Yesterday was… quite a roller coaster emotionally. I spent most of the early part of the day angry. I asked Noah to take the kids out of the house because if they stayed home I would be yelling at everyone basically because they have the audacity to breathe in the same room as me when I’m that angry. It wasn’t logical, reasonable, fair, appropriate… nada. It sucked.

It also sucks that my family spends a lot of time telling me earnestly that I need to rest while also being a group of people who freak out if the mess escalates beyond a certain point. It’s not that they will clean up after themselves when it gets to that point… they will just start freaking out and yelling at everyone until I clean everything up for them. It’s challenging being the bottle neck point in a lot of ways. My house has to maintain a certain level of cleanliness or all four of us start flipping out. The only way the house stays at that level is if I do a whole bunch of work that is invisible to the other three. This is challenging when my life and energy are being sucked into an extra project.

I’m at the point of feeling like the remodel is self-indulgent and harmful to my family. Why don’t I stop dilettanting around and just fucking finish, sheesh.

I’m working as hard and fast as I physically can because I’m trying to stop inflicting this on my family. I can’t do more than I’m doing. I can’t get us through this stage any faster than we are going. I feel so bad that I wanted to do this project. I was told it would take 3-6 months and here we are more than two years later.

And the remodel is ongoing fuss in a way I can’t write about today but I can say that the lawyer who represents opposing party in the dispute? He can eat flaming shit and die. I don’t like him anymore. He’s not just zealously advocating for his client he’s a liar and a first class manipulator. I look forward to investigating the anti-SLAPP process in this state on my own as well as talking to journalists and lawyers about this process.

Man it is handy that I know so many writers and I can instantly be connected with the CEOs of journalism enterprises. My life is god damn awesome. Angel investing in a news organization may have been useful in the long run.

I do continue my streak of winning money whenever I go to court. Bring on more court, motherfucker. Not that I won a lot. But I won enough to say fuck you, motherfuckers.

Oh man. Stop talking, Krissy.

I really wanted a rest day this weekend. And I really want this damn remodel done. I have a bunch more painting to do. I could get a bunch done today too if I don’t rest. Sigh.

My intention for the weekend had been to rest on Saturday until going to first a kid-dance-party then a bdsm party. Instead I worked all day and skipped the kid event. I sent Noah and the kids and they had fun. I made progress on a tree and a bush. That doesn’t sound that exciting but six hours of painting produced some pretty pictures. And I redid the sky part in the hallway where it was messed up. The hallway mural is mostly fixed. Just the flowers, leaves, and rainbow to go. By area that’s most of the wall covered already in fresh paint. I love how the hobbit door is popping now. I have much better browns on hand right now than I had when I originally painted that wall so I’m actually kinda glad. It’s perty.

The bdsm party was lovely. I bragged on photos of my work and folks who have been in my life for going on 17 years admired my work and told me I’m doing well. I’m kind of an idiot and hearing that kind of feedback is nourishment for my soul. I need to have the people I love say that what I’m doing is neat and not just an obnoxious waste of time. Luckily my friends were lovely and validating. Thank you all.

Also my glorious and delicious submissive was there and we were all in a good mood. So I got to do a little middling. Noah spanked me and I bit chunks out of my submissive’s thighs while I was being hit.

Middling is wonderful. Middling is my favorite role to play. When I am just bottoming/submitting I run into a problem: I live with chronic pain. Asking me to absorb more pain for fun and just… absorb more pain and have fun! Err, that’s hard for me. My body is at a really challenging place with managing the pain I feel. If I’m getting spanked on my own I whine and cringe and spend a lot of time having a hard time managing what is happening to me.

Now, put a nice tasty thigh in front of my mouth and allow me to go to town while I am being hit? Or if you electrocute me and allow me to spank the shit out of someone else? Or if… you probably get the picture. I don’t need to keep listing scenes I’ve done.

Anyway, if the energy is allowed to move through me and into someone else I can take a shitload more pain. It makes me giggle. When I get to pass the pain along my tolerance goes sky high and I all of a sudden can handle just about anything. Hurt me more, please oh please oh please because this glorious creature in front of me wants every ounce of energy I can muster.

Please oh please let me hurt someone with this energy.

I didn’t make him bleed but his bruises are going to last weeks. That’s my idea of a lovely night. I adore you. I love you. Thank you my dear submissive.

And the spanking was great. I felt glowing and alive and that energy came from Noah. I was allowed to direct it through and that is glorious for me, but the energy came from Noah. Thank you my dear husband. That felt so very good. I’m not sure I can express how and why it felt good. But I try.

I spend so much time trying to absorb pain and just put my head down and keep that pain invisible to everyone around me because I know that people are sick of hearing about how much pain I’m in. It’s boring. People want to hear about something interesting and not something boring and repetitive like, “I want to cry because I hurt.” Folks get real god damn tired of that shit. My masochism is complicated by the fact that my body is utterly overwhelmed with pain daily. More pain doesn’t feel sexy. It feels draining and demeaning. I am worth so little that even though I struggle to function in my life because I am in so much pain I need to accept more pain because it amuses other people.

That’s a tricky god damn thing.

Last night I didn’t get to absorb pain. I got to transform it into something precious and wonderful and pass it on.

