There are parts of caring for a baby that are hard, even when the baby is easy for a baby. There are nights of disrupted sleep even if the baby sleeps pretty well. There is fussing and discontent because sometimes it takes mama a few minutes to figure out that the current problem is what position I’m holding her in. Baby screams are designed to climb inside your ear drums like shards of glass. Do not ignore me say the frantic screams that can erupt in a minute when the baby realizes OH MY GOD MY DIAPER IS WET. THIS IS NOT OK. FIX IT.

But I’ve been through this rodeo. I remember crying because I needed time off from EC. Now I’m still thrilled to get time off from EC but don’t you touch my baby. She will only need me for a little while.

The load on my brain and body feel different. I have been all the way through this and come out the far side with functional, interesting big kids. I don’t feel impatient with my baby this time because in my body I know that this dependency period is so short. Then they pull away and want to do it alone.

She will only think I am everything for a few months. I can be patient for that long. It means I get to snuggle her sweetness. I’ve been calling all of my kids my/your/her/their sweetness as in almost a stand in for “highness”. It keeps me from calling them “your heiny” which sometimes I am inclined to do because I am a turkey butt.

She’s not the most robust nurser ever. She doesn’t suck very hard and then my nipple falls out of her mouth and a pool of milk spills. It’s not spit up, she just didn’t swallow fast enough/hard enough. But the double chin tells me that she’s getting enough in her. She just prefers to stimulate my let down and then just let it spray. This is wise; my older children would suck hard after my let down and then get mad because they choked with the intensity. My boobs are energetic about how they deliver milk. HI. YOU WANT MILK. HERE HAVE ALLLLLLLLL THE MILK WITH GREAT FORCE.

It’s funny to me. But I spend a lot of time staring at walls so I need whatever levity I can get.

Height wise, baby is about out of 3 month clothes. She has plenty of chub space left, but the toes are getting tight and that makes it hard to dress a baby. Luckily some kind friends are going to come get my we-are-done-with-it pile this weekend. R will pick up the stuff she lent me that I don’t need to keep and Y is picking up stuff we are culling so she can sell it on the internet. She has time, energy, and the extreme need for money so she’s happy to do it. I’m happy I don’t have to get all this stuff to a donation center this month. Yay. It also means she can pick through my stuff to see if anything is useful in her new apartment. Shopping in your friend’s house for free is the best shopping.

I am not hosting an Easter party this year. I just can’t. I’m tired and not up for the amount of stress I put on myself for it. I spend 30-50 hours getting ready for the Easter party every year. I do a lot of yard work over months prepping for it. I do a massive deep clean of the house so I can have other people’s children come over and dig through the nooks and crannies of my house. I don’t want all the germs around my newborn.

I am going to hide eggs, of course, but my kids are going to spend a freakin week finding eggs.

The kids asked if we could put the house on the market next year after Easter so we can have one last big party because wouldn’t it be sweet for YC to get a real Easter egg hunt in this house…

We’ll see but it’s not a bad time line.

And I’m totally out of time.

Today was long. I have absolutely no memory of when I woke up, which is weird. Usually I notice that time and it imprints on my memory. Time is a big deal to me.

I’ve always been obsessed with time and clocks. I play a variety of little games with myself about manipulating the numbers and the lines in analog clocks. I play the adding/subtracting/multiplying/dividing games with face clocks too. I’m really into thinking about how to get everything to 10.

Anyway.

Today we woke up and went out to breakfast. It was a weird ass day. We ate out twice. After breakfast we came home to grab a few odds and ends and nurse the baby then we drove to San Jose. We went to the consignment event I said we weren’t going to visit this spring. Oh well. I found the stuff I wanted and the big kids filled in their summer wardrobes. We were down to 1-3 tank tops or shorts for each kid. Even though we do laundry a lot the summer is a little annoying with one tank top and three shorts.

I also found a swing for $35 to replace the one my friend gave me… which was broken. To be fair the one from my friend is like ten years old. These things are not manufactured that well to start with.

