Not just me & you anymore (G!P)

C. 36

Hi everyone! I'm always grateful for all your comments, votes and for who keeps reading.

Here the weekly chapter: I can see a little storm (😇) and.. a koala!

Have a good day. See you soon. 

The monotony of life as a mother is destroying me. It is true that on the one hand I am so lucky because I am enjoying these first few months of Celeste's life without too much thought, devoting myself almost exclusively to her, besides Viviana of course, without losing sight of even the slightest change. On the other hand, however, all this makes me exhausted. I get to the evening that I am a dead battery, without even knowing how I got there in that state. I am not talking about physical exhaustion, because with the fact that it is Maya who picks up and takes Viviana to school or dance, I could really stay on the couch all day, at most sit on a bench at the park on the afternoons when I have Viviana and watch her laugh and play happily. I am talking about a mental fatigue, which is perhaps due to having so little stimulation. Conversations with Maya often boil down to just the girls, those with my friends ditto, always talking about kids and home, and when Maya's mom comes to visit, even worse, because everything even more revolves around the girls. The working part of me has been lost. The woman part of me appears in moments, but then disappears again.

The worst part, however, is that in my slow drag, almost going down a cliff, I am taking Maya and our relationship with me. She is perfect, she doesn't burden me with anything, not even the times when my low mood makes me not even want to cook and I make her find the usual pizza. She doesn't say anything to me when suddenly, perhaps after sending her fiery messages hinting at a night of sex, I shut down and reject her every approach. She follows my every mood change, trying to humor me, but at the same time trying to help me. Her perfect way to stay afloat is to have perfect organization, so when I confide in her about this fatigue I am feeling, Maya begins to throw a series of dates at me: the beginning of our vacation, my gradual return to work that corresponds to her detachment, my complete return to work, her staying home a few weeks to be with Celeste, and then Celeste's daycare placement as soon as she turns one. She seasons her obsession with time scanning with a series of exhortations, exclamations, and enthusiasms that most of the time, however, do not belong to me. If I yell at her that to me manic organization only increases anxiety, then she turns a loving puppy, showering me with cuddles, sweetness, flowers, until I yell at her that even that is too much, it is inappropriate. Yet Maya does not give up. She starts again the next day with her sweetness, maybe organizes an outing on Sunday, in which I drag myself, trying to show enthusiasm especially for her and Viviana, and then at night I end up in bed crying because I think I don't deserve anything. If Maya invites me to take "days off" from mom life, organizing spa days together with my friends, or even simple coffees and aperitifs out of the house, first I accept, then I feel guilty about abandoning my daughters, then I start to get jealous because I think of the times when it will be Maya who will want to go out and so I come home more inflamed than before, throwing causal things back in her face that I didn't even think I noticed, like the time that, out of sheer kindness, she let a girl who had only a bottle of milk pass by her at the supermarket checkout, yelling in her face that maybe her real desire was to impress or trivially look at her butt. I really have no idea how Maya copes with this constant change of mood and direction in our relationship, which obviously depends solely on me. Yet she remains there, like the most experienced sailor in the storm.

Lately, however, to all this jealousy I express verbally, a small, as much as big, paranoia has crept inside me. Trying to get out of the tangled web of my thoughts, I spend my time observing others, and Maya is my favorite element to study. And that's where the paranoia arises, however. For day after day I began to have a terrible suspicion: what if her perfection is only apparent? What if she was hiding something? My thoughts are not just pure madness, because slowly I began to find, or rather to want to find, little connections in reality. There are days when Maya calls me in the middle of the morning, as always, but the background noise behind her is different: it is not her office, it is a noise of the street, of open air. If I confront her she always replies that she is in the construction site, which might be plausible, but by now I have a woodworm inside me. One particularly difficult day for my mood and mind, I started thinking about that evening at Andy's house, our post-evening talk, in which Maya candidly admitted that she agreed with Leo about not showing his phone to his partner. What if she had something to hide? I started thinking about the times when she arrives home at night and brings the phone directly into the bedroom, whereas before she would put it down wherever she happened to be. I tried to think if there are times when she walks away from me to answer the phone, but then I thought that she spends so many hours physically away from me that she would not need to hide in her own home. Before, however, she often offered her phone to Viviana to play with and now she doesn't, she almost forbids it. When I confronted her though, it was like shooting myself in the foot, because she reminded me that I was the one, during one of our small but big discussions about education, who held it against her that she was making my daughter a cyborg. I even phoned Andy, invited her to have coffee at our house while Maya was away, and practically questioned her about a possible betrayal by Maya, a hypothesis that made her laugh a lot. However, I tried not to sound like a crazy person, asking her to focus on the details, whether in her opinion she was, for example, going out more times than expected, whether there was anything strange in her behavior, but Andy only tried to calm me down, telling me that it is all the fault of the monotonous rhythm I have at home, that she actually doesn't know all the projects Maya follows by heart, they are quite independent in this, and that yes, it is true, she has been going out more often lately, but Maya also explained to her that she is doing all this now so that she can free herself up more later and allow me to go back to work full time, leaving Celeste to her and not to daycare right away. What I took as a confirmation to my paranoia, however, was when Andy, under my insistence with respect to thinking about strange and different behavior than usual, reflected on the fact that previously Maya used to try to put on plans that involved going out either in one day or at the end of the day, so that she would then go directly to school to pick up Vivi and then home, whereas now she often goes out mid-morning and then comes back for lunch as if nothing happened.