It’s been over a year since my first (and last), post. In that time, we went through our first and only round of IVF, had a beautiful baby boy, moved 2 apartments, changed countless plans, finished both our studies (Lord know how the hell we managed to do that), my husband’s grandfather died, his aunt was diagnosed with stage IV endometrial (ironic, I know, right?), cancer, and… well I don’t know what else. I think that’s enough, though.
Being pregnant was the best feeling in the world. I had horrible reflux that wouldn’t go away no matter what I ate, drank, or took (until I took some heavy-duty antacids that worked until the little Mister Twister became too big for his one-bed-womb apartment); I threw up every day at least once, my back was killing me, the munchkin was relentlessly restless, and to top it all off – I had contractions for an entire week before the little rascal decided to show up! It was really funny: I’d wake up in the morning and head straight to the bathroom, retch, then onto my usual morning business. Hubby would laugh and tell me that I spend most of my time in the bathrooms, whether peeing or throwing up. But, I was doing the impossible 24/7. I was pregnant when I had lost all hope for having children of my own. When my husband and I got my blood test result to see if I am pregnant and it came back positive, we just stared at each other and laughed like a couple of maniacs out of the nuthouse. I don’t remember ever laughing so hard in my life. Looking back at all of it now, it kind of seems unreal, dream-like, as if I were the entire time in a state of trance and now finally waking up to this new reality.
I finished nursing school and had my NCLEX at 12 weeks pregnant, flew to visit my dad in Georgia (back in September, ’20 amidst all the raging COVID extravaganza), came back to be in a maddening two-week quarantine, and then found a job as a COVID sampler (yes, the ones who shove the sticks up people’s noses and wear the hazmat suits). When vaccines were released, I immediately joined the force and have fallen in love with my job ever since. Vaccinating people in a drive-through (yes siree, a drive-through just like McDonald’s!), was not something I thought I would do in the heap of winter with bone-freezing winds and icy rains (that’s what you get when you are less than a mile away from the sea), let alone all throughout the third trimester right until the start of my contractions.
I gave birth on the first day of spring, 24 hours and 4 minutes after first arriving at the hospital. When we first found out that we’re having a boy we started to bounce off name ideas and eventually reached Robin so that’s been his name ever since. Our little Robin bird… I have a thing about names since I never felt connected with my previous name and I was always scared that my children won’t like the names we would choose for them, but looking at my son and his already beautiful personality I can honestly say he is a robin. He even makes these cute little flying attempts while on his tummy as he flails his arms and legs around and looks super concentrated.
Since Robin was born I felt my life get a whole new purpose and meaning as if I was only existing before but now I am actually living. I can’t see my life before him anymore; it’s a big blur. His smiles fill me up with such warmth and hope… it’s better than any drug and beats any high. Sort of.
Until about a week after giving birth, everyone was still circling around us, offering help, buying us whatever we needed, and helped some with the baby. During those first few days postpartum, physiologically speaking, oxytocin (that “falling in love” hormone), is at its highest, meaning the woman is in a state of euphoria of sort. Physics taught us that everything that goes up must then go down and that’s exactly what it felt like. I had a very difficult labor and the injection site from the epidural hadn’t closed, so spinal fluid kept leaking out, which caused me horrendous headaches to the point of not being able to bow my head or tilt it even the slightest. After a 3 day stay in the hospital and a short trip to the OR to patch up later, I was fine. Or so I thought. I was bleeding profusely for weeks and it didn’t stop. Another trip to the OR 2 months after birth…
While pregnant, I thought a lot about nursing and whether or not I would be up to it. I decided I’d give it a go because truly, breast milk could be wonderful for the baby. Robin was born with a tongue tie and had a hard time latching on, and me being a paranoid first-time mom I constantly thought if I wasn’t starving him. I decided to pump and feed him with both nursing and bottle-feeding. Pumping was hell. It was painful and long and agonizing and LOUD (electrical pump). I had copious amounts of milk, meaning every pumping or feeding session could take a really long time, but it also meant I had plenty to store for later use. We froze as many bags as I could produce over a week and then stopped altogether nursing and pumping. I gave everything I had into breastfeeding in every way I could, but couldn’t do it for longer than 3 weeks. Instead of drawing closer, I felt as if all I wanted to do was get as far away from my baby as possible. I was tired and all the high of the labor had made its way for the baby blues, which very quickly turned into full blasted postpartum depression. There were times when he’d wake up and I needed to feed him and then it would turn into this whole process of trying to get him to latch on, all while bleeding massively, and crying of frustration, exhaustion, pain, self-criticism, and feeling like a failure. These sessions were torture for me and I would dread closing my eyes when I had the opportunity because I never wanted to wake up to his hungry crying since that would mean having to nurse him again, or rather try to. I started drawing back, letting my husband do more as I stayed in bed as much as I could, not even sleeping or doing anything but crying and staring at the wall or ceiling or the wall on the other side.
