A Melancholy Month

T.S. Eliot wrote that April was the cruelest month, but for me it's always been February that is the most difficult time of year to get through.

When I was growing up in Detroit, it seemed that February was the time when winter settled in with grey clouds, biting cold, and not even a glimpse of blue sky for weeks on end. It was when the snow either settled into a permanent crust with snow tires creating deep grooves that remained permanently frozen, or fell from the sky in a perpetual icy drizzle that was not quite rain, or else simply melted into black slush, an ugly combination of salt, snow, and mud.

They hadn't invented the term “SAD" (seasonal affect disorder), but I knew that if I ever had the choice, I would definitely spend those twenty-some days in a place far warmer and sunnier than Michigan.

Now that I live in northern California, I no longer feel saddened by the winter weather. Instead, I feel anxious if we have too many stretches of sunshine between the rainstorms that roll in from the Pacific, and I enjoy afternoons where the temperature reaches 70 degrees in January with more than a tinge of guilt, knowing that the warmth doesn't bode well for the Sierra snow pack.

My February blues these days don't come with the weather but with my own inevitable sense of disappointment and failure to live up to my own expectations. I always look to January, the month when I was born, as a turning point in the year; a time to take stock and start over. As anyone in my family will tell you, I am not a laissez-faire sort of personality. I want to take life by the shoulders and shake some sense into it. Like my hero, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, I want my “Earl Grey hot” as soon as I finish saying the words, and my dream is to arrange real life so that “Make it so” could be more than a line in a sci-fi script.

Unfortunately, none of my other family members ever conform to this fantasy, and February has had more than its share of small domestic dramas that have kept me awake at the wee hours of the morning worrying about how my teen is ever going to make it to college and how my little one can find a school that values rather than tries to suppress his energy and enthusiasm.

I worry about how we're going to find the funding to sustain the great ideas my husband has for his new company and whether or not I'm ever going to find a job I love again. I worry and worry some more, joining the company of thousands of Americans who lie awake at 3:00 a.m. wondering if they can keep a roof over their heads or pay their medical bills or avoid the pink slips that seem to be sprouting like the buds in my garden.

Each day seems to set a new low for the stock market, and a new dip in consumer confidence. I know I am not alone in my February melancholy and my heart goes out to those who have far more reason for a heavy heart than I do.

But knowing that your misery is shared does not necessarily make the sufferer any happier. So a couple of days ago, after getting the kids off to school, I went back to bed with an escapist novel and spent as much of the day as I could in my pajamas before heading off to the airport to pick up my husband.

If I were the bubble bath sort, it would definitely have been a “Calgon, take me away!” sort of moment, but for me, just a couple of hours in self-indulgent sloth is enough for me to gird my loins and return to the grey skies of February and a reality that we could all stand to be a little less grim.