The Heart Star

There are a lot of words.

2012-01-24T05:33:00.002Z

Mostly they are coming out of my daughter's mouth. When I started this blog she was a squawking lump of refluxy, giggling fat. You could roll her across a room. Now, she has opinions. And good lord, don't we just know it. She will tell you, at length, what the other parent did that day that really pissed her off (although when she doesn't know a word, she replaces it with babble and outrage). She will delight in realising that she knows the word for something when we see it and that delight will lead to ten minutes of joyful crowing about the dog/cat/cake/bus/whatever. I can ask her a question and get a response. She can articulate her needs in more than just gestures and screeches. Words are amazing.

For the first time in her life I'm really enjoying being a mother. It's a good feeling.

However, everything else right now, it just feels bad. I'm so depressed most days that it chews at my edges. I cry every day about how bad a mother I feel I am, about my failings. Sometimes the crying is big, chest-shivering, full-body crying. Sometimes it's that silent, tearless, unsatisfying crying that happens when I'm so exhausted by a situation that my body can't even drum up the energy to cry properly.
I'm better now at recognising the signs of mania. The problem is that by taking pre-emptive action against mania, I trigger bouts of what I call 'riptide depression'. Little whirlpools of depression that arrive fast and fuck you up. The thought process goes thus: (real example from tonight)
While surfing the web: "Oooh, instructions on how to make herbal soap! That looks like so much fun, and I have some ice cube trays that would make perfect moulds! Maybe I should look into that."
While searching for a place to buy glycerin soap: "Wow, this could be a really fun project, maybe I could sell them? Or make loads of Christmas presents in preparation for Xmas '12! It would be SO organised, this is a great idea!"
After adding glycerin soap to my amazon basket, while looking for moulds: "What am I doing? I have 4 unmailed out orders, 6 orders waiting for me to start them, four unfinished personal projects, and a few dozen projects waiting to be put on Etsy. Why am I trying to give myself more to do? Why am I collecting a new hobby? OH. Because I'm manic. Right. Let's put a stake in this time-vampire right now."
Immediately, we hit the riptide: "Yeah, because I'm such a fucking idiot I can't even have a hobby, or buy soap. Why do I bother doing anything? I never finish. I'm an idiot. I'm a stupid, stupid, useless person. Why did I even think that was a good idea? Like anyone would want some shitty soap I made myself anyway. Like anyone wants to buy anything I make. They DON'T, that's why I don't make any money. And here I am, when we've just had a big fight about budgets, trying to waste more of his money buying materials for another fucking project that would only get forgotten about and half finished like every other fucking stupid thing in my stupid, pathetic life."

This happens at least three or four times I week. I'm swimming along, quite happily, then I over-reach, hit a riptide, and drown in self-loathing. Every time. I really desperately need my psychiatrist appointment to come through. I need someone to listen to me and help me. I'm trying to sort my life out but I feel like nothing I do makes a dent in the pile of shit it's turned into.
Some people on a forum belong to wanted to help me so much that they got together a lump sum of money and donated it to me, so I can hire a cleaner, because the place is such a mess I can't cope with it. I cried for days with gratitude. I looked up cleaners, and I sent one email out but never got a reply. After that I lost confidence for a few weeks, but finally the shame of the money sitting there made me move, and I sent out another email to a different company. But I mis-typed my phone number and so they sent me an email instead, but now I'm so embarrassed that I can't even type my own phone number right that I can't contact them. How stupid will they think I am? And when they see my flat....the shame of the state we live in....I can't cope with it. I can't accept help because my shame is so huge. It makes my fingers heavy and stops my hands moving and make my chest close in panic when I even try to move forward.
Shame.....my world involves so much shame. Shame over my mental health. Shame that I feel ashamed for being crazy. Shame for how I 'allow' my mental health to affect my family's lives. Shame for allowing my daughter to live in a dirty home. Shame for taking charity from my friends. Shame that even when people give me money to help me do something, I'm too pathetic to get it done. Shame that I can't even tell my friends about this because I worry they'll think I'm not grateful. Shame for being a bad businesswoman, and wife, and mother. Shame that everyone thinks I'm intelligent, and loving, and funny, and strong, and basically doing an ok job, when the reality is nobody really understand how very, very bad things are. Shame that I'm such a good liar that nobody even realises they're seeing a lie.

There are a lot of words, but 'shame' seems to be the only one I see right now.

Oh, hi, what?

2011-11-09T06:13:00.002Z

*stumbles in*

Shit.

*stumbles out again*

*stumbles back in with big bouquet of 'SORRY FOR BEING CRAP' roses, like every bad boyfriend throughout history*

So, it's been a really really long time since I updated my blog. Part of this has been technical problems -my laptop went in for repair and that turned into a three month long saga about how fucking shit the company I sent it off with are- and part of it has been health problems, and part of it has been that part of me feels like if I don't write it down, it isn't real. I write it down on Facebook but on facebook everything disappears so fast....everything is gone in a few days and you can forget. With blogging, things stick around. They stay.

*

Health wise, things have been shit. In late August I started having seizures. A lot of seizures. Between 2-6 a day. At first we thought I was just fainting. I have been known to faint quite a lot, so we didn't think much of it. But it got more and more frequent and more and more scary and it didn't seem to have any logical cause and I started shitting bricks about the fact that I was just randomly passing out ALL THE TIME. I scouted around a bit and eventually figured out that I wasn't fainting, I was having Atonic Seizures. We figured out a day when my in-laws could take Terror Tot so we could spend the day in A&E trying to get someone to figure out what was wrong with me. After a kerfuffle with a shitty A&E nurse, an hour and a half in another clinic and a seizure on re-entry at A&E, I was eventually admitted 'overnight'. 'Overnight' turned into 'for three days' and for one of those days I didn't see a single doctor or get given a single test. It was horrific, because the ward I was on at one point threatened to ban Terror Tot from visiting on the ward, because she was 'too loud' and could upset the other patients, so the next day I didn't see her at all, and Mr A had to go back to work while I was still in hospital, so for a day I didn't see her and only saw him for 12minutes. It was miserable and lonely and this coupled with having no friends come to visit me (despite a few FB hints (ok, a lot of FB hints)) made for quite an unhappy few days.
Eventually I had an EEG and a consult with the head of Neurology. The Neuro's felt that what I was having weren't epileptic attacks, but non-epileptic seizures. They bounced me to Psych, and together with Psych I decided to go on medication (SSRI's) to control my stress and anxiety and therefore control the seizures. They discharge me, I go home and hug the crap out of my baby.

I get hold of the tasty tasty psych drugs (Citalopram) and start taking them. Immediately, things go Really Quite Wrong Indeed. First of all I feel sick, and spaced out, and very very numb, and that lasts for a bit, and I think I'll be happy when it passes but I'm not, because what comes next is so much worse. Scary scary scary depression. Like, my friends are worried about my safety and I'm staring dreamily at kitchen knives and talking frankly about how if I wanted to die, no one could actually stop me and that my life is pointless, I'm just trudging through it until I get to a natural resting point and then I'll jump off a roof or something. It was horrific and I thought I'd be happy when it passed but I wasn't. because guess what? Yes. It got WORSE.

It started with a gentle but swift *pop* out of the depressive cycle. I wasn't any happy, but I suddenly had the urge to Get Up And Do Things. I started doing crafty stuff, to take my mind off and Make Myself Feel Useful. Then I started doing little DIY projects. Stuff I'd been meaning to do. Hells yeah, I thought, look at me, being all useful and shit! Look at me and my productivity! Medication ROCKS. Then I couldn't sleep properly. I'd sleep really fitfully and wake frequently, and I'd wake up early and not be able to get back to sleep again. I wasn't getting any rest during the day because I was So Busy Being Productive. In fact, I was SO busy being productive that some days I didn't sit down between waking up in the morning at 10 or 11pm, and even when I was sitting down I'd be at my sewing machine, working on something. I began to realise that I felt possessed. I wasn't productive, I was manic. I couldn't stop. I was miserable and exhausted and near tears all the time but the pills just would not let me stop doing stuff.

I went to my GP and asked her to take me off the pills, because I couldn't cope. Then came two weeks of misery while I weaned off them, and then a new prescription (Sertraline). We're currently about a week into the Sertraline and so far there've been no huge changes, but I am climbing out of a pretty big depressive-pit. The last week I've slept most days and I haven't really got out of bed in a while, because bed is safe and comfortable and warm and bed doesn't make me need to do things. If I'm in bed, I can pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist.
I can pretend that crippling manic episodes on low-dose anti-depressants aren't a giant red flag for Bipolar Disorder. I can pretend that Bipolar would explain....a lot. Like, my whole personality and everything I've done since I was 15. I can pretend that the few feelers I've put out with people who know about these things and who I trust to be honest with me didn't return the info that yes, bipolar seems likely.
I can pretend that I might not have another mental health label before I'm 24.

*

I've been doing a lot of craft stuff lately. I started an Etsy shop and it's fun and I like the community. I like having a sense of purpose. I like feeling good about myself. I like doing things with my hands. I'm not bad at this stuff, not by a long shot. I'm not amazing, but I'm better than the average person, and that makes me feel good.

*

Terror Tot is doing really well. She is officially no longer allergic to dairy and we're making up for 2 years without it with loads of everything she's never had before. I'm enjoying this stage of her life. She's so communicative and every new word is a revelation and every new quirk makes my heart skip a beat, and every new skill remind me that this isn't MY baby here, this is a person I just happened to give birth to.
And everytime she grows up a bit more I get a little bit sad that I'll never give birth to another baby. My heart dips and my stomach drops and my chest rises as it fills up with hurt and loss, and I swallow it down and breathe it out and scrub my wrist across my eyes and tell myself I wouldn't really want another baby. Not really.

Oh, there I am.

2011-06-07T23:55:00.004+01:00

We moved house, then I got sick, then I got better, then there just seemed to be an endless stream of really important things I never had the time to do, then we had to start preparing for our trip to South Africa, then we had to actually GO to South Africa, then we had to come back and deal with the aftermath of being gone for a fortnight and then we found out I was pregnant with a planned and much-wanted baby.

Now I'm sitting here going through my 2nd miscarriage in 11 months.

I have been a shit blogger and a shit friend recently, but I have felt *so* overwhelmed by everything. There are all these demands on my time and not enough of me or my time to meet them. I'm having worse partial dislocations and the 'normal' partials are happening more often. My mood is generally much improved but physically I'm beat up. I've been trying to be good to myself and part of that was stepping away from blogging, because I was getting so emotionally invested in what was happening that I was coming away drained. I don't think that's healthy but at the same time, it upsets me that there are people out there I care for who I haven't even 'seen' for months because I'm too weak to cope with reading about their lives. It's pathetic.

Right now we're doing a lot of thinking about the possibility of my hypermobility being connected with my inability to stay pregnant. The more I read up about chemical pregnancies/early miscarriages, the more I think that I've had more of these than I realised. There's definitely been one more, possibly more but a mix of bad memory and incredibly irregular periods makes this difficult to track. If your period isn't due, how do you know it's late? You can't. But I can know if it's suddenly much much heavier than normal, or much more painful, which has happened a few times.

It was my 23rd birthday yesterday, I dragged Mr Arienette to a theme park and we rode rollercoasters. I smiled so much my face ached. Life is ups and downs.

Disconnected.

2011-03-30T15:52:00.002+01:00

Before we started moving house, I'd had lots and lots of partial dislocations (as is normal in people with my condition) but never a full dislocation.

In the last two weeks, I've had 6.

My mood is still up, my life is still good, but my body is struggling with the extra activity, and it's starting to weigh on my mind that my hypermobility may be even more severe than I'd previously thought. And I thought it was pretty damn bad before.

Dislocations *hurt*.

Anyway, laptop is now only opening in safe mode, and keyboard is ridiculously fucked up, so it needs to go to the laptop hospital. Poor laptop :(

Alive with the Glory

2011-03-20T16:55:00.004Z

I originally wrote this as a comment over on Veronica's latest blog post, but then I changed my mind and decided that really, it needed a more general audience and it's something I've been trying to figure out how to say here anyway.

Last night I was hanging out of the window of my new place, smoking my 'congrats for making it through the day alive' cigarette, and I realised in that moment that I felt alive. Fucking.....ALIVE. Like I could breathe again, not just go through the mechanical, necessary motions of moving air in and out of my lungs and heaving my chest up and down, but properly and fully, I could breathe. I could feel my skin and I could feel the tears in my eyes and I could feel that feeling I hadn't felt since I was 17, that wanttosingwanttodancewanttoshout feeling that bubbles up inside and overflows.

It was beautiful. For the first time since I started smoking again I didn't feel bad about it, or mentally justify it to the baying mob of better-mothers in my head. It was ok, because it was making me feel. It was ok because I wanted to do it and I am allowed to do things I want, even if I'm a mother. I'm allowed to want. I'm allowed to need. I'm allowed to be a person, with flaws and bad habits and things that have nothing to do with my child. I'm allowed to do things I'm not 'supposed' to. I'm allowed to go away for a night and NOT miss my baby. I'm allowed to drink a little more than I should at a special night out with girlfriends. I'm allowed to drop my kid off at granny's house and go home and have loud sex with my husband even when we were supposed to be running errands.

I feel like I've taken off a heavy winter coat and boots and hat and scarf and gloves and I'm glorying in the nakedness of freedom from guilt. I'm a person. PART of that person is a mother, but I'm so very much more than that too.

Today for the first time in years I smiled for no reason. Just because the sunset was beautiful and the air was crisp and I was alive, and it was enough for me.

Update very quickly.

2011-03-04T10:40:00.004Z

My marriage is not over, but my keyboard is FUBAR so I can't write a big long update on what happened because right now I'm having to C&P in ALL my 'h's and that shit is looooong. What I might do is c&p in some posts I already wrote on a private group on Facebook where I've already filled in all the blanks, that way until I have a working h-key you're not all in the dark.

It's dark in here.

2011-03-02T01:37:00.004Z

I think my marriage is over. I had my first night away from A.B on Saturday and it was lovely, but I was chatting with my friends, we were complaining about our relationships -as you do- and the things I was saying seemed so small, so insignificant, so stupid. I realised slowly over the next couple of days that all our fighting, all my unhappiness with the relationship, it's not because he's actually a bad person or a bad husband. I'm unhappy with him because I'm unhappy with EVERYTHING. And the worst thing is, I'm taking it out on him, blaming him for my misery as if he's causing it, when really all I do is drag him down and hold him back because he spends all his time looking after me. I'm so sick all the time, he's either at work or he's taking care of A.B and taking care of me. We fight over stupid things because I'm unhappy and never satisfied with life.

The truth is, I didn't want this. I got married because I fell in love but at the time, I wasn't expecting to live very long. I was very sick, and I wanted a few years of stability while I slowly wound down my life. It's easy to be in love when you think you're about to clock out. I wasn't expecting to get pregnant after 6 months of marriage, and when I did, I didn't want a baby. I continued the pregnancy for two reasons. I didn't think it would last (everything every doctor was telling me pointed to a negative outcome) and and I didn't think our relationship could survive any alternatives. As stupid as it sounds, I wasn't expecting to have a baby. No one, at any stage, had really prepared me for the idea that we would end up with a child. From the moment she was born, I went into a waking coma. My life just stalled and nothing I did, nothing that happened could re-start it. I tried over and over to do things that might make me come back to life but nothing worked. Blogging was supposed to help but while it was a good distraction sometimes, it didn't produce any real revelation like I was expecting. In fact the more involved I got with the disabled blogging community, the more depressed I got.

If I leave, they'll both be better off. He's an amazing dad and he'd be a better dad if he wasn't having to care for me too. I know people won't understand... it's practically accepted that fathers sometimes leave their children, but mothers don't. Mothers are supposed to be there always. Mothers are supposed to stay forever. But that's not what's best for her. What's best for her is to be with the best parent, and her father is the best parent. I'll stay around as much as I can to help him and I won't disappear from her life, but I think the only way to give her a happy, healthy childhood is for her to grow up in a home where there isn't constant unhappiness and fighting. I love her too much to ruin her life by staying around to poison everything.

I don't know where I'm going to live or how I'm going to live. I suppose these things have a way of working out. I won't pretend I have any answers at this point, or that I'm not scared, but there's no doubt in my mind that this is the right thing to do. Both of them deserve better.

Pointless Post In Which I Am Lame (and a picture of Baby A.B)

2011-02-24T00:42:00.003Z

(This is pretty much the face everyone pulls around me, all.the.time.)

So today I discovered (read: saw on the side of The Bloggess' blog) an awesome guy called Josh Weed who is basically the blogger I wish I was, but mormon and with a penis and with three kids (my vagina just couldn't handle that shit.) I clicked on his link at about 9pm and it's now 00:50 and I have been reading almost solidly (except breaks to take a pregnancy test and make some cheese and crackers and eat a lump of danish blue cheese crackerless BECAUSE I'M FUCKING FEARLESS) and I have laughed more times than I can count. I could say a bunch of shit about Josh, like that he's witty, and sensitive, and shows a surprising amount of insight into the life of his wife (known as Wife) and a touching appreciation for what she does for him and her role in their family and in society. I could say that I think if I could ever persuade Mr A to go to counselling, he's the kind of person I'd want to explain my marital problems to. I could say a lot of shit, but instead I'll say this:
He is crazy in a way that I seriously appreciate and twisted and dark in a way that had me cackling.

If that's not a first rate endorsement, I don't know what is.

Anyway, in an example of how fucking convoluted and ridiculous my life is, about a million months ago (November) Josh wrote a post about The NeverEnding Story (if you have never seen TNS you are not old enough to operate the Internet. Please go crawl back into your crib and stop making me feel so fucking old) and it reminded me that for a brief, shining moment in my pregnancy, I was all 'LETS CALL THE BABY ATREYU!' and my husband was totes scared of me because I kept waking him up in the dead of night by slowly twisting my thumbs into his back and screeching "I just can't stand the way you breathe!" so he didn't immediately voice extremely loud objections and question my sanity, which I totally took as a green light. Little baby Atreyu B.J was going to be awesome.
So tonight I was thinking back, and then I started wondering about all the people little Atreyu went to school with, who would think we actually named Atreyu after the band, Atreyu (which they knew of as some weird oldies music their clearly awesome parents listen to) and then I had this insane urge to listen to some Atreyu, so I paused Snakes On a Plane and youtubed me some Atreyu, and it was while listening to 'Lipgloss and Black' that I remembered how fitting this song used to be to my life, and realised with sadness how fitting it still is.

For those of you with less than perfect hearing, or who just don't speak metalcore, I've included some of the lyrics (without the endless repetitions)

If I gave you pretty enough words
Could you paint a picture of us that works
With emphasis on function rather than design
Aren't you tired?
cause I will carry you
On a broken back and blown out knees
I have been where you are for a while

Aren't you tired of being weak?
Such rage that you could scream
All the stars right out of the sky
And destroy the prettiest starry night
Every evening that I die

I am exhumed just a little less human and lot more bitter and cold

After all these images of pain
Have cut right through you
I will kiss every scar and weep
You are not alone
Then I'll show you that place,
in my chest where my heart,
still tries to beat;
It still tries to beat

Aren't you tired of being weak?
Such rage that you could scream
All the stars right out of the sky
And destroy the prettiest starry night
Every evening that I die

Live, Love, Burn, Die

I spent my teen years writing poetry, trying to communicate what people clearly weren't hearing in my much more eloquent habits of casual sex and black-out drinking, and in four years I never wrote something that expressed what I was trying to say like this song does. I wrote some dark shit and it still kind of flummoxes me to this day that no one took me aside and went "Listen, I've read some of your poetry and truth be told, I think you're a little disturbed." I mean...my boyfriends were reading this stuff, and what I was saying by writing it was 'Please, please, I am so fucking damaged that I can't even tell you how damaged I am, please tell me you see it so that some of this pressure building up in here can release.' I still know some of my ex-boyfriends now, and I kind of want to shake them and ask them if they realised at the time just what they were dealing with. Mr A was one of the only boyfriends ever who has never read anything I've written, and I'm sure that's a coincidence, but sometimes I wonder.

More to come soon, on such diverse subjects as holidays, moving house, cleaning, and breastfeeding.
Actually, those aren't that diverse at all. They're all boring and mundane and domestic. Oh Josh, you had me pegged.

Avoidance and not-so-near-death experiences.

2011-02-15T02:04:00.005Z

So, the Flu is gone, but it left me with what we thought was a fractured rib. It got worse and worse however, and on the night of the 13th, after what I thought was 3 weeks but appears to only have been one*, I was writhing around, in so much agony I couldn't breathe, screaming from every movement, convinced the the rib was breaking, splintering, and penetrating my lungs. I caved, and told Mr A I needed him to take me to the hospital. Four hours and an x-ray later it's discovered that I do not have a broken rib, but instead I apparently live in the 16th century. I have fucking pleurisy. Who even gets pleurisy? Pirates and poets, thats who.

I was released with a box of codeine and instructions to rest. The resting I was happy with but the codeine? Lets be straight here: I wouldn't say I'm an ex drug addict, but I'm an ex drug abuser. I didn't drink because I liked it, or because it was social, or because it felt nice. I didn't take drugs to achieve new experinces or enhance a good time. I did drugs and took alcohol specifically with the intention of getting fucked up. I attempted to obliterate myself with substances. I have abused everything from diet pills to ibuprofen to whisky to cocaine. You can't give me a drug and ask me to be sensible. I'm not. I don't have a filter, I don't have a valve that cuts things off when it gets too much. There is no shallow end of substance use for me. I always jump in at the deep end, and then I sink to the fucking bottom, because there is something wrong in my brain that won't tell me when to stop. Even when I was first given co-dydramol by my GP in response to my (at that point undiagnosed) hypermobility, I immediately started abusing them, however unintentionally. I was taking the maximum dose of co-dydramol alongside the maximum dose of ibuprofen, every single day, and I was still in pain. I weaned myself off them and now I don't even take them daily. Not because there's no pain, but because the fear of addiction and abuse is stronger than the pain. The knowledge of how easy it would be to slip up looms over me. The weight of this all is enormous.
So too was that box of codeine.
I turned it over and over in my hands. I didn't take any the moment she gave it to me, I made myself wait. Why? Why prolong my agony when I had a solution? I don't know. Just to prove I could, perhaps. Just to make sure I was able to. I waited until I got home, and then I waited until I got settled back into bed, and then I waited a little longer, and then I sneezed and then coughed and a scream ripped itself out of my chest and tears stabbed at my eyes and my vision sparkled with little white flakes of pain and I knew it was madness to wait any longer, so I took two tiny pills.

Ten minutes later I was filled with the knowledge that once the pleurisy is gone, the pills will have to be gone too, but I will probably spend the rest of my life hoping that something goes badly wrong with my body so that I am once again prescribed an opiate. Because I have never felt as at peace with my life and myself and the world as I do now. I have never felt as good as I do fifteen minutes after taking my pills.

And isn't it sad that that's a dangerous thing?

*Time has gone all screwy. The result of lying in bed for three weeks with the 'flu rather than drug use, because I was having trouble before the codeine, but still annoying. I was sure I'd been ill about 5weeks but first mention of it elsewhere on the internet is on the 22nd of January. I've been free of the 'flu but nursing the pleurisy for what felt like two weeks at least, but can only have been one. I'm a bit confused, to be honest.

Swine Flu

2011-01-23T10:49:00.001Z

I has it.

Strangers.

2011-01-20T02:26:00.004Z

The most bizarre part to me now, was thanking him afterwards. This man had just ripped my world apart in a matter of seconds. He'd destroyed me, and once I'd stopped being eaten alive by pain, I would go on and destroy all of my closest friends.
And I was thanking him. Sincerely, and repetitively, and robustly. I was thanking him for his time, apologising, all the apologising....I felt genuinely sorry that I'd dragged him into this, that my mumbled, hysterical, tearful voicemail had been left on HIS phone, that HE was the one who had had to destroy me, that I'd made that his role in the whole thing. He hadn't asked for it and he didn't deserve it. It was an accident of fate, and in one of the last feelings I was to have for 6 months, I felt bad for him.

