Neurotic

Posted by Anonymous.

It's been six months since my baby was born and still, every time I see you and have to fake smile and ask you how you're doing as if I cared. I feel so furious. I'm a new mother, you were once too so I assumed you would understand. If I don't want children visiting us in the hospital and holding the new baby then as the mother of the baby guess what? I have the right to make that decision! We made the decision that we didn't want any children at the hospital, just adults. We did not selectively choose your kids and say that they were the only one's not allowed. At NO POINT did we say this was because we thought they were diseased and would infect the new baby, why the heck would you assume that? Although if I had to be honest about it, it's true I don't trust you enough to be able to control your kids around the new baby, they're manipulative whiny brats. The fact that you decided not to visit because your kids couldn't was your decision, not ours. We accept responsibility for our decision, why not accept responsibility for yours?

That day was not about you or your kids, it was about the new baby and the fact that you would call us selfish self-centered idiots only goes to show just how insecure and neurotic you are. Screaming at us in letters and writing on facebook about how dumb we are and how selfish our decision is only shows what kind of person you are. Everyone, and I do mean everyone in the family hates receiving your little "The world didn't revolve around me for five seconds and I'm mad about it so I'm going to blame it on you" letters. Stop writing letters and talk to us- maybe we could clear up some of the misunderstandings you get in that delusional little head of yours.

You are the parent to your children and as such you have the right to make decisions regarding them, explain to me why that isn't the same for everyone else? Are you super fucking special? Now I can't see my brother without there being a strain and it's obvious that the relationship is forever marked by your insecurity and bi-polar behavior. Thanks, really.

I Wish I Never Married You

Posted by Anonymous.

You,

I'm tired. I can't fight this uphill battle another day. I just don't have the energy to bridge these gaps anymore. I feel sorry for your crappy upbringing and absentee parents. I know it's hard to lateral your experience into a connected and loving family life, but people do it every day, including me. I didn't exactly come from the best corners of life, either. I'll never say this to you, but I think having a child with you was a huge mistake. I have no regrets about our son, as he is everything to me. However, I have regrets about having him with you.

Don't you understand how hard I work at this? I lost my dad, my mother abandoned me and I was barely raised by my sister. I didn't even have anyone making sure I bathed and brushed my teeth, nevermind the more important stuff in life...so this is a struggle for me. When it comes to parenting I go off of love and common sense, as I don't have much else. I am trying to instill the things in him that were not instilled in me. I try to keep myself calm, despite the fact that riding my last nerve seems to be his favorite hobby as of late. I try to be a firm parent and do the right thing even when it hurts to do so. While these are normal parenting issues, what's not normal is your complete lack of involvement. Your son is going through puberty and he asks ME questions. Not you. ME. And that pisses me off to no end. He should be asking you these questions. The fact that he comes to me for everything proves that in his young life you haven't established any kind of closeness with your boy. He's halfway to adulthood and you've made no effort to positively influence him in any way whatsoever. Do you know what he tells me? "I can't ask dad, he'll say no." Dad is on the computer, he won't help me." "Dad is in the other room, he's busy."

Do you know how much this breaks my heart to hear? DO YOU HAVE ANY FUCKING CLUE HOW MUCH IT MAKES ME HATE YOU?

This is why I fucking nag. Because you put no effort into your relationship with your family whatsoever. Your closest relationships are night elves and shaman, not us humans that love you and stand by you. I know I sound like an out and out jerk, but I have to bleed out the hate and hurt if I am going to get to the heart of things. I want to be sympathetic, I really do. I give you credit for supporting us financially. I give you the respect you deserve and do nice things for you. Somehow, though, you stopped noticing or appreciating any of it. Then again, recognizing mine or our son's value would mean you'd have to pay attention and God forbid you pull the World Of Warcraft out of your ass for 5 minutes. This is why I'm angry. And no matter how many times I've tried talking to you about it, I get nothing.

Speaking of nothing, that's how our love life is now. Do you know how much it hurts to know that I've been treated better intimately by lesser men than you? It makes me feel like less than nothing. When I got sick and couldn't work anymore, you slowly but surely stopped touching me except for at 3 a.m. when you roll over and offer to "help" me finish the job I started. If you don't love me enough to initiate, you can go fuck yourself. I am not a glorified means of masturbation! I am a human being with thoughts and feelings, I deserve better than that! We didn't even consummate our marriage on our wedding night. You spent the night watching movies with your mother while I slept alone.

I WISH I NEVER MARRIED YOU.

