Tag Archives: sad

Pity party, table of one

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Today my (awesome, fabulous) midwife was asking me questions about my community and what kind of support I have. It was quite disheartening to realize that for my first pregnancy I was completely confident in my community, my chosen family, and my friends that they would be there for me. I’m not anymore. If something bad happened and I had to stay in the hospital for a while with the new baby I would have to do it alone because Noah would have to stay with Shanna. I don’t think we have other options. I have people in my life who love me, but they are all people who have too much on their plates to begin with and they really, legitimately don’t have time for me.

I’ve tried so hard to make new friends in the mommy world and it’s just completely failed. When people just stop returning my calls that is kind of a hint. I feel like I have become too mundane for the freaks to give a shit about me anymore and the more mundane people seem to find me kind of disgusting.

I am so lonely.

out of sorts

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I suppose it isn’t a surprise that I feel funky and out of sorts. I have a nasty headache. I’m tired and drained and stressed. But I’m at Dad’s house. If the house were a little more babyproofed it would be way way more restful. I can’t really ignore her here and that’s hard.

There’s a part of me that wasn’t 100% certain that I had a miscarriage before because I never had a positive pregnancy test. The past few days of seeing what is coming out of my body has dispelled all doubt. This is my second miscarriage in less than six months. I talked to my midwife. This might be coincidence. This might be a problem that is easy to fix with minor medical intervention. She didn’t really want to say but there was the strong hint that this might be a sign that something is Wrong. I know that it’s a small chance. But I still freaked out when I kind of had to acknowledge that. I had cryosurgery and was told then that I might have trouble getting pregnant because she was taking off a lot of the surface of my cervix. Then I had a hard labor. There is a non-zero chance that something was damaged. I’m scared.

And I’m a petty, horrible bitch. I found out today about two more pregnancies in my relatively close social circle. I’m jealous. I’m angry that my body isn’t working right. I’m upset that they aren’t having this hard of a time. And then I think about my friend who hasn’t been able to get pregnant at all and I feel like the worst sort of horrible person. How dare I be upset about having problems now when I have such a wonderful, beautiful child.

But it hurts. It hurts so much. I hate that I feel betrayed by my body. My body has more or less always done what I wanted it to. My body doesn’t have a lightening fast metabolism, but I’ve proven that I can have the kind of body I want (I just don’t care enough to maintain it). I don’t have allergies. I’m mostly healthy. The Meniere’s hasn’t actually made my life harder at this point. I have disliked having the stomach acid problems, but enh.. that’s just whining.

This is awful. This is hard. I feel broken and bad and horrible and defective.

hard

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The drive yesterday was nightmareish. The GPS took me the most assbackwards way possible. It took almost 12 fucking hours to get to Eureka. *sigh* It was not a pleasant trip at all. Shanna and I are both out of sorts. Now we are hanging out with DA and boy is his house not childproofed. 🙂 I’m debating if I am going to try and drive to Eugene today. I may stop at a hotel part way if I am just done with Shanna being in the car. And my back hurts. It’s like I’m expelling something from my uterus or something. 🙁

Two things

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Noah’s parents sent us a box of stuff for Shanna. She loves the duck. The book is a bit over her head so it will go on the shelf for later reading. The clothes are all very adorable. There is something funny about the clothes though. They sent a mix of sizes. As in: 6/9 month, 12 month, and size 5. She wears 18 month and is rapidly heading towards 24 month. I find this kind of funny. 🙂 The too small stuff will go into the baby clothes box and Little TBD might wear it. Luckily we have a box of WAY too big stuff (started with that excellent juggling shirt from Andrew) so we can store stuff for later. 🙂 At least his parents send clothes I like unlike my mother. 🙂

I think I need to give up on having friends. My life is pretty lonely and I need to figure out how to come to terms with it because fighting against it is making me really miserable. Very few people are willing to make any effort to see me and even those people are too busy to do it often. I’m tired of being the one to put in 100% of the effort in relationships. I’m tired of trying to make new friends and having it go pretty badly. Like driving 30 minutes to south San Jose for a play date only to find that the mom I am meeting brought a friend and they sit there talking to each other…in Russian. I feel like going through a list of the things I try to do is a comedy of errors but it’s gone on long enough that I’m not laughing anymore. Scene people have dropped me completely. Shanna goes to sleep at 8/8:30 so dancing just isn’t an option. This is my life. People don’t want to visit me. I need to stop fighting it and just accept it so that maybe I can stop crying.

