Today I have been so fucking bitchy. I’m tired of my kids whining for sugar. It happened about half the hours they were awake today. That gets old. This is not constant for them. They did a bunch of cleaning, but we got to the end organization bits and everyone ran out of steam. They did work hard.

I just woke up in a god awful mood.

I’m tired but I feel wired for sound. I don’t feel sleepy, which is weird because I took my normal night med almost three hours ago. Usually I’m pretty damn sleepy. I feel cranky and restless and fussy and I don’t know why.

Because I’m a day shy of being 39 fucking weeks pregnant and this shit fucking sucks.

I want to meet my kid.

I want to stop waiting. I want to get the show on the road. You’ve baked. Move out.

I said that out loud and I got the fiercest kick. I’m going to have another feisty little snot. I am so excited. I’m not being sarcastic.

Maybe this kid will be less obedient. hahahaha…*sob*

It is utterly bizarre to me the way this person… yeah. They are the last. I have no desire in my heart to bear more children. I want this person. I don’t know them yet but I will and it will be awesome. And then I can spend a few years getting this person inculcated into the family culture. Then I might be ready to foster.

I love our family culture. I love the family I get to introduce this child to. I love the boundaries and limits and respect and consideration that is shown in our house.

Even when I’m a cranky bitch and I want to fuss at everyone for BREATHING SO FUCKING LOUD IN THE SAME ROOM AS ME it isn’t that I don’t like them. It’s that my body is pissed off today.

Weirdly… I haven’t pooped at all today and I’ve eaten a lot of vegetables in the past 36-ish hours and I have this absolutely bizarre feeling that I’m partially angry because my intestine is full. But I don’t seem to be able to poop. I don’t know. It’s… really weird. This does not usually happen to me.

Less than 24 hours till labor can go ahead and start without us having a problem. I mean… I don’t have my “pre-admission intake appointment” till Wednesday but whatever. I can fill out paperwork between contractions. I’m talented.

I found the advance directive! Doesn’t that count for anything?!

This here dude Noah is allowed to make decisions for my body. Even if I’m not in a coma. It’s kind of wacky.

I feel like I am absolutely going to explode with energy. But I’m tired. This is weird. I’m contracting but it’s not anything regular or majorly intense. It’s just “Yup. Still contracting occasionally.”

I think I may have officially past the point where I can do a sit up. I tried to get up earlier and I almost pulled a damn muscle. That fucking hurt. Ok, so I’ll claim it as I made it to 38 weeks and count myself thrilled. That’s way the fuck more strength in my abdomen than I ever expected to have. And that is probably a lot of why I haven’t had big back problems this pregnancy.

Hey, past self: well done! You maintained fitness! That’s really fucking cool! You can still walk three miles without a problem! You are doing so great at staying strong this time!

I’m told it will help.

I asked blacksheep how she psychs herself up to be a bad ass. Her response was… I almost fell over backwards laughing. She is such a tremendous bad ass that she doesn’t need to psych herself up to be a bad ass. She just decides she’s going to do something and then it gets done.

I aspire to that kind of self regard. I have worked so hard in the past 12-13 years to make a lot of her words my inside voice.

I can’t live like someone else. My needs are too weird. I can’t be like someone else. My brain and my body are odd. But god damn I can have people become part of my inside voice and that part’s great.

When I feel like shit and I want to give up I think of how loving and gentle blacksheep was as she coaxed me through just one minute of running at a time.

She didn’t need me to hurry or meet a schedule. She wanted me to challenge myself and do my best. She didn’t complain even once about how fucking slow I was. She accepted me. She could encourage me from where I started through where I needed to get without causing me to feel even a little bit bad about not being better.

It’s basically a fucking miracle. That kind of feat hasn’t been accomplished very many times in my whole life.

I want a birth that ends like that. Where I feel like I did exactly what I needed to do to get through my process and it was totally ok it happened like it did.

I tell people I didn’t run a marathon I energetically walked a marathon. I completed a marathon. I did it because I signed up to run it with my brother and I said I would go so I went. Even though he didn’t race. I did it because I wanted to be physically fit enough to handle my kids and frankly… I’m still coasting on the fitness I gained and I’m so glad I did it. I did it because I need to change how living in my body goes and I need to change how I perceive myself.

