In anticipation of the four horsemen of the apocalypse neices and nephews descending upon us next week, I agreed to help Z go buy presents for them. And as it turns out the pitfalls and assorted hells of braving IKEA on the weekend is nothing in comparison to winding up stranded in Toys'R'Us an hour before your boss's funarel.

As is the way of disasters, this one started well. Organisation was sound, age-appropriate presents were duly sourced without draining my will to live or the family finances, my child was behaving beautifully and I was feeling somewhat smug. This, I believe, is known as hubris and verily verily my nervous system was about to crumble like the House of Atreus.

Thus at 11am, with 40 minutes to spare before I needed to head off for the memorial, I didn't see the flare of danger when Matei went off to investigate tricycles and Z found himself mesmerised by tiny helmets and bycicle seats for children. However, 15 minutes later I was feeling somewhat less relaxed when we hadn't moved despite a flurry of customer service activity and so, still determined to seize organisation by the balls I told Z:
'I'll take the buggy and the child to Tesco's next door to buy some food for the memorial, and I'll meet you by the car'
and he said:
'Please watch the child and make sure that he doesn't get decapitated' and with a flustered sigh I went off to locate the offspring who seemed determined to weld himself to as many objects of transportation as possible. After five minutes of that fun, I saw that Z was gone. Vanished, with the buggy.

5 minutes of steering the child and the tricycle he had attached himself to through the shops using the power of suggestion and the odd shove didn't reveal sightings of Z, although it did bring us face to face with a man dressed in a Spiderman costume (creepier than I can say). By now it was 11:25 and my good humour was vanishing faster than human rights in China.

After Z's failure to answer his phone, I decided that the time for diplomacy had passed, so I swept Matei up from his vehicle with a bright: "Let's go find Daddy!" amid rigid-backed wailings and fist flailings and cries of: "Don't want Daddy! Want Tricycle! Triiiiiiceeeeecle"
By 11:30 I was racing around the store with adrenaline pumping, radiating grim determination and despair like Jack Bauer, while an unwiledly bag dug into my shoulder and a toddler repeatedly hit me on the head, chanting "Tricycle! Trycicle!" and my mind swivilled between homicide and divorce.

And then it was 11:35 and my husband was still nowhere, nowhere and I could feel my blood pressure rising exponentially and the prickling of furious tears in my eyes and Matei was still hitting me and still screaming like he was being flayed alive and everyone in the whole shop was looking at me and when he managed to wrench my handbag off my shoulder and hurl it away in an arc of frefalling Oyster cards and loose change, adoption was the mildest of the fates I had in mind.

Instead I just plonked him on the floor with a furious hiss of 'Stay there!' and set about trying to restore my posessions with the blood pounding in my ears, battling between the desire to primal scream or strangle at least one male member of my family when I heard a cry of :It fell... it felll... and turned around ... and saw my child weeping heartbrokenly holding up a pound coin like a peace offering...
and everything slowed down...
and I sat on the floor with him and wept for 30 seconds with him because it was 11:45
and then I pulled it together and gave him a hug and said that everything was going to be all right...

And then Z phoned and I shrieked Where the fuck are you? and he said in offended tones I've been waiting in front of the car for 20 minutes, where the fuck are you
and then the earth ruptured, and the walls exploded in a shower of crashing masonry and sparks
although in the real world everything went on as before
and as I bore down towards the car it was probably a good thing overall that by then the burning power of my angst and rage had rendered me speechless.

Dear Diary,

This day marks 15 and a half months of imprisonment in this frustrating world, and this miserable fleshly shell.

I hate the fact that I cannot watch airplanes every waking breathing moment of my day, and I hate having my nappy changed, but most of all I hate my mother. She's such a bitch!

Take yesterday, for example. When I wished to be carried and elected to cast myself down on the pavement weeping brokenly to communicate this need she said: 'Either walk or ride in the buggy'. Stupid cow! She just doesn't understand! And then after she strapped me into that infernal wheeled contraption Against My Will and in clear defiance of my Curved Back of Rigor Mortis Posture she had the temerity to offer me a consolation biscuit!

A biscuit! The insult is really too much. I cast it down on the pavement in my rage. Pah! That is what I think of you and your BISCUIT, whore!

