Sometimes, The Twins Just Don't Make Up For It All

Some days, I hate being a woman.

I haven't gotten my period yet, but I have started having days of major mood swings again.  Whee!  I certainly didn't miss those.  For some reason, being pregnant actually leveled me out some.  But it's back with a vengeance.  I think my body hates me.  Yes, it most certainly does.

Yesterday was particularly bad, and being tired didn't help with the swinging from being happy and content to being angry and frustrated to being depressed.  Oh so much fun.  The plus side; I'm enjoying all this great hormonal action without getting a period.  THAT is truly a blessing.  I hate cramps, and I can't say that I'm unhappy that I haven't had any for a year now (no, labor does NOT count as cramps.  Sorry).  Though with not having one in so long, I'll probably not be paying attention and one day WHAM!  Woman-ness running down my leg.  Good thing having a baby that is exclusively breastfeeding ties you to your home, because it would most certainly hit me while out grocery shopping or something, and I'm not smart enough to keep the tools of the trade with me.

And now for breastfeeding.  I love breastfeeding, most of the time.  When she is quiet as she eats anyway, not thrashing around and trying to skin me alive with her sharp little baby nails.  I'm not sure why she does that.  She doesn't come off my breast or cry when she does, so I'm pretty sure it doesn't have any thing to do with something I ate.  She just tries her best to tear my boob off.  Sometimes tucking her arms in against my belly works to calm her down, but most times she just squirms until she gets one out and she goes after my skin again.  I try adjusting her position, re-latching her, anything I can think of, but most time, she just keeps at it.  Very frustrating.  She's also taken to biting me a little bit already.  Usually when she's done nursing and is just sucking away for fun.  Thankfully I can fix that by re-latching her, or taking her off if she's fallen asleep.  And that's another thing.  She almost never un-latches herself.  I have to do it, because she will lay there, asleep for half an hour or more after I'm pretty certain she's done, but still latched on.  She used to pull away when she was finished; I'm not sure why she doesn't now.

But breastfeeding is also something that I hate about being a woman.  I can't wait until she's eating food that I'm not making.  Just for a break.  Even if she would go longer than 1.5-2 hours between feedings would be nice.  She goes about 3 hours at night, and only eats for 20 minutes at a time then, but baby, I'm tired of being tired.  She doesn't sleep long enough during the day, usually, for me to nap with her.  If I put her in her cradle, or her crib, she wakes up about 15 minutes later, right when I'm falling asleep.  Poop on that.  Right now, she is fast asleep, probably out of pure frustration.  She couldn't keep her pacifier in her mouth, and when it fell out, it was always just out of reach.  And mom isn't always quick on the draw and wouldn't put it back as soon as it came out.  She has her angry face on.  I love it.  Maybe I'll go take a nap on the couch.

Breastfeeding is not lewd, it’s food

Breastfeeding is not lewd, it’s food

This Is AWESOME!!!

Please tell me that I'm not the only one who remembers acting like this.......just a little bit.

Challenges

I've been struggling lately.  A lot has been going on in my life (besides the new baby!) and I've been having a hard time coping with it.  I had to have my gall bladder removed this week because of gall stones that developed while I was pregnant.  That was hard enough to deal with, because I had to go on a non-fat diet.  Great diet plan for someone recovering from an eating disorder, but I had no choice.  It was that, or suffer through attacks that put me in the ER.  I tried to continue to control the gall bladder attacks after my baby was born with the diet, but it turned out to be too difficult for me to do.  And I couldn't really narrow down what was giving me the attacks. So out it came.  But one side effect to not having a gall bladder is that I will now gain weight easier, and have a harder time losing weight if I need to.  I've been in panic mode.  It doesn't help that if I do gain weight, there is a good chance my mom will say something to me.  I've told her not to, that it's not helpful in anyway, but she has a hard time NOT pointing it out when she thinks I'm fat.  She does this very passive-aggressively, and I really don't think she knows how much it hurts me to hear some of her comments, even though I tell her.  She thinks she's being helpful.

Anyway, I've been feeling out of control lately and really struggling to eat during the day, and to eat better at night.  I know I need to stay healthy for my little girl, especially since I'm nursing her.  But it's been hard.  I cried on my husbands shoulder one night because I was so afraid that he wouldn't love me if I got fat (he told me he would).  And I argue with myself over whether to eat a biscuit, or have ice cream, or some other sugary or sweet thing (I have a major sweet tooth, and love white bread).  

I have a pretty good idea why I feel out of control, but I can't do anything about it.  Besides that, it's the holidays, which means parties revolving around food, and my family coming to visit.  It's hard, and some days, I just want to crawl into bed and stay there.  Instead, I'm constantly cleaning out the fridge, throwing away food that's probably still good, or fighting to eat something that my rational mind knows isn't going to make me fat.  I've lost my ability to cope any other way.  

But I have hope that I'll get past this.  I don't want to do this again, and I'm watching myself.  I always make myself eat the thing that part of me is afraid of, and then I point out to myself that I didn't balloon.  I remind myself that my husband likes the way I look now (after gaining weight) BETTER than he did when he met and married me.  I remind myself that I have to eat, and eat right, so my baby can grow right, and grow strong.  And I remind myself how terrible and even more out of control I felt when I was in the midst of my eating disorder.  I know that I can figure this out and move on.  I just needed to vent about it.  I hope that someone out there reads this and sees that even those well on the recovery path have their bad moments.  It doesn't mean that giving up and going back is the only option.  Because it's not.  And I won't let it be an option at all.