We live in a one-bedroom apartment and Robin’s crib is in the living room. The first month, he slept in our bedroom until we could no longer sleep with all the random noises he makes in his sleep.
I would lie in bed, hear Robin’s babbles in the living room and cry quietly to myself, thinking both he and my husband deserve a woman who wouldn’t wallow in her self-pity and actually do her job as a wife and mother, because after all, I was the one who fought so hard for this blessing. Of course, thinking this way only makes things much worse. Yes, I meant “makes”, because this thing isn’t over. Oh no, not at all…
I remember at some point, my husband got really mad at me for being in bed all day long, and at about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, he led me to the living room and actually took my hand so that I would touch Robin’s foot, as I haven’t done so much as look at him in about 24 hours at that point. I collapsed immediately and started crying hysterically. I felt my heart shatter into a million pieces and every piece turned to ash in my finger as I desperately tried to mend it all back together. How dare I react that way to touching my own baby? My flesh and blood? The one thing I have prayed for in the past 4 and a half years? I bolted to the bedroom and bawled my eyes out. I’ve never felt more ashamed in my life.
I’m absolutely in love with my son. We are doing so much better right now and he is truly shaping up to be a mama’s boy! I sing to him songs like Blackbird, What a Wonderful Life, You Are My Sunshine, Beautiful That Way, and more and I love seeing him smile and laugh so excitedly as I do. He especially loves my singing when it’s feeding time; then it’s actually manageable to feed the little hyperactive munchkin. In a way, spoon-feeding him while singing to him feels to me like a much better experience to, sort of, compensate for not having much luck with breastfeeding.
In the past 5 months, I have been in a constant state of anxiety, pain, depression, paranoia, panic, and misery. Nothing I do seem to alleviate the situation, at least not to the point of being even slightly happy. I have had so many friends come and go in the past 6 years that to count them would make my head spin and I will most likely have a panic attack. I did, however, manage to keep one friend, who is very dear to me and, for once, not in the obsessive way it usually means to me. She has a daughter two months older than my son and I met her in a clinic we both attended for mommies & babies. She got me out of the house with Robin to the mall and we went shopping and are supposed to go get our nails done together next week! For the first time, I don’t have any expectations from her or our friendship. I feel more relaxed and less anxious when our plans don’t pull through. We have a lot in common, so there is a lot to talk about, yet somehow when we meet face to face, I don’t find the courage to speak up like I do when we text, so it’s mainly just her talking or awkward silence. I still need to work on that, but hey, I’m really getting better at having conversations with people!
