But then the fact that I had a bit more energy, and less of my brain was being occupied with pain, nausea and general hormonal fog, meant that I actually started feeling more down (in the 'metaphorical large black cloud hanging over head' sort of way). The fact that I have nothing to do, and have actually lost touch with quite a few people over the past few months, became a lot more apparent. And I also realised that a lot of the people I was 'hanging out' with on forums - as a low-stress substitute for actual human interaction - were actually really quite unpleasant, and in some cases doing things which were borderline criminal. I even lurked on Mumsnet, in search of a new online home, but there's no way I can cope with quite so much domestic ... 'stuff' - so I'm now officially homeless in the virtual world as well as being pretty stuck in the real one.
One of my friends - who is still employed, and has a two year old - described pregnancy even in a work environment as very isolating, as nobody really has an expectations of what you should or should not be doing. The way I had always seen it - from the other side of the fence - was that other people had to assume that you could perform as normal (even when it was patently obvious that you couldn't) - and then had to pick up the pieces without complaint when you didn't. Either way, it does seem that, whatever the context, pregnancy sucks - I'd just like the opportunity to try the alternative right now, as it might at least distract me!
Anyway, just when I was trying to cheer myself up by starting to try to plan a holiday and think about trying to get back to studying, I threw up again. Thankfully it wasn't the usual start of a 24-hour stomach-acid storm - I was able to eat 'normally' again after a few hours - but it completely destroyed the tiny bit of confidence that I'd managed to scrape together. I'm getting anxious about the Downs risk again now; but I'm also anxious about the birth, about what will happen after the birth, whether I'm going to get varicose veins, how heavy I'm going to get, whether I'll ever get a job again, whether the husband is going to lose his job, whether the balcony drain is blocked and whether the boiler is going to blow up. If I manage to stop thinking about one of them something else looms large in its place, and I can't see that removing one of the factors completely would actually change the overall effect.
Which brings me, finally, to something else I failed to blog about on a timely basis. The Stephen Fry Twitterstorm (I really, really want it to be a fritterstorm, but I have no way of disseminating or enforcing this...): he's bipolar, and posted something which made it clear to anyone who has even the vaguest notion of what that means that he was thinking of quitting Twitter at a time when he was experiencing a 'down'. It's well-documented that his downs can be quite severe, but don't tend to last very long. So the entirety of the British media machine - including the BBC news website, the main Channel 4 news bulletin, and most of the broadsheets - decide to report the story as news. However, the story wasn't 'Stephen Fry has mood swing': it was 'Stephen Fry quits Twitter because it's too nasty'. Fry was apparently on a plane for most of the fuss, and felt a lot better about life when he landed to sunshine in LA - but that doesn't pardon the fact that the media response was utterly unhinged, and completely failed to take his psychiatric history into account (even though the same media outlets had also reported that in some detail, a year or two back). Grrrr.
I can't help envying him the sunshine, though.
(Nothing at all like life in this particular corner of W14 - especially as that picture seems to insist on being quite a bit bigger than I want it to be.)
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