In 2008, an ocean away from me, a good friend of mine took her life. The facts surrounding her suicide will never be clear. We will never know the truth of what happened, and that hurts. I can't last any of it to rest while there are so many pieces left out of this puzzle. We, her online support network, had known her for some years, and we were a tight-knit community. As far as we had known, she was in a residential psychiatric unit, so it was not at all strange to us that we hadn't heard from her in a while. When you're trying to bring the crazy under control, that can be a 24/7 experience, and access to the internet can be limited, if it's there at all. The first we heard that something was wrong was from an outsider, who sent the leader of the community a message saying that she was sorry to break the news, but J was dead. We, the moderators of the community, immediately broke into mass panic, and quickly mobilised in an attempt to find out whether this was true. We didn't trust any outside source to break news like this to us.
It was the Friday before a holiday weekend in Canada, and from my small flat in London I frantically phoned every hospital in and around her city, desperately leaving messages, trying to find anyone who could speak to me. When I reached a dead end (ha ha) with phoning morgues, I started on newspapers, figuring someone, somewhere, had to have a connection. I left strained, tearful, jumbled messages on answering machines, begging anyone who could possibly help to please please phone me or contact me.
At 22:15 on May 17th 2008 I received this message from a reporter at a local newspaper who had said he may be able to help me:

I would rather have spoken with you on the telephone about this, but it seems the sad information you have is correct. I have a source who just called me back and confirmed the news about J...... Once I got the information, I was sick with dread wondering if I should tell you at all...but I get the sense that you needed to know, one way or another. I am truly sorry for your loss.

And I thanked him. And my heart washed over with ice water, and I thanked him. And my stomach puddled in a cold heap at my feet, and I thanked him. And I shut myself down at that moment and did not let myself open up again until November 8th, when 2 little lines on a little white stick threw me out of my orbit. And I thanked him.

Three years later, it is easier, and less painful. I've shut J up in a box in my heart and the muscle around the wound there has healed over and sometimes I feel her when it beats. I feel the sharp edges of that box and I feel the ice that gripped my nerves that night, before I drowned myself in alcohol so that I wouldn't have to feel something so immense.

Two years later, I watched J's sister via facebook as she went through a pregnancy with a nephew J would never meet. I watched her give birth to a beautiful son, and I'm watching him grow up. He will never know his beautiful, damaged, once-in-a-very-short-lifetime aunt, although I know she will influence his life immensely.

Sometimes I am angry, sometimes I am overwhelmed. But always, always I am thankful to the man who listened to his messages and heard a girl sobbing on the other end of the phone, and put a dampener on his holiday and put his professional life at risk to try to bring comfort to a group of strangers. He made a sacrifice that day, and we will never forget him for it.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Toddlerhood.

2011-01-17T05:18:00.002Z

Not-So-Baby A.B has recently decided to wake up between 3 and 4 every day and then stay awake, unless I lie down next to her for the rest of the night. This is infuriating and has the effect of making me so angry that tonight I found myself shouting at her, shouting at Mr A, shouting into my hands. Nothing will get her back to sleep except over an hour of lying perfectly still beside her. Now, under normal circumstances, this would be fine. Where else would I be at 3am except in bed? Except that HER sleeping badly makes ME sleep badly, so I HAVEN'T been in bed, or capable of going to sleep earlier (and even if I was tired, by the time I've done even 20 minutes of the 'make mummy pretend she's a statue' game, I'm so wound up and irate that I have no hope of sleeping) so right now, we're both pretty miserable.

I know you shouldn't wish stages of your childs life away, but I really can't wait til she can talk. It's so frustrating just not knowing what the fuck she WANTS. I'm tearing my hair out because she can't just tell me what's wrong so instead we're both upset and crying and tired beyond words.

It's 5:30am now, she's upstairs crying while her dad tries to get her to sleep, and has been for almost an hour, and I was upstairs trying to get her to sleep for at least 40 minutes before that. It's ridiculous. What's the problem? What's the matter? Why won't she just SLEEP.

I have no wisdom, no wit, no insight into the depths of mental health problems tonight. Tonight everything is fucked and I'm tired and I don't know what's wrong with my child and I just want it to stop.

To 350D or not to 350D, that is the question.

2011-01-05T03:26:00.002Z

When I was a teenager, I was a member over at DeviantArt.com. My fellow London members were my only real friends. They were the group I hung out with and we had a circle of people that was just like a 'real life' circle of friends, except instead of meeting at school or whatever, we originally met online.
Within this circle, photographers made up the bulk of the artists. This meant we spent a lot of time talking technicalities. A lot of time. I soon learned to covet certain camera's, and among them was the Canon EOS 350D. I wanted a DSLR so bad. It pulled at my soul and everytime I'd fiddle with one of the boys' camera I'd practically salivate. I never got my DSLR from my parents, because the thought (fairly, to be honest) that I wasn't responsible with my belongings. I would have been with a DSLR, but I don't blame them for not trusting me.
A couple of years ago I was at a family event for my husband's family, and I wandered off with one of my father-in-law's millions of camera's to take pictures of horses and avoid the awkward lull in conversation that developed whenever I came near. I fell in love all over again. I took some absolutely stunning pictures despite not knowing a thing about the camera I was using. It was amazing, and I went home feeling a bit sad I had to leave it where it was. But DSLR's are expensive. I knew I'd never afford one, I just let it go.

Last christmas, I didn't really get any presents. We didn't have any money, and there wasn't anything I wanted. We kept saying we'd put it off til I found something I wanted. My birthday came round and it was much the same thing. Not much money, nothing I wanted. I was supposed to go to a comedy show with Mr A but A.B was refusing to drink anything and we couldn't leave her for long enough and we very unhappily had to cancel. For this Christmas just passed, I was supposed to be getting a backpiece tattoo as a BIG present for all the presents I'd missed out on. Then we realised that because of my moles, I'm going to need to have my back examined for changes fairly regularly and covering up a bunch of marks with a tattoo is not conducive to appropriate and regular checks of mole size. Damnit. So I started thinking of what else I could get. Mr A had vaguely suggested the idea of getting me a new digital camera as a smaller present before christmas, but I'd dismissed the idea. But slowly last night, I came around.

And so I did it. I 350D'd.

Hmm.

2011-01-04T00:43:00.002Z

Yes. It all seems to have gone wrong there a bit, didn't it?
I'm still alive. I'm alright, although Christmas was stressful. I've just been struggling to cope with some things.
I had a bit of a freak out about some upcoming tests for possible gynae issues. I pretty much convinced myself I had cancer, and I didn't want to talk about it, because I felt stupid, and with so many friends who've lost people or had cancer themselves, I felt ridiculous. How on earth could I sit there and bitch and moan about being scared of MAYBE having cancer when other people actually DO have it?
My first test came back clear, which is good, but means that problems I've been experiencing are still a mystery.

I had my first hydrotherapy appointment and it went well. I have another one next week. I'm not too keen on sharing my therapist with another person in a small pool during sessions, but whatever. Limited resources and all that, it makes sense I guess. And I don't have to like it, I'm not paying for it, so I should be grateful I can have it at all.

I had quite a bad downward turn after my last entry, and was very very down for a couple of weeks. About mid-december suddenly the depressive episode was over and since then I've been clawing my house back from the wilderness that had taken over it. My husband has also been home a lot of the time (only been at work two days since December 10th) so I've been trying to not only get some time to myself, but fix my sleeping habits, get quality time with Mr A and also do a fair amount of housework. Unfortunately the problem is the more cleaning and housework you do, the more you feel you need to keep it up. And the worse it looks when it gets the slightest bit messy. I've yet to train Mr A to 'tidy as he goes' which is a bit infuriating when I go up for a bath and come back after only an hour to a destroyed living room. He also seems to be allergic to the dishwasher.

I don't really know what's going on with my life right now. I feel more directionless than usual, except before I was directionless and stagnant, now I seem to be moving forward but just in no direction, which almost seems worse. It scares me that a whole year went by and I don't have a single thing to show for it. Nothing happened. Nothing changed. Nothing was achieved. And that I have nothing planned for the next year. Nothing will be achieved, nothing will be changed (except a move of house). I feel like I'm just going through the motions and I honestly don't feel like anything will change until we move country in 2012. I feel like I'm halfway through a 3 year pause, and nothing can happen until I get off that plane and unpause. Then I can start my life again.

Honestly, I'm not happy, and haven't been for so long. I'm STILL waiting to hear about councelling, my doctor has tried to chase it up twice to no avail. At this point I'm 3 months away from moving, and once I move house I'll have to go onto a new waiting list in my new area. It's doubtful I'll receive any help in the next 6 months and I know my next GP will try to encourage my onto medication before councelling. I feel like I've fallen into a gap.

Broken and Crazy: Part 1

2010-11-25T00:01:00.002Z

So I'm splitting this into two parts, because I need to sort it out in my head that way. It's just what I need to do to make this all make sense. Part 1 will go into my recent physio appointment, and some physical stuff, and in part 2 we'll examine some recent mental health insights. Looking forward to it? OH GOSH I KNOW I AM!

Physiotherapy appointment. It SHOULD have been an hour, but for some reason that was never quite explained to me, it was only 30 minutes. I was just happy I got one, to be honest, after my projected callback time of 26 weeks, which would have put my assessment in March. For realz.

I get there and am presented with a form. What are you here for? How long has the problem gone on? What started the problem? Mark the area's affected. Does anything aggravate the problem? Name three activities that are difficult for you and mark their difficulty on a scale of one to ten. What do you hope to achieve with physiotherapy?

What do you hope to achieve with physiotherapy?

Hope? I'm so overwhelmed by this form and its questions that I only get to writing down the first word of my first of three named activities. I want to be facetious and write down 'Life', but I resist. There's nothing like a standardised form to make you feel like shit. Pathetic, whimpering, broken shit.

The physiotherapist [hereafter, physioT] takes me into a little cubicle and runs through the form with me. She seems surprised and a little suspicious about how much I already know about my condition. I'm embarrassed, flustered. I worry she thinks I'm trying to con her, trying to con everyone, going to extreme lengths for my scroungermoney. Later I feel a little angry. Why the FUCK should being informed about a diagnosed condition I've had my entire fucking life be suspicious? Am I supposed to stay wide-eyed and in the dark, put up with months of being uninformed and not seeking possible relief, just so that I don't arouse suspicion by being knowledgeable? Fuck that.

Her suspicions seem to be allayed during the physical exam, however. She gasps, again and again; short and sharp intakes of breath when my elbows touch behind my head or my arms bend backward on themselves or my hips, knees and ankles click loudly as I stand. Later she'll see me massaging what I accepted as a standard occurrence in my life, 'just' a dodgy knee to me, she informs me that my patella is subluxed, but for now she says I have one of the most severe cases of hypermobility she's seen in a while. I'm stuck between wanting to smile in pride and vindication and wanting to cry. On one hand, I finally don't feel like a faker, I finally have another confirmation of what I already knew: that my body is different. Part of me feels like if I MUST be broken and pained, then can't I be the best at that? It's an attitude I inherited from my eating disorder. Anorexics are competitive. Who will reach that impossible goal first? Who will get sickest, fastest? Who has most hospital admissions? Who is most shocking? No one with an eating disorder who's spent time amongst others with the same disorder can deny this phenomenon, or the strange feel of sickening pride you get in winning a round. It was strange to feel the Broken Pride again, and to feel it for something I have no control over. I'm 22. I win at being bendy. Do I get a trophy? Do I get a Bendy Badge? These questions remained unasked, and therefore unanswered. I have a feeling that's exactly as it should be.

The rest of the appointment is short and uneventful. PhsyioT wanted me to start a pilates class they hold there, but due to the fact that I can't get childcare on Thursday, I had to decline. She's referred me for Hydrotherapy instead, which I'm looking forward to, kind of. I have to get a swimming costume. In the fucking snow. I know right? She told me I can 'click' my joints all I want to if it makes me feel better, but not to purposefully sublux them if I can help it. She made me laugh a couple of times by giving me insight into things I didn't know about myself. She told me that my 'bad posture' is because I, like many hypermobile people, 'hang' off my joints, and that because it takes me more effort to sit up 'straight' and keep myself together, it's no wonder I bend and curve and bow all over the place. I suddenly had a memory of repeated tellings off by my mother, who didn't understand when I told her it hurt my back to sit up straight. Hydrotherapy should help develop my core strength and put a stop to all the slouching. Maybe!

I left with a better understanding of my condition, and a better appreciation of my body. I know I have it easy. I have online friends with Ehlers Danlos, and another with cancer, two more who've beaten cancer. I am lucky. I am also broken in my own right, and that's ok. I didn't realise that what my joints were doing were in fact partial dislocations. I have a lot more respect for myself for some reason now. Saying that my joints 'do this weird pop-y thing' doesn't have the same severity as 'partial dislocation'. Now that I know that's what it is, I feel relieved. I feel like...I'm not exaggerating how painful it is. I'm not being dramatic. Obvious full dislocations are worse, by far, but a partial dislocation is still a big deal, and multiple subluxations, dozens of them, all day every day for 2 years? That's fucking huge. That is just the most enormously huge amount of shit to deal with and I'm finally proud of myself for managing to do it, no matter the cost.

Hello chums

2010-11-20T23:00:00.002Z

I'm still alive.

Things are just...things. Mr A is buzzing with nerves about a promotion, we've decided where we're moving to in March, I've been looking more deeply into immigration stuff for the move to Australia in 2011, Baby AB is now a Toddler, having discovered the ability to walk, she has 8 teeth coming through right now and we're trying to lay down the motherfuckin' law when it comes to breastfeeding, because feeding constantly to the level we were doing it was killing my soul.

So it's all been very....very. I'm so tired all the time but also so blank and uninspired and empty. I'm less depressed than I've been in a while but I'm feeling it more for some reason.

I have my physio assessment on Monday. I'm....nervous. I've all but weaned myself off my painkillers and I'm scared that I'll get in there are they'll ask me why the fuck I'm there.

Ho hum. Ho hum.

Sad Panda

2010-11-02T06:32:00.002Z

Today I am a sad panda. No particular reason. Just am.

Except...maybe there is. Maybe I realised tonight that once again, I launched myself into something without actually thinking about the logical conclusion of my launch, and now that I am fully immersed, I've realised what a terrible, awful, ridiculous, stupid mistake I made. But it's too late now. There is NO going back without hurting people. Without letting people down. And while I probably overestimate my importance in peoples lives (probably? Definitely) I still am not enough of an asshole to think I can do whatever I like. And what's more, in the words of some anonymous philosopher somewhere, what is seen, cannot be unseen. I cannot bury my head in the sand now. I can't ignore what I know. And that is shit.

I've been blogging here for 10 months, which is longer than I lasted on any other blog.

'Just' a simple meal.

2010-10-31T01:48:00.004+01:00

So last Thursday I went and had spontaneous coffee with a friend and then on Friday I went to a big baby-company exhibition with another friend and then on Saturday I had my second night out since I got pregnant two years ago and then on Tuesday I arrive at hospital at 7am and they put me to sleep and ripped my mouth open and yanked all my teeth out.

Well. Two of my teeth out.

But it might as well have been all of them because GOD DAMN MOTHERFUCK that hurt. So then I just basically cried for a few days.

And that is where I've been at. I've also been avoiding blogger a bit because, to be honest, the reforms are overwhelming me right now. The atmosphere when it comes to disability is so toxic, it's terrifying. I never log onto twitter because my feed is flooded with news of who hates me now and who's started a campaign to have me and people like me sent to work camps or just made into dog food. I keep down what I'm doing, plugging away, trying to inject a little bit of good into the world in the hope that karma will see fit to take mercy on me. In the last month I've donated £100 to Whizzy Wheels, because Eilidh's story makes me cry, and because I want so badly for her to grow up thinking not of the people who's policies and decisions in some back-room in parliament made it almost impossible for her to get the chair she needed without a huge amount of help, but rather of the good people, the strangers who have so much love in their hearts that they spread their arms right out, touched as many people as they could, and spared as much as they could. I want her to grow up filled with the joy of the kindness of strangers, not the bitterness and fear and hurt that I feel. She won't have a face to put to most of her joy, and that's good. I have a face to my hurt, too many faces, in fact, and that's not how it should be.

The week before last, I changed GP practices, and I spoke to one of my new GP's about my depression. The good news? My new GP's are like, 700 shades of fucking rock. It's an all-female practise, you can get appointments SO easily, they're ridiculously friendly and accommodating, and I've met both doctor's and the practise nurse and they're all awesome. The bad new is that they're up two separate and brutal hills. The first time I went on my own, and by the time I got there I was late, grey, sweating, hyperventilating but barely breathing (I'm talented like that) and my pulse was insane. This is just what happens when I do hills, but they didn't know this, and thought I was having a heart attack. They took good care of me though, and from now on I'll do my best to only arrange appointments when Mr A can drive me there.

Had a bit of trouble at the appointment though, when I tried to explain to my doctor how worried I was about my weight. I'd just finished explaining how much pain I'm in and how difficult it is for me to move around. Her solution to my weight problems? Eat 7 meals a day! Words failed me, but I tried a different approach. What about the days when for whatever reason, I'm not hungry (this happens often, between pain and fatigue I can have to force down food I will gag on that will sit heavily and painfully in my stomach)? Her solution: Smoothies! Make lots and lots of fruit smoothies!
I just....
I don't....

I don't know how to explain to people whats wrong with me in a way they'll understand. Clearly I'm doing a terrible job at the moment, if my doctor thinks I can cart a toddler up and down the stairs and stand around making a meal seven times a day. Even 'just' a sandwich requires so much effort. My friends, blessed as most of them are with pain-free, mobile lives, don't understand. Just make some pasta? Surely that's the simplest of simple meals, and full of carbs! Excellent! Yes, it would be. But lets dissect that, step by step:

Get out of bed by climbing over railings at end of bed (bed is flush against both walls in teeny tiny bedroom)
Pick up toddler, carry downstairs.
Find somewhere to stash toddler where she is not in my way, or harms way.
pick up heavy pot
either fill heavy pot with water at sink and move now-very-heavy-pot over to stove, or move heavy pot to stove and reach UP into cupboard, or DOWN into drawer, lift up jug, fill jug with water, transport very heavy jug to stove, tip into pot.

Lets stop here for a sec. I have already pulled my wrists out, lifting and carrying. I am already tired, from the lifting and the carrying and the fighting-toddler-into-highchair. My back and shoulders ache from reaching up or down, and I'm dizzy, too.

Turn and press stove knob while holding down ignition switch for five seconds.
shake out hands, which are throbbing and shaking from the pressing and holding.
wait for water to boil (even if I pre-boil water with the kettle [which is heavier and hurts my wrists more] this takes a couple of minutes)
pick up jar of pasta, unscrew lid, reach in and grab handful (because I don't trust my hands not to spasm and tip it all in)
wait 5-10 minutes for pasta to cook.
lift heavy pot off stove, avoiding toddler
carry to sink
tip out water while trying to retain pasta.
carry heavy pot back to stove/counter while trying not to drop it
reach up and get bowl
pick up heavy pot, tip pasta into bowl.

That was 16 steps, some of which could have easily been expanded into two or three steps of their own. 16 steps, every single one a potential to hurt myself. Every single one a drain on my very limited supply of spoons, every single one carried out while not only looking after myself, but after Tiny Terror as well. 16 steps for one plain bowl of pasta. Since I can't eat pesto (it has cheese in it) if I want any flavour in my pasta, I'd damn well better make it myself. That's another, what, ten steps? 11 of those steps were carried out AFTER I had injured myself, while I was weak and dizzy.

It really isn't ever as simple as 'just' a bowl of pasta.

She's an insoooomniac in-sooom-ni-ac on the floor...

2010-10-16T04:25:00.003+01:00

So it's been roughly two weeks since I slept at night for more than one night in a row. I think I've had one 'decent' (by decent I mean long) nights sleep in that time and that day I woke up shaking with withdrawal and in massive spasms of pain.

I have never slept well, but this is wearing me down. Most days I've been surviving on 3 or 4 hour naps, maybe 7hrs on a 'good' day, but always in the middle of the day which makes for incredibly unproductive, stupid days. I'm desperate to go outside, just get some fresh air, get dressed, have some coffee or a muffin or something. But if I wake up at 2pm and then don't sleep for the night, by the time it's late enough in the morning to go out, I've been awake for 18 hours!

It's also ridiculously hard looking after Bug in this state. We're living in bed at the moment, which sucks, I know, but I just don't have it in me to get up. Yesterday I called Mr A crying and he had to leave work because I couldn't cope with her. She was just screaming and screaming and I hadn't had any pain killers in over 36hrs and had woken up in this funk. I just couldn't make her stop and she was driving me to desperation and I wanted to jump out the window.
It's now 4:30am and I'm trying to figure out if I can cope with today. My body is exhausted but I can't sleep. I also can't get up or go out, or function. I'm just a zombie. But an angry one. With a toddler. Toddlers are not conducive to rest.

I'm going to load up an episode of Greys Anatomy, go get some fruit tea, and try to beat myself into sleepy submission.

Let's just be real for a second here.

2010-10-10T00:42:00.003+01:00

"Please pick up the plasters, pregnancy tests, pills etc that Bug has taken out of the drawers and put them back properly, like I ask you to EVERY TIME."

The 'every time' is underlined, violently, four times. I had originally started picking them up myself, but with every single plaster I put back in the box my rage increased exponentially until I yanked them all out and threw them up in the air, watched them land on the bathroom floor.

Mr A is a wonderful husband. I'll never deny that. But sometimes? He's a thoughtless fuckwit too. People can be both, I've found. Wonderful and fuckwitted, all rolled into one. It's rather annoying.

This week has been SUPERBUSY. On Monday we have Sushi Monday's, a new family tradition in the making. It means being out all day and lots of walking, but also enough sitting to make it good for me without killing me. I didn't sleep on Tuesday night, which led to me going to bed at 6pm on Wednesday night after a day of running errands, hoping that I could re-set my body clock. Except my body-clock is a dumbass, and woke me up at 3am. The Beast woke up at 4am and we ended up spending the whole day at an old school friend's house. She's expecting her first baby and it felt good to be useful to someone. But useful or not, it was a full day of activity, and I was zonked out at 10pm. I woke up at a rather alarming 2pm on Friday, completely burned out, shaking with soreness and tiredness and broken-ness. I didn't have the spoons to go and pick up my prescription, but luckily I knew I had just enough to last me until Monday morning, if I was careful. However, this is where Mr A and his Fuckwittery began surfacing. He came home, collected the baby from upstairs, where we'd been all day save for nappy changes and scavenging expeditions (it was strictly grab-it-and-run, I didn't have the energy for even so much as a slice of toast) and went to go make dinner. I'd asked for steamed kale, he'd decided to make tortillas, I couldn't be bothered to fight him, I didn't have it in me. Five minutes later he tells me the chicken he was planning on using had gone off. Already not in an eating-mood, this just made me feel sick. I told him to forget it. Did he? No. He bloody did not.
He came upstairs and asked what I'd eaten, in an annoying, patronising way. So irritated, tired, ache-y me said 'Food.' Then he pushed and pushed and the more he pushed the less I wanted to tell him, because WTF. I can't be trusted to decide whether or not I've eaten enough and/or whether I'm actually hungry, after TWO YEARS of being A-OK about food? AM I SIX? So he started a 'discussion' about how he's so worried about me, because I'm not eating and spending all my time in bed and blah fucking blah. I pointed out that I have been up and about and VERY active EVERY SINGLE OTHER DAY THIS WEEK, that I was awake from 3am until 10pm the day before and out from 9:30am until 5:30pm and that ONE day in bed is not all the fucking time, then I reminded him that I was sick last month and I am still recovering, that I don't bounce back from illness at the drop of a hat and that this is nowhere near as bad as earlier this year when I was bed-ridden for most of six weeks. I told him over and over that there was NOTHING to worry about but that stressing me out over food was not exactly the best way to get me to eat, or to talk to him properly.

I am so ANGRY. How much longer am I going to be subjected to random inquisitions on my food intake? At what point have I proved that I'm capable of deciding for myself whether or not my intake is ok?