As if that wasn't enough, then she wouldn't let me drink from her bottle of ice tea! I couldn't believe the betrayal I was witnessing. I felt in that moment that all I had ever wanted in this world was that bottle and our separation crushed my spirit. My heart is as biscuit crumbs beneath a cruel buggy wheel of rejection.

I weep, I weep, I weep. Come, sweet dummy! I hasten to my sleep.

I am tired beyond tired and just as deeply frustrated and aggrieved.

I've spent bajillionty hours at University getting harassed in various ways by various people and if it weren't for NaBlo I would be in bed already.

The Saturn return is kicking my ass hard. I feel constantly under constraint and pressure, like all the Universe (as personified by my tutors and the odd colleague) is saying to me lately is 'Yes But' and I try harder but am still found wanting. Now, some people thrive on this spartan emotional environment but I do not. Instead, I feel incredibly tired and fed up and a bit demoralised. Nowadays it's all about being made to feel guilty and inadequate and responding with sullen resentment and bright rage and dull grief.

But let us not speak of that! Instead,let us think of funny things.

You Make Me Touch Your Hand For Stupid Reasons

Are you reading auzerais? Because you should.

I am wearing BOOTS in JULY. I believe this constitutes a new personal low.

Yesterday was a horrible day. Matei screamed for about 5 hours solid (I think it's teeth again) and refused to sleep unless I was holding him and WOULD NOT BE PUT DOWN. I currently have a sprained muscle in my shoulder from catering to that demand, so you can imagine how much I'm looking forward to carrying him around today.

It was awful. I haven't had a day that bad in months. I held my shit together, more or less, until 6 o'clock when Z was due home and when I learned that Z was stuck in a traffic jam my shit fell apart in a rather spectacular way. With jazz hands! And fireworks! (The highlight may have been putting my child down and leaving him to scream while I walked away to engage in such soothing activites as deep breathing and banging my head against the wall.) I ended up walking vacant eyed in aimless circles holding my baby and sobbing in big gushy sobs which strangely enough made Matei quiet and contemplative. I think I may try it again. It was quite soothing.

And then a bad night followed a bad day and the sight of a grinning cooing baby at 3am made my head full of #####&^&*(###'s and thank god there are two parents in this household is all I will say because I was ready to give him up for adoption.

Nothing hits to the core of me quite like the sleep thing, because you know, I thought we'd got over that. He has pretty much been sleeping solidly through the night, and while the fact that babies his age are meant to sleep from 7pm until 7am is a concept he scoffs at, sleep from 9pm until 5:30is am is actually pretty ok by me. And I get slightly hysterical when he doesn't sleep because I am transported into the Bad Old Days commonly known as months 0-3 whose broken nights still make me break out in PTSD symptoms.

And then there's today, when the child is engaged in his number 2 nap with minimal assistance from me. Babies! They are weird! And unpredictable! I think it's a design flaw.

( Things Which Irritate Me About Breastfeeding and Its Promotional Materials )

There are bad days. Bad days involve little sleep and a lot of screamings (of which a percentage is generated by me, a few hours in). On bad days I get so frustrated I end up punching sofa cushions and chanting things like: "Why do you hate me, why?" and telling my pre-verbal baby how cross I feel.

And there are the good days. Days that involve long naps, and gurgling, and cuddling on the sofa with one sleepy warm baby and three zonked out purry cats, watching films I'd recorded earlier. Sometimes if the baby feels sociable afterwards we look together at all the bright colours in HEAT magazine. There are even days when the baby is awake and content to suck on his hand in his Moses basket long enough for me to post to LJ.

Although each bad day feels like a rite of passage in which a stick is forcefully applied to one's head, the good days are so golden that I want to stretch them out forever.

Nina and Z looking at the baby chortling to himself in his sleep:

"What do you think he could be dreaming of that's so amusing?"
"New ways to torment me."
"I think it's bosoms. GIANT BOSOMS."
"Being perched like a maraschino cherry on top of the biggest bosom in the world."
"Being centerstage surrounded by endless dancing spinning bosoms like a baby's version of the 50s musical."
"It's either that, or he's thinking - when I grow up I shall suck on the tail of a cat! Having sampled most other surfaces, that way I'll complete my collection! "


This morning:

"How was the baby?"
"You know, the usual. Screamy."
"What was he crying about?"
"Probably his outrage and sadness at being alive in this world."


