Jealousy Mistaken and Post Partum Depression

So, a few ages back, I said that J was jealous of me, right?
Well, it turned out that she was misunderstanding. She was, indeed, jealous, but not why we originally thought. We thought it was some deep-seated territorialism over the father of her child, or perhaps some weird female drive from before she really considered the poly. We were wrong, of course.
Mostly, she just wants M's attention, and doesn't like when I get it.

Not that he's not paying attention to her, 'cos he is (although she and I have both agreed that he could do it more and better, and told him such), nor that I'm stealing his attention from her (I'm not, she is not home when I'm recieving most of his attentions, thus the reasons I'm recieving most of his attentions.), it's just that their work schedules conflict and they almost never see each other, and he's got plans for when he's not working already in place so that she feels like she can't butt in edge-ways.

Now, he and I had to have a very long, long conversation about how to handle it.
Because this has been going on since he started his current job, and she's gotten less and less okay, and has felt more and more like she was being whiny and naggy and bitchy when she was asking him not to go (which, in fairness, she started to act, so she was justified in feeling that way, but her causality was off), and he felt more and more like she was being one of those impossible-to-please naggy whiny bitches, and I was kind of watching, because what happens on weekends is really not a lot of my know anyway (I'm working then), but I do get to see the wrath during the week.

Ultimately, the only night they can possibly have together, kid-free, is Saturday. Maybe Friday if they start late, but not too late, 'cos kids will still be up in the mornings.

Childcare, by the way, is a bitch, when you're trying to find for three boys and one's and infant and the family's kind of.... mrrph about one of them for reasons that shall not be discussed right now but make me grind my teeth in irritation.

Anyway. Saturday. And M has a permanent plan for Saturday.
J has no plans for Saturdays, but she wishes he didn't have a permanent plan for Saturday, because she wants him home spending it with her.
I'm always home Saturdays, so they can bring the boys home and as long as they get back before I leave for work, all should be well. (Our house is never empty, and I don't sleep well on work nights) So they can make plans.
But he completely misinterprets what she wants out of this, because the only hints he's been getting are when she gets mopey while he's on his way out the door.

A part of this miscommunication is because of her post partum. That shit is a nightmare. I know how it is, too. When I was neck-deep in my depression, I would get sad when people would leave the room. To go to the bathroom. Even if I wasn't talking to them.
Another part of this miscommunication is the fact that it is emotionally charged. And a third reason is due to his irritation at her and the topic at hand and the situation itself, and those all lead to subconscious sabotage of your reading of the situation, and he wouldn't have any room to try and see it from her point of view.

At one point, maybe a month ago, he told her that if she wanted to come up with anything to do, to let him know by Wednesday so that he could cancel or confirm his normal plans.
This is, of course, fucking annoying on his part. He gives her two days to come up with a reason to get herself, but not him, out of the house.
It was at this point that I suggested (lightly) that maybe she wanted to spend the time with him? And that's part of why she's upset?
The idea hadn't occurred to him, I don't think.
I was trying my best to be all cuddles and kisses and stuff, but I think it was his attention more than anything else she was craving, and I could never have substituted that.

It took me a while to work him around to the idea that it was him she wanted.

Took longer to get him to consider that maybe he was messing up, a little, just accidentally, in that situation. And then I had to translate that he had basically told her that she had two days to come up with date plans or else. And that his handling of the situation was nearly as bad as hers.
While she'd wait 'til he was nearly out the door to tell him she wished he wouldn't leave, he would only get angry and keep doing it, telling her why he was always going to.
I finally, last week, suggested, why not set aside every other weekend? Or just one weekend out of the month?
He tried to get out of it, using work as an excuse, but I pointed out that when that doesn't happen, it'll be okay, and if it does, we can work around it.
I think I probably also threatened his life, 'cos it's starting to annoy me, having to be the middle man because they both get hyper defensive/offensive and fight rather than solve anything. This is both of their faults, and I spend a lot of their fights refereeing.

So, lately, she's still unhappy about it, because of the scheduling thing, but now she's overjoyed 'cos we might get to fix that.
But she and I are on hiatus, because she's accidentally friendzoned me, I think (I honestly have no idea.), but if nothing else, she has not been well, she has not been herself, and I know and respect depression enough to know that added pressure basically just makes you wanna curl up into a ball and not do anything ever again for fear of messing it up beyond repair.