And it doesn't even stop there. I didn't manage to sleep last night, fighting with him leaves me feeling sick and angry and too awake, and I was watching 'The Road' and it took me four and a half hours because I kept being upset and having to stop. By the time he left this morning I was feeling like someone had backed over me with a truck and then scraped me off the road, flipped me over, and had another go. I was so tired, and Beast woke up at 4 again, and I kept jokingly begging him to take her to work with him but I was only half joking, there was too much of the begging and not enough of the joking, and watching him walk out the door gave me little flutters of panic. By 7am I'd managed to feed her back to sleep, so I sent him a text asking him to phone me at about 12 to wake me up, so I could try and get some sleep without fucking up my body clock too badly and losing a whole day of productive possibilities.
At 10:40, three hours after I finally managed to force my body to submit to sleep, he phones. I ask him what the fuck part of '12' means twenty to 11 to him, but he just says they're getting busy. I hang up on him. I set my alarm clock for 12, change the baby, force a painkiller down, and cry myself to sleep, thankful that for once Beast seems willing to oblige with my crazy sleep schedule.
When I surface from sleep, I know something is wrong. Very wrong. The room feels wrong. I check the time and immediately exactly how wrong everything is is clear. It's 4:30pm. I had forgotten to change my alarm setting from AM to PM, so my alarm hadn't gone off. I have wasted a whole day. Two whole days in a row. Opportunities for productivity, for fresh air, for a chance to stretch my limbs. By this point I'm drunk on a horrific mixture of too much broken sleep, and exhaustion, I haven't taken my painkillers nearly regularly enough for them to be any kind of effective, and my entire body is shaking with pain and inactivity and lack of nutrients. All of which could have been avoided if he had just bloody well woken me up when I asked him to, not an hour and a half before. Even an hour late would have been better. I would have had enough sleep, uninterrupted, and still had time in my day to Do Things.

All of this goes some way towards explaining why, when normally I would have just tidied up the mess he lets the baby make, bitten my lip and mentally reminded myself to ask him again to clean up after her when he lets her fuck up the bathroom, when normally I would have just dealt with it myself (like the four dirty nappies he left on the living room floor that I put in the bin despite my complete fucked-up-ness this morning), I instead chose to write a stupid note that he may not even read and will probably not understand the implications of. This week has taken it out of me. This week I am more depressed (in a fundamental, state-of-mind kind of way, rather than an immediate, want-to-die, kind of way) than I have been in a while. I am trying my tired, bony ass off. I am Making Plans and Looking Forward and Living In The Now but sometimes The Now is shit and I'm tired and I just want more help instead of more articles about how soon, we're going to lose some of our income. Sometimes I want to cry in my mothers kitchen while she makes french vanilla coffee for me and cuts me some watermelon and tells me that if I ever need her, she's there. Even though she's not there, she's there, and there is 10 thousand miles away and that is too far. And 2012, the year we move out to be 10 feet away from her is too far too.

At times like these, when I am overwhelmed by how badly I'm coping with my life as it is, when all I see when I look at myself is cheekbones and too-thin arms and ribs and spine and things I wanted so much when I was 16 but which just make me sad now, I don't have it in me to pretend that tiny things that Mr A does, like forgetting to throw nappies away, or not tidying up when he lets the baby destroy something, or complaining that he wants to spend time with me and then immediately falling asleep once I've stopped doing what I was doing, don't make me so so so angry that I want to beat him in the face with a pair of his own dirty boxershorts. I don't have it in me to pretend that I am calm and serene and pondersome and zen. I am not. I am as un-zen as it is possible to get without becoming zen again. I am fuming. And I don't even care anymore that it's not fair for me to be fuming, that he works hard and that I expect too much from him. Because it's not fair on ME, either. Everyone and everything expects too much from me. I expect too much from a body that is disintegrating so fast it scares me. Doctor's expect too much from me when they send me away empty handed and tell me that I'm fine and to get on with it myself. My daughter expects too much from me when no matter how much of myself I give, she wants more. No matter how many episodes of Pocoyo we watch together, it's not enough, or it's not right. No matter how many milk feeds she has a day, I seem to spend half my time trying to get her to go longer between them. No matter how much I feel like absolute, flaming shit for not being a productive member of society, the press and the government wants me to feel worse.

My mother is always telling me to change my perspective, that things will be bad if I think they are bad. She expects too much of me if she expects me to spend every day skipping and laughing with the joys of sunshine and wonder, when every day I wake up overwhelmed by more greyness and pain and fog than the day before. I wish I was One Of Those People. One of those people who even on their death-beds keeps up the cheer, has a smile and a joke and a laugh and shoots beams of sunshine out of their eyes, one of the Criptastic. I wish I was ENabled and not DISabled. I wish I was Inspirational. I wish a was a Trooper. But I'm just fucking not, ok? The best I can do is pick myself up, dust myself off, be honest about the fact that this is shit and I hate it, and try to Look Forward and Make Plans for things that are not so shit, and that I don't hate so much. I try to participate in online life to make up for my lack of participation in flesh-life, because the people who are making up the network of blogs I read regularly understand so much better than the people who see me wince in pain, see me stumble, see my joints come out of place. Somehow, these people who have never seen me cry in pain and frustration understand so much better than the man who placed a ring on my finger two and a half years ago and vowed to take care of me in sickness and in health.

And that sucks.

One step forward, one hasty shuffle back.

2010-10-06T04:00:00.002+01:00

So further to my post last night about the pictures on facebook, so far I've had a couple of shocked responses, some sympathy from a fellow Bendy Babe (HOLLA E!) and a whole lot of 'LOL I CAN DO THIS TOO!!!!' Well how wonderful for you. Come back to me when it stops becoming something to lol about and becames achingly, crippingly, disablingly painful and stops you living a normal life. Until then just please please please go fuck off and stop LOLING at me.

I've had a headache for three days and I'm in SUCH a bad mood. Taking my painkillers every 3 hours doesn't help, forgetting to take them is more common because my mind is just...elsewhere. I nearly dropped the baby five feet today because everything siezed up as I was climbing out of bed and I was so scared because if Mr A hadn't been there I would have been stuck instead of just calling for him to come and save me while I used up more spoons than I had to spare holding myself perfectly still without any arms to balance me.

I'm not sleeping, and it's going to fuck with me. But right now I'm stuck in this place where I can't go to sleep but I can't wake up either. My brain thinks I'm depressed. My body is all 'FUCK YOU EVERYTHING IS FINE GODDAMNIT.' and neither of them is really right. I'm somewhere inbetween a full blown depressive episode and just being generally run-down. I'm still hovering just above 90lbs after my stomach flu last month and my body can't really handle the stress of ANYTHING. But I don't have the option of not coping. I don't have the option of staying in bed for a full week to recover. I'm using up at least 500 calories a day breastfeeding and I know I'm not taking in nearly enough to counter that. But I also don't have the option of not-breastfeeding. The sheer effort involved in weaning her right now is beyond me. If I can't get dressed in the morning or manage more than one walk a week, I'm not going to be able to stay up all night fighting to get disgusting-tasting prescription milk into a violent toddler and then get up and spend the whole day doing the same thing while she cries and screams and paws at me and worst of all, she just won't even understand why. Knowing I'm causing her distress and that I could just stop it if I wanted would be impossible.

Eh.

I have a post brewing in my head about post-natal depression and bonding and baby stuff, but as with all of the PND stuff, it's hard for me to write down and put into words. It scares me to admit to things that our society finds unnatural or wrong. There have honestly been times when I've felt worse than a child abuser because of things that people have said about feelings or thoughts I've had. Less than human. There have been nights when I've wanted to just get up and walk away forever because of how people think. I know I shouldn't, but I let it get inside my head and once it's in there it festers and rots and eats at everything good. I have a few good friends who tell me I'm doing a good job, and Mr A is filled with admiration, but as petulant, whiny, and selfish as it sounds, it's not enough. There isn't enough good people throw at me to fill in the black void of hate, insecurity, and terror that seethes just below the surface of me.

Step one.

2010-10-05T01:32:00.003+01:00

Tonight I took the first step in being openly, publically, and unanonymously vocal about myself as a disabled person. I asked Mr A to take some pictures of me in various hypermobile escapades, and I uploaded them to facebook for everyone to see. I'll write a note explaining what Hypermobility means for me soon, but for now, the pictures are enough.

Immeditately, I was overcome with the desire to delete them. I thought 'No one will care, people will roll their eyes, wonder what the big deal is, confirm that there's nothing wrong with me, that everyone can do this.' Mr A didn't help much by being generally sleepy and saying 'Yeah, I can do that' when I bloody know he can't.
I'm scared, and that's ridiculous. to be disabled in our society is to be vulnerable. If you asked people if they would kick a disabled person simply because they were disabled, you'd be met with horror and vehement denial. Oh no no no! We would PROTECT the vulnerable! We would HELP! No, no they bloody fucking wouldn't. They'd bitch and moan about whether or not you were really disabled, accuse you of lying, kick you for good measure, then when you provide medical proof of disability, mutter 'well, doctors will label anyone disabled these days, just to get them out of their office. Half these bloody diseases and syndromes are made up anyway.' As a disabled person, you can't fucking win. To be 'allowed' to be disabled you have to be a blind, deaf, quadruple amputee with cancer. Otherwise you are FAKING and MALINGERING and should JUST GO BACK TO WORK.

So far I've had one comment, on a picture of my elbows bending 'backwards'. It was 'Mine do that too!' so not negative. I just hope that maybe by seeing the degree to which everything in my body is fucked, people can understand why I am the way I am sometimes.

Thirteen. Thirteen. Fifteen. Eighteen.

2010-10-02T03:01:00.004+01:00

The ages of the four boys who committed suicide in the last week because they were bullied for being gay.

Lets all take a minute to just absorb that, ok?
What were you doing when you were 13? I was still secretly playing with dolls in my closet. I hadn't hit puberty yet. I was a 4'11 baby, I loved reading Harry Potter and watching cartoons. I haven't yet held hands with a boy.

Fifteen: This year I will have my first kiss. I will rebel against my parents. I will go to my first rock concert, and afterwards, I will jump into a fountain with a bunch of other kids. I perform on stage at the Globe Theatre.

Eighteen: I haven't yet met the boy I will spend the rest of my life with. I will try sushi for the first time. I will get my first job. I well get accepted into university. My wisdom teeth haven't grown in yet. I am still hopelessly young.

These are our babies. None of these boys will grow up, grow older. None of them will move into their own places, experience life as an adult. None of them will know the joy of getting married or bringing up children. None of them will fulfill a lifetime of small and large achievements. None of them will hug their mothers on christmas day, or open another birthday present. None of them will travel the world. None of them was old enough to drink.

These are our babies. They were somebodies babies. Now they are sitting in some refrigerated container, waiting to be buried, or cremated. Waiting for the last suit they will ever wear, the last pair of shoes their parents will ever buy them, most of them before they've even grown to their full size. Tiny boys in tiny boxes, hounded to the point of taking their own lives because some fucking prick decided that his desire to taunt, tease, ridicule and humiliate over-rode these boys' right to LIVE. To EXIST.

I can't even understand this.

Dancing with myself

2010-09-29T03:20:00.002+01:00

So. Did you know I used to dance? No? Well, I did. I danced a lot. I was in gymnastics since before I have memories. Then I dabbled in a bit of ballet and then I joined a drummajorette team which is hard to explain, because where I come from (did you know I'm not actually originally British? No? Now you do!) its a Big Fucking Deal. Like, national and international championship big. Like almost as big as Cheerleading is in America. Which is kind of how I explain Drummajorettes to English people. It's like Chearleading, except with 5 foot tall flags. And I was 4'9 at the time. It's 7 minutes of precision routine wearing a ridiculous uniform. You're performing a mix of marching, dance and propwork on a field with 30-50 other girls, some of whom are throwing mace's (a mace is like a baton, but hardcore. Like if a baton is Adam Lambert a mace is Ozzy Osbourne) 15 feet in the air. You have to be split-second in-sync with every single other girl on that field. You have to be PERFECTLY in time with your music or the whole routine looks unbelievably shit. I practised every single day for years, and I was at official squad practise 5 days a week, with competitions almost every single week, on top of going to school, on top of school sports teams I was also a member of, including the netball team in which I was an inter-school competitor. You have to be dedicated, and determined, and strong. You have to be really strong...we're talking about tiny 9yr old girls carrying 5 or 6lbs of metal and fabric onto a field while marching in time and formation and keeping on-choreography.

It was fucking hard.

And I loved it more than I can even explain to you. I loved it so much that when I watched this video I cried. It was the first point in my life where I had a group of friends. And when I won a place on my team's elite Indoor squad, it was the first point in my life where I felt like I was good at something. Where I felt important, or valued, or proud of myself. The indoor side of drummies was, as it's name would suggest, competed in indoors. It was much more like the group dance-acts you see on TV talent shows now...kind of a mix of chearleading and gymnastics and street dance. It was my life and I loved it.

When I moved to England, there was suddenly no more dancing. I tried to keep up my routines and my dancing by practising at home, but my parents said they would no longer be paying for me to attend classes like they did back home. Without any sort of formal structure, dancing slowly drained out of my life. Sports did, too. In England, sports isn't really valued at a state-school level. Not in girls. My brother would later join his school's basketball team and help win competitions within London, but for me, there was no more moving. There was no more belonging. There was just no more. The eating disorder that had been brewing for a couple of years exploded and took over my life; the more I lost the order, structure, and control that dance and sport had given me, the more I tried to claw it back, take it out on the body that I now felt was useless, surplus to requirements. I hated it. I called it 'the body'. I refused to consider it a part of me. I refused to care about it. What did I care if it was hungry? What did I care if it was weak? What did I care if it collapsed? What did I care if it didn't work right? I didn't. It couldn't do what I wanted it to so I would punish it mercilessly. I would starve it, cut it, beat it. Let others use it. It was no use to me. It was a hideous thing that trapped me, held me down. It was slow and stupid. It was ugly.

When I was older and wiser and better, I decided to take up dance again. I enquired about beginners ballet classes and joined my university's cheerleading team. But weeks later I discovered I was pregnant. And we all know what happened after that.

I love to watch dance videoes and movies now. I have come to grips with the fact that I will never really dance again. I have come to terms with the fact that my body is sick and broken. Of course it makes me sad. Of course it makes me angry. Of course I would love if dancing was possible for me without pain, or a very real risk of injury (fun fact: I pulled my wrist out picking up a fork the other day. Tell me how to do a pirouette without breaking something. Go on.) and people think I'm being negative when I say that, but I'm not. I'm being realistic, and I'm trying to come to terms with dancing not being part of my life anymore, or ever again. I don't want to 'think positively', as my mother puts it, when thinking positively means giving me false hope. I want to think realistically, and rather than think 'hey, maybe one day I'll dance again!' I want to think 'Hey, maybe one day I'll go a whole week without needing a 'bed-day'!' or even 'hey, maybe one day I'll run to the beach with my daughter.' Now the role that dance and gymnastics play in my life is strictly from-afar. When I watch dance video's, it does give me hope, but not that I could dance again. It gives me hope when my shoulders start twitching, when my hips move, when my foot taps. It gives me hope that I'm really coming to terms with what my condition means for me, and that I can still be positive and still enjoy the memories of my past, not look back on them with bitterness and anger like I used to. It gives me hope that my body and I are one again, a co-operating unit.

The Body did one thing right in it's entire life. It turned out to be the last right thing it would ever do, but do you know what? Looking at her sleeping next to me now, with her tiny red baby-curls and Hello Kitty pyjama's? Kind of makes up for all the shit we pulled on each other all those years ago.

Truce, Body. Truce.

Defining yourself as a blogger

2010-09-23T03:45:00.003+01:00

Defining myself as a blogger is something I struggle with. To be honest, I struggle with the label 'blogger' at all, I don't feel like keeping a blog and being 'a blogger' are the same thing. It's like the difference between keeping a diary and writing an autobiography. So when it comes to the question 'What type of blogger am I?' I just...don't know.

Am I a Mommy Blogger? Well, I'm a mommy. And I blog about my kid sometimes. In fact when I started out I just seemed to blog about being a mom. But I don't feel like it's enough a driving force in my blog to really define me.

Am I a Breastfeeding Blogger? Not really, although I have blogged about breastfeeding and how that works when you're dealing with other problems.

Am I a Disability Blogger? I'm disabled, and I blog quite a lot, quite consistently about my disability. But I don't actually blog about being a Disabled Person. I blog about being Arienette Who Also Has A Disability. I suspect that those of us with disabilities will understand the difference. There's no activism drive behind my blog, I'm not trying to spread a message (except maybe 'You're not alone! You're normal!') or change anyone's minds. If minds were changed that would be nice, but it's not my driving force. I don't blog about the disabled community or the threats we face, I leave that to more experienced, articulate bloggers with the sort of audience that reaches more people than I can. Occasionally I'll blog about the sort of problems I face as a disabled mother, but I still don't feel like I'm 'saying anything' here.

Am I a Humour Blogger? Er. No. Much as I would love to be, I will never be Sara, of Sara Swear A Lot. I may do the odd post where I try to be funny but I'm not very good at it, and I usually go back to being tiring and pondersome the next time.

Am I a Feminist Blogger? Definitely not, although feminist issues do get touched on now and again (there's a post in the making which talks a lot more about feminist issues and myself as a woman and what that means for me and has meant for me).

It seems to me like a lot of the community in blogging comes from having a somewhat narrower description than I do. I have friends from a couple of communities but the blogs I follow are strangely eclectic in their subjects, and I don't feel like any of those circles are really where I'm at. So I drift from one to another and I dip my toes in and then I come back to my blog and I feel like I'm trying to catch fish with a torn net. I have no focus for my blog but PICKING one feels disingenuous. It feels like I'm trying to force myself to be something for the sake of being able to call myself 'Arienette, Disability Blogger' or whatever. And that kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

A message to Achelois

2010-09-19T16:46:00.003+01:00

You left a comment on my earlier post that has disappeared, but I received it in my e-mail and have read it. I'd love to have a chat with you about some of the things you mentioned, if that's alright, but your profile and blog have no e-mail address and I can't reply directly through e-mail to the comment. If it's alright, could you e-mail me at arienetteborealis@gmail.com.

For the rest of you, you should know that she rocks. Her comment left me with tears in my eyes and her blog is one of the ones I enjoy quietly reading through. Go say hello to her and give her a hug, she needs one right now.

Frustration, hissy fits, and hypochondria.

2010-09-18T20:20:00.005+01:00

I'm frustrated. Really really frustrated. Logically, there is no reason for this frustration. I should feel good, I should feel happy. I have a diagnosis, I have a referral. A small voice in my head keeps saying 'Come on now, what more do you want?' I listlessly scroll through the ARC webpage on Joint Hypermobility, clicking, reading half a page and then pushing away in frustration. The more and more I read, the more I look through pages, the more I think, the more I believe and simultaneously disbelieve, that I've been under-diagnosed. Part of me is screaming 'THIS CAN'T BE IT. THERE'S SOMETHING MORE WRONG HERE.' and part of me is muttering 'Oh shut up, please just shut up, you have your fucking diagnosis now please please just get on with your life.'

I have a 'modest' Beighton Score of 5, possibly 7 but I can't tell how far 'back' your knees are supposed to bend to 'count' [Edit: I got Mr A to have a look at the charts and then my legs, he says my knees definitely look like the ones in the picture. He also says my elbow is way more severe than the pictures of 'backwards' elbows. So that's a solid 7, meaning I only fail the pinky test!]. I am in pain almost all day, every day. I am always exhausted, I have extreme trouble with sleeping. I can't get off to sleep and then I can't wake up. I can't keep my weight up no matter what I do. I have had mysterious heart problems for years now, wherein my heart will start having palpitations or 'dips' or my chest will hurt or I'll have what feels like a heart attack. These are repeatedly dismissed either as panic attacks or without any answer. I pass the ECG, the nurse/Dr shrugs their shoulders, I am ushered out of A&E with no answers, still terrified I'm dying. This has become so bad that even when these 'attacks' are incredibly painful and even temporarily affect my vision, I no longer seek medical help.

I show SO MANY of the characteristics for people with joint hypermobility related syndromes. Even a quick browse through a list shows that. Lets have a look (I've italicised the applicable criteria):

Marfan Syndrome:

People with Marfan syndrome tend to have several physical characteristics, including:

being tall (I'm almost 5'7 and would have been taller had I not spent my teen years starving myself.)
being slim (I have never in my life been a 'normal' weight. I have always been extremely slim)
having long, thin arms and legs
having loose and very flexible joints

Other physical signs of Marfan syndrome can include:

small bottom jaw
high, arched palate (roof of the mouth)
deep-set eyes
flat feet
breastbone (sternum) that either protrudes outward or caves inward
crowded teeth

Many people with Marfan Syndrome also have vision problems. I'm short-sighted and my eyes are quite weird. They re-adjust and unfocus and re-focus much more often than is normal or necessary. This in itself doesn't necessarily mean anything but chucked in with everything else it feels significant. While I was in my appointment Dr Rheum kept asking if I had lens dislocations. He came back to it a couple of times, seeming to mull over it, which makes me believe he saw Marfan Syndrome as a possibility.

Then we have Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, which is what I was convinced I had up until recently.

Ehlers Danlos Syndrome:

skin problems

soft velvet-like skin
fragile skin that bruises or tears easily
stretchy rubber band-like skin
easy or severe bruising
poor and slow wound healing (usually taking weeks to months to heal)
small harmless bumps under the skin
joint problems
loose unstable joints causing frequent dislocations usually occurring in the shoulders, knees, hips, collar bone or jaw (see figure 1)
double jointedness (hyper extensible joints), extreme in some cases
eye problems
nearsightedness, occasionally extreme

That's a lot of italics. But the problem is, I could probably find a lot of italics on a list of symptoms for LOTS of problems that I genuinely DON'T have. Where do I draw the line between a logical step and an imaginative leap? I read two 'bendy-blogs' (Veronica over at Sleepless Nights and Bendy Girl at Benefit Scrounging Scum, both have Ehlers-Danlos) and SO MUCH of what they say and experience feels so close to my life. In e-mails with Veronica we've both felt that my problem extends beyond 'just being a bit flexible' but I think we've also both felt a bit helpless. She knows firsthand the issue with misdiagnosis. But again, I until I properly looked into EDS I was 100% sure I had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome! Admittedly the list of symptoms is almost identical to a range of joint hypermobility related syndromes + depression, which I had, but still. If I'd been a doctor I would have diagnosed myself with it on the spot. Then I read about EDS and suddenly I think I may have it. Then I read about Marfan and I'm all 'OMG, I'm tall! And thin! and my eyes hurt! I have Marfan Syndrome!' I'm my own worst enemy, the more convinced I become that I'm sick, the more convinced I become that I'm a massive hypochondriac. How do I shut this cycle down and just move in a straight line, preferably forward?

At the base of it all, this has been a horrific year. From January when I started this blog, when I was first realising that something just wasn't right and that maybe it wasn't all in my head, to my rapidly degenerating physical health, to the highs of getting a referral to a Rheumatologist and the lows of waiting to see one, to the emotional confusion of that appointment itself.

Today I watched my 14month old do the splits on a shop floor while the assistant looked on in wonder. "Wow, is she supposed to be able to do that?" she asked, clearly shocked. My heart lurched and I felt sick. I have to find out what's wrong with me so that when the time comes, Bug doesn't have to live in pain while waiting to find out what's wrong with her. As soon as she's old enough I'll be Beighton-Scoring her. She's not living like this, and she's not living with the thought that she must just be fucking crazy. She's always going to be able to say 'Actually, it really does hurt, it hurts because I have [whatever], which means [whatever].' She's never going to endure having her spoons snatched away from her by people who are forcing her to do things because she can't explain to them what's wrong in language they accept. She's never going to leave a doctors office crying and humiliated because some patronising prick with a PhD has told her that her pain is all in her head. She's never going to consider killing herself because she believes the alternative is to live in pain and the limbo of being labelled a hypochondriac forever, with all the lack of sympathy, empathy, and compassion that comes along with that. It may be too late for me, I may have done all the damage already, but she will go through the same struggles over my cold, dead body.

There's diagnosis and then there's diag-no-help-whatsoever.

