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Jun. 8th, 2008 12:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altarflameI've become really ambivalent about livejournal and fantasized about deleting my lj without a backwards glance. I was writing about this in a letter to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rainingkisses when I realized that it's because I don't feel like I can be honest here anymore.
I don't lie. But I don't give the whole story, either; I don't have the same time or energy to give to blogging that I used to and so it usually seems like a lot to get into to tell the rest.
Basically, I've had really bad, sudden spurts of anger that are so deep and viscious that they freak me out, for several months now. Times that I have to grit my teeth and curse under my breath. I've never gotten angry like that in my life. Ever. I'm EXTREMELY NOT ANGRY under normal circumstances.
I have horrible recurring nightmares two to three times per week, for several months now. Really bad nightmares. I'm scared to go to sleep pretty often. They're all themed the same way.
I'm bursting with short story ideas. They flow out rapidly whenever I get a chance to write one. And they're gripping and engaging and well-written and nothing like anything I'd normally write. Or read. They're "not to my taste" and more than once I've said, "I don't know where these stories are coming from". They're about suicide as a freeing, liberating experience, or self-mutilation, neither of which I have any experience with, among other similar veins.
And, ok, all mothers get overwhelmed, right? And I have a lot on my plate, right? Right, except that normally, I DON'T get overwhelmed nearly as easily as other people do, that's why I'm generally speaking a very happy person with several small, closely spaced kids, and we do things like take road trips and go out to dinner with all of them regularly. But I get overwhelmed sometimes, now. In the past two months especially, I get deeply, crazily overwhelmed to where I feel hopeless, and helpless, and miserable. Of course there have been times in the past when Isaac wouldn't sleep for what seemed like a week straight or when we just added a new baby that I had that hopeless miserable feeling for the length of a crying jag or "the witching hour" moms complain about right before dinner, but now that feeling can last an entire day and I have to just go through the motions. And those days can come four in a week. Sometimes one right after the other, "still" rather than "again". While by normal standards we don't have any help, by OUR standards we have more help than ever before, as Grant Sr and Teresa are both willing to stay with the oldest four for an afternoon and my sister has re-opened periodic babysitting as an option, including Elise. Also, Grant has a much more family-oriented schedule than he did before. And, Elise is over a year old, all the other ones are a year older, as I'm writing this I haven't heart peep one out of any of them, they're all on the other side of the house playing independantly. It just seems like things should seem easier now, not harder. But they're harder anyway.
It's hit me as a realization that should have been more obvious, that I'm screwed up in the head from our last year and a half. Or longer.
Does anyone realize how hard I tried to have JAKE naturally? Driving an hour north to the birth center for every appointment, health food store supplements for my platelets, bananas every freaking day getting choked down for my platelets, overdue by weeks, THREE FUCKING DAYS OF HARD LABOR? Jake. That botched up surgery with the lopsided extra long scar and the screwed up bladder and him getting an infection and ending up in the NICU, in the NICU during a hurricane, hematoma on my spine and waiting to see if they'd have to operate on my BACK, that was then. All that was separate and before my deliberations with Elise's pregnancy even started, calling and emailing and calling and emailing DOZENS and dozens of people and thinking we'd fly someone in who had a stroke at the last minute, wanting so badly to keep her out of the NICU where Isaac and Jake had ended up, wanting to not die on an operating table after everyone told me I should never have another c-section, 3 should be the maximum, we sold my old car. We had a yard sale. We put our whole tax check towards it and cleared it with a dozen different clients and had people going to check places out for us, and drove 3 days to live two months in the SLEET, the freaking snow and hail and sleet with 3 layers of clothes on everyone in an apartment where people called the police if Jake ran across the floor....with my stupid little bracelets on that meant people were rooting for me and my stupid little candles all lined up on the dresser and this STUPID FUCKING BLOG for the whole world to watch...working on myself, affirmations, blessingway and belly cast. It looks different from this angle, let me tell you.
