I Know I'm Supposed to Be Thankful But...

 Well, we have just about finished November and we are now headed into December.  Normally, December is my busiest, craziest month of the year.  I don't know what it will be this year.  What's unusual is heading into the holiday season while fighting depression.  Usually I get a bit of a reprieve and then face the post-holiday blues.  Not this year.

Image by Pixabay user:jplenio 

The good news is that I don't feel as terribly awful as I did a few months ago.  Perhaps President Nelson's challenge to take a week to post things I'm grateful for helped.  Possibly avoiding social media like the plague before that helped as well.  I did manage to survive a beast of a November.  I took on Nanowrimo (earned my seventh win yesterday), and then managed to handle the other crap life threw at us, which included some serious challenges with my parents.  My parents have been remodeling their house-- such an extensive remodel that we packed up the entire house and moved them out in August.  It was supposed to be finished last month, and problems kept cropping up that delayed their move back in.  We ended up moving their stuff back into a house that was not quite finished, and working like crazy people in the midst of all this to unpack and set up the house.  You see, while the house was needing my mom's constant attention, my dad's health decided to take a sharp turn south.  He ended up spending most of the month of November hospitalized, with a serious infection that originally began with his dental implants several years ago, and nearly cost him his life.  

Needless to say, it was a rough month.

There were hard decisions that had to be made, and a ton of prayers beseeching for miracles.  We got the most important ones-- my dad made it through, and he was even able to come home just in time for Thanksgiving.  But there are some life-changing consequences of the infection that will impact my dad's career and quality of life going forward.  There has been a serious amount of grieving and adjusting going on in our family, though I have to say I'm quite proud of how my dad has faced all of this with courage and a fighting, positive spirit.  

So.  I'm grateful for life, and prayers answered.  But like always, I don't deal well with change, and 2020 just keeps flinging those changes at me like fastballs aimed at my head.  I want to find my optimism for the future, but it keeps slipping through my fingers.  I find it only when I'm reading or writing stories, which is apparently my primary form of coping.  But optimistic or not, we are still moving forward.  

All I want for Christmas is some peace-- and maybe some enthusiasm again, instead of apathy.  I hope I can find it.