Y’know, the original plan was for Alex and me to work on this blog together, consistently. Funny how life turns out.
We did get married on December 17, 2016! And I found out on October 10, 2016, just two days after we took our engagement pictures, that I was pregnant with our first child. My due date was exactly six months after our wedding day. We later found out we were expecting a little boy.
The pregnancy was rough, as were our finances, since I was on bed rest and couldn’t work and Alex was a full-time student and couldn’t work a job on top of homework and studying. We still have some credit card debt, but we’ve been switching things around to avoid interest and we should get it all paid off within the next year or two.
After many stressful non-stress tests, the doctor decided I needed to be induced. I was 38 weeks and 5 days along, and our son Ian was born on June 6, 2017. He weighed over nine pounds, even though he was less than 20 inches long, and his head was in one of the larger percentiles. That explains why it took so long to push him out! If it had taken another 45 minutes the doctor would have had me do a C-section. Can you tell how exhausted I was? It felt like a dream when they handed me my son for the first time, but not a magical dream. More like the kind of weird dream where you don’t know how to take anything that happens so you just roll with it and don’t really feel any emotions at all. Also, come to think of it, Alex’s mustache makes him look totally creepy. Don’t worry, it’s gone now and it’s probably never coming back.
Ian is 19 months old now, and he’s a very active child who knows exactly what he wants. We love him to pieces. After he was born, though, I took a hard hit with post-partum depression and psychosis. It wasn’t the kind of psychosis that made me want to hurt my child. The harmful desires were exclusively directed at myself, and were likely an extension of an undiagnosed illness I already have. We started going to marriage counseling shortly after Ian was born, and once the psychosis really settled in I secretly began making plans to divorce Alex, leave him with Ian, and travel the world living an awful partying lifestyle with drugs and alcohol and who knows what else. The only thing holding me back was the thought of hurting Alex when I didn’t actually blame him for anything; I wanted us to get through enough therapy that he’d survive that. As if. Fortunately the psychosis cleared up quite rapidly after about six months of suffering, and Alex never had any idea it had happened until afterwards. We’ve been making upwards progress ever since. In fact, just about four weeks ago we were sealed for time and all eternity in the Payson Temple! (We’re members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
Our relationship is kind of extra unique. The thing is, Alex is autistic. That isn’t a problem until you take into account both of our extreme lack of experience in romantic/loving relationships. I’m depressed, anxious, occasionally (ranging to constantly) delusional about various things, slightly OCD (unofficially diagnosed by our marriage therapist), with symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder. I desperately want to feel loved. Alex is desperate to grasp onto some idea of how to make me feel loved and acknowledge/validate my emotions. And we’re both screwing up in dozens of areas in the meantime because of our mental setbacks, and aggravating the worst parts of each other as we struggle to understand what’s wrong with us and how to work around it.
We also have a handful of issues that don’t have as much to do with our relationship with each other. Alex is struggling to make enough money to support us, and struggling with the idea of being in a career that will continue to pay him enough to support us as our family grows. He wants to do more with his hobbies and possibly turn those into sources of income, but he struggles a lot with that because of some of his autistic quirks and traits. Meanwhile, I’m working on writing books, and I really want to get my first one published, ASAP. I’ve been saying, “I’ll get published this year!” for like five years now, no joke. I’ve also started a huge collection of nonfiction books that I desperately want to read to educate myself in order to be a better writer and member of society. Recently I signed up to be a Beachbody coach just so I could get the discount on Shakeology, which I love, but I haven’t been exercising or eating healthy much otherwise. Working on any of those goals at all is hard enough as a homemaker with a crazy toddler around. I’ve got to cook the food and put away the laundry and keep everything organized and do whatever else Alex doesn’t have time to help with at home, on top of taking care of and cleaning up after Ian. Usually it’s hard enough for Alex to stay on top of the dishes, which I typically save for last. Not to mention, I really want to do more with my son. I want to spend more time playing with him and teaching him, and actually take him outside (in the cold–ugh!) every now and then, since he loves being out there. The last three weeks have been especially hard as I’ve been going through my first miscarriage, and I’m so exhausted that it’s all I can do to sit on the couch and stare at a screen to keep myself awake. Usually I’m not nearly such a couch potato, and it’s taken a toll on my self esteem as a mother and housewife.
Alex and I love each other, very much. We both want to show it, and we want our marriage to last for eternity. Sometimes the only reason we have any hope at all is because of this divine sense of commitment we’ve felt for each other since the moment we met. We want our lives to improve. We want to stay better organized and stick to efficient routines and have time for each other after taking care of everything else, rather than ignoring everything that needs done in order to spend time together. We want to feel like we’re on top of things, like our future is going to work out, like we’re becoming the people God knows we can be. We have so much to navigate, between ourselves and our spirituality and general responsibilities and careers and church callings. And more. There’s so much. It can be overwhelming. Honestly, our lives are kind of a wreck if you look at everything piece by piece. Yet we’re still working it out. We’re still surviving. And this is part of what I’ve come back to this blog for–to show our journey as we learn to do more than survive, as we ‘discover gravity.’ We both know we’re destined for great things. We know we have the potential to get in charge of our lives. And I’m hoping that we can serve as some form of inspiration for others who are struggling with similar issues. I won’t lie–it would also be really cool if we could start monetizing this blog in the future. I’m all for the entrepreneurial route, and I’d love to make money while still being a stay-at-home mom (and writing!).
Anyway, here on this blog I am going to be raw. I’m not going to hide anything (save it be things that are sacred, in which case, is it really ‘hiding’?). I’m not just going to talk about the things that are going right, because we struggle, and you struggle, and everyone struggles, and it’s okay to talk about it and to talk about how we overcome our struggles. It’s okay to be real. I love being real. So, we’re going to be real. We’re going to talk about the nasty stuff. We’re going to talk about our faith. I’m going to talk about my fears and the despair I feel at times–later today I’ll probably write a blog post that covers faith and fear in my experience with this miscarriage and how suicidal I’ve been all day today. In the future I’ll also write posts on our progression, on what’s worked, on what we’ve learned about ourselves and each other, on the goals we’ve reached and the excitement we feel because of how far we’ve come.
So. I’m excited. Excited enough that I almost moved this blog to a site where I could start monetizing better tonight, except the cost for that web site turned out to be like eight times more expensive than that website claimed once all the hidden fees were taken into account. I guess I’ll save up and start posting regularly before I do that.
Anyway. Thank you for reading! And please, know you are loved. If you ever need someone to talk to, you can always reach out to me and I will do my best to respond. Assuming I don’t get super popular and get so many responses that I couldn’t possibly keep up with them. Haha. Yeah, right. But then again, you never know.
And since I’m trying to be real as can be and I haven’t shown you any pictures of Ian except the day he was born, here’s the latest picture of the two of us where I’m not wearing any makeup:
Discovering Gravity 