33 Weeks

 33 weeks along...only 7 weeks to go and it both feels like this is taking forever and like it's flying by. 

Oh yeah. And cal and I both caught covid this week. 

Sigh. 

You know what's weird? I know I have a crap ton of stuff on my plate to finish up so I can graduate and get things ready for the baby and everything, but why do I have such a hard time giving myself grace and forgiving myself for shortcomings? 

Like, I'm literally 33 weeks pregnant AND I have covid. I feel like sh*t. I have no energy. I also feel awful on top of the no energy. Yet I'm beating myself up for the unopened Amazon packages, for the unwashed dishes, for the lack of mental focus...and feeling like I'm a bad wife/person in general. 

If there were ever a time to cut myself some slack, it would be now, would it not? But I only have five days to complete my master's capstone project (when I got all my official instructions I only had two weeks). 

I need to change my...what's the word? Priorities? No. I need to set boundaries for myself and stick to them. For too long I have had the habit of taking on too much on my plate at once, and I also have issues that make it hard for me to cope with that. 

Like, I was raised to be a people-pleaser, by a people-pleaser. Who had serious anxiety issues and I suffered the brunt of them. So I never learned coping mechanisms. I had to figure them out on my own, and I didn't even get allowed to use them properly. 

Being pregnant has brought up a lot of thoughts about how I don't want to be anything like my parents when it comes to being a parent myself. Yes, they did their best with what they knew, but ugh, where do I even begin? They treated me like I was a parent to them. They made me their marriage counselor from the time I was less than ten years old. I grew up feeling like every time they argued, it was my fault somehow. My father relied on me WAY too much, from when I was a teenager I went grocery shopping, paid the bills, cashed his checks, listened to his marital problems and stresses and tried to give him advice (he would literally come home from work and talk to me instead of my mother about his day), I did the laundry...and I know some of these are life skills that a child needs to learn, but not in the way that I did. It got to the point where now that I'm married and have moved out, he is learning to do all this stuff on his own. He didn't even know how or where to go grocery shopping, or how much food cost. 

He would tell me story ideas over the dinner table, tell me to write them up, and send them to Warner Bro's as movie ideas, but how should a 15 year old know how to do that? What's to stop Warner Bro's from stealing the idea? Wouldn't it need a lawyer? Or a thousand other nuanced things? Where would I find their contact info/who to contact about story ideas? Who would read the contracts/do all the communication back and forth? It's not that simple. And then he would blame me for us not being rich - saying if I were to just have written down the story that he told me in fifteen minutes over dinner once - then we could be millionaires and own a house. 

But that's how his ideas always go. He gets a half-baked idea, tells it to me, and expects me to make it happen so that his dreams can come true. Always in something that I have zero interest in, too - so it would take away time from what I actually want to do with my life. 

Sigh. 

Anyway. My point is, I really don't want to be like them. I don't want to care what other people think, because really, how does that affect me? As long as I'm doing what's right, it doesn't matter. There will always be busybodies and nosy people and those who think they have a right to be super involved in your private life. Which they don't. 

That being said, my dad doesn't even have the right to be super involved in my life anymore. And I'm rather annoyed with him and rather annoyed with the fact that I still feel like I need to not disappoint him.

I have to enforce my boundaries.

And learn to give myself grace. 

I'm tired of typing...I think I'll get some rest.