Whew...ok. Now I am shifting gears again. I'm sad. What the hell happened to us? We've always had our issues, but we stuck together. Now I feel like we've never been further apart. I don't trust you when you compliment me. I don't like it when you touch me. I miss the days when you didn't push me away. I feel like a lot of this went to hell once I got sick. I feel like you don't love me anymore because I have limited mobility and can't hold down a job right now. I don't expect you to understand what it's like to be me, but I understand you. I know it's hard to watch someone go from a vibrant go-getter to someone that can't carry groceries into the house anymore. I just wish you never pushed me away. I know your heart is good and that you love us, but I don't think you know how to love us. And I'm sorry to say that it's just too late for me.

As the saying goes, "I'm too old for this shit." I really am. I am tired of waiting patiently for you to decide you want to be part of this family you helped make. I'm tired of giving you a pass because you had a shitty childhood. I'm tired of talking about it with you for nothing to happen. I'm just tired. I'm tired of trying to volley a ball that isn't even on my side of the court. I'm just done and will bide my time until I get my health back on track and become financially independent again. I have complete faith it will happen, and when it does it's time for me (and our son) to go. 15 years...I can't do it anymore. I want affection, connection, someone that will want to have a relationship with our son. He's such an incredible kid....I'm so sorry you don't know him the way I do. Perhaps it will be better the next time around...and there will be a next time. I'm not allowing our failure of a marriage to sour me on relationships. Who knows, maybe you just don't love me and don't want to admit it. Maybe your next relationship will be a better one, too. I never wanted to say goodbye, but you're giving me no choice. I can't live in misery much longer.

Somewhere deep down inside a micron of my being holds on, hoping the situation will turn around and our family will improve. Unfortunately, my head is 100% convinced it will never happen. Either way, thanks for the good memories. May we all grow from this mess we're in.

Me

So Mom Is Dying And You Are Not

Posted by Anonymous.

My mother is dying. Slowly, but perceptibly. Fading out, like a blurry xerox, her features sinking inward and melting toward one another. And for the 9 months this has been happening, I have wished it were you, Daddy.

Because Daddy, she showed up. She was there for every lost tooth, every prom, every school play, every nightmare, every spilled juice, every outgrown shoe. It wasn't pretty. She yelled. She was so tired she fell into bed every night. She wasn't good at comforting me. But she was always there, like a rock, a tired, jagged, sometimes cold, but always firmly and absolutely present rock. And you? You missed it all. You were drinking, and then trying not to drink, and then piecing together the ravages of a self from what was left after you stopped drinking, and then you floated off into some kind of oblivion I still don't understand. I played the part you needed me to play: loving and uncomprehending little girl, forgiving adult. But when the diagnosis came in, when they told us what it was and we realized what it meant, all I could do was hate that it wasn't you. Because when she is gone, I will be an orphan. Only you won't know it, and I will have to go through the motions of comforting you about the fact that there's really nothing you can do for me anymore, make up things for you to do so you can feel like a dad after missing it all in the first place.

Mom and I, we had plans. She had bought a house. She was going to move near me, be a grandma, see my kid grow up, be there for her. For the lost teeth and the outgrown shoes and the school plays. That's all gone up in -- not a a puff of smoke, but a steady stream of twisted cells multiplying silently. So she'll go, and my kid won't remember her, and we'll have a photo or two of you, the grandpa she's hardly met, and at some point I will say to her, it's OK, honey, I hardly met him either. But your grandma? She loved you to pieces. She was there when you were born and she held you and rocked you and did your laundry and laughed with me about how stupid cloth diapers were, and she bought you your first clothes and your swim lessons and all your shoes till she died, and she put money away for college. She loved you. She was there for you. She hated not being able to see you grow up more than anything.

And Daddy, you'll never know any of us.

Best Friends Without Benefits

Posted by Anonymous.

In July, I will be married to my husband for ten years. My husband is a stay-at-home dad while I work full time as a teacher. I used to work 7 days a week because I would wait tables on the weekends as well. We have two children, a 7 year old boy and a 4 year old girl. The girl stays home with her dad all day.

We have a tiring life--doesn't everyone who has two little kids? Teaching takes a lot out of me. I love it, but it does drain me. My husband is dabbling in the movie making business (hopefully moving into that full force once Keira goes to school next year).

