Hiding

Tags

depression, dreams, miscarriage, work, writing

Life is… challenging right now.

Perfect Husband is depressed. He has always been prone to it, and I think the miscarriage and the lack of support at his work and who knows what other factors have helped spur it on. I haven’t seem him this bad in years, so I am trying to give him breaks wherever possible. He does as much as he can, but he doesn’t have much emotional or physical energy right now. What he does have, I want him to devote to getting better.

Luckily, I think I started taking my antidepressants again in time, because I am not depressed.

But I am sad at times.

I get sad thinking about how, a month ago, we were happy and expecting a baby.

Now I have no baby to expect, and a damaged husband, and we are focusing on getting through life one day at a time. We’re short on money, because we’ve been eating out a lot rather than trying to summon the energy to cook. We’re trying to stay cheerful for Owl, but it exhausts us and when he is asleep we collapse into introverted silence.

I had a midwife appointment booked for today. In a parallel universe, maybe I will cheerfully attend it.

I am worried about my husband. I am worried I won’t get pregnant soon, that I’ll never have a second child or that Owl will be half grown by the time I get pregnant, when what we really wanted was a playmate for him.

I am worried that I WILL get pregnant but that PH’s depression won’t improve and I will be functionally a single parent with two kids.

Thinking about life scares me right now.

So I’m hiding.

When Owl is asleep, I spend a lot of time re-reading and editing my NaNoWriMo story, which is now complete with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Working on it helps me dwell in a dream world where I become a rich author, can stay home to write all day, and support PH so that he doesn’t have to go to work in that poisonous environment. Instead he could coach children’s soft ball and soccer teams, umpire sporting events, practice his curling skills, and do the other things he loves to do but has no time or energy for.

If I could just become a paid writer… do what I love and need to do and get paid for it… stay home all day on the computer…

So I dream.

Even though I know that it is just a kind of a joke of a story and unlikely to ever make me a penny.

What I should be focusing is on reality – washing the dishes that PH can’t wash, folding clean laundry so we can stop living out of a hamper, and pursuing new dog training clients to replace the money we have frittered away.

I need to stop hiding in dreams.

Another One Of Those Dreams

Tags

dreams, sadness, wtf

I have no idea what brought this on, but I’m an emotional mess.

Last night (or this morning) I dreamed that I had adopted a child who (at the time of the dream) was about Owl’s age and with his complexion – blond hair, blue eyes, etc. I wasn’t me in the dream, which is common. My dreams usually involve me being a fictional person living a fictional life. Not sure why.

Anyhoozle, I had this adopted little boy, and he died in his sleep, from undetected cholera (despite having NONE of the symptoms of cholera, but whatever, subconscious).

I was heartbroken and inconsolable and spent, like, the next two days clutching him to me and wailing dramatically, refusing to let him go.

To add to my misery, the baby was fairly famous. Now, as the dream went on his exact identity fluxed several times. At one point, he was Daniel Radcliffe’s younger brother (I was looking for pictures of Danial Radcliffe as a baby to see if he looked like his brother as part of my grieving process). At another point, he was some kind of close relative of Hitler, moved to me for safety reasons.

In all cases he had been adopted from Europe, so I had to go back there for the funeral.

By the time we got there, they said he needed to have a closed casket because he had decomposed enough that he wouldn’t be cute with his casket open. This caused even more despair because I hadn’t expected that and lost the chance to look on his little face one last time (maybe that’s when I googled Daniel Radliffe’s baby photos? Dream is hazy).

It was a bad dream. 

Now, I haven’t been dwelling on the dream all day, but instead I find myself just dwelling on sad things.

I have caught myself thinking in graphic detail about the scene in Mama’s Going To Buy You A Mockingbird when the mother tells the children that their father has died, and imagining how I would weather a similar scenario.

I have caught myself going to pieces over a news article about a couple who adopted a child and had to give her back to her father, who never gave up custody.

Pretty much, anything sad my mind wanders to or is directed to, I dwell on, my empathy going into overdrive until I feel like it is happening to me.

This is apparently what happens when I try to go to bed early and catch up on lost sleep.

NaNoWriMo wore me out, but I WON DAMMIT !

Don’t worry, I am adamantly NOT thinking about that scene from Sophie’s choice.

That’s one way to get going in the morning…

Tags

dreams, night terrors

Time: 6:58 AM

Babby, while nursing in bed: “Wah. Wah!”

Perfect Husband, leaping horizontally out of bed like a fish out of the water: “Aaaaaaaaaaaah!”

Me (startled): “AAAAAAH!”

Perfect Husband, practically climbing onto the ceiling in panic: “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!”

I had to physically reach out and touch him and assure him that everything was ok. Neither of us have any idea what the hell he was dreaming about, but there must have been some pretty scary train spotting style babbies in there somewhere.

I’m obviously perfectly sane

Tags

dreams, pregnancy

Aaaaaand now I’m totally over it and feeling normal again. I can’t even begin to understand what my problem was yesterday. Except for the Jigglypuff part. I’m still enormous.

