Welcome to Gaia! ::

Okay. I guess I'll start out the Journaling forum. I don't mind comments or helpful remarks in my journal at all, in fact I encourage them. I guess I'll start out with sort of a cast of characters for reference.

I'm Raven. I'm Borderline Personality and Bi polar.

Tahiri is my daughter. She's almost three months old.

Joe is Tahiri's father and my boyfriend. He lives with us.

Sherry is my mom. Joe and I are staying with her and her husband while we get our lives together as far as money goes.

Justin is my mom's husband. We don't exactly get along very well.

Cody, Dakota, Chris, Lauren, and Remington are my D&D group and the only acquaintances or sort of friends that I have outside the internet.

Nel and Sarah are my best friends. I only know them online but they are two of the greatest girls ever.

Anyway those are the people most likely to be mentioned in here. And I'll try to keep this journal as low trigger as possible.

Lately I find the thought of being alone tramatizing. Panic inducing really. Usually 1-2 days a week Joe goes off to play video games with his friends and I stay home because if I didn't we'd have to take Tahiri with us, she would cry the whole time, and no one would have any fun. So I opt to be the one that doesn't have fun instead. This has always bothered me a bit. Enough that sometimes I don't want him to go. I never get a chance really to be without Tahiri (don't get me wrong, I love my child, I really do. It just seems like I never have a moment to myself.) And it strikes me as unfair that he can go have fun whenever he wants and just expect me to stay home with the baby.

Today though when he said he was leaving I almost had a panic attack. I didn't want him to go. Period. He ended up asking my mom to watch Tahiri for a couple of hours so I could go with him. Though I'll still have to go home before he'll want to.

Even being out with him I feel anxious. I feel alone. He makes snide comments whenever I touch him or hug him that make me want to run away. It seems like he doesn't want me near. Or that he's bitter about having to take me with him. Still, I'm not looking forward to going home alone.

This newly intense feeling of dread is probably directly related to an arguement we had a few days ago where he said he was going to leave. It started out as not a big deal, a little fight over a little offense. But then he just stopped talking in the middle of it, which always infuriates me. I threw a fit. He responded with yelling and such. Things just progressed until he said he was leaving and started packing stuff.

I screamed and cried and begged. I made a big deal about how I couldnt raise a child alone and he might as well take her with him and leave me completely alone with nothing. I don't know what was wrong with me, or what got into me. Lately it seems these small arguements turn into these fits, these huge fights, and I remember so little afterwards of what happened. Even as it's occuring, I feel like I'm sitting outside of the situation, at a window looking in at someone else's life. I hear myself screaming and crying and carrying on about whatever it is I'm saying and yet I'm not thinking of what I'm saying, its like my mouth moves on its own. Like its someone other than me freaking out like that. When its over I remember everything with the distant fuzziness of trying to remember a movie you saw many years ago.

It wasn't until I was so exhausted that I couldn't continue and seemed therefore calm that he said he wasn't going to leave. That he could handle it. He figured that I had wanted him to leave but even after I had made it clear that wasn't the case he still said he was going. He says he isn't now. And that he was just angry. But it makes me afraid. Now it seems that if he's leaving my sight he's not coming back. I'm beginning to see why my poor daughter cries when I leave a room. In her mind, once I am out of sight I am gone forever. That's how I feel right now. Like a baby who has no idea if someone is ever coming back to take care of them. I know, logically, that its probably not the case. That most likely he is returning. But before I can force up those thoughts I'm over come with panic. My head spins, I get nauseus and tears spring to my eyes. I don't know what to do.

I still don't know what to do. He said today before we left "You want me to get a job, don't you? (he's been looking for one for several months). I was torn between yes and no. Yes, I know we need him to have one. We need the money to get our own place and take care of Tahiri. But NO, no I don't want him to leave me alone every single day. What if something happens to Tahiri? I don't know anything about babies, I'm learning as I go. Or what if -I- need him? What if I can't handle whatever is going on by myself? What if I'm scared and alone and Nel and Sarah aren't online to comfort me into being calm again? What will I do then?

I think about going back to the doctors and going back on medication. But then I think how bad I'll feel because I'll have to stop nursing Tahiri because of the pills. And then I think of what the meds did to me before. How they made me feel like a zombie, how good that felt for a while. Until they stopped making me so numb and I had to take more and more of them. And then they didn't make me feel numb and I couldn't take more of them so I started taking narcotic pain killers instead to search for that place without emotion. I can't possibly imagine that I could take care of a baby in that state. Or even take care of myself.

*sigh* I'm sitting here thinking of how I should go soon. How Tahiri is probably upset and my mom is probably getting stressed out trying to deal with her. And how my back hurts and I'm tired and I'd love to cuddle up and take a nap. But I'm scared. I'm afraid to go alone. My mom will be home so I wont be there entirely by myself but its not the same.

Sorry for the huge wall of text...

I suppose you have to weigh the pros and the cons of the situation. It helps if you narrow down your options. Like,

a. Stay where you are,
b. Move.

And make a list like,

a. If I stay where I am, I'll have ABC pros, but XYZ cons.

b. If I move, there will be ABC pros, XYZ cons.

To me it sounds like moving would be the best thing to do. I'm not sure if it's a widely applicable thing, but I know that every time a major change has happened in my life, whether it was good or bad, it usually brought good things with it.

Are you folks able to save up money in the meantime?

I don't consider it fair that I can be viewed as "wrong" for not exhibiting "normal", but (at least in my opinion) undesirable traits. Example: I'm not perverted, I don't look at people and think "oh I want to ******** them", I think considering people desirable based on their looks is a disgusting behavior, and I think people prancing around naked are pornographic. So I'm wrong for -not- being a pervert. I'm wrong for thinking people should keep their clothes on and thinking that models and porn stars present an unrealistic and unfair view of what a perfect woman is. Sure, painters from centuries ago painted nude women. Often with the intent of showing form or historical figures (Bottecelli's Venus, for example). There is a big difference in painting Venus and shoving a naked girl in front of a camera so people can scrutinize whether or not she has been edited into being "sexy" and if she has, fantasize about screwing her. Which brings me to another problem, women shouldn't have to be edited into being what people consider appealing. It isn't realistic and it usually narrows the range of what people will view as pretty. In this time period one body type, one facial shape, one set of features is considered perfect. The rest? The ones on the other 95% of women? Disgusting. Ugly. How is that fair? In older paintings Venus doesn't look like any of the Madonnas who don't look like Mona Lisa. Yet they are still considered attractive. The model for the Mona Lisa was once considered one of the most beautiful women in the world. Now most men think she's ugly. What does that say about where our standards have gone?

You know the really messed up thing about all this? I didn't -care- about any of it until I met Joe. I wonder if its his fascination with sex and "beauty" that makes me so bitter.