Then we went out to lunch. Lots of veggies were had.

We came home for a brief respite. The kids and I weren’t home for two hours. Then we got to go to chess class. Then the kids had belt testing in martial arts. We got home almost 12 hours after we initially left this morning.

The baby was great.

I would say that if you added up every minute of her screaming/crying there were about 10 more minutes of upset than we would get in the same time period at home. It just… went fine. She’s a trouper. (And now I’m second guessing that spelling of that word, Noah… even though I’m not wrong.)

This is a baby to inspire frequent breeding.

“Have a baby…. ” she says, “then you can experience the bliss of soothing a tiny helpless human with baths and car rides and being put down while you do things….”

IT’S A FUCKING LIE. NOT EVERY KID IS LIKE THIS. DON’T DO IT. KIDS ARE USUALLY HARD AS FUCK. THIS KID IS A GOD DAMN MIRACLE.

I mean, she’s still a lot of work. But she’s so sweet about it…

There are moments when I seriously think that karma is a real thing and I paid so hard when I was young that I earned having my life get better and better starting at 25. The last 11 years of my life have been surreal.

Thank you, Noah.

I am grateful that you have been willing to essentially train a feral animal. I am not who I was when we got married. There are parts that are better and parts that are harder but absolutely none of who I am today would be possible without the safety, support, and love you have given to me.

And the kids. You gave me three specific reasons I never get to quit on you. You made it so you have a permanent manipulation button on me. “It would be better for the kids if you…”

You are a genius.

I’m getting over my internal whine about oh my god I signed on for 30 god damn years of active parenting and moving into a feeling of gratitude. This spacing is really wonderful so far for a variety of reasons. I’m really glad we didn’t get pregnant right away. Our big kids are at the perfect developmental stage for accepting a sibling and six months ago I think it would have been shitty. They were both in hard disequilibrium periods and right now they are both riding high on equilibrium, self assurance, and mastery. They are both feeling good in their bodies and lives.

I mean, there is still that deep pocket of shame. There is still that base line of emotional volatility… but it’s doing so much better. There will always be seasons that are easier or harder and we lucked into having the baby be born during an easy season. This timing is wonderful.

I think MC in particular would not have coped with a sibling before this. Being a middle child isn’t easy. There is all the fuss and complication of always striving to feel “as good as” the older sibling and all the pressure of being an older sibling and not being permitted to “be the baby” forever. I think MC would have done poorly at pretty much any point in the past. They needed seven years of being the baby before they were ready to move on and let someone else be the baby.

MC is really latching on to “Sibby”. In my family of origin Sissy is the name for the oldest sister in the family. So we have Sissy and Sibby and both of them really wish I was more supportive of them being little mommies. I believe with all my heart that while it is good for older siblings to be capable of helping and for them to do some of it… they aren’t parents. They are not going to be given power or authority over their younger sibling(s). Just no. There are lots of life circumstances where I might have no choice and I am not judging folks who have to.

It is important to understand how and where your personal choices and preferences are about the intersection of needs, abilities, resources, and desires of the people involved.

I understand why people have to leave an oldest in charge. I just want to do everything I can to avoid doing that. If I have to then… everyone’s principles can change in case of need. That’s life.

In four more years when YC is around four and MC is around twelve and YC is around fourteen…. I can imagine paying the older children to babysit so I can drag Noah to a munch with me so we can make friends in a new place.

But it won’t be frequent and when my kids babysit… I will need to pay them. Given all the schtuff in my life… that’s just part of the deal.

I don’t know why I kept the Sissy thing when I hate my Sissy so much.

Because I love her and I want to look up to her and Auntie was such a good Sissy to my mom. Auntie is always there for my mom. Sure she’s codependent as shit. I’m pushing EC to not put up with being disrespected and working on teaching her patterns of abuse and what to put your foot down about.

Can you be a good Sissy and not be an enabler?

I tell my children, “You only stay in a relationship with someone if they treat you decently and that includes your family members. If you don’t like how I, or your dad, or your (whoever) treat you then you don’t have to continue knowing us as an adult. It will be up to you. Hopefully we will act right and you will want to have relationships with us… but you never owe us. Only share what you freely want to share.”

