11/22/24
maybe we don’t go back to the lovers we were. Maybe we go through it- the storm- and meet again for the first time on the other side.
11/23/24
started reading some Medical Medium books- something that struck me- is making me reconsider- he continually repeats that your body- liver, specifically- will never betray you, is always working to protect you. i know i’ve felt and said, when sick recently, i felt betrayed by my body- and i did feel that way. but also, in the book, whenever he keeps insisting that that’s not the case, I feel that it’s true- that it wouldn’t- that maybe I just need to understand better.
when you have a child, starting from pregnancy- at least for me- everything you do, you do before you’re ready. Because nothing can prepare you. raising a child, everything is in real time, learning in the moment. You can try to prepare, but that is mostly like, food. The other stuff- like his actions and emotions and all that- are unpredictable. that’s what’s so scary and I guess exhausting about it. But also wonderful.
realized i never wear my seatbelt in the car anymore when in the backseat on family outings. Hunter always wants my attention so i have to lean forward unrestrained, or else if he falls asleep, i have to keep watch sitting kind of backwards, to hold his head back whenever R stops and turns hard (happens frequently, multiple times a trip). or i’m leaning forward holding his cup of water for him to drink, or leaning forward holding something in front of his face to block the direct sun on it. besides this, sitting behind R and not ever having enough alone time with him these days, it’s in the car when i can reach up and massage his shoulders, have conversations by holding my head close to one of his ears, and just leave my hand on him while he drives- all of which I can’t do seatbelted. so I’ve just given up that for now. But I always wear it when I’m alone and driving, or everything is calm for some reason, whenever I can.
11/24/24
was in Rastelli’s market and looking for organic celery to restock my stash, but couldn’t find any. Found nonorganic, pre-sliced, like in little bits like I need to feed into my juicer, prepackaged, and I bought two packs just to relieve me from the slicing and dicing for a little bit. Just drank the first batch this morning and it tastes sweeter than the organic kinds I’ve been drinking (from ShopRite, sprouts, Imperfect Foods). I’m a little worried though because dad told me last night about an E. coli outbreak on Whole Foods celery and ground beef and some other stuff. Was wondering if I might ever get poisoned like that, especially if I’m drinking celery every day?
11/25/24
again this morning, halfway through drinking celery juice, overcome with hunger. ate ravenously again after the juice. loving the sweet-tasting, pre-cut, Rastelli celery, though not organic. Emailed Imperfect Foods to see if they would start carrying a pre-cut organic celery. skin still getting better in general, but day-to-day, still not in a straight line: it’s better to worse then better to worse – fluctuating. Still need to wear the pads inside of socks to absorb fluid.
just realized, while sitting in the quiet house today working, that part of heaven, for me, is silence. Like even recently, there was a small gap in which I had no air filter running in my room because I had moved mine (bigger) down to hunter’s room and was waiting for the new (smaller) one to come in, it was just so nice – I loved the grounding feeling of silence there. And maybe also explains why I get so stressed with the baby, because baby’s so loud all the time. I love it, but… I really need a balance between noise and silence.
11/26/24
found a celery I really like. It comes from Sprouts, in a bag from Earthbound Farm, it’s organic, “thoroughly washed”, and pre-cut. All I have to do is open the bag and feed into the juicer. No washing, no cutting, no chopping off leaves and separating the leaves from the stalks and the end bits and different containers and wet hands when my hands aren’t always all intact, etc. It’s pretty perfect – not medicinally bitter like the Imperfect celery, not as sweet as the non-organic celery from Rastelli’s- a neutral taste somewhere between the two- but definitely I could chug this every morning. The only problem is that it’s $4.50 a bag, that’s like double what a bunch of uncut celery is. The time-saving efficiency of it, though, makes up for it for me. I guess for now, it’s seven bags a week of this. so about $125 a month, times 12- an extra $500 a year more than I thought it would be.
feet are getting better and better. Two nights this week, I peeled off the bandages, and there was hardly any stain there. But there’s a small spot on my face that’s dark and dry and irritated that’s bothering me, but it’s not too bad. if you’re standing like 5 feet away, it’s hard to see.
