I’ve been really busy for the past few days and feeling fairly up emotionally. Now I am awake and crying and I am having trouble stopping because… Noah will die some day. Shocking, right?

Sometimes it is really hard knowing that I am probably already 1/4 of the way through the best years of my life. I feel very guilty for being so unstable and sad during what is going to be the easiest and happiest portion of my life. Well, maybe empty-nesting will be “easier” in terms of less work. I don’t think it will be happier.

I feel really weird about the fact that Noah has bought so much life insurance. I wouldn’t need to work for a few decades and possibly never if I scrimped the whole time.

I feel weird and ungrateful because I really hope I die first. I don’t want to find out what it is like to go back to wishing that somebody liked me enough to hang out with me on a day-to-day basis.

I am so afraid of being an old woman like my mother. She hides in her room. She comes out to do her crappy job. She doesn’t have friends. She hasn’t dated in decades because she knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that the only kind of man who would want her is someone with bad intentions. It has been true over and over and over.

I think about my mother’s life. I think about the permanent damage she has incurred because of domestic violence. She did “get out”. She left. She did what people tell women they “should do” when they are being abused. And her life got worse. And she has never been allowed to have a scrap of dignity since.

And then she gets her kids all grown up and they violently reject her for not being a good enough mother. For not being able to protect them. The only one that still wants contact with her is the one who bought hook line and sinker into the perversion and degeneracy.

It is hard feeling like I am trapped somewhere in between two stories. I wish I could stop feeling afraid. I wish I could stop feeling like I am just waiting for the next terrible experience. Of course it will come. How could it not?

Noah dying is something that there is just one way to avoid. I have to die first. But he and my kids don’t want me to decide to do it on purpose just to make sure. Which means just sitting with that discomfort.

Sometimes I feel like it is ridiculous that I can’t just “enjoy life”. I have a good life. I have a lot of things happening that I do genuinely enjoy.

And I’m still sitting on the couch at 3 am crying.

Sunday walked three miles to the farmers market. Monday ran three miles while the girls had dance class. Tuesday walk three miles to the park. (The home schoolers are coming to our neck of the woods! Woo! We win!) I haven’t had a ten mile week in a while and right now my hips hate my ever-loving guts.

And I’m going to finish painting the second story of the play structure this week. It is ~30 minutes of painting away from being ready for the roof. Woo. I probably have another ten or so hours to go? I think I will finish painting the play structure before Halloween even. Which would be nice. I really should paint the arbor in a big hurry. It will be both easier and harder than painting the play structure. Easier because it is just thin coats of stain and I have to do the work and the kids can’t help. Harder because I will have to work on a very tall ladder and that is never my favorite. Work must be done. Ain’t nobody but me here to do it. No whining. Just work.

Washing machine repairperson scheduled. Good thing because now it won’t fill or spin. Weeeeee.

I feel guilty for liking that my daughter is so bossy with me. She is repeating my language exactly back to me. “It’s food. Eat it.” is a common refrain. Shanna won’t let me skip trying foods. She thinks I need to widen my food palate. Well, she isn’t pushy with sushi any more. We went to the buffet again. I like taking them there.

I like going to the buffet restaurant because I like being able to practice negotiating with my kids in a low-stress environment. If they genuinely have a melt down then… dude… it’s the buffet restaurant. There are already ten kids making a lot of noise.

Shanna can serve her own salad at this point. We walk around together and discuss the options. You must eat a reasonable amount of vegetable matter before moving on to the carbs and sugar. And only take as much as you want to eat. And you need to eat what you have before you go take more. No, you don’t get to serve a salad then not eat it in favor of chocolate cake. Idon’tthinksokid.

For the second course, Shanna still needs help. The hot foods are just a bit more intimidating. So I hold both hands and we walk around and look at the options and they tell me what they want. Then I walk them back to the table and they sit quietly and color while I assemble their plates. This time I had the brilliant idea to say, “Why don’t you draw me a picture of your favorite part of the day.” Shanna drew her gymnastics class. I could see the uneven bars very clearly. Calli drew rainbows because her favorite part of the day was painting rainbows on the play structure.

Then I get drinks. Then I get my plate. They have to sit patiently and wait for me to finish eating before we get dessert.

Always when we are there I notice some minor way that someone needs help. Often it is a mom struggling with holding too much. If you stand nearby and say, “Is there any assistance that might be helpful?” something will be shoved at you post-haste. Last night I noticed that a big man sat right behind an older woman. His chair was slamming into her and she had no where to go because she couldn’t push her table forward. I got up and asked her if she would feel more comfortable if her table was scooted over. She lit up. “Oh yes. That would be so very helpful. Thank you so much for noticing.” It took me under a minute. And she was more comfortable for the rest of her meal.

I am shit-tastic about being steady support for people. I don’t have the spoons to sign up for being weekly babysitting for a friend. I can’t just show up and help my friends with their problems any more. I take care of the kids and the house and that is all I can be responsible for on an ongoing basis.

When I find out my neighbors have had surgery I show up with food. If I see something right in front of me where someone could use minor help I don’t treat it like an invisible problem.

I want to feel seen and supported and like I matter. So I look at other people and I try to support them and I try to treat them like they matter.

I wish I were less limited in the kinds of support I can provide. But it is what it is.

I’m not very good at supporting other people though. In order to really support someone you have to understand them. I don’t really understand other people.

The older I get the more I feel sad that most of my memories of my mother involve her sitting on her bed (we usually didn’t have any other furniture) reading a book with an intense look on her face. I wasn’t allowed to touch her. She wanted to be left alone. She read a couple of different romance authors voraciously. She read nothing non-fiction. She didn’t want complicated books and she felt annoyed with me when I suggested she might like something I had read. She wanted to read Amanda Quick, Bertrice Small, Jude Deveraux, Johanna Lindsey, and J.D. Robb/Nora Roberts.