Nancy thinks I should be a midwife. I laugh at her when she says it. Everytime I see a baby born on tv or hear a birth story or read a birth story I'm some kind of wreck. I'm not going to live in that headspace as a career.
All that stuff with Elise? All that "Everything that makes a person an individual destroyed", will she open her eyes, "Mrs Walker you need to wait out here the nurse will come out and explain things to you in a minute" stuff? I've never hurt like that before. I've never wanted to take pain killers to dull emotional pain. I've never slept to escape hurt. I've never felt like the whole world was just turned upside down and couldn't be real. I feel like she took years off of my life, sitting up nights watching for seizures and spending the night at the hospital for a fever and...I don't know what to say about it. But it was so all consuming and deep and difficult that I totally ignored my own physical pain until it was debilitating, and then I kept trudging on with therapies for her and lessons for A and A and carting everyone to ballet and karate and AWANA all for a whole month while I was actually DYING. I have paper journals expressing my confusion and depression that I felt I was dying, but how could that be, what would be causing it, the dermatogist said my moles weren't cancer and the surgeon said my hernia wasn't intestinal and the md said my thyroid was fine...I remember Laura acting worried, saying I was pale and me telling her, one day you'll come over and I'll have my hand over my forehead and I'll be singing "Swing Low Sweet Chariot". AND I WAS RIGHT! HOW COULD I HAVE BEEN RIGHT? What a lot of nonsense to have actually been dying, but yeah, I waited until two more days would have been, you know, death. Because of Elise. I couldn't leave Elise and go to the hospital. Flawed weird mother logic, but who else was going to watch her for seizures at night, make her appointments, do her therapies all day long, nurse her and wear her and love her and *make sure she was ok*? I never had any idea if she even WAS ok.
So yeah. Thinking I might die in THAT surgery, having my surgeon tell me he was really surprised by how well it went because he thought I was going to die or at least need a colostomy bag, but that was weeks later after I woke up in the ICU full of tubes and surrounded by nurses who were constantly looking at the heart monitors with worried expressions. Grant brought Annie to see me and I was so upset because I couldn't stay all the way awake, I couldn't smile and talk normal and I could tell she was fraid of all the STUFF...
Until I came home, pale and hobbling and swollen, to see Elise for the first time in 10 days, and have her BIGGER, doing new things, amivalent to me, and me unable to lift or hold her for WEEKS afterward. Just yelling for someone else to come whenever she raised her arms to me, or fell and got hurt. Asking people to lower her into my lap so she could nurse. Trying to somehow let down the wall I'd put up in my mind, against all of my kids, while they acted nervous about me, scared of my belly, and asked other people for anything they needed. I waited to be able to go to the bathroom and panicked whenever it was hard and got my wound packed regularly for the second time in a year and, you know, sometimes there would be really incredible moments when I was so glad to be alive.
I found gray hairs for the first time last year. I know I can die, now. Sometimes I feel like I'm living on borrowed time, like I'm dead in some alternate reality, like this is all very surreal. Laura told me a month after I was discharged that I still wasn't really back home yet. I get bitter now, periodically, whereas prior to 2007 I couldn't even relate to the idea of bitterness, and thought it was almost comical. When I imagine ever getting pregnant again - like through a condom even though I'm not ovulating, or post-vasectomy as the .whatever% - I'm sad to find that I'd really wish I were more capable of considering an abortion, and that I WILL NOT ever hope for a natural birth again, period. That is over for me.
I don't give myself a lot of credit, you know, it doesn't make sense to me that I should be "having problems" now, when "everything is fine". I mean, you know, Elise - she walks and talks! She figures out problems, her attachments seem in order, she's beautiful and advanced in all skill sets across the board. And me...I'm scarred up and have to wear this stupid thing, and I might have problems down the line or need future surgery...ok, I'm going to stop with the qualifiers because they undermine the whole "but basically I'm fine!" thing, don't they? We are basically fine. And way better off financially, we own a house! We have new cars! We have no debt!
