Couch 245: STELLA!

I am sorry. Scarlet do you have PCOS (with specific symptoms) or polycystic ovaries? My daughter has polycystic ovaries, she had several surgeries periodically removing the biggest ones, also many ER trips etc. She was always told that she’d have a big fertility issue due to those, but it turns out not to be the case.

Also I am sorry if you already answered it at some point but would you consider adoption or perhaps start with fostering?

Thank you, Divine.

The doctors have told me I have PCOS, but I'm not entirely sure. I do have a lot of the symptoms and comorbid issues like diabetes and high bp. I also had irregular periods in my early 20's. But ever since I was on Clomid (except for extremely stressful months), I am 100% regular. They say if you have your period, you're ovulating. So maybe the Clomid helped restart my hormones? And maybe it's just H's low testosterone? I'll need to take an ovulation test to be sure. The only time I had a diagnosed cyst was due to Clomid. So maybe I don't have PCOS?

Yes, I would love to do adoption if I can't get pregnant: baby or a young child. However, it is so expensive! I know babies are expensive, too. Just adoption you have to pay extra. I'm not to sure on fostering. I would hate to get attached to a child and then have it taken away.

*curls up on Couch, whimpers*

This business of being one's own technical support sucks.
Trying to figure out how to get what I see in my desktop email client to line up with what I see on the web in my new email account...

Its not exactly music, its more like Stomp - all beats and boops. But eventually it repeats, so i thought it was symphonic.

Yay, my power came back two hours ago, but i was so enthralled in my Denali book that i missed it.

In 1967 a 24 yr old physics grad student led an expedition up mt mckinley. He had 8 people on his team, another team of 3 joined them, but these 3 guys were all supermen, while the original group was a bunch of nerds and weirdos. Summit day, the leader summits with the supermen, leaving the orig group to go up the next day with his co-leader. Yeah right. SNOFU.

So i keep turning the pages - this is not the first account ive read of the expedition, but it is the first written by this so-called leader - anyway im turning pages waiting for him to take responsibility.

So i kept kool reading this book and i have a little battery-operated fan. Plus my bike headlamp to guide me to the bathroom, i survived the 48 hr blackout

You could sell a tshirt!

I have been miserably down the past 48 hours. Like a cheerfulness blackout.

I don't have children. I am scared of them and by the idea of being a mother. I was brought up by a mentally ill mother who was abusive. How do you know when you are healed enough from your own wounds to be able to safely mother a child? I know that plenty of people have children without considering questions like that. However, I think that when you are in therapy and are working on your own pain and wounds, it feels like the question becomes more conscious as we are (hopefully) more aware of this kind of existential crossroad. I can't imagine being in the middle of my work around attachment and relational wounds with all the core pain that this entails, and then adding in a child. That is hardcore emotional work with such great risk to self and child. As I said, my stuff around mothering and children is very delicate so no wonder it's not clear to me, but I am interested in how other women know they can mother despite their own wounds.

This is causing some kinda complicated musing in me, moo. When I got pregnant with my son, this was going on 26 years ago now, it was a good 10 years (if I did the math right) after I'd first tried therapy with 2 different t's because my parents made me go when they found out I had been dating a woman (t1 i walked out of the first session cuz he was a d*** and t2 there was no connection at all so I didn't see her for very long) and at the time of my marriage, I was so happy - loved my job, h and I had only been married like 2-3 months when I found out I was pregnant, being a mom was something i wanted with every fiber of my being. Looking back now, I can see that while I was happy, I was also very much living my life at a surface level if that makes sense, doing what was expected of me basically as far as marrying a man, working, having a family, etc. Don't get me wrong I really wanted to be a mom and that was about the only thing at the time that came from deep inside me. Besides wanting to be a mom, I had no idea what was going on inside, of the childhood wounds that needed healing, because I had shoved them down, covered them up, so that I could deny their existence to myself I suppose. If I hadn't been in so much denial and had known how messed up I was, I would have been afraid to have a child. I wouldn't have gotten married, either.

But I didn't know.

