SLAYING THE DEPRESSION DRAGON (Part 2) Laura L. Valenti

This is the second part of a two-part blog, the first being posted last week. If you haven’t read it, please flip back and do so (Of course, you can always go back and read any of my previous columns, too!) so that you can follow this week’s conclusion.             

And so the battle against the Depression Dragon began. Many times it was difficult but generally, “He” was just out there, skulking around in the shadows, like the Bible says about the Devil himself, waiting for a soul to devour. I kept watch, glancing over my shoulder and that way, I could always be sure of where “He” was.

                That was my survival technique for all the years from 1977 when my mother died to 1995, eighteen years later when Francesca graduated high school in 1994, and then it was her sister’s turn in the spring of 1995. Suddenly, as the old cowboys say, the wheels came off the wagon! I wasn’t watching “Him” close enough. “He” got free and came right for me. He had me in his clutches and it was just like 1977, I couldn’t breathe! We had 4 teenagers in the house, ages 16, 17, 18 and 19. The 16 year old ‘lost’ it and tried to jump out of our van as it was cruising down I-44, with Warren at the wheel, bringing him back from a counselor’s appointment in Springfield. It was determined his mental/emotional state was such he had to go to a residential care center. What we didn’t realize was that he and his sister, our youngest daughter had never been separated and just as she was about to graduate high school, she hit the ‘panic button’ and ran off with a boy we had never met. He was the older brother of a friend and the next we knew, she didn’t come home. She stayed with his parents and his sister for a time (After feeding them a line about us being abusive. If making your bed, taking care of your chores at home, insisting you talk with respect not only to us but to all in the family, is abusive then I guess we were guilty.)  She quickly got into ‘couch surfing’ where young people crash on somebody’s couch for a couple days or weeks, until those who are rightfully in the house, throw them out and then they go on to the next couch. Suddenly, two of our four kids were gone to places I did not want my children to be and I was devastated.

The Depression Dragon was out of the shadows, headed for my jugular with those big nashing teeth and that very same summer, our pastor, Larry Snow introduced us to a program called Camino. It had all kinds of Spanish names with Jesus right smack in the middle of it. I went that first summer as what they now call a participant, a new-bee, somebody who had never been there before. I’ve been going back almost every time they hold a weekend since, to cook, wash dishes and serve food to all the ones who have come through since. Camino saved my marriage and my life but like I said, Jesus is and has always been at the center of Camino so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that this kind of Christian leadership program produces all sorts of miracles.

In 1995, the Dragon got away for a bit, wreaked havoc in my life, nearly took it from me again, but with Prozac and a good doctor, I made it through. (I was one of the lucky ones, a year on Prozac was an immense help.) We kicked that dragon back to the shadows and I made sure I got back on my guard. Watch him, watch him, watch him! If you don’t “He” will be back to capture your soul and take it to a dark and airless place.

                Now fast forward another few years to the present. I’ve taken Celexa off and on over the years to help keep him under control. And it does work but drugs like Prozac and Celexa, they round off the ends of the spectrum. In other words, you don’t spend all day in the bed, not caring, hiding from the world. That’s the bad (negative) side and that’s good. But it also rounds off the tears that come when you are happy and proud, like when the oldest daughter marries her best friend 20 years ago this December or your youngest finally marries her long lost love, after they’d both foolishly married other people over the years. (They’ve only known each other since they were in the fourth or fifth grade together.) They got married—basically when their 6 year old son told ‘em they needed to get married. There are no happy tears when your first (of seven) grandsons is born or your daughter graduates from nursing school with honors, or when you hear your words coming out of your oldest son’s mouth as he speaks to his teenage son and tells him to straighten up, behave yourself, and don’t embarrass your family. And you realize he really was listening to you all those years back. My happy tears were gone but that was the price to be paid to keep the Depression Dragon in the shadows.

