Stuck: The Long Venting

I don't mean to be such a roller coaster. It's just that I'm trying very hard. So that is clear. The more I try, the more each moment of rage and grief and yes, self pity, becomes a tsunami. As if all the other 23 hours of the day I was holding back the water with sheer force of will. So that when I hit a weak moment I literally bust the seam. I picture a huge boil and the smallest of lances. The tiny hole made and the entire thing erupting all inflammatory and ugly. I work all day on how I'm 'framing' what is happening right now, like my therapist long ago taught me. I work all day on redirecting my thoughts as if they are unruly toddlers. I work at breathing. I work at not panicking or over inflating the problems. I work at accepting my part in everything. I smile and laugh at work and I feel a relative calm and peace. And then I can come home and the stomach ache starts. I can't eat at home. The entire last two weeks. I eat all day, then I come home, and despite my best efforts I feel a cramping sick in my low low gut, and my stomach feels hard and high and gross, and the thought of eating dinner makes me want to puke. The stomach ache is some kind of physical trigger for my thoughts, which immediately turn to resentful anger that I feel this way. I have two more goddamn months left of this pregnancy, I think, I just want to breathe. Then I tell myself I'm the only one responsible for breathing. For managing my emotions. GROW UP, I tell myself, and get to doing what needs to be done. And I do, and still, at some point every night the emotions are lanced and I literally cannot hold back the tears, and my chest feels so full of pain and sadness you would think I just experienced something much worse than broken hopes and hard times.

The whole pregnancy I managed to avoid feeling this way. Even when the anxiety was kicking my ass I still felt a nice, clean lack of self pity. I hate self pity. I lose respect for people who have too much of it in certain forms, myself included. I have no measure for what is normal grief over this situation and what is veering on self pity. At night the house is quiet and still and dark and my body is so deeply sad. I read the article in Time on how mental health of your baby can be partly determined in utero by the amount of stress the mother experiences and I felt FURIOUS. I am angry at my family for not protecting this baby better. I am angry at myself for not handling my anger better, for having to cry every night. I don't know how to let go of what I wanted this to be like in comparison to what it is. I never had a traditional family unit during pregnancy before. I might never be pregnant again...let's face it, I probably won't. Unless the financial fairy blesses us we are done having babies. I wanted this one to be different, I wanted to experience the kind of pregnancy I know is not a pipe dream, it's perfectly possible and I read stories here in blogland all the time about women who are having them. How do I work around this, how do I let go and stop feeling so angry? I cannot remember the lessons of my old therapist or the wise words of authors I have read. All I can seem to do is what I am doing. I'm stuck.

The baby shower is this weekend and all I can feel is exhausted to think about it. A day of slogging through everyone's happy faces and asking ' how are you? ' while I have to lie and say how great everything is at home, how happy everyone is, when no one outside of Lola can spare the emotional focus to ask how Ever is every day, to check on her movements, to ask what needs to be done every day or to take some of the planning and thinking off of me, to see if I've eaten my vegetables or taken my vitamins, to talk to Ever in there, to talk and plan for the stresses and the blocks we are encountering right now, to make lists or read or plan for the labor. Mr. Curry is not available for any of this right now, too overwhelmed from the last month of stress with D, burnt out.*** It is important for my own clarity to note that this is only true for the last couple of weeks. The entire pregnancy has certainly NOT been like this. The last couple of weeks have felt like an eternity, as you can tell by this post. *** The look on his face when I start talking about anything with Dakota or worry about the baby or ask for the 100th time if he's yet read the book I asked him to is so tight and closed off I feel worse than if I just say nothing, so I'm saying nothing now. Not fighting is better and more mature than repeating the same patterns that end with us raising our voices. The kids peace must come first and noisy battles between their parents will only make them stressed, when we are both doing a good job at least of being kind and available and sweet to our children. I am trying as hard as I can not to be enraged at him for this but often failing. My close girlfriends all live far away and my girlfriends here are all going through their own hell in different ways. I feel lonely and emotionally exhausted. My work is exhausting. My mom wants to go to dinner with our relatives flying in on Friday and I just want to stay home and lock myself in my room. How can I say no without being rude? Everyone is coming to see me when I don't want to be seen. And this is making me too sad to know what to do with. I just want so much that I can't have right now. I have no pithy line to end this with. The End.

ps
I'm OK though. Really. I know part of the reason the last two weeks have felt so very long and awful is because I am not on the zoloft, and partly because of the enormous hopes I had for this pregnancy, and partly because when your husband and you have as intimate, close and supportive relationship as Mr. Curry and I do, and then things fall apart for a time, it feels much more dramatic in the meanwhile. The worry about a major Bipolar episode is very hard too, for both of us. I am afraid of it and I know he is too. I need him tremendously right now and part of what this is is me trying to understand how to cope with this disease stealing my husband away when I need him most. Sorting out my emotions and my right to them and what to do with them...while very pregnant, while having a very troubled teen..is kind of really shitty. I mean, it is. But it's not the worst. It's not. We aren't easy people, either of us, with our mental floss all fudgy.