Migraines

I started with migraines, and ended with migraines! To keep things simple, I’ll just talk migraines now.

We talked about a few possible causes:

• Grief – this time of year has a lot of painful memories.
• Relationship stress – well, you know!
• Meetings – difficulties with everything to do with online meetings – including the lack of breaks.

Richard had some good suggestions for online meetings:

• Everybody who isn’t the current speaker should be on mute.
• See if there’s a feature to highlight the current speaker.
• Enforce breaks for myself between meetings to help manage the context switching.

Two out of those three I can fix myself. The muting non-speakers I need to talk to talk to the team about.

More on “not enough”

I talked about what my husband had said about not being enough. It is mostly making sense to me.

That then connects to taking responsibility for some of the unhappiness and pain that my husband has had to endure this last year.

The idea of apologising felt difficult, since it seems as though my husband wants me to apologise for being ill. Richard said that an apology implies regret – and then I realised that I do regret the way that it all came out, I regret not sharing myself with my husband sooner, which denied both of us love and support.

That feels like something that I could work into an apology for him.

Talking about talking about talking about sex

I had a bit of a moan about my husband wanting to discuss historical difficulties in sex rather than just getting on with it and either just having sex, or at least taking about what sex might look like for us now.

I get that hubby needs to work through this stuff, but I need something positive to look forward to – and look back on.

Positive strokes

Of course, I talked about last Sunday, the conversations, and going to the pictures on my own.

I told Richard that hubby asked whether I was blackmailing him (my words) as I said that I needed something good to happen in order to keep having difficult and painful conversations.

Richard asked “What’s wrong with having some good times?”. After all, if we can’t have a few nice times, what is all this bloody talking for anyway?!

Masking weight gain

I commented that I’d put on a bit of weight during the time after my surgery before I went into hormones and it’s taking a while to shift it. I was wearing dungarees that were now too tight for and were uncomfortable.

I said that it’s amazing how much space testicles take up – it was months before I’d put in enough weight to full the waistband in my jeans! He laughed a great toothy laugh!

ABBA

Tomorrow night we have a chance at creating a good time: we are seeing ABBA Gold (an ABBA tribute act) at the Guild Hall. Hopefully we’ll grab something to eat first.

I am looking forward to it. Hubby less so.

It might be a fun night.

Most importantly, it’s going to be a shared experience and maybe it will bring some much needed positive energy into the mix.

I also need to tell hubby that I’ve been taking a double dose of testosterone on the weekends in hopes of getting lucky!