That’s a big deal. I feel lighter. I feel like being in pain was, for that span of time, a great gift that I got to pass on to someone I love very much.

I know that you would stop someone else from biting you that hard because it can damage you. I know you will accept me biting you harder than that. It makes my proverbial dick so hard I can cut diamonds with that motherfucker.

Yes, I can transform my pain for you. Oh yes.

There is something so special about someone who wants to give me a frame into which I can pour my pain so that it is a positive aspect in this universe instead of a horrible burden I carry.

But just topping isn’t the same as middling. I like topping sometimes and I can get really into it. But middling is better. Middling feels like performing a magical ritual. Let me take something that is so hard and make it wonderful.

Thank you for allowing me to do that, Noah.

Then we came home and had one of the most useful conversations we’ve had in a long time. We talked a lot about the silent resentments we are carrying. We talked a lot about the intersections of my compulsions (If Noah says he wants something that means I have to do it because he so rarely asks me for things and he does so much for me) and Noah’s coping methods (he tries hard to not ask at all because he doesn’t want me to have to do things I don’t want to do… increasing how rare it is that he asks and the amount of pressure I feel when he does ask. Cheers) and how we can try to move past some of the roadblocks we are experiencing.

Right now things do feel very black and white. I “know” that the truth is somewhere in the gray area but I’m struggling like fuck to see any gray right now. I’m exhausted and weary.

I’m struggling with my kids telling me earnestly that they want to help me because they love me but cleaning up their shit from the living room is way too fucking much to ask because clearly they should have a full time maid because that is justice. They are kids. They are actually mostly pretty good about cleaning up their stuff but there are times when they are resistant because that is life.

But maybe I need to think about this shit differently. Eldest Child really wants to go to sleep away camp this summer. Maybe I need to talk about proving maturity to earn the price tag. That damn week of camp is a full month of kid-budgeting. That’s a big expense. If you want me to cough up that kind of money… maybe you need to prove your maturity first by not making me clean up your fucking comic books. YOU KNOW WHERE THE COMIC BOOKS GO. WHY DO THIRTY COMIC BOOKS GET PUT IN THE STACK OF ‘WHOOPS WE’RE SORRY BUT WE DON’T REMEMBER HOW TO RE-SHELVE THESE BOOKS’?!?!?! YOU KNOW WHERE THE GOD DAMN COMIC BOOK SHELF IS. I NOTICE THIS KIND OF SHENANIGAN. WHAT THE HELL.

I was 100% not in the mood to do any house cleaning yesterday. Instead I reshelved a lot of comic books among other tasks. My cranky was large.

So I didn’t rest but I did get cleaning done and six hours of painting.

Hey, it wasn’t a bad thing that I made Noah take the kids to the park to play with sports equipment anyway. That’s all positive and shit.

I’m not stressing the conversation with Noah last night. It was really good.

Noah pointed out that he can see that staying with him is a choice that is sometimes hard for me for a variety of reasons. For some strange reason having him point out that he can see that… kinda helps? Yes. It is a choice. There are a bunch of reasons I could leave you. Lots of things I could decide to make “things”.

But I want to stay. I’m struggling with figuring out the balance of life I want and how I need to intersect with more people than Noah and in different ways… but I like doing this from the bedrock of being with Noah.

Noah’s place in my life is less secure because of money and mostly secure because there isn’t a person alive who wants to put as much effort into understanding me as Noah. I am oriented towards “new” in a way that is very challenging for my marriage, but new will never ever give me the understanding of my partner.

Other people like me. I can tell. Noah has devoted his life to me because he’s kind of obsessed with me. Noah has reordered every part of his life to accommodate me and my weird issues and rigidity and fuss. And with how complicated my sex drive is… I’ve never known another person who can cheerfully perform the range of sex acts Noah can. We are remarkably compatible.

I choose Noah. I choose him over and over and over every single day. I want to be here. Running away from my feeling that people don’t love me as much as I need to be loved is the MO that drove me away from a lot of people earlier in life. I choose to believe in Noah.

Even though I have squidgey feelings about him sometimes there is no one I’m looking forward to spending old age with like Noah. He’s funny and fun.

I feel really bad for these periods of marriage that have stomped him down into exhaustion where isn’t so much fun anymore. I feel like it is my fault.

I have mixed feelings about my impending reduction of freedom and personal return to the role of support person. I got to do a big project. It has been glorious. Now I get to stop doing things for me and organize my week around cleaning up after other people so that they don’t get frustrated by living in a mess and take it out on me. I can’t wait.

Sigh.

Life. It’s a pain.

Ok, time to start today. Maybe I’ll rest and not be all cranky. Maybe I’ll work so I can get this god damn project finished sooner so my family can stop freaking out about it. Sigh.

There is no good choice.

I’ve been thinking about the idea of safety a lot for the past few weeks. For some people safety means never being challenged about the choices they are making. For some people safety means never being questioned. For some people safety means people will absolutely call you on your shit.

We all get to be different.

I love, value, and appreciate that if I do something fucked up in front of one of my friends they tell me that I crossed a line. I’ve had people question my parenting, my marriage, how I treat my friends, and how I treat myself. They do it because they love me. This isn’t the same thing as random people passing judgment on shit they don’t understand… My friends say, “I don’t think you are upholding the deal you made.” That’s different. That takes knowledge of me, my husband, and our marriage.

