Since my last post I have started to feel a lot better. Not every day is perfect, of course, but I think like I've made progress and I'm more comfortable with the way I feel about everything. Functioning day to day was the number one thing that I needed to get under control and between Jim picking up a bunch of the slack and rest assured, there was a BUNCH of slack to be picked up considering just taking care of the basics was starting to feel overwhelming and taking my vitamins and supplements, the hiccups are coming fewer and further between.
*Hah! I just re-read that and honestly, it was not the functioning day to day that I needed to get under control. It was the anger and temper and the frustration with myself for feeling so out of control when it came to day to day tasks. Big difference. And how in the world can someone be so indecisive but so upset and certain that the decision that was just made was the wrong one? I don't know, but that's where I was.
In hindsight, I know I experienced some of this when Karleigh was little and interestingly enough, to me at least, right around 4-5 months because I know she was sleeping in the nursery by then. I can recall rocking her in just her lamp lit bedroom and thinking "huh... I wonder what would happen if I just let her roll off my lap and onto the floor..." I never once even came close to considering it and I've never had any thoughts of hurting the kids or myself - just to be very blunt about it so there's no lines to read between - but after that questioning thought, I had the disturbing and very unlikely vision of her rolling off my lap, onto the floor with a thud and then continuing across the room and then up and out the bedroom window and down. Cah-Rae-Zee...
It was the only and the last thought that I recall having like that and it freaked me out. And like I said it wasn't me thinking that I could, would, or should do anything like that but just a very "not me" moment. Five months postpartum with Rylan, the "fit hit the shan", so to speak and I honestly don't remember a whole lot about that time. My dad had a stroke, I started on a hormonal birth control for the first time in my life that totally sucked and messed me up so stress and not being myself would be a total understatement and with everything that was going on there's no way possible that I could begin to divide and pinpoint what was what. At any rate...
I had gotten to the point a couple weeks ago, that if I didn't feel any better by "insert date here" that I would be making a call to my OB or to Stella's ped because she also handles adults - great office by the way. It's a good thing that I did start feeling better though because I don't know if I really would have made the call. Just thinking about calling was overwhelming so tell me how in the world women really do get help? If there isn't someone to say "this isn't abnormal but it's not ok, let's deal with it together" what else is there? The anxiety of just calling. Good grief. Luckily, I do have people who checked in with me and said just that, to a point, I may be paraphrasing to save time. :) It was just very hard to deal with those feelings while knowing that, as far as many people were concerned, I had everything that I wanted so I shouldn't feel this irrational way and I should stop complaining about it.
For now though, things are good. Things are actually getting really close to great again! I'm trying to remove any unnecessary drama, get a decent amount of sleep, be more rational about my thoughts and keep up with my vitamins and such. It is nice to feel like the fog has lifted and I'm really grateful that is seems to have just been a great big hiccup along the way.
Since I'm feeling more me again. Well, I've always been me, but the better more like myself me... I realized that I hadn't hardly gotten past but a few pages in Stella's baby book. That too is one of those little things, that turns into a bigger thing, that's been bugging me. What kind of mom just chooses not to fill out the baby book? Granted. I didn't really like any of them that I came across while shopping so I settled on one that was more girly than gender neutral like I have for Karleigh and Rylan. They have gender neutral baby books because that was one of the first purchases for both of them. I wrote in them from fairly early on but this time I could not bring myself to buy a baby book because, you know, when the baby dies, that's just another thing that you have to make room for in the memory box. But I finally bought one not long before Stella was born and it was going well for the first several pages until I got to the page labeled: Mommy and Daddy are Having a Baby. Really? Are you sure? Can you, little book, guarantee that!? So, I got mad at the baby book. Rational much? I ended up not liking the colors and the butterfly decal on the front annoyed me. It didn't even match.
So, I stopped writing in it.
And that made me mad and sad too. My mom doesn't have a baby book and it may very well be because my grandma had the same issues and couldn't get to a place where she was "ok" filling out a baby book for her. 13 months before my mom was born, my grandma had a stillborn son at 8 months and I'm almost positive she didn't have the support that she needed to deal with it. On the other hand, my dad has The. Best. Baby book. Ever! His mom died when he was a young teen but when he was younger, she wrote everything down. She wasn't anal about using the same perfect back pen every time. She didn't stay between the lines. If he said or did something amusing, she wrote it down. As I recall, she wrote about buying his first pair of cowboy boots in red ball point pen. And she kept the ink foot print for sizing. And the receipt too.
I found a new, slightly less taunting baby book, gathered everything together and started over today. That same page that bothered me before says "A Baby is Due!" in this new book. And why does the wording even matter when she is here already? I don't know, but it does. Sure, there's the hangup of how to fill out the sibling section. Do I? or Don't I? include Eli and Collin. I haven't. I don't want to scare the kids when they think about having their own babies, yet at the same time, I also don't want them to feel alone if, heaven forbid, they do have to deal with some of this.
So, soon I will be heading back to the dining room to continue filling out the information for the first five months of Miss Stella's life. And I will feel good about doing it!
