1/18/21
Eyes rolling back in head while eating cinnamon raisin bagels w/cream cheese today.
hahaha. I just realized, like for the past few days, no matter what we’re texting about, R puts the pregnant lady emoji after his texts to me.
Looking at myself in the full length after shower tonight, i notice my usual flat abdomen has already begun to change shape, to bloat out. my breasts are big and heavy. They feel like actual “breasts” now, instead of just boobs. now throughout the day, their weight will make me notice myself carrying them, instead of before- i could easily forget about them. I am a little…scared. Q&A with myself arises:
Q: what if this is the end of me?
A: there have been many ends of you, even before this. and you liked them. desperately needed some of those ends, maybe all of them.
Additional A: there will never be an end of You. Just an end of different versions of you. You will always be yourself. Don’t worry.
Q: is this an end that you want?
A: I think so. I think…i think i’ve been waiting a long time for her. Or him.
1/19/21
what can I do so that her skin never hurts as much as mine did?
seeing the school bus pick up kids sometimes during early morning walks. remembering how sad I would feel on the school bus sometimes, the tall seats like little jail cells. What can I do to make him feel better about school, and let him know that it won’t last forever?
the baby makes me take better care of myself: started not turning my head when I cross intersections- but I did start looking with my eyes to the side for cars, which I never did before.
1/20/21
Started crying on walk tonight (I could go kind of hard because it was nighttime and dark and I was wearing scarf, mask, baseball hat and had big fur-lined jacket hood up over all that, so no one could see) when I started thinking about something. It was…when I thought about how much I hated my body when I was younger – like high school—when it somehow got in my head that my thighs should be half the size they were – the torturous time when the size I thought I should be seemed both attainable and never within reach, no matter how much I starved myself, no matter how many cigarettes or caffeine pills or adderall—and I remembered during this time, how mom one day when I hadn’t really eaten, put a whole plate of food in front of me: a fresh plate of rice drowned in sour tamarind soup how I like, oxtail, radish, green beans, all this home-cooked, hot stuff. She set it in front of me at the dinner table. And I didn’t touch it, and when I knew she was gone, I got up and dumped the whole thing in the trash- it all slid off the plate in one second. Such discipline I had for self-destruction. Such a fucked-up perspective of my body I allowed others to impose upon me. I cried because I thought: what if my daughter, if I have a girl, ever felt this way- ever came to hate her body to that extreme? To risk her life chasing after such a sad goal. I’ll never let it happen. I’ll protect her sense of self-worth with my life. I’ll…I’ll tell her she is beautiful, that every part of her is beautiful, all the time, even if she doesn’t believe it. I’m sorry that I ever wasted a a moment of my life regretting myself. I won’t let it happen to her. I was crying for myself—how harshly I treated myself when I was so young—and I was crying in fear for her, for the future, because there are so many factors: people, images, media, friends—who could lead her down the same path. What can I do? Would she even listen to my voice above the noise of all that?
1/21/21
Today I opened blinds, and the sunlight didn’t really bother me. Before it used to bother me and felt bad on my skin.
Last night when R said something funny and I laughed, I felt the urge to pee and had to hold it back – I never had to do that before- never felt any connection with laughter + pee before. It does seem like I’m peeing a little more frequently now.
I feel like 25% more of my brain power now is taken up by food: what I feel like eating, listing foods I need to buy, preparing food, perusing menus online and thinking for days sometimes of what I want to order, reading about food, wondering what I could possibly eat and where can get it, and when, and at any given hour planning my next meal.
1/22/21— Last night on the couch, I felt it. Maybe for the first time. It was such a simple thing: just after we ate some dinner (pizza), I got under R’s blanket, snuggled up to him, and he put his arm around me, and we didn’t say any words explicitly regarding it, but the feeling struck me all at once like a bolt, and I think we both felt it: this feeling that now there is someone else here- there’s three of us- when R holds me. I never felt that before. It was always just us two, very plain, uncomplicated. I mean I would feel God with us a lot. But…not another person like this. And a person who can’t physically walk into the room; a person just added to us invisibly, just arrived out of thin air, it seems, who will come to us through a weird door. Like he was just an idea that we both happened to think at the same time, and now…now my trusty period is gone, and no one knows when it will return (or all that will happen while it’s gone).
Marriage Journal 