Time for more painting.

I am moving my sewing/work room downstairs to what I hoped would be a nursery. We will start painting it this weekend. We aren't giving up. But we are being realistic. I need to do something aside from just housewifing to help with the constant stream of my brain telling me how much I fail. It's too hot up there to sew much in the summer. Mr. Freak Flag has been pushing for this and I have resisted because it felt like I was giving up. But it's not. I can easily repaint if we have a baby.

I may sign up for a few shows to sell, a maker market and a green market.  There are some handmade boutiques around town, too. I could consign. I don't know. It's something. I feel better when I am designing and sewing. I need to have something already going so if/when we call it quits in a year I won't have a complete come-apart.

This last cycle was fucking hell with the fertility drugs and I failed again. It wasn't timing, it's me. I'm going to wait a cycle or two to reap the benefits of the kickstarted cascade of hormones and then back with the meds. I get two more cycles this way and then we have to discuss more or considering IUI. It's super expensive and it would be our very last hope.

 IVF will never be an option unless we won the fucking lottery and used donor eggs and a surrogate.

Throwback Thursday

I took this picture while The Man parked the car after dropping me by the door of my therapist's office. As of yesterday, it has been two years since I started some pretty intense therapy. He had to drive me to that first appointment. He had to shake my therapist's hand because I didn't touch people. Ever. Not even my husband by that time. He had to sit in the room with me for the first few sessions. I loved those shoes because they had little umbrellas on them, like panic disorder was an umbrella keeping me safe from everything in the world that scared me.

He had to drive me for the first few months until I renewed my license.  He had to learn to watch me fuck up and not try to fix it. It was hard. We started seeing a therapist together to help us create new patterns, or as she put it, for me to stop inflicting my OCD on The Man. Which is accurate. I needed to stop treating him like a child and he had to stop taking care of me to such an extent that it was enabling me.

Some things came up that weren't things my behavioral therapist could tackle, they were traumatic and trauma has to be handled more carefully. For vomiting I had to watch that horrific food poisoning scene in Bridesmaids hundreds of times. Watch it until I felt no panic at all, over and over. By the end I could watch them all vomit and shit themselves and eat dinner at the same time.

You can't do that for sexual assault, so it meant a third therapist who does PTSD and trauma work. It meant poking at things and having flashbacks. It meant learning how to pull myself back into the moment when I would begin to dissociate. It meant being vulnerable. It meant feeling pain, a lot of pain. So much pain that I had built my whole life around not feeling it. I won't lie, it fucking sucked. And I am so angry sometimes, so very angry.

Last January, I was discharged from my behavioral therapist and left to staying responsible for my OCD and panic on my own. This month with my other therapist we have started to discuss wrapping up, maybe having her be on call instead of scheduling monthly sessions. Or scheduling them and I can call and say I think I am OK for the moment. Or say that I am not OK for the moment.

We will still be touching base with the marriage therapist on a semi-regular basis as we move forward with trying to build a family. We need the support and feedback, this is so much harder than anything else we have tried to do.

So that's where we are two years later. I don't have the shoes anymore, I don't walk around with an invisible umbrella anymore, either. It means getting messy when life happens.  Sometimes my feelings get hurt. Sometimes they get hurt a lot. And I can say so. And I may even cry. And it's OK.

this week in adulting

I took another round of fertility drugs from Saturday to Wednesday. I have pretty much been bursting into tears at the drop of a hat since Tuesday, full on sobbing. Uncontrollably. Usually til my nose bleeds. And my ovaries occasionally hurt like little burning motherfuckers.

 I filed the taxes that I completed last week.

 I went to therapy with my PTSD/trauma therapist on Tuesday and after about 18 months of hard work we will begin to wrap things up this spring and move forward on a more “on call” basis.

 But I had to call my behavioral therapist for the first time since January 2014, for a check-up. I didn’t want to have to do that. I want to think I am handling all of this just fine. I can take it. But at knit night on Wednesday my hands started bleeding in several places. Because I wash them too much. Because I’m not handling all of this just fine.

Driven to Distraction

So in my last therapy appointment we were discussing this big thing that I am working on. But that while I can influence it in some ways, I cannot completely control it. Which is crazymaking. Because I want to control the hell out of it. But she asked how often I think about it. Duh. Always. Which is not great, because it's putting me back in that old pattern. And it's setting me up for so much disappointment. So I need to learn how to distract myself. Which is different than avoiding, and avoiding is one of my banned behaviors. This is hard for me. It's my nature to well, obsess. So, I am trying to work on distracting. And I have decided to learn how to make amazing croissants as a project. Go big or go home. So far I know how to make shitty lumps that taste like croissants and have the texture of spongy bricks.