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I’m having baby reservations. Last week I was saying that if I never had a child it would be my biggest, most sorrowful regret. But I’m nearing the “now or never” age and I’m finding myself not ready. I’m still healing emotionally and mentally, my book is underway, and I depend on excessive sleep most weekends. Feeling depressed or “blah”? Stay in bed. Tired or feeling lazy? Stay in bed. I like the option of being bored. I like not going to the grocery store or washing laundry for no other reason than “I don’t feel like it.” I don’t want to wreck my body for two years after just getting back on track with my weight and fitness. Mastitis sealed the deal. I read about it on a friend’s blog, and according to my follow-up research on Google most women who breastfeed experience mastitis. I don’t want mastitis. I’m fearful of postpartum depression. If anyone is going to get slapped with an additional layer of depression it will be me. I made such poor choices for so many years and I put myself here, the “now or never” age. And, I have to get my weight down before getting pregnant, an agreement that my husband and I made and a decision most any doctor would support. It’s like my marriage. Until I got my debt under control, my husband would not marry me. So because of bad life choices, my wedding age was delayed. The wedding delay added to the baby age delay. Now my weight is further adding to the baby delay. And now I’m not even sure I deserve to be a mom, or have what it takes to be a mom, or can guarantee I will not bring any mothering baggage to my own child. God, I need relief from this swift sadness that has just entered my body. I don’t even care about sorting out the mom vs. no mom decision. I just don’t want to be sad because I have too much activity in my life right now. I cannot be bound by tears or regret or brokenness. I need to be free.
“As a social worker, I’m seeing red flags when you say that. Do you feel like you are a burden on your friends and family?” I was completing my discharge after-care plan with the social worker provided to me by…
What makes this section in the pie of my life taste the way it does? Bitterness is sure to be found, then and now, but less back then so it seems. It was sweeter back then too, or again, so…
I did an online energy healing workshop yesterday hosted by Briana Borton, founder of The Dragontree (http://thedragontree.com/about/). Yes, yes, to some “energy healing” sounds hokey, and it sounded that way to me years ago. But I do believe we all…
“Sometimes you have to find your wings on the way down,” I once heard someone say. Hopeful words if I hadn’t already hit the ground. Where did the problems I was born into end and the ones I created begin?…
“You are just like mom!” my or-so-I-thought-confidante sister yells at me. Says the girl screaming at me because I said she was stressing me out by something she was saying. I don’t even remember what it was about. This same…
But there she was, coming up to hug me, showering me with superficial comments about how long my hair is and how good I look. And there she was, asking me questions that I didn’t want to answer — “Where…
I decided to continue on with my reading of Beverly Engel’s Healing Your Emotional Self”. It’s painful to read. It brings back many bad memories. During and after my reading it, I feel uncomfortable, highly anxious, and often experience moments…
It’s true, I am healing from consequences I experienced due to my choices as an adult. I’m not blaming everything on my childhood. A lot of my behavior was a result of the environment I grew up in, and I…
Sometimes I feel like I take 10 steps forward and then 2 steps back. And while I’m still moving forward and making progress, it’s those 2 steps that hold so much pain and anger and frustration. They leave me with…
Writing a Memoir 101, a workshop I’m taking, is helping to strengthen my confidence as a writer and why I am worth reading. The book emphasizes the importance of reading: you cannot be a good author and tell the story…
Wow. How much personal work I have done! I am reading my hand-written journaling from 2011, and I did much writing during that year. And understandable so. I had moved in with my now fiance and the plan was for…
Struggle: this is a word I am familiar with. Sometimes too familiar, sometimes way too familiar. Hourly I find myself asking, “Will my struggle always be real?” Talking with my counselor earlier this week, she said something very Oprah-esque. “You…
Most of my life I have steered clear of my sisters’ dad’s family. When we would go and visit the aunts and uncles and cousins, I felt out of place and like I was wearing a sign that said “Not…
“May God have mercy on your soul,” my mother said. The bee sting is over. I’ve come to peace with her words. Like a Borderline, she projects. So, maybe she is actually saying may God have mercy on her soul.…
I had a revelation in a counseling session a couple weeks ago. For the first time, my counselor did the EMDR method. It was odd at first but I enjoyed it. She gave me a week to think of a…
My reading of Surviving a Borderline Parent by Kimberlee Roth and Freda B. Friedman, PH.D., LCSW has continued. Here are excerpts I connected with. Ongoing or frequent feelings of being hollow, empty, or fake. “Lacking a strong core, a sense…
Can there be growth without struggle? I switch back and forth between contentment, anger, and sadness. One constant is that I always feel blessed. How can I feel sad and blessed at the same time? I really don’t understand my…
I finished House Rules tonight, underlining and scribbling notes in the margins because I couldn’t find my highlighter. I saw my family members in hers, Rachel the author. My mother was a key player, of course. But I was surprised…
It’s the grown-up things that scare me the most. Keeping up a house, being a wife, getting out of bed in the mornings. All are on the same scale of “how the hell am I going to do this today?”…
I am reading The Memory Palace by Mira Bartok. Her memories take shape as a.house or maybe a castle. Nevertheless, they take shape. I feel close to Bartok. While she has a schizophrenic mother, I have an emotionally ill mother.…
