Guilt, Rage, Panic, Outbursts, Bah, Bah, Bah

I know I write more about the negative aspects of pregnancy than the positive, and that sometimes I forget how cool it is to have a real little person in my belly, and how I get to be the one to feel her move around and bond with her and know her little funny womb habits, but you know what? Deal with it, I'm cranky.

I decided to take a personal leave of absence from my job before my maternity leave kicks in, and the guilt associated with feeling like I gave up is overwhelming right now. For the past couple months I've been emotional like never before, and those who know me know that I can be pretty emotional. In normal-KT mode I tend to deal with stress by taking on more stress. Case in point: while in graduate school I also worked three other jobs, danced on a dance company, and tried to train for a marathon while fundraising with the non-profit organization, TNT, to fight leukemia. WhAaaat? Yes, yes I tried to do all of that. AT THE SAME TIME. This was also the semester I was engaged to a boy from South Africa and trying to juggle my mom's ideas from Oregon and Warren's mom's ideas from South Africa, and figuring out what my ideas were (if I had any) at the same time knowing I could possibly be making a huge mistake by marrying someone who lived on the other side of the world, and moving to South Africa for an indefinite amount of time. Needless to say my life came crashing down on me one week before I was supposed to leave for South Africa when I dislocated my knee and had a breakdown that eventually landed me in a room with padded furniture. I'm not kidding.

Why am I sharing this with blogworld? I don't know...but that experience taught me how to effectively deal with stress, and more importantly how NOT to deal with it. One of my favorite professors at BYU, Dr. Cox, pulled me into her office and told me there are two ways depression manifests itself: either through tears, ambivalence and sleeping, or through what I was going through--taking on too much to avoid feeling anything. She told me then I needed ease up and take care of myself by recognizing what I was going through and making changes in my life. Unfortunately, she told me this in May of that year and I continued to beat myself up until my breakdown in December. Sometimes I like to learn the hard way.

Since then I've made an effort to only take on those things I know I can handle. I've been able to learn skills to deal with anxiety attacks when they come on and how to stop one pretty early before it turns into full-blown, debilitating panic. That's not to say I haven't had my occasional bad days, but for the most part just recognizing my problem and knowing how to cope in a more healthy way has helped me be much happier. It's not easy, but I can handle it now and have found room in my life to laugh and enjoy the small things.

Or I should say I COULD handle it pre-massive proportions of estrogen pumping through my body. These past few months have been INSANE. I know how to deal with anxiety attacks now, hell, sometimes they're even entertaining (like the time I freaked out over all the Chester molesters in my neighborhood and printed off their faces on the Chester molester site and made Warren burn the list up in our driveway just so I could feel safe from the bad guys), but it's the first kind of depression I've felt recently and it's wiping me out. At any given moment I am about to either bite off some one's head or cave into myself with tears and self-deprecation. For example, I forgot to bring pillows to a birthing class Warren and I are taking (apparently pushing a baby out requires a certificate) and I had a meltdown over it. PILLOWS. In my mind I couldn't do anything right and I was going to fail as a mom, and what was I doing having a child anyway? PILLOWS. These meltdowns happen at least 3-4 times a day, usually two smaller ones and one or two 45 minute crying episodes. It has affected my motivation to do anything and everyday has been a challenge just to wake up and take a shower. I've felt like I've been treading water to survive and it has sucked in catastrophic proportions. The worst part is I've been too embarrassed to talk to my doctor about it. The last time I was in his office I had an episode over my weight and he laughed at me (with good reason), but I was unsure how to tell him about all the other dark thoughts going on. It wasn't about my weight, my weight is just an easy scapegoat that I'm used to blaming my life's failures on. It's deeper and scarier than that and I have been ashamed to say HELP.

Last night it all about crashed again. I woke up in the middle of the night with my fists clenched so tightly my arm hurt. This morning I woke up fully prepared to face my stress, to face a high stress job, to organize what I've left go unorganized and take back control of my life. However, instead I decided to take a personal leave, and the guilt over quitting is almost as bad as the fear of failing. Part of me wants to buck up, say to myself that I'm pregnant and this is hormones and lots of women can manage just fine, but the other part of me wants to hide in the bathtub and sob. I guess today I gave into the latter and my next step needs to be accepting that right now that's okay.

On the upside, a nurse from the hospital told me that all these emotions are probably a sign that I have high amounts of estrogen, which makes for a baby with strong lungs. I'm hoping this means she's a singer and we can exploit her talent to make us really, really rich.