course, that can’t happen immediately – it takes time to make something your own. It takes time for people to get to know you. It takes time for children to stop being “the new kids” at school. And it takes a hell of a lot of time to go through a house and put your own special touch in every room.

I should point out that I am not an organized person by nature. (My husband is, thank God, or our lives would be falling down around us.) Between my messy tendencies and my unfortunate propensity for feeling guilty about my many flaws, I dealt with a massive amount of anxiety this past year. It’s only been in recent weeks that I’ve started recognizing the role depression has played in my inability to get shit done. Last year, right around this time, I stopped taking the antidepressant I’d been taking for years. I was going through a period of health concerns and serious headaches, and I was trying to pinpoint exactly what was causing my headaches. I decided to wean myself off the antidepressants to see if my headaches went away. They did! And I seemed to be doing okay, so I never refilled my prescription after our move.

I’m realizing now that I made such a dumb decision in doing that. For me, depression manifests itself not in sadness, but in anxiety and in feelings of being so overwhelmed that I can’t figure out how to tackle a situation. And I don’t really understand why it’s so hard to take my own advice – I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve told girlfriends of mine not to be afraid or ashamed to take antidepressants, because depression doesn’t just go away on its own. When it comes to my own health or my own psyche, it’s like I’m a total dumbass, though.

That’s one thing I intend to do differently in 2010. I work so hard to take care of my family, but think nothing of putting myself last – like I just don’t have it in me to think about my own needs. I heard someone recently compare it to putting on your own oxygen mask on an airplane before helping someone else. How can I really be supermom if I super-suck at taking care of myself? I started taking my meds again a few weeks ago, and already I’m feeling better. Now if I could just shake this stupid cold!