3.13.2003

i am terribly lonely. my husband is away all day at school, teaching, learning and then once home he is away all night reading, researching. my son is wonderful, but cannot speak let alone fill the void in my day where adult interaction should be. i have not met and befriended anyone here in my new town. i've met other mothers, but have been unable to feel a connection with any one of them. i am so bored with all of this. i love my son and love the opportunity to stay home with him, but there's a limit to how much of this i can handle. my sanity may be fast escaping. that is an exaggeration, but most certainly points in the direction of the truth of the sensation. i create staring eyes in my head and sense immense disparities in experience between myself and the older mommies. actually, i think i sense those disparities between myself and everyone these days. maybe i've just become way too attuned to them. sometimes it's the age difference, or an imbalance in intellectual endeavors (be it my education or theirs). other times its parenting styles, or some other fundamental value that's not in sync. when i'm feeling especially lonely, however, it always seems to come back to my son's cleft. i remember talking to a woman from my prenatal yoga class a few days after alex's birth and asking her how her birth went. she told me about the birth and the subsequent time with the baby and how perfect it all was. her biggest problem was that she'd eaten lots of broccoli and caused her daughter gas. i couldn't believe it. i'd had a great birth with no problems, but my son was born with a defect and couldn't breastfeed and hearing about some other person's perfect life just made my skin crawl. and when i'm feeling like i just can't make any friends in this town, i remember that instance. i see women out with their babies and think of trying to make friends, but then remember that we've got a surgery coming up and i just don't have the time to invest in making friends. or i get really ridiculously down and start feeling all this jealousy. sometimes i just don't understand why i couldn't have a perfect baby (not that alex isn't perfect - he's wonderful, but a defect's a defect and i don't want him to have to go through this crap). because there are so many of them around. it seems so easy to have a perfect baby. i see them all the time. and i know that every kid has their own things that they'll have to deal with - be it allergies or trouble in school or not fitting in, or whatever. i also know that we have it great compared to what's possible. i guess i just haven't gotten to the point where i can just accept how much alex enriches my life and not be pissed off for him and for myself about the years of struggle that lay ahead. that is what i come back to again and again - that i'm really pissed off about this. i'm jealous of other women, i feel like all of this is so unjust, unfair, miserable...