Duett-ASP

                       Life hurts.

 My lover wrote a story for me about something I am no longer capable of giving him. I sat in the bathroom weeping. I don't know what to do with this.

Scared

I am scared.

Finally?

I am becoming out of control. Last night, I realized just how on the edge I'm living. I need a meeting.

PPD ten months in...

I received a comment today on emptiness and the need to use addictions to fill it. In that moment, I realized just how empty I feel, and just how hard I'm trying to fill that hole. I haven't been able to find a 12-step group since we moved here. I can't make the hour drive to see my therapist anymore, not with a baby.  And I know a baby isn't meant to fill my emptiness--I am strongly aware of that, and I keep a level of detachment in that area. Not that I am not loving and caring of my child, but I realize that I must keep my self separate and not enmesh like my father did with me. That's the reason I continue working full time, and volunteering until I am so fatigued that I can't see straight. I try to do it ALL-keep myself intact, keep my child emotionally and physically safe and it's sapping the life out of me. I am not the same person I was just ten months ago. I feel sadder, more burdened, and unfortunately, more prone to my addictive tendencies. I find myself sometimes thinking too much about my lover, unable to detach as I need to. I keep myself up at night reading and rereading his emails and stories, forgetting at times the nature of this. I get sad, angry, then try to detach out of frustration. He doesn't fall for any of it, and I end up feeling helpless and depressed at times. Then I repair myself, become consumed with my everyday life, and it starts all over again. This is called obsession, I believe.

One of the emptinesses right now is that my daughter weaned herself very recently, about perhaps two weeks ago. It was gradual and I felt I was losing her. I had come to love breastfeeding, the closeness it brought to us, the earthy womanliness I discovered in myself, and the sense of worth and self-sufficiency I had gained through the act of being able to provide sustenance for this beautiful, dependent creature; how she grew plump and healthy on my milk. And now, it's all gone. I am left with a depression and a loss that I don't know how to cope with, aside from indulging myself with fantasies. Sexual fantasies and plans for a meeting, these things keep me going now. The fact that he will appreciate my body, as changed as it is; that he still wants my breasts in his mouth, that he makes me feel sexy and gorgeous and alive, the opposite of my feeling on most days. I'm clinging to this like a life raft, and I am so sad.

A thoughtful post

What a thoughtful post by this blogger from Qatar. It think this shows that pain, suffering, and yearning for peace and calm inside is a worldwide experience. 

http://juxtapositioninglife.blogspot.com/2010/02/second-chances.html

Another manipulative surprise...

I am fuming. My father is trying to weasel his way back AGAIN. After what he said about my daughter! After disowning my family! A package arrived from him for my daughter yesterday. After he said he wanted nothing to do with her!!!! This is so messed up, I can't believe it. What is this man thinking? That a ten-month old can open a package without her parents knowing about it??? That after what has happened, that her parents would even allow his manipulative gestures to affect her??? And I just love the way he goes about this--he can smugly say to himself that he was just being nice, just giving her a gift. After all, if a person criticizes a gift, who looks bad--the giver or the refuser??? This is the kind of manipulative shit he's pulled all my life, making me doubt my own feelings and being consumed by guilt. After all, I must be the bad one to refuse or be angry about a gift! It's what came beforehand that makes all the difference. It's his words, "it is ----'s loss that her grandfather won't be in her life." This is a pretty typical narcissistic ploy, is it not? Can anyone confirm this for me?

In other areas, this Christmas is turning out not to be what I had hoped. My daughter has been sick for a month with a double ear infection, and somehow I have ended up with one, too. Dh has been sick as well. I've given up on trying to go to work right now because I simply can't cope with all of this at once. Whatever happens with that will happen. I can't do more than I am capable, and I finally hit my limit.


My daughter has decided to self-wean, and in a futile attempt to preserve our bond in case she wants it back soon, I am working very hard. But my body knows and is deciding to take matters into its own hands, so to speak. I am grieving the loss of this, and it hurts to watch her draw closer to her father. Sometimes when I pick her up, she cries and reaches out for him. It just breaks my heart and I run upstairs and cry. I haven't been as available for her as I wish I could be, having been sick all this time--seven infections in ten months. I thought this might be the case, as I knew I was not physically strong enough to handle pregnancy, birth, recovery, and nine months of breastfeeding without some major problems. I wish I were stronger, but it is what it is, right? At least she's here, safe, and getting the most we can possibly give her. We love her more than anything in the world.

Faith in the journey

Faith in the journey. One of the hardest things for us humans to accept...when I started out on this journey, it was because I was weak. I thought if I attacked my weaknesses head on, I might be able to become strong--not the other way around. My most glaring weaknesses--vulnerability, blind trust, and naivete--got me into situations...however, looking back, the situations pushed me to grow, opened my eyes, and granted me sagacity. I have even allowed myself to retain a portion of my weaknesses, because, you know, I was born that way. We are all blindly trusting and physically vulnerable when we first enter the world. It is our natural state in the very beginning. I honor that and wish to keep that supreme closeness to God alive, all the while learning to protect and care for myself in this harsh world.

Best Christmas song, imho

Oh I love this....this is the heart of Christmas.

Just a thought. Lessons from the past. I wish "million" hadn't been misspelled though...

