Tag Archives: Sue McRoberts

Share the Journey: Release Your Books Project Details

Happy Mothers’ Day!

May you have a blessed day today, no matter where you are on your journey into Motherhood. (And by the way, check out Postpartum Progress today every hour on the hour for an open letter from a survivor or expert about Mom’s Mental Health. Yours truly is an author!)

Book ReleaseToday marks the launch of what I hope will be a very cool project, Share the Journey: Release Your Books.

I’ve just registered my four books at Book Crossing with plans of releasing them into the “wild” soon!

The books I’m releasing are:

The Hidden Feelings of Motherhood by Kathleen A. Kendall-Tackett, Ph.D

The Mother-to-Mother Postpartum Depression Support Book by Sandra Poulin

My Journey to Her World by Michael Lurie

The Lifter of My Head by Sue McRoberts

I’ll definitely be releasing more in the future as well!

Here’s how you can participate (read completely):

1) Register at Book Crossing.

2) Make sure to type in lauren-hale as the referral username during registration.

3) Register your book.

4) Be sure to write your BCID (Book Crossing ID) inside your book along with a brief message. Please include the following url with your message: http://unexpectedblessing.wordpress.com/release-your-books/ so those finding the books will know they are a part of this project.

5) Release the book.

6) Make sure to go back to Book Crossing to enter release details and change the status of your book to “Traveling”

7) Leave a comment on the Release your Book Project Page here with your book’s specific url @ book crossing.

8) Enjoy the good karma!Release your books button

Oh, and here’s a cool button you can put up on your blog to let others know you participate in the project.

If you can, be sure the button to the Release Your Books project page here at Sharing the Journey.

When promoting this, please use the tag Release Your Books. At Twitter, the hashtag should look like this: #releaseyourbooks.

I can’t wait to see where this goes!

Coping with Depression after PPD

Sue McRoberts, author of Lifter of My Head: How God Sustained me through Postpartum Depression, recently blogged about her recent revisit with depression. I asked Sue for permission to share her words here and she graciously granted it. So here are her words, her story about coping with depression after surviving Postpartum Depression. To keep up with how Sue is doing or to offer words of encouragement, you can visit her blog by clicking here.

I have taken quite some time to reflect on 2008 and contemplate what 2009 might hold.  This past year has been a mixed bag of good and bad.  I am thrilled for my husband and his wonderful new job that has brought us to Indiana.  But this move has been pretty hard on me.  Ten days after we left Minneapolis for Indianapolis my dear Aunt Carolyn died.  I felt like I’d lost my mother and immediate support system all in one swoop that month.  How do you make new friends in a new place when you are hurting twenty four hours a day?  How do you even talk to someone when you have nothing but tears and grief?  For six months I suffered because I had no idea what to do with all my grief.  To make matters worse, once again, I felt like I’d never even existed in Minnesota.  I found myself missing my friends way more than they missed me.  It was deja vu and painful.  I had no idea what to do with all my pain.  So I spiraled downward and found myself in a familiar place.  With no church home and no friends to speak of I found myself desperately depressed.  I did a weird thing with God that I don’t recall doing before.  I ran and hid.  I didn’t want his comfort or peace. I wanted to hurt and hurt.  I avoided any scriptures that would offer comfort.   I read stories and parables and things Paul wrote;  I avoided anything David wrote.  It was completely different that when I had PPD.  Each and every day I wanted to feel better, to feel human.  This time around I did not want to feel better.  I wanted my friends and church back.  I wanted my aunt back.  I reasoned that if I felt better then I didn’t really miss these people.  I wondered if somehow it would mean I was okay with Carolyn being gone if I didn’t cry every single day.  I cried each day for six months when I finally decided to address what was happening.  I admitted publicly that I was struggling with depression…again…and it cost me some huge opportunities professionally in ministry.  I was devastated as I never predicted such an outcome of my honesty.  It took me six weeks of reeling in pain to reach the point where I called my doctor for help.  My world felt like a bottomless, foggy pit and the medicine and medical support gave me a floor to stand on.  I am now reading the Psalms again and clinging to God for strength and hope.  I’ve decided to quit being a stubborn mule and ask Him for his loving comfort.  For some reason I felt like I needed to prove to God that I could do this by myself, boy that was dumb.  So here I am feeling pretty darn healthy.  I’m running and training for my first half marathon.  I’m sleeping well and I’ve stopped crying.  I’m reading a book about grief that is helping me sort out my world post Carolyn.  I’m determined to figure out how to live in my new world in Indiana.  I will continue to encourage people to see their doctor if they are depressed for months on end.  I take a pill and I’m okay with that.  Not everyone in ministry is.  I’m in a good place now and I’m able to pray for them, pray that they will never experience the depths of depression that I have.  I pray they will never understand the pain I’ve felt.  And I’m grateful to God for new opportunities that he’s already brought me.  I am hopeful that I will find my place in this world and that God will grow me up some more in the process.  So here’s to a new year, a new year for a better me, and for a better you.