I completed a god damn marathon. Not quickly… but I did it. When the vast majority of all people don’t have the stamina. Even though my body is shitty. Even though I’m usually in a lot of pain. I can put that to the side and say, “It doesn’t matter how I feel; it matters what I do.” Even though I could barely fucking breathe.

“After you get this surgery you will feel so good you will want to go run a marathon!” “Uhhhh. I’ve already done that.” “You ran a marathon with a septum this deviated?” “Yup.” “Wow.”

That’s part of my inside voice too.

What is true and what is not true. Many things can be true at the same time even if they directly contradict one another.

I can be a bitch and still be a nice mother. We all have our bad days. My poor family. They are being so patient. And they’ve worked so hard lately.

There is no fair.

I couldn’t eat much dinner. My belly just said no. This feels related to the not really pooping thing. I hear (because I talk to pregnant folk a lot) that right before labor there is usually a massive cleansing of the system to make room and shift things about. Somehow this weirdly feels related to, “Babysitting hasn’t gotten here yet. Sit tight. Almost. Soooooooon. Then just go.”

I understand that all of my lovely friends are telling me how much easier their later births were because they are trying to be comforting. I totally get it. That does not align with my personal experience to date so I really apologize if I’m tetchy. Right at this point I’m barely holding my tone of voice together at all. If I sound massively cunty, please forgive me. Or avoid me for a while. That would make sense.

I didn’t post much on the forum today. I’m not sure I posted at all. My arms are so pissed. I have to slow down.

But that’s part of why I have this pent up need to whine here.

Also: I will never be this pregnant again. It’ll be interesting to remember how I felt. If I ever go back and read. I really wonder if my kids will ever read. I hope not. But this shit is public because I don’t keep many secrets. It’s too hard to keep secrets straight. I know my stories drift over time as my perspective and perception and memory change. That’s… not something I know how to avoid. It’s part of why I try to record stuff as soon as possible after it happens.

I am very sad to report that my massage therapist’s mother died. She has been frail and barely hanging on for some time. She was 99 1/2 years old. I feel bad that my massage therapist, in her grief, reached out to me to offer me a massage because now she doesn’t have to worry about every sniffle and illness as much. But given that I know I am her highest paying client and I know she just had a bunch of bills fall in her lap… I went in to see her. Clearly my body has missed her as my family has been persistently sick and I haven’t been to her. I brought chicken and dumpling soup that Noah made.

She told me that I am consistently the only person who gives anything to her that is thoughtful. That makes me sad. Her brother is self absorbed and doesn’t do much for her beyond helping to manage their mother. Her mother… stopped being there like almost a decade ago. No one else looks at her and thinks about her.

Dude. She just lost her mother. Show up with fucking food. She is going to have trouble getting up and making food to nourish herself. She is going to get super fucking depressed. I gave her an electric blanket for Christmas because she can’t afford to heat her house and she was in so much pain from the cold she couldn’t sleep. When she was talking about trying to figure out what she could afford to make for Christmas dinner last year for her and her brother… I brought over meat from my freezer. Because dude… I won’t miss a damn roast.

People have given so much to me in this life. I have some friends who blow my mind with their generosity and their love. Why do I deserve it? Why do I get it? Why in the hell doesn’t my massage therapist have friends who love her too?

I don’t deserve to take up more space than her. I don’t deserve more than my share.

If I’m even a little bit honest with myself… my life is preternaturally good compared to hers. She has not lived for herself.

I won’t see her for a while. I was planning to take the 4th trimester off. She said she was invited to go stay with some folks out of state and she’s going to take them up on it. She’s going to go find herself.

I am so glad. I hope that what she lacks here she can find there. I am not going to be here forever any more than her mother could be.

And she matters. Her needs matter. Her health matters.

It’s already been a year full of death. And here comes new life. Because it is all part of this big never ending process. Things start and end and change and change again and there will always be pain. Pain at the beginning and pain at the ending. Change hurts. That doesn’t mean you are doing it wrong. It means you are part of the human experience.

