Monday, April 16, 2007

Just Hormones, I Hope

A lot of things are vaguely upsetting me these days. Hopefully it's like Calicat said and just hormones. Here's the run-down - not to be a whiner, just in hopes that writing it all down will give me some peace of mind:
- Smoke. Someone in one of the adjacent apartments smokes like a chimney, and due to some quirk of the ventilation system, the smoke always comes right into our apartment. Opening all the windows just seems to create a vacuum that sucks it in more vigorously. This morning I woke up and the first thing I noticed was the smoke hanging in the air, permeating everything in the apartment. I just felt desperate to get ready for work and get out of there. It's one of the reasons I wish we could live in a house - even if that's less environmental than an apartment, and we'd have longer commutes, at least we'd have a little more control over the air quality. It makes me so intensely upset - to the point of anger - that I'm trying to do everything right in this pregnancy, that my husband and I don't smoke and never have and even if we did, would have quit prior to trying to get pregnant - and yet I still breathe smoke all afternoon and evening when I'm home. I just hope that it's not at a level that is harming the baby. (If I did some research online I'd probably discover that there is no safe level of exposure.)
- Paint thinner. I was at work last week when I suddenly smelled a really strong odor like paint thinner or varnish, something sprayed from an aerosol can. I put my sleeve over my nose and breathed that way for a while, but I could still smell it. Based on some thumpy construction-type sounds I heard through the stairwell, it was something building maintenance was doing. I felt trapped, sitting at my desk at work breathing in this stuff that was probably killing off brain cells right and left - mine and the baby's.
- Cold. This isn't unhealthy, it's just something that affects my mood. I feel like it's been winter for so long, and it's never going to be spring, ever. It's just going to be cold and miserable and rainy forever. Last night the wind was howling around the apartment like it was going to tear the screens off the hinges, like it was a living being full of hatred that wanted to get in and punish us. I don't have any warm clothes any more that I can fit into, either, so every day I think, "What will I wear?"
- Space. The final frontier. If I hear one more story about how I should be decorating "the baby's room" or if one more person asks me why we're not moving, I think I'm going to burst into tears. We have no place in our apartment for baby stuff, and yet the baby is coming inevitably. Maybe it's just a frustrated nesting urge turned on itself. I want to have a room - even half a room! - even a few square feet! - where we can set up the crib and a changing table and a dresser to hold the baby's clothes. And instead there is no place for any of that stuff.
- Breast-feeding anxiety. I really want to breast-feed for the first year. But I'm preemptively worrying about whether I'll have enough milk, whether I will get the hang of feeding, whether I will be able to keep feeding after I go back to work. I don't have an office of my own where I could close the door and pump, and if I use a bathroom stall to do it, there'll be constant traffic in and out around me. I wish we could afford for me to just stay home with the baby, and feed in privacy.
- Not being able to confide in my husband. He's under so much stress of his own right now that I feel like it's my responsibility to deal with baby-related problems by myself, and not drag him into it. But labor and delivery and parenthood are bearing down on me, and even though abstractly I know that his stressful time is going to pass and then he'll be involved and supportive - and even though he is being pretty much perfect these days and so loving and nice to me -, just because I can't worry aloud to him right now it feels like I'm facing everything alone.
- The knowledge that emotional stress adversely affects the baby. I have to somehow make myself feel happy and secure, even when I'm not feeling that way at all.

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