11/27/24
when I hear cars revving outside my sleeping baby’s window at 12:45 AM, it makes me not want to live here anymore. it doesn’t happen much at this time, but it does happen a lot during the day. We don’t even live right off the road- we live on a street that comes off of the main road, but we can still hear it really prominently. for some reason, this stretch of road, people like to rev and rev their engines. I wouldn’t care as a single person. But as a mother with a child, it pisses me off.
had a sweet dream. I wandered into a classroom; at a school. Lots of people all around. the place I wandered into, only one guy was there, M____, this boy, who, in real life, I went to school with, who had pretty intense blue eyes but I’ve never had any real relationship with. It was just him watching the projector screen, they were teaching old stuff like VHS before they would teach us the new video technologies, and it was kind of funny to watch. It was weird now that I remember because there weren’t chairs and desks in this room; it was just a big kind of sofa lounge that incidentally fit the two of us. I sat a few feet away from him, but it was on the same sofa, because that’s all there was – the sofa facing the screen- he offered me some pens or pencils to use, which I did use them, and just ended up close to him, and we both ended up falling asleep to the boring projector reel. So I was actually dreaming that I was asleep- that I woke up slightly, but was so groggy and heavy when I woke up that I could not really move very far away from him- our shoulders and heads were touching in a really cozy and comfortable way, but I still tried to move away from him when I woke up in the dream because I subconsciously knew that we should not really be seen sleeping together because I had a husband and he had a wife, but we just had simply fallen asleep, and I did feel so sleepy in the dream- like so sleepy that you feel paralyzed and not able to move.(it seemed maybe I also physically woke up when I dreamt that I woke up?) it seemed like a long time, maybe two hours, when finally some noise from neighboring classrooms woke us both up- an older-looking woman teacher peeked around the corner at us- not sternly, but not kindly- and I smiled shyly and left, running through the hallways, looking for my R. I was anxious to find him, but also sweetly refreshed from the innocent incident that just happened.
I really need to deep clean the house, but the only time I have to do it is when R and Hunter are not here (when they’re here, we spend the little time we have together, together). And when they’re not here, I’m working- and when I’m working, I have actual work, so I can’t do it. and when I take PTO days, most times, my parents will give back Hunter, so I’ll be with him the whole day and can’t do anything else. I guess the only time I could clean would be, I would need to take a PTO day and not tell them I took it? Just so I can clean.
I think I had a little bit of PMS today, by myself. I had to clean the whole house today: vacuum, dishes, change bedsheets, decorated for Christmas, took Halloween decorations down finally, laundry, on top of having work. About to go scrub toilet and bathtub before I take a shower now. The whole day I was moving and going and whenever I got held up just a little, I got frustrated. i was going as fast as I could, and then finally at night, when things were winding down, R got home and was taking a shower while I folded laundry and watched baby sleeping in his bed on the monitor in the living room, and it was then I thought a little bitterly about how in the early days when Hunter was a newborn, I didn’t have that – I was alone and trying to take showers and there was no baby monitor or anyone else here helping me, besides my mom sometimes coming over for a few hours during work days. I remember taking a bath/shower when he was a newborn and bringing him in his car seat into the bathroom with me, or just running away for a shower after I put him down for a nap hoping to God he didn’t wake up during, and rushing through everything during those showers- my adrenaline going and going until I could get back by his side. Too many times to count, holding him while sitting down peeing, because he would not let me put him down – he’d cry and scream if I did. I just thought about all this tonight, and was comparing how easy R has it compared to what I had to go through, and just didn’t feel like talking, just wanted to go up to my room and cry. it’s not really R’s fault, I know. I know he didn’t know it would be like this, and we both weren’t prepared. But I still feel, three years later, that it hit me the hardest. And I know you should take responsibility for your life and your decisions and everything that happens to you – that that’s the best thing to do – and I want to do that- the best thing- and I love my baby so much. but there’s a small part of me that comes out, that I can’t stop sometimes, that is just blaming and blaming: why didn’t you take better care of me? Why weren’t you more prepared? how could you let me hurt and suffer for so long?