I don't know why it's so hard to just wipe the sweat off my forehead, go "Whew! That was all close!" and then move on with my life. But it is. I mean apparently it is. I move on as best I can, I play with my kids, we go places, they make me laugh, I have a sex drive and a very happy marriage and I cook good food, albeit a little less often.
But I have these nightmares. And gray hairs. And this awareness of how often I go to the bathroom. And this bitterness. And when I start to (not lj, creatively) write, really grotesque psychodrama spills out onto the page. I get angry, I get overwhelmed.
Grant and I were both really thrown for a loop by Isaac being admitted and having surgery last month. So soon after Brian's seizure had me up at Miami Children's with Laura. Nothing in this life seems certain to me, not one little bit. Assuming made an ass out of me, ha ha ha. When Isaac was back home and vomiting green bile and we were on the phone with the surgeon in the middle of the night trying to figure out whether he'd need to be rushed back and opened up for real (not just laparoscopic)...you wanna talk about nervous wrecks. Grant was nauseus, he left and came back, he paced and cried and he's been the strong one, you know, for me to lean on for over a year now.
That is a big focus of my thoughts lately: strength. Everyone says I'm so strong, but I find myself feeling very burdened by my own standards. I am smothering under my own inability to send the kids to bed without being read to. I sometimes LONG to be able to drop Ananda, Aaron and Isaac off at public school without a second thought every day, and go pick them up 7 hours later, educated, excercised and socialized and ready for some time to veg out in front of the tv. I didn't snap at the kids when Elise was in the NICU. Because they were far from home and had just had me dissapear into the hospital for 6 days. I didn't snap at them or stop cooking them good dinners when I was in terrible, TERRIBLE pain and septic, because Daddy was gone working almost all the time and we'd had a new baby and they deserve _______. I felt guilty that Ananda missed ballet during my hospitalization and recovery, because it made the recital really hard for her at the end of the year. I fantasize often, lately, of making Jake and Elise go to sleep in their own damn beds whether they like it or not, when *I* say it's bedtime.
And I have a BIG pet peeve, lately, about attachment parents who try to say it's easier to AP. Because it IS NOT. It's natural. It has benefits for mom, too. It's better for the kids, and it is worth it, but it is also work. I feel like AP'ers are trying to sell AP, so they want to make a case for how convenient it is. Like the Christians who try to sell God with loud bands, fun services, cake afterwards, promises of riches if you have faith, and nary a mention of repentance or Hell in sight.
Anyway. I don't know who I am anymore. I'm having an identity crisis. I can't hold a train of thought. All of my judgements and ideals seem fluid. My faith in God is forever changed: I believe He's there, and in charge, and listening, and I even believe He loves me, but I also understand in a very concrete and somewhat infuriating way that what He has planned may not be what I want, like, or feel prepared to deal with. So I will still pray, and worship, and be thankful, but I get kind of resigned and confused about the whole "asking for what you want" part of it. I still feel like I was led to Boston, I really think he "used" Elise, after having so, so many people tell me that she and other's generosity in reference to her sparked or reignited their faith in God. But I have some issues with being used that way, I can't deny it. I try not to, I don't want to, we talk about it, let's say that :p I feel burdened by being someone who would never stop believing and trusting in the same way I feel burdened by being a mother that mothers through it all: I wish very much sometimes, lately, that I could be like Mindy or Jackie and just drop them off somewhere for the afternoon and then come back a week later to get them. Or even a parent with options like my mother had, to drop the kids off at a Grandparent's house for the weekend. I wonder what it must be like to be a Christian who can just renounce it all when the going gets tough. I wonder how thin I can freaking stretch, without rips.
rainingkisses when I realized that it's because I don't feel like I can be honest here anymore. I don't lie. But I don't give the whole story, either; I don't have the same time or energy to give to blogging that I used to and so it usually seems like a lot to get into to tell the rest.
Basically, I've had really bad, sudden spurts of anger that are so deep and viscious that they freak me out, for several months now. Times that I have to grit my teeth and curse under my breath. I've never gotten angry like that in my life. Ever. I'm EXTREMELY NOT ANGRY under normal circumstances.