I owe them because I selfishly chose to bring them into the world. I made them just because I wanted to know them. Because the other seven billion fucking people didn’t love me enough and that was never going to change.

It’s interesting perceiving how much I have changed because of the simple reality of having relationships that are intensely physical and completely non sexual. I am pretty sure that the longest I ever lived with my mother was a six year span from when I was 12-18. My mother and I did not have an intensely physical relationship. She would hug me at times but mostly she didn’t like to be touched; I get it.

I have wonderful friends. We don’t see each other much. Mostly we don’t touch that much when we do see each other unless we are having some kind of sex. Because…

Yeah. Because.

Because that’s what I do. Only I can’t anymore. I have to be something different.

I feel sometimes like I was born when EC was. Sometimes I wonder if part of the reason I went through a really horrible long period when sex was pretty traumatic most of the time was because I did a lot of abreacting and trying to identify with EC’s life to learn how to feel safety in my body and it kept being interrupted by physically painful and damaging sex.

I started really coming out of it eight years later.

I started coming out of it on my own at a time when women in my family have often gone into puberty in generations past.

True and not true. Just looking at patterns. They don’t mean anything.

Abort. Abort. Delete Paragraph.

Anyway. I should go to bed. I’m starting to hit the wall. I was overstimulated like I had been sucking down… I don’t know what. Caffeine doesn’t keep me awake very well. Nothing keeps me awake when I’m tired except intense emotion. I can stay awake. But it takes something ridiculous like a new baby or a term paper I didn’t write until 24 hours before it was due.

Not that I was ever such a slacker. All the way through grad school.

But I don’t stay up well for parties or social events.

Why did I used to go to so damn many parties?

Ahhhh…. so I could meet my wonderful friends. But once I find them I can go home and contact them in my preferred mediums.

It works. Mostly. I do have some neat friends. I find them all over.

I am struggling with talking myself into holding the baby while I brush my teeth. Whine. It’s wonderful. It’s a great job. Holding the baby (or being on my side while I face the baby and nurse in bed) for approximately 22 hours a day gets… ouchie. And I’m not seeing my normal body workers because no I don’t leave my baby for an hour or two because this is my thing. I spend the fourth trimester with my babies.

Sure I dragged this one out of the house all day. But she was in the car for about two and a half hours in chunks spread over twelve hours. The. Entire. Rest. Of. The. Day. Is. On. Me. 

Noah hasn’t had her for an hour out of the last 24.

And I give him dates by himself. Two of us on a self abnegation spree goes poorly. Someone has to be getting some damn needs met.

Ok, I’m getting most of my needs met. Just not alone time or body care. There is more of that in my future. I can be patient.

In the past I made poor decisions because I pursued self-care stuff at the expense of my children. I won’t do that again. If it hurts sometimes… well… I didn’t have kids because I wanted a convenient life. I wanted purpose and connection. I wanted to have someone whose opinion I care about.

I am selfish and small and not everyone else in the world was enough without them.

I needed to have there be more people who think of the holidays and me and “home”. Noah feels like that and it’s great.

When I was born I was told I would get three older siblings. Instead I was raised mostly as an only child and I had occasional visiting abusers.

Now I get to have one kid on one side of me and another kid on the other side of me and another kid on top of me. Noah leans on some part of me or another.

They want me here so much.

This is what safe feels like.

Sometimes I feel pretty squeamish about the fact that I am not sure how much I want to “be” a good person and how much I want to pretend I am a good person so I can model it for my children. I want them to have the option of being good people or effective monsters if they choose.

That’s an interesting thought process. I don’t want to decide for them how they end up. I want to give them the opportunity.

I honestly feel like “being good” was not an option for me when I was young if I wanted to survive. If I had striven harder for being good I would have cooperated more. I would have fought less. And I’d be dead.

