What is it when you walk around slightly dazed, yet feeling the coiled- up spring of a tiger’s tail in your gut, ready to pounce on anything or anyone who crosses your path?  When the impulse flashes to punch yourself in the nose to awaken from the eyes-open coma you feel in your soul?  Perhaps the split-second shock of pain would snap you out of it?  The lack of feeling feels like too much February grey.

It’s raining, so I can’t shock out of it with a run- though in college I had the gear and used to always run (and love it) in the rain.  Today I feel it may be my only hope, so the old yellow poncho that’s accompanied so many of my kids to camp may have to do for 30 minutes of cover, and my knees may have to ache in the cold, wet air.

My kids are moody.  Angst-ridden.  Coiled tiger’s tails themselves.  My Thirteen wants to know why he won’t see his dad for a month again (his dad will be out of town on “his” next weekend).  It’s unfair.  He is slamming around like a feral cat at the SPCA, and snarling every few minutes.  My Fifteen is getting over being sick.  My Ten wonders aloud why his friends don’t want to play with him.  My Eight and Eleven (for one more week- happy birthday, baby!) are holed up “cleaning the room,” but I hear the GameBoys on, so I imagine the dust bunnies are safe for another hour.

Me?  I’m going to resist punching myself in the face, screaming, cussing- I’m going out into the grey.

I need a placebo.  Now that we know that fake acupuncture is as effective as the real thing, now that we know our anti-depressant medications are actually less effective than sugar pills to the unsuspecting, now that we are looking at different ways of re-focusing ADD children and finding these even more miraculous than our miracle pharmacopia… well, I want a damn placebo.  Because the black dog is dogging me again, and man do I hate that SOB.  I didn’t even realize it this time until today, trying to catch a small tree frog in the garage to let him out into freedom, I broke down weeping at his wonderful sticky small greenness, and my own inability to do even this one little thing (those suckers can hop).  Weeping in the garage?  Let’s reboot, shall we?

So I want the damn placebo that tricks my brain into tricking me into feeling better.  I don’t want to be in slo-mo, paralyzed by just the thought of trying to function- what, me drive the child to school?  Do I have to get the dinner made?  Is it up to me to field the emotions of all these people in my care?  I’m inept at fielding my own, lately…  I am weary of indecision, even in the smallest choices.  I am sick of the inertia that weighs 900 pounds.  I am bent over with the huge coat of skins on my back, feet sticking and pulling in the mire below.  Bootsuck noises with each step.  Almost not making the step, time and again.

Call my psychiatrist- get her on the horn!  Let her know I want the best damn placebo there is, and she has to be fully convinced it’s a keeper!  (Oh, I know this is unethical, but I wouldn’t get mad at her, honest!)  That this is the magic for me, the new combination, the just-the-right-cocktail of seratonin and norepinephrine helpers~ this is the answer.  And I will believe in her (as I have so many times before) and I will swallow the magic white sugar pill and my brain will be fooled!  And the rest of me will be, too.  All we need is to trick the brain- the faith healer, the shaman, the drinking of the crushed bones and blood.  I will do it.  Give me back myself.