So in the past few weeks I have been in a few situations that have been challenging for me. They have been challenging for me because of old baggage and *not* because of the people I have been interacting with–let me make that clear. Ok, on to my babble.
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Dear Sissy,
You are persistently asking, nay demanding, that I give you information about my pregnancy and Shanna’s current progress. You state that I haven’t wanted to share, but you can’t wait any longer for the information. I’m not sure why it is that you believe you “can’t wait any longer” but you are going to wait quite a bit longer, potentially into forever. I’ll explain why.
In the past year you have made it very clear that if I want to have a relationship it involves “forgiving you” of anything you do at any point. You stated to our brother that “that’s how love works.” No, that is how abusive relationships work. I do not have any obligation whatsoever to forgive people constantly of repetitive hurtful behavior. In fact, it would be strongly to my detriment to do so. I would be showing my daughter that I believe I deserve the treatment you give me by continuing to engage with it and I am absolutely unwilling to present such a view to my daughter.
You came to my house, where you were my guest and I had gone through a great deal of effort on behalf of you and your family, and proceeded to lecture me about how you have to assume all of the matriarchal duties because “No one else is going to do it.” Essentially you were letting me know that regardless of what you actually -do- you are my superior. I reject this version of reality on every level. You will never be the matriarch of any group I am part of. The reason for this is very simple: I have no respect for you. If you nominate yourself the matriarch of our family I will leave. I would prefer having no family over having to tolerate the abuse you consider standard in familial relations.
I will never send you this letter because just like every other text book abuser you would find a way to feel victimized and declare that I need to apologize for being so terrible to you. I am not terrible for pointing out the specifics of your inappropriate behavior I am being honest. I am taking responsibility for my own mental health and well being. I am accepting the overwhelming responsibility of modeling healthy, appropriate relationships for my daughter. I am no longer engaged in the cycle of abuse and I refuse to step back into it.
Sincerely,
Your Adult Sister
Last night I spent some time with the California Mindfucker. I have some really awesome friends. 🙂 I really really appreciate that I can call up my friend the Master NLP practitioner and he’s happy to go hang out with me for a while and help me deal with some of my big painful mental issues and help me get my head on straight. That is just so rad.
To follow up on that: I’m really not so freaked out about the upcoming birth. There is still work for me to do there to get properly excited and to work on getting back in my body (I’ve been incredibly disassociated for a long time) but that’s not something he can do for me. He did a great job of taking the anxiety away and he was only mildly smug about it. 😀
It was probably also very useful for him to beat me over the head with the idea that if I was in trouble there would be droves of people who would show up to help me. On one hand I feel like I want to tell him it wouldn’t happen–people wouldn’t bother. But he’s right, people would show up. It’s kind of hard to wrap my head around the fact that even though people don’t have the time to spend with me all the time they would absolutely be there in an emergency. It’s kind of a weird sort of security. He pointed out that I am really good about showing up when other people have an emergency and that karma really does come back to you. Believing in that takes a kind of faith I struggle with but I’m trying.
And then I came home and talked to Noah about it and explained some of where the anxiety is coming from and he committed to being home for six weeks. It was looking like he was going to be home for a lot less time for this birth and I was really feeling upset about that and not being good about communicating my fears/needs/wants around this birth and when I got around to really saying what was going on for me he is absolutely willing to do what I need.
It’s been really hard lately expressing my needs. I have too many of them. I feel really bad for having so many needs. I feel like I am asking too much of Noah. I am avoiding talking to other people because I would rather sit home just not getting my needs met than risk asking and being told no. That hurts too much. I’m not sure what to do about the fact that there is a tremendous amount of stuff that is just not getting done because I can’t do it and I feel ashamed of asking for help. Pregnancy is the most humbled I have felt in my life. I don’t want to impose on anyone. It seems as though bad stuff is crashing down on just about everyone I know. Everyone is suffering right now and I just can’t add to that for anyone. So I just do without help. Noah and I are muddling through the absolute essentials, but there is a big gap between the absolute mandatory essentials and all the stuff that really should get done. It’s really hard when I think about the fact that much of it will have to literally wait for a year. That’s such a long time.
But! I made progress on one of my biggest points of anxiety. That’s important.