I think the email saga is finally over.
Managed to migrate everything from the old one to the new one and changed what needs to be changed over.

*collapses in a heap*

For me, childhood issues that I hadn't resolved resurfaced when I became a mother. I returned to therapy about 5 months after I had my daughter (and have been going ever since). Some of that was due to intense postpartum anxiety (and postpartum depression, though I didn't fully recognize that part at the time).

My daughter's initial diagnosis of a developmental (speech mainly) delay, followed by her diagnosis of autism dredged up even more stuff, like my dealing with OCD and anxiety as a kid, but not having help for it. Well, and things with ex-MC triggered some of that, too, in his talking about helping his daughter with her anxiety.

I was talking to Dr. T recently about why I became very attached to a teacher in high school, then didn't really have any sort of paternal/maternal attachment again until ex-MC. I thought at first that maybe it's because I was becoming attached to people I dated instead. I think that was part of it. But then I realized that a big factor was becoming a parent. He agreed that it made sense. I do wish I'd worked on some of this stuff more before becoming a mom.

I never wanted to be a mom. I dont think i ever had a mom. I would not know how to be a mom, or have the patience or attention span it seems to require. I didnt even know how to play house when i was a kid. I remember one time, i hit my dolly (speaking in italian - omg how cute was i?!), then the game was over - the other kid (a younger cousin maybe?) was kinda horrified, and my mother pulled me away.

I was told to sit on the couch and not move until my mother got out of bed at noonish. There i taught myself to read from a big book of fairytales. Later i was promoted to sitting at the dining room table so i could play with my crayons. Basically no interaction on a daily basis between me and my mother, except that we were in the same house. Once in a while she would cut my toenails with freezing cold nailclippers. My dad gave me a bath once a week on friday or saturday night. I would go with her when she shopped for dresses and shoes for special occasions - i was the zipper-upper. Thats it. I made my own cold cereal, my own sandwiches, my brother made my toast. I remember many nights lying awake with a stuffed nose. I called for a parent once and was told to never do that again because they had to sleep for work.

The old hungarian lady next door yelled at my mother for leaving me in my crib all day long. Like once a summer, she would invite me over and give me a butterscotch candy. My dad would walk us to a city park in the evening, not as frequently as i wanted.

Once i started walking to school by myself (3rd grade), things opened up and i started going to day camp and the city library, all about 5 blocks away from my house but in different directions. And the shopping center. Often with a neighbor girl, but like the library was usually a weekly solo trip. In 5th grade, 5 blocks in yet another direction to buy my feminine supplies.

No parental helicoptering! I got all A's, so they never attended any parent-teacher conferences. Summer i was 16, she told me WE were going to Italy, tickets were BOUGHT. I told her *I* can't go, im taking drivers ed. How could she not have known that? She really only started interfering in my life when it was "time to get married". And i lived unhappily ever after.

I truly think I'll be a "good enough" parent. I have extensively talked with 3 therapists and my ex-pdoc about it, and all agreed I was ready. Being in the middle of childhood trauma work isn't ideal, but when is ideal? I will have year of working on it. But I think that's the best part: I'm working on it. I'm getting to know my young parts and identifying what she needs and wants. And I will continue working on myself and also working in therapy when anything anything arises with having a child.

I also have some experiences that will help. I was raised in my mom's preschool. I helped with all ages of children. I also have my experiences with my 2 nephews and 3 nieces. That will help me with the logistical part of raising a child. And lastly, and I know it's not the same, I have experiences raising all 7 of my dogs. And each one I gotten better and better meeting their needs at different stages of their lives.

Bit again, I think the main thing is that I AM actively working on my issues, and will continue to do so.

I hope the blackout lifts soon

I think most people should not be parents.
Wanting a child doesn't make people qualified to do the job well. Wanting a child to me is just the very starting place. If one has a child simply because one wants one without looking at a bunch of other factors (including one's support system and, as one example, if one doesn't have a good support system and if one tends to fall apart at the least little thing -all the want in the world is not going to help raise a happy healthy child) surrounding it, seems to me to be a most selfish act. It seems that, to me, most people want to be parents either because they are trying to fix themselves or because society says married straight people should have them. Most parents, in my opinion, are well intentioned and yet we see how well that turns out. Just more little fodders to grow up and hand money to therapists to complain about their parents and keep the therapist employed.