Last night:
It is 4am in the N&Z house. Nina has been enjoying some restful REM sleep for the last 45 minutes. Then the baby wakes up and starts crying. Nina asks the baby's father if he would mind changing his nappy so that she can rest a bit more. The baby's father points out plaintively how he's also very tired and he needs some sleep so he can handle being at work the next day. Nina gets up and changes the baby and brings him back to bed to feed at which point she notices that the baby's father is still awake and offering up helpful commentary. No husbands were harmed in the following exchange:

"Oh this is wonderful. You basically made me GIVE UP MY RESTORATIVE REM SLEEP so that you could rest and here it is that you are I see, not sleeping."
"I guess so."
"You realise, this is a HANGING OFFENCE in some countries."
"Which countries?"
"The righteous ones."

The baby is lovely and I am in love with him (except between the hours of 3-7am when my feelings can be significantly more colourful and interwoven with things like anger/irritation/resentment) because you know, the fact that he doesn't sleep on command is clearly a sign of a malign intelligence working to persecute me.

Breastfeeding Pros and Cons

The Good Stuff

* The baby is developing beautifully and is becoming ever more chubby.

* It's nice knowing I am giving him tailor-made nutriotion and my immunity.

* The weight loss is nothing short of remarkable. Each day when I wake up I can practically see where a section of my thigh has been transplanted onto his.

* Jiggled right breastfeeding still allows me to do other things - like read a novel (my top parenting tip: baby's body makes a useful bookrest)

*Z who famously used to think that eating three meals a day is a sign of spiritual weakness and female caprice can now be heard saying things like: "Here! Have another slice of cheese pie!" or "Would you like more clotted cream with your scones my dear?"

The Bad Stuff

*My Breasts Before were a lovely, manageable C-Cup. I liked it that way. Now since their indenturement to a greedy infant they have shot up to an F cup. F! I have industrial-strength breasts.

* Which are much heavier and more painful that I am used to and require industrial strength scaffolding and bras to be tamed and restrained. Pretty lacy underthings how I miss you!

*Sleeping on my front is impossible. Sleeping on my side is fairly tricky too.

* Engorgement bloody hurts. Sometimes it hurts so much that I like to reverse roles and wake up the baby to feed.

*You know what else hurts? Blocked milk ducts and sore, cracked nipples.

* Being called upon way too many times a day (often in the middle of particularly delicious REM sleep) to offer up sustenance. Listening to the ear-piercing screaming when sustenance not immediately available. Worse, being the only one who can provide this service. In fact counting down (25!) like a condemened woman the number of nights until people who are not me can start taking on some of the feeding responsibilities and plugging up the child with bottles.

* Being the slave of someone the size of a breadbin. This is not edifying. Particularly in the early hours of the night. TO illustrate, here is a sample of things I could be heard saying in the past week somewhere in the region of 5am:

"You can't be hungry AGAIN."
"Oww, easy you little piranha."
"Why do you hate me, why?"
"No! No more food for you! Enough with the tallness and the rapid development! Someone will love you even if you stay small."
"How much immunity do you really need?"
"Why, why, why?"
"I am almost certain you will be my only child."

Thanks to a heady emotional cocktail of grief and sleep deprivation most days melancholy is not far behind. Occasionally even when the baby is sleeping I feel too emotionally and physically worn down to sleep myself (it feels pointless if the baby is only going to wake me up half an hour later; of course this is nearly always the time when baby chooses to sleep for a several-hour stretch).

The wanting of the feeds an hour apart was completely killing me, and so after three nights of that malarkey Z and I took the advice of paediatricians (favourite quote: "Breasts are not toys for children!") and have stopped giving in to the baby's demands in order to push feeding times at least two hours apart. Predictably there was a lot of screaming from the milk junky, but it worked, and that nervous breakdown I was having has been postponed.

It is gruelling stuff and I spend most of my days feeling like a gang of hostile individuals has given me a kicking. But I hold on to the thought that it will get better. And that we are unimaginably lucky to have this healthy, thriving child whose inheritance of my appetite is probably some sort of karmic payback. Or a black magic spell cast by my mother, incidentally whose chortling over the phone I did not feel contained the right notes of sympathy.

