This is probably going to sound horrible.

 Hi.
I shouldn't be writing this late, and certainly not while I feel like I do, but I really want to get it off my chest.

J has been either subconsciously or consciously competing with me.
You can nearly hear her tallying up how M treats me versus her. What he tells her when he tells her, when we've had what kind of sex, whether he's cuddling me or whatever. Just. She does it. I know she's doing it, and it's making me upset and angry and hurt because even when he does tell her things before he tells me, it's usually just a matter of presence or how well he's able to articulate at the moment or who's there when he thinks it-- and that's when she's listening, anyway. There are times she gets mad that she's been left out of the loop when in fact she just wasn't paying attention when the loop was totally right there.

She got mad the week before last because M was having trouble with Mj, and when she called he told her he didn't want to talk about it, and when I asked via text rather than calling, he simply said Mj's name.
Both of these can be attributed to time factors, seeing as the trouble was his throwing a fit about not wanting to go and not getting in the car like a normal three-year-old, and I imagine being on the phone didn't help. That five minutes would have made the difference between the door and the car and actually being strapped in.

Today she quizzed me, I mean third freaking degree (or fourth or whatever number it is) about what he told me about some super complicated bullshit that's come up with his ex, just in case she'd been left out of some communication.

And got mad later today because she forgot something he'd said when she was in the goddamn room and she thought she'd been left out.

I do not know what she wants, but I am not competing. I have never been competing, and if it becomes a competition that is outside her head, I quit and I'm running away, because their relationship is first and foremost in my mind, and I know for damn sure that he treats us equally. If nothing else, he married her and running away with me would be a horrible idea because I kind of need them both to ground me because splitting my attentions has probably been the best thing for me.

 There is not only no competition, but most of the time, no one's deliberately leaving out anything, no one's deliberately not saying, no one is intentionally not telling anyone anything. If something gets unspoken, there are two people that know what's up and can correct this matter, if someone feels like asking.

But instead, she wants to make it about her and decide that M's deliberately not telling her and prefers to tell me instead. Why? I don't fucking know.
She thought he was deliberately not having sex with her, too. And deliberately not sitting on the couch with her.

I don't know how much of this I can attribute to her postpartum, but it's making me want to strangle her.

TV show J's been watching lately, a couple hadn't been having sex for a year and a half, and she said she didn't know what she'd do if they went a year and a half. I (rather bitterly) said that she'd blame me.
She asked me why I said this. I don't think she's noticed the accusatory manner. So I don't know what to do. Especially since I've been calling her on a lot of her bullshit lately, because she's got these habits she inherited straight from her mother like yelling at you for asking a question she thinks the answer's obvious (like whether her cell is connected to the wi-fi), or getting mad at us for asking a question at all.

There. Said it. No problems solved, but I figured it fell right into the "troubles of the relationship", probably more than anything else has. Part of why I decided to do this blog was specifically that, to talk about the troubles of the relationship, because I know anyone else in our situation might appreciate someone else's slice-of-life on the matter, know they're not alone. 'cos you're not. Jealousy is totally a thing, and an ungrounded one, and my anger in response to it is bitter and unfair.

I got a headache while we were shopping, yesterday, and I requested that we make the window-shopping in the baby section quick, because I was wishing I didn't have my left eye in, 'cos then the pressure would have somewhere to go, and she got mad at that, too. Stomped around and left us behind to go grab something real quick without saying a word.
And said that if we didn't want to go shopping, we should have said. Like I knew ahead of time I was going to want to take my eye out or something. Or wouldn't have said. 'cos I'll say. Oh boy, will I say. I did say. And she got mad.

I don't know what to do. She's making communication more and more unpleasant, and then getting mad at us for not communicating, and then refusing to talk to us because she thinks we're refusing to talk to her. I don't know what to do. I'm getting frustrated, now.

I'm also getting very deep impressions that she doesn't want me in the relationship. Or here at all. She can't really put me out, but I'm wondering if the desire to break up with me isn't just something that's part of the postpartum.
It's making me want out. M doesn't want me gone, but of course he doesn't. He's not competing with me in his head.

I could kill her for that. That's so unfair. That's so unfair, to make everything a fight that I don't want to participate in, that I don't even think she knows she's fighting, and she wins by default, every time, because if it EVER came to that, I forfeit and run away. Simple as that.

Thanks for listening.

Bonds of Matrimony

Hello again.

J and M got married! Hooray!
They picked the date, like, a week and a half ago, and they said their vows and did their thing yesterday. It was cute. J's parents brought her a bouquet and wrote "just married" on her car windows. The minister doing the ceremony was this tiny old guy that rambled for forty-five minutes, I swear. Which got to be hilarious, 'cos J started getting impatient and dancing in place. And I laughed, because I already have a special place reserved in Hell, I might as well earn it with a little more specific blasphemy.
Of course, the clothes were simple and casual, but appropriate. The little room we were in was set up real cute, real simple. No arch, but a carpet on the floor. They held the flowers between them, and the rings on each others' fingers, and M's stomach made a loud grumbly noise right at the beginning.
Overall, simple, beautiful, and adorable. The only problem now is that if it doesn't work out, I'm going to be the one to help hide the body. Or if it's J's body, I'll have to do it myself. (M is a necrophobe.)