I check in with people about whether or not they think home schooling is still a good idea. I talk to a lot of people who have interactions with my kids. I talk to doctors and neighbors and friends and professional educators who have relationships with my kids. If I begin to believe that I am not offering them the best deal possible, their ass is going to school pronto. I’m not doing this just for my ego. I’m doing this because I want to AND because I happen to be an incredibly well trained, excellent educator. I’m lucky enough to have solid support. If I didn’t have it I would make different choices and that would be right.

I’m not living out the one twue life. I’m doing what I’m doing. There are lots of reasons to do other things.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to outgrow a relationship.

A friend said it is like outgrowing a shirt. It’s not complicated and it isn’t mean. Then how come endings feel so god damn cruel?

I have a thing happening with a friend where it feels kinda like Puppy. Puppy tried to dump me. He had a list of complaints and said that he didn’t things would work out for these reasons. I said, “Oh. Those are things that are reasonable to complain about and I don’t think they are set in stone demands. What can we change to make this a workable situation for you?” He expected me to blow up and get huffy. He didn’t like that I was calm and reasonable and wanted to work things out. So he told me he didn’t love me and had never loved me and was only using me for sex. On Thanksgiving. Right.

(For those who haven’t known me for long… Puppy is a dude I dated/lived with for a while after leaving my Owner.)

I don’t like the idea of outgrowing people. I feel almost allergic to the idea that I might be “better than” someone so outgrowing feels… too big for my britches. The funny thing is, it is very easy for me to understand how someone would only want to deal with me during certain periods of their life or for certain reasons so I have compassion for people wanting to ditch me after a while.

I get hella fucking annoying. I sure wouldn’t deal with me if I had a choice.

More than once in the past twelve months I’ve been told I was unsafe. In one situation the person made it clear that they didn’t feel physically threatened by me at all–I did a great job of deescalating. But I’m unsafe.

I make people feel unsafe is maybe more accurate?

The interesting thing about this is I think it happens less often than it used to but people tell me more about their experience of this happening.

I say things you don’t want to hear. It’s absofuckinglutely true.

This feels related to trigger warning sort of stuff in a weird way. I am triggering as fuck for a lot of people. Does that make me actually bad? Does that mean I’m doing something terrible or immoral by existing in a way that promotes other people feeling unsafe? I’m not threatening them. I’m not insulting them. I’m rigidly defining the boundaries of the reality I believe in. X is not ok.

I’m stating the reality I believe in. X behavior requires an apology.

X behavior means you need Y solution whether it feels good or not.

I’m not attacking you or your personhood or your integrity or…

But I’m not safe. Ok.

If you believe you are above apologizing then we can’t have a relationship and if that makes me unsafe I can fully live with that. I think everyone owes apologies sometimes. I think everyone fucks up and you can never hit an age or a rank or a social status where you stop needing to apologize. That’s not a world view I accept.

Being a rigid person causes me problems. I am rigid. I am very rigid about a whole bunch of things. I have extremely strong feelings about child neglect and I can’t really be talked ’round to justifying why it is ok to hurt a kid because a parent just … needs to? Does? Something?

I have incredibly strong opinions. If my opinions make you feel unsafe then it is fair and appropriate for you to take space. Does that mean I am unsafe?

What do you mean by safe? Do you mean that in order to have a relationship you have to be unquestioningly affirmed? Cause I can’t offer that to anyone. Oh my poor kids.

Question everything. Which is why my kids drive me bananas and never shut up. They question every god damn thing I say.

I went to a class about monsters recently. Well, it wasn’t a class so much as it was a lecture with a little interaction. Monsters are nearly human and exist to teach us something. I have been describing my father as a monster for many many many years. Do I need to dehumanize him in order to deal with him? What would have happened if instead of killing himself he had gone to prison?

What would have happened if he became a man in my head instead of an unknowable monster? If he had stayed alive… my life would have been a lot worse in a lot of ways. If he had gone to prison child support would have stopped and we wouldn’t have gotten his social security like we did because he was dead. In many ways… he made the magnanimous choice.

Now I’m free to hate a ghost without the complications of hating a person who exists and shares my blood.

Do I hate him any more? I don’t know. I want to know what the hell happened to him. There is a part of me that knows that if he were alive I would want to have compassion for him the way I have compassion for a lot of sex addicts who have committed rape in my life. I may be careful with my boundaries around them… but I haven’t completely shunned all rapists.

Life is complicated. How can I judge? Am I really better?

Somethings I judge. I judge actions. I judge the impact of actions. You may mean well but you aren’t taking care of business. You may be trying but your best isn’t solving the problem so you need to find different support.

That doesn’t make me better or smarter or whatever. I’m not. I make stupid decisions. I foolishly waste resources. I hurt people who love me very much.

I’m not better than anyone.

I do have more education than a lot of people. I do have access to more resources than most people. But those are separate things to evaluate.

SIgh. I should probably go paint for a couple of hours. Just finish, woman. Sheesh.