I never had much of an urge to be a parent and I never wanted to be the one who actually gave birth under any circumstances.

Hugs if wanted, LT.

Y'know, this rings familiar to me "childhood issues that I hadn't resolved resurfaced when I became a mother." except for me it was after my son was a little older like preschool age, like when he started really becoming a person with his own opinions maybe? cuz I wasn't really allowed to think anything different than i was told when I was growing up maybe? not sure, but that was around the time depression started affecting me and my gp put me on prozac. And that worked until it didn't anymore, and the depression came back full-force, I had a messy breakdown while working one day, and I went to pdoc and got changed to Zoloft and then finally went back to therapy and started working on those childhood issues.

I wish I'd worked on my issues too, before becoming a mom. I might have been a better parent to my son.

eta after seeing other posts: I used to babysit when I was in high school, taught swimming lessons to gradeschool-aged kids, etc and I always enjoyed working with kids; it just felt natural to me wanting to be a mom. Regardless of who I ended up with - alone, with a woman or man. I just wanted to be a mom. I think I mean i KNOW parental/religious/societal pressures at the time kinda made the decision for me to marry h before i got pregnant. There was a big part of me back in 1988-ish well before i ever met h, that was trying to figure out how to just do it on my own without a partner at all - as I watched a couple single friends at the time have children - but I knew how hard it would be, also, seeing their experiences - and wasn't ready to be disowned by my parents for being an unwed mother - so I never pursued it.

What astonishes me is how unaware i was of having been put on this path of no interaction with mothers or children. I never babysat (except once, disastrously - no one was harmed, but i lied to the parents), never changed a diaper, even though there were plenty of babies around. Only got to hold newborns for a few seconds. It was always, go read a book.

Scarlet, i was gonna say that your dogs was good experience! I am mortified, 45 years later, at how little and how poorly i interacted with the kitten my h surprised me with.

I babysat a lot and I even worked at a couple of daycare centers while I was in college and Law School. The children seemed to like me well enough. They would run and grab and hug me and cling on me and drool on me and so forth. I even like babies – I'm not so keen on when they start talking but baby to about three I think it's good. But it didn't make me think I should be a parent. I've known too many people who've had babies to fix what they thought were their parents' bad parenting (not necessarily consciously) and who did just as bad a job with their own kids -again through no ill intention. Now granted, it was often a different bad job

Now that I'm thinking about it babysitting served several purposes for me - of course like I said I enjoy working with kids, but also, I was socially awkward so didn't date, I had friends I would sometimes hang out with but not like every week or anything so babysitting was also a way for me to be out of the house - and I had regulars that I babysat for every friday and saturday night, then sometimes on sunday afternoons for the people who lived behind us. I didn't so much like babysitting for that last family though cuz they paid less than everybody else and also expected me to fold laundry and stuff where nobody else did.

As far as wanting to be a mom - maybe subconsciously there was something in there too that I wanted the chance to do better than my parents did??

I need a 3-day weekend every week haha! I'm feeling very relaxed and rejuvenated right now. I took Thursday off cuz they offered VTO (voluntary, unpaid time off). I had to use 40 hours of paid vacation time while I was in the hospital last month, so my vacation time is currently depleted and I have to save what i'll be earning now so I'll have enough for my trip to visit our son in September.

The last two nights, H and I went out to dinner with H's work. That was the hardest socializing I've had to do in a long time. But I did it! And I'm proud of myself. H and I felt so out of place! They were all extremely nice and welcoming, but we clearly didn't fit in. They were all beautiful, in shape, and rich. They talked about botox and fillers and superstitions about celebrities. All of them drank. I really liked them, but I was so anxious. I did my best to talk and to engage. I did my wifely duties.

Well done Scarlet.

I'm sorry you felt uncomfortable though.