About a month ago, my husband told me that he felt like I had emotionally pulled away from him. He felt like I didn't try to connect with him anymore, and that I spent most of my time just trying to sleep. The fact that I would never initiate sex with him made him feel like I didn't want him. (In reality, I was just tired! The kids stayed up later than me most nights, so the sex we did have was at 3:00 in the morning when my husband would wake me up.) He said that he has been depressed, and that he was just realizing the extent of it. He felt like my caretaker rather than my husband.

Sounds like my husband has a case of the housewife blues. I get it. I didn't want to stay home with the kids full time. In a way, I think it would've been better if I would have--I would have gone to play dates and activities and LEFT THE HOUSE during the day. It seems like my husband has lost his sense of self.

Horrible. The next week, I quit my weekend job so that I wouldn't be so exhausted. I started trying to show him that I really do love him and that he is more than just a maid, nanny, and cook (terrible maid, by the way). I tried being more affectionate and emotionally available. (We've always talked all the time, so it wasn't that)

I think I missed my window, though. My husband has lost his attraction for me. He loves me. He is my best friend and I am his. He wants to cuddle and hold hands, but he doesn't feel the warm fuzzies or tingly feelings for me when he sees me. We took a long hard route in finding out this information. He didn't want to admit it to himself or me. It is a horrible feeling.

It feels better than what I had THOUGHT he felt. When he described it to me, I thought he didn't really like me or want to be around me. I thought he had completely fallen out of love with me. I thought he hated me, even though he told me that there was nothing about me that he didn't like. I thought we were through, even though I didn't really do anything bad--the feeling of rejection were mostly in his head. BUT, they were real FEELINGS, so he feels numb toward me.

How are we going to work through this? We are going to continue to be best friends. We can hold each other and cuddle. We won't be having sex, though. We haven't really been having much of that anyway, so in reality nothing much has changed. Is this forever? No way. We are going to do this until he either realizes that I am the hottest woman (for him) around or he realizes that I'm definitely not and we will drift apart. I'm fairly certain it'll be the first one. I'm fairly certain it'll be soon.

It is a weird arrangement, but it'll work. Here's the problem. How do I handle MY self-esteem? How do I handle that my husband has admitted that he thinks I am beautiful and a wonderful person, but he doesn't want to have sex with me? (He is kind of girly in his view of sex--there is no such thing as casual sex. He can't get turned on unless the FEELINGS are there.) How do I not act weird around him? How do I not focus on how the ACTUAL rejection is making me feel?

It is all a mind game. We were only doing it once every month or so anyway. Nothing has changed other than his recognizing his feelings and telling me what they are.

I kind of wonder if everyone goes through this--they don't have the warm fuzzies all the time. It is just really painful for me because my girly husband talks about his feelings and TELLS me about them!

I guess we will both be separately spending some time making ourselves physically feel better for awhile, and then (hopefully) sometime soon we can do it together.

Frozen With Fear

Posted by Anonymous.

I am a mother. A blissfully happy mother to an amazing, brilliant, beautiful boy.

But I am also infertile. I was lucky enough to get a diagnosis quickly—after only a year. Premature ovarian failure. My eggs were shot at age 29. At that point I had undergone a laparoscopy and a single IVF cycle with my own eggs. The reproductive endocrinologist recommended donor eggs. He listed the likelihood of success of another IVF cycle with my eggs (5%), and the chance of miscarriage if I did conceive (greater than 50%) and the risk of chromosomal abnormalities if I didn’t miscarry (greater than 50%), and the right decision was clear and, well, easy.

Yes, I grieved the loss of a genetic child. I still do, sometimes. I’m sad that my son will not be able to go to my family’s ancestral home and recognize his nose the in the portraits on the wall. I’m angry that having a baby was such an emotionally difficult, lengthy, and frightfully expensive process for me, when it is free—and often accidental!—for most people. But the very fact of my son eases those pains. Now that he is here, I cannot imagine having had any other baby, and the pain, the anger, of infertility, has faded. Sometimes I think about how miserable I was during my first year of trying to conceive, and how I was consumed with jealousy of pregnant women and new mothers during the two years that followed, years that I had to wait in order to save enough money to try donor egg IVF. Years that one friend after another got—surprise!—pregnant. But now that’s in the past, and I am someone to be envied. I am a mother. I was pregnant. Those experiences are no longer out of my reach.