The thing about this strike today is: I don’t think me sitting on my butt would impact people beyond me. My family would smile at me and go on about their day. I would only abdicate a few minutes of work to them because I’m otherwise caught up on house chores. If I did no work on the remodel that means I’m not painting this week at all because tomorrow morning I have to take Eldest Child to the dentist and then my neighbor is coming over and Friday is hella busy and Saturday is booked…

I kinda need to make some painting progress this week. I cleaned and puttied and did that fuss. Today I should paint the hallway ceiling and work on magnetic paint. I really should. But my house is cold and my painting clothes require some ambient warmth so dressing for painting sounds heinous.

It is below 60 degrees in my house. I’m hella cold.

Layers! I love layers.

I have a red sweater on right now. I have a medical appointment at 11. That’s kinda like supporting the strike by going to a small business run by women….

Fuck. How am I going to get painting done when I have an appointment at 11 and the kids have class from 3:40-4:30? That’s going to suck.

I’m feeling really cranky and overwhelmed because of interruptions. I never have a day where I do a thing. I always have to do six or seven things (that think I kinda twitched and freaked out at blacksheep because she’s like super DO ALL THE THINGS and I just can’t) in a day and it is causing me to hate everyone and everything. There is no flow.

This is why I work in the middle of the night. So no one fucking interrupts me. I have the hardest time getting into and out of work mindset. Killing 15 minutes kills hours because switching gears is starting to feel almost physically painful. I can’t just switch what I’m thinking about easily over and over. I flip out. I can’t do seven periods a day with after school activities.

I fear I’m causing my children to have problems because they are like me but more so. My kids feel unfairly disrupted by three hours of class in a week. Shit.

I had a great conversation with Eldest Child last night about our current schedule and how I’m pushing the kids physically and why I’m harping on the stuff I’m harping on. It blows me away that my child is able to utterly glow while expressing that she knows that everything is better now that she is here and I drive her so hard because I love her and I want her to have a better life than me. This kid is secure. She doesn’t always like how I push her but she knows I’m doing it because I love her and I want what is best for her.

If you can’t be a good example be a horrible warning. I struck the jackpot because I’m kinda both. I have a whole bunch of things where I can say, “I have this problem and that problem and this other problem because of x and I’m trying to make sure you don’t have these problems and that’s why I insist on y and…” My children believe me. They eat their god damn vegetables (while grumbling) and say, “I don’t want to have to take all those pills when I grow up so fine I’ll eat healthy food….” My kids are normal and they kinda resist exercising until I talk about how much pain I’m in from being sedentary for years and then all of a sudden they are super happy to come exercise with me.

I tell them: “See what I have done since you were born. Look at how much more healthy and strong I am. Because I want to be here for you. Because you are worth any amount of work I have to do. I want to see you grow up and get old.”

Then they get excited and explain in detail about how happy they are that they will have healthy eating and exercising on autopilot when they are adults because they’ve been practicing so long and they are glad they will get to focus on something more interesting.

I love you. I live for you. I will change anything about me I have to change for you.

I won’t make that promise for anyone else in this world. Just you, my children. You are special.

You can tell me to stop cussing. Anyone else will be told to go fuck themselves.

I love you. You are everything.

Yesterday we spent a while watching Billy Gilman (he was famous in Nashville for about 5 minutes when he was 12) as a grown up do covers of songs by women. Then we watched his self-written adult song debut. Dude, stick to singing songs for women. You do them better.

I also spent a bunch of time watching random covers of Adele’s music. I sorta feel like other people do her songs better than her and I feel guilty for thinking that. Like this one, this is danceable and beautiful.

Also: I’m bleeding and maudlin. I’m hyper-aware that a lot of what is going on in my brain is bullshit. Of all people I don’t get to feel like no one loves me. That’s ridiculous. I’m very loved. But recently I’m having a hard time with there being a background track reminding me how terrible and bad I am.

I hired a lawyer when someone was fucking with me. Clearly I’m just so mean.

I don’t think this is logical or reasonable. But it is where I am.

This period is raging. I skipped a full cycle and I started bleeding at 12:03pm today. I knew exactly when that motherfucker started this time. There was a sudden ohholyshitthat’snotgood feeling. And now I feel like someone is stabbing me in the lower back. I hurt and hurt and hurt. Whine. Motherfucking whine.

But I feel weirdly lonely. I don’t think it is lack of contact with people. I feel like I’m doing pretty well on socializing lately all things considered. I’m not sure what this feeling really means. I’m grateful that my kids are so snuggly. It helps. Ok, I don’t know what it means but it is probably connected to my mom. I miss her.

I’m more grateful for the family I have with every passing year, but there is still this ache. It isn’t just my mom. It’s my sister and brother and niece and nephews and aunts and uncles and cousins. It’s all the rest of my family not wanting me.

I do have friends who love me. I know. It isn’t fair or right that I feel unloved. That’s bullshit. But it is also true that my family did not love me. It is possible for more than one thing to be true.

Why why why why why why why why why why does this matter?

Ok, maybe losing the Bonus Mama is hitting me harder than I want to let on.

I went from hearing, “Let’s plan family trips together in perpetuity” to “You aren’t safe” in a very short period of time.

It feels like a continuation of last year’s “You are the same as police officers who shoot black children.”

I am all the evil. I am all the destruction. I am all the bad.

I am why we can’t have nice things.

*************************

Next morning. I woke up kinda feeling less irritated. Then Eldest Child started complaining about how her life is too overwhelming because she has three whole hours a week of classes and Noah defends how horrible it is.