Throughout the entire pregnancy, we didn’t fight once. Okay, maybe we fought some. A lot. But it was only in the beginning and in a really crappy apartment that set our teeth on edge. When we moved to our current apartment, all fights have vanished. Life took a sharp turn for the better and all our negativity towards each other subsided to make room for excitement and non-stop planning. Now, we can’t stop fighting. Everything we talk about immediately escalates into some heated argument. We fought so much in the past three months that a few weeks ago, my husband actually came up to me and said that he can’t stand my crying. It drives him mad and he gets enraged when I talk while crying or when I start crying when we talk. I’ve been really good with not crying in front of him until 2 days ago, when we made the calculations for our expenses and income and came to the grim conclusion that relocating from this hellish country will not be possible this summer, meaning my life-long dream of going to med-school will be put on hold for at least another year. I broke down and cried and I couldn’t stop myself, even though he was sitting right next to me and I could see the color rising in his cheeks. Of course, if he was angry he didn’t voice it, but he never voices anything he’s feeling. Even when I cried in front of him for the first time in weeks, he never said anything. Why am I always looking for his reaction all the time? It’s not like I wouldn’t have cried otherwise. I am actually really proud of myself; about a week ago, we were fighting (shocker), and I felt the tears choking me and the anger rise in my veins, so I told him, calmly, that I cannot speak to him right now until he shows some feelings, stop acting so coldly towards me that he wouldn’t even look at me, and apply at least a little bit of tone to his speech. It drove me insane, so I cut it short. The conversation actually went better afterwards when I got back inside.
I feel desperate. I feel like I am trapped in a dark hole where I can’t see my feet, but the top is wide open and always blindingly bright so I can never really look up. The walls of this hole are so smooth that there is nothing to hold on to and the edge of the hole is just out of my reach no matter how high I jump. I feel like there is a stack of every single science, math, literature, history, and fine arts book on my chest, just sitting there, peacefully preventing my lungs from properly inflating.
My endometriosis has deteriorated so much that there have not been 2 consecutive days of no painkillers. If before I was addicted and took them to pass my whatever excuse I had at the time that I wanted to avoid, now I take them because I have no choice. I can’t deny, though, that I am not too reluctant to take them…
My body feels like it’s betraying me, mutinying against my control, and leaving no hostages in the process. There are many times when moving my arm in any way, slight and effortless as it may be, requires so much energy that I don’t know where to take from. My body doesn’t feel like it belongs to me. I feel like a guest, a hostage, forced to fulfill a mastermind’s wishes, all the while pleading for some relief. Shooting pain from my hip to my rib to my back, centering in the kidney area, frozen shoulder, constant twisting knots in my abdomen… I am exhausted. I am tired of feeling as if the pain is the one true constant of my life. Well, that and fighting with my husband… even now, as I type this, I feel the panic rise in my chest as I force myself to focus on writing, however many times I have to hit the backspace button to fix mistakes made by shaky hands. I tremble, breathe unevenly, and my heart is threatening to explode from the walls of its rib cage containment, and I still cannot allow myself to disarm and become vulnerable to him. The very thought terrifies me to the core.
Our fights are usually because of miscommunication, unrealistic expectations of each other, not listening, and impatience. We’re quick to pull the trigger when it comes to spouting something under the belt because we know exactly what will hurt and when it will hurt the most. Here is the thing, though, both of us hate it and it hurts a lot to give and receive the blows. I feel so alone in the past few months that sometimes I just fantasize about being with someone who won’t make me feel so alone. He loves taking naps whenever he can. It’s like he’s in a constant state of being so tired that he can’t function without getting at least a 2-hour snooze midday. Usually, we have a fight right around the time when Robin falls asleep and when we have a fight he distances himself to the point of being completely apathetic and then declares he wants to (surprise, surprise), take a nap, and “recharge” so that “we can get back to it more calmly”. I can’t sleep when we’re like this. My mind races everything I ever did wrong in my life, I wonder how I will screw up my son’s life, I feel like the air is running out in my lungs and I can’t get any more in, all I want is for someone to hold me as tight as possible and tell me that I’m not alone. But he is asleep. He closed the bedroom door – not that he needs to, because nothing will wake him once he’s out – so that I wouldn’t bother him with my crying. Cue the flashback to when my stepmom used to close my room door when I cried… Upon realizing that I am truly alone with myself, I usually go into a full-blasted panic attack that more often than not ends in me cutting. At some point in his snooze, Robin wakes up and I need to care for him amidst all this emotional turmoil and panic attack. I will always do anything for him and without giving it a second thought, but boy is this 10 times harder when you feel like you’re trying to catch your breath with your fingers. It doesn’t matter if I’m crying hysterically, having a panic attack, or just shedding a few tears here and there – he won’t pay attention. You know, he knows I’m cutting. He sees them sometimes when I do them lower than usual or just don’t cover them up. A few days ago, he decided to organize my things in the bathroom and found my razor. He put it back neatly in its place and didn’t bring it up until I did, saying that it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d taken it away or not because I’d find another one.
