10 weeks, 3 days - what's it all about

It was a rough weekend with loads of nausea and a headache. I dealt with it by just folding into myself and spending both days up in our bedroom, on my bed, alone. It's difficult - I feel pulled to be with Al and Alex even though I'm miserable, yet even when I'm with them, I'm NOT with them because all can't focus on them at all. I begin to wonder if they will still know me and love me much longer when I am not at all the woman they have come to know as their wife and mother. I'm empty and passive and unsmiling, and it terrifies me. I do not feel worthy of this family and wonder as well why God is giving me another person to care for when I am doing a very poor job of caring for the people I already have.

But then I think that is ALSO likely just the hormones - many things I've read even say this can be a period of intense self-doubt and depression for a woman. It WASN'T for me last pregnancy, or at least if it was I was smart enough not to write it down.

I try hard to laugh this off. I know one day it'll all be a distant memory and I won't even be able to recall in my own mind the depth of my own misery, sadness, frustration with my body. How the smell of the downstairs of my house is so awful to me that it makes me BOIL WITH ANGER to go downstairs into it. How the simple little tiny things like leaving a few bits of Alex's uneaten lunch or a small container of leftovers from a restaurant in the fridge for later turn into huge, gag-inducing landmines hours later. It should be funny, shouldn't it? But it's not.

My mind has wandered the past few days off on trips I've taken over the years - I've remembered a trip to Europe with my friend Carole - how we were both young(ish) and single and just hopped a flight to Europe for 10 days where we skipped from London to Germany to France and saw beautiful cities and rolling countryside and drank beer and wine and champagne and coffee and ate panini and pasta and heaven knows what else and rode on trains and buses, our feet carrying us between, rolling our luggage, our backpacks slung on our shoulders, thinking of nothing besides ourselves and the experience just behind or just ahead of us... living in the moment, taking everything about it for granted, never knowing the lives ahead of us would find us glimpsing back at this freedom and wanting it recaptured, even just for an instant.

It is not that I'm so burdened by my family. I know I carried with me on that trip which literally spanned the final official days of my first marriage, slung over the other shoulder like another, more sinister backpack, the fear I'd squandered my only chance for a family - for a forever love, and I worried I'd be alone for the rest of my life. I am thankful that was not the case, and I would not trade this family for another youthful unfettered romp around the globe - not even for just the feeling of it. I am heavy with the weight of myself - of the pressures of not measuring up to my own standards, of the pain of not being perfect, or perfectly happy and accepting, of this comparably small trial of life. Morning sickness - pregnancy nausea - so common, so simple, so fleeting, yet in the midst of it completely consuming and threatening. Countless women suffer from it and none of them die.

I hate having these days of my life eaten away - I hate that the baby inside me - my child until the day I die and beyond - gets only the occasional passing thought, and rarely a truly grateful and loving one - among the depression and longing for this all to end. I do not research my baby's growth or development, I research How Much Longer? I do not leap for joy at the thought that my child is no longer an embryo but a fetus, I rejoice at an hour of feeling normal in my own skin.

I want to stop writing here - disconnect myself from pages of words of which I can never be proud, as they will forever remind me of my own failings - my inability to rise above and see beyond. I want to erase the record of this weakness. I do not like this person I've become.