I’m like, “The alternative minimum is 35 hours a week. Shut up.”

And Noah doesn’t like that. And Shanna doesn’t like it. And I resent the fuck out of both of them acting like me wanting someone other than me being responsible for teaching three hours a week is excessive.

Because I understand that Noah stepping up to help during the remodel is a fluke and we are going to go back to how “real life” works for us when this is over. It’s me doing all of it. Noah’s cranky about taking the kids to classes lately when I’ve done every other class in their lives.

How dare I want to not be responsible for teaching them every single thing they ever learn every minute of the day. Why am I so lazy?

Because even though I love home schooling I don’t know everything. I can’t teach everything. I don’t have the patience. I don’t have the experience. And you know what? I need fucking down time.

I miss teaching in a school; I had 7.5 hours a day where I worked with children and then many hours where I prepared for dealing with children while no one was around. Now I have constant children on top of me and I’m supposed to prep full speed while they demand information.

Home schooling is filtering back on top of me while I move back towards painting. I’m interacting more and directing more and I’m already feeling so overwhelmed I want to cry for months.

AND HOW DARE I WANT THE KIDS IN THREE HOURS A WEEK OF CLASSES. HOW COULD I BE SO MEAN.

Given that the babysitter is moving in May… Soon those will be my only hours in the whole week when I don’t have to be in charge.

But three hours are too much. It’s not fair.

It’s half an hour of swimming and 2.5 hours of martial arts spread over three days.

The only fair life would be sitting in front of youtube all day. Duh.

I’m fucking cranky. It doesn’t help that my back pain is definitely at a six on this scale. I am taking a lot of pain medication. I don’t forget about the pain for a second. It limits my movement. It limits my activities. My arms are bouncing between four and seven. My sleep has been negatively impacted by pain for a long time. If I roll over I hit my shoulder wrong and I wake up to stabbing pain.

But why don’t I do more work? Why am I so fucking lazy?

I don’t know how to cope any more. I am not physically capable of doing more work and the amount of work I’m doing is a real problem. But why am I not done yet? Why am I not working harder? Why do I want my kids to have a few hours a week where someone else directs them?

Because I’m a selfish, lazy asshole. That’s why.

I asked for help in cutting boards because it hurt. I asked for help in moving the skylight because it was too heavy for me. I said yes when my babysitter asked to carry all the bags of donation stuff.

See, that’s like being moderate in work.

I have done a lot of laundry and dishes. I put putty on the hallway ceiling and walls. I went to the bank and the dispensary and Home Depot.

Have I adulted enough for today?

But the best part? I started bleeding. Now I can go have another chance at pregnancy this month.

With the sudden spike in hits I assume that opposing lawyer is still checking my blog. Hey dude. You know, as rude as you were… you could have been worse. I get that you were doing your job. I just regret that you picked a job that wants you to be a soul sucking toad weasel.

Today is hopefully going to result in a massive drop in pain for me. Massage, chiro, acupuncture. Bring me allll the treatment. Pleeeeeeeeeeease.

Medical care is magical. Everyone should have access to this shit.

After medical care we get to go to a neighbor kid’s birthday party. Then go over the hill to drop off tile. Then hang out with friends who live over there who are kind enough to visit us regularly so we really have to make an effort. No shirking on folks who put that much effort into you.

I haven’t said this in writing yet. There’s trouble with the Bonus Family. Specifically with the Bonus Mama. I don’t know that I will be mentioning their family in connection to mine anymore.

Of course I have terrible guilt over this. I don’t think I did anything wrong and I would repeat my actions again. People have different opinions and needs and evaluations of stuff. Life is hard.

I think frequently of the relationships that have ended in the last few years. Godmamas. A. My shaman. Now the Bonus Family.

With the Godmamas I actively asked to help over and over; I was told no. Then I was told I was not deserving of a relationship with them because I didn’t help. Ok then. A… I drew him diagrams detailing why I needed help instead of to have an adult man show up and expect me to baby him. He was used to our friendship where he made almost $100,000/year and I made $14,000/year and I should pay to take care of him because he’s special or some shit. I don’t feel bad about telling him I was done being used. I had no more to give. My shaman told me that my children had to be submissive to him and he would ask them if they wanted sex when they were 18. I made the right damn choice. The Bonus Family… well… in a few years I’ll talk about what went down. For now I can’t.

I don’t regret my behavior or word choice. I think I said and did what I needed to. Life involves evolution of relationships and friendships. It’s true for everyone, not just me. What is weird about me is that I write all this shit down. It’s not that weird that it happens.

Yesterday I scrubbed the walls and ceiling in the hallway. I didn’t putty because I think I let the construction workers borrow my tub of putty and now it is gone (they only needed a tiny bit to dab on a hole). They also stole my ladder. This is irritating. Oh well. Another trip to Home Depot.

Sigh.

I also did laundry and dishes.

I took the kids on a bike ride to REI (Eldest Child needed a new helmet because her previous helmet was purchased when she was three. Her head has grown a bit) and Home Depot. It was surprisingly fun. I think the kids are close to being capable of doing bikes as transportation in town. Squee!