2010-09-16T02:42:00.004+01:00

Just a short one (hopefully). Mr A is on annual leave from work until the beginning of next month, so I'm not around very much right now.

First, some amazing news! Mr A and I had discussed getting me a new laptop for a little while now. My old one had been dying for ages, then finally about 6 months ago died completely. Since then I've been using a teeny tiny 10" netbook which has been giving me major back, neck, eye, and finger strain. It also doesn't stream video or play DVD's or music or really do any of the things I relied on my old laptop to do. I also went on a self-imposed clothes-buying-ban earlier this year, in order to teach myself self restraint and hopefully to appreciate my existing (and fucking enormous) wardrobe a bit better. I've been doing really well, have not bought a single item of clothing (not including underwear, which is an essential) since I made the challenge. It's also been a tough year for me. I don't talk about my depression much anymore, but coming out of it has been an ongoing battle, and I don't win every day. But slowly slowly, bit by bit, I'm learning to treat myself well, and I'm learning to love myself and my baby. No. I'm learning that I DO love my baby. And I'm learning that I'm human, that no one expects the things from me that I think they do, that no one WANTS me to work myself into the ground, that no one thinks I deserve to be punished for the rest of my life for not living up to the impossibly high standards I set myself. My self-flagellation knows no bounds, really. But I'm learning to ease up on myself with the help of Mr A. I'm learning that when I inevitably fail because I've set myself yet another Promethean task, that actually, it's ok. I don't need to weep and gnash and beat my back with willow branches. But I'm not quite there with the loving-thy-self thing yet. Which is why when Mr A said he thought we should get me a laptop and because of all the things I mentioned above, then he said I could spend £500 on it (I had originally set the almost impossibly low limit of £350, forced up from £300 by the lack of ANYTHING in my original price range) and then said I could buy the lusciously pretty pink one I'd stroked and cooed at the day before in PC World, I told him 'No, nevermind, I don't want one. I don't deserve it.'

Luckily for me, I have a husband who knows I'm an idiot and every now and again he does things for my good. He came home from being sent out to fetch some vegetables with a laptop under his arm. Not just any laptop, but a beautiful pale pink top-of-my-price-limit laptop with enormous keys and a DVD drive and the ability to stream video's and it's perfect and I love it and I nearly dropped the pan of potatoes I was cooking and then I cried a lot. And then he panicked and threatened to take it back if I didn't stop being so bloody silly. And then I TOLD him to take it back, and he refused. So right now I'm typing on my lovely new laptop and it is lovely and all the keys work and I can use it without my hands cramping up and I love it and I could cry.

Secondly, good news and bad news. The good news? I saw the Rheumatologist and I have an official acknowledgement of hypermobility. The bad news? The appointment didn't quite go as well as I hoped it would. I forgot loads of stuff and as a consequence I don't think I really gave him a great picture of my condition. Like he kept asking about my hands and we'd just been talking about bendiness so I said my hands were fine, completely forgetting that while my hands aren't actually very bendy, that's kind of EXACTLY the problem. They cramp up incredibly fast any time I have to hold them in any position, especially around an object, for example while peeling veggies or writing. I also don't think I did justice to the constant exhaustion or what he referred to as 'clunking' and I refer to as all-my-god-damn-limbs-going-where-they're-not-supposed-to. He asked if I dislocate, and because I don't 'officially' dislocate (although sometimes I really wonder how I'd know. Sometimes my limbs do things that make me feel ill to look at, and it hurts, but 90% of the time I don't have to physically push them back in.) I had to say no, and I felt like once he heard that he kind of stopped listening. I know I'm nowhere close to the worst case of hypermobility he's seen, but I can click both hips in and out of their sockets like a light switch, for gods sake, and walking out of there with a bad 80's A.R.C leaflet and my name on the end of a 6 month long physio waiting list (I won't live in the area in 6 months time, by the way. Awesome stuff, no?) felt like a massive, massive disappointment.

On one hand, I feel validated. There's a bit in the leaflet that says 'You're not a hypochondriac. You're not making this up. Don't believe that.' and it's so helpful to read. To hear. to have a doctor go 'Yes, ok, there's something wrong, let's work on managing it.' is amazing. But at the same time he didn't address any sort of alternative pain management (except to tell me to take ibuprofen with my co-dydramol to help with swelling) and he just seemed to want me out of his office as quickly as possible. I know I should be grateful but I felt let down. I wanted answers. I don't know if I was just being unrealistic but I wanted something more than what I already knew and a joke of a referral for physio.

There's also a tiny part of me that died when he said 'No, this won't go away, it won't ever get better. You just have to manage it now.' I think until then and possibly still even a bit now, in my heart of hearts I hoped there'd be some magical House moment and he'd figure out I had some rare but entirely curable problem and I needed to take 3 spoons of grape juice an hour and then clap twice and I'd be cured and I'd go back to living like a normal human being who isn't already approaching her sell-by-date. But there was no House moment. I'm broken. I'm going to stay broken. From now until I die it's just a matter of keeping me patched up however we can.

In the last of the news I saw the dental surgeon. I have serious dental problem. Recurring infection in my bottom right wisdom tooth has caused bone loss around the tooth, and both the bottom right and bottom left wisdom teeth will need to be removed. I'm awaiting a call for them to schedule the surgery, I'm just praying they can schedule it for a monday. Mr A works Thursday-Sunday and is off work Monday-Wednesday and not having anyone else nearby means that he has to be the ones who looks after me and drives me home and looks after the kiddo. The longer I have to recover the better, but if they schedule it for a Wednesday it will be disastrous. I can barely take care of us both under normal circumstances. The day after surgery it'll be impossible.

Oh life.

House of the Rising Temperature

2010-09-11T00:29:00.002+01:00

I am absent. I came down with the worst stomach bug I've ever had in my life on Wednesday, Mr A had to take two days off work to look after me except that he got sick so instead of looking after me he fell asleep a lot and then didn't eat the food I dragged myself out of bed to make us. Because it was burnt. Because I was trying not to pass out while I cooked.

So I have stuff to say, but I will say it after I'm feeling a bit better. I haven't had a proper meal since Tuesday and I've lost 4lbs, which is fucking annoying and made me cry, because for the first time in months I was over 93lbs. I am so weak and tired, even though I've been over the worst since Wednesday night (when we had to call an ambulance because I passed out, hit my head and was convulsing on the floor. Good times.) I'm still so out of it and haven't recovered myself properly.

Somebody wrote on my facebook status 'You get sick so often!' and I felt taken aback, then defensive, then like screaming. Rightly or wrongly, I read it as 'Shut up, you attention seeking bint, and take some vitamins.' Yes, I do get sick so often, because my body is incapable of taking care of itself. Thanks for the unnecessary reminder. Will you let George Osbourne know? Only he seems to think that I don't spend every day of my life in pain, with the intermittent day of vomiting so hard and so often that I shit myself. He seems to think I just need a good kick up the bum to get me back out into the workforce.

Isn't it good that there are other people around to tell me about my life? I'd get it all wrong otherwise, wouldn't I?

Confusion and superhecticbusy-ness

2010-09-03T15:18:00.002+01:00

First of all, I have FOLLOWERS, y'all. Actual people who like, follow my blog. I have two of them. Don't get me wrong, I'm incredibly grateful that anyone feels I'm worth reading, but I won't pretend it doesn't surprise me. I mean, seriously guys. Why?? I'm not that interesting! I spend all my time rambling about painkillers and babies! Also, I consistently forget to spellcheck my posts before posting them!

We've been superhecticbusy recently. There's been a lot of stress. First of all, we had a dairy challenge for Beast. Basically what this entails is exploring the severity of a child's allergy by bit-by-bit exposure and gauging the reaction. There are seven steps, the first being rubbing a drop of milk onto the child's skin, then a drop of milk on their lip, then 0.5ml of milk in 10ml of water, then on and on leading up to a full milk feed, over the course of about 5 hours. We were due to start at 9:30. We arrived on time and were shown into a children's ward. Immediately, we were nervous. We'd been expecting some sort of medical clinic....off into a side room for the tests and then out into a playroom or something while we waited for a reaction. So sitting in a ward, with cots and emergency buttons and oxygen masks....it made me feel a bit sick. There was nothing for her to do except sit in her cot and play with toys or sit in the small playroom and play with toys. I put one of the sides of the cot down completely and sat on the cot with her to make it seem less scary for all of us, but it was hard. There were sick kids all around, a baby not much older than Beast, with an IV hooked up to her foot, suffering with an unknown infection, a boy toddling around with his arm in a sling, his little face white and pinched. I'm not afraid of hospitals, as such, but I don't like being in one with my young baby. No parent wants to see their child in hospital, no matter how non-emergency the situation is.
In the end, after making us wait until 11 with no explanation as to the delay, she started reacting to the first stage of the testing, but they pushed us through to stage 3 and tried to push to stage 4 before we put our foot down and said we were taking her home. We go back in 6 months to repeat the whole ordeal and hopefully by then she'll be allergy-free.

We're having a load of problems with our Housing Benefit claim. First of all they took 4 months to approve our backdated claim, citing that we should have just claimed earlier, ignoring that Mr A works full-time and that I can't really make it down to the office and sit there for a few hours waiting for someone to stamp a few bits of paper. I don't know why, but the air-conditioning in that building does something weird to me. Every time I go there I get dizzy and almost pass out. I actually get the same thing in Asda. It's really strange.
Anyway, so we finally got approved for the backdated payment for a SIGNIFICANT amount of money, and then we get a letter saying, word for word, 'We were going to pay you on Sept 6th but now we've stopped your whole claim'. Like, wtf. WTF. That is some cold shit. COLD. They've put a stop to not only the backdated payment, but also all our ongoing payments, until we supply PROOF that we're not behind on our rent, and a copy of our tenancy agreement. They already have a copy of the contract so I don't know WHY they need that again, but as far as proof of being paid-up with our rent, why couldn't they have made a to minute phonecall to our property managers? Surely that would have cost less time and money than the process of stopping the entire claim, sending out separate letters and then re-starting the claim, including re-paying the missed payments that will amount while they're faffing about? Not to mention that this is going to put a financial strain on us while we're not getting our payments. Yes, wah wah wah, poor me and my free money from the government. But seriously, they're creating work and expense for themselves for no reason. Aren't they supposed to be trying to save money? They seem to find a problem with our claim every 6 weeks. If I didn't know better I'd think they had nothing better to do.

We had our property inspection on Wednesday, so we've spent most of our spare time in the last few weeks trying to clean the place up and make it presentable. Housework falls by the wayside for me, because I never have the spare time and spare energy. I do what I can to stay on top of the laundry and nappies (diapers) and dishes, but almost everything else doesn't really get done. We have painted wooden stairs that need to be washed instead of just vacuumed, a small, cramped bathroom which would need to be emptied of about 10kg's of storage before I could clean it, a kitchen that is as devoid of useful storage space as it is over-burdened with space-swallowing-furniture, and we have a lot of 'stuff'. Just stuff that is accumulated over the years. I'm a terrible pack rat. Mr A has a box of colored pencils and random teenage-boy-desk-crap that despite NEITHER of us using or touching for over three years now, I cannot bear to throw away. I'm just convinced that one day, probably the very day after I throw it away, we will DESPERATELY need something in that box.
This all makes for a house that is pretty tough to clean, even if you are in full possession of your physical well being, and DON'T have a toddler who is never happier than when she's causing mayhem and won't allow you out of her sight for longer than two minutes.

Anyway, after next Friday Mr A is off work for 2 weeks, woo hoo! We're still trying to figure out if we want to take advantage of the time off and go away somewhere. We're thinking about a day in Paris, but it may prove to be a little expensive for just a day out, especially when Mr A isn't actually 'into' museums and the like. It'd be cheaper to stay in England or go to Ireland, but not quite as romantic or interesting. It may all be a moot point if the benefits don't get sorted out, as we may find ourselves short of money at the worst possible time. Bloody typical!

It's never about what it's about.

2010-09-02T00:17:00.003+01:00

I'm a bit sad today. I started an argument with Mr A over 'nothing'. I still don't really know what it was about, he didn't bite though, thank god, so all is good in the Borealis household. I'm just feeling insecure and confused.

I had my first afternoon away from A.B with a friend. It was less than three hours but it was great. I dressed nicely and A.B's Godmother and I had a fabby time wondering and chatting and not having to pause awkwardly every few minutes to chase the baby, or not being able to go into half the stores because of the pushchair.

We also had the property inspection today, which is why there's been quite from me recently, as I've been working my tiny, bony ass off trying to get the house in a presentable state. It's still not guest-ready, but at least it wasn't going to have the landlord cancelling our contract. However I did massively over-do it, and if it wasn't for the painkillers I wouldn't have made it.

Having painkillers is good and bad. Good, because I'm starting to live what is approaching a normal life. Bad because the more normal I feel, the more normal I assume I am. You know the mentally ill person who takes their meds, feels better, so decides they're cured and goes off their meds, only to go off the rails? That is LITERALLY me. I used to play chiken with my anti-depressants, forgetting to refill my prescription and going three days sans medication. This week I went through withdrawal and FUCK ME SIDEWAYS. That SUCKED. I wasn't even withdrawing off anything strong, but shit a brick. It was horrific. I never want to do that again, so despite my little cat-and-mouse game with myself (going from a pill every 3-4 hours to 2 pills in over 24) not going so wrong until very near the end, I will be refilling my prescriptions at the appropriate times from now on. Although there is still a voice in my head that goes 'You're just a massive, drug-addict hypochondriac. The painkillers 'work' because THERES NO PAIN. Co-dydramol? That's basically just paracetemol. You're MAKING IT UP.' And this is hard to deal with, because, guys? I actually kind of am a drug addict. Like, not in a terrible, heroin-mommy kind of way. I don't even drink. But I have an addictive personality and I have always always always preferred my state of mind to be altered. I don't even care what way it's altered. I just do not like being in my own headspace. It's uncomfortable for me. I've been taking substances to address the difference between where I am and where I want to be (read: anywhere else) since I was 12. A decade and a lot of bad experiences is a WHOLE LOT of time to think that everything is really just in your head. It doesn't help that my problems are not, as far as I can tell, quantifiable to me. As in, I'm not covered in postules. I'm not bleeding from my eyeballs. I look fine. Skinny and tired, but fine. I limp a little, but I look fine. Until and unless a Doctor does a magic test and tells me that I am Definitely and Completely Surely broken in some way, it doesn't matter what my body does...I'm just not going to believe it.

Things Moms Aren't Supposed To Say

2010-08-19T17:57:00.002+01:00

Sometimes I am sick of living a life wherein the best thing that happens to me all day is that the baby goes to sleep. Sometimes I want to be with all my old friends, all the people my age who are out having fun and not feeling crushed under a burden I wasn't prepared for.

Sometimes it's hard to be grateful for what I have when I feel like I had so much more 2 years ago. I know, I know. Every child is a blessing, every day your child wakes up and breathes is a miracle, but... She would have been just as much of a blessing in five years time when I'd finished figuring myself out.

Like Unwashed Windows

2010-08-11T12:31:00.002+01:00

The funny thing about a long-term, pain-inflicting condition is that you don't fully realise or understand how much pain you're in or how much it affects your life until it's not there anymore.

Last night I got a reminder of what life is like when your whole body doesn't ache and stab mercilessly, all day every day. It was so bizarre, to not be in pain. My body felt numb, but it wasn't, it was just that the points of pain which have been identifying markers for so long weren't there.If I thought about it, I could still FEEL my hip, it just wasn't in pain. I could still FEEL my knee, it just wasn't in pain. Never having had any sort of severe condition, never having broken a bone or anything like that, I'd never experienced pain that lasted longer than a few weeks until suddenly I was in pain every day for 18 months.

Being out of pain for the first time was eye-opening. It was like I had been living in a house with unwashed windows for so long that I'd forgotten what the outside looked like. I'd forgotten that there was sun, that there was grass and trees and such beautiful things. Maybe I was just high, but for the first time since I was pregnant I could see things clearly. I could remember how I used to feel, before my whole life became about controlling and limiting my actions so I could control and limit my pain. My world had shrunk down so far, into what could be achieved without pain, or what had to be achieved and how much pain it would cause. You can't have a happy, fulfilling, and productive life if you focus it on pain. Or at least, I can't.

I have been such an unpleasant person over the last year-and-a-bit. I'm snappy, difficult, miserable, negative, impatient and withdrawn. I make an effort to be pleasant, cheerful, and delightful in public when I see people, but the truth is I almost never see people because it's just too hard. Most of the time I'm at home, alone, moody and brooding. There have been times when my world view is so clouded that I've had serious thoughts of suicide, and -more worryingly- divorce. It's so hard for me to see good in things when I feel bad all the time. Last night for the first time in ages I felt close to Mr A, properly close. Not just physically or out of gratefulness because he'd done something nice that day, but the sort of closeness that comes from feeling years worth of happy memories and good times. A stretching, reaching sort of closeness. A warm, safe feeling that wasn't interrupted by 'Ow, my hips' or 'Shit, my knees'. It was like someone opened the door of the room I was in and let in some light, and allowed me to see all the rooms I'd walked through before, with him.

The only real problem with this is that I'm becoming hyper-aware of when the pills wear off. The pain starts coming back, my mind becomes fuzzy and I get a feeling of slight panic. I lose concentration and start losing my train of thought. Not good, and I'm understanding more and more how people becoming addicted on pain medication. Before that, there's also a slight nausea that's near-constant, but it's worth it to feel this GOOD all the time.

Progress

2010-08-10T22:23:00.002+01:00

This afternoon I was treated to a truly wonderous display of the way the NHS works when it really does work. As a dance of various components of our medical system, it wasn't a fine ballet, but there was a rythm and a beat and I wouldn't mind watching it again.

3:30: I go in to see my general practitioner. I explain that I am in pain, all the time, that my body doesn't do what it should, that my bits don't stay where they are put. I tell him I'm exhausted, all the time. After an initial confusion wherein he thinks I've already seen a specialist for this problem (no, I had an x-ray for a suspected broken foot in April) he makes an appointment for me with a rheumatologist for a day and time that suits me, as soon as the waiting list allows. When asked about pain, he asks how I've been treating it, then prescribes me stronger painkillers. When asked about the exhaustion, he says he doesnt think it's connected, and gives me an 'order form' for blood tests. I leave his office with a half-smile, clutching three very precious bits of paper. I don't pay a thing.

3:50: I enter the pharmacy, and hand over the prescription. I ask if I'm still entitled to free prescriptions on the grounds that I'm on benefits and low income. I'm told yes, I am. Ten minutes later, I leave with 60 co-dydramol tablets, enough for between 7 and 30 days, depending on how much pain I'm in. I don't pay a thing.

4:10: I walk into my local hospital's phlebotomy department.

4:25: I am called through into a room where a polite man in a clean uniform smiles at me, takes my order form, and within a minute, has gently inserted a needle into my arm, extracted enough vials of blood for the tests, applied a cotton swab and taped me up. I thank him, and he wishes me a good day. I don't pay a thing.

By 4:35 I am back in my car headed home, having experienced one of the most iffecient interactions I've ever had with our medical service. The most wonderful thing, for me? All of this, the initial appointment, the blood tests, the referral, an the appointment with the specialist, when it comes, as well as my rescription, was completely 'fre', in that no one asked me for any money, and I didn't have a moment of sitting there debating with my doctor as to whether I could afford the care I needed. That's not a factor. Whether or not I can afford to live pain-free existance doesn't come into it. Yes, I will 'pay' or these services in taxes, in the £200 a month the government skims off my husbands paycheck, but when I need them, I don't have to check my bank account before heading into the pharmacy or the hospital. My major worries as they're drawing my blood? Fainting, not my overdraft.

There is the small matter that the wait to see a rheumatologist is a frankly shocking 58 days in my local hospital, and a not much better 32 days at a further hospital which is the soonest we could get an appointment. But the thing is, I'll be able to see someone, and I'll be able to do it for free, and I'll be able to get answers that if I had to pay for my care I may not be able to afford.

In the mean-time? I have painkillers. The painkillers do, admittedly, kill the pain. I got to be pain-free for the first time in months tonight and it was exciting. When they wore off, a little shiver of panic and a whimper of grief scuttled through my body. However, they also make me dizzy, and extremely nauseated. I had to lie down for four hours until they wore off, because sitting up, standing, walking, everything made me want to vomit or fall over. That was on a 2-pill dose, though. I've now taken a 1-pill dose in the hope that that will kill the pain without killing my nervous system.

In other news, I looked up 'rheumatologist' in an effort to understand what I was getting myself into, and subsequently convinced myself I have Lupus. Yeah. Maybe I should rename this blog 'The Hypochondria Star'.

HOLLA

2010-08-08T02:12:00.002+01:00

I'm totes alive, y'all. I promise. The miscarriage is over and my hormones are starting to settle down. I am sorting through stuff in my head so although I have things to write, I don't really have the gumption to write them. Also, Mr Man is working ridic hours right now so The Beast and I are alone all day and that is SUPER TIRING Y'ALL.

I get southern american when I'm sleepy.

My pain levels are through the roof, and my legs are doing WEIRD THINGS that legs shouldnt be able to do. Tonight after having sex all the joints from my neck down just decided not to do their jobs. I tried to push up with my arms from lying on my stomach and my shoulders gave out, my legs were hanging out of my hips sockets and my knees were doing some sort of ridiculous thing where the kneecaps decided not to join the rest of my legs.

I've been thinking alot recently. I've never really believed I had EDS, or any sort of hypermobile problem. I always thought there'd be some other explanation, that it was too convenient that a friend should happen to be talking to me about her own EDS, should happen to send me a link to a blog to explain things, and that I should happen to find this syndrome so very like what I was experiencing. But the more time goes on, the more pain I'm in, the more my body does things that it just SHOULDN'T, the more I think 'Hey, maybe the universe had a plan, and who the fuck am I to mess with the universe?'

I went to a drop-in nurse last week, just to seek reassurance that all this stuff was abnormal. She took one look at my hip dislocating and relocating and immediately told me it WASN'T normal, that I NEEDED tests and specialist referrals, that something had to be done. The relief I felt was just astronomical. For someone to tell me that it wasn't all in my head helped so much. I sat down with Mr A and said I really needed his support in seeing a doctor about this. I needed him to come and hold my hand, because I was scared. We're making an appointment first thing on Monday.

Stuff and Things and Babies that weren't.

2010-07-28T01:18:00.002+01:00

This is hard to write.

I've been a bit absent. Something happened. I was sitting in Inception on Saturday the 17th, enjoying it thoroughly, and it struck me. 'I'm pregnant.' It wouldn't leave. I thought 'No I'm not' and a little voice in my head replied 'Yes, yes you are.' Since the only day I COULD have gotten pregnant was Friday the 16th, I thought it was ridiculous to even think that I could know 36hrs later. That's not possible, right?

Except it was. The next Saturday, Bug-Baby's first birthday, we found ourselves staring at a positive pregnancy test. We got a positive result after a week with her, too. Apparently my body reacts to pregnancy ridiculously. I was having symptoms before the result, and by Saturday I was having serious problems. I was nauseated, really tired, and all my joints hurt like hell. We went out to wonder around our favourite market and have a picnic for Beast's Birthday, and I hd to hobble around using an umbrella as a walking stick. I also dislocated my shoulder picking up a bag of shopping. It was a heavy bag, but still. On Monday I went to meet friends and by the end of the day I was leaning heavily on the pushchair, using it as a zimmer-frame, my hips rolling in and out of their sockets like they were doing The Twist.

My body is a total drama queen.

I went to bed early and dreamed about giving birth to a tiny baby boy. This morning I laughed with Mr A when he came to wake me up about what we named him, and how in my dream I didn't give birth, they just said 'We have to deliver the baby right now' and then brought me this tiny little baby that could fit in my cupped hands.

I got up and went to the bathroom for my morning wee.

I was bleeding.

A lot.

It's been a week of turmoil. Nerves, sadness, worry, stress, tears, anger, pain, now a feeling of confusion. We had decided not to continue the pregnancy, because it was making me too sick, and because we were too concerned about my health and ability to take care of a toddler while bedridden for nine months. So what right did I have to feel emotional - nay, hysterical- when I passed that solid white would-be-baby? I don't. I have no right at all.