I have no one to talk to. I feel like my husband couldn’t care less about what I’m going through and if anything, will do anything he can to ignore it as much as possible. When we’re not fighting, we just sit in front of the TV in silence, not watching some series that we’ve watched before. I used to write because I loved it and it made me feel like I have a safe place for my thoughts; now? Now, writing has become my only outlet. I can’t go see a therapist because they cost so much money and every penny needs to be saved right now since I am the only one working at the moment and we are planning to move to the Netherlands. The financial issue in the house is strangling me. We’ve made a lot of very expensive mistakes in the past, but everything seemed to be stable when Robin was born. In the blink of an eye, my account has been drained and we’re starting to eat through our savings, my savings. I was always very careful not to spend too much money on myself and I wouldn’t even buy myself food if I thought I couldn’t afford it. It drives me absolutely crazy how much he is smoking lately. He buys at least one pack of cigarettes a day and it costs so much. A fifth of my salary, to be exact! Just to put things in proportions, he spends about half the amount of our rent cost on cigarettes. I can’t say anything about it, though, because I am also smoking a lot from all the stress and all the times he’s going out for a smoke, which automatically draws me to go out with him, since I don’t want to be alone, not even for 10 minutes. Pathetic, I know.
I feel myself drowning in worries and misery and hopelessness and despair. I want to scream at the top of my lungs, but it doesn’t help at all and sometimes even makes things worse. I have so many things I want to say to my husband and tell him, but I can’t. All I think about is how much he doesn’t care to listen and how much of my crying will he be able to retain before exploding. I sit here, practically about to burst and he doesn’t bat an eye in my direction. On the contrary, he just acts as if nothing’s going on; talking about this and that, mentioning random facts or pointing out things in the show.
I no longer interest him in any way. Physically, he won’t touch me anywhere. Our kisses are these short pecks on the lips, bearing no sentiment. I can’t blame him, though. After birth, my outward appearance changed. My hair keeps falling out as if undergoing chemo and it’s brittle and thin, my stomach is not as flat and elastic as it once was and now has a mini bulge around my belly button, and my breasts… my breasts are hideous. My nipples used to be perky and pink and small; now they’re enormous and ghastly brown. They are sagging over my chest like an old woman in the changing rooms. I can’t stand to see my reflection in the mirror. In the first trimester, when all the hormonal changes are at their peak, I had excess hair all over my face (actually had to pull a few thick, black hairs from my chin), acne on my chest and forehead, my face swelled and I grew another chin… mind you, I’m a very petite girl, so this was all very disproportional to my figure. People couldn’t even tell I was pregnant in my 38th week if I wore a jacket. Even still, with all the bodily side effects of pregnancy, I never detested myself so much in my life as I do now. For the entirety of the pregnancy, we never had sex once, until around 38 weeks when we both said that enough was enough. It was kind of symbolic in the sense that sex has been for a single purpose (have kids), for a very long time, and now it’s for that same reason again. Neither one of those times was for actually having fun together. We tried having sex a few times here and there after Robin was born, but only actually did it about 4 or 5 times. I told him how I feel about myself. I told him how I have lost so much weight in the past few months that I now weigh less than I did at the start of my pregnancy; I told him how lonely I feel, how depressed and constantly anxious, how miserable and hopeless life seems to me right now, but I still get no reaction from him. Not really. He’ll talk about it for a few moments and then the subject will have somehow changed and never to be brought up again.
