Dog Days

Holy COW you guys! It is so hot here that I may melt. Literally.

While it would be nice if fat actually liquidated at a certain (achievable) outdoor temperature, I may have to stick to It's Too Damn Hot To Eat as my 'diet' plan instead of relying on good ol' Mister Sun to melt away my butt.

So, I feel better. I really do think that I have some level of cyclical depression. After feeling almost immobile last week, I woke up Saturday morning and cleaned the house so that I wouldn't have to come back from our overnight trip and walk into a mess. I was clear-headed and felt positive.

Other than the angst and exhaustion of having The Man gone for 3 days and 2 nights, I've continued to feel pretty good. My house is tidy. The Child and I kept our bickering to a bare (heat-induced) minimum. We managed to eat real, healthy food without outside assistance. Good times.

Now, if only I could figure out this whole job 'thing', I'd be riding high.

Snippets

The Man went to a mini-retreat over the weekend. I think that it was helpful to him, but not quite the epiphany he was hoping for.

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This week is his first long business trip since I found out. I feel a bit fragile. I have read the e-mails. I know what he would normally be doing. It's up to him to not only not contact strangers for sex, but to do the right thing because he wants to - not because he thinks he'll get in trouble.

Just like every other stage in this process, it's all up to him.

I love him and I hope that he is successful. I really hate that all I can do is sit and wait.

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This whole process is exhausting.

Slogging Through

Ya'll, I think I'm depressed. Wait, scratch that - I know that I'm depressed, but I think that this bout might be a bit more serious that I originally thought.

I've battled depression since my twenties. I had episodes then when it was just too much work to get out of bed. I have since learned to control it better, and even to occasionally head it off. This one's a doozie, though. I have insomnia, but can't wake up in the morning. I have headaches and feel fuzzy-brained most of the time. My temper's on a hair-trigger. I just can't seem to get anything done.

I was attributing a lot of this to a combination of grief and PMS. While those are both valid concerns in my life, neither can completely explain the absolute mess of my house, the sink full of dirty dishes and the fact that I can't keep a thought in my head for more than 5 minutes.

I'm wildly disorganized right now. Me. The list maker. The planner. The over-scheduled whirlwind who can't say no. Well, I still can't say no, but I don't remember to do whatever it was, either. Yesterday, I agreed to do a massage for a friend. I told The Man about it when he got home. In the next 2 hours, I proceeded to forget about it no fewer than 3 times, and almost forgot to get up and leave not 5 minutes after The Man reminded me. Tonight, I glared at the mess in my home and thought 'it's a good thing that all I have to do tomorrow is sleep and maybe clean up while The Baby is at parent's day out... hey, maybe our friends will want to go swimming tomorrow afternoon...' In actuality, I have a completely full day tomorrow. No time for sleeping. No time for afternoon swimming.

Then there's the crying. I keep crying. Sappy moments on t.v. Poorly written paperbacks. Lying next to The Baby for two minutes while she drifts back to sleep. I'm like a faucet over here! Of course, the crying makes the headaches worse. Yay.

I'm not sure what to do about this, folks. I'm not convinced that I can snap out of this one by speaking sternly with myself or forcing myself out of the house. Other than counseling (with a therapist; not a doctor who can prescribe the big guns), I've never sought professional help for depression before. I don't even know who to call. Then there's co-pays and prescriptions. We can't afford this stuff right now!

Oi. I really wish I could sleep.

Mired or Just Tired?

Today is a weird day. It's the first day of my first period since the miscarriage. While I welcome the renewal that this brings to my body and I am thankful for the sign that my poor system is recovering, it still sucks.

I have been dealt a whopper of a case of PMS this go-round, and I have happily flung it around like monkey poo. Let me tell you - it's been just about as welcome as flung poop. Wildly moody, completely irrational, greasily acne-covered, bloated... the list goes on and on.

Oh, don't let me forget to add 'Itchin' For A Fight', because that's exactly where I am right now. Last weekend, I sniped, snipped and griped at The Man until we (ummmm, me) had a full-blown meltdown. This one was a heartbreaking melange of my deepest fears and most volcanic rages. I spewed forth a diatribe that started with 'I HATE that you have an addiction that involves sex. Now every time you turn me down, all I can see is the list of people that you practically begged for sex.' It continued on with 'I've sublimated what I want sexually for 18 years and now I find out that you're giving it away to every whore on the internet with a digital camera. I see. So it's not that you don't want sex, it's just that you don't want it with me.' I even ended it with a rousing round of 'well, maybe it's time that we both find people who are more interested in meeting our needs.' It would seem that I have a bit of truly poisonous anger lurking just beneath my surface.