I have horrible recurring nightmares two to three times per week, for several months now. Really bad nightmares. I'm scared to go to sleep pretty often. They're all themed the same way.
I'm bursting with short story ideas. They flow out rapidly whenever I get a chance to write one. And they're gripping and engaging and well-written and nothing like anything I'd normally write. Or read. They're "not to my taste" and more than once I've said, "I don't know where these stories are coming from". They're about suicide as a freeing, liberating experience, or self-mutilation, neither of which I have any experience with, among other similar veins.
And, ok, all mothers get overwhelmed, right? And I have a lot on my plate, right? Right, except that normally, I DON'T get overwhelmed nearly as easily as other people do, that's why I'm generally speaking a very happy person with several small, closely spaced kids, and we do things like take road trips and go out to dinner with all of them regularly. But I get overwhelmed sometimes, now. In the past two months especially, I get deeply, crazily overwhelmed to where I feel hopeless, and helpless, and miserable. Of course there have been times in the past when Isaac wouldn't sleep for what seemed like a week straight or when we just added a new baby that I had that hopeless miserable feeling for the length of a crying jag or "the witching hour" moms complain about right before dinner, but now that feeling can last an entire day and I have to just go through the motions. And those days can come four in a week. Sometimes one right after the other, "still" rather than "again". While by normal standards we don't have any help, by OUR standards we have more help than ever before, as Grant Sr and Teresa are both willing to stay with the oldest four for an afternoon and my sister has re-opened periodic babysitting as an option, including Elise. Also, Grant has a much more family-oriented schedule than he did before. And, Elise is over a year old, all the other ones are a year older, as I'm writing this I haven't heart peep one out of any of them, they're all on the other side of the house playing independantly. It just seems like things should seem easier now, not harder. But they're harder anyway.
It's hit me as a realization that should have been more obvious, that I'm screwed up in the head from our last year and a half. Or longer.
Does anyone realize how hard I tried to have JAKE naturally? Driving an hour north to the birth center for every appointment, health food store supplements for my platelets, bananas every freaking day getting choked down for my platelets, overdue by weeks, THREE FUCKING DAYS OF HARD LABOR? Jake. That botched up surgery with the lopsided extra long scar and the screwed up bladder and him getting an infection and ending up in the NICU, in the NICU during a hurricane, hematoma on my spine and waiting to see if they'd have to operate on my BACK, that was then. All that was separate and before my deliberations with Elise's pregnancy even started, calling and emailing and calling and emailing DOZENS and dozens of people and thinking we'd fly someone in who had a stroke at the last minute, wanting so badly to keep her out of the NICU where Isaac and Jake had ended up, wanting to not die on an operating table after everyone told me I should never have another c-section, 3 should be the maximum, we sold my old car. We had a yard sale. We put our whole tax check towards it and cleared it with a dozen different clients and had people going to check places out for us, and drove 3 days to live two months in the SLEET, the freaking snow and hail and sleet with 3 layers of clothes on everyone in an apartment where people called the police if Jake ran across the floor....with my stupid little bracelets on that meant people were rooting for me and my stupid little candles all lined up on the dresser and this STUPID FUCKING BLOG for the whole world to watch...working on myself, affirmations, blessingway and belly cast. It looks different from this angle, let me tell you.
Nancy thinks I should be a midwife. I laugh at her when she says it. Everytime I see a baby born on tv or hear a birth story or read a birth story I'm some kind of wreck. I'm not going to live in that headspace as a career.