Be lifted!

Sue

Isaiah 43:18-19

Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.  See, I am doing a new thing!  Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?  I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.

Sue McRoberts on 100 Huntley Street!

Sue McRoberts, author of The Lifter of My Head: How God Sustained Me through Postpartum Depression, appeared this past Friday on 100 Huntley Street, the flagship program for the Canadian Crossroads Christian Communications, Inc. Their Friday program is women centered and entitled 100 Huntley Street Full Circle. The format is a live, open discussion focused on current news and matters of the heart.

You can see Sue’s appearance by clicking here.

Blessings indeed!

Sue McRoberts, author of The Lifter of my Head, emailed me last week requesting an interview. I excitedly agreed and then immediately came down with a nasty spring/summer cold. Ugh. Finally recovered enough to think straight, I completed the interview today and wow – she’s got it up already!

Sue has meant a lot to me and the way she entered my life seemed to be random at the time but with everything that has happened in the past few months, I have no doubt that God placed her in my life to allow me to witness how comfortable it feels to be open and honest about my faith in relation to my PPD experience, something I had been struggling with since first starting my journey in helping others. God has truly allowed Sue to be a shining example of how a strong Christian woman can be herself and not be at all afraid of what others think. So a tremendous thank you to God for placing her in my life and a tremendous thank you to Sue for allowing Him to work in yours.

Click here to read the interview!

Sharing the Journey with Sue McRoberts

I have had the good fortune recently to get to know Sue McRoberts, author of The Lifter of My Head: How God Sustained me during Postpartum Depression, and 1/3 of the blogging team at Totally New Moms. The following are 10 questions I emailed to her and the responses I received. Enjoy!

(As a side note, interviews with Arlene and Rebecca from Totally New Moms will be arriving shortly as well!)

Sue McRoberts

1) When did you become a Christian and what has helped to solidify or sustain your faith over the years?
 I became at Christian at the age of 8 but I didn’t really understand it until I was 14.  In college I started really living out my faith.  What has solidified my faith is God’s faithfulness.  He’s always done what he says in scripture he will do.  Seeing God’s consistency and compassion has sustained me.

2)      What made you decide to write your book, The Lifter of my Head: How God Sustained Me through Postpartum Depression?
I went to a local Christian bookstore, looking for a book on postpartum depression from a Christian’s perspective.  There was no such book on the shelf.  After doing some research no one at the store could  find such a book on the Internet either.  The clerk suggested to me that I should go home and pray about  whether or not perhaps God wanted me to write that book.  At first I thought that was the craziest thing I’d ever heard.  God gave me no peace until I started writing!  
 