Now, one of the youngest grandsons has been diagnosed with Celiac disease, the one in which the child has no tolerance for gluten. It means his digestive system is a disaster and has no ability to pull the nutrition from his food. It is as if he eating cardboard every day and nothing more. To rebuild his system, the doctors recommended something called The Whole 30 diet, easily found on the Internet. It truly is an extreme diet, done for only 30 days. Only 6 items are allowed….meat, fish, seafood, veggies, fruits and eggs, basically Biblical foods. That means no sugar, no artificial sweeteners of any kind, no breads or gluten, no grains, including corn, no dairy, and NO PROCESSED FOODS OF ANY KIND. Through an MRI, the doctors has determined that this child no longer had the fibers in his gut that take his nutrition from his food but with this diet, they believe he can re-grow them. That’s all fine and good except that he has a 9 year old brother so his dad (a doctor) determined the only way this is going to work is if the whole family goes on it together. Warren and I were there visiting at the time and he says to me, why don’t we do this with Tyson, to be one more support? Come on. We need to straighten up our own eating anyway and it’s only 30 days, we can do it. And so we begin….

Now for some of us, if there is no sweetness to the coffee, there is no point. Black coffee or tea are allowed but not for this girl. I can do the tea but not the coffee, so there’s the first big loss. And no chocolate, OH MY! And no corn???? We live on corn, corn tortillas and so, it is the 3 Big C’s--Coffee, Chocolate and Corn that bother me….for the first 3 days which were difficult but then after a few more days, it got easier and at the end of 2 weeks, it was a breeze, already a habit.

 I’m living on grilled chicken, steak, shrimp, grilled asparagus, red peppers, zucchini, and fresh pineapple spears (yum!) Strawberries, blueberries, big dark fresh cherries, scrambled eggs with homemade salsa, smoked salmon, tilapia sautéed in clarified butter…I mean, it’s tough, you know, eating all this good food and calling it a diet. I lost a few pounds but suddenly, “He” was gone. The Dragon was gone. I don’t know where “He” went but for the first time in 50 years, I am FREE! The only thing I can imagine is that it is the processed food. 

For more than 30 days, I have had no soda or liquor nor have I eaten any potassium sorbate, calcium disodium EDTA,  tert-Butylhydroquinone or tertiary butylhydroquinen, a derivative of hydroquinone, found in microwave popcorn, propyl gallate, potassium chloride or any of the other dozens of chemicals added to our foods every day and my head is spinning! Not from what I have ingested but from what I have not. Someone told me, Laura, you have so much energy, it’s like your “ON” something and I said, I know. It’s wild! I haven’t felt this good in years, maybe 50 years!

Think about it. It’s right out there for you today. On the net. It comes with a book for only $15 and my friends at Lebanon Books have it right here in Lebanon. Buy Local! It’s the best at $15 and it might turn out like me, the best $15 you’ve ever spent. I love the book’s opening line. Don’t Say This is Hard. Beating Cancer is Hard. This is only 30 days. It might just change your life, too. It certainly has mine! I know I sound like a brand new Christian…..YOU GOTTA GET JESUS IN YOUR LIFE! But this is incredible! I’m now past 30 days and we are adding foods back slowly. Very slowly and it is still so good. Because now God and I—not the sugar, not the chemicals—are in control and it is wonderful! God bless you. He certainly has me! And Tyson is doing better, too!

Laura L. Valenti, author

The Heart of the Spring,

The Heart of the Spring Lives On,

The Heart of the Spring Comes Home, and

The Heart of the Spring Everlasting

Between the Star and the Cross: The Choice and

Between the Star and the Cross: The Election

Ozark Meth: A Journey of Destruction and Deliverance with co-author Dick Dixon

www.BetweentheStarandtheCross.com

We know that Jesus had 33 years Between the Star at his birth and the Cross at his death. We each have a time between our star and our cross. We just don't know how long that might be. The real question is 'what will you do with yours?'  Blessings, LV

SLAYING THE DEPRESSION DRAGON (Part 1) Laura L. Valenti

           

As a teen around age 15, I began my lifelong battle with depression. Now back then in the mid-1960s, no one believed teens really dealt with such things. Many folks in high school with me did so with their drug of choice—booze, marijuana, LSD, pills, even heroin—but none of those things held any appeal for me. First of all, I knew if I got involved with anything but booze (that was OK in my dad’s book) he would simply kill me, tell God I died, and move on. I was also terrified of all that stuff. I LIKED knowing what was going on around me. I had no desire to take anything that would jam up my faculties, make it harder for me to watch, listen, learn, and KNOW exactly what was happening.