This person, who is kicking the shit out of my ribs, has something to teach me that I need to learn very badly. They will have behaviors and needs that will trigger the shit out of me. And I need to look past myself, I need to set myself aside and reach for a love that is bigger than me and see what does my child need?

This is my church.

I am going to be un-PC and potentially offensive to my non-breeders for a moment here. This isn’t about you and it might sound fucking rude.

I go on. I have an obligation to get up and go on because there are these people that I created who entirely depend on me at this stage. When they no longer need me to help them survive, they will still have something they need from me. It might be closeness and it might be distance. We’ll see.

I check to see that my mother is alive. I may need distance… but I don’t wish death upon her. As long as she is alive there is a chance she might cyberstalk me and feel pride in what she finds. Hey maybe it’ll make her hate me more. Whatever. I can’t control that. But I think very hard about the fact that her story continues. It continues in my children. In the hair my kid is growing out to their waist. They have my mother’s hair. I spent a lot of time brushing my mother’s hair. The texture is in my fingertips. My mama used to love having me brush her hair. She always said I was good at it. She was rough and she even hurt herself. She could do some things with such delicacy… but she could not be gentle with bodies.

When I teach my children to be gentle I think of my mother and how her story is changing and growing. What she could not give… I can. My children will not grow up knowing constant pain just for inhabiting a body as their due.

Stories can change.

People can change. But they have to work like a motherfucker. It’s hard. But if you can’t look back on yourself 18 months ago and think “Wow I really sucked” you aren’t trying hard enough. Noah is part of my inside voice now too. Sometimes in good ways. Sometimes in mixed ways and we are trying to figure that out.

I feel incredible envy towards my friends who feel confident that their body just knows what to do for labor and it’ll all be fine. My body is a little shit head who did not study for the fucking exam.

BUT I DID STUDY. I READ BOOKS. I WENT TO CLASSES. I LEARNED BREATHING TECHNIQUES. I DID FUCKING HYPNOSIS AND NLP. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Want to know how I completely fucked my relationship with Anna up beyond all possibility of repair? I told her she needed to be realistic about the needs and limitations of her body and she needed to get a new dream that was actually attainable given her issues.

I deserved that divorce. I was a cunt.

I have to get a new dream with regard to god damn birth. I don’t need to prove that my body is a wonderful magical strong natural creature who will just do the right thing. hahahahahaha

*cough*

My body likes to get dragged kicking and screaming over the finish line minutes before folks are saying, “Well never mind then.”

I procrastinate on shit like a motherfucker. Then I race the clock because I live for pressure.

Then I try to mask my exhaustion and terror that I may have failed anyway.

I went to CSUH for 5 quarters after I finished bouncing through a bunch of junior colleges. Those were the only terms of my entire scholastic career where I consistently did all of my work in advance and turned everything in with time to spare. I think it was because I was trying to please my Owner. He had opinions about my “laziness”. Yeah I’ve never kept that kind of thing up before or since.

EC’s birth I was able to labor down just fine once I was given the epidural so I could sleep. But I had to argue against “Just go ahead and c-section” the whole time. They would have opened me up the hour I came in if I had let them. I was not interested. I had a chip on my shoulder.

MC’s birth I was dealing with the fact that my labor support was pissy about having to spend so much time with me. That sucked.

This time… I’ll just deal with shift changes. Ta da! No pressure to hurry already. But I get to decide when it has hurt enough.

I’m not looking for another merit badge. I’m not proving that my body knows how to do something cool. I’m trying to get through a bloody shit show of an experience where my body will… have to fucking cooperate one way or another. Mother fucker.

As I get kicked viciously. Yeah. I mean you.

It’s gonna hurt and I’m going to bleed. Because that is just life.

And at the end I will meet a person. A person who will be part of the story of my blood line. And they will not grow up being denigrated. And they will not be abused. They will be cherished and loved and told that they were very much wanted. They will not be treated like an unwanted burden.

I get to make that true. Because I have the power to write that part of the story.

My mother did not understand the power she had to create my inside voice. I work very hard on making sure that I am careful what I am programming.

Baby I have so much I want to teach you about. I love seeing your siblings already believe it. You will be a complex person. You are going to suck sometimes. You are going to be awesome sometimes. You are going to hurt people. You are going to be hurt. You are not defined by one part of yourself… you are instead defined by the patterns you create.