So I don’t want to force my children into the model of always doing as they are told. I want them to know how to choose. I want them to have a strong sense of their own internal compass for right and wrong and I want them to do their best to do right according to their own metrics.

Shit like giving money to homeless people. That isn’t something that I feel “Everyone Must Do To Be Good.” That’s not how it occurs in my brain at all. *I* was homeless for years and people helped me. People helped *me* not die. *I* owe paying that help forward. I have extra. My life is freakishly blessed. If *I* don’t hand $5 to anyone who asks me then I am betraying the child I once was.

That’s not about a universal sense of right or wrong or being good or being bad. It is about me playing the other part of the role I used to play. Because I can. Because in this life if you receive it is also good to give.

But different people receive different things. Not everyone is morally or spiritually obligated to have the same role as me.

How does goodness fit into that?

I do actually perceive myself as a generous person. I do perceive myself as a kind person.

But goodness is just a bridge too far.

I ain’t nice, but I strive for kindness all the time. Kindness is not always nice. Kindness is sometimes brutal. Kindness is telling my best friend she needs to change because this outfit sucks on her instead of saying something nice about it being an interesting pattern.

On a completely different note… my body has gone through some kind of intense reset lately. I cannot remember when I last had diarrhea. I’ve had solid stool for weeks. Even postpartum it never got liquid again. It was soft and easy to produce… but not diarrhea. I am pretty sure this is the longest period in my life when I have had solid stools. Apparently we are doing a fantastic job of nailing my nutritional needs plus lowering my stress levels. I’m really impressed. I didn’t know my body was capable of doing this well.

It’s exciting to me.

My sleep is all over the place. Meaning I’m not sleeping very well or very deeply. I’m absolutely terrified that I am going to be responsible for killing my baby. I don’t think that is going to happen but the terror is there. So I don’t sleep well because I check her over and over and over all night long. We do follow safe sleep practices. I’m not medicating at night. I’m not doing risky stuff with my baby. But SIDS is an absolutely terrifying boogeyman. Sometimes you do everything right and your baby still dies. So I don’t sleep much in the hopes that if her breathing pauses for some reason of immaturity I will be there to poke her back into action.

I’ll sleep when she’s more sturdy.

I am so so so grateful I don’t have to drive or have a job right now.

My hat is off to the mamas who have to go back to work already. You are strong, powerful, and loving. Your kid is lucky to have your protection in every form you give it. You are teaching your kids stuff I am not teaching mine and your kids are lucky.

I do wish my country viewed the long term mental health of everyone who breeds as important and provided longer maternity/paternity leave. A low stress time period of adapting to being a parent would be better for everyone.

One lady in my online due date club had to go back to work nine days postpartum. She’s the bread winner for her family and her job won’t let her take more time off. She has cried a lot about how sad she is to leave her baby, but it is necessary for the survival of her family. I believe it is wrong that our country does this to people but I don’t have even 1 oz of judgment for her. She’s surviving and coping in an unfair situation.

Mamas usually (not always) do their best. It is really sad when circumstances control the fact that their best is probably not what is truly best for their family. I don’t blame the mothers. I blame our fucked up culture.

When your choice is between feeding and housing your family or bonding with your new infant… that’s not a choice. That’s evil.

*We* choose to allow that to be the way our culture works. We elect politicians who keep it true.

Someone Noah grew up with has a baby just a couple of months older than our new one. Their baby was diagnosed with liver cancer.

There is no fair. There is no amount of paranoia that can actually keep my children safe. It’s luck of the draw and life is so unfair there are no words to adequately express how unfair it all is. I mourn for their family and pray that such a fate does not strike my children. Because nothing I do or don’t do will actually influence that kind of health. It’ll happen or it won’t.

Being a parent is terrifying.

In this exact moment I feel like I have passed some sort of… I don’t know a line in the sand. Some level of development. I’ve reached some sort of change.

I know that I will again feel like I want to die at some point. But in this moment I feel like there is so much need for my presence that I hope I will never again feel like I “should” die because in this moment I am capable of seeing how untrue that will be for the rest of my life. From here on out my death is going to absolutely devastate several people. There is no chance that my death is a positive thing ever again.

