Well… the house isn’t going to look how I wanted it to look when I scheduled two weeks to get ready. Sad face. But pushing anyone else or myself harder is not going to get it done and we have to be ready to leave the house for the airport in a little less than four hours.

What will be, will be. Sigh.

I am really really really struggling with how upset I am about going to Texas. I don’t want to go to Texas. I hate Texas. I thought I got to break up with Texas. If the baby were no longer nursing… I would not be going.

Fuck cancer. I don’t want to go to Texas.

I’m not going for any of the funerals to come over the next few years. But Noah and the kids want to say goodbye to a nice guy. The baby still needs me. So I’m going to fucking Texas.

I am struggling with how explosively angry I feel about going. I don’t want to go to Texas. I struggle with how much I place the happiness of my family members over my own.

I have a lot of shit to do. I could be here in my own space doing. Instead I get to spend a lot of time and energy on Texas. Which has not been a source of good in my life. So I get to go drain myself dry for a place and people that are just a source of pain for me. Fuck Texas. I hate Texas.

I am really sad for the poor guy who is sick. That’s really not fair.

I’m being a self pitying asshole. I’m trying not to take it out on the people around me. This is hard.

Fuck.

I got a bunch of boxes packed yesterday. I am one tiny thing away from three boxes being ready to ship to Jenny. I think I have 1-3 last boxes in the house of stuff we are using till we move. Today Noah will bring 9-10 boxes to the storage unit.

Today I get to clean the house because the day after we return from Texas… we are having a photo shoot. Wheeeeee. I’m actually really excited about that. The photographer is one we have worked with before and she got fantastic pictures of us and my art. I also need to figure out what we are all wearing because hoo boy I’m not doing that at the last second.

So I’m cleaning the house and setting out clothes today. Oh yeah, Middle Child has his long awaited evaluation at Stanford (like Eldest Child had two years ago). We are going over a bit early to have a date together and talk for a while. Then he has martial arts. Then we are heading north to drop off stuff with a friend in Berkeley and to drop stuff off in San Francisco before going to see Mona Haydar! She’s a really really really cool up and coming musician. I am ridiculously excited that I get to meet her before she is too famous to talk to assholes like me. The kids and I love her music. (If you don’t know it, Hijabi, Dog, and Barbarian are the three songs she has released so far and I’m excited about what is coming next. Here are links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOX9O_kVPeo, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idMJIEFH_ns, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfDQ5REWCu0)

Wonderful Muslim rapper/singer. She’s got a lot to say.

Oh, I also need to pack for Texas. The three kids are packed for their clothes. I haven’t packed mine or Noah’s yet.

It’ll all be fiiiiiiiine. I will get a lot of work done today. I will wake up in the morning tomorrow and finish setting up the house. Then tomorrow morning we go to the airport. Oh shucks. I sure hope my damn global entry card shows up today. We have 4 of them. Not mine. That’s getting irritating. According to the website I was approved… I just haven’t gotten the card yet. Damnit.

Ok. Need to snuggle baby more.

(ETA: last day here before the photo shoot and the house needs to be ready to remodel. Not last day in the house or last day in the country.)

Yesterday I hit the wall. I had 40mg of marijuana in the afternoon and my body went, “Hahahaha. You are done working.” Oh.

I could push through. But I would scream. I would be nasty. I would be actively hurting myself. My back and my arms and my neck are doing quite poorly at this point. I only have a few more boxes to pack before I get a break from packing. A few more boxes and… everything is just waiting to be put on a table in the yard. That’s a wee bit terrifying.

We’ve already gotten rid of a lot and we will get rid of the rest.

I am afraid that Eldest Child is not going to be going into Disneyland park this year. I don’t think she will catch up on math. She’s getting real bored of doing so much math. So she’s doing how much in a day she needs to do for maintenance. She uhhhh is less interested in catching up.

That’s fine. You can hang out with whoever is in the hotel room resting. We have a bunch of adults going (5-6 at a time!). We will trade off.

