10/4/22
started crying today while reading an article online written by a mother about how her son (and in her opinion, all children) naturally wean themselves and sleep the night when they’re ready. Her son was into his second year and still waking during the night, just like Hunter. When I read the part where she wrote “I thought I would never sleep more than two hours at a time again”, I felt it right in my chest. One of her main themes was that this period of sleeplessness is only a short period compared to the entirety of your child’s life, and just the hope it gave me to read about someone going through the exact same thing and coming out on the other side ok, made me kind of involuntarily burst, I realize now because…it just feels endless all the time to me. The tiredness is frequently….painful, palpable.
10/5/22
starting just the other day, feet (and kind of all my skin) starting to feel and look better. Maybe it’s the turmeric supplement I started taking a week and a half ago? But it just seemed to, in one day, all the raised patches went down & start to heal on their own, for no explicable reason, and I’m not even using the hydrocortisone or any steroids. Just like one day a few months ago, they all just raised on me and got bad and wouldn’t heal no matter how i treated it, for no explicable reason, with no discernible change in my life.
10/6/22
I feel like maybe in eight years, I’ll have time to be myself again.
Sometimes I feel really good while I’m working, like a calm comes over me. It’s hard to explain but I think it’s kind of because, when typing a dictation, there’s not really any way I can work smarter or more efficiently: it’s very linear work, every word said I must type down, and there’s this purity about that to me that I can’t find in a lot of my other daily tasks. With other things, I frequently feel that maybe there is a smarter or better or faster way to do them, but with my work, there’s really only one way to do it, and so I can relax into the process while I do. I love my job and am really grateful we found each other.
10/7/22
Have never had so many “everything is everywhere” moments until I had a baby. By which i mean like, nothing is where it belongs- clothes and products and food and tissues and misc items just unimaginably strewn about the house, the room. But that’s what happens I’ve found, when there is this person crying whose needs are more important than putting everything back where it belongs. I also realized these moments stress me out – i’m used to, from being childless most my life, having time to clean up after myself, and love being surrounded by order and beauty at home. But i realize that now (and ever since he was born, really) we can’t do things exactly when we want to, anymore. It’s a baby-having fact that no one prepared me for, that I learned the hard way. Have actually tried to post this entry twice since last night, but first he woke up crying to nurse while I was writing it so i had to stop, then tried again later this morning but it clashed with his naptime and had to nurse him again. Now he’s fallen asleep and this is my third attempt – the charm I guess.
10/8/22
Just found out recently about Elimination Communication. Reading the book Diaper Free by Ingrid Bauer. I think it’s awesome, and so wish I had learned about it sooner. Gonna try this with baby asap. It made me think today, when I was reading it, how living in the US, I enjoy the benefits of like the “latest” and most “modern” everything…but at the same time, if I’m not careful and don’t question or think things through on my own, also suffer from integrating its heavy-handed and frequently untrue marketing narratives into my personal beliefs.
Marriage Journal 