it was so obvious now that I think about it.

I don't know if it has been apparent in my last few months worth of posts or not, but I've been experiencing a little bout of the blues. I did write about my relationship with depression in October and unfortunately the fug has managed to stick around a little longer than I would have liked.

Normally I'm pretty aware of why I'm feeling any given feeling at any given time. I'm an internalizer who reads a lot and I often find therapy sessions (when I have them) to be troublesome because of this.

This time around I haven't been so aware of where my sadness is coming from. I thought it might have been sleep related, or possibly that it was my way of mourning for the lost time devoted to my art because of being a mother, or because I haven't seen a single member of my family since last January. I mean any one of those things and a hundred others would cause a bit of the Down In the Dumpses but really they were just extensions of the real cause.

So here's my moment of clarification, and it came to me as I was catching up on a few Blogs yesterday. I was reading about a the latest in a series of emotional sculptures by ArtMind (see photo to the left) and then I went on to read a very sad post from another one of my favourite Etsy artists The Dreamy Giraffe, she was writing a tribute to her recently lost pet Buddy and it occurred to me, that while this past Wednesday is the anniversary of the day we found out I was pregnant, it also happens to be the anniversary of the day my Dad passed away. This year is a little different for me because I am now the same age he was when he reached the end of his life. It's a bit of a bummer (Understatements are my speciality).

One of my Aunts once told me a story about a dream my Dad had. It affected his whole life and was eerily prophetic. In his dream, a tear-away calender began to flip through the days in a month. As it got closer to 30 and 31 it flipped faster and kept going until it reached 36, where it stopped.

For almost all of his life he lied about his age, even convincing my grandma at one point that he was in fact the youngest child in the family and his little sister (my youngest aunt, who is about ten years older than I am) was older than he was. He made it to his 36th birthday and then died in his sleep about a month later, while he was away working on an oil rig in Northern Alberta.

Now that I'm looking back at the last few months I should have known what the problem was and I'm feeling a little relieved that it's a naturally occurring sadness and not a chemical imbalance. So I've been missing my Dad and a have been a little freaked out over passing this age milestone myself.