More about sexual assault.

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Note: I am friendslocking this because I think my journal can be searched via google and I am not yet confident enough about this subject matter to want to broadcast it on the internet.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about rape and rapists. I am close with more than one woman who was raped and who still has to deal with the person who raped her socially. In at least one case this feels even more personal and difficult and it has prompted me to do a lot of thinking. Not too long ago linked to a discussion about rape that made me think. How many people know rapists and don’t even realize that they do? No really–look around your circle of friends, you probably know a rapist and you may or may not be able to figure out who it is. That got me thinking more about my own history of sexual assault. I’ve written about my early sexual assault experiences here in some detail but I’ve skipped the last few sexual assault experiences entirely. Why? I feel like part of the reason is because they were all less physically traumatizing so I minimize them in light of the rest of my history. I mean, if I can survive being brutally sodomized when I was like nine years old, what is a date rape here and there between friends? I say that sarcastically but that is basically how I have treated this subject. There is a part of me that believes that given how “minor” the sexual assault was–no physical damage–I need to just get over it. There is that fucking phrase again. “Just get over it.” Fuck that fucking phrase with a fucking chainsaw. (Can you tell I like stream of consciousness writing?) There is another part of the issue that plays a much bigger part I have realized recently. All of the recent assaults touch other people in my life in some way or another. Two of them are still friends with people I am friends with. If I talk about the assaults I will name them. Naming them creates a situation where people might say, “Oh I don’t believe that ‘x’ did that to you”. How fucking awful is that. I have counseled dear friends to publicly name their attackers because otherwise the bastards get to continue to have squeaky clean reputations and when someone eventually says they are a rapist it will be harder to believe–if there is a history of it, maybe something will actually be done about it. But that means I have to put myself out there and make me vulnerable to disbelief and maybe even to losing friends. That is scary. Hey wait! I’m a counter-phobic six! It’s scary! Here I go.

Cut for length.
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That’s what grief is

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Yesterday I had my second session with this new therapist. We spent an hour going over my history so that she would have at least some idea of who I am before we got into the fresh stuff.

It was amazing. I’m sad when talking about the old stuff because it is all sad stuff. But when we started talking about Francesca, when we talked about my child, I sobbed. That’s the difference. That’s what I’m struggling with. That’s grief.

More erf

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I woke up at six and can’t get back to sleep. Too much going on in my brain. Physically I’m kind of off and I can’t figure out exactly what is wrong. I’m obsessing about all the deaths that have happened in the last year and some. I feel very anxious about life. The comp exam is in 18 days. I should probably review poetry. *sigh*

I can’t get driving directions online to the place we are going in Oklahoma. All the mapping software basically knows that the road exists but that’s it. Awesome. I have to wait until a more sane hour then call them. I’m sure there are tiny little motels in the town we are going to, but there is zero online presence for any hotel there. I lived in this town for a little while as a kid. I remember feeling very superior because I was from the big city. Now I find it almost charming in a severely inconvenient sort of way.

I still haven’t decided if I am going to deal with dragging the carseat around in the airports and gate checking it or if I am ok with actually checking it. I’ve heard some horror stories about baggage handlers destroying carseats. They are somewhat delicate and if you throw them too hard they are no longer useful in a crash. And they are so fucking expensive. But I’m not going to have much in the way of help. *sigh*

They don’t sell good travel potties that fit over elongated toilet bowls. Fuckers. You’d think that this would be a reasonable thing to have given that almost all public toilets are elongated. Shanna does not appreciate sitting precariously on a grown up toilet while being held up. It makes the whole pottying experience much more stressful. I think I’m going to bring her potty and disposable anti-bacterial wipes for cleaning it out. Not my first choice, but better than not being able to potty her. At this point I’m only having a couple of misses a day and I don’t really want to back slide a lot. I think it is funny that by volume more than half of what I am bringing on this trip is diapers. People still ask me when I am going to switch to disposables (not for traveling–just in general) because “Aren’t you sick of washing diapers?” The washing really doesn’t phase me in the slightest. However I was really really really tempted to not deal with lugging the volume on this trip.