 
3)      What kind of process did you go through to write your book? What part was the most difficult to write?
Writing from beginning to end what happened to me during my PPD experience was excruciating.  I wrote 95% of my book while I was sick.  I wrote the book as these things were actually happening.  Only editing was done while I was well.  I cut about 35,ooo words from my final manuscript. I had a lot I wanted to share!  The process itself was simple.  I had  a brainstorming notebook I constantly wrote in.  I wrote constantly when ideas would come.  Sometimes at 3 a.m I would do my best writing and thinking.  For me the toughest part was describing the darkest parts of my illness.  I wrote the whole thing in faith that God wanted me to do it.  But I never believed for one second that anyone would relate to my experiences with psychosis.  I was wrong!  Other than that, reading the book in it’s entirety for the audio CD’s was a nightmare.  It’s one thing to write it and edit it over 6-8 months.  To read it in 5 hours was tough emotionally.  Hearing those words come out of my own mouth about broke me. 
 

4)      Prior to Motherhood, what was the main focus of your life?

I was a teacher and a coach.  My students were my life.  I miss teaching and coaching so much that it’s difficult to express that emptiness in my life.  I’ve filled that with a great husband, three kids, and much ministry but boy do I miss it.
 

5)      What is the hardest part of Motherhood? The easiest?

 The hardest part of motherhood for me is having strong willed kids only to discover that maybe I’m strong willed too.  That can be volatile so I’ve learned to be a little more passive and easy going.   What else is hard for me is that  I can’t make them choose the right things in life.  I can only guide them and that is scary.  I’ve learned to guide them and pray for them but let God take the reigns. It freaks me out to much to try to control these little people.   They aren’t puppets.  I was shocked when I discovered that!

The easiest part for me is playing with my kids.  I love pitching baseball to them, kicking a soccer ball, riding bikes.  My five year old can’t stand when I want to work on reading or math with him.  He sees me as his soccer pal.  So playing is a very important thing in our house. 

6)      How has becoming a Mother changed you? Has it strengthened your faith in God?

 I have three strong willed kids, all of which have worn me out at times.  I’ve learned to focus on what really matters and know what those things are that I will battle on and which ones aren’t so important.  Strong willed kids will get in your face no matter what though.  They love a fight and a challenge.  So I have had to rely on God for strength, creativity in parenting, rest, and most of all some grace for my kids.  It has strengthened my faith in God tremendously.  When my first child got her first spanking at 18 months she looked at me and said, “Is that all you’ve got?”  I knew I was in trouble!  But God has stayed with me!

7)      In your opinion, what aspect of Motherhood should be most celebrated?

 The fact that we  are molding and shaping godly men and women one diaper at a time, one feeding at a time, one school grade at a time, one conversation at a time.  Every day we are impacting our children’s lives.  Mothering matters!   It’s only what you do for Christ that counts.  Leading your kids to Christ, teaching them to walk with and depend on him…these things count.

8)      When you get time to yourself, how do you pamper yourself?
 
I eat breakfast out with my friends, go to dinner and a movie with my husband, or go for a nice  long run.
 
9)      How did the idea for your joint blog, Totally New Moms with Arlene Pellicane and Rebecca Ingram Powell come to fruition?

 I knew when Rebecca agreed to write an endorsement for my book that we would one day work together.  I prayed about it for ages.  I don’t even know if Rebecca knows that.  We both have a heart for girls and women.  That drew me to  her.  Arlene was Rebecca’s special find!  I’m pretty sure the idea started with me and Rebecca talking about it.  Then Rebecca  found Arlene and it took off from there.  I think the three of us have such different styles and personalities, we complement each other well.

10)   If there was one piece of advice you could give to an expectant mother (new or experienced), what would it be and why would this be important for her to hear?

Look for resources around you, they are everywhere.  Printed material, experienced mothers in different seasons of life, your Bible, your doctor, your neighbors.  Listen and learn.  Be open to other’s opinions and take help when it’s offered.  And above all, don’t be so hard on yourself.  We aren’t perfect and that really shows up in our mothering.  But don’t beat yourself up for a decade because you did or said something wrong to your child.  (I’ve done that…)  Kids are resilient.  We aren’t most of the time.  Ask God’s forgiveness and move on.  There’s bigger things to come!   And just think, some day you’ll be entering middle age and you’ll not know where the time went.  Cherish the good, the bad, and the ugly of mothering because it all matters!