The baby is three months old, now, and is hitting all his milestones perfectly. He watches us enter and leave the room, he gets distressed when he can't see anyone, he can get his hands to his mouth and suck on then with reasonable skill.... He curls on his side, and can scoot on his stomach across the crib, etc..

K has learned to take his diaper off. And does so with a frequency. But still doesn't tell us when he's pooped, and prefers to sit in a poopy diaper rather than let us change it. And, in fact, at one point, he pooped in the floor, because apparently, this is what toddlers do. I know this because when I looked it up, the first entry on helping getting poop out of the carpet wasn't, in fact, a pet site like I expected, but was the blog of a woman whose daughter had done the same thing. (The answer is hydrogen peroxide, by the way.)

I keep wondering how on earth parents without three adults around do it. I am always impressed by single parents, but I used to think that two would be enough, but even with two kids, it's just so handy to have six hands. From having someone to drop the one off to so that you can go handle the other one, to being able to stomp away and glare at the wall in the next room while someone else handles stuff, to when someone is screaming and you've still got to untwist the damn seatbelt because shit happens and that's how it goes.... Like, last night, we were trying to pile everyone into the car, and the baby was screaming for god knows why, and K was being annoying about getting into his seat, and J was getting mad 'cos the seatbelt strap had twisted into the seatbelt, and I couldn't get to the seatbelt buckle in addition to being unable to shut the baby up (because for some reason, all of us start losing our minds a little bit when the baby is crying. It's like the sims-- everyone in the general vicinity suddenly has a twenty point detractor from their mood bars when the baby is screaming. And because of that, we all get a little crankier than we were, and we're trying to get something done, and we just want everything to get quiet and still so we can finish.

And yet there are always still problems with the relationship itself, of course. You'd think with more people to fight, there'd be more fighting. I've been a referee once, because in the heat of the moment, a lot of things get lost in translation, and they start getting loud and angry without really understanding what's going on. That, and J's got rage issues, and I tend to duck out of the room when I detect them coming to the surface, because I know how I get when someone around me is angry, and I do not make anything any better.

Poor J, though. She's a very emotional person, in general, and they tend to manifest first as anger, and then as sadness. Even happiness, though I imagine that yesterday it was her nerves in general, and excitement and so forth, that eventually manifested and was why she got upset. 'cos, see, we were gonna have sushi (I spelled that as "suchy" first, because my hands hate me...) as a celebratory dinner, but almost no one wanted to come. Or, if they did want to come, they couldn't, etc., and it upset J rather a lot. I wound up cuddling her on the couch before she passed out. (we were also gonna do a celebratory drinks and game sorta thing, too, but she fell asleep way too early for that. Long morning, long day, with a lot of excitement and running around, I don't blame her. I passed out early-ish, too, but that's my tradition on Monday.) The day was good, but she kept trying to plan, and the plans kept getting harpooned, and it upset her. She does that.
And last week, when she was on her way out the door for work, the door started making a funny noise, and she still swears it was someone trying to get in, and she's requested being walked to her car every morning since then, with M's nightstick.
I'm not entirely sure how to handle the emotionality. I'm never sure if my cuddling her is enough of a sense of security, or if I should get M to do it while I go take M's spot in whatever task he has at hand (except when he's cleaning, because that's precisely what I do, 'cos I am sure that I'm better at housekeeping than I am at comforting an upset woman, and he's better at comforting his upset woman than cleaning.). A lot of the things when I express confusion, I get the same answer, which is "do what comes naturally". Still sucking at this. Out loud.

But I finally did get M to watch some Doctor Who with me. Old ass episodes, from like the seventies and stuff. He's being slowly won over to my British television, though J has remained steadfastly hooked to her Teen Dramas and stuff.

One thing that did happen a lot about the wedding was that when I told people at work, they asked me what was going to happen to me in our relationship. I think the clearest I could get on the matter was telling one girl that I couldn't very well marry them, I'd only been with them for four months (or five, or something.) and we'd get there when we got there. As things stand, I am still their girlfriend, we are all still in the same relationship, but now those two share a legal bond as well as an emotional and spiritual one. I can't seem to make it clear that legal marriage isn't my ultimate goal, and that their bond getting legal doesn't make our emotional one any lesser.

M did suggest "marrying" me in a year, but I don't want to share their anniversary (and possibly cheapen it somehow) and I'm not sure how I feel about marrying them even non-legal-like. It took me four years to get to that point with my ex, and having had my sense and reason forced back upon me, no thank you. We'll have to see.

Parenting by proxy. Whee. Infant needing attention, now. Wish my partners luck! They'll need it!