 I did the best I could, hanging out with my best friend, Diane, working at the YMCA as a swim instructor/lifeguard—exercise kept me going a lot of days—listening to my radio (didn’t go anywhere without my transistor radio if I could help it, the precursor to all these IPODS and M3P players today) but it didn’t matter because it didn’t last long. When I was 16, my mother had what was called back then a nervous breakdown. They sent her away for a few days and when she came back, she was on some prescription routine of MAOI drugs, the depression drug of choice at that time. She was not allowed to have cheese or wine, fermented foods. Those were, in her book, two of the major food groups and that loss simply added to her depression. She continued to fight it, through a divorce from my abusive father, who left her the same year she turned 40, through an even worse second marriage, and through the birth of my father’s only son (She and my father had 3 daughters). Somehow she always believed if she could have given my father a son, he would have stayed. And as a second impending divorce loomed, three months after the birth of my half-brother, at age 48, when I was 26, she took her own life. Now certainly, no one, myself included, was paying any attention to MY depression anymore.

                And now I teetered on the edge. Three days after her death, I was ready to follow her. I lay in the bed, thinking about where all the pills were in the house. Everyone else was asleep. It wouldn’t take but a minute to slip out of bed and take care of business. I considered it very seriously and if not for the grace of God, the patience and love of a very good husband and the unconditional love of a 15 month old daughter named Francesca, I might have done just that. Instead the depression continued to overwhelm me.

At first, I simply hid from it, burying my head in the sand like the proverbial ostrich. I began to realize what a monster depression really was and that it would eventually take me life, one way or another. Day after day, sitting around in a rental house in the snow in a town where I knew no one while Warren was gone to work all day,  I chased a little girl who still had to be fed, her diapers changed and entertained and thank God for it, because that is all that kept me alive. And for a long while, I didn’t care. Let the depression come and get me. It’s not like I felt like I had so much to live for anyway. I slowly realized it was a genetic thing, inherited from my mother, who got it from BOTH of her parents, so it was going to happen eventually, one way or another. And then a new realization—if it came after me, it might eventually come after my daughter, right down the genetic line. Now, I had a reason to fight. It could come after me and I shrugged my shoulders. But now the thought that this dragon monster I thought of as the Depression Dragon, might come to attack my child, was a whole different kettle of fish. Now I had to fight. Now I had to win, no matter what.

                I started with the research, reading everything I could. Phrases of the day—manic-depression, mania, finding out more about lithium and this MAOI stuff, two major sources of treatment with various results, from fair, not usually good to horrific.  There was electro-shock therapy which of course, was made over into more than one horror movie. There was confusion—hurt, men and women did not really talk to each, not like they do today. My father didn’t talk to my mother about her illness. She was his rock, she fell apart and he walked away. A great simplification, complicated by the economic crush of 1969 which under the Republicans damaged and destroyed many small businesses, like that of my parents, i.e., the money ran out and so did my dad. And my mother, with all her other problems, could not bear to abandon the customers they had served over the years and promised to continue their service contracts. The business bore my father’s name. He was the one who had made those promises, not her, to customers all through the 1950s and 60s but she was the one who stood firm on them. Her overwhelming sense of responsibility for a burden that wasn’t even hers to bear, was one more thing that led her to an early grave.

                I struggled on but the one thing that always killed me, that always made me cry no matter how much time had passed is when I would remember how much my mama adored the only grandchild she ever met, Francesca. My mama got the chance to know her for a brief 15 months but Francesca would never know her, would never remember the grandmother who loved her so much. It was time to fight this Depression Dragon, the biggest fight of my life.