I feel like an ogre. Only I really don’t. This is the natural consequence of your actions. This isn’t a punishment. She still gets to have fun things…. but not much. Dude, you need to catch up. Apparently 4th grade was the Year of History and 5th grade is the Year of Math. I plopped her 5th grade textbook next to her current book and said, “You are finishing both of these this year.”

She’s a bit freaked out. But it would be so manageable! If you didn’t fall behind.

We talked about how after 5th grade…. uhhhh…. then we are getting into pre-algebra, geometry, algebra…. you don’t want to be catching up at that point. Or you will literally never catch up and you will spend the rest of your scholastic career feeling frustrated that people talk down to you because of your math level. This year matters.

It is absolutely irrational the way that we depend on math scores to determine someone’s “smartness” in school… but EC wants to go to high school. She can’t be behind on math. Is it fair? There is no fucking fair in this life.

I mean, she is catching up. Verrrrrrry slowly. At the rate she is catching up she will be fully caught up by the time we come back from Christmas break if she doesn’t take a break.

We aren’t going to do expensive Advent activities if she is still behind on math. Because we will sit around all month doing math. Just…. no.

So this math experience is something she will remember. And let me tell you, Middle Child is keeping up. He doesn’t want to get behind at all. Wise choice.

She was not ready to seriously do math before she was 8. And last year she didn’t want to seriously catch up. Ok. But…. now you have to pay the piper.

I can’t make everything easy for you. If I could I would destroy you. You have to have struggle in this life, kiddo. You have to earn things. That’s life.

I’m doing better with yelling. I pick my authorities carefully and I do my best to comply with orders/directions. Stop yelling. Medicate.

I am less worried about Malaysia because Noah says I did great without medication… until we got to the heavy work part of the cycle. Yeah, I can’t work like this and be nice without medication. It hurts.

And plans with another friend were cancelled because of illness. We can’t risk exposure before going to see a sick person. Which is feeling so bad right now. I miss my friends. And that’s going to accelerate when we move.

Complicated.

I’m trying to not be angry with myself for my limitations. That’s really hard. I feel savagely angry at myself because I am failing and there is so much I want to get done.

I’m feeling a lot of pressure to get the house and yard into a condition where someone will pay me huge bundles of cash. We are not in a bad money position, but I am not being as careful like I would prefer. I do not have the ratio of savings to debt that I want to have. In October or November Noah will get a stock grant from work and then I think I will be able to pay off the small credit card balance, have a bunch in savings, and pay for the remodeling stuff for the house.

And in January all of our debt will go away; I hope.  We’ll see how long it takes to sell the house. Everything near my house is listed for less than $10,000 below a million.  The Trulia current picture for my house is recent and fun. I haven’t even put it up for sale yet with deliberate pictures.

We will definitely not have debt soon.

I keep thinking about IDB stuff. (Incest DataBase) I keep thinking that security is going to be the biggest and most important hurdle. Because the DB will need to be a series of walled gardens. The various sub groups of people will need to have ways to segregate themselves at will.

We need to find a way to get some kinds of metadata out of responses without violating privacy. And we need to find ways to give permission for different levels of disclosure. Like: there will probably need to be a chat room sort of space that is not archived or monitored and it vanishes every 24 hours. So that people feel safe being in there. There need to be layers of “It’s ok to share this data with people in x group” while preserving that security away from other groups.

I need to always be ok with being excluded from a lot of conversations as a white person. I want to help figure out how to make this space. That doesn’t mean I will have full rights to everything there.

How do I help build a system that will partially exist to keep out assholes like me? This is going to be really important.

It cannot exist as a large, multi-ethnic research project unless each group gets to control their own data.

We can’t just automate such roles though. I’m going to have to recruit point people. I am going to have to spend most of my time associated with this program looking for people to promote above me.

It’s interesting learning, through thinking about this, that probably the best character trait I am going to bring to this process is believing that basically every one else is more important than me. That’s not something to eradicate from my base programming package.

That’s useful. Complicated. And useful.

I’m going to find my cohort. I am going to offer up the best of myself and I am going to do everything in my considerable (fuck modesty) power to help us find the best pieces of ourselves. Because we are so different. We have so much to offer the world. Being in the cohort changed us and I want to understand what that means.