I’ve worked hard over the past few years to carve out a life for us within a radius of 3 miles from our house. My kids will be able to ride bikes to access all their classes and most of their fun in a few months. We just need a tiny bit more practice. How much longer until Eldest Child rides her bike all over town going to classes and camps? I think not long. She’s reaching for independence. More and more often I ask the kids if I can drop them off or if I need to sit at their class and they leap from the car waving. “I’m independent! Go away!”

This is fascinating from children who declare loudly and insistently that they do not want to go to school because it would mean they spent less time with me. We are all unsure what we actually want. We want to be together; we want space. We don’t know what we want. We want to be together while having space. Frankly that’s a lot of how our days go. We scatter to different rooms of the house to each have a little bit of space and we rotate around who is in which room. Sometimes we all converge on a room. Then we meander off to do something else again. But none of us want to leave the house very often.

I spend a lot of time feeling incredulous that I have managed to become part of a group. We are tight. We like each other and enjoy one another’s company and we talk all fucking day long. I mean, we have wonky moments too… but overall this is the most compatible group I’ve ever stood next to in my life.

No one else has ever had an interest in normalizing off of me.

That’s not true. But no one else has ever spent this kind of time and energy trying to normalize off of me. Ok, that is true. This is my one shot for being part of a group like this. I never had the group identity thing from hobbies or schools or my family. Now I do.

It feels a lot more ok that I don’t need to be liked by other people. I am liked enough by my family.

My kids can say, and believe it, that no one pleases everyone. They have a strong internalized belief that it is ok for people to like or dislike them and they should carry on as they are.

Please yourself. Everyone else has to worry about pleasing themselves. It is not your job to make sure other people are pleased. That’s their business. Don’t be a dick, but don’t bend over backwards either. Be. Don’t worry about pleasing.

You please me enough to make up for hundreds of millions of people disliking you. Cause really, do you have to interact with them or me?

It is the strangest god damn thing in the universe to teach these kinds of perspectives and beliefs when I have crushing mental illness issues that has me sobbing for weeks at a time because somebody doesn’t like me.

Oh good fucking grief.

I’m getting better. I’m learning from me over time. I’m getting to the point where if I have a problem in an area I turn to reframe it from a different point of view in my life.

I can’t possibly express how big of a deal it is that Sarah is still in my life and touching base with me frequently to help me find equilibrium. Sarah has been one of the people I speak to the most often for 13 years and counting. We’ve had big, difficult problems and worked them out. Like magic. No, like people who love each other very much and who desperately want to figure out how to treat one another right so we can have a healthy and loving and supportive relationship. We do a lot better than we used to. I do better than I used to.

I am going to spend the rest of my life working on behavior patterns. I have to not bully people. I have to not railroad people. It will take conscious effort… probably forever. I have a fucktastically strong personality. I have to work at being respectful. It doesn’t come naturally. But I want it. I want to be respectful so bad that I ache with it. I improve with time but I’m still not where I want to be.

And there will always be a big gap between my idea of acceptable (Hey, if I’m hurting my kids I bloody well expect my friends to call me on it) and what other people want to hear. I have to live with that. It’s ok. People are allowed to have different beliefs. I don’t have to interact with them. There are seven fucking billion people on this planet. If connection with you isn’t working out: next.

It’s not nice. But it is real.

Life goes on. We keep breathing and moving and doing stuff. We build new connections and relationships or we wither.

I want to grow.

Eldest Child is plowing through the Life of Fred math books. They are kind of weird. They don’t teach math in a linear fashion in the manner of school. Instead it teaches math through weird stories and many levels of conceptual math all at once. They talk about advanced concepts very early on with ideas instead of numbers. How do you put this list of stuffed animals together like a mathematical figure sort of stuff. I’m surprised by how much she likes it and how fast she’s progressing.

I was starting to really worry that I was fucking my kid up by not forcing academics before she was ready. Because she was pretty behind. She’s not behind anymore. She really did have to mature into this. I’m glad I gave her space. I’m so happy I didn’t allow my control-freak-nature drive this part of our relationship. I let her decide and now she’s ready. So she’s taking off like a shot and she’s really excited about everything she’s learning. She is super enthusiastic about how much she loves math and science and history and reading and art and writing and…

Because she got here when she was ready with the amount and kind of support she needed. I remember being convinced already at that age that I was too stupid to do art or math and I was “bad” at science and…

I’m not a stupid person. As an adult I’m fairly god damn conscious that I’m anything but stupid. Hell, around the time I was 8 was when I finally was given an IQ test. That should have convinced me that I was smart, right? The numbers were pretty damn flattering. But no, maybe I had a brain that started out with potential but I just happened to not be able to learn all of these subjects. The only thing I could do was read fast.

For so many years I cried and cried and cried because I believed that literally the only thing in the world I could do well was read fast. My mom spent a fair bit of time trying to convince me that it was in fact a positive trait. It was a good thing. It would pay off. Thank you, mama.

It really has paid off.

I no longer believe I have one talent. I’m a Jill of All Trades. I can do a lot of shit. I’m pretty damn handy.

But my children have never been told they are bad at art or science or math or… I say, “You are where you are today. If you don’t know something yet, you will.” When my kids hit a period where they are frustrated with themselves for lacking the finesse they wish they already have I say, “The thing standing between where you are right now and this thing you want is hundreds of hours of practice. Now, you can complain while you do the practice and still get there and we’ll all be miserable; or you can chill the fuck out and realize that you are doing great for your age and you will be better with time. Your choice.”