On that note Matei's father is an easygoing, cheerful, amiable sort of person. The person most likely to say: "Whatever you want to do is fine!" and "What do you think?" and "Sure, let's do that!" On the other hand Matei's mother is an intense and wilfull woman often motivated by irrational pride and defiance. Now, let us make an educated guess which of them it looks like their child takes after more, in the soul?

The parenting gig is still crazy but Z and I are settling nicely into it which is not to say that we actually know what we're doing but we're figuring it out as we go and everyone involved is pretty laid back.

Aside from its attachment to pelvic pain my body has really come through for me and deserves thousands of gold stars. The carnage of my ladyparts seems to be healing quite nicely, I am regaining my strength a little bit more everyday (I can go for short walks around the house now and can hold the baby while standing) and my bosoms are producing enough milk to sustain my little boy (who has gained a whopping 70g on his birth weight).

Although I look back fondly on the 27th of December 2007 as The Golden Time Of Yore, The Last Time I Slept For More Than Four Hours At A Stretch, Z and I are adjusting to the whole non-sleeping thing much better than I thought. (It's amazing how rested I feel after three hours of uninterrupted sleep!)

Also it turns out that pregnancy can boost your self-esteem! I have never felt slimmer in my life, because people there's nothing like months of carting around a watermelon in your abdomen to make your post-pregnancy stomach look like peanuts. I have a waist again! I no longer look like Pillsbury Doughboy with a great haircut!

Perhaps to compensate me for the anemia and the blood loss and the iron-tablets induced constipation my body has snapped back into shape amazingly fast. Aside from the fact that I'm carting around the baby equivalanet of a boob job thanks to my milk-enhanced bosoms, at six days postpartum I am back to my pre-pregnancy size and back in my pre-pregnancy trousers oh how I have missed them. Although it will doubtless take months for my stomach muscles to lose their current dough-like consistency and regain their former lack of tone I feel GOOOOOOD. In fact the Breastfeeding After Pregnancy will go down in memory as the Golden Time I Have Yearned For All My Life When I Have Never Eaten More Or Been Thinner.

If only I had more energy and didn't come with a bottomless opossum attached to my breast I would be singing and dancing down the street. And going to clubs.

Evidence that hormones are swinging wildly and freely in my household

1.
When on Day 4 of your baby's life, having spent a sleepless night crying as you breastfeed because the baby will NOT STOP FEEDING you find yourself profiting from your baby's nap to fold towels, then that there truly is a sign that you are losing your mind and that rationality has left to seek better times in Rio long ago. Because woman, your theory about how at the end of their life few think damn, I wish I had done more cleaning has never been more true.

2.
Things that have made me cry in the last 48 hours:

The fact that my baby was so beautiful.

The fact that he refused to sleep.

The fact that Z was such a good daddy.

The fact that my nipples were cracked and bleeding and the little piranha was refusing to let go.

The fact that I have never been this happy.

The fact that I have never been this tired.

The fact that I hated breastfeeding.

Because baby things are so cute.

Because babies look so cute dressed up in clean little baby things.

Because he was driving me to the brink of nervous breakdown and it wasn't his fault.

Because breastfeeding sucked and made me want to claw my own eyes out with frustration.

Being smiled at by my son.

The perfection of my baby's eyelashes.

The tinyness of his feet.

How desperate and angry I felt during one of the first nights when I couldn't get him to settle, that all he wanted was to feed feed feed and I had no milk left to give him and was practically blind from stress and exhaustion.

Bleeding again and needing to go back to the hospital to be assessed and feeling my heart breaking because all I wanted was to be at home with my husband and son.

The sight of my son all tucked up and asleep, clutching his blue elephant.

The fact that the towels weren't folded correctly.

Feeling so lucky and blessed and so loved.


Ways in which Z and I have screwed with our child so far:

Spent the second night of his life obsessively trying to wind him and tapping him on his little back because I was convinced that he had gas when in fact it turned out he was just hungry.

Suckered him into gnawing on a plastic dummy instead of my tender flesh.

