It’s been five months since I started this blog and it’s time to sit back, be quiet, and and re-evaluate. Thanks to all of you who have become my companions on this journey. I’ll be back when I figure out what exactly it is that I’m trying to accomplish here. (Don’t worry, I won’t be able to clam up for too long!)

I’ll leave you with one thought: Faith is being sure of what you hope for and certain of what you do not see (Hebrews 11:1). I need to find clarity on both counts.

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Hope Edeman’s memoir, “The Possibility of Everything,” is about finding faith in things you can’t see or understand in order to rid her three-year-old daughter of a disruptive imaginary friend. Here’s my conversation with her about faith, parenting, marriage, and possibilities.

Jennifer Haupt: What is your definition of faith, and why is it important piece of being a good parent?

Hope Edelman: My definition of faith is very simple. It’s the ability to believe in the unseen and in the intuition that there’s more going on here than we can prove at a sensory level. The book is the story of how I learned to trust my intuition. When Maya started acting out and blaming her imaginary friend “Dodo,” my pediatrician and my friends all told me it was a developmental problem she’d grow out of, or that maybe I needed to take her to a psychiatrist. But my intuition told me there was something else going on⎯that I needed to follow a different path.

Hope and Maya now

HE: My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was 15. It had already spread by the time it was discovered and she died sixteen months later. I felt that if this kind of suffering could exist⎯both physically for my mother and emotionally for my father and the rest of our family⎯how could there be a benevolent God or higher power looking out for us? My father pretty much collapsed emotionally when my mother died. He was able to go to work and provide food and shelter and clothing, but beyond that I was pretty much left to raise myself. I definitely lost my faith in a higher power then, or in anything more than myself.

JH: I don’t want to give away what happens in the book, but you did wind up being part of Maya’s healing process. Did that have anything to do with rediscovering your faith?

HE: The shaman gave me flowers and herbs to bathe Maya in, and told me to pray into the water. Sitting in the bathroom, it took me a while to think of something. When I did it was first the Lord’s Prayer and then a Hebrew prayer from my childhood. It was the first time that I had prayed in many years, and I felt as if I was calling my mother into the room. As my tears fell into Maya’s bath water, along with the medicinal herbs, it felt very healing for me too.

JH: Since the Belize trip, have you been more open to spirituality the way your husband experiences it?

HE: I’m definitely still the more skeptical partner in our marriage, but I’m much more open now than I was nine years ago. I’ve gone back to Belize to study Mayan healing and become part of the community of people here in the States who’ve taken the same course. Having that knowledge of plants and our relationship to the natural world makes me more grounded as a person because I do have a sense that we’re only able to see part of what’s going on around us.

JH: Has faith in any way strengthened your marriage since that trip to Belize?

HE: Uzi and I came back with a renewed commitment to each other and to the family. That may also be why Maya didn’t need to act out anymore with her imaginary friend. I think our experience could be explained either way: that the Mayan healer rid her of an undesirable spirit or–what a Western psychologist might say–that a child’s behavior improves when the parents resolve their stress. And maybe the two are even connected, just different cultural ways of explaining the same thing.

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A friend of mine is considering going to Haiti to provide medical assistance. Here’s an email she received with advice on what to pack from a relief worker there. I found it very powerful:

The people of the affected areas are sleeping in the streets and in the yards of their buildings, because what has not come down has cracks. It has not rained yet, so be prepared.

They are in need of toilets, so bring your own stuff that you can carry and do whatever on the go and keep walking. I know it’s going to be something that none of us has seen before, so get ready in more than one way. Bring your plastic container to pee +++, your wet towels, toilet paper (it is good to carry small rolls that are about to finish), energy bars, a light scarf for your head and a light plastic poncho or a few large garbage bags that you can get inside by opening some holes. Bring a small pocketbook umbrella.

Bring all the clothes you can get rid of and be prepared to give them away as soon as you find the opportunity so that you can carry just your one or two change of clothes. Do not bring anything that you do not want to lose, not even a pocketbook. Be ready to give everything away and come back with just the clothes on your back.

I think that a light backpack will be best to carry around with your basic stuff, and one of those “green” bags that may be water proof. No luggage you don’t want to leave there. Bring your medication and a bit more to give away, because you may be meeting people that have not had access to many things yet. If you are bringing water, get the small bottles, so that you can give away some on the way, depending on how you can replenish your supply while there.