(To be Continued) 
 

Laura L. Valenti, author

The Heart of the Spring,

The Heart of the Spring Lives On,

The Heart of the Spring Comes Home, and

The Heart of the Spring Everlasting

Between the Star and the Cross: The hoice and

Between the Star and the Cross: The Election

Ozark Meth: A Journey of Destruction and Deliverance with co-author Dick Dixon

www.BetweentheStarandtheCross.com

We know that Jesus had 33 years Between the Star at his birth and The Cross at his death. We each have a time between our star and our cross.  We just don't know how long that might be. The real question is 'what will you do with yours?"  Blessings, LV

THE ANGEL FOOD CAKE by Laura L. Valenti

                Those of you who follow blogs regularly know they use Guest Bloggers from time to time and I am doing so today in a different sort of way. I just spent a fabulous weekend at a church retreat with an incredible group of women. One of my friends there, Jo Stair, sent me a story which she said went ‘round on the Internet some years ago. I’d never seen it and it tickled me so, I just had to share it.  Jo laughed when I asked her if I could use her as a Guest Blogger and said, “Sure. It’s not a very spiritual message perhaps but still pretty interesting!”

                Have you ever told a white lie? Alice, new to the community, was to bake a cake for the Baptist Church Ladies’ group but she forgot until the last minute. She remembered the morning of the bake sale and after rummaging through cabinets, she found an angel food cake mix. She quickly made it while drying her hair, dressing and helping her son, Bryan, pack for Scout camp.

                However, when Alice took the cake from the oven, the center had dropped flat and the cake was horribly disfigured. She realized there was no time to bake another cake and tried to figure out what to do next. This cake was particularly important to Alice because she did so want to fit in at her new church and community of new friends. Being inventive, she looked around for something to build up the center of the cake. She found a roll of toilet paper, plunked it in and covered it with icing. Not only did the finished product look beautiful, it looked perfect!

                Before leaving the house to drop the cake by the church and go to work, Alice woke up her daughter, Amanda and gave her some money. She also gave her very specific instructions to be at the bake sale the moment it opened at 9:30 and buy this cake and bring it home. When Amanda arrived at the sale, she found that the perfect cake had already been sold! Amanda grabbed her cell phone and called her mother. Alice was horrified. Everyone would know! What would they think of her? She would be ostracized, talked about, ridiculed.

                That night she lay awake, thinking about people pointing fingers behind her back. The next day she promised herself she would try not to think about the cake. She would attend the fancy luncheon-bridal shower at the home of a friend of a friend and try to have a good time. She didn’t really want to go because the hostess was a real snob who had more than once looked down her nose at Alice. Alice was a single parent and not from one of the founding families of the town. Having already RSVP’d though, she could not think of a believable excuse to stay away.

                The meal was elegant and the company definitely upper crust Old South. To Alice’s horror, the cake in question was presented for dessert! Alice felt the blood drain from her body when she saw it brought in. She started out of her chair to rush to the hostess and tell her what was about to transpire. Before she could get to feet, however, the Mayor’s wife commented, “what a beautiful cake!”

                “Thank you,” the snobby hostess replied. “I baked it myself!”

                Alice sat back down and smiled. “God is good!”  

Psalm 119:103

Laura L. Valenti, author

The Heart of the Spring,

The Heart of the Spring Lives On,

The Heart of the Spring Comes Home, and

The Heart of the Spring Everlasting

Between the Star and the Cross: The Choice and

Between the Star and the Cross: The Election

Ozark Meth: A Journey of Destruction and Deliverance with co-author Dick Dixon

www.BetweentheStarandtheCross.com

      Between the Star and the Cross....we know that Jesus had 33 years between the Star at his birth and the Cross at his death. We each have a time between our star and our cross, we just don't know exactly how long ours might be. The more important question is, what will you do with yours?