All that stuff with Elise? All that "Everything that makes a person an individual destroyed", will she open her eyes, "Mrs Walker you need to wait out here the nurse will come out and explain things to you in a minute" stuff? I've never hurt like that before. I've never wanted to take pain killers to dull emotional pain. I've never slept to escape hurt. I've never felt like the whole world was just turned upside down and couldn't be real. I feel like she took years off of my life, sitting up nights watching for seizures and spending the night at the hospital for a fever and...I don't know what to say about it. But it was so all consuming and deep and difficult that I totally ignored my own physical pain until it was debilitating, and then I kept trudging on with therapies for her and lessons for A and A and carting everyone to ballet and karate and AWANA all for a whole month while I was actually DYING. I have paper journals expressing my confusion and depression that I felt I was dying, but how could that be, what would be causing it, the dermatogist said my moles weren't cancer and the surgeon said my hernia wasn't intestinal and the md said my thyroid was fine...I remember Laura acting worried, saying I was pale and me telling her, one day you'll come over and I'll have my hand over my forehead and I'll be singing "Swing Low Sweet Chariot". AND I WAS RIGHT! HOW COULD I HAVE BEEN RIGHT? What a lot of nonsense to have actually been dying, but yeah, I waited until two more days would have been, you know, death. Because of Elise. I couldn't leave Elise and go to the hospital. Flawed weird mother logic, but who else was going to watch her for seizures at night, make her appointments, do her therapies all day long, nurse her and wear her and love her and *make sure she was ok*? I never had any idea if she even WAS ok.
So yeah. Thinking I might die in THAT surgery, having my surgeon tell me he was really surprised by how well it went because he thought I was going to die or at least need a colostomy bag, but that was weeks later after I woke up in the ICU full of tubes and surrounded by nurses who were constantly looking at the heart monitors with worried expressions. Grant brought Annie to see me and I was so upset because I couldn't stay all the way awake, I couldn't smile and talk normal and I could tell she was fraid of all the STUFF...
Until I came home, pale and hobbling and swollen, to see Elise for the first time in 10 days, and have her BIGGER, doing new things, amivalent to me, and me unable to lift or hold her for WEEKS afterward. Just yelling for someone else to come whenever she raised her arms to me, or fell and got hurt. Asking people to lower her into my lap so she could nurse. Trying to somehow let down the wall I'd put up in my mind, against all of my kids, while they acted nervous about me, scared of my belly, and asked other people for anything they needed. I waited to be able to go to the bathroom and panicked whenever it was hard and got my wound packed regularly for the second time in a year and, you know, sometimes there would be really incredible moments when I was so glad to be alive.
I found gray hairs for the first time last year. I know I can die, now. Sometimes I feel like I'm living on borrowed time, like I'm dead in some alternate reality, like this is all very surreal. Laura told me a month after I was discharged that I still wasn't really back home yet. I get bitter now, periodically, whereas prior to 2007 I couldn't even relate to the idea of bitterness, and thought it was almost comical. When I imagine ever getting pregnant again - like through a condom even though I'm not ovulating, or post-vasectomy as the .whatever% - I'm sad to find that I'd really wish I were more capable of considering an abortion, and that I WILL NOT ever hope for a natural birth again, period. That is over for me.
I don't give myself a lot of credit, you know, it doesn't make sense to me that I should be "having problems" now, when "everything is fine". I mean, you know, Elise - she walks and talks! She figures out problems, her attachments seem in order, she's beautiful and advanced in all skill sets across the board. And me...I'm scarred up and have to wear this stupid thing, and I might have problems down the line or need future surgery...ok, I'm going to stop with the qualifiers because they undermine the whole "but basically I'm fine!" thing, don't they? We are basically fine. And way better off financially, we own a house! We have new cars! We have no debt!
I don't know why it's so hard to just wipe the sweat off my forehead, go "Whew! That was all close!" and then move on with my life. But it is. I mean apparently it is. I move on as best I can, I play with my kids, we go places, they make me laugh, I have a sex drive and a very happy marriage and I cook good food, albeit a little less often.
But I have these nightmares. And gray hairs. And this awareness of how often I go to the bathroom. And this bitterness. And when I start to (not lj, creatively) write, really grotesque psychodrama spills out onto the page. I get angry, I get overwhelmed.