11/28/24
i’m so perfectly happy that my baby is healthy and thriving. i can hear him yelling in nonstop sentences downstairs. But as I lay here tired when I should be getting up, I wonder: why did it have to be like that – that he like sucked the life out of me for the first two years to get stronger, while it made me sick, and left me still currently recovering from all that over a year later? Like why couldn’t we both have just been strong at the same time… with no one unpreparedly sacrificing anything. Was I weak? Would many others, if they’d undertook, for 15 months straight, never sleeping a full night and waking up every 2 to 3 hours to breastfeed, have gotten as sick as I did? I just don’t know anyone personally who’s been through the exact same thing. But it was a sleep deprivation experiment I never wanted to try.
definitely had dairy and gluten today. Went over parents for Thanksgiving and she had Wegmans Thanksgiving meals out: turkey with gravy, mashed potatoes that tasted really buttery and good, mac & cheese- of which I only ate a few spirals just to taste, green beans which were probably OK, broccoli with cheese, and stuffing which was so good I would’ve eaten the whole tray, but it was obviously bread stuffing, so just took a few bites. ate mostly green beans and turkey. Also had pumpkin pie, lots, which I scraped off the crust and it was basically pumpkin pudding, but I’m sure there was still cream and eggs in that part, that also was really good. brought a strawberry vanilla cake which I made gluten-free and dairy free, and Hunter was really excited by, and tasted pretty good- mom even said so. The last time I had gluten, it seemed to affect me, if at all, only for a few days and went away. hope it does the same this time, and maybe also the celery juice is working too.
just found out that R had a beer(s) before picking up Hunter and driving him home last night. only found out bc i thought he was acting weird (fell asleep on couch while on baby monitor duty and when i woke him up after soothing baby who woke up while R was sleeping on couch, he said unintelligible things to me and grabbed my butt calling it a lemon. also just this look on his face he gets, that i can’t describe), so on the way home from parents from Thanksgiving meal today, asked him if he had any alcohol last night, and he said yeah, he’d been working on Paulo’s deck and Paulo’d brought out some beers. I recoiled for a moment then said, “can you please not drink and drive w the baby.” he said ok. Then i said, you can call me to come pick him up if you drink, or tell my parents to take him home (from their house, where he’s babysat). He said he didn’t drink that much. I said you were drunk enough for me to think you were acting weird and not answering baby when he was calling for you in his sleep. He said baby needs to learn to sleep by himself and that we’re not always going to be there and if we keep babying him, he’ll always act like a baby. he said he wasn’t worried about baby waking up by himself and crying. and i said ok, then let’s tell him and warn him and prepare him that we’re going to do that, like we tell him we’re leaving somewhere in 5 minutes, instead of doing it all the sudden with no explanation, after we’ve been sleeping with him every night since he was born. so he doesn’t know what’s happening when he wakes up alone and no one’s answering him. He said it sounds like I want him to be perfect. I said no, i just want you to not drink when driving the baby. He said, well then don’t bring up all that other stuff, just say “don’t drink with the baby.” (he apologized the next morning, saying that he was wrong and that he’d never speak to me like that again)
11/29/24
funny: dad told me too while I was over there yesterday, that the celery juice (I shared the book with him, and he started drinking it) makes him hungry too. He feels like he’s gaining weight because of it.
11/30/24
ate cheese bread today because i was taking care of Hunter alone and that’s what he likes and didn’t have time to make separate meal for both of us. also bc i missed it, and feet are still getting better – rash on them is shrinking and shrinking.
Marriage Journal 