Ways in which my attitudes to parenting have changed so far:

The first day both Z and I were nervous and over-cautious in holding the baby. Now we have reached a level of comfort and skill with it where we can more or less twirl him like a basketball as we pass him around.

Before he was born I was all like " no, let's not get a dummy because it can make his teeth grow crooked and his speech delayed yadda yadda" only to revise my opinion three nights in to "We'll get him braces if need be but fuck it let's get an arsenal of dummies".

Names I am calling my child:

Smurf. Little Frog. Bun Stinkyevic- Roncevic.
Also until he starts keeping more sociable hours he shall be known as The Breast Bandit.

Things that have made me laugh the hardest:

Three hours into labour moaning as a contraction hit and Z asking: "What is it?"

The explosive noise of the baby's farts.

The sight of the baby repeatedly smacking himself in the face with one of his wildly flailing uncontrollable hands.

Profitting from one of the baby's naps in order to set up the tiniest nail salon in the world and blunt the 20 fearsome claws the baby had been born with. Me clipping the nails of his left hand while Z filed the ones of the other hand with an emery board.

What we call the "Herr Flick" face where the baby will raise one eyebrow and/or the eyelid underneath it.

The sight of the cat curled up in a shoebox.

Dear Nina,

Keep up your efforts to make the baby come, because I like laughing.

Love,

The Universe

P.S. Also keep on drinking that foul tea. And hoping. Your hope tastes sweet. Like your tears.

Ah, life, it has such a sense of humour. We all knew that right? And how nice it is to get reminders. So let me regale you with retelling the series of cosmic pranks which Z and I have been living with since Friday.

You know what's even more amusing than being sent a bill for backdated Extra Service Charges (merry Christmas to everyone!)? Having that bill sent to the wrong address.

And, what you may ask, is even funnier than that? Having court proceedings brought up against you because you neglected to pay this bill which you didn't know existed, and then being held responsible for all (steeply rising, bedecked with interest) costs for the legal proceedings.

And the punchline, the height of hilarity? Why, only learning about this situation upon receipt of a letter from your mortgage lender. A letter and copies of correpondence that uses an emotive turn of phrase such as 'blah blah violation of lease due to nonpayment of service charges' 'blah blah bad credit' 'blah blah remortgaging application on hold' 'blah blah sort it out suckers or look into the stony raging jaws of the repossession of your house'.

It's all been a barrel of capitalist laughs I tell you.

Actually, I am deeply proud of the way Z and I have dealt with it all. Nobody shouted, nobody blamed or accused or shook hands at heaven while shouting 'WHYYYYY MEEEEEEEEE'? Instead, we just pulled together in a steely team-like fashion to devise a plan and sort out the situation as quickly as possible and spent the in-between hours clinging to one another like chiller's kittens re-affirming the depths of our affection for each other and the the most important thing which was not losing sight of that or of our excitement at the nearness of baby.

Because if you do get stressed, if you do lose sight of that? Then the bastards have truly won.

So while the last few days have been embellished by all kinds of new and interesting stresses of the Plutonic 'let me strip you down to your naked shivering cores' sort, they were also some of the most deeply intimate of this year. Because the only antidote to harshness of the world? Exchanging ever-more tender language with your husband. And knowing that as long as you yourselves are okay, that is the key, the deepest heart and bone of it; that everything else will resolve itself.

Also, I have hope, for I have seen that men and God are not immune to the tears of women. How do I know this? Because yesterday the Cats Protection people phoned me up to ask if I wanted the little cat back.

October 2007 may well become known as the month when the Universe decided to beat up on Z and Nina until they wept for mercy just so it could go "No mercy for you suckers!" and then kick them in the teeth some more. My stress levels can be perhaps accurately mirrored in the fact that I either seem to have no appetite at all, or I eat vast quantities of cheese. (Mmmmmm, cheese).

October has been the month where I have found myself facing £3000 of bills I did not epect, not receiving the £2000 I was expecting and contemplating idly what life will be like next year when Small Squalling Thing is here and I'm bringing home the pittance that the British Government likes to call Statutory Maternity Pay. (And cheese, as we well know, does not pay for itself).