I think that's probably the worst part about it right now.
See, we founded our relationship on the principle of open communication. You must speak to one another. Even, and especially, if you don't want to talk about it. You must. It's important. Vital.
She hasn't spoken much to either of us.
Part of this is because she feels like when we talk, it's about work or money, and it stresses her out, and she doesn't handle stress well. Part of this is also because she wants to talk to M and not me as much because of the aforementioned attention thing (and that big-strong-man part of the equation that I will never make up), and part of this is because she's got that wheedling little voice in her head that tells her that there's no reason to bother talking about anything ever because it doesn't matter, and even if it does matter, it doesn't matter that it matters, and even if it did matter that it mattered, nothing good will come of any of it anyway.
So she mumbles, we say what, she mumbles, we say what, she yells nothing, nevermind, we never listen.

I've asked her if she's considered suicide. I know I do when I'm in the worst of my pits of angst (I suffer clinical, take meds for it, lovely little pills. Named it to separate it from me, too.), and I would like to take care of my woman as best as I can, and she said no, and sometimes I wonder.

She has been doing remarkably better. She still has her days, and her moments, but lately, either she's gotten better at faking it (Hope not, fear so), or it's coming less often. I'm wondering if this is because M is on vacation from work.

She did get to take care of us while we had "the plague". (I think it was just the flu, but I don't think I've ever been that sick in my life. It was terrible.) She got to make us chicken soup and get us medicine and make sure we were taking it and helping me use the thermometer, and just overall got to be needed and wanted and helpful in ways she knew how. She seemed to like it.

Alright, thanks for reading. Have a good evening.

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!

First Steps

Confirmed location to move. It's feeling like that moment at the top of the big hill to start off the roller coaster. Hanging onto my seat and lungs filled to scream, now.
And closet empty and I need to figure out how to get all my gigantic amounts of crap into my tiny car and try not to hyperventilate.
And change my address. I already called to transfer the job place thing. And explained to baby brother. And stuff.
Oh boy.

Secondly...

Hello again.
There were a few elements in the last post that I left out, because it needed enough in depth explanation that I felt that it deserved its own post.
Like the complexities of the polyamorous relationship and what it means and does not mean.

First of all, it isn't cheating. Cheating is a dishonest practice in which you have more than one lover without the permission of one or more lover.

It is not swinging. Swinging is having multiple sex partners without having multiple relationships. This is generally agreed upon as an acceptable behavior.
I just read the term polyfuckery, which is when one claims to be polyamorous, mostly to get into bed with other polyamorous people, and without any sort of emotional bond.

It's not a three-way. That's just sex.

It is a relationship. And if you've ever had a relationship, you should know what that means-- all the drama and crazy and emotions and feelings and communication necessary. It's nuts.

There are many kinds of polyamorous relationships. In ours, it is a triad. This means there are three of us, all of whom are romantically involved with the other two.
In our case, it means that there are four relationships to maintain at all times.
J+M; J+MB; MB+M; J+M+MB
We've established that there should always be open and honest communication between all three of us. One of the rules I've found someone else stating is that if you don't want to tell your others, you should tell your others.

I think the biggest source of confusion to people that have not seen, nor participated, in a polyamorous relationship feels that it's not a relationship. Especially in the cases of hinged relationships (where one has two partners who have nothing to do with one another, also called a V), or N where there are four people who have two partners each, and I'm sure there are people who have some W going on or a hell of a fork going.
And personally, I think that's much better than cheating, or affairs, or serial monogamy, where you dump one and get a new one  the next week because the shiny wore off.

I've only had one relationship before, and that was monogamous and always long-distance, so I admit I'm no authority on anything romance. In fact, that's something I'm rather enjoying about the polyamory with the partners I've chosen-- there are two of them, with two very different styles and tastes and I can test out what I like and don't like with each of them. He's very much more sexual and energetic and dominant, whereas she's sensual and passionate and doesn't take command so much. The only problem I'm having so far is that I'm a sarcastic shithead, and I'm meaner than I intend a lot.