I’ve noticed that with a couple of friends I have a particular issue. So my friends are eldest children and they were assigned a lot of child-minding duties growing up. They very automatically step in and start doing what feels like parenting my kid. I have mostly bit my tongue about this but I’ve felt kind of butt-hurt. Recently I started talking to one of the people in particular and I think that I’m having the feelings I’m having because I have so many issues with my own sister and her attitudes around doing the same thing. But I don’t like that I’m feeling this way about my friends. They aren’t my sister and they don’t behave like her at all. Even if there are some surface similarities in ‘caring for nearby children’ it’s just not the same.
Ok. I’m going to make a resolution for myself. I’m going to work on my butt-hurt feelings. In all seriousness these friends who take these kinds of self-imposed caretaking roles are going to be the closest my children have to family experiences. I really want my children to feel what it is like to have people other than me who love them and take care of them. That means I need to get comfortable with it and not fuck it up for them because of my issues. I really wish that the list of ‘shit to work on’ was getting smaller instead of longer.
(Shanna asked to watch videos so I got to type again. 😛 )
I notice that when I feel bad about something and I don’t act on it because I feel confused/anxious/uncertain about how to handle it I tend to get very fussy and anxious overall and it bleeds over into way more of my life than it should. I tend to hold on to things for a long time in that state building it up into my head until I am so frustrated by it that the smallest hint of an infraction in that direction feels like THAT’S IT!!! I’M DONE WITH YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!!! Often this doesn’t go all that well. When I completely over react like that I feel terrible and guilty and like if I were just a better person I wouldn’t blow up like that. But the situation doesn’t really get resolved and it continues on and the cycle continues.
But if I manage to say my piece in a way that is maybe not perfectly polite but not a complete and total overreaction directed at one person I feel way better about myself. And I will have an easier time enforcing that boundary for a long time afterward. I’m always super happy when I manage to do this.
And just because this is the kind of thing I almost never say–I’ve been doing pretty well lately. I’m having lots of emotional cycles but I’ve not been depressed in quite a while. Frustration seems to be ever present while pregnant though. 🙂
I noticed something today that I consider interesting. When I glance around at the profiles of mothers I know in various social networking sites almost all of the mothers with young children have pictures of themselves with their children as their primary picture and sometimes their partner/husband is in the picture. It is very rare for a father to have a picture of himself and his child as his primary picture. Once parents have teenagers it is fairly uncommon to have pictures of the kids in a primary profile picture at all. In fact, for most fathers of young children you have to spend some time hunting to find mention of their kids/pictures of them. And once you find pictures you notice that the father has 1-5 pictures of his kids (out of dozens or hundreds of photos) whereas the mother in the same relationship has the kid(s) in almost all pictures up.
I hear a lot about how women give up too much of their identity to their children. I wonder if this attitude comes about because men don’t give up enough of their identity to having children and in our society the default ‘personhood’ is being a man and women are wrong for where and how they deviate from that norm. If you think about it, that is very much how (at least American) society works. Women are shafted in the work place because they need maternity leave/sick leave to care for children/time off during the day to take care of appointments for children. This is all left to the sole providence of women in the vast majority of cases. Yes, there are some exceptions but they are exceedingly rare. I believe that companies get away with their nasty anti-woman policies because the default is that everyone should behave like a man therefore women are bad/wrong for when they need something different.
Back to my original point about parents. I’ve been thinking about this kind of stuff a lot. Women are told not to give themselves up to being a mother. I hear it. I’m told to go out and have a separate identity. The thing is, there are only so many hours in the day. Having a toddler is a shitload of work and I really don’t see how I could do much more than I am doing lately and still be as present as I am with my daughter. I’m not willing to put my daughter in daycare for a wide variety of reasons, not least of which is I’d have to get a job to pay for it and then I would be gone all the time working and I would have even less time for myself than I get now. 😛 My job was brutal on me for having a separate identity anyway.
My point being that I think that it is crap that women are told they should be less invested in their identity as a parent when men are not told they should be more invested in their identity as a parent. Yes, there needs to be a balance but I don’t think men are doing better than women they are just fucking up in the opposite direction. There has to be some meeting in the middle and I’m not exactly sure where it is.