Nostalgia and why shopping doesn't work like prozac.

2010-07-16T18:39:00.002+01:00

Last night I had a really EDS-y dream. I don't know why, I wasn't particularly researchy before I went to sleep, but there I was in my dream, dislocating and falling over like the best of them. And so was everyone else. And then there was Peter Pan*, an old flame, and we were madly in love again apparently. And I hate to admit it, but it felt really nice. It felt really, really nice to be in-love and excited and nervous.

It's hard to explain, I've been feeling sad recently. Today is Mr Arienette's birthday. He's on his way home from drinks after work. We used to always take each others birthday's off work, we used to spend the day having fun and showering the birthday-person with love and attention and whatever they wanted. This year was our first year of birthdays post-baby. My birthday was awful, as documented. Mr A's won't be a whole lot better, but at least I went to the effort today of spending a few pounds and a few spoons picking him up some presents. Only some fun socks, a pair of cool boxers and some (really expensive) jellybeans, but hey, presents is presents, right? It's three pairs of socks, a pair of boxers, and two packets of jellybeans MORE than I got.

We've been married two years and together for three. Whenever people give me That Look I tell them 'You don't get married at 19 unless you really love someone or they're really rich. And he's not rich.' In a way, it's true. We love each other a ridiculous amount, but in three years we've dealt with so much. Huge mental health problems, an affair, unemployment, homelessness, physical ill-health, constant poverty, pregnancy, a baby... We both came into this relationship damaged, and we both work hard to repair each other, but there are parts of me which will never really be fixed. I'm chronically fucked up. I have such severe abandonment issues that if he gets more than 2 text messages in a row I'm convinced he's having an affair. I have spent the last three and a half years waiting for him to realise he can do better and leave me. I'm the one who cheated but yet he's the one who trusts implicitly, I'm the one who's jealous. Because I'm the one who's bored. He always wanted to settle down, get married, have babies. That wasn't even on my radar until I met him. I haven't worked since 2 months after we met, he's been mostly employed the whole time (barring about 6 months over two periods when job markets crashed and his career-field was shoving people overboard faster than they could take a breath) so he has had adult contact, he has a feeling of security and grown-upness. I don't. Because I don't deal with the money, I never know how much there is. Due to the way my family moved around when I was a kid and my parents leaving England to live abroad when I was 19, this triggers off REALLY terrible anxiety attacks and makes me feel so insecure. I am constantly waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under me. Mr A is always trying to reassure me that things are fine, but then he'll come in and say 'Hey, can I used your account to pay the gas bill?' or I'll get a fucking summons notice for non-payment of council tax (it was a mix-up, but it nearly gave me a fucking coronary) and it makes me scared deep down to my core. If he leaves me, I'll be a young single divorced woman with a baby and no job skills or qualifications or family. It's a thought that makes me feel claustrophobic, like someone is putting a bag over my head. I can't even express how terrifying my position is. I am 22 and I haven't had a job since I was 18, and I've never kept a job longer than 2 months. Can anyone even comprehend how that, plus having a baby, will affect my chances of ever getting more than the most basic of employment? I'll never be able to fulfill my dreams of going to live in Australia because I couldn't take Beast so far away from her father. So I'd be stuck in England, with no connections, no family, no prospects. Terr. If. Eye. Ing.

So, why does all of this have the effect it does on me, which is to make me fantasise about going out like a single person again, and to go shopping? I couldn't tell you. I could hazard a guess that the fantasising is my way of working through the worst-case-scenario. I'll be on the bus or walking down the high street, mentally assessing my chances of getting every vaguely good-looking guy that walks past. Usually, they are slim-to-none. Babies are MASSIVE cock-blockers. Pushchairs turn you invisible. Every now and again when it's not IMMEDIATELY obvious that I have a baby with me I'll catch a guy paying a bit more attention to me and flatter myself that instead of being a creepy stalker perv, he COULD be into me, and by extending that line of thought I think that maybe, men that I'M into could be into me too** I have little daydreams about going out and getting a boyfriend, living the life of a young twenty-something like all my friends (when Beast is with her dad, of course) and it's nice for the three minutes when I suspend disbelief and make myself forget that I'm disabled, damaged, a mother, and not that attractive, especially with my post-pregnancy funbags. I don't have anything to recommend me that wouldn't be cancelled out by the problems. It all falls apart, this strategizing and damage-limiting. But I keep doing it, maybe in the hope that one day I'll convince myself that if he left, I would have a chance of being ok.

The shopping is harder to explain. Whenever my emotions get too extreme, I get compulsions to spend money. It doesn't matter what one, but the more extreme the emotion, the more I feel I have to spend. I'm getting better at calming it down. When I was pregnant barely a week went by when something didn't arrive in the post, and often it was multiple things a week. Now I only really have to do it when I'm anxious, although the urge is always there, under the surface. It especially pops up when I'm anxious about how other people see me. For instance, next week is going to be insane. We have a really important function for Mr A's work n the same day and Beast's first birthday party. We're attending the function but I have no idea what to wear. This may not seem like a massive issue, but it is to me. I hold this fundamental belief that if I just look right, no one will suspect that I don't belong. Every time I step into a new situation I wait for everyone to turn, look at me, and then cast me out with a quivering finger, screeching 'YELLOW SHOES?! GET THEE OUT!' My aim in life is to stand out just enough to not stand out at all. I want people to see a perfectly put together mask so that they don't probe any further and realise I am fundamentally broken at my core. So I will spend WEEKS trying to put together an outfit that says 'Look at me, I'm so stylish and so together. You can forget I'm here now.' and then hours on the day deliberating the outfit I've spent weeks on. I literally cannot just throw a t-shirt on. Every time I get dressed I think about what my clothing choices will make people think of me. It's horrible. So I'll go into a shop and be worrying about money and social occasions and I'll spend three hours trying to find the perfect outfit that says what I need it to say and then I'll stand in line to pay and suddenly, between joining the line and leaving the shop, at some point I will get The Guilt. The nagging, sucking, joyless vacuum that says 'Happy now? You can't afford that, you know. It'll probably be uncomfortable or it won't suit you or you'll wear it once. Why do you even bother, you never look nice.' and my palms will sweat around my purchases and they'll feel heavy and my heart goes numb and I feel sick and suddenly I just want to run away and cry in a corner.
So far over the last 6 months for this work function I've already bought 5 items of clothing. I've considered many many many more, and am, as we speak, trying to decide on another. I don't know why I'm bothering, whatever I wear won't work and I'll either be over dressed or under dressed or wearing the wrong color or will stain my outfit on the way there or Beast will throw up on it. But still I feel the need to carry on trying. Like the scorpion, no matter how destructive me behaviour, it's in my nature.

*Name changed to protect my sanity.
**Not massively likely. Almost every man I've ever been into based on looks alone has been completely indifferent to me. My 'type' is quite specific and they don't tend to look twice at me, because they're sucking-face with infinitely better looking women. Sucks. I think Mr A is slammin', and truly beautiful, but as he looks now I wouldn't pick him out of a crowded room.

Write despite it.

2010-07-15T01:06:00.003+01:00

A friend posted a link to "I Write Like..." and I have been having a lot of fun since plugging in different poems and bits of writing and seeing the results. I'm also having a lot of fun reading through my old work. I used to write a LOT. It was what I was going to do. I felt really really passionate about it. Also? I was good. And I don't say that with smugness. I haven't written much since I got pregnant, I have nothing to be smug about. But I consistantly got very high praise from anyone who read my writing, including my university teachers, who were writers themselves. A teacher at school was willing to pull strings to get me into the best Creative Writing course in the country. I Was Good. Especially looking back on things I wrote when I was 16/17. I really did have quite a remarkable way with words and language for such a young person. I miss it, but more than that? I miss being YOUNG and being good. Somehow being good now wouldn't have the same impact as being good at 17. Although of course when I was 17 I had no idea I was good. I thought I was rubbish and I wrote despite that, and I think that's probably what made me good. That I wrote anyway and that I was never complacent because I never had an inflated sense f my own skill.

Today was a good day again. I'm still in lots of pain (what's new?!) but I just had a good experience, on the whole, of the day. It rained again and that sucked but both A.B and I were in a good mood and there was much less grumping than usual. On both sides. The phone got re-connected and so now I can phone my mom and dad again and it'll make our lives easier to not have to rely on our mobile phones.

I wish it would stop raining and get warm again. I can't do washing if I can't dry it and I can't be bothered with all the lifting necessary to dry it inside.

We had a paediatric appointment yesterday, the paediatrician is very pleased with Beastlet's progress but once again managed to upset me with her anti-breastfeeding attitude. She's genuinely a nice person and I couldn't have coped without her listening to me when Beast was small and no one else did, but while she doesn't out-and-out tell me to stop feeding, she's really dismissive of it in a way. She'll be all 'You've done really well, she's thriving, but you know I had all mine off the breast at a year old' or '...but she really can do without the breast now.' or '...you just need to break her will, she'll get hungry enough eventually and just give in.' Which really really upsets me. The idea of trying to break the will of a 12 month old baby, just starving her until she 'gives in' is just horrendous to me. I would make a complaint but other than her very un-hippy attitudes she's a great doctor and has helped us so much. I do worry about a less determined mother seeing her and maybe giving up breastfeeding because of what she says but I worry MORE about the mothers who desperately need help their GP's can't or won't provide, for whom Dr S might be a godsend. After our first appointment with her I sat in the car crying in relief. She bouyed my spirits. Without her I'd still be living in a nightmare and i definitely would NOT still be breastfeeding, because I wouldn't have been able to keep up with Beasties demand for extra milk to soothe the pain her allergy caused. So I put up with her occasional upsetting aside, because it's a compromise, and if there's one thing the NHS has taught me, it's that you compromise, every step of the way. You have to. You don't have a choice.

Good days

2010-07-12T02:28:00.002+01:00

Today was a Good Day. I woke up at 2pm, which is more or less unheard of on weekends unless Mr A drags me out of bed. Weekends are when I catch up on the sleep I miss during the week. Without them I would collapse from exhaustion pretty quickly. I have two days a week to catch up on running myself down the other 5 days, so I usually sleep in what most people would consider a ridiculous amount. On saturday I got up at 4pm. Hey, walk a mile in my shoes, ok?

I literally collapsed into bed sometime between 3 and 5 this morning. I don't remember going to bed, Mr A woke up to A.B awake and 'playing' with my hair at 5am, I was out cold with no blanket on me (UNHEARD OF!) and when Mr A went downstairs all the lights were on, the TV was on, the netbook was open and running. It looks like I went up to feed A.B and then just passed out in exhaustion. Mr A thought I was dead! Ho ho ho.

Anyway, I woke up at 2pm, confused and groggy but feeling rested. I did a bit of laundry and then we decided to go for a drive. This is more or less unheard of for us, we never seem to go out on weekends except when we're running errands. We never go out just to go out. It always seems to be us hurrying out in a rush to rush around some place. It was really nice though. We had a really good long chat, we listened to some good music, we enjoyed ourselves. I'm so glad we did it.

Then when we got home I finished off the laundry and we made a kick-ass dinner and ate it outside on our deck. The deck is coming together really well, I'm really proud of myself. It was really bad befre, covered in junk and unusable. I worked really hard to get it to a state where we can use it. We've bought a string of solar lights and a kick-ass solar lamp. Added to the barbeque and the lettuce that I'm growing, it's looking really homely. Not spectacular, not Home & Garden-worthy, but there's space and we can eat out there and it makes me smile. Working on the deck is slow, four years ago I could have done in a weekend what it's taken me over a month to do now, but it is what it is. I get tired really easily working outside, especially in this weather, so I have to accept that I can do two, maybe three hours over as many days, maybe just that in a whole week, and that's ok. I have limits, that's ok.

Right now it's 3am and I'm taking a little break from tidying up the living room. We have a phone technician coming to the house on Wednesday because our phone hasn't been working for almost three months. The room is a MESS though so I'm a bit stressed out. Tuesday we have a paediatrician appointment so I only have tomorrow to get it sorted out to the point where I'm not embarassed to have someone see it!

I dyed my hair from pink back to blonde and I'm already a lot happier with it. I needed to go through a stage of dying my hair funky colors, I needed to be able to say I'd done it, but I would be lying if I said I felt happy with it the last few weeks. It just didn't look good and it was affecting my self-confidence, because I felt other people looked down on me and as much as I SHOULD just not care what they think, I do. I always do, always have, always will. I feel more confident now that I feel like a look more normal. I wish I had the self-confidence to carry off looking as alternative as I am at heart, but I've discovered that unless you have a community around you of alternative people to reinforce that what you're doing and wearing is ok, it's really hard. It's hard to be one person standing against a wave. I'm content that that doesn't make me a sell-out or a poser, it just means that I don't have enough support, and that's just not my fault, at the end of the day. It wasn't ME that stepped back when I got pregnant, it was my friends. They left me.

Today I am feeling peaceful. Now, back to cleaning!

Knock knock. Who's there? No one, I fell over halfway to the door.

2010-07-08T01:03:00.002+01:00

So I promised I would come back and expand on Round Seventy Gazillion of the 'Ari Is Tired' game.

Last Week I was invited to attend a play on July 1st with a relative of Mr A's. This was exciting, and also anxious-making. It would involve a longer stint away from Baby A than I had ever had. I am also currently not on speaking terms with Mr A's parents and grandparents, so spending a whole evening with his brother and aunt? Ummmm. I had to think long and hard about it, but eventually decided that actually, I really did need an evening out, away from the house, being a grown-up. I was a Theatre and Drama student at school, I used to love nothing more than checking out plays. I haven't been to one since I finished my A-levels in '06. I haven't been out during the evening without Mr A or Baby A for 2 years. I really, really, really needed a few hours in adult company, doing something I enjoyed.

So, with much trepidation, I started to get ready. What to wear was a major issue. On one hand, I wanted/needed to be comfortable. On the other, this is my first adult evening in two years, and I wanted to look NICE. I ended up settling on a long red skirt with white spots, worn as a shorter dress, with a black silk belt, with red high heels and my hair pinned back as best I could (it's very short). Once I'd slapped on a bit of slap, I was looking pretty smoking.

We had an amazing dinner (steeeeeaaaakkkk MMMMMM) and the play (Women Beware Women) was spectacular, as was the conversation. I came home buzzing, elated, refreshed, and best of all, missing Baby A (why is that a good thing? Because 99% of the time I just resent her and want someone else to come and help me with her. To MISS her, to feel excited and elated to see her? Awesome feeling.) It was, on the whole, and amazing success and I'm so pleased Mr A bullied me into going.

However.

The effort required to pull this night together was enormous, and it knocked me flat on my ass. I got home barely able to walk, despite having worn flip-flops all the way into London from Home, only putting on my heels at the last minute. Sitting in the theatre for three hours and the all of maybe 15-20 minutes walking I did in total was too much for me. I burned out in a major way. It's now a week later and I'm still hurting. On Tuesday we went to IKEA for me second birthday, and we hd a great time but by the time we had zipped round to the market hall (maybe 45 minutes, tops, of light strolling) I was really hurting, could barely support myself, leaning heavily on the trolley to keep upright and avoid the embarassment of Making A Scene.
Apart from Tuesday I've been stuck to the sofa every day since Thursday, and sleeping til almost 1pm. I'm exhausted, in a huge amount of pain, and now, tonight, my chest has started hurting as well. It feels like I'm having an asthma attack, but a really low-grade one, for hours and hours now. I could scream. Mr A sent me to bed early (9pm) after a chat about how I'm not doing terribly well, but then we had sex and it woke me up and now it's 1:30am and I CAN'T SLEEP. I was supposed to be seeing a friend and her new baby tomorrow but may have to cancel at this rate. Luckily, she is AWESOME and understands and is willing to be cancelled on at the last minute. I'm frustrated, because I really wanted to get out, but what use is it pushing myself to the point of collapse? Where I'm at right now, I can honestly se myself passing out and leaving this poor woman trying to get help for me while looking after two babies. No, not fair.

As for the conversation with Mr A earlier... I am having a bit o a wibble at the moment, about my health. I'm 22. I should feel this fucking old. I feel geriatric. I'm always tired and always in pain. my life is a never ending list of compromises. Want t go out for a walk? Well you can't. Go sit on the balcony instead. Want to clean the house? Well you can't, settle for putting a single load of laundry on instead. Want to cook up a batch of food to freeze? Well you CAN'T. Settle for buying the ingredients and hoping you having the energy at some point and that this lot won't get thrown out like the last six lots (it did get thrown out, by the way.) I'm tired of all of this never-ending tiredness.
I finally narrowed down the list of GP's and found one nearby that ticks all the right boxes. Close by (although it IS uphill. Compromise.), two female GP's, excellent reviews on NHS Choices of the GP's treatment (although not of the support-staff's behaviour. Compromise). Next stage is phoning to ask if they're registering new patients and then finding a time when we can go and register.

I've had to stop driving lessons/practise because I wasn't safe behind the wheel. That was a massive blow. I love my car, it's a thing of beauty, and I love the wy I feel when I drive. But I was not safe. I kept forgetting about the handbrake, I forgot to check for red lights, I would zone out while driving. At one point I became REALLY sick while driving home and started greying out, trying not to vomit. I couldn't pull over because I couldn't turn my head or use my brain to figure out where would be safe. It was scary, and dangerous. This is bad news, because without a license I am really really limited. I'm getting better at taking public transport, because I HAVE to, but it's still difficult and it's still enough to keep me much more housebound than I would otherwise be.

I'm frustrated. I'm scared I'm never going to get any better, that my life goes downhill from here and never, ever gets better. I don't want to have peaked at 21. 21 is supposed to be the beginning, not the beginning of the end. I get so down about it. I shouldn't be reading all of this stuff about the DLA and benefits reviews, because I'm internalising a lot of the things being said by stupid, ignorant people. I'm internalising the belief that I'm scummy, scrounger, useless, work-shy. I already had a gold-medal in self-criticism, something I've fought hard to put aside in the last couple of years, only to have it all come crashing in on me now. Without any work or possibility or hope of work, without any indication that things will GET BETTER SOON, I feel like I'm collapsing.

(next morning)

I had to run upstairs to feed the baby and subsequently couldn't post this last night. I woke up at 6 this morning with a dodgy tummy and so had to cancel my outing today. Bah. Still having chest pains.

3am and that-time-at-the-bus-stop

2010-07-05T03:06:00.004+01:00

I've spent the last day or so in a lot of pain* and so I've been just chilling out reading this and all the comments below it. And for some reason it dredged up this memory that I systematically repress every time it comes to the surface.

For back-story, I have been subject to sexual, emotional and physical abuse from many people in the course of my life-time. This ranges from childhood sexual abuse, to stranger-rape, to acquaintance rape, to parental violence/emotional abuse to extremely controlling emotional abuse from an ex. Until I met my now-husband, there wasn't a year in my life that went by that I wasn't subjected to some form of abuse. So I did not come to this situation wide-eyed and bushy-tailed and full of the fluff and joys of the world.

I had an office job in London Bridge. It's a densely populated area, with a wide-range of people. There are offices, shops, cafe's, homes...all sorts of people around, all the time, for all sorts of reasons. I left work one day and stood at my usual bus-stop, waiting for my usual bus. There were at least 10 people there, possibly as many as 25. It was on the main road, not tucked out of the way. I've included a picture of the street, the bus-stop is next to the black streetlamp that goes halfway over the road. You can see there is very obviously a lot of people that would have been around or within sight around the time that this particular incident occurred.

I was a young-looking 18, 5'6 and maybe 8 and a half stone, wearing office-clothes. It was April or May so still light out. I was standing with my back against the building, the normal London-Appropriate amount of space between me and the people around me, allowing for crowded-bus-stop-adjustments, of course. As I waited, I barely registered that a man was approaching, walking down the pavement. Without resorting to class-privileged snubs, he was clearly either homeless, or mentally ill or both. He was what most people would term a hobo, dressed in baggy dirty clothes, unwashed, long matted hair, carrying a blue plastic bag I would later realise was the type usually given out at cornershops and off-licences. As he came up to the bus-stop, he very marginally sped-up, and with no warning, swung out his arm and smacked me full in the head with his bag, which had cans in it. He swung it again, without even breaking stride, only missing my face because I somehow, through my shock, put my arm up and caught the blow. He didn't even turn, or slow down, he just carried on going.

And not a single one of those 10-25 people did a thing.
Not one of them tried to stop him.
Not one of them moved to protect me (although the speed at which the attack happened, I don't blame them for this really)
Not one single person asked if I was ok. In fact, they pointedly avoided even making eye-contact with me.

I was a teenage girl, alone, who had just been assaulted by a strange man, and sustained a serious blow to the head, and not one person acted as though anything had even happened.

I was fine, physically apart from a sore head. There was no concussion, no head injury. But there was a much much worse injury, which was mental and emotional. It was the knowledge that I was not safe in public, not because people might attack me, which was something I had learned many years before, but because no one cared. It was deeply and profoundly shocking to me to discover that my previous assumptions, that if any of my attacks or abuses had happened in front of witnesses that someone would have stepped in or helped, were completely off-base. That was worse, in a way, than the attack itself. I felt like by being silent and ignoring the attack, these people were sending me a message. Shut up. Don't make a fuss. Don't embarrass us with your hysterical display. We don't want to know or hear about your problem. Just forget it. I bit my lip and tried to stop my shoulders from visibly shaking as I cried in pain, fear, and humiliation. I got on my bus and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with people who clearly wished the ground would just swallow me the fuck up so I would go away. I ended up getting off the bus two stops later and walking the few miles home, chain-smoking and crying, calling my then-boyfriend (Mr A) and blubbering about how much I wanted to vomit.

Soon after this incident, abnormally soon, in fact, within days, I suppressed it to the point whereupon reading a line about it in my diary a year later, I couldn't remember what on earth it was referencing. In fact, I didn't remember it until I randomly remembered it about 6 months ago. I then immediately forgot about it again, after feeling overwhelmed by the apathy shown by those strangers at that bus-stop.

This isn't really going anywhere. Just a memory that cropped up in response to a lot of reading about rape-culture and it surprised me that I've suppressed it not once, but twice. It surprised me that at a crowded bus-stop a young girl can sustain a vicious and unprovoked attack and even when there is no risk of danger to them, the people around her will decide not to get involved, not even to ask if she's ok. Even as I write this, I'm making excuses in my head. I should have gone back into work and told someone what had happened. I should have screamed, to alert my fellow bus-stoppers that what had happened was Serious Business (because they might otherwise have assumed that getting hit in the head with a few full cans of beer wouldn't have bothered me, obviously). If I didn't scream, it's my fault, right?

NO. NO IT'S FUCKING NOT. This is rape apologist language applied to a much milder assault. And don't get me wrong. I know that this is nowhere near the worst thing that could have happened to me. I would rather take another 100 blows to the head than ever be raped again. But this particular instance and something that happened around the same time, when work-colleagues got me way-way-way fucked up, took me to a strange place and then completely failed to even attempt to throw up the vaguest concern for my well-being, which in turn led to them watching a complete stranger walk me out the door and into a cab despite the fact that I could barely stand, did a lot to wreck my trust of the average person. We live in a culture that allows this sort of shit to happen by not ACTIVELY and LOUDLY stepping in and stopping it happening. Why did not one single person at that bus-stop ask if I was ok, or offer to take me to the tube-station so I could find a police officer? I shouldn't have been getting on a bus. I should have been being checked out for a concussion and making an incident report. Because not one single person there acknowledged that something had even happened, I somehow felt like it was my FAULT. Like I was making a big deal over nothing, like this was something I should just accept, that he was allowed to assault me and why was I getting all fucking uppity over it?

This has been a blog about why I wish I had a son so I could teach him to be a Good Man. This has also been a blog about why I cried some tears of sadness when I found out I was going to be raising a daughter.

*I will talk about this soon. And not in a general 'I'm tired and in pain' way like usual!

How much will it cost the government to remove my Disability Living Allowance?

2010-06-30T04:42:00.004+01:00

(Following on from immediately earlier entry.......)