But I dreamt that we had to peel off all the wall paper in the baby’s room in order to do something to the undercoat (even though in real life it’s just paint, not paper) and a girl I went to school with in elementary school (who isn’t even on my Facebook) showed up acting all suspicious, and wouldn’t tell me why she was there. I knew her mother was having some kind of feud with MY mother, and she kept trampling on the paper and wrecking it and I was just freaking out sobbing with stress because my baby’s room was going to be totally ruined. And the girl from elementary was like “you’re CRAZY” and my mother was all like “I am so suing you and your mother too” to her.

What do you suppose that means?

And THEN I dreamed that I went to the OB who was like “you have the scariest yeast infection EVAR, take pills for a month at least” and then I forgot to book my next week’s appointment because Natalie from Mommy By Day was in town and was going to meet me at the mall so I was in a rush, but when I got to New York Fries there were only some imposingly tall and blond drug company reps in white lab coats and I was confused and made excuses and “lost” them in the crowd because I didn’t know what to do. Perfect Husband was there and ordered me a poutine, but I started getting text messages from the drug rep people going “where are you? We’re buying baby things!” and I didn’t know who they were or what to do and couldn’t relax.

So, clearly my mental state is MUCH BETTER today.

It can only get worse from here

Tags

dreams, insomnia, pregnancy, sleep, third trimester

Insomnia is back.

I’ve always struggled with insomnia – I remember being a little kid and crying at night because I was so tired and just couldn’t sleep. I would lay awake until one thirty in the morning, trying to keep myself occupied by remembering every song I knew, mentally going through every second of the Lion King starting from the opening credits, reciting poetry in my head…

That disappeared with pregnancy. I was going to sleep BEFORE Perfect Husband, at ten o clock at night or sometimes even earlier, and he was all like “Who are you, and what have you done with my wife??”

But it’s back now.

It’s becoming less comfortable to sleep. It’s not a blatant discomfort – I’m not in pain or anything – but I notice it. It’s harder to breath, and harder just to get settled. My belly only feels heavy when I’m lying down. It seems to affect the pull of gravity on my body, and I am beginning to feel like the world’s worst constructed Weeble. I toss and I turn, trying to get comfy, constantly being pulled face down by the weight in my midsection. The pregnancy doesn’t feel uncomfortable – when people ask if I’m getting uncomfortable I say “no, not at all” because except when I try and bend at the waist, I feel pretty normal. But sleeping just isn’t happening.

And when I do nod off I’m having crazy dreams. Last night, in between restless awakenings, I went for pizza with friends but we had difficulty in paying the bill, then I had one of my other friends sleep over like when we were kids and I took the fetus out to show him to her but he looked like a baby sea turtle. Then I went to stay with some crazy Jenny McCarthy type man who wrote a whole book about how your child isn’t developmentally delayed (except he used the word “tard” in his book) –  you’re just not trying hard enough. He had a large family one of which was clearly a developmentally delayed young man whom he put tremendous amounts of pressure on to memorize things that he didn’t really understand, so he could show off for the video cameras how “cured” he was. I began to raise objections, and developed a friendship with the developmentally delayed son, and the guy decided to murder me. So I contacted Perfect Husband secretly and snuck out of the house, cleverly meeting him at a brothel disguised as one of the workers (clearly I was not pregnant in this dream). He was all bemused because he didn’t know what was going on, but was clearly like “if Carol wants to dress up like a prostitute and meet me at a brothel, I’ll play that game…” When I got him into a room alone, I was about to explain about the crazy man and his wanting to kill me when crazy man burst in, all “AHA!” and we spent the rest of my tossy-turny night trying to escape from the guy.

I feel like I got no sleep at all, but I’m avoiding sleeping in because that can only make things worse.

At least I got a prenatal massage today. Maybe it’ll relax me into sleepy blissfulness tonight. My massage therapist, by the way, was fascinated by the concept  of a diaper service which apparently she had never heard of before, and thought it was the most amazing idea ever.

What, already??

Tags

doctors, dreams, nursery, pregnancy, preparation

Monday was my 30 week OB appointment. There was a different doctor there that day. Instead of the usual Monday doctor, a friendly and somewhat hazy lady who tends to wander off on tangents a lot while we nod and smile, there was a brusque Chinese (one of those many Chinese names that means “penis” in English slang) doctor man. He came in and had me lie on the table while he whipped out a tape measure, stuck one end of it down my pants onto my vagina, and the other end up between my boobs while prodding vigorously at my belly. Then he bounced my uterus enthusiastically like a kid trying out a new basketball, to get an idea of how the baby was lying. He was running behind (we were the first appointment after lunch but he started us half an hour late because he’d been off delivering a baby) so you could tell he wanted to get through us quickly. Everything he did was swift and hurried.

You’d think I’d hate him, but I actually liked him.

While he was in a hurry, he didn’t hurry us. He asked if we’d had any concerns the last two weeks, and when I told him that my rash was getting worse, instead of better, on the new steroid cream they had given me, he asked to see and then showed great sympathy, noting in my chart that it was “clearly demarcated” and “very prominent” and advising me to discontinue the cream and try an anti-fungal cream instead.

