Oops!

I was about to write a long entry about my productive, relaxing day, but Linnea just woke up, so you'll have to make do with the summary! The house is clean, I've been to the library and had lunch out and read a lot of email, and I feel well and dinner will be ready when I get home.

I'm writing this in Debenhams.

How it coudl be worse, and why that is totally irrelevant

Linnea could have been sick.

We could both have died.

I could have had a fourth degree tear, which would be so much worse I'd have had my repair surgery by now, but it probably wouldn't have worked.

We could be living somewhere without a postnatal PTSD clinic, so I could be getting treatment for postnatal depression instead of what's really wrong with me.

Rob could have gotten tired of living with a sick woman and a hard-work baby and left us.

My legs could have gone green and runny and fallen off, the world could have been hit by strange flying dinosaurs, and an asteroid could have eaten my mother.

None of this has happened to me. And you know what? Knowing that doesn't make any of the pain go away, and it doesn't stop the nightmares, and it doesn't stop the flashbacks and the panic attacks.

And the next person who tells me how hard all this is for Rob will get punched on the nose - poink - just like that. Yes, it's hard for him. I know. I can't make it any less hard for him because I'm minimising all I can right now. I feel quite guilty enough at being an emotional burden on him, putting him through the horror of having to observe my agonies and so on, and I don't need any help with that.

I've been wanting to say this for weeks. I suppose it needed to wait until I could do it without crying.