eye-glasses full of stars

summer updates!

life
mom and jason visited over the summer. we had a really lovely time with them, and visited the jimmy carter center and the center for civil and human rights. they helped us paint our guest room and put together some ikea furniture.

i always feel awkward around them? it's just weird. they didn't get married until after i had moved to atlanta, so i don't know jason that well, even though i do really like him. it's just weird that almost as soon as i moved my parents got divorced and my whole family structure changed. i mean, those changes were all for the good, since my dad is a pretty shitty human, but it's still weird that the family i grew up with isn't the family i have now. i don't think it will ever stop being weird.

whenever i have dreams about my family, it's always with my dad, and they're always bad dreams. i don't think i've ever had a dream about my family with jason being apart of it.

it's like how i don't dream about brittney, too, probably. i have lots of dreams about someone, usually a straight girl friend from hs or college, marrying me out of pity, because no one else will. i have very very few dreams about my actual wife though. possibly none? though i feel like i must have had some i just can think of them right now.

my relationship with my mom is weird, too, in that i don't think we really know how to be around each other. we've both become such radically different people over the past few years, and even though a lot of those changes have been very good and very similar, they happened when we weren't around each other much, and so it's weird getting to know each other as these new people.

i meant for this to be a post about how my summer went, not meanderings about how our brains hold onto some memories and feelings even when they aren't relevant anymore.

so in other news, we also went to the beach!! we rented a beach house in north carolina with several of our friends and we all had a really lovely weekend. i think it's the most relaxed i've felt in years. the trip was wonderful and the people were wonderful, and i love the people we have in our life right now so so so much.

we all got horribly sunburnt, though, despite being very diligent about sunscreening ourselves and reminding each other to sunscreen. the uv index all weekend was 11, so it's possible that no matter how much we tried, we were going to get burnt anyway.

they also made this amazing lesbian bachelorette video while i was staying inside recovering from my sunburn and rereading the two princesses of bamarre, which absolutely holds up to my childhood adoration.

health
i started going to physical therapy! i can't take my muscle relaxers while i'm pregnant, so i started going to physical therapy in early july to see if that would help my constant tension, and it really has, so far. we've been doing a combination of massage and specific stretches to relieve the tension, and i love it. my insurance only covers 20 PT sessions a year, though, so i don't know how long i'll actually be able to stick with it, since it's pretty expensive out of pocket? i can do the stretches and exercises at home, of course, but i don't know how well they'll work without also having the massage included?

i'm also weening off my anti-depressants as much as possible before pregnancy. i've gone down from 150mg of zoloft to 50mg. the transition has been okay. i've noticed my energy levels going down a bit, and my mood was really bad for a couple of weeks when i first went down to 100, and i had some withdrawal symptoms for a few days after i'd been at 100 for a few weeks, but it all leveled out after a while. i just went down to 50 a few days ago, so we'll see how that goes.

i'm worried it will be as bad as it was when i weened off of lexapro -- the weening went okay, but after a couple of months completely off of it, i got really depressed again. i'm gonna see how 50 goes, and maybe stay there? i think the risk of it hurting is less scary than spending my whole pregnancy horrible depressed.

and on that subject

baby
i started taking clomid yesterday! we were hoping to do our first insemination in july, but my regular health care provider took a long time sending my records to the fertility office, so we weren't able to. they finally did, though, so i'm taking clomid this week, then going back for an ultrasound on friday, and if that ultrasound looks good, we're doing our first insemination on sunday the 13th.

i'm equal parts excited and terrified. i really really want this to work, and i'm trying hard not to focus on what it will be like if it doesn't. we have enough sperm for three inseminations right now. i keep trying to stay calm and focus on what we're doing right now, and leave the "what if it doesn't work" planning for if/when we've gone three rounds with no success.

we also have four friends who are pregnant right now, and i don't know if having so many new babies in my life will make it that much easier or that much harder if it doesn't work. i'm so excited for my friends, but also slightly jealous, and i hope the excitement stays outweighing the jealousy no matter what happens.

next week is finals week and i spent most of the day studying and rewarding myself with an episode of the handmaid's tale for every two hours i worked. i loved the three episodes that are out and can't wait for the rest of them. it's really well and beautifully done and there were so many moments that gave me chills, both from terror and from beauty.

i love that juxtaposition of beauty and terror and how it could mean either that even beautiful things can be horrible or that even horrible things can have some beauty in them.

it reminded me a lot of being in college -- not that women were forced surrogates -- but living in an atmosphere were you always have to keep your feelings and opinions to yourself and you never know who you can trust with your secrets that shouldn't be secrets in the first place. i was lucky in that i found people very early in my time there who i could be my angry feminist dyke self around and was able to live with them sophomore and junior year, but it was still so hard to sit through chapel and classes and remember that conversations we could have in the dorm we couldn't have outside.

funnily enough, we read the handmaid's tale in my women's lit class. 80% of the class did their final papers on it, most of them comparing/contrasting it with persepolis.

it's so weird thinking about harding. how my years there were some of the worst i've had and how depressed and scared i was the whole time i was there. but also knowing that if i had gone somewhere else, i wouldn't have many of the friends today, probably wouldn't have moved to atlanta and therefore wouldn't have met britt. so like, i get angry thinking about how depressed i was and how much i hated being there, but also i'm so in love with my wife and the life we have built for ourselves and am so grateful for ending up here as the result of going through all of that.

silver linings.

however, this month has been so stressful and i haven't been to the gym but twice and my whole body is so tense and hurts so much and i've been so tired. but school will all be over by tuesday and i'm not taking classes this summer and we're going to disney at the end of may and to the beach in july.

i made it through harding, i can make it through the next five days. :)