You people don’t post on lj enough. I tell you all about my life, where is the reciprocal reading material? 😛 (Essaying–you do well. 😀 And I have no complaints about Rbus.)

My house isn’t clean and I’m trying very hard not to care. It’s a struggle though. I will never again buy black furniture. Being able to see dust 15 minutes after dusting makes me feel like I am the worst, most terrible housekeeper ever in the history of the world. I really don’t need that guilt.

I had a good time at the museum on Sunday. It was nice to see people and play with kidlets. 🙂 Shanna is still not quite to the interacting large scale stage. It’s all about her. 🙂 It’s very cute.

It’s hard balancing things with Noah right now. His job is sucking the life out of him. I am trying as much as I can to be supportive and not demand much of him. I was doing ok for a while. Then I hit an emotional wall and started feeling really upset and crummmy and needing a lot more from him. I’m largely still not pestering him with those needs. He doesn’t have much extra right now. So I’m spending a lot of time crying. It’s interesting how I know this isn’t depression–it doesn’t feel that way. I’m grieving. I’m sad. It feels pretty lonely to feel like this and spend so much time alone. Shanna doesn’t count as a person in this way because she is pretty much a bottomless pit of need with not much to give. I’m ok with that–that is what she is supposed to be. But I’m having a hard time. I’m pretty sure my grieving isn’t impacting her negatively. She seems to be still very healthy and happy and delighted by life.

Oh, and she’s teething again. The diaper rash appeared instantly and is fierce. I don’t entirely understand how she can get diaper rash like that when she is barely wetting diapers at all and she never sits in pee. Babies are a mystery. Good thing they are a cute mystery. She has been asleep for more than 11 hours. This is very very good because it is going to be a long day of traveling and her naps are going to be disrupted. I’m nervous about traveling with her by myself but I’ll manage.

Wow that’s a lot of whining. And she slept through me writing it. w00t.

Eventful.

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When I got up I thought today would be boring. I thought I would go to Whole Foods with my neighbor and maybe hit the nursery (for plant matter–not baby). Well, it was a starting plan.

I went to the nursery this morning and spent quite a while figuring out what sorts of veggies to put into the pots in my back yard. I selected two varieties of tomatoes (one is best for paste the other is best for being more solid like and mixes in well for sauce), squash, sweet basil, oregano, sweet peas, and a neato sounding pepper. I was planning to try and put them into pots basically immediately but when I got home I was derailed by a phone call from my mother.

It turns out that a family friend died this morning. She was 79 and in extremely poor health so I can’t really call it a shock. My mother and I had been planning to go out to Oklahoma to see them this summer at a big birthday party. It turns out that we will instead be flying out on Tuesday for a funeral. It took a while to find reasonable airfares for both of us.

Then I went to Whole Foods with my neighbor. We both had a lot of fun wandering around looking at the sheer variety of pretentious food. Of course we both spent too much money. Oy. That place is dangerous. While we were there we ran into one of my former students. It was quite lovely as she danced with joy and told her three friends extensively about how I was the best teacher ever. She was not one of my most dedicated students so we spent a lot of time together in 8th period social club getting to know one another. 🙂 It was great to see that she is trying to go to college. On the ride home my neighbor told me, essentially, that I make her feel kind of stupid because I know so many things and can answer in depth questions on such a wide variety of topics. I think that it was made even worse when she figured out that I am seven years younger than her. I don’t think she is stupid, I think she is simply asking questions about things that I have researched and she hasn’t. Oy. But I helped her realize a few things about her marriage and that’s to the good.

I came home and spent a while talking to Noah about how frustrated he is at work right now. I wish there was more I could do to help him. Then I made the rest of the arrangements for the trip to Oklahoma. Then I sat down for a few minutes to catch up on the internet and I received a phone call from Debbie! This is always exciting. She lives in Taiwan right now so I don’t get to talk to her much. I’m glad that she has been awesome about keeping in touch with me. 🙂

Noah decided that it would be a good plan for him to go to the gym for a while after dinner because it will be a break from thinking. As he was getting ready to run out the door he casually mentioned that his parents are trying really hard to come out here for Shanna’s birthday.