In an attempt to remind myself of the people who love me I called one of my friends last night and asked him if he wanted to grab dinner since I was giving Noah the night off. 🙂 It was lots of fun. It was really nice to reflect on how much our relationship has grown and changed in the last ten years. He is pretty awesome about listening without trying to ‘fix’ at this point despite the fact that it takes conscious out loud reminders (he does this for himself) don’t fix! Don’t fix! It’s pretty cute. 🙂 He said something to me that I appreciated a lot. I told him I was pregnant (he is kind of out of the loop) and that I had been last time I saw him at Dickens but I didn’t know yet. He said, “That explains the level of emotional you were displaying then” and I quipped, “As opposed to just being generally crazy?” and he said, “Despite your desire to self-identify that way you really aren’t crazy.” I kind of stopped. That was interesting for me. Let’s just say that if he thought I was crazy he would say so. He’s really not one to uhm pull punches. So it was kind of startling.
What am I getting out of describing myself that way? Something to ponder.
Not to mention that I spent the earlier part of the day with a girlfriend. She asked to come over and that felt nice. It was nice to catch up with her because we haven’t done that in months. 🙂
And I was right to cancel the massage. There was no way in h-e-double hockey sticks Shanna would have tolerated me lying on the table. She’s starting to feel better physically today but now I’m getting a cough too. I’m glad I didn’t send this bug home to Ms. I Have To Take The Boards On Tuesday. 🙂
I’ve been feeling very fussy about a few social interactions lately. I’ve in fact been writing humongous long rants in response to them (they take a while–I think I’m up to page six on one of them and Shanna is a big distraction) and I think I’m just going to let it go. I got a message today that reminded me of the humanity on the other side of the behavior that bothered me and I need to let go of my internalized grudge. Now the work will be for me to not feel bad about the stuff I never got around to saying publicly. 😀
I haven’t been posting filtered stuff. As a result I have ceased to feel safe posting about some of the stuff going through my head and I’m tired of feeling like I can’t post on my journal. So I’m back to filters. This isn’t a particularly broad filter. There are many cases of one person in a partnership being on this filter when the other person isn’t. I’m not asking you to keep secrets from your partner but I would prefer if you didn’t go out of your way to bring this stuff up. I still like all of your respective partners I just don’t want to be argued with right now.
Most people talk about the first year of their kid’s life as being really difficult, sometimes awful. For me it was rather good, you see… I wasn’t ovulating. I didn’t realize how much that affected everything.
It went really well. We ended up in a fun little group of four girls and two boys. Probably the hardest part is that most of the group wanted to bottom. 🙂 One of the girls didn’t get much play because of that very problem and that was sucky. I’ve crystalized some of my thoughts on group sex. I’m going to expound about them after the cut. So here’s a cut. Continue reading
A while ago I said that I was just happy and that I didn’t need to process anything for a long time. I guess that span is over. I’m getting good stuff out of the processing though. Don’t read the cut tag stuff if you are likely to scoff at my woo. I don’t want to hear it.
One of my wonderful friends told me that I inspire her because I have accomplished so much and I started out with so little. If I stop and think about that even semi-objectively she is right. But there is always that voice in the back of my head saying, “But you didn’t do ‘x’ and you failed at ‘y'” and those things seem to cancel out my accomplishments. But why? How do I lose credit for the things I have done? I got a high school diploma. I was the first one in my family to do so. I managed to avoid pregnancy/abortion when most folks in my life circumstances didn’t. I am not an addict and I seriously doubt I ever will be–given my familial background that is huge. I have a bachelors degree and a teaching credential. I have been to five foreign countries. I have been to 30 states including an amazing backpacking trip in Alaska (have I said thank you lately, DA?). I am a fairly technically skilled top. I am a very good teacher. I have a good eye for putting together colors in interior decorating (if I do say so myself. :P). I’m a good mom. I’m a good wife.
I am sane. I own my shit. I am good about boundaries. I give and receive respect. I am an honorable person.
If I fail the masters exam what have I lost? I lose out on the chance to have a piece of paper to hang on my wall. I lose out on the ability to feel snotty and superior because of my formally recognized education. In reality I won’t be more educated if I get the piece of paper. I will still be in the top pay bracket if I go back to teaching because no one can take away the units I have earned.
I’ve been having a serious identity crises lately because I feel like who I am has somehow become less since I became a mother. It’s rather bullshit though. I’m not actively doing a lot outside of being a mother right now, but that’s ok. That is the season of life I am in. I wanted it and doing this does not devalue me.
I am good enough.
