no good feelings

In about two more days, we'll be leaving Carbondale, Illinois and heading back to Seattle, Washington for two more weeks before flying to my home of Kaohsiung, Taiwan for two months before our "final" destination of Haifa, Israel.

I don't know if my periodic bursts of feeling hopeless, dread, sadness, nausea, just plain suicidal has anything to do with another descent into antepartum depression, or just the stress of all the international paperwork and packing that we've been doing every six months for the last two years, or the last week in Seattle when Daniel will go to a math conference in Utah i.e. I will be home alone with Declan and probably nobody else because that's part of moving all the time--not having any community. Or maybe once morning sickness subsides, I will feel normal again.

I hate being pregnant. I really do. If memory serves me well, it only gets worse before it gets better. This will for sure be our last child, biologically. I'm open to adoption later, but honestly, some people are just not meant to be pregnant. Ever. I hate being pregnant so badly, and dread all that will naturally follow later, that I'm actually 20% hoping that I'll have a first trimester miscarriage. It's awful, I know, but let me be honest.

Maybe all this feeling awful is homesickness, perhaps. I haven't been back home to Taiwan since our wedding banquet about 2.5 years ago. That's a really long time to be away for me, and I've been dreaming almost every night of all the food that can be found only in Taiwan. I had come upon a fruit store here in Carbondale that sells a lot of "Asian" produce, and threw caution to the wind in grabbing bags of lychee and papaya to buy. The cashier jokingly gave me a hard time about buying "the most expensive fruits in the store!" And I only waited as long as the time it took to walk out the store to break into the bag of lychee. Turned out Declan loves lychees too, but not papaya. Maybe he'll like the papaya in Taiwan; there's still no substitute for those.

Right now, he's watching cartoons in the living room with his cousins. I think I need to go at least change his diaper.