Ever since giving birth, I no longer feel like an individual person. I am Robin’s mother, truly the world’s best title to have, but I am nothing apart from that. People no longer have any genuine interest in me but in my son. My mom and I got really close during my pregnancy, but now we barely speak again. Every time Robin sees or hears her he starts crying hysterically. She doesn’t do anything with him but shove a camera in his face and take selfies with him, no matter how many times I tell her to keep the screen away from the baby’s face. She’s somewhat of a little girl, my mom; she’ll do whatever she wants and then blame the rest of the world for the consequences. She is always the victim and if I want any relationship with her, I have to be the one to bend over backwards for her. I do have one person in my life, one of my mom’s many unlucky fellows to fall for her in the past, with whom I recently reconnected. Out of all my mom’s friends and momentarily lovers, he was always the nicest, kindest, sweetest, and most understanding. This man has never shown me anything but kindness and now, as an adult 12 years later, I am able to talk to him openly (to an extent, obviously), and his insights are a blessing since he is also basing them on my past experiences, pleasant or traumatic. Aside from my husband, he was the second person I told when we got pregnant (the first was hubby’s cousin who helped us paint and arrange the apartment before we moved). I told him before I told my parents (my mom being the last person to know, but still in the most creative way I could think of – I printed Robin’s first ultrasound picture on a magnet and captioned “my grandchild’s 1st picture”, put the magnet in an envelope and gave it to her to open and find out in a restaurant just the two of us). She was dumbfounded at first; couldn’t speak for about 30 minutes or so, then started saying that she just can’t believe that I am making her a grandmother. Anyway, she got over her initial shock and we became very close. She was super excited to buy him everything, from his crib and stroller to the diapers and wipes, all the while saying how she had asked for a granddaughter and I, as usual, didn’t do as I was told. Such is the humor of my mother… Anyway, this man and I go out some evenings to talk and catch up. Mostly it’s me chewing his ear off, but he listens patiently and gives his opinion to the best of his ability, as objectively as possible. When I talk to him and share, even just a little bit, I don’t feel so alone anymore. I suddenly feel like someone truly cares for what I have to say and what is weighing on me. When I tell him things that to me seem negative, he somehow manages to make me see the bright side of them; for example, a few weeks ago, I told him that sometimes when I am alone with Robin and he’s calling for me, when I feel too overwhelmed, I don’t go to him straight away and sometimes I even go to the bathroom to cry and then come back once it’s out of my systems. To this, he told me this it was “exactly what should have been done”. He calmed me by saying that even though the baby seems in distress, he is not, he’s just grumpy. Obviously, I would not ignore a baby in distress. “Robin is fine crying for another 2-3 minutes as you compose yourself and it’s better than getting all that stress on him”. When I told my husband the exact same thing, his lips broke at the corner and he told me there needs to be a solution to this problem because the baby has to always come first. I really am trying my damn hardest to provide for my son.
My birthday was last month and just like every year, I had really high hopes for it. This year, I can count on both hands how many people remembered, including my family. My husband made us a romantic dinner with wine and cheeses and deli meats out on the terrace. While outside, he said that wasn’t all he had planned and that he has yet to give me my birthday gift. That was all there was to it. I snapped at my family for never actually giving a damn about my birthday, so my mom arranged for the entire family to meet at this restaurant. You could cut the tension with a knife. You could see it on each of their faces that no one wanted to be there. I kept trying to explain to anyone who would listen that I don’t care for presents or celebrations; I want people to give a crap about the fact that I was born. Hubby declared that he is already dreading next year’s birthday and that he doesn’t want to get into it, whatever that means… when I were a kid and had to blow out my candles (didn’t happen many times, maybe 4 or 5), I wouldn’t wish for a pony or a castle or a pretty dress; I would wish for a happy birthday next year. This year I consoled in the fact that my next birthday was supposed to be celebrated in the Netherlands, away from my family, but seeing that we don’t have enough money to even pay the rent, that’s not going to happen.