When I die it will cause more pain than it will relieve. I don’t believe that has been true for most of my life. It would have been a selfish act, always, but I don’t think it would have hurt people the way it would now. And for most of my life I have been in so much more pain than I am now. My physical pain comes and goes and sometimes spikes much higher than it was when I was a child but the physical pain has never really been the problem. The emotional pain is what I have struggled to bear.

I don’t know why this daughter feels like such a tipping point to me. She is not more important, valued, or loved than her sister or sibling.

But there are four fucking people who would absolutely never be ok again if I killed myself.

I am not really ok after my father and brother killed themselves. It doesn’t hurt like it would hurt my kids… I had different relationships. But if I still feel the amount of pain I feel in relation to their deaths I can barely imagine what it would do to my kids. It would scar their souls until they died.

I can see that so clearly. My oldest daughter has been clingy and loving and so wonderful lately. She’s having big feelings about the transition to having another baby and she is needing a lot of snuggling and chats about life and change. She’s not trying to regress. She is trying to affirm her own importance in my heart.

My children continue to feel glad that when we go out and it’s chilly, I will still give them my warm layers so that I can shiver and they can feel better. Even though I told you to bring something or I’d let you suffer for your own silliness. I never really do though. If I have warmth to share I will give it. Because you are my externalized beating heart and I want you to be ok. I will be ok enough with what I have left. I have survived so much worse. But you feeling uncomfortable is enough for me to try and fix it. Because you are my love. How could I look at you and make a choice to let you feel uncomfortable when it is so easy for me to fix?

You are my everything. My reason for living and striving and trying.

I need you. I love you.

And now my family has brought me back donuts. Time to go!

I’m wandering back and forth between here and fetlife for this chain of thoughts. I’m never sure why I post stuff on fetlife at all, but once in a while I feel moved to. Ok.

I have a hard time with the very concept of goodness. What is goodness?

I keep thinking about this kid from southern Louisiana. I can’t remember his name. He was a kid who got in trouble a lot when he was young. When Hurricane Katrina hit this kid rescued a lot of people. He was black and he lived in a poor neighborhood that was not given a lot of help in evacuating. He saved a lot of lives. The news stories I read about him (quite some time ago) were all shocked that this young black guy would be so heroic… so good.

Fuck all y’all for being surprised.

The funny thing is I would trust juvenile delinquents to help and be resourceful in that kind of situation faster than I would trust most “high achievers” or obedient children. Why? Because in order to really be helpful in a crisis you probably need to be good at thinking outside the box and not following your standard way of behaving. You need something new and challenging.

In modern America that kind of personality gets sent to juvie on the regular.

I believe the only reason I didn’t end up in juvenile hall was because I moved so often I didn’t develop a sufficient pattern of behavior in a given community.

What does it mean to be good?

I’m rereading the Imriel books again. Kushiel series. Jacqueline Carey. The Phédra books are way less interesting to me this time. (I need something I can read 2 pages at a time and pick up and put down and not put real effort into learning a new thing.) I’m interested in the thought process behind being problematic from conception and trying to have your very existence not cause more problems in the world. I’m interested in what it means to try to be good when you have impulses that are not so good.

I’m thinking about monsters and intent.

Beauty and the Beast. The whole town comes out to kill the beast… why? Because they are afraid of him. Has he hurt someone? Enh, not really. He has imprisoned intruders… but that was not particularly a violent reaction at the time.

When I think of what goodness means I think of when I read the statistic (that might not be accurate) that 100% of Alaskan native women are raped. Usually by a family member. Are those rapists driven from families or communities? Of course not. They are members of the community and they are necessary for survival. They do good things.

I can say good things about pretty much everyone who raped me. Paul Nathan does an award winning comedy act. He’s great on stage. But I know I’m not the only woman he raped.

What does goodness mean?

There is a woman in my local community. She’s a god damn leather title holder. When I was a teenager she spent a lot of time actively trying to get me to sleep with a list of her friends because “They like it when I bring them fresh meat.”