Today I learned just how much potential damage the written word can do...I accidentally emailed a rude comment to a work client. Did I say by accident? ACCIDENT. Oops. I immediately wrote a humble apology, saw the worst happening, and lucky for me, he took it quite well. Moral of story: don't push that send button 'til you're absolutely ready...

Born American, but feel out of time and place

Directed by my pastor of course, I found an entire album of these incredible, profound but not cliche, sayings. I hate cliches, even if some are true. But this sounds to me like a 12-step saying, and to me, recovery sayings are never cliche.

Can you think of instances in your life when you had to accept something you didn't want to happen?
Found out more information than was comfortable? Let go of someone you thought you would die without having in your life?

I know I can--can you?

On a different topic, I had the heavy thought yesterday that perhaps keeping something like this (having a lover) a secret from the world just doesn't feel good. We have access to each other's worlds through facebook (the bane of my existence at times); he seems to like keeping track of my day-to-day life sometimes, but we cannot speak of this to anyone. I am a hidden part of his life. I know who his friends are, his family, I hear a lot from him about these people. I have a much better sense of his life now and who he is than I had even a few months ago. But I am the secret shadow in the night that comes and goes. Not so on my end at all. But there are many times I try to forget that he is in my world at all, so I don't end up in the same emotional place I have been before. Since it's been so many years, he takes my presence for granted, I think. He believes we are "close and intimate" but I wonder...how close and intimate can you be with someone when you are constantly having to make sure his interest in you stays peaked? You can't truly be yourself. I try not to talk about mundanities, I don't talk at all about the struggles in my head, I try to be the woman he imagines me to be. And it's sort of the opposite of the real me: he sees a woman who doesn't ask much of him, who is independent, not clingy, in emotional control; one who touches his cheek gently when she crawls out of bed, showers, packs up and leaves with no demands, no longing to stay....in other words, the absence of everything I am inside! And he knows that, I really think. But he likes it this way. And I'm a good actress when I need to be, I suppose.


He's told me that I am his perfect lover, and he wants to find a younger version of me as the perfect mate.  I did not know how to take that- a compliment or an insult.  I don't know, I get very sad sometimes. It feels like this world is really quite cruel. Monogamy would be blissful if one person could meet every need. I don't know what you call this, but it makes me sad because one person fulfills 95 percent of what I need in a man, and the other, 5 percent. But that "small" 5 percent is what causes others in monogamous relationships to have affairs, and this is what my father did when he divorced my mother.

Even younger and single, though, I could never have married him; we're too different. Engineer mind vs. pure emotion. But sexually, this works perfectly and fills a deep part of me that I don't believe another human could.

I talk about this so much because it is a human relationship like any other, impacted by other experiences and relationships--past and present--but simply not an acceptable type in American society.

I never did fit in here in any case. I seem to fit in whenever I travel abroad for some reason. I'm more comfortable and people tend to treat me as familiar in some way. Not here. I stick out like a sore thumb here.  I know I was born out of time and place, not fit for twenty-first century America.

Please Don't Leave Me by Pink

One of my favorite songs, Pink "Please Don't Leave Me"--I found this comment under the youtube video:

"I wonder how many people get this video. It's usually the man who plays Pink's role but I think it was ingenious of her to play the role herself instead of playing the victim. It's about abuse and narcissism. It's about selfish self-centeredness. It's about control freak behavior. It's not about female power, it's about abusive relationships."

I discovered Pink while I was at the Caron recovery program--I think she's  quite flamboyant, but speaks for victims of domestic abuse and addiction. I probably mentioned it before, but this is the song my group therapists played "accidentally" for me at the end of the program. I personally don't believe it was any accident! The first time I listened to the lyrics closely, I recognized myself and it scared the crap out of me. That's exactly how I was with one person. "You're my perfect little punching bag. I need you. I'm sorry." But these things aren't one-sided; they're very complex and it's part of the karmic relationship; I've known that for a long time. I was both the perpetrator and the victim. That's the relieving thing about my current lover--there is no karmic revenge in the background, waiting to play itself out.

After those four years, out of the blue one day (he'd been seeing many women for the past four years, this was a very casual thing), he "proposed": "I want you as my lover, ----, you." He'd finally made up his mind, I guess. I didn't know there was anything to make up his mind about. Our meetings are so infrequent and he was never vocal about anything up until then. I've since found out what a deep, damn smart (absolutely gifted-physically, academically, artistically...I had no idea!) person he is. It's like the Irish ballad about a woman running off with a gypsy, only to find out after she married him that he was a wealthy, landed aristocrat! You accept someone for who they really are--and only then might you find out their secrets. I simply accepted his reservedness and never asked anything of him. I don't know how I managed that because I am a very needy person, as a certain few people can attest to. Probably because I am happily married, believe it or not. He likes that--we all like that. I don't see him often in order to keep my mind on my family--he takes me to a completely different realm when I'm with him and it takes me about a month to fully return, so our meetings are spaced out. I think something similar happens to him, too. He's talked about "recovering" and "processing" before, and he gets so exhausted! It's funny to me, how knocked out he gets, when I'm full of energy (and I'm ten years older than him!) We're all happy this way, though. I can't explain it, why this works for all of us in a monogamous culture.

Next time...Pink's song "Fucking Perfect"... for all of us who hate ourselves, contemplate suicide, and eventually recover.