Realistically, the govt. would pay me much more in working-benefits and subsidiary costs than it would save if it sent me out to work. I currently receive higher rate care and mobility. Let's call that £450 p/m (although because I have a car on the motability scheme, the cost is more but the cash is less)

Lets say that I get a job working 16hrs a week for minimum wage (I can't expect much more than that, to be honest) our total entitlement to benefits as a couple? £11,400.63. Now, that DOES include some things we already claim, like housing benefit and tax credits and child benefit (all things, I'd hasten to point out, than ANYONE is allowed to claim, working or not, except tax credits which are an in-work benefit). It's still a lot.

Now, add to that that because I'll be working, I'll be pushing myself past what I am capable of while still retaining any degree of comfort. This will mean that most likely, I will have to go on medication. Probably anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, and pain management.

I'm going to break this down as much as I can to make it a bit clearer. Obviously, these numbers are not accurate as, guess what? I don't have a direct line to the NHS offices to find out how much meds cost. But I'm going off searches of the things I would need and an educated estimate at how much they would cost based on the assumption that the NHS bulk-buys. For example, I got a price of 64p per pill for Sertraline if bought in bulk at 270pills, so I assumed the NHS would buy in even larger numbers than that, and just pegged it at 40p. It's probably less, but lets add some more for admin costs, the cost of my GP, the cost of the pharmacist, etc etc. Assume all numbers are accurate for the purpose of this excersize.

Assuming Sertraline at 40p per pill: £12.50 p/m
Diazepam (assuming 1-2 pills a week): £3 p/m
Codeine (assuming 28 a month, which I could easily do now, without a job): £5 p/m

That's £20.50 a month on pills alone, almost £250 a year. And because I will soon be diagnosed with a lifelong illness, I will soon get my prescriptions free, which means the NHS will foot the entire bill. It will also foot the bill for the support I will no doubt need. The 16 weeks of councelling I'm sure I'll be provided with (pffffft), the braces (£40 please) I may or may not need to hold myself together (chortle chortle), the hospital stay I may end up needing if I relapse and require hospitalization, or the hospital stay I may end up needing if my perilously low weight plummets any further (which it would do, if I was stressed and also having to be doing physical activity 16 hours a week more than I do presently. And lets not kid ourselves that a 22 yr old with no skills, qualifications, previous work experience AND a baby could get anything other than something that would require a large degree of standing on my feet all day, serving people).

If I was to get pregnant again (not unreasonable for someone my age, in a stable relationship, but also not something I'm planning on doing, but I COULD) the cost to the government would skyrocket almost immediately. I would be extremely high risk, I would most likely have to leave work fairly soon which would mean I would have to go on *drumroll, please* unemployment benefits, or maternity wages (the actual term escapes me at 5am, sorry) all of which come straight from the governments coffers, I would most likely have to have a high-risk birth which would cost some hospital a lot of money, if I have my baby prematurely (stress and weight problems would contribute significantly to this possibility) the costs shoot off astronomically. If I had to stay in hospital for any length of time on bedrest, Beastlet would have to go into full time childcare while I'm in hospital, AND GUESS WHO WOULD HAVE TO PAY FOR THAT, GEORGIE? The government, in the form of childcare vouchers. I haven't even accounted for the fact that I probably wouldn't find a job straight away that could take me, and therefore I'd be on JSA for posibly months before anything came up. That's another £250 a month.

This is all ignoring that the initial assessment, administration, and paperwork required to remove my Disability Living Allowance in the FIRST PLACE will all cost money. George Osbourne is basically saying he wants to pay me more money so that I can be poorer and in lots more pain while someone else brings up my child two days a week. Rightio then. That makes a ton of sense.

Originally I was going to round up this post with a definitive number for you, but I don't have one. The peripheral costs, the ones that just cannot be accounted for, calculated, those are the ones that will really get out of hand if G.O succeeds in his plan of forcing me back to work by removing my DLA and 'encuraging' me to get a job. It seems fairly obvious to me that continuing my DLA payments is actually the most financially sound option for the government, so why isn't it obvious to those who are in charge and should actually know what they're doing?

"...and then my boobs will basically explode and I'll die."

2010-06-30T02:58:00.003+01:00

That is why Mr A should just google shit when I tell him I'm sick, instead of asking 'What's that?'

I'm getting over a bout of mastitis. The anti-biotics did a number on me. I'm nauseated, have a dodgy tummy, and keep feeling very... I can't describe it. Wiggly. Like all the molecules in my body are doing the mexican wave. Or something. BUT. That's all ok, because my boob no longer feels like it's going to explode and I no longer feel lie I'm sitting in an ice bucket even though it's 30 degrees outside.

I'm feeling better these days, and worse. I'm a little depressed about this whole shake-up of the DLA. I know I shouldn't get involved. I shouldn't. But I feel I HAVE to. I feel like remaining ignorant to the issues isn't right. But when I open myself up to the truth of the situation, I feel like I'm drowning.

I'm drowning in the futility of the situation: The big bad government against a small rally of educated cripples.
I'm drowning in the bad press; hyperbolic, sensational stories of benefit cheats.
I'm drowning in the ignorance of the average person about what DLA actually IS, and who can claim it.
I'm drowning in the truth of what will happen if I lose my DLA award.
I'm drowning in the feeling of being worthless, scum, a scrounger, no good, a waster.

...

I'm in tears writing this. The worst part? The words of fellow disabled people. People who feel that their disability is more worthy than mine. People who campaign for ramps and toilets and better chairs, but who would happily consign me to being sent back to work or, more realistically, just being much much worse off.

I try so hard not to judge people. In the car park the other day a man driving a car with a blue-badge rushed into a parent-and-child parking space that Mr A and I had been patiently waiting for. When Mr A pointed out it was a P&C space, not a disabled bay, and that the disable bays were further down (closer to the store entrance, in fact) the man became belligerent and rude. We drove past an empty disabled bay just 10 parking spaces down. He hadn't even bothered to check for one before taking the last P&C space. We had to park at the back of the car park so as not to get boxed in, and I had to limp across the car park.
That man judged me and my family. He decided arbitrarily that his desire to not bother to look for a more suitable space and his right to park where he liked, outweighed my need to park in a P&C space (for those without children, P&C spaces are important, because getting a baby into a carseat when you can only open your doors a foot is dangerous and difficult. P&C spaces usually also have safer routes to the stores, so parents don't have to walk children through open roads where there are blind corners made by badly designed carparks. Sometimes they aren't even closer to the store. Just safer and wider than regular spaces) He decided that I didn't need that space as much as he needed to stop driving RIGHT THAT SECOND.
Now, had there NOT been a free disabled space, I would have been the first to tell Mr A to give the space to him. But the act is that he can park in the disabled space, we could not. He had two spaces to choose from. We had only one, and he chose to park in that one space.

This is all getting a bit garbled. There was a point..... in that, people like him would look at me and go 'Well the medical assesment will weed out people like her! Send them back to work!'

I'm going to write a seperate entry about this...I started writing it in one entry but this deserves it's own one.

Tired.

2010-06-25T12:44:00.002+01:00

Again.
It's been a tough few weeks. I've been over-stretching myself while simultaneously not getting anything really achieved.

It sounds stupid but my dental treatment is really stressful. The dental office is up a flight of stairs, which means that nt only do I actually physically have to climb the stairs, but it also presents the baby-problem. Firstly, there's getting to the place. It's a 5-10 minute walk, with no bus that goes there, so I have to walk. What does this have to do with stairs? Well, think about it for a second. I can either take her in the pushchair and then have to lug 12kgs of pushchair AND a baby up and down a flight of stairs, or I can not take the pushchair and carry the 20lb baby there and back. Neither of these options is actually any good. I can't really physically do either of them without doing myself damage. Forgoing the pushchair is the easier option, because I can take her in a sling, but that presents the problem that once she's in the dentists office and I'm in the dentists chair....what the fuck am I supposed to do with her? For my last appointment her godmother came with me, but I cannot and will not ask that of her again (except for when I go into hospital to have my wisdom tooth removed) I hate being in debt to people, I hate asking for favours, it humiliates me. The dental room is too small for her to be in there with me, so assuming I get there in one piece and get up the stairs in one piece, we then have the issue of who looks after the baby.

Are you starting to see why I'm extremely fucking stressed about this?

Yesterday I had a really great day out with a couple of friends, but the need to pretend that everything was great and I was fine and normal and wonderful meant that I massively over-excerted myself. Then we had a huge problem that took a couple of hours to sort of on the phone and that caused a lot of stress. Because we'd had a big day and then a stressful night we didn't end up having dinner, just a small snack. So today I woke up exhausted, in a lot of pain, with stress-whiplash, and the niggling guilt of having things that desperately needed to be done but hadn't been. I was also starving. But because I was out all of yesterday and out of spoons when I got home, there were NO clean dishes. At all. And no clean pots or pans or cooking implements or anything. The fridge was full, but not of grabbable, immediate-to-eat food. It taunted me with ingredients! They were all 'Ooooh, look at me, I'm a lettuce. If you took me out and chopped me up and added those tomatoes over there? You could totally have a really crappy salad. But you can't do that, CAN YOU? HA! YOU LOSE!'
Guys, it's a bad day when you're being taunted by lettuce. Lettuce is pretty much the wimp of the vegetable world. If you suck worse than the suckiest vegetable, then you suck a LOT.

I ended up having a can of coke, just so I would have the energy to grab a few sticks of celery and a jar of peanut butter. I wiped down the cleaniest of the dirty plates and after being up over an hour and a half finally had the oomph to eat something.

I'm in a guilt-spiral right now. A friend is very ill, and I bought her a present and meant to send it off a while ago, but didn't. The more time that goes by between when I MEANT to send it and the present, the worse I feel, and the less I can physically look at it. It is not all my fault, as I said it's been a tiring few weeks and honestly, I'm beyond exhausted. All the time. The 50 minute round trip to the post office (including standing around for 25 minutes in the que while A.B screams at me and my hips freak out) is something that I dread and that I've put off on thebasis that I can't push myself any more than I absolutely positively HAVE TO. And who always loses? My friends. My friends lose. And then I'm so ashamed of myself that I step back from them and then you know who loses? Me. And then I'm miserable and grumpy and guilty and who loses then? A.B and Mr A. So now EVERYONE HAS LOST. Awesome.

I also just got an e-mail from Mr A's aunt, inviting me to the theatre in a week. I could cry. I like this woman a lot, and I haven't been out by myself (as in, without Mr A) to an evening thing for over two years. I would love to go but I can't, because Baby A.B won't take milk from a bottle. And no one understand this. No one seems to understand that I can't 'just' leave her to starve. People don't understand why we don't 'just' get her on bottles. They act like the answers are so easy but they don't know her and don't understand what we've been through trying to get milk into her. They don't understand what it's like listening to your baby scream and cry and knowing that you can fix it. They don't know how hard it is to 'just' ignore that. And I get so tired of trying to explain why I can't 'just' leave her to people who don't understand why I bother to breastfeed in the first place, why I bother to breastfeed for 'so long', and why I care SO MUCH about breastfeeding her. They always feel like they need to offer me advice I don't want or ask for. Really, she won't starve to death? You don't say! Fuck off, even if she doesn't starve doesn't mean she'll be ok. There is a lot of bad stuff between being happy and starving to death. Bad stuff that I don't necessarily feel like inflicting on my baby.

See, I'm getting all defensive and angry and upset and.... I don't know. I'm stressed. I may have mentioned that.

I'm going to go drown my sorrows in some strawberry and mango tea.

Dentists do the funniest things

2010-06-15T20:39:00.002+01:00

I had a dentists appointment today. I was scared. I hadn't been to a dentist in about 3 years, when I had two root canals and had an entire tooth rebuilt from scratch. When I was pregnant, my wisdom teeth started growing in, and caused a HUGE amount of pain, but because I knew they couldn't do anything (because I was pregnant) I didn't bother to have them seen to. The pain went away, I assumed all was well.
It wasn't. From then until now, every few months the pain flared up and I spent a week or so crying and clutching my head.
I also, in the course of my labour, chipped the tooth I'd had rebuilt at a cost of £350. Not. A. Happy. Bunny.

So after 11 months of faffing and procrastinating and avoiding, I went to the dentist. It's worse than I thought. My left wisdom tooth is growing in sideways. Not at a slight angle. Not a bit wonky. Actually almost fully sideways. This image gives you a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about. So I have to go to hospital and have it removed, probably under general anaesthetic. The waiting list is about a month long, so I'm not even sure when it's going to happen. I'm asking A.B's godmother to help me out by babysitting on the day, but I'm pretty nervous. I'm not sure whether the drugs they give me will affect my breastmilk, how long it'll take, how much pain I'll be in...it's all very worrying for someone who likes to know what's happening and doesn't like uncertainty.

I also have to have the chipped tooth capped. They're doing a silver cap, because I get free treatment, which I am SERIOUSLY unhappy about, since I paid fucking £350 3 years ago to have the tooth replaced in WHITE. Now I'm going to have a horrible ugly silver thing in my face. You couldn't even tell it wasn't my real tooth before. But we don't have the money to get it fixed 'properly'. Aaaaaahhh. I am SO glad that I get free tretment, please don't misunderstand. I am more angry that the previous dentist charged me so much money for something that didn't last.

I'm watching random snippets of Stephen Fry on Youtube. He makes me happy in my pants.

94lbs

2010-06-14T14:05:00.002+01:00

It's 'funny' how the less I weigh, the less I want to eat. I just don't see the point anymore. I never gain weight, it never gets better, nothing ever helps. My BMI hasn't been above 15 for months. I've been struggling for months and months to get it up and nothing ever works.

I'm just so tired of fighting this and never getting anywhere.

2010-06-14T00:49:00.002+01:00

Ganked from BendyGirl

Birthdays suck

2010-06-11T23:37:00.002+01:00

So, I turned 22 on Sunday, and it sucked. I won't go into detail, because a LOT of stuff happened, but it was just a horrible day in general and involved a big falling out with Mr A's family. I spent about an hour solid just sobbing in a way I haven't done for years. Needless to say, it failed in every aspect as a birthday. We're trying again on July 6th, hoping 22 v2 goes better.

Today we also got a letter from the council. The council ALWAYS send their damn letters so they arrive on a FRIDAY so you can't fucking do anything about them. We had applied for housing assistance (yes yes, I'm a horrible benefit-scrounging loser, I know, but please bear in mind that we are roughly £1000 a month below the poverty line [the poverty line here being less than 60% of the median UK income after housing costs have been paid] so I'm sorry, but we do need government assistance. And if you disagree you can come and live in my house with my budget for a year without any. Then we'll talk.) and when Mr A handed in the forms, the woman insisted on putting down that we were applying for Working Tax Credits and Child Tax Credits at the same time, even though we weren't, she said we HAD to. So today we got a letter through saying that they would not assess our claim until they had seen documentation of what we were awarded in WTC and CTC. Guys, we havent even received those forms yet. They need to be sent to you, apparently, and we havent got them yet. We then have to SHOW the Housing people our filled-out forms AND show them the letter detailing what we've been awarded. We won't have the forms until next week at the earliest and we won't hear back from then for at least two weeks, add another week to sort things out with housing and two weeks for them to make a decision, and we won't be getting our back-payment and our payments for over a month, at the earliest.
On top of this, theres a box on the form asking why you haven't filled it in any sooner, and we put that Mr A is working full-time and when he's not, he's looking after me and helping me look after Baby A.B. When Mr A took the form in the woman was SO snotty about it, saying why hadn't I bothered to come down, and what was so wrong with me that I couldn't get out the house. I should point out that the form clearly states I am in receipt of the FULL amount of Disability Living Allowance. Nothing on this form should have led her to think I sit on my arse all day thinking of essential tasks I can shirk. Along with the letter above, we get a letter saying that we have to provide PROOF that I have been ill in the time-period we're talking about, which means supplying a fucking note from my GP. Er, except, my GP doesn't KNOW about my PND. You know why? BECAUSE I AM NOT OBLIGATED TO REPORT ON MY HEALTH TO MY GP. If I want to keep that shit secret, I'm ALLOWED. I am so ANGRY. It was clearly stated on the form that I have post-natal depression, Mr A works full-time, leaving at 7 and getting back at 6:30, when is he supposed to be able to go there? And I'm angry too that I'm being ordered to produce proof of my depression when that isn't even relevant to our case, only to the time-line of when we handed the form in. I don't go to my GP for every sniffle, I was sick for 6 weeks earlier in the year, immobilised for weeks at a time and I didn't go to him then (mainly out of stubbornness and because their appointment booking system is ridiculous) so why would I go to him with something so personal and difficult?
Yes I know I shouldn't be bitching about all my free money....I'm not really, I'm just upset about all the rudeness we get from them and all the red tape and things that stand in our way just to get help. You have to fill out a 50 page form and then supply 600 bits of paper and then get grilled by a super-rude bitch and then 10 days later get told 'Oh well thats not enough'. They want you to give up before they have to give you anything. Why can't they just be nice? Like asking for help isn't daunting and demoralising enough, they need to beat you around and make you jump through hoops and feel like shit on their shoes. It's so unnecessary.

What else sucks? Well... one of our pet rats died this week. The other won't be around much longer. I have a dentist appointment for Tuesday which is scary and I-want-to-avoid-y. The company delivering my replacement credit card (part of the Birthday Of Suckiness, my e-bay/paypal/email account got hacked into on my birthday so I had to cancel all my cards) has my address SO wrong it's baffling that the letter even arrived to tell us they couldnt find our house.

Right, I'm off to go watch Secret Life of The American Teenager and pretend my life is awesome.

It's a bad sign when..

2010-06-02T01:16:00.002+01:00

...you google yourself to see what people you're getting into fights with online who know your full real name will find if THEY google you.

Guys, that should NEVER be a concern.

What do people find when they google me? Oh god. Well mostly, random listings websites that don't really do anything other than list my name. But also, a link to my poetry on a writing website (I tried to erase that link but it didn't work. Damnit! It's *very* incriminating.), pictures of me on my wedding day, my goodreads account (not terribly incriminating, that) and a bunch of dud links to my facebook account (which is so private that even if you click on them and search, knowing my full name, you get nada)

Once again I am kind of floored by the internet and the scary scary things on it. I'm also now stuck in the whole cycle of clicking through the profiles of people I used to know, to be friends with...getting sucked into that vortex of pain is NOT goodtimes.

But hey, at least if the people I'm in a dispute with see my crazy 16-yr-old poetry, they'll back the fuck off and leave me alone because they'll assume I'm certifiably insane.

CAKE

2010-05-31T21:28:00.004+01:00

or, How I Burned My Face Melting Butter.

Today in my little corner of the world, it's a bank holiday. This doesn't actually affect me, since my husband is off work anyway and I don't have a job and we weren't planning on doing anything. BUT I feel the need to use 'it's a bank holiday' as my excuse for trying to make cake for dinner tonight, and the chaos that ensued.

I was making no-bake tiffin cakes, a'la My Daddy Cooks. Because it's easy and because tiffin cakes are yummy and because we had all the ingredients. Which is pretty much my criteria for making anything.
First I had to crush the biscuits. Nick recommends doing this in a bag, but again, I'm lazy and couldnt be bothered to find a bag, plus I like mine crushed a little finer than the bag allows for. So I just break them by hand and then complain about how long and arduous this process is. Tonight I managed to rub my skin raw breaking biscuits, which is a) ridiculous, and b) kind of deeply deeply gross. I have decided it's ok however, because no one else will be eating them and I'm pretty sure Mr A doesn't mind eating a little bit of my skin. Lets face it, we're a married couple, he's done worse.
So now I have really painful hands, which are silky smooth but that's only nice for anyone I'm touching, not so nice for me, who has been rubbed raw. Next I have to melt some butter. Simple? Oh. Oh no. Not simple at all, apparently, because when I put the butter in the pan, it all goes horribly, inexplicably, wrong. First clouds of smoke, thick, grey, solid-looking smoke, issue out of the pan in quantities I've never seen issue from anything in my life. It is EVERYWHERE. I turn the heat off and move the pan, but it doesn't stop. Mr A comes to the rescue, opening the back door and telling me to calm down. Once the smoke stops, I resume cooking, except it's not over yet. As soon as I put the rest of the butter in the pan, it starts EXPLODING IN MY FACE. Yes, you read that right. EXPLODING all up in my FACE. Then it starts exploding EVERYWHERE. I'm screaming, Mr A has Baby A and so can't come and rescue me, I back off from the pan but now I'm trapped in the corner of the room while the pan is still on the heat, volcanic bursts of boiling butter spewing forth every few seconds, coating everything in a five foot radius, including my face and arms.
Eventually I grabbed a towel, covered myself and moved in on it. This minimized the damage, but didn't stop it all together. I was terrified every time I heard the pop and bang and felt hot fat hit me through the towel.

I've just surveyed the damage, and my entire kitchen, including the clean clothes and nappies hanging up to dry, is covered in big fat droplets of grease. I did a quick wash of the floor but it's going to need heavy duty work tomorrow to get it properly usable again.

Ugh. Bloody bank holiday Monday. Why didn't I just make toast?

Imploding laptops and a fortnight of duelling

2010-05-28T13:31:00.002+01:00

So the other day my laptop imploded. We knew it was coming, sort of. The little plastic bits on the back that kept the lid up had snapped off and so the wires leading from the screen to the base were exposed and rubbing. It was really only a matter of time before it died.
Of course, knowing it was coming didn't inspire me to do anything about being able to rescue all my vital information once it DID happen. Oh nooooo. One morning I turned my laptop on and got the grey fuzzy screen of death. So I hauled out the netbook that came free with my blackberry that I tried to sell but that no one wanted to buy. And I quickly learned WHY no one wanted to buy it. I hate it. It has teeny tiny keys on a keyboard clearly designed for pixies, not real human beings, the auto-updates keep messing with my internet settings, the sound quality is worse than awful, and the right click on the mouse stopped working after two days. Awesome. I have provided above some evidence of the tinyness of the netbook, to give you a better idea of my pain. I dont have large hands, you guys. My ring size is H/I (please to admire the sparkly on my ring finger, plz)
BUT. BUT. At least I still have something. The internet is my therapy, my friend, and my link to the outside world on the days when I can't interract with it properly. Without it, I'd pretty much be lost. So fr now I hold a grudging truce with the Netbook of Death and we shake hands, not as friends, but not as foes either.

So, Mr A's company offered him a pretty sweet deal to have some time off, and we'd been having ishoo's within our marriage and with my health and with A.B too, so he jumped at the chance. We're on Friday of the first week and it's been nice. Stressful at times, he plays too much playstation and doesn't take enough initiative with things that need to get done, but still, it's good. We are bickering a lot more but also spending more quality time together and being more loving. Ahhh. Sweet. He's alright really, sometimes. Now if only he'd put the playstation controller down and take the fucking bins out on time, we'd be in business.

Things I will totally do this summer. Probably.

2010-05-21T10:20:00.002+01:00

1. Go swimming. This was originally going to be 'Go swimming every week' and then 'Go swimming every month' and then I decided to be vaguely realistic.
2. Get the house spotlessly clean. For at least one day.
3. Sew at least once a week.
4. Do an hour of housework a day each weekday.

-STOP-

That list fucking sucks. Ahhhh. When I first started this entry it was supposed to be an AWESOME list of FUN and AWESOME. Now it's a to-do list of chores. I have a feeling my list should actually be more like 'Learn to ride a motorbike!' 'Take salsa classes!' 'Have coffee with a hobo!' 'Run away to Paris for a week!' but that doesn't seem like a good list to write. I think it would probably just depress me.

Money is set to be bad this month. It's always bad, but this month its going to be especially bad. Mr A has the next 11 days off work and we'll be able to speak to the council about benefits we should be recieving, but that will take at least 3 weeks to come through. In the meantime we'll be living on vapours. Funtimes. Once again I'm disgustingly thankful that we use cloth nappies and I breastfeed. We wouldn't be able to afford nappies or formula this month.

Sobriety, illness, PND, and pork

2010-05-11T01:59:00.004+01:00

Today has been bad. Like, really bad. Like, raging-PND-that-you're-not-supposed-to-admit-to, mentally-counting-all-the-pills-in-the-house, shaking-in-a-corner bad.

