Trying Too Hard

For anyone who is not interested in listening to self indulgent whining my advice is to skip this post.

The handful of people who read this blog probably know that I've been actively trying to get pregnant with baby number two for almost a year now. And before that we were, I guess you could say, informally trying by rarely doing anything to prevent pregnancy. I got pregnant with Eli like that (picture me snapping my fingers) and honestly I thought this time would be a snap as well. It hasn't been. And I'm having trouble thinking of anything else. I am so obsessed with getting pregnant that I'm driving myself and a lot of other people crazy. Every month until my period comes I am analyzing every single thing my body does. Every ache, every twinge, every fluid, every weird dream, every episode of absent mindedness. Could that be a symptom? Could that be a symptom? Could that be a symptom? EVERYTHING until I want to bang my head against something hard to make my brain stop.

When I was a teenager and in therapy for a few different sorts of obsessive behavior my very awesome therapist taught me to meditate (I used to do this on top of the dorm sized fridge in my room which was a please eat bribe from my mom) and made me keep a negative thought journal. Whenever I thought something like "I'm so fat I don't know how anyone can stand looking at me." or "That apple slice had all my calories for the day now I can't eat anything else." or "My mom is ten minutes late coming home from work she must have died in a horrible car accident." I had to stop whatever I was doing and write it down. This helped because 1. I saw how ridiculous I was after a few weeks of rereading my daily entries and 2. I got tired of writing these things down. And while I'm usually obsessing over something in my head nothing has been as bad as things were in adolescence until now. Of course I have considered starting another fun notebook of all my nasty obsessive thoughts but I don't have time for that with a toddler and I'm not so sure it would even work. Until I get pregnant I can't imagine anything distracting me from trying to get pregnant.

Since no one in real life wants to hear about it I finally decided to blog about it because after rereading my old diaries I remembered how fucking good it feels to write things out. I also realized how annoying 14-16 year old Emily was (sorry mom) and I don't want to be obsessed and annoying like that here but I need an outlet. I promise to head up any posts like this with a warning and people can skip over them and look at pictures of the little man and continue to like me. Seems fair right?