What does goodness mean?

Most of the ‘big name’ presenters from coast to coast have mixed reputations. Everyone has fucked up. Most people have crossed some major line at some point. The victims tend to leave. The big names stick around and become fixtures who cannot be assailed because everyone knows them and they do so much good for the community. Communities cannot exist without tolerating abusers. Abusers do a lot of fucking work to carry communities forward and the community would cease to exist without them.

What does goodness mean?

I won’t work Dickens Fair because I can’t go face my rapist. But Dan’s been a dedicated member of Mad Sal’s for way over 10 years and he’s done  so much good for the show and the community.

I fear that over the summer when I discussed restorative justice with some folks… they really didn’t understand what I meant. I didn’t mean that “communities shouldn’t throw people away” I meant “if you don’t specifically center the needs of victims you will drive them out of your community and only keep the abusers”. I meant that it’s not just about getting over transgressions and letting folks who fuck up have a second chance. How do you help heal people from being hurt?

Shouldn’t communities care a lot more about the members who are wounded instead of the ones doing the wounding?

Naw. That shit is about work going out and communities need work going in. Victims are hard. Victims are annoying. Victims make people feel weak and vulnerable and bad.

Abusers are way better to keep around.

What does goodness mean?

“But I’m a good person”. I don’t give a shit about your inherent goodness. I care that your fucking behavior is abusive.

What is abusive?

When you make someone feel small and bad about themself and like they don’t deserve to have the feelings/thoughts/emotions they god damn have about their fucking experiences.

I do not know if I ever want to think of myself as good. I’m not sure I would want to be. I’m not nice either.

But I am kind. I am compassionate. I am thoughtful. I am giving. I am generous. I am helpful. I am a good listener. I am educated about how to help people process their emotions. I am a very good teacher–I don’t have to know something to teach it.

Maybe I don’t have to be good to teach it.

Maybe it doesn’t actually matter if I am good and instead it matters if I am actively engaged in improving myself and doing things that make the world better for others. Other people, other animals, other ways of existing.

What does goodness mean?

A baby is sleeping on my chest, supported by one arm. The time between typing and hitting “post” changes with a newborn.

I was reading something on the parenting board I’ve been codependently hanging out on. (I want to feel like I can “help” someone and I’m physically incapacitated. I know! I’ll go give advice to internet strangers!) One of the ‘known names’ (i.e. people who post so much that everyone knows their story and references them between threads) made a comment about her mother rugsweeping her father’s physical abuse and my response was that I wish I could slap the shit out of her mother.

I didn’t have the reaction that I wanted to hurt her father.

That’s a thing. That’s a whole societal thing.

(Break for poopy diaper and outfit change and now we are nursing.)

Whether the mother is the main instrument of abuse or the enabler… we blame her first, most, and often only her. Mothers are responsible for protecting their children. A child being hurt is the fault of the mother. No matter who does it.

I think about this a lot. Do I blame my mother most? This dynamic is on the gigantic list of reasons I homeschool.

It’s not really about whether I physically, mentally, sexually, emotionally, or spiritually abuse my kids… It’s about whether I can keep it from happening at all.

The funny (to me) part is I have agreements with Noah around him intervening in *my* behavior. I am monitored. He has told me things I needed to change. That’s good. If I go off the rails I have to leave for the good of the kids and we’ve skirted that before. He warned me I was heading that way.

I got the fuck back on the rails.

I’m not sure I’m actually temperamentally suited to the job I chose. But I’m going to force myself into that mode if it kills me. But instead of killing me it is healing me.

I woke up overwhelmingly cranky and with a long list of complaints. Noah suggested a walk. I’m less bitchy now. Over a mile this time! And it didn’t hurt! We’ve been doing just under a mile and it’s been real slow and hard. This felt better.

Noah doesn’t get mad at me for my moodiness. I don’t know what I did right to get him. I know that saying yes was important. (Technically I didn’t say yes I said “Yeah, I could do that.”) But what did I do to make him want me so bad?