First of all, Mini-A is being a shit. It's not really her fault, she's teething and has a cold and that sucks for her, but she is also being a shit. I have bruises and welts and scabs and broken blood vessels from where she has been....what word fits? It's not assault or abuse because there's no intention. It's not playing, because that makes it sound much less malevolent than it is. She hurts me because she's angry, because she doesn't know her own strength, because she's frustrated. At under 10 months old, I really can't expect much from her in the way of self restraint. But days like today when I've been pummeled near non-stop and when she isn't hitting she's shouting, are tiring days. It doesn't matter that it's not her fault. It' not mine either and I just have to live with it.

We've talked about the PND before. It's there. It doesn't go away. But it's more managable some days. However today I got to the end of the day and I just wanted to not exist. I have been Sober With A Capital S for most of the last couple of years, falling off the wagon once or twice. The 2nd anniversary of the first major wagon fall is pressing down on us right now. Two years ago this month a dear friend took her own life and mine fell apart. I didn't do anything for 6 months. I lay in bed, I didn't talk to my husband. I drank. I smoked. I was a terrible person to be around. I have no memories of it. They just aren't there. So with this looming over me and Mr A's job getting more stressful every week and with A.B being 'difficult' and with my physical health ebbing, you may go some way towards understanding why I have a drink balanced on my knee right now. This drink and writing this entry is the only thing stopping me getting dressed and walking out the house. Ostensibly,to buy a packet of cigarettes, but in reality, I know I would find an excuse not to come back. Right now, it's That Bad.

Ask most mom's why they do what they do for their children, why they want the best for them, why they work so hard for them, and they'll be able to sum it up in one word: Love. Because they love them.
My huge shame and my greatest regret is that do my best, work my hardest, and try to do everything 'right' to make up for the fact that I don't love my daughter. It's the one thing she needs most and it's the only thing I can't give her. Instead I give her breastmilk and carefully chosen clothes and child-rearing methods that I've painstakingly researched to try to fill the gap that post-natal-depression has left between us. Maybe if I do a good enough job with everything else, it won't be too bad. Her father loves her, and I raise her kindly and carefully. Maybe that will be enough. Maybe it won't matter that I'm incapable of loving her. Maybe it will mean that when mental illness inevitably shuffles me off into the ante-room of existance it won't be too bad for her. It may even be a relief to finally be free of her un-mothering mother.
Meanwhile, I will lactate and make her pork chops (her favourite) and play the airplane game and pick out pretty clothes so that when she looks back on the pictures of herself as a baby, the pictures I'm never in, she'll feel the fact that even though I didn't love, I did care.

Moms, Jewish Convents, Zombies, and Foxes

2010-05-09T05:47:00.002+01:00

I feel the need to show you the e-mail I just sent my mom, to prove to people that the way I write my blog is not a million miles from who I really am. I sometimes worry people think Blog-Me is an act I put on. Because I put on a lot of acts. I'm that sort of person.
Also, it's fucking amusing. To me, at least. And hopefully to my mom too. And even if she has no sense of humour, fuck it. It's mothers day, she has to pretend to love everything I do.

I was going to phone but some arsehole (Mr A) has helpfully removed the batteries from the phone without telling me, rendering it useless. Good thing I didn't need to phone the fire brigade or anything, RIGHT? ARSE.
Anyway, I hope the boys gave you (let you buy yourself) nice presents, and that you have a good day of chilling in the pool and reading. Bliss!!

Love you

x
PS: Have included a picture of A.B at her boyfriends 1st Birthday party. They have a love/hate relationship. There is LOVE! for a minute, and then there was hate for about 6 hours. Have also included a picture of said boyfriend, because he's fricking gorgeous and she's a lucky chick, snagging herself a handsome older guy. We've already told her though, this age difference? Alright when you're 9 months old. Not so alright when she'll be 15 and the equivalent age ratio would make a boyfriend 20. Mr A is still trying to figure out the Jewish equivalent of Convent school. I keep telling him they don't have one, it's just Schul and a lot of guilt and Yiddish and eye-rolling, but he refuses to believe there isn't somewhere paranoid Jew-y fathers can send their daughters. He says the Jews invented paranoia and it's basically why Christianity exists because you have to be pretty paranoid to think a guy that says he walks on water and turns it into wine but doesn't turn massive bodies of water into wine is a serious threat. I have to admit he has a point, but I don't think that changes the fact that the Jews seem to know better than to lock a bunch of teenage girls up in a school with only religion and hormones for company. Jews may be paranoid but they're not delusional. Except Jesus. He was a little delusional. But that's alright, he had cool party tricks. Plus he was pretty much the original zombie and everyone loves zombies.
PPS: Also, a fox. Because it was sweet and you have wallabee's and stuff, but can you look out your kitchen window and see a fox? NO, Madam. You CAN'T. So I must bring the fox. And bring the fox I shall. Consider yourself outfoxed.
PPPS: It's 5:40am. Does it show?

It's now 5:52am. So I'm out. Like a light. Except they don't go out, do they? They go off. So I never understood that phrase. You don't turn a light 'in', a light doesn't go 'in', it goes 'on', so why does it go 'out'?
Important fuckin' questions, y'all.

I pack it in real good

2010-05-07T08:30:00.003+01:00

That title is pleasingly suggestive. It is making me giggle.

So it's 8:30am and so far today I have:
-Showered
-Dyed myself pink
-Scrubbed myself raw
-Tried out two hairstyles
-Fallen out of bed twice
-Had breakfast AND coffee
-Looked up all my directions for travelling later
-Had a stare-down with a rabbit
-Made scathing and witty political commentary via Facebook
-Made unscathing and unwitty skin-dying commentary via Twitter
-Waved off Mr A with a parting shot about not loving me because I'm pink now, just to keep him on his toes
-Given extremely serious thought to being productive in the kitchen
-Decided not to give into insanity (re: kitchen)

Now, given that by 8:30 on most mornings I am still dragging myself out of my comatose state while begging A.B to go-back-to-fucking-goddamn-sleep-please-baby-breath-mummy-loves-you-please-sleep-PLEASE, I think that this is actually pretty awesome going.

However, there are a few problems in this sudden burst of productivity. Most pressingly, I am pink. Bright pink. This would be fine if all I had to do all day was mooch around the house, scrubbing myself with Q-tips soaked in bleach. However, I actually have to leave the house in an hour and I'll be doing TWO seperate social functions today. A picnic with a friend and my very first kid's birthday party as a mother. It is pretty damn exciting. I feel like this is a rite of passage. Which I am going to complete while PINK. Secondly, I am also now pretty tired. Awesome. I'm going to fall asleep in that poor kids cake and ruin the whole damn party. All because I have a need for hair the color of raspberries.

10 Things You Should Hate About Me

2010-05-03T01:39:00.002+01:00

1. I over-use the words Really, Seriously, Actually, Ridiculously and Also. I don't think I can get through a paragraph without using one of them. It's a disease.

2. I have bad taste. In everything. I like tasteless things on both ends of the spectrum, too. I'm talking 'Mommy drinks because I cry' t-shirts for babies AND floral ruffled romper suits. My bad taste does not discriminate.

3. I swear like a sailor. I also swear in front of the baby. Fuck it. The day she accidentally swears in front of her grandparents will be the proudest day of my life.

4. I'm needy. Ridiculously so. Like right now? I'm considering waking my husband up so he can tell me I'm pretty.

5. I'm a snob. Pretty much about everything, but only if I don't like you. I WILL argue with you for years about the pronunciation of 'scone' and I will totally sneer at you if you have Twilight as your 'favourite book' even though I've read the entire series cover to cover four times. It's just how I roll.

6. I'm not a nice person. I'm just not. I'm not one of those people who is just *nice*. I'm pretty much only nice if I love you. Luckily, I love easily.

7. I'm unflinchingly self-obsessed. ME ME ME ME ME. Everything is about me.

8. I have no self-esteem, which makes me paranoid, obsessive, mean, spiteful, pathetic, whingey, two-faced, and introverted. You will almost never see the 'real me' unless you know me for years, or unless I am SO DRUNK, but now that I'm sober, that's unlikely to happen. (sobriety is fucking boring as hell.)

9. I'm so vain I can't even think of ten things you should hate. So you tell ME what the tenth thing is. What do you hate about me?

One of those days

2010-05-01T01:29:00.003+01:00

When I really really really wish I had woken up with an infectious disease that would force me to stay home.

Firstly, my wake-up. A package came in the morning, which required me leaping out of bed when the doorbell went and flying down three flights of stairs, detouring halfway to grab a dressing gown, standing on A.B's little plastic octopus of EVIL, screaming 'FUCK FUCK FUCK OWWWING FUCK!' while trying to wrestle the dressing gown on (one of the sleeves was pulled inside out. Of course.) AND grab my keys (my house is a fricking fire hazard, you have to lock yourself in at night, with KEYS. One day we WILL all die at the bottom of the stairs) AND hope that A.B didn't decide to crawl out of bed and wasn't at this very moment in time lying bleeding on the floor. I got there in the end though, dropped the keys, picked them up, found the right one, opened the door to my postman's right arm, the rest of him already being halfway to the next house. But it was ok, because in this package was clothes I had ordered. My first Maxi dress, a HOODSCARF with EARS and button-eyes (pretty sure Jae will divorce me, but that's ok. I'll have my hoodscarf for comfort), a very cute tea dress, a nautical headband (thick horizontal navy and white stripes with a matt gold helm! So cute!) and a pair of those shoes that are supposed to be small enough to fold up and put in your bag.
I get upstairs and A.B had NOT crawled off the bed. This was the high point of my day.

First of all, the shoes. I bought them in a 6. This was taking into account that I was a 5 and that my feet grew a little while I was pregnant. I figured a 6 was generous enough. I figured wrong. They weren't even big enough for me to get on properly. I screeched 'I AM NOT A FUCKING SEVEN!' at them. They looked back at me silently, as if to say 'Hey lady, if the shoe fits...oh no, wait! BURN!' It is a bad day when you get zinged by your shoes.

Then, my outfit. When we got up and I got dressed, it was SUNNY and WARM, so I basically built my entire idea of what I would wear around that. Then, 20 minutes before we had to leave, the sun is all 'Nah, I'm going back to bed, Laterz.' and I am Fucked. I managed to just about figure out another outfit, but I'm one of those people who cannot tolerate last minute, unexpected change. I don't mind EXPECTED spontaneity. I don't mind if I KNOW I'm not going to know what's happening. But if I plan something and then something comes along and messes it up completely, I get twitchy like a crack addict without a fix.

Then I leave the house and we're running late so despite knowing I should really really really really take the bus, I don't. I get in my car and I decide to drive to the coffee date with the aforementioned mom-friend who isn't actually a friend, just a mom I know. We have literally nothing in common besides the fact that we were both pregnant at about the same time. Almost immediately, I find myself either directly behind or directly in front of a police van. Awesome. Because I'm not a nervous enough wreck, what with the plan-switching and the shoe-mocking and all. No. I need to have a Police Presence. I am, in fact, so busy trying to drive carefully around the police that I fucking crash my car. Ok, I didn't. I dinged it on a width restricter and you can't even tell. But my heart stopped beating and I was roughly 300% positive I'd written my car off. Because I'm an optimist like that.

Next, I didn't have enough change for the meter for very long, so I put in everything I have with the intention of asking for change once I get inside, but they won't give me any and then my 'friend' turns up and I forget about the fucking parking meter in favour of making chit-chat (are you seeing where this is going?). An hour later I realise, and jump up and rush to my lovely beautiful wonderful brand new car to find a bright yellow envelope stuck to it.

Fucking. Awesome.

Oh. Oh, oh, OH, BUT IT GETS BETTER. Because not only was the ding and the outfit and the parking fine and all that enough, no. But as I'm sitting in my care trying to pay the fine I get a tweet through on twitter (no, really? A tweet on twitter? Say it ain't so) telling me that I'd been caught doing something that I technically should not have been doing, and I was in Big Fucking Trouble.

So basically, I had the day from hell and I wish I had woken up on Thursday covered in spots and chosen to spend my day quietly erasing all evidence of my wrongdoing and NOT driving, or parking, or getting dressed. Because that really would have been preferable to the rain of shitness that I was privy to instead.

And I am sending those asshole shoes back and asking for a pair in 6+1. Because I'm not a fucking seven.

Idiot. And Zombies.

2010-04-29T03:49:00.002+01:00

It's 3:40am, I have a mild fever (what's up with that? I'm not even sick.) and I have a coffee date with my mom-friend who I get on least well with and have least in common with and am most judged by in 8 hours and I need to sleep at some point, so naturally I decided this was the best time to change my blog layout.

Equally naturally, I did a fucking shitty job, and now it looks shitty. My blog looks like it has a terminal illness. Fucking awesome.

___

So the other day a friend(/psychopath) challenged me to tell her about something that I had invented that someone else had taken credit for, or she was going to kick me out of our secret society and shame me in front of all our friends, and I was all HELL NO BITCH and so I submitted this. For your viewing pleasure:

It was a dark night. I was sweating profusely, my skin taking on a green sheen. The leprosy was taking hold, and worst of all, it was joining forces with the tapeworm. I'd already lost a couple of toes down the back of the sofa and as I slid the needle into my arm, I felt the muscles start to disintegrate and the flesh come apart. The situation was getting seriously fucking dire.

I withdrew a vial of my blood, just enough to complete my experiment. Exhausted, I handed it to my assistants, Raul and Georgie R. I gave them detailed instructions on what to do and shuffled off to rest in the drawing room of my mansion.

Suddenly, I heard a commotion. Something crashed to the floor, there was a roar of anger and outrage. George came streaking out of the labratory, grabbed a broom and ran back. I lifted myself up on my elbow and fell back down when the flesh on my forearm ripped and slid off.

The sound of wood hitting flesh over and over rained down upon my ears for ten minutes, and then silence. There was nothing for 3 hours, and then a low groan that got louder and louder arose. Metal rattled against metal and every now and again I could hear George muttering to himself. 2 days later, he brought in an elixir that cured the strange leprotic illness and 3 days after that, he sent me to a spa for recovery. When I arrived home a week later the labratory had been cleaned out, the corpse was gone, as were George and Raul. There was no evidence of our experiments. This struck fear into my heart, but I decided it was better to let it lie, lest the authorities ask what exactly we were doing in the sewer under the graveyard that night.

I well regretted that though, when my humble assistant turned his hand to film making and a few years later George Romero was some kind of sodding cult hero and rolling in it! I INVENTED ZOMBIES, GOD DAMNIT. WHERE ARE MY FUCKING ROYALTY CHEQUES, HUH? THREE MONTHS OF MY SKIN FALLING OFF FOR FUCKING NOTHING. TWAT.

If you don't read anything else, read this.

2010-04-29T01:28:00.002+01:00

Jenny wrote a blog at the beginning of the month that I've only just read (why do I always forget to add her to my sodding bookmarks? Because I'm an idiot, that's why.) and I feel so, so strongly that if you haven't already read it, you must.

"Hi. It's me."

That's all.

It can always get worse.

2010-04-26T01:46:00.003+01:00

So, you know how I was whingeing the other day about being tired and wah wah wah, I wasn't going to get any sleep, and oh how terrible my life is? Well then my baby went grey around the mouth and suddenly being tired was seriously the tiniest teeniest least of my problems. We spent all day in A&E, me trying to hold myself together, A.B trying to eat the furniture, Mr A trying to calm me down and keep me calm.

She's fine. But it just goes to show that anytime you think things are bad, they can probably get worse.

I'm having a really grumpy week this week when it comes to food. I'm just absolutely desperate for things I really can't have. We bought some DF chocolate cake today hoping it would tide me over, and it tasted like eating packing peanuts. It was awful. So now I've wasted £4 or whatever it was on cake I'm not going to eat. I snuck some to A.B and she spat it out. Or, rather, she opened her mouth, pulled a face, and thrust her tongue out until it fell to the ground, where she gave it a disgusted look and crawled away. This is the child that will eat dirty socks.

I would chew my own hand off for some cheesecake. Or some scones with jam and cream and real butter. Or a donut! Mr A had donuts today and I don't even like donuts but I WANTED ONE.

My IBS is flaring up something chronic the last day or so too, so I am hungry for things I can't eat for another 3 months at least, and I'm in near constant agonizing pain. Which you'd think would put me off the idea of allergens, but all it does is make me think 'Well if I'm already in pain, what's the harm?' and puts naughty thoughts in my head. And then I have to go 'Remind yourself you said that tomorrow morning at 4am when A.B has chronic diarrhea and is vomiting on your face.' and that's JUST about enough to put me off. For the moment.

I'm so tired and moody, so I will sign off, because at a certain point, it just becomes ranting, and no one likes ranters.

Tired.

2010-04-19T09:29:00.002+01:00

So we're getting closer and closer to figuring out what's 'wrong' with me. We think we've cracked it but it's early days. I don't have a terribly sympathetic set of doctors....they already think I'm a raging hypochondriac so going to them with a self-diagnosis is always best avoided. But no one has diagnosed me and they can't diagnose me unless I say something is wrong...therein lies the problem.

This should feel good. It should feel like hunting big game...drawing closer and closer, so tantalizingly close I can hear it's heartbeat and smell its sweat. But it doesn't. It feels like circling the drain, getting further and further down, trying desperately to fight the tide. Because if it is what we think it is, it's not a case of me needing to pull my socks up and get in a good headspace and work out my issues and plow through. Which, much as I hate it and am bad at it, is pretty much the only way I've survived so far. I would have to stop plowing through and start accepting limits, and I'm just not sure how well I can do that.

This morning I am so tired my body aches all over. A.B decided that 4am was an awesome time to wake up for the day, and I hadn't slept, counting on her not waking up til 7:30 so I could rest until then and go to sleep earlier tonight. 3 and a half hours of awake-baby more than I was counting on had me shattered by the time 7:30 rolled around and Mr A left for work. It's 9:40am and I'm near sick with exhaustion. My vision won't keep up with where my head is turning, my muscles feel like they're unravelling, and my stomach is heaving. I need sleep but I can't have it and that's the worst. The aching resentment of being denied what I want so much.

Bah. It's only 9 hours til Mr A gets home. I'll just have to survive somehow. Pity the foo' who cold-calls me today....

Damnit, Janet.

2010-04-10T01:20:00.003+01:00

So last night I was lying in bed, drifting off to sleep, and I had THE MOST AWESOME idea for a blog-post ever.
So naturally, I have completely forgotten not only what it was but what it was even vaguely related to. Quelle Surprise!

Instead I'm going to go into some light-hearted heavy talk. Do you mind? I don't care.

I have mentioned in previous posts that I'm physically disabled, and that I have a lot of medical issues, and that I've had a fair few mental health problems. I want to phrase that in a less dramatic way but there just isn't one. It is what it is.
Today I went out to see a friend for coffee. The sun was shining, the weather was pleasant but not TOO warm, and because it's only April, we didn't have the horrible muggy stifling summer air that seems to make Londoners so irate all the time. All in all, it was a really great day to be out. I had a great time chatting with my friend (who is A.B's Godmother) and come time to go home, I decided instead of getting on the bus and jolting about for 40 minutes I was going to stroll partway home. It's not THAT long a walk. At least, it wasn't in my head. Before I started. So I set off, and I have Justin Timberlake and the Glee Soundtrack on my iPod and the weather is awesome and I was feeling great. I got about halfway home and decided to just carry on instead of waiting to get on a bus now. I thought I'd save myself the 90pence.
MISTAKE.
See, I have always been slightly double jointed. Not quite circus-freak bendy, and not as bad as some have it, but my joints don't always stay where they should. This got really bad when I was pregnant when my hips parted like the red fricking sea. I was in absolute agony for most of my pregnancy. Some days I couldn't even walk, because I couldn't make my legs work. They just...wouldn't do what I told them to. All my ligaments and muscles felt stretched and it felt like I was resting a bowling ball on the bones of my pelvis. My doctor essentially told me to suck it up. And I did, and I made it through with no treatment, medication, or even sympathy, because at the time I believed everyone when they told me I was being a great big pansy and I just needed to woman-up and get on with it. Except, since giving birth, my hips now like to play this game where they randomly screw with me. I'll be walking along and suddenly they go funny and I feel like one of those toys where you push down on the base and it releases the tension holding the parts together and they collapse. You know those things? Of course you do. Anyway, that's what happens. Usually I soldier on, lean extra hard on the pushchair and deal with the pain until I can sit down. If it's especially bad, I might actually fall down. This, is embarrassing. But as awful and horrible and annoying as having my hips randomly come apart is, it is good, in a way. Because it helps me feel that what I was going through while pregnant was valid. I WAS in pain. There was a medical problem. They ignored it. I didn't need to 'toughen up'. I needed assistance. I wasn't weak and young and stupid, I was genuinely in trouble.

Validation is a big thing for me. I seek it everywhere, with everything. One particular problem I have is using the label 'disabled'. The United Kingdom government officially recognises me as disabled. Quite a lot, in fact. If I look at it coldly and logically, I know I am. I am less able than the average person. So why do I have such trouble with using that term? Why do I not feel validated? Which is why Mr A ends up yelling at me because I forget my limits and push myself and then end up making myself sick, or messing up my mobility for weeks. Because when you look normal on the outside and everyone expects normality from you, it's hard to remind yourself that what is normal for you is not the same as what is normal for other people.

Why do I need validation when it comes to my pregnancy? It's over, isn't it? It's done with, it's gone, it's in the past. Why dwell on it? Why keep trying to find the hidden meaning in it all?
I think because we always planned to have 3 kids, but then A.B's conception came as a surprise, and I had a very bad pregnancy. I was high risk, I was very ill, and we spent 9 months worried out of our minds. I didn't have it nearly as bad as a lot of people, but I had it bad enough for a 20year old with no friends or family around to lean on for support. So I relied on medical professionals who I can now see let me down terribly. And it was so bad, we decided we could never ever put ourselves through it again. But if I can identify what made my first pregnancy so awful and work on thinking about what I would have done differently if I was given a second chance, then I can open myself up to the possibility of more children.

I got home, in the end, and flopped down onto the sofa, whereupon my legs immediately went numb and my hips set fire to themselves, but I looked at my awesome little girl, pulling on her dad's hair and so close to walking and talking that it aches, and I thought 'This is a good hurt. This s a hurt of opportunity.'

Don't cry over wrongly prescribed milk

2010-04-09T02:08:00.003+01:00

There is a running joke among some friends of mine and I that I just cannot catch a break when it comes to Baby A.B's allergy and the associated problems. First off, exclusively breastfeeding a baby is hard. Exclusively breastfeeding a baby when you are physically disabled is really hard. Exclusively breastfeeding a baby when you are physically disabled and then that baby turns out to be very seriously allergic to milk so you have to cut all traces of any dairy whatsoever is really REALLY hard. I lost weight, I got sick, I had no energy, I couldn't eat easily and without having to put a lot of thought into my food (a major major problem for an ex anorexic.), I couldn't eat out, or at other people's houses, I didn't trust anyone to cook for me...it was and is, very very difficult. Cutting out dairy also kicked my dormant intolerance of milk into overdrive, and I am now VERY intolerant of it. Hoorah!
Like I said, cannot catch a fucking break.

Dealing with the Dr's has been some of the worst. First I was told there was no such thing as an allergy to milk, and even if there was, there was no way she would get milk through MY milk. I knew this was wrong, but Mr Doctor Man with his big medical degree decided he was NOT WRONG. Even though he was. He refused to refer me to the Paediatrician I needed to speak to. So I went to a different doctor and got my referral. The paed immediately agreed she had a dairy allergy and said the milk exclusion diet I'd started was the best thing to do and gave me a pat on the back. So we toddled off, happy that our problems seemed solved. But they weren't! Because now her classical reflux was fixed by excluding dairy, she still had silent reflux! Joys! We only saw the paed again at the beginning of March, and she wrote an order for the GP to prescribe us an acidity regulator and some dairy-free formula in case we need it. So we toddle off and collect our medication, but the GP has declined to prescribe the formula, and since I wasn't told the paed had recommended it, I didn't know we were supposed to be receiving it. Then we find out that the medication we've been prescribed is HIDEOUS tasting, and only keeps for a fortnight. So we have to get the prescription filled every two weeks, which is hideously inconvenient when the associated paperwork takes four days. This week the GP also put the formula on the prescription, which Mr A picked up and dropped off, because I was stuck inside staring down the Vacuum Hose of Anxiety, but he gets home and I find out that the GP has only gone and prescribed the wrong formula! The stuff that he's prescribed is a supplement and it isn't even suitable for children her age! It's 12 months plus, and neither he NOR the pharmacist noticed that they'd prescribed and ordered this shit for a fucking 8 month old baby. So I had to go out today and dick around, going from pharmacy to GP's office getting things corrected.