I’ve been having a lot of anxiety lately. I feel anxious about all kinds of things. The comp exam, interactions with people, am I doing ‘enough’ in various ways, and of course my ever present internal push to be Mary Poppins. (People keep saying Martha Stewart and Hell No I think she is a wasteful twat.) I don’t keep my house clean enough. I feel confused by the barrage of information out there about health and diet and trying to be good to the planet. I feel confused by the myriad of different parenting philosophies. I feel like I am not being a good enough partner to Noah. I feel like I am not exercising enough. I feel like I must be doing Something Wrong as a parent. I don’t have any frame of reference for ‘normal’ for children so I have no idea if she is doing alright. (I think she is, but how in the hell would I know?) I alternate feeling kind of lonely and feeling like I am tired of dealing with people and it would be fine if I never saw anyone ever again. I feel frustrated by stupid interactions. I feel like I am being judged and found wanting in just about every way. I realized yesterday that my mother plans to come up here for Shanna’s first birthday party and she plans to fly to Oklahoma in July. How in the hell is she going to pay for that? Wait–is she going to expect me to? I am feeling a lot of pressure to save money and yet it seems like one of the easiest things I can do to help me not stress out all the time is spend money. (I think I’m fairly frugal but of course there are people out there who are more frugal so I feel like I am awful and terrible.) I have this problem of feeling like if I am not in the top 10% of (x) skill/ability/talent/whatever/activity then I am obviously pathetic and a loser.
That paragraph is hard to read. That’s how my brain looks right now though. I’ve never heard of postpartum anxiety but this doesn’t sound like postpartum depression. I’m not sad. I’m just anxious. I’m not happy with the fact that having a baby made it so that I don’t enjoy sex much. What the fuck happened? I enjoy the closeness and the intimate feeling, but it’s just not all that… exciting. I feel really fussy about having to be the one to initiate dates and sex when most of it is happening because it helps Noah stay cheerful. I understand that I have to be the one to initiate because I’m the one who can get Shanna to sleep most of the time, but still. I don’t feel sexy or interesting anymore. I gave a friend most of my ‘interesting’ clothes this weekend. I have weird feelings about that. On one hand I won’t be able to wear any of it for a long time (I’m too fat) but I feel like I just gave up on being interesting. I’m not worth looking at like that anymore. I’m completely de-sexed. I’m really thrilled that she is getting to enjoy the clothes though and I’m happy she is going out and having fun. So I get to feel like I’m a nice person for assisting her in fun and I get to feel like I’m just kind of pathetic and lame because I’m not having that kind of fun anymore. It’s a mixed bag.
So yeah. I feel like my brain is going close to a mile a minute lately and there isn’t much I can to do calm down and just feel content. My life is where I want it to be and that is hard. I’ve always been striving in the past and I don’t know how to stop doing that. I need to find my zen and just be happy in knowing that I accomplished (almost) everything I wanted to accomplish. It’s ok that my house isn’t perfectly clean–it doesn’t make me a bad person. Noah doesn’t care. I actually don’t care that much of the time. I worry about the hypothetical people out there who do care. I feel like they think I am pathetic because “You have all that time at home and your house is still dirty?!” It’s all about projecting stuff.
And I’m still freaking out about my therapist being dead. I wonder if that is part of the reason I have so much fuss bubbling to the top right now because I just found out that I can’t go process any of it with the person I process with. AHHHHHHHHHHHH
My neighbor (the one with a son six weeks older than Shanna) came over for a bit this morning. She’s having postpartum depression issues and she wanted to ask me for advice. It turns out that my impression of her thoughts about me were pretty far from the mark. She started telling me about all the ways she has taken my advice so far. She started telling me about how she “just isn’t as creative as [me]” which almost made me laugh. Me? Creative? She asked me what she should do to handle a few issues that are coming up with her son. She asked me how I deal with not having much of a mom in my life. It was interesting.
It was one of those things where I stopped and thought, “Hunh, maybe I should stop assuming people dislike me.”
I was thinking earlier today. I was in a funk earlier this week and for part of last week and it was annoying, but really not so bad. I have been sad for short periods in the past few months. I get angry every so often. But I haven’t felt self-loathing in a long time. I can’t remember when I last hated myself. It’s kind of weird to think about, but I loathed myself for most of my life. I remember what it is like to think terrible thoughts about myself constantly and I’m surprised I didn’t notice it stopping. Somehow I just let it go.