This is the worse that anyone has ever seen!!! You have to be careful, because people are still in shock in one way or the other, even the Jesuits and the NGO workers that have lost their colleagues, so there will be some kind of adverse reaction from individuals and God forbid, in mass!!!

For $50 or less you can help to change someone’s life. These organizations, all launched by women who each took one step into Africa that led to leaving a lasting footprint, can help:

$50: Enough yarn for eight women in a crafts co-op to knit 21 sweaters (Rwanda Knits).
“The terrorist attack on 9/11 was the catalyst for me to take positive action,” says Cari Clement, 51, a former co-owner of a knitting-machine manufacturer in Montpelier, Vermont. In 2002, Clement worked with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to donate 60 knitting machines to women living in a Rwandan refugee camp. She trained 50 women how to knit, and in turn they trained another 400 knitters. Today more than 1500 women in 17 organizations in Rwanda have learned to make scarves and sweaters as well as market them in Rwanda and the US. During the past year, one group of 30 women alone earned $3,000.

$32: Counseling for a pregnant woman with HIV/AIDS throughout her pregnancy, giving her the tools to keep herself and her baby alive and healthy (Mothers2Mothers).
When Robin Smalley’s best friend Karen died in 2004, her world fell apart. Karen’s brother invited her to Cape Town where was launching an inspiring peer education program for pregnant women living with HIV. “I lost my heart to these women with no reason to have joy or hope, and yet they met the challenges of their lives with both,” says Smalley, 51, who now divides her time between Los Angeles and South Africa. In 2004, Smalley co-founded Mothers2Mothers, which now employs approximately 600 HIV mothers to mentor more than 40,000 mothers per month at 153 sites in South Africa and Lesotho.

$20: One goat to help support and feed a family (CHABHA).
Susanna Grannis went to Namibia in 1996 as Fulbright scholar professor, and eight years later she was still thinking about how to help children orphaned by AIDS. “I was worried not just about their physical well-being, but about what it would be like to lose your family history,” says Grannis, 70, who started CHABHA in 2003, a nonprofit to support community-based organizations that keep families together. Today, CHABHA funds four organizations in Rwanda and one in South Africa, providing money for education, health cards, emergency food, home visits, life skills workshop, and leadership training.

$6: Netting for a child to sleep under, protected from malaria-infested mosquitoes (Children of Grace).
In 2001, Mary Ann McCoy, a retired nurse in Danville, California, was inspired by a magazine article about the millions of orphaned children in Uganda. “I donated $25 per month to keep a girl in school, then I got my friends and family involved and before I knew it we were sponsoring 50 children,” recalls McCoy, 62, who went to Uganda eighteen months later to meet these children. Upon her return home, McCoy decided to help even more children and founded Children of Grace. The organization aids about 550 primary school students in Uganda, providing them with healthcare, food, tuition, computer labs, latrines, libraries ⎯ whatever they need to unlock their potential. McCoy has raised more than one million dollars since 2001.

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If could relieve my depression with a little pill, I would gladly swallow it. I have battled depression for as long as I can remember but it seemed to get worse when I started raising a family. During my thirties, I tried everything from Amitriptyline to Zoloft, more than a dozen anti-depressants in all. If I could only find the right medicine, I thought… I kept trying various medications for nearly a decade, desperately looking for a magic bullet to dissolve the heaviness and emptiness that sometimes colors my world.

Each pill numbed the emptiness in varying degrees, and each had its own special side-effects ⎯ from the merely annoying dry throat and foggy head, to horrendous jitters, nausea and loss of sexual desire. But, hey, better than depression ⎯ right? The side effects were socially acceptable. Even complaining about them was a bonding mechanism with PTA moms and co-workers alike. Admitting to overwhelming sadness and hopelessness, though, is about as socially acceptable as an open mouth sore. As a teenager, my dad would jokingly tell me to stop walking around like I had a rain cloud following me. I learned to keep my depression to myself.

Even so, when I was 38 I decided to clean out my medicine cabinet, cold turkey. The catalyst was an emotionally devastating hysterectomy. I went through a period of deep grieving over my loss. It’s not that I wanted more children; my pain, in a simple nutshell, was about losing an important piece of my identity as a mother. This pain was much worse than the gray fog I sometimes felt, and I knew it must be a key to something even deeper. Perhaps, I thought, this was a plea from my body and soul that I need to pay attention to some important information about myself that I had been ignoring.

