Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Sitting it out

Nope, haven't written a word in 4 months, and haven't published one in more than twice as long.

I had a train wreck with karma in January and lost all my URLs.  My account with my URL/hosting company got frozen, and after four totally fruitless calls with their customer service, I gave it up.  Nobody could figure out how to unfreeze my account and allow me to make my $8 payment.  So everything expired and went into the ether.

Well, not everything, I still have my archive on blogger, because despite over a dozen good-intentioned attempts to migrate to wordpress, I'm still here.

So, this little run of words won't actually get published to the world until I untie that knot, and I cannot currently fathom mustering that much emotional energy.

I'm in the thick of the bottom of the barrel again, pregnant for what we're all hoping is the last time.  I realize I sound unreasonably pessimistic about pregnancy.  I make it sound like the worst thing that could happen to a person.  The rational part of my brain understands that this is ridiculous.  But for the emotional part of my brain, pregnancy is catastrophic.  My entire identity is ripped apart by the malaise and disillusionment that comes with being pregnant.  My mental health plummets, and it takes me months to years after each baby's arrival to pick up all the pieces and gain some good momentum again afterwards.

Pregnancy, or rather my antepartum depression, obliterates my relationship skills, and I fall completely off the map for most relationships I'd like to maintain.  The poor people who are close enough to me that the relationship doesn't fizzle out from lack of contact, well they all absorb the shrapnel of a mom who literally cannot force herself to care about the things she normally cares deeply about.  All my kids end up acting out, and my marriage is strained.  It's just the worst, friends.

Plus there's the quick descent into debilitating nausea, followed by an infinitesimally slow ascent back to the land of not constantly spending one's focus managing it.  At 14 weeks, I can tell people I've graduated from food poisoning sick to stomach flu sick, and am hoping to arrive at carsick sick by the end of June.  I am so tired of having to think about nausea.  I haven't figured out how to think and work through nausea the way I can think and work through pain, so in that sense it seems more debilitating.

I've mostly moped about and moved as little as possible for two months solid.  Unable to find the focus to read real books or work on real projects.  Or the will, really.  It's a quick path to some solid self-loathing.

Anyway, I hate it as much as ever.  I am doing it, yet again, because I know it's worth it.  It's been worth it every time.  But I cannot help but look forward with complete elation to the day when I get to have my body to myself again, be fully human again, and feel a normal spectrum of care, concern, emotion, and drive.

Plus I'll be able to cook again, and that sounds good too.

Anyway, we're due around Thanksgiving, and if all goes well I can start 2018 knowing that things are looking up and that I can reasonably hope to never be this low in this way again.

Which is a great thing to look forward to, but it feels pretty far away when it's not yet quite June.  So in the meantime I spend what energy I can spare on a desperate search for things to look forward to. A lot of things I'd normally look forward to lose their luster when I'm in this state, so it's tricky.

But that's where I am, and where I hope to never be again, once I'm through it.

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