It’s been a day.

not good

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Shanna is sick. She has a fever and she is lethargic and tired. This isn’t great but it pales next to being told that someone I love tremendously was raped. I don’t know how to adequately help him. Yes, him. I feel terrible because I didn’t try harder to help him when/before it happened.

Sometimes I feel like I could joyfully take on all the suffering in the world just to protect my loved ones. I’m very strong; I know I could handle it. I don’t really know how he will truly heal.

I had trouble sleeping

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When I got back to CA I had a message on my phone. It turns out my therapist died of an overdose while I was gone. This is the second death by that method of someone I was close to in just over a year. I’m feeling very conflicted and confused and unsettled. I knew she was cracking up when I stopped seeing her. I said snarky things about her cracking up. I was pretty sure she was on drugs. But now I feel terrible that I didn’t do something to try and help her because she was pretty clearly asking me for help–the whole taking over my therapy sessions to talk about her bit was obvious. I really liked her, both as a professional and as a person. I haven’t called the person who left me the message because I’m kind of freaked out.

My mom always said that deaths go in threes. I’m really afraid of who will be the third overdose. 🙁

That darn life.

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So I’m in a funk today. I’m lonely and bored. It’s interesting to realize that. I think it is because of how much time I have been spending alone at home doing baking. I really am an extrovert. I need to try and make more plans with people in the upcoming time. It’s hard making plans with people because 9/10 times involve me having to drive somewhere, often taking up a lot of time. I also find that most people want to invite me to parties because that’s what they do with their time. I get the efficiency of parties–you get to see lots of people at once. Lately parties really kind of suck for me. I don’t enjoy them and that’s not anyone’s fault. So I’m skipping parties and feeling even more lonely and isolated. I need to try harder to get in touch with people. It’s just hard because I feel like I’m initiating the contact with most everyone and that feels hard. I’m not the bell of any ball anymore and it’s a hard come down. A friend recently posted that she knows that she has finally completely left the “cute young thing” group at 33 and I wanted to wistfully tell her that it must have been nice to have it last so long. I left it a while ago. Waaaaaa waaaaa waaaaa. [insert pity party]

I know that this stage will pass. It’s just kind of annoying.

Down

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For some reason I feel sad this morning. I’m sitting here with the intermittent tear running down my face. I’m not thinking about anything. I don’t know why I feel like this.

Stupid hormones.

Folsom

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So we went. Ten or Fifteen minutes in we were stopped by a very earnest woman with a clipboard from the NCSF. She proceeded to lecture us on how people on the religious right are trying to shut down Folsom and I am a terrible person for bringing in my baby and giving them more ammunition. There were very thin hints that if Folsom shuts down I will be at least partially responsible for taking it away from the 400,000 people there. When I relayed this story to a friend at the fair his response was, “And did you tell her to go fuck herself?” I kind of wish I had said that. We were at the fair for less than an hour and I felt pretty shamed and dirty the whole time and not in a good way. My daughter is four months old. She won’t remember this. I won’t be bringing her ever again because she might remember and that’s crossing a line.

And you know what? If Folsom shuts down it won’t be because of my four month old. And despite her scare tactics, I don’t believe that my child is going to be taken away by CPS now. Our house may be mildly cluttered, but it’s cluttered primarily with books that I am reading for a graduate degree and baby gear. Our daughter is huge and healthy and extremely happy. And it’s not as if she is using a dildo for a teething device. Give me a break.

Drained

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Today I went and gave emotional support to a friend who is going through some pretty rough stuff. Trying to manage his needs with Shanna’s simultaneously was very difficult. And then she screamed the whole way home. I did all this having eaten a few bites of yogurt and granola (I accidentally dumped the rest on the floor), a rather scant amount of leftovers (a little chicken, a couple bites of potatoes, and about four bites of squash), some mostly-veggie soup, and a bowl of vegan stew. That’s very little calories in a day for me.

