Note: I wrote this a few weeks ago but I’ve just now been brave enough to share it.

Every morning I open the curtains.

It sounds small when I write it down like that, almost laughably small, but there were seasons where even that felt impossible.

But I open them anyway.

The upstairs hall curtains first. Then the living room. Then the library, much to my husband’s chagrain. (“People can see into our house!”)

My garden is going to weeds. Not metaphorically. Literally.

The bindweed has taken ever. There are vines creeping where they shouldn’t be and dead daffodil bits I keep meaning to trim away. I think there’s more grass in the garden than in the yard. Sometimes I stare at it and think, This is exactly what depression feels like to me. Slow neglect and tiny unattended things becoming overwhelming things. Even still, life keeps moving around it, because I am still a mother, a wife, a friend.

Which means there are books stacked on the table and math lessons waiting and children asking for snacks every seventeen minutes. There are read alouds and muddy pawprints on the sheets and that dinner I need to take to a friend I love dearly and want to be there for. There’s a husband who does so much. The rhythm of being does not stop simply because my mind is tired.

I still have to get up. I still have to keep feeding everybody. I still have to locate the colored pencils and explain fractions and wipe the counter and answer questions about volcanoes while my brain feels like wet cement.

I think from the outside that can make depression difficult to recognize, because maybe people imagine depression as absence. But for me, depression has rarely looked like total collapse.It looks like apathy, or maybe not even apathy exactly, more like a terrible disconnect between desire and action.I cared deeply about my home. My children. My calling. I had endless lists of things I wanted to do. Nature journals I wanted to start. Picture books I wanted to rotate seasonally. Unit studies planned in my head. Gardens envisioned. Recipes bookmarked. Art projects saved. Work to be done. But there is a traffic jam somewhere between intention and execution.

Simple tasks feel enormous.

Starting laundry felt like standing at the bottom of a mountain, so my husband gently stepped in there and that has helped.

The other day I brought in all the groceries from the car. I did the hard part. I carried the heavy bags inside during a Spring rainstorm while my kids asked for snacks and told me unrelated stories at the same time. Then I walked into the kitchen, looked at the bags sitting on the counter, and felt completely finished. Not physically, although I am battling a vicious cold (no sick days for the SAHM), but mentally finished.

I sat down on the couch and just stared at the wall for thirty minutes trying to gather enough energy to put the groceries away. If you have never experienced depression or executive dysfunction, that probably sounds ridiculous. How hard is it to put groceries away? But that is exactly the kind of invisible wall people do not understand, and meanwhile the world keeps calling it laziness because technically you could do it.

Eventually I got up. I put the milk away. Then the frozen things. Then the bread.

One tiny task at a time. One thing. Then another.

And oh, I have begged God in the middle of those moments. Sometimes prayer has like survival. Help me.

He keeps meeting me there, with daily bread. Enough for this hour, for this day, for this task. Enough to open the curtains.

I think Christians sometimes struggle to speak honestly about long-term depression because we want redemption stories tied up neatly with a bow. We want the testimony where everything changed instantly and forever. But healing, at least mine, is quieter than that. Sometimes it looks like reading Scripture again after months of feeling numb to it, watering the plants, getting everyone’s hair done, cooking dinner. (Although, one thing about me is that my house might be falling down around us, but there will be homemade dinners on the table.)

I used to think healing meant becoming an entirely different woman. A woman who woke up early effortlessly and kept immaculate routines and never forgot library books and found the time to chase after her kids picking up all the little treasures strewn around and maintained beautiful homemaking systems with cheerful consistency. A woman who doesn’t need medication. But, I don’t think that anymore.

Now I think healing may mean recognizing that my worth was never measured by my productivity. Hear me when I say this: I am doing the best I can.

Sometimes well-meaning loved ones they are uncomfortable sitting with ongoing pain they cannot fix. Quick solutions make suffering feel less frightening. Chronic struggles unsettle people. But, chronic struggles are part of many human lives, including faithful lives, including good mothers and capable women that still get oh so much done. I’m trying not to internalize the few things I’m getting wrong with housework when I look around and see thriving, home-educated children, nutritious meals, a generally tidy and beautiful home.

God is so kind, because in all my different seasons of depression, I have always been able to delight in my children. The other day my youngest pointed out a yellow flower growing in the garden.

I never planted it.

A bird must have carried the seed there months ago. I rose right up through the weeds anyway, bright and stubborn. Standing there barefoot in my messy yard, listening to my children argue about whose turn it was on the swing, I suddenly felt something I had not felt in a long time. Hope. Peace, just a steady quiet thrum.

I do not have to pretend I am cured in order to be healing.

For mother’s day this year, I wanted to go shopping for plants and to garden with my family. I didn’t get that because of rain and really also because I don’t want to force the ones I love to do things that I enjoy when there are other things we all enjoy. But, this past weekend I spent time working in the garden, pulling out the grass and bindweed. I left the yellow flower weed. In the ever ongoing game of Mama chore whack-a-mole, the house is now a bit neglected, but my garden? It’s weeded.