That’s really awesome. 🙂 Man my life is good.
Oh, and in other news: Shanna sat up from laying down today for the first time. 🙂
For the past couple of days I have been on a really annoying emotional roller coaster. I’m angry, sad, giddy, and annoyed by turns. In the main I am able to keep my expressions of these feelings down to saying, “Wow, I am really really annoyed right now for no good reason” replacing “annoyed” with the emotion of the moment. But I’m *feeling* really intensely and it’s bugging me. I like having more moderate emotions; they are less draining. Nothing much has happened to trigger me in any direction that I know of.
My (minor) things wrong at the moment: for some reason I have started doing all the bad habits that make my jaw hurt really suddenly. I had stopped doing all of these for a long time. A have a tooth that hurts. I’m mildly fussed about money stuff but only in a stupid vague way–we aren’t exactly in trouble. And I’m starting to read towards the comp exam again but I’m doing it very slowly and mellowly with books that sound interesting.
Yeah, those are all very very mild irks. I have no idea why I am experiencing such intense feelings. I am also starving. By golly I’m eating my weekly points and my exercise points and I still kind of want to cry with hunger. Don’t worry I am continuing to eat when I’m that hungry whether I have points or not. I don’t think it is reasonable to be that hungry and not eat. I’m trying to figure out what sorts of food will make me feel full because nothing is doing it right now. I can’t figure out why I am so hungry. Shanna hasn’t been nursing more than usual.
Shanna is in fact being her awesome, mellow self lately so I can’t blame any of this on stress from her. She’s sleeping 11-12 hours a night with one, sometimes two wake-ups. I really have no complaints about her. She’s a little clingy during the day but not beyond what is totally reasonable and normal for her age. It’s cool watching her scoot all over the floor playing with toys. 🙂
So yeah. Feeling batty just now.
I get too upset about stupid things. I got all excited about getting my mom’s recipe book and I decided that I was going to make Every Cookie Recipe In It. But you know what? That’s not realistic right now. I am stressing myself out for something really really stupid. It’s time to remember that I am supposedly a grown up and get over this.
My goals need to come down to a more reasonable level. No one expects that I be superwoman except for me. If I say, “You know, I didn’t manage to make your favorite cookies because Shanna kept me busy” no one is going to hate me.
I still feel bad. I’m kind of dumb sometimes.
I don’t like that the tired bear cries. I’m not crying.
It’s amazing to me how this stay-at-home-mom gig works. Caring for Shanna requires continual physical effort (it’s not *hard* physical effort, but it is physical work) and almost no intellectual effort. Yet I don’t have the mental bandwidth to do much else at the same time. Studying Spanish is hard. I don’t retain the stuff I do while I’m playing with her. I have to be interruptable at all times (As I come back from a diaper change that had to happen mid-entry). I feel like my brain is not working the way it used to. I feel like I am less smart, like my brain is on hiatus.
This doesn’t make the prospect of studying for the comp exam any happier. My daughter is the whole scope of my world right now, or at least I wish she was. I’m so happy most days. I love seeing how she changes day by day. This is all I want to be doing right now. It’s interesting because I have always derived so much of my self-image from my intelligence and what I am doing right now has no part in that.
I want to be done with school so bad I could scream. I have missed four semesters of school entirely in the past 23 years. Otherwise I have been in school for at least some portion of every term. I am starting to hate school. I am starting to lose any desire to learn what can be taught in school. There are still many things I want to learn–don’t get me wrong. I just want to go out into the world, damnit.
But I have a Spanish presentation tonight. And finals next week. And I have many more months of studying ahead of me for the comp exam. And I have two more terms of Spanish if I pass the exam. I have decided that I am going to study like mad and take the test in April. If I fail I am not going to bother with finishing Spanish. I have too much resentment as it is. I hope I don’t fail. I am going to work pretty hard to ensure I don’t. *sigh*
Every so often I notice that I have been rude a lot for a period of time. It’s sometimes hard to figure out why I am doing so. I’ve been like that a lot lately. I’ve been rather snotty or nasty to more than one person in the last couple of weeks and I don’t have a good excuse for my behavior.
I’m sorry to everyone I’ve been rude to. Most likely you don’t deserve it. I’m going to think pretty hard on my behavior for a bit and try to figure out how to ditch my bad attitude.