Reasons I think my dp wants to stay around:

Fear of Aaron
Fear of the past repeating itself
Pain from the abuse I went through and the losses that I've suffered in life
Possibly my phobias that are difficult to face in reality but they are going to happen regardless of if I have dp or not


Reasons to no longer hold on to dp anymore:

I have everything I've always wanted: Gorgeous, loving husband, baby on the way, own my own home
I'm not afraid of Aaron anymore, atleast like 90% better. There's no reason to fear him because he cannot get access to me anymore. He can't scream at me or abuse me. I call the shots. It's all on my terms now and if he dares to come near my I will beat the living shit out of him.
Anthony is committed to being with me for the rest of his life and will never leave me. I am safe with him. I can trust him. He protects and spoils me. He provides for the kids and I.
I don't want to experience this pregnancy, the birth of the baby, my marriage, or anymore of my life dissociated.
I want to recover. It's time for it to leave. I want a normal life again.


I'm afraid because the process of my reality changing is and will be scary but the thought of living with dp and missing out on any more of my life is even scarier.

The little girl inside of my went through some really tough and terrible things but she is safe now and no one is going to hurt her anymore. I won't allow it and neither will my husband. It's ok for her to stop hiding and to come out, be held, be protected, be loved. Everything is safe and ok now. It's time to recover.

I think that I've finally realized that a huge source of my anxiety, stress, worry, fear, dp, is that I don't trust God and I don't trust those in my life who can give me the comfort and safety that I so deeply crave. I feel, in so many ways, that my inner child never grew up and I've always craved the type of love and security that children are supposed to get from their parents. I know that when I left my parents' house and got married the first time, my child like attachment went from my parents to my ex. And I think that maybe the thing that screwed me up more than anything was that I latched onto him like another lifesource and he abused me and left me without any sense of safety at all. I had to grow strong and calloused to be able to survive in the world on my own and I suffered very deeply mentally and emotionally from that experience. And, to my surprise, letting go of that callousness has been much more difficult for me than I ever would have imagined. I guess it's a safeguard that I built for myself and began to deeply fear the vulnerability that letting go of that safeguard would cause me, even if the comfort and security that I am so desperate for is only attainable by lowering those walls. All of this came into my conscious understanding not too long ago and with it, I made the decision to let go, to make myself vulnerable, to allow my inner child to attach to my husband and let myself be protected, be loved, be held in safety. Let me tell you, it feels like gulping down cool water when you've been in a desert for days without any. Only, my heart has been a desert for over a decade and even with every ounce of love and affection he pours into me, I find myself frantic and thirsty for more. It's soothing and freeing and I find myself feel more at peace and happy. We spent the weekend away together this past weekend and he had Monday off as well and I realized that through parts of it, particularly Monday, I was completely relaxed physically and reality felt like it would come back any second. The dp was lighter, the film thinner, reality just right there. That's incredibly remarkable for me. That is HUGE. The ability to feel physically relaxed is something that I haven't been able to grasp and has been a huge issue for me for a long time. I feel that it, along with allowing myself to trust God and trust the protection and provision of my husband, will be the keys to my recovery. I also recently have started to try out different strains of Satvia in hopes that their properties will help me in my effects to attain relaxation as well and have found that they do relax me but the effects are much more short lived than I had hoped. The physical relaxation and euphoria are wonderful but it does come along with some detachment and feeling funny mentally, which I don't like. Coming down, clarity returned but my anxiety returned right along with it.

Things

Things I want to accomplish during my days at home:

Keep the house tidy
Wash, Dry, Fold Laundry
Go to the YMCA and exercise every day
Have dinner made every day
Practice photography
Read the bible

Things I'd like to pursue:
Singing
Baking
Dance
Art classes
Find a church with a small group and/or mid week services