But the pregnancy! Infertility laid the groundwork of fear before I got pregnant, and my pregnancy built that fear into a monolithic tower. From the beginning, I qualified every statement about my pregnancy with an “if.” IF this pregnancy continues. IF I actually have a baby. IF my baby survives. I didn’t call to schedule a childbirth class until after they were all booked up, because I was so uncertain that I would actually need one. I didn’t plan for the baby the way other women do, because the last thing I wanted was to come home to a house full of baby stuff after losing the pregnancy. I couldn’t believe that he would actually be born, full term (barely) and healthy.

I started bleeding at 5 weeks. From 5 weeks through 15 weeks, I had regular episodes of heavy bleeding. Really heavy bleeding; heavier than any period I’ve ever had. Then, after a few weeks of blessed relief from the bleeding, I started having contractions. Regular ones, 7 minutes apart, that sent me to L&D first at 22 weeks, then again at 24 weeks. “Yes, those are real contractions,” they told me at the hospital. “You should lie down and drink lots of water.” “If they get closer together, 5 minutes apart or less, we’ll think about putting you on terbutaline.” Cervical ultrasounds, fetal fibronectin tests, contraction and fetal heartrate monitors. Intermittent bedrest. The first time I went to L&D, the security guard asked if I was in labor. “I certainly hope not,” I said. Did I really look like I was ready to deliver? I was barely showing!

So for the second half of my pregnancy, I listened to my contractions. Even walking for a few minutes could set them off. Here comes a contraction . . . here’s another one, 6 minutes later . . . and 6 minutes again. Every day. Lie down, drink water, time the contractions. Do I need to go to the hospital? Are these contractions causing cervical change? Am I in labor? What are the chances, at 24 weeks 3 days, that my baby will survive if he is delivered today? That he’ll be disabled? At 26 weeks 6 days?

I spent a lot of time working from home, lying on the couch. I breathed huge sighs of relief as I hit the milestones. 28 weeks. 30 weeks. 32 weeks. 34 weeks. By 36 weeks I was convinced that all the worry was for naught and that I would go overdue. So I was ridiculously surprised by his birth at 37 weeks exactly. It was fine. He was fine. I was (mostly) fine. Normal labor experience, just a few annoying complications for me afterward. All fine.

And he was here. And I was happy. And everything was OK.

And it was, for a while.

Now he’s 15 months old. People are asking when I’m going to have another. I wonder that, too. How could I not want another? The first is so delicious! Sometimes I convince myself that I don’t want another, that my family is complete, that I am happy with things just as they are. But the fact that I get viscerally upset when my husband expresses reservations about having a second tells me otherwise. I do want another baby. I want another baby.

But I don’t want another pregnancy. Well, I kind of want a “do-over,” a normal pregnancy experience, but I don’t think it’s really possible for me to have pregnancy without fear. A couple of months ago I had a moment where I thought the impossible had happened and I was pregnant, naturally. I wasn’t happy. Instead, I had an honest-to-god panic attack. Racing heart, nausea, panting, sweating, shaking, the works. My husband: “wow, you really don’t want to be pregnant right now!” Me: “Duh.”

I feel melodramatic even saying this, but my therapist says I have pregnancy PTSD. Have you ever heard of such a thing? Even though everything turned out fine. The very fact of my fear has traumatized me. And that is why I still find pregnancy announcements upsetting. Even from my very good friends. Those reactions made me feel guilty enough when I was waiting to become a mother, but now it’s even worse. How can I begrudge people the experiences that I’ve already had? How come I can’t just be happy for my friends? Why do I react physically to pregnancy announcements, shaking and feeling sick? Why do they leave me feeling unsettled for days afterward? I am just so sick of pregnancy being such a thing for me. I want to just not care anymore. Been there, done that.

Adoption isn’t an option for me for a number of reasons. So that leaves another pregnancy, if I really want another child. I can even face the idea of another donor egg IVF cycle. I’m not thrilled about it; not looking forward to finding a donor, to making all those appointments, to injecting myself in the ass every day for 10 weeks if I’m lucky enough to get pregnant again. But I can do it. I’m not even—may the gods forgive me—that worried about getting pregnant. I think I probably can get pregnant again, with enough perseverance.

But what I can’t face, can’t even really think about without starting to panic, is actually being pregnant. The day-to-day worry about whether I will lose the pregnancy, whether my water will break early, whether I will go into preterm labor. It lasts a long time, pregnancy. Or at least one hopes it will. It stretched out before me like an eternity, even when I felt like I must have already completed 24 months of gestation. And I don’t know if I can face that eternity again.

But I want another baby.

So here I am. Lucky. Unlucky. And frozen with fear.

A Common Problem

Posted By Anonymous.