And you know what? I honestly accept that sometimes you have to bitch a lot while you practice because the practice step sucks so much ass. I get that. There are days when a kid has to bitch. On those days I wear ear plugs and I separate the kids. We muddle through and do ok with that.

There are days when life is totally fucking frustrating. We try to give one another space for that. It isn’t personal. There is nothing that other people can do to save you from the fact that some days just kinda suck. Yup. Get through it. We will forgive you and let it go. Tomorrow is another day and all that rot.

Sometimes I look at my relationship with my children and I feel utterly confident that we will still want to have a relationship in 40 years. Then I think that my mother was probably equally confident 10 years into her 15 year marriage.

Shit. I can’t get complaisant. There is still room for everything to blow up sky high. My mom’s life looked like it would be pretty damn stable 10 years into marriage. How did that turn out?

I don’t know if my mom is ok or not and I may never know again.

Build up my kids. Give them the confidence to choose relationships that make them feel good about themselves. Teach them how to evaluate how people treat them.

Teach them that if someone says they want space you don’t come back and knock on the door and say, “Was that enough space yet? Are you over it?” No. You give people god damn space. It’s respectful.

I do want to be respectful. I don’t want to always say what you want to hear…. but that’s different. Sometimes being respectful of a larger situation means saying things that aren’t fun to hear.

I get called on my shit. I totally fuck up. I’m not trying to sit on a high horse or throw stones from my glass house or be a pot calling a kettle black or whatever. Metaphor, simile, trite cliche, whatever.

I don’t even know. Rawr. I’m on day 48 of my cycle. I’m not pregnant. I’m just… not bleeding. This is getting annoying. This knowledge is hanging over my head and bothering me more and more. In previous skipping-a-period months I’ve had 53 or 58 day cycles. So I’ll make an ob/gyn appt if I’m not bleeding by day 60. Cause come on body. I’m too young for the change. But my period tracker says that my cycle range isn’t normal. Meh. Stress will do this to a body. One more week until we get arbitration results. Wheeeee.

I appreciate the friends who are thanking me for writing again. I’m glad you missed me.

(I’m going to have to go back and tag all these damn journal entries one of these days. The very thought makes me weep.)

The first time I had an x-ray done to try and see why I was in constant pain I was 8 years old. When I was 18 I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Other diagnoses have arrived over the years. I haven’t started seriously trying to treat my physical issues until my 30’s.

Now I’m fucking expensive. Lately every Friday I see: a massage therapist, a chiropractor, and an acupuncturist. That’s to keep me *moving*; I’m trying to slow the rate of damage right now. It isn’t possible to heal while working the hours I’m working. I’m doing more damage every day.

I saw my massage therapist for an extra hour yesterday. She spent an hour putting one side of my clavicle into place and mostly digging the nerves back into place on one elbow. There wasn’t time to touch my hand let alone the other arm. Because it took her so long to unlock the joint around the clavicle to put it back in place.

I have to stop lifting. Like, for real.

My body is crumbling and I believe I have so little worth that I have to keep working until I completely collapse.

This is not positive.

I follow a bunch of African women on Twitter. Today one of them said something like how the world isn’t going to cut you a cheque for being a good person; the world doesn’t care. I interpreted this as meaning: do what you do because it feeds you and not because you hope for a pay off in the end.

Sometimes I wonder about the wisdom of working at such a rate that I am going to kill myself early and I won’t get to enjoy the payoff of the beauty of this house.

Then I think that the resale value is going to be pretty fantastic and my kids will be safe whether I’m dead or alive.

Yesterday I had a chat with my daughter. She was the first one up. She asked me what I’ve learned from her. I said that I learned that snuggling really and truly is mandatory for happiness because I’ve gotten to see concretely in her behavior what happens if we snuggle or don’t on a given day. Her behavior is so different. She needs to snuggle or she has a hard time managing her feelings. If she gets in a snuggle in the morning she does better for the whole rest of the day. She’s more calm. It’s like someone handed her a bonus 20 spoons.

I didn’t understand how physiologically important contact was before that. I knew I always felt like I had a deficit of 20 spoons when I started every day but I didn’t know to connect it to the fact that I was touch hungry.

I wouldn’t have been raped so many times if I hadn’t been so desperate to have someone, anyone touch me in any way they were willing to. I know that I bear a lot of responsibility for being in places I shouldn’t have been. But I was a little kid and I didn’t know and I was so fucking lonely.

So I guess I got what I deserved.

My fingertips burn like fire and they will until the skin grows back. Using a razor blade without a handle for hours a day for months… did bad things to my hands.

I’m struggling with feeling like I’ve abruptly stopped working so now I’m a useless cow. I haven’t even really stopped working; I’ve just slowed the pace and I’m doing stuff I’ve been putting off for months. I’m not doing tile/painting. I’m seriously dreading painting right now. My arms and shoulders hurt so much that the very idea makes me want to cry.

I’m not painting this week. Next week. This week is fucking busy. Mondays and Wednesdays are the easiest days for painting due to babysitting plus class schedules and I missed them this week because I was doing other work.