I’m so tired and emotionally wrung out that I want to cry. My head hurts. I’m really grateful she is asleep in the swing right now. And that we bought the mozzarella and prosciutto roll.

dagnabbit

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Does it count as insomnia when you wake up after seven hours of sleep and can’t go back to sleep? Here I am, oh LJ. It’s 5:15 and I wish I were sleeping. Instead I am thinking, again. This is becoming a habit. This time my thinking is about much more melancholic topics that I’m not really willing to share. I find it interesting when people tell me they admire how open I am. I am open in very specific, limited, controlled ways. I don’t talk about the things that are currently able to hurt me. I’ll talk about them once I’ve worked through the issues and I’ll seem all deep and shit.

*snort* Deep as a puddle.

sex

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This is something that I would normally filter to just people who have requested access to my sex life filter, but I don’t want to. Hell, I’m not even going to cut it if it gets long. That’s all the warning you get.

Sex isn’t working how it used to. Hell, it’s barely working at all. Yesterday we got the opportunity to have sex (yay for Miss Jenny!) and we got started in a way that was very consistent with our history of sex together. Namely: not much in the way of foreplay and lots of roughness. At very first it mostly worked and I had one ok-ish very weak orgasm. Then… it just stopped being interesting at all. It wasn’t about what Noah was or wasn’t doing, I just basically checked out. I think I heard some noise that sounded like Shanna so my brain switched off the “sex” part. Noah talked about transitioning into some other rough-ish sort of uhm activity and I get the impression that he could tell from my face that I wasn’t real gung-ho. I was willing enough, but not because I was enjoying the sex. See, I’ve gotten to the point where I am having sex because it makes Noah happy, not because I’m really enjoying the sex. I really want to enjoy the sex; I miss enjoying sex. Theoretically I want sex, I’m just not enjoying it in the moment. My masturbatory life is uhm on hiatus. I try to masturbate every so often and it usually doesn’t work out very well.

I think that a lot of this is because my perspective has changed so drastically. I’ve always been a stories person and the stories that used to get me hot I now think, “If someone did this to my daughter I would castrate them and end up in jail.” I get violently angry. I’m not really sure what to do about this. Other stories have just never been that interesting. My brain is so firmly locked in ‘mommy-mode’ that sex is absent.

Noah offered to stop and just cuddle. He’s awesome like that. He offered to stop pushing for sex and we won’t try again until I actually feel in the mood and want it. I think that is a bad idea. A lot of our overall dynamic is dependent upon him being a very tolerant, cheerful, happy guy and if he doesn’t have sex for a few months that wouldn’t be so true any more. I *need* that from him. As a result I consider it my price to pay that I need to keep having sex whether I’m “in the mood” or not. (It’s not like I actively don’t want to have sex–if that were true I wouldn’t. I’m just not into it.)

I don’t really know what to do right now. I asked him to tell me a funny, silly sex story and we got through sex ok. I didn’t really orgasm during sex again, but it was more fun. It also doesn’t help that my wiring is very different now. I’ve always been a penetration kind of girl. Now it’s… not doing it for me. I need a tremendous amount of external stimulation (it’s like I became a regular girl) and orgasm is far from assured. I feel sorta betrayed by my body actually. Sex was so easy for me and now it’s not. And I don’t have time for the work it would take to figure this out again.

I feel lost and hurt. It’s no one’s fault and no one is doing anything wrong. But sex has always been such a huge part of my identity and now it’s gone.

Not all hormones

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Today has been hard for me in a couple of different ways. The day started out so well. Angela showed up and made breakfast and that was awesome. Then we were all highly productive for a couple of hours. Then stuff started going down hill triggering a lot of trust issues for me. Punctuality issues. Frustration with people. I spent a lot of the later part of today being alternately very angry and very sad. Couple of times I started crying and couldn’t sit down for a good long cry for various reasons. I’m sure it was partially hormonal, but it really wasn’t all about being pregnant. It was about disconnect between how I see the world and obligations and how other people see the world and obligations.

Noah said something today that is making me think: “You treat manners/etiquette as a second rate way of enforcing boundaries.” He’s right. I treat things as being about basic manners when they are really about my personal boundaries. I did something risky for me this weekend and it went really badly in general. I’m not going to take that risk again anytime soon. The potential payoff isn’t worth the consequences of things not going well. Not 100% badly, but bad enough that I am going to remember this for a long time.

I guess learning is an important part of living and all.