a merry sunshine

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.

1.
my wife was published on autostraddle! we're getting closer and closer to having to pick a sperm donor and it's getting frustrating. we have a few in mind, but the one we LOVE might be too expensive for us to use. the cheaper banks have some promising contenders, but we can't choose for sure until we do genetic counseling this summer. i'm actually really nervous about the genetic counseling since it's testing for charcot-marie-tooth, which my grandmother had, and my dad and brother both have CMT feet even though my dad refuses to get diagnosed and my brother hasn't yet. i have to be tested to see if i'm a carrier, and i'm worried that the test results will show that i actually have it. i have high arches, though not as prominently as my dad and brother do, but it can also onset really slowly soooooooooooo.

i had to take two xanax last night to fall asleep because i couldn't stop obsessing over it. every so often over the past few years i'll google "charcot-marie-tooth foot" and just compare my feet to the pictures of cmt feet for a long time. and now the anxiety about it is just growing. so like. on one hand it's good that i'll actually be getting an answer soon, but on the other hand i'm just getting more and more anxious about it the closer we get.

2.
tonight we're having dinner with some sort-of-friends!!! they're a wonderful lesbian couple we met at a dog training class, and again at an LGBT family planning class, and then ran into at various restaurants and grocery stores in the neighborhood, but have never actually been able to spend time with. we've friended them on facebook after the family planning class and we've wanted to hang out forever, but they had twins about a year ago and britt and i are both working full-time and in school, so scheduling is impossible.

but we're having dinner with them tonight! i'm so excited to actually get to spend time talking to them and meet their beautiful twins and talk about lesbian conception woes. :)

3.
i'm starting to want to try to reclaim christianity more? like. i don't know if i'll ever believe in god again, and i don't know if i WANT to, but i want to read the bible again and remember what i loved about it even when i didn't felt like it loved me back. i saw an article about how quakers should adopt liberation theology and picked up a few books on it, and found a book in our meeting's library called reading the bible again for the first time and really liked the intro. i'm reading that one right now and will read the liberation theology books afterwards.

it's weird. i don't know how i feel about it. i don't know if this will change anything about what i believe or my relationship with christianity, but i feel like i'm finally far away (time-wise, physical distance-wise, emotional trauma-wise) enough from the christianity of my youth to try giving it another shot. there are aspects of it that i miss so much and i want to see if i can somehow reclaim them.