Can someone tell me how I am supposed to trust these people with my and my baby's life when they can't even check age suitability labels when prescribed what is essentially medication?

Twats.

The thing about blogging

2010-04-07T13:33:00.003+01:00

The thing about blogging is this:
When you're feeling up, you're too busy being up and out of the house and enjoying life to sit down and commit words to your thoughts, and anyway, what do you have to say? Everything is great! There's only so much you can say about how much stuff rocks.
When you're down, you have plenty to say, but lack either the motivation to sit and figure out your head-fuckery, or the inclination to depress your readers with your woe-is-me bullshit.
So you start a blog, with every intention of updating regularly and using it properly, but then you go through a low patch, and then a high patch, and then another low patch, and before you know it you haven't updated in a month and every day that goes by is another day full of things you don't want to talk about.

The Good:
I have gained weight! I am now pushing 98lbs (7stone for UK readers, 44.5kg to antipodeans) which at almost 5'7 is not great, but it's a darn site better than the 92lbs I'd been hovering at for so long. Hopefully this is the push my body needed to start gaining weight properly.

The Bad:
Money isn't wonderful right now. We had a major one off expense last month that gobbled up Mr A's whole paycheck and sort of crippled us until next payday. We're maxed out, everywhere, and that sucks.

The Ugly:
Today I was ambushed by the worst anxiety attacks I've had in about 2 years. If I thought it was awkward having them before, having them in charge of a 8 month old beastlet impossible. I'm going to have to go beg a doctor to think about prescribing me something, but since I can't even get them to give me an appointment for a medication review for Booby-Breath, I don't know how much luck I'll have.

Ciao, beautiful people.

Dear Chest Infection

2010-03-15T23:56:00.002Z

Hey! Hi! Sup?
Do you think that maybe perhaps we could have a discussion vis a vis your apparent desire to make your previously temporary residence permanent? Only, and I mean no offence, but you're not really my favourite tenant. I mean, ok, you're not quite as bad as A.B was. There was no way SHE was getting her tenancy deposit back, it's just that well, we never really agreed on you moving in, did we? You kind of took it upon yourself and I didn't really put up a fight like maybe I should have, but I was tired and everyone said it would only be a temporary arrangement. So I thought 'Hey man, I can be cool, I can be hip, I can be down with it' and I thought I'd let it slide. But now I'm getting a little ticked off. It was one thing to break all the pipes in my sinus', one thing to clog up my lungs like Chewbacca taking a nap in the shower, one thing to do that weird trick where everytime I stood up the room tipped upside down (how did you manage that, by the way? I must know. Excellent dinner party trick.) I could be a good sport. I could grin and bear it for a week or two. I could keep refilling the mug with honey and lemon tea and pretending I didn't notice you keeping me up all night and coughing in my baby's face.
But really, it's just gone too far now.
Five and a half weeks!
Five and a half weeks is not 'crashing just a couple of nights til I get my own place sorted'. Five and a half weeks is not 'I know a guy with a spare room, I just need to save some money for a deposit'. Five and a half weeks is almost squatters right and you know what? I am just NOT cool with this anymore.
Look. I still want to be friends, but I feel you're taking advantage of my generosity here. I know I should have called it quits when you took 4% of my body weight. I probably should have spoken up when my voice went, but..well..my voice was gone. And yeah, you could say it was my fault for not saying anything when I spent the entire night coughing/retching in the bathroom so that I wouldn't wake Mr A and A.B up, but I was trying to be nice. I was trying to be a good fucking Samaritan, ok? OK??

I'm sorry it's come to this, but I'm afraid I'm asking you to leave. Now. Or I really am going to call the police.
Or, at least, get Mr A to do it, since I seem to have lost my voice again....

Happy Mothers Day to me!

2010-03-14T11:20:00.002Z

It's my first Mother's Day today and I am very pleased with it. It's a nice day outside but I am INSIDE, in my pajamas. I had honey and lemon tea brought to me in bed and I got to read a chapter of Wuthering Heights in peace while Mr A dealt with the first nappy of the day (and the two after that!). I didn't get any cards or presents or flowers, but last Sunday was our wedding Anniversary and I still have the massive bunch of flowers he bought me then, and he's giving me a huge doll house as a birthday present in June, and so last week I got a lovely box delivered with a bit of furniture and some cats and a conservatory. Yes, I really am one of those crazy doll house people. I know its lame. Really, I do. But I can't help it. I've loved doll houses since I was a little girl. I built them for a while myself. In one house we lived in I had a walk in wardrobe and I turned it into a doll house. I didn't have money to buy the lovely 'proper' doll house stuff so I made do, building furniture out of toy construction kits, making food and dolls out of plasticine, using anything and everything I could find that I could turn into something for it. I only really stopped playing with it altogether when I was 15 and ran out of space in the tiny house we'd moved into. We're currently negotiating exactly what house to get, but he's given me an unreasonably large amount of money to spend on it. Sickeningly large. I think he's just very pleased that he never has to think too hard about what to get me for my birthday/christmas ever again!

Anyway, I'm going to totter off and carry on enjoying my mothers day. It's the biggest scam mothers ever invented. It's basically an excuse to lie in bed and have other people do the chores you don't want to. Brilliant! Whoever invented it is a genius.

Today I am mostly...

2010-03-13T05:24:00.004Z

Today I am mostly watching Death Note and then hopefully going to sign for my car, and then hopefully going to go look at pushchairs. Mine needs to be replaced, and I've spent the last couple of weeks trawling through websites trying to find the Perfect Pushchair that does everything I want it to. We thought we might go for the Bugaboo Bee but it's far too small, and the basket was impossible to get to easily. For shame! Now we're probably going for the Mama's and Papa's Sola.

I am addicted to pushchair shopping. I think it's because I never really got to do it when I was pregnant. We were flat broke and couldn't afford to shop for what we wanted, we just had to get what was in our price range (or rather, what we felt comfortable asking my parents-in-law for, which wasn't much) and we ended up with something I really disliked almost immediately. So getting another crack at the whole thing is very exciting. I'm like a kid in a candy store! The only regret I have is not being able to do this earlier, when I would have gotten more use out of whatever it is we end up getting. Once she's about 12-18 months old well probably get this for nipping around in. I'm a sucker for the vintagey, uber-girliness of it. The part of me that has been very very poor for the majority of the last 3 years and who never had much money as a teen is screaming "Buy something cheap! You can get a perfectly good stroller for £50!" but where's the fun in that? The part of me that owns 50 pairs of shoes and three ball gowns and 6 cocktail dresses despite never having gone to a ball or a prom or a cocktail party is going "OHMYGOD SHINY". I think we both know which part will win.

If I had it all to do again, with unlimited funds, I'd probably go for the Bugaboo Bee Plus (the Bee's younger sister, which has solved the Bee's main problem of being impossibly small, but with a whacking great price hike) which is super cute and pretty much everything I need in a pushchair, except that it costs about half the husbbot's monthly wage. So perhaps not for us, then.

Thus concludes possibly the most boring blog post ever written. Thank you and good night.

I'm awesome, but...

2010-03-12T09:48:00.003Z

So, I'm awesome, but I'm not a fucking miracle worker, ok? Do you know what I CAN'T do? Fly. See through solid objects. Laser people with my eyes. Survive on 2-3 hours sleep a night, every fucking night. Except that A.B seems to think I can. And I mean, part of me is ok with that. Every mom wants her kid to think she's superwoman, right? Except that the power to fly and the impression that I have eyes in the back of my head are not superpowers that are likely to make me want to throw myself out a window.

It IS partly my fault, and I feel I should own that. My insomnia is exacerbating both our sleep issues (for me, the cause/result is obvious; for her, if I'm not in bed she doesn't sleep as well) so ok, hands in the air, I am kind of 'causing' this whole problem.

But do you know what ELSE I can't do? Control the way my brain works, and how much melatonin it chooses to produce and when. And yeah I could probably not taunt my insomnia by drinking caffeinated drinks, but the choice is drink a few cans of coke and survive the day, or don't, and risk falling asleep while holding the baby, or cooking, or in the bath. And when I stopped drinking coke I wasn't actually getting to sleep any earlier (ok, maybe an hour) but I WAS exhausted and drained and zombie-like throughout the day. At least now I'm exhausted but awake, right?

A.B is shouting at the TV in a really determined but very weird and creepy way. She sounds like a gremlin transforming. Ever since she got her tooth she seems to think she's really a particularly aggressive guard dog, barking and growling and shouting at everything. But mostly at me. Sigh.

In other news:
Dear Vanessa Hudgens,
Do you know what's CRAZY? Some of us have bigger stresses in our lives than spots. Isn't that like, insane? Insane. Unless Neutrogena has valium in it, I really don't think it's going to solve my stress.

Dear Elliot Minor
Owl City wrote an amazingly pretty, happy song, and you have to GET ON THAT and reproduce it almost note for note and release it? That sucks, and so do you. Go swivel. NO HUGS FROM THIS LIGHTNING BUG.

9-0-2-1-UH-OH

2010-03-10T23:01:00.003Z

Oh, snap, look at that. I'm back. Like a sack. Like a sack of CRACK. ("Say crack again." "Crack." 100 internet points to whoever gets it first)

So I have 90210 paused and loaded and waiting for me to click play and instead I am what? Here? Updating? Like an updating type of person? Crazy business.

What's new? We saw the paediatrician and I met the two craziest people in Sidcup, on the bus. This made me really really really want my car, NOW. The first was seriously mentally ill, obviously, so I feel bad talking shit about her, but seriously, she had a hair stuck in the scum in her teeth, and she clearly hadn't seen the inside of a bathtub in at least a month and she sat RIGHT NEXT TO ME (I like my space. I like it ALOT) and talked at me the entire journey, despite the fact that I was quite obviously reading a book and drinking a coke (common bus curtesy says if someone is reading, you leave them the shit alone) but luckily she didn't try to touch A.B, otherwise I could possibly have hit her. A woman in the pharmacy today touched A.B and I had to restrain myself from physically assaulting her. Do.Not.Touch.Other.Peoples.Babies. I know I sound crazy here, but seriously. You don't know me, you don't know my baby. Please do not come up to us and ignore me and while I am holding her TOUCH HER.
Anyway, second person was a 14 yr old boy who took it upon himself to beat the shit out of a 11 yr old boy in front of a bus full of witnesses. It happened so fast that no one could stop him, but we all offered the younger kid tissues and water and sympathy and I gave him my number and I'll be acting as a witness for the police. I nearly offered to walk home with him but he was with a group of friends and I think I would have just embarrassed him. It made me feel so old, mothering a boy in secondary school. I'm not old enough to be this mumsy!
Anyway, the paediatrician gave us an order to give to our GP to write a prescription for the meds she needs. That was last Tuesday, and through a series of cock-ups by my husband and then the GP, we only got the meds this morning (thursday, 9 days later). We can't really expect miracles just yet but we're hopeful that in time, they'll help.

Men baffle me. The other night I was ironing Mr Arienette's shirts and suddenly a black cloud descended on me. I could tell I was in a bad mood all of a sudden and that we'd end up having a fight, so I suggested he go to bed (I wasn't sending him off, he'd been saying for about an hour that he was tired and going to bed 'in a minute') so that we didn't get all ugly with each other. And what does he do? CONTINUES to sit on the sofa gormlessly playing with some Blu-Tack! I repeat a few more times that he should go to bed, or ask when he's going to bed, stating I really don't want to fight with him but I'm in a bad mood, and since I cannot remove myself from the situation, it's better if he removes HIMSELF. He continues to NOT leave the room.
I don't get it. I really don't. You don't want me to be bitchy and whiney and start a fight with you over 'nothing', yet when I inform you that a fight is likely brewing and give you an opportunity to avoid it, you choose to ignore me? WHAT? WHAT??
I could understand if he wasn't ready for bed, but he was, he was just too damn lazy to get up. From now on, I shan't bother. If I get into another bad mood I'm not even going to try to diffuse the situation. Why should I, when he's not only going to not help, but actually going to make things worse by rejecting my attempts to be nice?

A.B's carseat arrived, as did huge order of dairy-free yum. The only problem is I have no self control and therefore have eaten over 15oz's of dried papaya cubes today, and about 4 DF chocolate rice crispie bars. I'm terrible!

I also bought a dress for Mr A's Friends & Family work do, which I will go into later.

For now though, the glossy hairstyles and over the top story-lines of 90210 are calling my name.

Fevers and mirrors

2010-03-08T07:52:00.002Z

I haven't updated in like.....a long time. I've been really sick and my husband took off thursday and friday so I could stay in bed for four days straight, and it really did the trick. It does however mean I'm behind on EVERYTHING.
I'm about to rush off to the doctor's to pick up A.B's prescription and then I'm out all day (chilling at a SuperMall with another Allergy Mom) but I will be back later and I will be blogging the shit out of the last week or so.

PEACE.

Let's talk about Post Natal Depression

2010-03-01T02:00:00.004Z

(from Wikipedia)

Postpartum depression (PPD), also called postnatal depression, is a form of clinical depression which can affect women, and less frequently men, after childbirth. Postpartum depression occurs in women after they have carried a child, usually in the first few months. Symptoms include sadness, fatigue, insomnia, appetite changes, reduced libido, crying episodes, anxiety, and irritability. Current data suggests that 5 to 9 percent of women will develop postpartum depression, but less than one in five of these women will seek professional help.

-----

That was how far I got writing this entry before I snapped the laptop lid down, grabbed a book and my pone and went to run a bath. Then I went downstairs and grabbed a jar of peanut butter and a spoon. Then I started re-hanging all the clothes my husband hung out to dry early tonight. Then I tidied an already tidy area of the living room. Then I went upstairs again and got into the now very full, very hot bath. And that's where I stayed for an our and a half until the water was cold and A.B started crying for a feed. I fed her, then checked my e-mail. Then my Twitter. Then the forum I belong to. Then I browsed a couple more blogs. Then I checked my e-mail again. Finally, I opened this window back up. And now I want to do nothing more than to close it again.

I'm not exactly a novice when it comes to depression. I've had it for at least 8 years. In the last three years I've had two nervous breakdowns. I've been suicidal, I've self harmed, I've tried to starve myself into non-existence, I've used drugs and alcohol to alternatively attempt to numb the pain, and when that didn't work, to obliterate any trace of the memory of the pain. But none of this really prepared me for PND. PND was another animal altogether.

Thoughout pregnancy I was told to expect it, with 'my history'. So I was very pleased with myself when my baby came along and I took to motherhood very well. I instinctively seemed to know what I was doing and everything came so easily to me. To myself and everyone around me, I was doing really really well. But then when A.B. was about 4 months old, I woke up one morning and realised that I could see in colour again. I had no idea when I had stopped seeing in colour, just that now I could. I realised that for most of the last 4 months I had been on auto-pilot. I hadn't really gotten out of bed. There was always a very good excuse, of course...I was sick, I was tired, giving up dairy made me weak...there was always a very very good reason why it was ok for me to not get up for weeks at a time. And after all, Bug was fine! She was happy and thriving and advanced for her age. I couldn't possibly be doing anything wrong.. There couldn't be anything wrong.

But there was.

There really, really was.

The thing about PND is it makes you feel like a terrible person. No matter what the literature and your friends say, the voice in your head says 'How the fuck can you be unhappy when you have a beautiful baby? Do you know how many people would kill to be in your shoes?' and you feel guilty. You've spent your whole life conditioned to believe this is the Happiest Moment Of Your Life and then it comes and you feel nothing. You feel empty. I love my daughter, she's my everything and I would die for her, but that love doesn't change the fact that there is a serious hormone imbalance in my brain that saps away my ability to fully engage in life.

After I woke up that day I vowed never to spend a day in bed again. I thought I was out of it. I though I was All Better Now. But I wasn't. Apart from the odd very very very rare day (like today when I have flu and my husband has ordered me to rest) I get up every day and I go downstairs. But really, it's just a change of scenery. For a few months I did nothing more downstairs than I was doing upstairs, I was just doing it on the sofa instead of in bed. This year I've been trying to leave the house more often, something I haven't done alone since A.B was born. In the last couple of weeks I've been trying to get back on top of the housework that's been piling up for months, but every now and again the PND-wave will swamp me again and I'll retreat back to where it's safe, I'll go into survival mode and anything more than that can fuck off.

Looking back, I recognise that I started showing signs of PND pretty early on. I remember her being about 5 days old and I already looked like I'd never been pregnant at all. I looked around at my in-laws fussing over my baby and I felt no connection. Or rather, I felt like I had no right to feel a connection. I felt like a nanny. This feeling intensified over the weeks, not helped by comments that people made about the fact that I didn't look like I'd just given birth, and I wasn't behaving like most new-mums*. All this made me feel so disconnected. My own body showed almost no sign of having recently given birth, apart from the bleeding, which seemed to go on forever. I lay in bed sometimes expecting a knock on the door from A.B's real parents, asking for her back.

Right now, I just live my life day to day. I make plans when I feel up to it so that I have motivation to keep moving forward, and when there's a break in the clouds, I enjoy the sun and make the most of it. I don't know when this will lift, I only hope for the day that it does. And I only hope that that day comes before A.B is old enough to see in my eyes that mommy isn't always 'here'.

*They meant it as a compliment, really, but in the fog, it just made me feel more and more like an experienced childminder than a new mother.

No child should get a headstone as a birthday present

2010-02-26T10:00:00.002Z

But that's just what Scott got, this year.
A friend of mine very sadly lost her child a year ago today. She had to terminate her pregnancy for medical reasons. Every day since then she has lived with the pain of the child she lost. She is pregnant again now and pulling her life back together. She's one of the bravest women I know. Today she will spend the day with him at his grave, his shiny, newly-installed headstone a present that absolutely no child should have for their first birthday.
My spiritual beliefs don't really give me any guidance in this situation, and that hurts. Most religions have a plan for death, an outline, an inkling. It's comforting. Mine say 'You just have to trust the universe' and so I do. I trust the universe is looking after Scott. I trust he somehow understands that his mother loves him. I trust he is looking after his new baby brother or sister.
Happy Birthday, Scott.

Thursday Blogshare: How Not To Dress Like A Mom

2010-02-25T11:52:00.005Z

So every Thursday I'm going to start sharing some of the blogs I have bookmarked, because they're pretty awesome, and everyone should know about them.
Nomoremomjeans.blogspot.com is the MILFtastic Jae's fashion blog, primarily directed at ~~slaves~~ mothers, but with a lot of fashion advice for everyone. And while she definitely has an eye for trends and for what's hot, she also gives advice that most women can follow without looking like they ran through Topshop with a butterfly net, putting on whatever they came out with. She doesn't want us to all look like 17 year olds (in fact, she advises quite strongly that we should NOT dress too young) she just wants us all to look good.

Sensible advice written with humour. Easy to follow, Jae doesn't expect you to have tons of cash, and she is more likely to suggest a style or type of clothing, rather than a specific item from a specific store and coming across a bit like a paid advertiser.

Whether you just had a baby or you just need some fashion advice, Jae has a tip for you.

1:15am

2010-02-23T03:13:00.002Z

A loud wail starts up over the tinny static of the baby monitor. I tromp upstairs as fast as I can, but the wailing is continuous. Unlike usual, she doesn't even stop to wait and see if I'm coming, or when she hears my footsteps on the stairs. I climb over my sleeping husband and snuggle in next to my baby, releasing a boob. All the while, she shrieks. She latches on, and there is silence.

Me: You know, a quieter cry would have produced the same result, A.B.
A.B.: Pfffflllrn.

Who am I?

2010-02-21T05:22:00.002Z

An interloper, I expect. Much like most people, who I am changes. sometimes I am the person sitting at the back of the room, quietly watching, who you don't notice until I disagree with you. Loudly. sometimes I am in the middle of the circle, speaking first and fast. Loudly. Sometimes I am the adjudicator between the other two people taking these roles, asking everyone to please just calm down and lets-all-get-along. Loudly.

I always have an opinion, until I don't. I am always friendly, until I'm not. I can always see the other side, until I can't.

I'm pretty much like a lot of people you've already met.

Like most bloggers, I am also helplessly self-obsessed, convinced I have many important and interesting and valuable things to say. I probably don't, really, but no one can stop me from blogging so for now I'm going to have my say completely uninterrupted. Bliss!

What makes me yoo-neek? What is my life like? Well, I have a wonderful husband, who we will call Mr Arienette. Mr Arienette and I met fairly young and got married very young. Not for any particular reason, other than that we were in love and impatient. We're on the cusp of celebrating our second wedding anniversary and our third anniversary of being a couple. We have a 7 month old daughter, called A.B. (well, she's not, but that's what I'm calling her) A.B. or Bug, as she is more commonly known, is of course the most intelligent, beautiful, and wonderful baby on the entire planet. This is a given. She is also enormously chubby. I say this with the utmost love and pride. Why am I so proud of my baby's vast, rotundnessitude? Because even at 7 months old she's almost exclusively breastfed. Despite the fact that she has a severe milk allergy, and so to do so I have to cut ALL dairy out my diet. Despite the fact that consequently I have a BMI of under 15. Despite the fact that not a single person believed I would be able to. Despite the fact that I live in a culture that vilifies the natural and normal use of breasts to feed babies. Despite the fact that I was surrounded day and and day out with the subtle but overwhelming message that breastfeeding was not normal, was distasteful, was too hard, wasn't necessary, was 'icky', was a little bit perverted, was only for poor people, was only for older mother, was unbearably painful, was not as good as formula feeding. Despite all this conditioning, I decided to feed my baby and once I made that decision, I didn't let a damn thing stand in my way. So that, in fact, is why I am really fucking proud whenever I see my girl's Buddha belly graze the carpet. Because with all that bullshit in my way I still steamroll past it every day with a smile on my face and my finger in the air. At 6 months with no food other than breastmilk we were a rarity, being part of less than 1% of the population exclusively breastfeeding at that point. I personally know of at least 2 mothers who were waiting for the 6 month half-birthday to stop feeding and 'know' many more from online parenting forums, so at 7 months still feeding, we are now extremely rare. How special are we?!

I live in London, near my husbands family but very far away from my own, who are scattered over two other continents and three countries. This sometimes makes me sad, but we are planning to relocate next year to be closer to a better way of life for our daughter. Mr Arienette is also looking forward to a reasonable excuse to wear shorts all the time, and hopefully a job where no tie is required. And watermelon. He is a massive fan of watermelon.

I have been writing most of my life, poetry and prose. I briefly attempted to do it professionally (and by that I mean I attempted to gain a degree in Creative Writing, because we all know being a student is the same thing as being a Proper Grown Up) but first ill health and then pregnancy got in my way. I will always be grateful to my teachers though, for what they gave me in the months they taught me. If I ever write a book, it'll be dedicated to them and to my A-level English teacher, who first informed me that actually, I was a writer, and not an actress as I had assumed I was in my very blinkered 16 year old way. I don't write anymore in the sense that I don't write poetry or prose. Motherhood is a tiring business and I've written one poem since I embarked on it properly. For now I don't have the energy to give myself over to it. My muse is busy campaigning for a better world for my daughter to grow up in.

I love crafty things, and reading, and listening to music, and watching things. I love to be entertained. I love to create things and to have things created for me. I love the magic of theatre and art and music. I love the escapism of TV and movies. These things bring me a very childish and satisfying pleasure.

I have a lot of health problems that I won't list in this post, because they are dull, and they make me dull. They will come up and I will explain them, but for now lets pretend I'm interesting enough that they don't matter.