Another brick in the wall....

It has been a crappy week. The past couple of weeks, I had tried to start getting myself back out into society. As usual with any cycles, I had turned inward and pretty much removed myself from any situations that would be stressful. I met up with a girlfriend a couple of weeks ago and that was a resounding success. After that success, I thought I would really put myself out there by offering to help my sister with her baby shower. I organized a catch up with her two best friends and we got together a list of questions to ask my sister so that she could decide what she wanted. One of the girls was going to see her on the Saturday and ask her all of the questions. I ended up seeing her on the Sunday and asked her about it. I realized pretty quickly that she was angry with me. This is not unusual but I was at a loss as to what I had done. I think I have now realized what she is angry about. I think that she wants her friends organising the baby shower and not me. It is definitely an assumption that I am making but I don't know what else she could be angry about. I feel pretty hurt by it actually, I was just hoping to make it a really special time for her. Our relationship has been very fraught over the past few years, and most of the time I find myself apologizing to her, treading on eggshells around her or being overly nice to her so that she would forgive me for something that I had done. Sometimes it is even for things that I had not done, one of which was that she thought I called her (current) boyfriend (they were broken up at the time) an arsehole but it wasn't me who said it, it was my older sister. I even brought that up with her recently and said it was my older sister and she said 'whatever, I don't want to talk about it'. So, I am stepping back from it. I will do anything that anyone asks me to do for it but I'm not going to take the lead on it.

Another incident occurred after I had my counseling session this week. This needs a bit of background. On Saturday night, I am going to my cousin's wife's 40th birthday. I am not really close to her or my cousin but she is a nice girl and I always was going to go, that was until I realized the Footy was on on Saturday night and my team was playing. The reason that this is a big deal is that I thought immediately that I would be able to watch it with my dad. That's my thing with Dad, we watch the Footy together, it is how I relate to him. I mentioned it when I was at the psychologist and we talked it through and talked about how I do a lot of things because that is what someone else wants and for me it was important to spend this time with my Dad because I don't know how many games that we have left that we can watch together. I talked to my Mum about it and I was shocked that she thought it was more important for me to go to the cousins wife's 40th. She was really mn about it too, basically saying that it was extremely rude and that she is going to feel bad because only me and maybe my younger sister are going. It really hurt me that she rates her desire not to look bad above me spending time with my Dad. It is really strange to me because she related to her own Dad over the Footy, I thought she would have understood. Needless to say, I am going to the cousins birthday instead of spending the night with my Dad but I have lost a lot of trust with my Mum. She has asked to come with me to take JBB for his final test and whilst I don't want her to come, I wil never use JBB as a pawn in a relationship with my mum. I will ensure that it is off limits to talk about Saturday night though, I will not be talking about that.

So, my foray out into society has come to a screeching halt, in fact, I am reversing at full speed. I am very tired, I am in a massively vulnerable place and I need some walls around me for protection. I am so sensitive to anything that people are saying to me, especially family that I am not going talk about anything of consequence. Here is my off limits list of conversations:

1. My Dad
2. Cycles, Thailand or pregnancy
3. My feelings about anything

I am stopping all outings that are going to put me in a position of spending time with my family, no more market on Saturdays, no more Reiki, no more trips to the shops with my Mum, I am in self protection mode now. I need to minimise the opportunities that i can get hurt. Looks like I will have some nice conversations about the weather, about JBB and about the Footy. That's fine cos in my fortress, I still have my great stalwarts of support, JourneyMan and my Bestie and of course you lovely readers of my blog. I'm fine, is going to become my new mantra to the world and really, maybe if I say it enough, I will be.

Thanks for reading if you made it down to this far.