The man doesn't even know how to begin to respond to all of this. He's so busy trying to make his life look the way that he thinks it should. He's the one tap dancing now. I'm the one raving about how I feel and how hard this is for me. He's doing his steps and going to his meetings and presenting the front of 'I've got this. It's easy-peasy.'

I wish that in this, he could just be a little bit less male. I wish that he could say 'I had a hard day. I thought about acting out' or 'the step I'm working on makes me feel like a complete asshole'... but he doesn't say those things, and I am left feeling like an overbearing lunatic who wears her heart on her forehead and airs her dirty laundry on the internet.

I just don't know, ya'll. I don't want to give up on The Man or our marriage. I do know that I'm tired of feeling like this. I know that I'm tired of worrying that the worst is yet to come. I say that I want to move forward. I complain that I don't know how. I seem to be living out the definition of insanity.

Don't Want To

Ya'll, I am FREAKING OUT. The next step forward is just more awful than I can contemplate right now. Let me just tell you now that this is about to get graphic and awful... again... I couldn't throw away my baby. It was more than I could bear. I kept as much tissue as I could (it's in the freezer), and now I have to deal with it.

My mama found a box for me, and with the help of a friend she found some liturgy to read. I just don't know if I can handle something so structured.

This baby didn't make it any farther along it's journey than the others, and I didn't have anything to bury with them. It's my body that created this situation, and it feels weird to put the focus on this particular pregnancy when it shouldn't have been any different than the others.

Today I contemplated building a fire in our chiminea and saying goodbye on my own, but I don't want to presume that The Man doesn't need to be there... maybe it's important to him to say good bye as well... I don't know what he wants, and that worries me. He's been so busy lately that he's not here even when he's around. I'm working overtime at not freaking out. This is how his addictive cycle starts. He lets himself compartmentalize in order to get through what needs to be done for work, and then he's able to keep compartmentalizing and rationalizing... but it's not my battle to fight. It's his. All I can do is be a living reminder of why he wants to recover. Of course, I'm so whacked out right now that I'd pretty much kill for an addiction of my own to retreat into... o.k. fine. I don't really want that... but I'd dearly love a reason to act out.

I feel lost right now. I feel desperate to claim control over SOMETHING. Anything. I want to go back to work. I want to contribute to our family and this world. I want to stop losing my temper with my daughter. I want to get some sleep that feels like rest. I want to stop worrying that The Man will fall into addictive patterns. I want to feel as confident as I keep telling everyone that I am.

What the fuck am I going to do with the baby?

Making Room

There is not a lot of room for grief in our society. Instead of offering you a place to be sad, most people offer platitudes (it happens for a reason) and reasons why you should have perked up by now (you still have your healthy child).

To a large degree, most folks seem to have lost the ability to empathize. A good friend of mine lost her brother to leukemia when we were in our early twenties. As grief does, it would occasionally wash over her in waves. Friends would ask her what was wrong. 'I'm sad about my brother.' 'Wasn't that, like, last year?'

I had a massage client once who was trying to grieve a loss. She had been stoic for so long because showing her pain meant listening to 'well meaning' persons lecture her on how good her life still was. I made space for her grief, and she cried through her session. It was one of the most wonderful moments of my career. I felt blessed to have been a part of her process.

My own grief has felt like a cartoon amoeba. A little bit taller than me, and shadowing my every move. Sometimes It just hangs out near me and tickles the edge of my awareness with it's cilia. Other times it gloms on to part of me, but leaves me able to function. Yesterday, it engulfed me. It was hard to breathe and I cried every time that I slowed down even briefly. It left me hollow-eyed, unable to sleep and drained. 

I don't have time for this. The Toddler is an emotional sponge. She has taken my grief and turned it into endless whining tantrums and sleepless anguish. Even now she's glued to the floor of her room with her face pressed into the crack under her door BEGGING me to let her out. Protesting furiously that she can't sleep. She's been there for half an hour. I, on the other hand, am so tired that I can barely function. Yesterday, I fell asleep on her floor while she played boisterously. I didn't even wake up fully when The Man came home and took her. Today, after a mostly sleepless night, I broke down crying and begged her for sleep. She patted my face, hugged me, and announced that she wanted to 'go watch t.v. other room'.

Where is my room to grieve? How do I make the space to heal? 

Just to Clarify

When I look at what I've written for this blog, it seems like The Man isn't here. He is. He's loving us and taking care of us and doing the best that he can - just like me. He's still going to meetings. He still answers any questions that I have and allows me the space to act crazy as I try to work through all of this.

This blog is my story. I don't feel like it's my place to try and tell his story. Not that you asked... I just wanted to give him some credit for the good things that he does... especially since this is my space to bash him for the bad ones...