The Netherlands is our light at the end of a very long, very dark tunnel. It’s always been my lifelong dream to study medicine and become a doctor. As a kid, instead of changing my mind about the ideal future career every other day, I changed specialties. Anyway, seeing as I have so many ideas for research and hypotheses I want to check out, my current route is oncology and clinical trials. I love school. I love studying new things and going to class and solving problems and having other students to share all these amazing things with. Not going back to school next year has perhaps been the most devastating piece of news in the whole relocation ordeal. But seriously, though, there are so many things that have been screwed over by not moving next year that not going back to school seems like the least of my worries. The Netherlands was supposed to be my safe haven: a non-religious country, good healthcare, happy people, amazing nature, legalized marijuana, and it was supposed to be the one place that I would allow myself to receive therapy. I wanted to go to a shrink here, but somehow what I talked to the psychiatrist about had made its way to the fertility clinic doctors during my IVF treatment, so now I can’t trust the public system’s shrinks and I can’t afford a private one. Fun. So this was supposed to be my opportunity to take care of myself and seek help. I only have this blog to tell all that I feel to. I don’t have anyone I can trust enough to ask for help and I am lost in loneliness.
I have been working a lot about finding the root of my problems lately and have come to many great understandings, but I’m still missing the therapist’s insight for the actual processing and what the hell to do with the problem now that I’ve uncovered its root. I feel trapped in the sense that, on one hand, I have this great motivation to work on myself, while on the other hand, I have no one professional to help guide me in the right path of doing so. I keep imagining myself in therapy sessions, wondering what the therapist might respond with when I tell them various things. Obviously, this plan isn’t working so well and I can’t rely on what I think the therapist would say.
In mental health, there are no blood tests or X-Rays or MRIs to help diagnose a disease. In psychiatry, there are symptoms and a patient’s history. Psychiatrists diagnose a person based on the general state they are in (how they are dressed, how they are behaving, and what their body language tells), what the patient and/or the close environment has to say about recent events that have led them to seek help, and the general history of the patient’s background. That goes without saying that mental health is a grey area, completely subject to change from one psychiatrist to another. The true constant, however, is my knowledge of myself. My point is, no psychiatrist will ever diagnose me properly because they don’t know me like I do. There will be things I will hide (such as cutting and the likes), and there will be things that to me may seem abnormal but to the shrink would seem perfectly regular and vice versa, of course. For the first time in my life, and that is saying a lot since I have been dragged to shrinks and therapists all throughout my childhood, I actually want the help of a professional. Sucks, huh? Such is my life: my goals are always just out of reach.
I was going to close this entry and just read over and publish it, but last night, while smoking our nightly joint, it dawned on me that whenever people ignore me, such as when my husband ignores me while we’re fighting and I end up crying hysterically, uncontrollably, it’s because when I was a kid and my dad came to visit (my parents divorced when I was 2 years old), I would beg for him to take me with him and not leave me here with my mom. He did eventually, but when he didn’t and I was left with her all alone, I cried. I cried as loud as I could, hoping he would take pity on me and come back. He never came back, but I never stopped this behavior whenever I felt abandoned (like when Hubby decides to take a nap during a fight or some other unresolved issue that’s triggering the waterworks). Fun fact, they actually had a system of getting me back to my mom’s: my dad would drive me back to my mom’s house the day of his flight back to the States, drag me by my arm to my mom, who would then hold me down as my dad drove away. Overall, I think my childhood was a blast, don’t you?
I also found this program online that lets you speak with a therapist for rather a low fee. I’m really curious, partially excited, and very terrified to try this.
The Missing Puzzle Piece 