Once is a mistake. Make new mistakes. Doing the same thing over and over ceases being a mistake and becomes a choice.

I wonder how much my depression this pregnancy has been related to knowing that this is one of the most selfish decisions I’ve made. The world doesn’t need another person like me. Not really.

But here I am. Making another one. Because I’m a selfish piece of shit and I want to see a reflection of myself that is better than me.

Luckily! I made sure that isn’t that hard.

If you start out a piece of shit… not that hard to be better than that.

I can make a whole twig of my family tree free from incest. It’ll be awesome.

I think meds have hit enough that I should eat something else before sleeping.

my computer is messed up and not functional. The washing machine broke yesterday. What will the third break be?

great bleeping timing.

Oh. We have a big ant invasion. Owning a house is a pain.

Sometimes I reflect that my perception problem is bigger than my actual problems at this phase of my life. Am I abandoned? No. Am I unloved? No. But I still feel like I am. Is this a reflected emotion from a previous time in my life or just some random insanity? It’s complicated.

I can’t perceive my mom as abandoning me. I told her to get the fuck out of my life and not come back. I did not give her a real choice between me and my sister because I believe if you give someone an ultimatum you deserve to lose. Just leave. So I left the family. The family didn’t really leave me. They are still squatting like a pack of evil toads in the exact same spot.

I’m the one who left. They didn’t go anywhere.

Do they love me? Who cares.

When I feel whiny that no one has ever tried to pick me up as a codependent project the way I have with other people… err… that’s probably actually a good sign. I’m a bad project person. Why? Because I have my own ideas about where I’m going and what I’m trying to change about myself. If someone wanted to come over and clean my house there are very few, very carefully delineated tasks I would permit them to do. And my big trouble at this point is organizing and the chance I would seriously let someone else come over and organize my house is about zero. I’d flip out.

So what in the hell am I whining about anyway?

Am I whining about my own frustration with my current lack of competence? Am I whining about my lack of ability to create a poly household? Am I whining about my inability to become an entrenched member of a community? I’m a fringe member of a lot of communities but I’m not entrenched anywhere and that’s real and valid and not my hysteria.

But I’m welcome in any of those spaces… folks just recognize that I’m a drop in, rare member.

So what am I really freaking out about.

Am I angry because I don’t know how to change the feelings in my body? Am I angry (partly) because I’m nine months pregnant and that’s just a normal part of the process. (My due date club assures me that pretty much everyone there is a raging lunatic right now except for the people who are depressed and crying so that they are non-functional. I love online due date clubs where everyone is crazy hormonal at the same rate. That shit’s validating.)

Most of the folks are sharing stories about how they are screaming at random people in public. So it’s truly not just me right now.

Incompetence is killing me. I feel so sick and so bad. I feel almost incapable of moving. I’m trying to go for walks because they are causing a lot of contractions and IT’S EVICTION TIME, BUDDY.

Noah told someone yesterday that I had two weeks to go and I wanted to hit him. Why? Because that makes it sound like more days than I want to admit in my head. IT’S LESS THAN 14 DAYS TILL MY DUE DATE IT WILL NEVER BE TWO WEEKS AGAIN OH MY GOD DO NOT IMPLY IT COULD POSSIBLY BE 14 MORE DAYS OF THIS HELL AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Clearly I did not hit him. I am cognizant enough of how irrational I am being. But it was a struggle. And oh my god I was so mad. I sat on it and didn’t bitch at him. But I’m completely irrational about this at this point.

Then I feel really bad about myself for emotionally over reacting. I didn’t hit him. I didn’t yell at him. I mildly argued with him that it was more like a week and a half but I didn’t flip out or get rude. But I still feel guilty and like I’m an asshole because my internal reaction was more like having a spurt of fire come out the top of my head.

I can’t do this again. No more babies. My lovely friend sent me a link to an article on microchimera. That’s about the cells babies leave behind in your body after you are done birthing them. It’s fascinating how they influence you forever. They are found colonizing the entire body. They go to different spots and are either antagonists or helpers at fixing problems depending on what kind of stuff is going on in your body. Sometimes I wonder if the intensity of my depression while pregnant is at all related to the fact that the cells of my former children are trying to convince me to think that the children who already exist are more important and I should not keep making more of these terrible parasites.