I’m angry with myself for feeling like taxes are procrastinating. No, they aren’t. That is mandatory work. I am not wasting energy by putting things in storage in the shed now that it is moved into a more permanent location. I’m not being lazy if I go outside and weed; yes it brings me joy–that doesn’t change the fact that it is work.

I hurt. I’m cranky. I don’t like me all that much. Ok. I’m done whining for the day.

This remodel has eaten my brain, my spoons, and my time for a very long time now. It’s been over a year of solid physical work and it isn’t over. But I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Yesterday the kids and I spent an hour and a half filling the green waste bin with weeds from the back yard. We are prepping for Easter. I talked to the kids about which plants to defend and why; we looked at examples of choking out. We did our best to recite the names of the plants we know we are keeping and why. (I need to look up some stuff again because I forget.

I’m putting things away in the shed that can live there for a very long time. The pantry is almost organized again. The garage is coming along.

I found a tile artist who wants the tile! I’m going to drive stuff down to Santa Cruz to her because that’s way more awesome than hoping someone will find a way to use it in an industrial setting.

The living room is downright livable. The kid rooms are easy to pick up and organize and the kids are enjoying that. They can find their stuff for the first time in almost two years. It’s been a long road.

Physically I’m still in a rough spot. I’m trying to slow down my rate of work so I can maybe stop inflicting damage and work on healing. We’ll see how well this goes.

Mood wise: gardening was smart. I felt so much better when I was done. Gardening is fun and satisfying. You don’t have to do 15 months on a project, you can set an hour as work time and be satisfied with the progress. Sure there’s more to weed (there’s always more to weed) but I’m out of green waste bin space so there is no point in picking any more plants this week. Done. And the plants are coming back to life so beautifully.

At Pantheacon I participated in a conversation that was fun for me. It was talking about the overlap of mental issues and existing in the world. In this case it was about bugs and pests and little creatures that want to live in our houses with us. I said that over the last few years I’ve been getting weirder with every passing year. I don’t like to kill pests or bugs anymore. (My only exception is spiders on the floor of the bathtub. That’s just a dumb place to hang out.) I carry them outside. We have critters who hang out in our yard from the neighborhood. We see opossums. Opossums are good because they eat fallen fruit and keep rats away. But the poop is kinda gross. So anyway, in the conversation I was talking to someone who says they have trouble exerting boundaries with these critters because the critters need to live too.

I said that I have lots of conversations with the bugs and critters and I encourage them to live in my yard, but not my house. You don’t want me in your house because I would mess stuff up and I don’t want you in my house. We can each maintain respectful space. I have corners of my yard that are very devoted to critters and I don’t clean up and there are wood piles and bugs and… that’s good.

It’s funny how the pagan thing is going to hang over my head. I’m woo. I can claim being woo without anyone in the whole world telling me that I don’t “count” because I’m not “pure” enough or I don’t have the right teacher or whatever. Being into woo woo shit is highly unregulated. No one really calls woo woo appropriation: they stick with weird. I’m fine with weird.

I like helping other creatures stay alive. I like that the birds and the bees hang out in my yard now. I like the explosion of beetles and spiders in the yard. I like the ants I see digging in my beds. That’s where they belong. The opossums are wonderful and when I had to evict them from one housing spot (they were damaging my house–I need their house to not be directly touching mine) I did it very gently and I didn’t harm them and I scared them as little as I possibly could. I don’t want to be mean. I just need you to move because we want to paint that wall there. I’m really sorry.

I made some spots further out in the corners where the kids don’t play. That’s a great spot to keep an opossum safe.

I used to ridicule bird watching. Now I spend a fair bit of time getting to know my neighborhood birds. I can’t get the hummingbirds to eat out of a feeder (I’ve moved it, tried different fluids… they hate my feeder) so instead I have flowers everywhere that they love. I can’t wait till they come back in a few weeks. Right now all the flowers are just barely emerging.

It makes me happy when I walk out in the back yard with a bag of bird seed. All the birds explode into conversation. They know me and they know what that means.

It’s kind of funny how much this means to me.

I sent out my monthly donations this morning. I believe with all my heart and soul that we need to #GiveYourMoneyToWomen because that’s the way to correct a lot of problems. As long as wealth concentrates in the hands of men we are in trouble. Which erases non-binary people entirely.

Shit.

Lately I’ve been noticing how much my language is binary and it is bugging the shit out of me.

I can’t say that men don’t menstruate. That’s bullshit. I can’t say that only women menstruate. That’s complete and utter fucking horse shit. But I’ve said it. Recently. I’m a piece of shit. I’m sloppy and lazy and reductionist in how I speak.

This shit hurts people I love. I gotta stop.

I think I had managed to completely ignore how much of it I did until recently. I’m done ignoring that shoddy behavior. It has to move up the list to “actively working on change”.

My child deserves this from me. My friends deserve this from me. Hell, strangers who mean nothing to me personally deserve this from me. I don’t have the right to erase people casually. That’s fucked up.

There are people who have uteruses and people who don’t. It’s not about being male or female. These are separate distinctions.

And male or female aren’t the only options so what the fuck.

I need more words for this. Luckily I have a backlog of books to go through that talk about trans issues. I need to start reading. That’s also waiting on the remodel.

Oh I’m tired. So much to learn. So much to think about. And now I have a lovely daughter who wants to snuggle up with me. ttyl