She would not talk to me about the books she read. She didn’t want to get into the sex details and she had no interest in dissecting plot.

I remember playing cards with her. I wasn’t very good. When she won (which was ~90% of the time) she would cackle and do this little “ha-ha-ha-ha-ha” thing. I used to beg her to play cards with me because it was the only thing we had to do together. Then she would gloat and I would lose and lose and lose and lose. By the time I was a teenager I would get so angry at the gloating that I threw the deck of cards in her face a few times. She wouldn’t play with me after that because I was such a sore loser.

Why do I miss my mother so much?

When we lived in Apple Valley I was on break from school during December. It was a year-round school and we got a month off every three months. My mother’s birthday is in December. The same day as my adopted leather mom. I made my mom a cake as a surprise for her birthday. I didn’t know the difference between wax paper and cling wrap. Err, oops. She tried hard to be nice to me about it. But she felt disappointed and annoyed. I had wasted a box of cake mix and ruined it because I was stupid. The fact that she told me that I wasted a box of cake mix because I was stupid means that her “nice” wasn’t all that nice.

But I miss her.

My mom regularly, starting from when I was a teenager and had my own pocket money because I worked, promised to sew me things. She would bring it up. “Would you like to have a _____?” Yes! We would trudge off to the fabric store and pick out a pattern and fabric and thread and notions and go home. Then she was tired. Then she wouldn’t want to do it that day. She would do it next weekend. Only next weekend she was always too tired. That’s why I had so much sewing stuff to give away a few years ago when I cleaned out the garage. Years of my mom telling me to buy stuff so we could make things together. Only she never actually wanted to do it.

“Get over it. Move on.”

If I could point to a place where the ache for my mother lives and cut it out of me I would.

Sometimes Shanna wants me to do something or give her something and I respond however I respond. Then she keeps pestering because she wants something different. I have started asking her, “Do you want me to be a mother who does what she says so that you can believe me when I tell you things or do you want me to be a mother who flip flops so you never know if you can trust what I say?”

Of course sometimes I do have to change my mind. I try to follow that with, “I made a mistake when I responded quickly with that answer. I didn’t think the situation through fully when the answer popped out of my mouth. I really apologize for misleading you.” I try to do this flip-flop fairly immediately. It sucks to wait all day for something and then not get it.

I don’t remember my mom smiling much outside of work. I expect she didn’t have a lot to smile about. She only smiled at work because they required it of her. After all, if you are a woman living in poverty who is being worked hellish hours as you do physical labor that is often really too demanding for your body of course you should be smiling. You wouldn’t want anyone to think your job was anything other than a pleasure.

No one wants to deal with your bed temper. It isn’t their problem that you are in a bad mood. That is a personal problem. Take care of it.

Sometimes when I am up crying in the middle of the night worrying about Noah dying I think about the fact that his death would not be financially destructive. I think about my mother’s life and what the simple lack of money has done to it. I think what a selfish piece of shit I am that I have no interest in helping my mother at this point. Isn’t aging hard enough without your children turning on you? Aren’t children supposed to be a comfort to their parents?

Aren’t parents supposed to provide some level of protection for their children?

With every day that passes I close my eyes and say a prayer of thanks that my children are still whole and safe. No one has hurt my daughters.

The older I get the more compassion I have for my mother. When I think of the story of her life I feel really bad for her. She has truly never had a break. I don’t think it is her fault she is so damaged. But she is. She is really messed up and she has never tried to fix any of it.

My shrink had me watch the movie The Brave One. It’s about vigilante justice after trauma. (My shrink is not trying to prompt me to start killing people despite the movies she keeps encouraging me to watch.) The reviews are pretty harsh.

I got into an argument recently about Moll Flanders (the book) and how the person I was arguing with (a modern American of course…) thought it was reprehensible that someone would act that way. Moll doesn’t raise any of the children she bears. She leaves them with people who can provide a stable life.

The reviews of The Brave One sound similarly like either you get why someone will do something or you don’t. Sometimes there are no good choices. Sometimes being told, “Well the police will handle it” isn’t good enough because the police won’t fucking handle it. So either suck up your trauma and shitty life and smile or … something. Something else.

You can kill yourself. You can decide to start defending yourself. When you get the urge to get into fights on your own behalf that tends to lead to wanting to wander around places where fights are more likely to happen. Then you get to fight more. It becomes chicken and egg. Do you fight because you have to or because you want to?

Just be nice. Just be forgiving. Turn the other cheek or some shit. I don’t have any cheeks left. They have all been hit already.

If someone murdered one of my children I’m pretty sure I would not be interested in waiting for what passes for “justice” and I wouldn’t worry in the slightest about going to jail. That would be fine with me. I would be quite happy to take the consequences for actually fucking doing something. Would it be terrible and hard for Noah and the remaining kid? Probably.

I still think I would lose my shit. And I think I’m pretty violent. See! I don’t own a gun! I don’t plan to ever own a gun!

I will be ok with going to prison if I hunt someone down and beat their brains in with a baseball bat. I will know it is an appropriate reaction from society and I won’t feel angry about it.

Sometimes there are no right choices. Only the choice you can live with. I don’t think I could live with doing nothing. I could kill them or I could kill me. I don’t want to die yet. Going to prison would be fine though. Plenty of alone time for writing and reading.

I don’t believe I am working in this life for a reward later. I think this is all I have. I can make of it what I will. I don’t go out looking for violence any more. I try to avoid it. I do my best to have it no longer come in to my life.

I have to just stop.