I suffer an involuntary pang of jealously at every pregnant woman I see. Of course I’m jealous of the stay at home wife with a six-figure earning husband who has an decorator design the baby room and gets mommy massages and has her prenatal yoga class before her appointment with the midwife at the private birthing center, not that I know any of those in real life. I’m also jealous of the young unwed mothers in the grocery store with their pimply baby-daddies dragging sullenly behind, of the cute girl I used to like until she married some ugly “godly” dude and went crazy and moved to the Middle East to live in a mud hut, and of the friend who can’t afford the two kids she has with her good-for-nothing husband and who deliberately got pregnant again on welfare. I don’t envy these people’s lifestyles, I am really grateful for my own husband over any of theirs, and I don’t want to be them, but why do they get to have kids and I don’t? Don’t bother telling me the problems and stress that their ill-timed pregnancies will bring, don’t tell me how smart it is to wait until you are financially stable to have children, don’t give me statistics about how waiting a few years can make all the difference. I want babies. I am really getting obsessed with this, experiencing feelings of longing and anger several times a day as I think about or see pregnant women or moms with young kids.

My husband wants to have children, and more than just one or two, or I wouldn’t have married him. But he wants to wait until we are more financially secure (i.e. have a house, not just renting) before we do. I understand the wisdom in that. He wants to have some time to ourselves (we’ve been married a year and a half), to be free to sleep in on weekends, to be able to buy tools and furniture and such, and have two incomes. I understand the wisdom in that. These are good things, and a lot of that does stop or at least slow down when you have kids. His thoughts make sense and his plan is designed to bring us and our children the best. But I don’t care, because I want them now. In addition, my PCOS could make getting pregnant take longer, so I worry that waiting even a few years will impair my fertility and reduce our chances of having our own. If that happens, I will be mad. Like marriage counseling mad. I’ve told him all this.

Bottom line, I don’t trust my husband and I don’t trust God to give me good things. I’m so selfish, but if I don’t try to fulfill my desires, who will?

Sadness

Posted by Anonymous.

I’m so sad.

I’m scared. I’m scared that in this instance hindsight has totally burned me.

In the summer of 2007 I found out I was pregnant. My husband and I made the decision to terminate that pregnancy. That decision was the hardest decision that I have had to make in my life so far. This was not a decision that was made lightly. We talked and talked and when we thought we couldn’t talk anymore about it we talked some more. In those talks he told me that of course he wanted to have another child with me but that at that time in our lives it was not a good time for us to have another baby. I agreed with him. I still agree with him. At that point in our life it was really not a good time to have another baby.

Here I am today a little over two years after the termination that I was and still am ok with it. My husband has made up his mind that he doesn’t want anymore children. We have one child that I love with so much completeness it makes me ache. But I never pictured myself as someone that would have only one child. In a perfect world I would have a lot of children but the reality is that I definitely wanted two. I feel like we talked about this all through our marriage and before we had kids but maybe we didn’t agree then either. I don’t know.

The point is, here I am wanting, like the kind of wanting that oozes through every cell of your body type of wanting, another child. My husband does not want another child. He’s done. What hurts is not just this impass. We will work through this; we’ve worked through much larger things than this. What is breaking my heart is that at the time when we were faced with one of the most difficult decisions ever, I was under the impression that he did want to have more children. At the time that was a very comforting thought. Because to me it meant that it was ok to think that it wasn’t the right time, that we would in fact have another child at some point and that the decision (we) I was making was really going to be ok.

Now it just feels like he lied to me to get his way.

I don’t know how much of that I truly believe. He was very much torn up over all of this. As was I, obviously. I just feel betrayed.

Yes we’ve talked about this since the termination and his response is that he was not lying to me then but that he’s just happy with the way things are now and doesn’t want to change that. I can respect that. I really can. It doesn’t make the hurt go away or make it feel any less painful.

So here I am now wondering if I knew then what I know now would I have made the same decision. I just don’t know.

What I do know is that I’m hurt. I’m sad. I feel betrayed. I feel like a part of me is missing and unfulfilled. I also know that in order to stay as the family unit of three that we currently are I will feel these things for a lifetime.

I refuse to guilt him into having another child with me. That notion is just too far away from who I am for me to be ok with.

I will continue to cry silently at night when I know he’s asleep. I will continue to wonder at all the what ifs. I will continue to be scared of the questions that will come from our child when she gets older.

For now I will put on my brave face and go forward. For now that’s all I can think to do.