M and J are engaged to be married, eventually. There's been talk of semi-marrying me (no legal, obviously, but I could write a will to allow them to make my funeral and hospital decisions), but as aforementioned, they're the priority, until I am more established in the relationship.
However, I'm no less committed than they are, and I have no intention of bailing on the relationship, either. I am Second Wife only because I appeared second.
It is a valid, real relationship. It will have all the dynamics of one and more because there are more elements at play, with more pieces and players and thoughts and feelings.
So wish us luck. We'll need that.

First Things First

Hello.
I'm M.B.
I've recently joined an afianced couple, to become their third and begin our polyamorous relationship. I'm a unicorn. Which is the colloquial term for a person, usually female, who is willing to be exclusively romantic and/or sexual with both members of a dyad.
For the sake of their children and any future careers the three of us might persue, I'm going to abbreviate names to J (wife), K (J's first child), L (J's and M's first child together and second child to each, who is yet to be born), M (husband), and Mj (M's first child.)

Yes, J, K, L, M, Mj, and MB. Right? It makes me smile. So many M's.

I suppose this blog will be about the interpersonal connections, family life, solutions to the problems that turn up, and just in general slice of life. And also very poorly ordered, because I'm very bad about thinking in jagged shards of everywhere. 

 I called the blog Cellular Polyfidelity because a cellular family is a vernacular term for a three-or-more adult family. The term is based around nuclear family (two adults and their children), and polyfidelity is faith to all the members of the relationship.

But since this is the beginning, and we seem to be headed into fairly uncharted territories, and my nature is one of a thinker and a writer, I chose to start the blog. I am later going to attempt to get both the adults in on it, and maybe even the children once they learn to read and write and type. If they won't post, I'll definitely get data and permission to share aforementioned data.

I'll let them post how they feel about polyamory themselves and let them decide to say why exactly they were looking for a third, or ask permission later, but for me-- polyamory's always just made so much sense to me. The extra help alone with children and money and cooking and cleaning and errands and-- just life in general-- seems like it would be very useful, and that's not to mention that you can get some things from some people (certain kinds of emotional support, sexual favors, someone to talk about the other person with) that you can't from a single mate.

For the initial contact... For the three of us, it was an accident, really. We met on fetlife, a fetishist social media site, where one can post all kinds of pictures and fictions and meet all kinds of people from all sorts of lifestyles. It's mostly BDSM-related, but there are furries, transsexuals, transvestites, asexual, genderqueer, polyamorous, monogamous,
The two of them had been together for about a year, and had been not-very-intentionally seeking a third. I'll ask if they want to announce the reasons later.

I have some erotica (okay, fine, porn) I've written and posted onto my page, the quality of which M appreciated.
And so he messaged me to talk to me about it, and he and I started to write back and forth. I expressed some interest, as did he (after I started it, I confess. I'm a horrible flirt.), and then I contacted J, because that's a part of the rules in my book (you don't hit on one member of a couple without hitting on the other one!), and I quickly won her attention, too. (Again, didn't realize how strong I was coming on, but I wouldn't change it upon retrospect.)

And within... say... two weeks? I think, of initial contact with M, they invited me over for the weekend, basically to be a first date.

The weekend was lovely. The bonding happened quickly and easily, even the kids got used to me quickly, and I learned a lot about them each, in their habits and their parenting methods and who they are. And so far, it has only gotten more intense and more wonderful.
I returned the following weekend, and the next one, and I brought her home with me (we still live apart), and we've started to take action to live together. We're hoping to establish a spot where I won't have to couch monkey soon.
They call me Second Wife (because she has a woman she's been calling her wife since second grade or something). And we're working on what the kids can call me. I think we've decided on Ima, which is Yiddish for 'mother', and doesn't sound too much like Mom.

At first I was rather ambiguous about joining the relationship. First of all, it was a commitment that I couldn't take lightly. due to the children.
And then M went to a girl's house and I got territorial, and when I get territorial, I determine it's time to put up or shut up.

We've determined that we're closed. (there are a lot of things that can also be used to call us what we are; exclusive, polyfidelitous, 'fluid bound', a series of other things.) Closed poly, being that there are the three of us and only the three of us. (Also the two point five kids.)

We're working on moving in together, and then, hopefully, the adventure will really begin.
Thanks for stopping by. Take care.