There’s a Hawaiian saying that contends you are responsible to act on what you know. Sometimes, it’s just plain easier not to know. But after my hysterectomy I felt that I couldn’t go back to medicating my emptiness and being an emotional zombie. I had a resounding hunch that if I could feel this depth of pain, I could also feel a greater depth of contentment. There had to be something more to life than just keeping in-step with the status quo. I needed to find my own stride.

So, I decided to go off anti-depressants for good and truly listen to my overwhelming sadness ⎯ what it was telling me about my life ⎯ instead of dampening it. During the past decade, I’ve been on an empowering journey. I’ve discovered loving ways to gently confront and release my depression to make room for joy, hope and peace. The quest itself is a healing salve.

I started with small steps, like journaling first thing in the morning to converse with my soul. It helped. I found that when I wrote down the worries and fears that tend to run round and round in my mind like a caged gerbil on an exercise wheel, I could look at them more objectively. And insights would pour out on the page that I didn’t even realize were there. It’s still a comfort to realize that I’m much wiser than I think!

Slowly, I began to consciously focus on the positive ⎯ some hours or days more successfully than others. I got in the habit of taking a moment periodically throughout the day for a silent prayer of thanks for all of life’s little pleasures. I found that I have so much to be thankful for ⎯ from the warm sun on my scalp, to a favorite song on the radio, to sharing a laugh with my two sons.

Gratitude is a wonderful antidote for negativity, but sometimes it’s difficult to see the light of appreciation through the murky shadows of depression. Just during the past few years, I’ve started carrying a 5×7 gratitude notepad in my purse. On those days when my mind is having trouble hanging onto the small gifts that every day brings, I jot them down. It helps.

As I started using inner reflection to hook into the positive in the world, and myself, it became easier to gently push aside all of the negative debris that had built up over the years and fueled my depression. I liked how this new way of thinking and being felt, and I wanted more. I used both psychotherapy and meditation to reflect on what I really wanted from life. As the answers came, I discovered that my depression stemmed from not honoring my authentic desires and seeking approval from others at the expense of my soul.

Mine is a journey in progress ⎯ most often, it’s two steps forward and one step back. I’ve tried acupuncture, biofeedback, psychotherapy, meditation, energy work, neuro-feedback, more psychotherapy, homeopathy, various forms of emotion-release massage, and even more psychotherapy ⎯ with varying degrees of success and conviction. I adopted the view that whatever didn’t harm me just might help and sometimes, miraculously, it did.

The key to my success in coping with depression without medication is my trial-and-error approach to developing a toolbox of remedies that work for me. I don’t know why they all work, but my experience over time tells me that they do. I hesitate to make recommendations because this is such a personal journey. What works for me may very well not work for someone else. Again, I believe it’s the process of finding ways to really listen to what the sadness and pain are revealing ⎯ and then honoring that new information as it comes along ⎯ that is healing. This was my problem with taking medication: It merely masked my pain; it didn’t help me to better understand where it came from or how to honor it.

Did I make some investments that didn’t pay off? You bet. There’s the time I invested thousands of dollars and three days of my time on a self-improvement seminar that just didn’t resonate for me. Neuro-feedback was a frustrating experience for me because the results were unpredictable. Sometimes the electrodes that manipulated my alpha and beta brainwaves were calming and sometimes they gave me a migraine. I went through six psychotherapists before I found one who really “gets” me.

I don’t regret any of it, not even the mistakes. It’s all been a process of learning to trust my gut feelings about what really works for me. So, I’ve learned to be more selective. I keep what works and gently place everything else back in the toolbox for someone else to try.

I don’t profess to have all of the answers for everyone. I know people whose lives have improved ten-fold thanks to the right anti-depressant. I envy them. What I’ve learned is that, for me, there is no “cure.” There are only tools to help get over the rough spots and become more at-peace.

I can honestly say that I am no longer paralyzed by my depression. I still have rough days, more often hours, but I now have the means to keep moving. It’s the moving, one foot in front of the other, that’s the real remedy.
To me, that what everyday faith is all about.

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