Happy New Year!
Looking back at last year’s Year in Review, I had a lot of big plans for this year. Most of them didn’t happen. I did finish and publish Journey to the Water, finally, squeaking it in before the end of December. I also attended an astonishing SIXTEEN events and markets, which continues a terrifying pattern in which I quadruple the number of events attended each year (one in 2022 and four in 2023). Other plans, like finally fixing up my Patreon and working on the Tarot of the Gates, did not come to fruition.
The reason for that, and the reason why Journey took so long, and also the reason why I will not be attending 64 events in 2025, is that I am pregnant! My husband and I are expecting a little girl in May (though if they tell us differently later, we will adjust accordingly). After months of being in limbo, including me not having health insurance for about half a year, we finally arrived at some stability in 2024 and made the decision to expand our family.
So, I asked my doctor if the medications I take to stave off the encroaching void (major depression) would be safe, and if I needed to make any changes before I started carrying around another tiny human. She instructed me to taper down the ones I was taking, and so I did, halving my doses about once a week. This was in April, I think? It went okay for about a month, and then I started having problems. By early June, I was sleeping four to six non-consecutive hours a night, crying constantly, and unable to do much besides stare at walls during my waking hours. I managed to keep it together enough to start Journey and attend my events, but I was not well, and importantly, not in any place to take care of an infant. I worried that if I were to have a baby, I would forget them in the bath, since I could barely hold a thought in my mind long enough to act on it.
I went back to the doctor, begging for something I could take that would be safe. She told me that no medications were known to be safe. This is more or less true; it’s very unethical to try to test these things with control and study groups during pregnancy, so nothing can be guaranteed. It’s generally a matter of mitigating risk and monitoring for any problems. This doctor, however, refused to prescribe me anything, saying she wouldn’t be responsible if anything happened to a fetus that didn’t exist yet. She did say that she would follow the guidance of an obstetrician, if one were to instruct me to get back on my meds, but otherwise sent me along my way, saying she wouldn’t need to see me again until the baby (which, again, did not exist) came.
At this point, my house was in shambles, I was barely sleeping at all, and the void was encroaching. I had to get back on medication, and if that meant I couldn’t have a child, then so be it. I wasn’t in any state to be a parent.
This is why I didn’t mention any of this to anyone except my spouse. I didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes for grandchildren up, and my parents read here. I also didn’t have the attention span to sit down and write a blog post.
As a last-ditch effort, I went to the local teaching hospital to see an OB, explaining my situation and asking if there was any way I could find a medication that was safe. I told her that I understood if meds and pregnancy just didn’t go together, but I wanted to make sure before I closed that door for good.
She told me that people give birth on the same medications I was taking all the time. In fact, it’s the practice at this hospital to keep people on their psychiatric meds throughout pregnancy, and they even have a perinatal psychiatry department that sees people from before pregnancy all the way through postpartum. I was referred to a doctor there, got back on my meds, and started feeling normal again.
By this point, however, I’d lost several months of working time. I was feeling pretty good by July, but soon after that, morning sickness and first-trimester fatigue slowed me down again (though not nearly as bad as I had been before). I was determined to get Journey to the Water out by the end of the year, but I wasn’t able to put in the eight- to ten-hour days I was doing with The Book of the New Moon Door last year.
Despite all my travails, Journey is out, I’m at about 21 weeks with a healthy baby, and I’m healthy too. I’m so glad that I can wish you a happy new year from my whole family.
I’ll have to take next year day by day, but I have some plans. I’ve got three events scheduled so far: the Spooky Frog Horror Book Fair in February, and two Author Nights in March, one at Storykeepers Books in West Allis and the other at Studio Moonfall in Kenosha. I was going to start some new projects and have you, dear readers, vote on which one you’d like to see as a serial novel, but that’s probably not in the proverbial cards. I have the most material written for The Well Below the Valley, so that will be one of 2025’s projects, and the other will be a webcomic that I am very excited to start. I appreciate your patience all this year, and in the year to come. I’ll have some good stuff for you soon. Also, the newsletter will be going out later today.
In mid-May, if all continues to go well, I’ll go on maternity leave, though I hope to have a backlog of episodes/chapters ready so it won’t be too quiet around here.
So, from the bottom of my heart and the depths of my soul, thank you, and I hope this year treats you gently.
Space Whales Press 