When he measured my uterus, he did something Dr. Hazy never had – he told me the measurement (31 inches). When he bounced my babby like a ball, he told me where he felt hands and feet, and grabbed my hands and put them on my lower abdomen, telling me where exactly to feel the head. Then he flipped through my chart and noticed they hadn’t done a urine culture and sensitivity, or a TSH test yet. Then he asked if we had any questions, and when I asked how overdue I would be allowed to go before they induced me, he told me seven days and then worked out the date – the 6th of September. Then he explained WHY the limit was seven days, while writing out requisition forms for the tests they’d missed.

So really, rushed and rough as he was, he was actually better in some ways than kind Dr. Hazy.

So I’m 30 weeks along, with a uterus 31 cm long, a head-down baby , a possibly fungal rash, and my baby will be born by September 6th.

Where did the time go? I only have 10 more weeks until the baby is born. The nursery isn’t even close to prepared – it’s still a pile of miscellany on and around a bare futon and a rickety wooden shelf that could give you splinters just looking at it, and it smells like my cat’s litter box. We have a pile of donated baby clothes, but they are in cardboard boxes in our living room. We have no dresser for me to put them in. We have no change pad for said dresser. We have no car seat. If it weren’t for Perfect Girlfriend sending me receiving blankets, baby socks, and breast pads when I was 12 weeks along, we wouldn’t even have those vital things.

We’re waiting for the government to actually approve my EI claim and start sending us money. We’ve been on a single income all month, and while Perfect Husband says we’re okay, I just KNOW we’re eating into savings – savings that should be used on baby dressers and car seats and paying that house assessment in October. The nursery is waiting on one of my friends, an incredibly talented person who is planning increasingly elaborate things for our nursery, but who works full time. She’s going to take some time off, probably next month, and come over here and paint but in the meantime the nursery remains Gulag Grey and filled with junk.

I can feel myself growing increasingly more edgy. I’m starting to lose sleep. Suddenly that moment in Marley and Me, where Jen makes John go out in the middle of the night for baby socks because she can’t sleep thinking about the baby’s naked toes being cold, even though she’s only seven months along… doesn’t seem funny to me any more.

10 more weeks – and we still haven’t set up a regular read-to-the-fetus time every night, the way that I thought we would have done back at the five month mark. I’m not really eating right. In fact, I’m ashamed to tell you how often I forget to even take a prenatal vitamin. It’s like that dream I had last year. I think we’ve been floating through in a vague sense of denial, or possibly we’re just afraid to really acknowledge the baby’s reality with dressers or scheduled reading times or videos of my kicking belly, because we’re afraid something will go wrong and we’ll be left with a decorated nursery and no child to put in it. I don’t know.

All I know is my pregnancy is slipping away, and I’m starting to panic.

At least this one didn’t croak on me

Tags

baby, dreams

I had another baby last night.

I have babies on a regular basis. I’m pretty sure this is my fourth at least within the last year. I’m THAT prolific.

In my dreams, the babies are always boys. I have never had a girl baby. I doubt that it’s prophetic, but what it might actually say about my psyche is a mystery to me. While the physical sensations or being pregnant, or the baby nursing, feel very real (I never usually have physical sensation in dreams, only in these dreams do I feel) the plot is usually something ridiculously hilarious. Like, baby William leaps off the table and into his crib like a particularly spritely young gibbon. Or Perfect Husband insists on naming the baby Beau. Or I panic, thinking my baby is dead, only to realize that it is actually a Baby Think It Over doll whose batteries have died, leaving me with an embarassed feeling that I made all this fuss over something that was just a doll. Or I leave the baby on the back of a couch and it dies, and everyone thinks I’m being rather obsessive and quite boring when I just won’t let it go.

Last night was the next instalment in the Bizarre Baby saga. So, last night’s baby was delivered successfully (I usually lose consciousness during this part, reviving when it is over. Since I often do pass out when in pain, this isn’t all that surprising to those around me) and I even got him nursing with some help from my mother. But then, driving him home and looking at him (suddenly he was a robust 18 month old with freckles and a lumpy looking birthmark/tumour) I was struck by the fact that I had missed my whole pregnancy. I had been so focused on the stresses of my job, and getting the new house in order, that I had forgotten to enjoy and savour my pregnancy. I hadn’t eaten right. I hadn’t sung to the baby or played music for it while it kicked in response. I had just let the time get away from me, and now I had this baby who was clearly all freckled and tumorous because of my deficient prenatal attention, and I couldn’t do it over again. I felt rather disappointed by my baby. Clearly he would turn out to be mentally deficient because I had not given him the attention he deserved while still in the womb. Now I would be stuck with this mediocre baby that I hadn’t even really taken any notice of until he decided to be born. I considered revoking his name and replacing it with my second choice name, so that when I had another kid that I had constructed properly from the womb outwards, HE could have the “real” name.

… Maybe I shouldn’t have kids.

Is there any way to psychoanalyze this which doesn’t result in “you would be a terrible mother and are a generally bad person”?