93 minus 7

Today would have been your 93rd birthday. This year you will have been gone for 7 years. I can't tell you how much those 7 years feel like an entire lifetime. I thought for a minute about getting flowers and taking them to your grave. Yellow roses. I know you would have loved them. But then I stopped and remembered that you're not there. As much as I still love you, as much as I want more than anything to bring you flowers on your birthday and do something to put a smile on your face, I can't. You won't see them. They'll sit lonely and quiet in the cold January air. No one will notice them, except maybe the groundskeeper, who will look on them with a sad smile. But you know what? That's ok. Because I know that you're with Jesus and I have no doubt that you're experiencing a more beautiful birthday than any of us can even imagine.
 Today I'm thinking about what a profound effect you had on my life and what a profound loss I experienced when you died. I would say that it has possibly been the single most profound loss I've ever had to walk through. I don't think that I was even consciously aware of this at the time but in retrospect, I realize that you were the person that I loved most in my childhood. You were a safe and unconditional source of love for me. The only safe and unconditional source of love in my life. The grief of that loss is something that I have yet to even begin to process, let alone overcome. For some reason, I can't access it. I never really have been able to. From a few days after you died I just went numb and from then on, the only emotion that I've managed to feel are a few brief seconds of sadness followed by complete numbness. I think that my brain instinctively knows that if I were to feel the full weight of that pain, that it would break my heart in a way that it could never possibly heal itself again. Or maybe my heart simply is broken beyond repair. Because you never ever stop hurting over the loss of someone that you truly love. The pain changes with time but it is never gone. There is always a void there that no one else can fill. I love you and miss you. I don't wish you back because I know that you were tired and in constant pain. But I do wish that I could sit and talk with you. I wish that my kids could know your sweetness and friendship. I wish that you could continue to be the glue that held our family together because once you left, we all self destructed and never came back together again. The core of who we are is gone and I don't think that any of us can salvage it. We can't replace what we've lost.
  I've tried so hard to keep your memory alive by showing my kids pictures of you and telling them about what a wonderful person you were. Meg remembers you. Jaikob and Kaleb do not. Kaleb will someones lay on my lap and longingly mention that he wishes that he could have known you. I think that on some deep level, he knows that he has missed out on something incredibly special. I have to say that, hands down, Jenn has gotten everyone beat when it comes to memorials. Each Christmas she has given me something that was a momento or reminder of you. This year she took your favorite housedresses and fashioned them into pillows for us to cuddle when we miss you. The only thing that could have possibly made them more perfect would have been if she has scented them with baby powder because then they would smell like you.
 January 20th gave birth to one of the most beautiful souls. It is my honor to have known you, to have been loved and taught by you. You shaped the person that I am today and gave me such a powerful example of what a woman, mother, grandmother, and Christ follower should be. Happy 93rd Birthday Grandma Ruth. I love you more than you could ever know.

And so it starts.

I don't even know where to begin. I guess, first and foremost, I just feel overwhelmingly sad. More than sad. Kind of heartbroken. I have that aching feeling in my chest. The one you get when you lose someone you love. Or you miss someone. I'm sad and disappointed and maybe even a little bit angry. And I don't really know how to sit with those feelings. I have a life. I have kids, work, a house to clean, errands to run, a relationship to invest in. I guess maybe I feel like I cannot give myself the permission to acknowledge my pain because it takes times and attention away from everything else and, let's face it, I don't have time to be sad. But I am sad.

I lost a baby almost a month ago. I wanted to get pregnant for a long time, years off and on really. I'm 32.  My biological drives are going insane right now. I know that I'm running out of time. And I really really want to experience that feeling of a baby growing and kicking inside of me again. I want to hold and nurse a newborn again. I want to have a sweet cuddly little baby and toddler again. But I am petrified of everything that comes after that. I don't honestly think I really want another child, another teenager, another person making messes and needing me to invest my already thinly stretched resources in. It's a very deeply confusing struggle to have my biological drives completely overwhelming my rational thought. I've gone back and forth no less than a million times on wanting another baby. Do I? Don't I? And then it happened. And I had about 2 or 3 hours where I freaked out and thought about abortion or adoption and then realized that as freaked out as I was, I wanted that baby. And I got to have about 24 hours of happiness before I started bleeding. And then, over the course of the next two weeks I lost that baby and it broke my heart. My fiance' and I started looking forward to that version of our future together and then it was taken away. We didn't know what to do but name our baby and tell our closest family and friends about it's existence because we were losing our child, a child that would not leave behind a body or grave as evidence of it's existence. I snapped the only photo I got of myself pregnant and tucked my positive pregnancy tests away in a drawer to save for a scrapbook page or something later down the road. And we just tried to move on with our lives.

I didn't really know what to expect with my cycles after a miscarriage and was pretty shocked that my body seemed to be fertile again two weeks later. Because of what my body was doing and what I read about increased fertility after miscarriage, I was sure that I was going to end up pregnant again this month. Before my pregnancy my cycles followed a pattern of "signs and symptoms" that were distinctly absent during the cycle that I got pregnant. And, again, they have been absent this cycle as well. I've had symptom I had during my pregnancy but, morning after morning, I've gotten negative pregnancy tests and, morning after morning, my hope has turned into despair. It's been like almost grasping your dreams and then watching it slowly slip from your fingers. Each day the answer grew louder in my heart until I just knew. My period hasn't even come yet and no one has to tell me. I just know. I'm not pregnant. I really don't understand what happened because I was absolutely convinced it was happening. I'm completely at a loss but it's not and I'm so deeply disappointed. There are all of these logical talking points swirling around in my head, trying to reason with me and convince me why this is all for the best. But my heart and the overwhelming instinct to reproduce are screaming so loudly that everything else is being drowned out. I'm not pregnant and despite every logical reason why now isn't an ideal time, I don't care. I want to be pregnant. I want my baby I lost. I want the one I thought I was having this time. That's all that I can see.

So I'm sad. Depressed. Confused. Grieving.

And I don't know what to do with that.