Grant and I were both really thrown for a loop by Isaac being admitted and having surgery last month. So soon after Brian's seizure had me up at Miami Children's with Laura. Nothing in this life seems certain to me, not one little bit. Assuming made an ass out of me, ha ha ha. When Isaac was back home and vomiting green bile and we were on the phone with the surgeon in the middle of the night trying to figure out whether he'd need to be rushed back and opened up for real (not just laparoscopic)...you wanna talk about nervous wrecks. Grant was nauseus, he left and came back, he paced and cried and he's been the strong one, you know, for me to lean on for over a year now.
That is a big focus of my thoughts lately: strength. Everyone says I'm so strong, but I find myself feeling very burdened by my own standards. I am smothering under my own inability to send the kids to bed without being read to. I sometimes LONG to be able to drop Ananda, Aaron and Isaac off at public school without a second thought every day, and go pick them up 7 hours later, educated, excercised and socialized and ready for some time to veg out in front of the tv. I didn't snap at the kids when Elise was in the NICU. Because they were far from home and had just had me dissapear into the hospital for 6 days. I didn't snap at them or stop cooking them good dinners when I was in terrible, TERRIBLE pain and septic, because Daddy was gone working almost all the time and we'd had a new baby and they deserve _______. I felt guilty that Ananda missed ballet during my hospitalization and recovery, because it made the recital really hard for her at the end of the year. I fantasize often, lately, of making Jake and Elise go to sleep in their own damn beds whether they like it or not, when *I* say it's bedtime.
And I have a BIG pet peeve, lately, about attachment parents who try to say it's easier to AP. Because it IS NOT. It's natural. It has benefits for mom, too. It's better for the kids, and it is worth it, but it is also work. I feel like AP'ers are trying to sell AP, so they want to make a case for how convenient it is. Like the Christians who try to sell God with loud bands, fun services, cake afterwards, promises of riches if you have faith, and nary a mention of repentance or Hell in sight.
Anyway. I don't know who I am anymore. I'm having an identity crisis. I can't hold a train of thought. All of my judgements and ideals seem fluid. My faith in God is forever changed: I believe He's there, and in charge, and listening, and I even believe He loves me, but I also understand in a very concrete and somewhat infuriating way that what He has planned may not be what I want, like, or feel prepared to deal with. So I will still pray, and worship, and be thankful, but I get kind of resigned and confused about the whole "asking for what you want" part of it. I still feel like I was led to Boston, I really think he "used" Elise, after having so, so many people tell me that she and other's generosity in reference to her sparked or reignited their faith in God. But I have some issues with being used that way, I can't deny it. I try not to, I don't want to, we talk about it, let's say that :p I feel burdened by being someone who would never stop believing and trusting in the same way I feel burdened by being a mother that mothers through it all: I wish very much sometimes, lately, that I could be like Mindy or Jackie and just drop them off somewhere for the afternoon and then come back a week later to get them. Or even a parent with options like my mother had, to drop the kids off at a Grandparent's house for the weekend. I wonder what it must be like to be a Christian who can just renounce it all when the going gets tough. I wonder how thin I can freaking stretch, without rips.
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no subject
Date: 2008-06-09 06:18 am (UTC)but if sending the kids to a class, or putting the little ones into their own bed, or giving yourself a break in some way will help...then do it. you deserve a break. it doesn't need to be all the time, and it doesn't erase everything else you're doing AP-wise. If you're being so completely stressed and everything about the arrangement, it might not be doing the family as a whole enough good to be worth risking your sanity.
But ultimately, what I think might help you is having someone to talk to--a therapist, perhaps. Someone who is NOT going through all this crap with you, whose feelings and needs you don't need to consider. I see you posting SO worried about how Ananda's going to react to you going to the hospital, can you be away from Elise, etc...but you can't just worry about yourself, your experience, and what you need. You've been through some seriously traumatic stuff. It's so much to handle even with help-you don't need to do it alone.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-10 03:38 pm (UTC)I am persuing therapy, for sure...because, yeah, I can talk to Grant forever, but he is going through it to and I do think there is a difference there.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-10 03:47 pm (UTC)I'm sure Grant is awesome to talk to, but he does have his own fears and his own repercussions from all this as well. sometimes it's just better to talk to someone outside the situation. good luck. :)