In a similar vein (because what are financial woes, without physical ones to accompany them?) my already-bad pelvic pain has been exponentially increased by the fact that on Monday afternoon a child barrelled into me in the library, smacking me in the most painful part of my pelvis, causing me to see every star in the sky and spend the next 45 minutes lying on the carpeted floor too shocked to contemplate anything but shallow breathing and getting someone to call a taxi to drive me the 500 metres home because I couldn't manage to walk that much.

Since then I've kept my walking/sitting minimal and my paracetamol intake high. I can probably go about half an hour of sitting and/or ten minutes of walking -I employ the word in its loosest sense, since I'm shuffling about with tiny steps, like a geisha with Parkinson's- before I feel like I'm being stabbed with a handful of fiery needles. The house looks like a bomb site and I haven't got the energy to clean it, even though just looking at it makes me want to cry. (I am a tidy person trapped in a disorganised person's body).

But! The month of October has still not dampened by resolution to Not Focus On the Negatives so let us talk instead about the gloriousness of the weekend past when Z and I visited chiller and met her cats, and ate her scones (which also happen to be the finest scones I have ever had) and admired her interior decorating talents. And then there's also the fact that I found The Best Smart Maternity Trousers In The World and I will post pictures of their exquisite beauty as soon as I'm vertical again.

Today I'm off work to rest and recuperate for a day in the office tomorrow, and I'm lying in bed piled high with kittens whose goal for Life Happiness seems to consist in molding themselves to my body and grooming my sweater (one of these days one of them will start spitting up blue hairballs).

One of my ex-colleagues is pregnant and expecting her baby a couple of weeks before I'm serving an eviction notice to mine, and by all accounts she is not only glowing with happiness but being amazingly industrious and sewing baby quilts and whatnot, which makes me smile in a wry sort of way since the most industrious thing I've done for my child is to feed it cheese and threaten its father with divorce unless he stops snoring.

Ultimately though, I am OK. One thing that this month has proved to me is just how amazingly strong and supportive Z is and how Things Will Be Fine. I have unshakable faith that as long as the baby is healthy and the two of us are as rock solid to each other as we normally are, then the world can fall apart and we will still be fine. We will find some way through the mess, work out a strategy, take out some loans if need be but ultimately work things out. That as long as we're together and good to each other, that's all that matters. That, and not letting the cheese run out.

So ultimately, I'm not anxious. Only holding my breath through a long dive underwater.

Before I begin any substantial recital of what I have been doing in my life, may I just say:

To The Person Who Stole My Mobile Phone, I Hope You Get Brain Cancer.

And to the people whose phone numbers I had but now no longer do thanks to that little fingersmith please do leave them in the comments. For this reason, all comments to the post are screened

I have had much rage about this but really it's not that horrific since the phone was insured and my wallet with what happened to be a substantial amount of money did not get nicked, so in the grand scheme of things everything is fine. But I am Very Displeased and I give thieves the Paddington Bear Stare.

And now not to dwell on these negativities, let me relate some nice happenings from the last month in which I have been forbidding myself internet access in order to work on the papers for my course.

1) Z and I spent the whole of the holidays with each other and did not kill each other or anything, except through overeating which seemed like a wonderful sign for the future of our relationship.

2)I went ice skating with ultraruby in Somerset House, and it was ace! And I did not fall down! In fact I enjoyed the whole thing so much that Z and I are going this weekend to skate at Alexandra Palace. Ice dancing rules baby.
And I can see how I have developed from my humble un-coordinated beginnings where I thought "Hmmmm this doesn't look too difficult, look at all these people just gliding" and ended up with 62 bruises* to prove just how easy it was. Although this was all way back when I was a child and children are bouncy.

3) I found lots of really beautiful things on Sale, crowned by the fact that I bagged two pairs of Perfect Courduroy Trousers in Perfect Shades of Brown for £15 at Dorothy Perkins and I'm so gleeful and pleased with myself that I might start a Livejournal just for my outfits.

4) miss_newham made me a hat! And it too is ace!

5) I have reduced my gainful employment from 4 days to 2 days a week and now I'm poor in finances but in rich in spirit so that's all right then. At the start I had been worried how I'd do with having less structure in my life but that was before I realised just how much time can be spent snuggling in bed with fluffy kittens. Employed people have no idea what they are missing out on.