I offered my children a deal. How about if I move a chair around the house today and supervise them cleaning so I can do the mental work of helping them organize their stuff (they got a bunch of new school supplies) but I won’t do any of the physical work so that I don’t wear out so fast and get bitchy. They think that is an awesome suggestion.

Do you know how grateful I am that my children are workers and not shirkers? The amount of times in their lives that I have been angry with them for shirking work… I can pretty much count on my fingers. They are bleepin motivated. And it’s not even that they fear my explosions of anger (I…. hope… I think… I’m not usually as explosive as I am right now… the kids keep telling me that my behavior in the past three months is super extreme for me and I’m not really being that bad) it’s that they have completely internalized that delaying work makes it harder.

When you put off a small task it becomes a medium or large task and that shit’s exhausting. You can only do that to yourself so many times before you just lose track and completely fail at keeping the small tasks done entirely. Then you create other problems for yourself. Keep your task list small and manageable. Be careful what you agree to do. Then bloody well follow through.

In my head I compare this to my extensive list of cousins and I weep for joy. My cousins had to be threatened with beatings before they would do fucking anything. I hate my family. Everyone just sat around and watched Auntie wait on people hand and foot.

Not in my god damn house.

Sometimes I have this odd moment where I realize that even if I feel like I don’t like myself… I like my behavior.

I like that me yelling at my kids once or twice a week is a huge explosion of mean and my kids feel perfectly entitled to tell me my behavior is sucking. That’s… a very positive situation to my mind. My kids feel safe going to therapy and bitching about how mean I am and I confirm, yeah I am grumpy as fuck and the therapist says, “Pregnancy sucks.”

Yup. All true.

And this is not forever. I’m not mean like this most of the time.

I’m not mean most of the time. My kids are getting more and more emphatic as they talk about this. “This is not like you.” Oh baby. If only you knew me before you were born.

Oh wow. That was a lovely moment. Middle Child came out to the living room and asked Eldest Child, “May I shoulder surf?”

I LOVE THIS SO MUCH. THEY ARE SO FUCKING POLITE.

(EC is reading a comic book. MC wants to share so that they can snuggle up and be dog piled on top of EC. They have been getting along almost preternaturally well in the past few days. The intense fighting we had for a while is at an ebb. Thank god. I’m the only grumpy bitch in the house right now.)

Oh. Slight notice to folks. Middle Child has asked if we can try to use the first three letters of their name only because that is a more boyish name that will hopefully have people assigning them female pronouns less often. Okie dokie. That’s a perfectly fair thing to ask. They have been spending a lot of time talking about how “I love being femme, but I need to figure out mixed gender signals because I’m tired of people thinking I’m a girl. Boys can have long hair. Boys can like dresses. Boys can like makeup. But… it is hard for people so I need to figure out how to get them to understand I’m more of a boy.”

The complexity of thought about presentation… it blows my mind.

I correct people about MC’s gender all the time. I’m pretty militant about enforcing their pronouns (they ask me to! I don’t come down hard with the hammer unless kiddo says it is an appropriate space for me to do so!) so I get a lot of questions about “What does non-binary mean?” I give a rough clinical definition and then I say, “But honestly I don’t know what it means to be non-binary deep in my bones and I don’t have to. It’s not my journey. It is my child’s journey and whether or not I understand I have to support them in any way I can. They have asked me to be respectful by using these pronouns and giving them a certain kind of treatment and I need to just comply. Understanding really isn’t necessary.” That shuts people down in a way I find useful. They stop trying to come up with loopholes for why they shouldn’t comply with “weird pronoun requests”. Ha.

I don’t have to understand. I just have to not be an asshole.

I mean… I’m being an asshole lately. Sigh. But I’m completely and totally out of cope and it’s coming down on everyone and I’m sorry.

Sweet cheese I hope I’m not quite this whiny all the god damn time. I have big feelings. But this… sitting in a chair whining shit is getting fucking old. If I’m whining and working… whatever. That is what it is.

I don’t like this sitting still and doing nothing but whining business. This is not my thing.