The last couple of days have been interesting in my brain. I feel like I am closing a loop of understanding around codependency stuff. It’s helping with pieces of my depression. It all started with an off-hand comment I made to a gal from the forums. I said we are all there because we are codependent and we want to “fix” someone. She hadn’t thought about it that way. That has made me have a lot of thoughts about my sex life.

I haven’t been writing much mostly because I would not have been able to do so without saying things I would regret in the future. As much as I am ok with most of my lame-ass and/or bitchy thoughts being recorded for posterity… there’s a level of respect I owe my marriage and that’s a fascinating thing to discover as the years go by.

It’s not that I won’t say bad things about Noah. I totally will. But they have to be true and said for a purpose. Sometimes that purpose is that I need to write it so I can see it and prove to my brain that something is real. But for the past few weeks… I’ve been bitchy as fuck and most of the things I wanted to say are true and not true and the only purpose of saying them would have been because I was feeling bitchy as fuck.

So I shut up.

When I am in a better mindset it is very easy to see that Noah fails upward. He tends to only make the same mistake once or twice. He has worked unfathomably hard for our family. He has changed in ways that I am not always sure are healthy but he god damn did it. He still fucks up. We still have issues.

But a lot of our fuck ups are about me. Our sex problems are mostly my sex problems. He has tried. And I am just about fully unable to communicate at the level necessary for really solving these problems. This also happens to be a not so hot month of my life for dealing with sexual dysfunction issues. For one thing, semen ripens the cervix and makes labor go faster. I want this over with so all the penis in vagina needs to be happening. Luckily I’m so god damn wet all the time that tearing isn’t happening.

I have to admit that physically this has been by far my easiest pregnancy. I am depressed as shit and I don’t feel good but I’m doing way better than any previous time.

I think all that stupid exercise helped. And the nutrition work. My body is in a much happier place than it was when I started this experience.

But what about my mind. A buddy sent me a neat article on microchimeras, which is a fancy name for the cells from babies that live in mothers forever. Even not full term babies seem to leave some hint of their presence forever. They were testing women in their 90’s and they had clear signs of their children’s cells. The cells are sometimes antagonists that cause health problems and sometimes are like little stem cells that protect the mother from issues.

It’s been interesting to think of that in terms of my increasing depression with later pregnancies. How much is that related to the cells of my previous children yelling at me bitch you have nothing more to give. Shut this god damn factory down.

Yeah yeah. This is the last. I promise myself. I wanted this one so very much. I don’t know why yet. Whatever challenge this child is going to bring to my life I need it so badly that I’ll fuck up big chunks of my life plan. We won’t do a lot of the travel I dreamed about. It will be hard to save up yet more money to put another kid through college. It will delay Noah’s retirement quite a bit. But I hunger for this child deep in my soul. I need to know them even if it will make my life harder.

I didn’t have children because I was looking for a convenient life. I had children because I wanted to feel what it was like to have a happy family and I knew that the parents have to create the frame for that. I have lost my shot in this life at experiencing that as a child. The best I can do is figure out what it means and go do it for my children.

That means listening to them and getting to know them as individuals. It means setting them up for success and letting them totally fuck up sometimes without rescuing them. It means learning what boundaries feel like because I have lots of developmental books telling me what should and shouldn’t happen at various developmental stages.

I look for broad agreement. I don’t like following any single philosophy. I’m not a good follower of any “ideal”. I think that there are a million ways to be right, you have to judge your own circumstance.

And temperament matters. I am so grateful that my children and I have incredibly complimentary personality types. We don’t fight much and it’s not because my children are cowed. They are sassy little things who absolutely voice every discontent. They just… don’t have many. I mean, there are probably complaints that they keep behind their teeth because they are afraid to tell me. Assume “afraid” in that sentence is really a stand in for a lot of complex emotions that can’t be simplified to fear. My kids want me to be happy and I’m sure that sometimes they would rather not upset me than voice an issue. I try to do my best all the time to accept “no” well and to give them space for their own opinions and boundaries. They do voice complaints sometimes about me and I try to address them with speed and good humor.

I mean, I asked them if they wanted to see therapists so that they could have a safe adult to talk to about problems with me. I’m trying to create space for them.

So I feel like this is a you can lead a horse to water situation.

I have put a lot of responsibility on Noah for a lot of years to fix my problems with sex. That’s really not gone very well and maybe I need to try something different. He can’t fix this. This is big. There’s a lot going on here that I literally can’t clearly articulate at this point and I’m not really heading into a time of my life where I have traditionally had a lot of access to thoughts about sex. Maybe we are waiting another five years. Oh god I hope not.

I feel really done with sex being something I owe. And that’s incredibly complicated for a laundry list of reasons.

It’s been interesting talking to Noah about the ways I have done sex. I didn’t fuck all those people by looking for intimacy. What does “feeling good” mean to someone who dissociates at the drop of a hair.

Part of the problem is that Noah worked really hard on helping me stop dissociating. And then I figured out that sex hurts and I can’t do that any more. I can do things that help me dissociate more and that therefore help me process a lot of sex. But those things all have a very high cost to my relationship and are probably off the table for the rest of my life.

So… then we need to change sex and I don’t even know what that means.

And I’m not going to be in the best physical or mental place to work on it for a long time.

Complete topic shift.

I have been having petty, stupid, bitchy thoughts about a situation. I am angry with myself for not responding more. I am giving away too much energy to someone who doesn’t matter. I know I’m being a dumbass. MAKE LIKE FUCKING ELSA ALREADY.

Why an I letting it take up space in my brain? Someone can only make you feel small if you let them. It’s ok to have different life priorities. But yeah. I like staying home for many good reasons.

I didn’t say something snottier because… even though I have bitchy ass thoughts… I don’t actually want to model that behavior for my children. I will directly address things but it’s… different?

I don’t get bitchy with people. I get forceful.

But I still wish I got to be bitchy. It would be satisfying sometimes. At least it is in my snide comments to Noah. But I won’t even write them down here. Because it’s really stupid and even I’m not that immature.

But I’ll acknowledge that the struggle is real. Being nice is shit.

This is all superego. My id is ready to be mean to someone for sport. Because I’m petty. sigh

But I didn’t and I won’t.

Because I really am staying alive for this “good role model” experience. And soon there will be three. And the third will be such a different experience.

Why do I start most of my sentences with fucking prepositions?! It’s a god damn nervous tic.

Everything is related to something else. I guess it feels more appropriate to start every sentence as if it were a continuation of a previous thought. It’s all building from somewhere. But where is it going?

To bed.