I keep trying to figure out why I have this intense burning need to go.

Didn’t I make a beautiful house and garden?

I did.

But you know what? Uhhh… I made them. If you think I can’t do it again you can fuck right off.

My home is Noah and my kids.

The bay turned out to be too big. I wanted to find a way to make my friends my family. That was not something I could figure out in a sustainable way that worked to fill my needs. That makes sense.

I wish I didn’t feel like a failure for that. I have really wonderful friends. They are friends. They are super awesome as friends.

I created a network that exceeded anything I had any right to hope for. And it’s not enough. That’s about me. This need inside of me is too big.

I don’t think I’ll find it with friends somewhere else. That’s not it.

I think I will be a great community member somewhere else. I will not be looking for family. I mean, some day we want to foster. But I don’t think I have it in me to trust any friends to get all that close though. I’m scared.

The Quiet One told me that I may have broken… but I broke open.

I don’t know if that is allowed to be true. It’s complicated.

I can’t be that open. I mean, I will probably always have my intense friendships. But I don’t know that I will ever permit anyone to ask for a family designation/title again. That well is poisoned.

We have the aunties. All of the uncles have opted out or been expelled for good reasons. My adopted Dad is still grandpa. He’s been really kind to my kids. He visits us and we visit him and he spends time with my them. I’m really grateful that he cares enough to reach out and try to see my children.

But… all the others have fallen away. That’s ok. But I’m not going to be able to stay here and slap a happy smile on my face and pretend that I never tried and failed. I am not good at playing that game.

I am capable of resetting the board and not having the history.But I can’t keep doing this over and over forever or I’ll do to my kids what was done to me. And I won’t actually cut contact with everyone. I have neat friends and my friends live on the internet anyway.

I want to go back to just being grateful when someone spends 30 minutes talking to me once or twice a year. I don’t want to feel like all the moments in between are a rejection. They aren’t. I tried too hard here. I poured too much of myself into the begging. I didn’t pace myself for the marathon of living here.

I didn’t even know what it might mean or that it might really happen.

Doing the marathon that is. I’m 100% in uncharted territory with this whole forever family thing. I am rapidly on my way to having been a mother for as long as I was a child. My mom didn’t treat life like a marathon. She’s sprinting until she dies. And some of that is kind of her fault and some of it is the consequence of a really shitty life.

My life is so easy. I will never be able to understand my mother.

And if my kids turn out to suck maybe I’m a worse mother than my mother after all. We’ll see.