6) I have come to understand that the cat and I are in fact One Being that enjoys the same thing in life: food, the bed, snuggling in the bed, and insinuating ourselves into people's laps/heabutting them as a demand for caresses & affection.

7) I made Z go see Brokeback Mountain despite his many protests of "But why can't we watch a nice gorilla instead of nasty cowboys", and we both thought that it was excellent and beautifully acted and Z's head did not implode during any of the love scenes.

And now here's some recent pictures:

( Z's Birthday, whrein I cook a meal and we all have fun with the Pink Flamingo )

( First (and only) Snow! )


our wholesome firelit christmas
Originally uploaded by rainsinger.

*My cousin and I counted, and I won by three bruises. I am the martyrest of them all!

Today has started out as a pretty dreadful day.

In the morning a very dear friend rang in distress because her mother is very very ill which propelled me from semi-asleep to full alertness like a shot of adrenaline.

Then I went back to my GP, who was even less helpful and I'm starting to feel more and more despair.
Apparently X-rays take *3 to 4 weeks* to come back, and when I explained that I was told 7-10 days 17 days ago he said he'd put the secretary on it and I should ring tomorrow afternoon.

He explained that *there's not much they can do* - well gee great, but it doesn't solve the fact that I can't do anything either.

I was doing my best to explain that a) I've been in pain, to various degrees and intensities for a month now b) i have no idea what to do c) my job involves a lot of walking and lifting up children and I haven't a clue whether these things are beneficial or detrimental d) I can do less and less, and doing any activity in the evening requires a rest after work e) I'm feeling increasingly depressed.

I don't think any of it sunk in. He just kind of nodded and hummed and wrote me a prescription for antihistamines.

I certainly didn't feel listened to, or valued and he didn't really answer my questions. I just felt like I was told I was being a pain and should just buzz off and die somewhere, but quietly please *because we've done all the tests and really it's your tough luck that you're still in pain and we've seen you quite frequently over the last few weeks*.

I'm still angry and upset, and I've given up being stoical so I just cried at the busstop while waiting for the 187 [queue helpful comment from old man: *cheer up, I'm sure it will come soon love*] and then kept sobbing for the next 30 minutes all the way into work.

However, so as not to end on such an unhappy note - after blithely dismissing things I was saying the GP smiled brightly at me saying
"But don't forget - if you need us, we'll be right here for you"
which I rate 10 out of 10 for comedy value.

I've just realised why I am so damn listless and cranky. It is because the intensely hormonal time of the month approaches fast.

(i thought people with pcos werent meant to have periods...)

but no mine have been regular since age of 12, which is i am sure a wonderfully good thing, but at moments like this i do not appreciate it.

I can handle the fact that my uterus is goign to be doing backflips. I can handle the fact that i am fast becoming anemic and that periods dont help that. that if i move around too much, too fast and so on i am likely to regret it at some point. physical pain i dont have that much problem with mostly because i have at least a fair idea of how to fix it.

i hate the emotional stuff. i really fucking hate it. its like getting hit with a bipolar episode one week out of four. it is enough to make me cry.

i feel deeply deeeply deeeply irate and peeved and i keep wanting to kick and throw things. preferrably breakable things that will smash loudly and prettily.

in the run up to the period exercise helps because it aids me in getting rid of some of the excess energy.
on the other hand the emotional stuff is more difficult to deal with, though i try mostly by keeping as tight as possible rein on my tongue.

here are some of the usual warning signs that period is imminent:

*i start to feel intensely vulnerable and paranoid. I am liable to imagine i am unloved and rejected and see veiled insults and brush-offs everywhere (especially in silence)

*i start to feel intensely impatient and moody. also bitchy. very very bitchy. and i am full of these jitters i cant release but whose presence makes me want to come out with sentences such as:
i hate the world!
you are a horrible person!
get out of my way fuckface!
a person of your age should not be wearing that skirt!

and swearing. lots and lots and lots of cussing for event he most minor of transgressions.

*burst into tears

*beat someone offensive to a pulp or at least run them over a few times.

*point out all thier flaws and call ugly and stupid anyone who aggravates me.

*cravings for weird foods such as chocolate, although presently this might be due to growing desire to eat anythign that is not and never has been associated with capers.