I want to help amplify. I do not want to talk over. That’s going to be interesting.

Do you know what is magical about my life? I happen to know some folks who know a fuck ton about security.

I don’t have to know how to do every piece of this work. I have to help make the connections and then get out of the way.

I can do that. I’m good at that.

I uhhh insisted on help packing this weekend. My family did great. Noah and I took a load to the storage unit. I think we have one more small van load of stuff going into storage and then… we have suitcases and stuff we are giving away. !!!!!!!

Except for the refrigerator (which is going to be a nuisance) like 80% of the kitchen stuff is in the garage where it will stay as the kitchen is ripped apart and remodeled. I can’t sell it in the current condition and get top dollar.

I used 40-60mg of pot per day to keep me from screaming. Very effective. Not enough to make me feel good… but enough that I can clamp my jaw on the screaming. I have to take what I can get.

Eldest Child is now only 62 pages behind on math. But more is being assigned this week. And going to Texas is going to be disruptive and hard. I am becoming afraid she is going to miss out on going into Disneyland. She can stay in the hotel room and work with Noah. Bummer.

Don’t. Lie. To. Me.

I’ve spent the entire weekend working with a tens unit on. My body hurts so badly.

Noah tried to be nice to me and tell me that I could finish the packing *hand wave* later. I almost snarled at him. I already have work booked for all that later time. Work that is going to make me tired and cranky and stressed. (I have to get the fucking yards together.) Saying I can do today’s work while I do tomorrow’s work will not make tomorrow better for me.

I am very certain that the only reason I successfully finish as many of my projects as I do is because I do not kick the can down the road to be a problem for later. If I want something done, do it ASAP. Even if that makes today hurt very badly. Future Me will appreciate the gift even if Current Me thinks I’m a bitch.

And every dollar I spend on paying someone else to do a shitty job of not really following my directions is money I can’t spend on medical care.

Only so much money in the pot.

When I pay people for help 80%+ of the time I end up having to do most of the work myself but then I’m short on money and time. It sucks.

I didn’t blog about Mexico. I should have. I feel like a complete fucking asshole for going to Club Med. But it was nice.

And good golly I need to write about appearance stuff again. This trip was…. a revelation.

I have arrived at being able to pass as upper middle class! Like, I can do it! Guess what?! It didn’t end the verbal abuse based on my looks! It just got passed around the room to other people.

That was super awesome to learn in a completely shitty way.

I cannot do anything to get people to stop verbally abusing me for existing and having a face and appearing female. I exist and people will be nasty to me. That’s just going to stay true.

Well that’s freeing.

I am so tired. Every day but Wednesday involves driving out of town for appointments. Then we go to the airport on Friday to travel. This is why I didn’t wait on the packing until this week. If I were trying to get that done while in and out of the house for appointments…..

Well. Uhm. I made it through the weekend without screaming. I would not be able to do that work *and* drive *and* not scream. I have limits.

This stage is drawing to a close. This frantic work cycle is followed by fewer house/yard chores for years.

All I will have on my plate is parenting, home schooling, travel, and feeding us.

That sounds like a dreamy small load compared to what I am used to.

Before I found out that the kids had been lying about math I made an agreement with Noah that his load needs to be lightened. His job requires an intense amount of creativity and learning. That’s hard to do when exhausted and working non-stop. His job will allow us to live in ridiculous comfort forever if he can keep it for just a couple of years.

Then I found out the kids lied and I didn’t get a vacation of rest time.

Then we found out that Noah’s brother is dying and we have to go to Texas. So all of the work I had planned to do over multiple weeks… I now have eight days in which to do it.

I am on a medication break. That sucks and always makes my life harder.

I have a nursing baby. That’s incredibly hard on my body and I don’t sleep much.

So yeah. I’m yelling too much. I have been working so much it is a problem. I am sleeping with a tens unit on.

I also haven’t seen my massage therapist in like a month. No acupuncture either.

We are spending so much money. That means I pull back on medical spending. There’s only so much in the pot. I’m holding my breath till the next stock release because that’ll pay for the remodeling stuff on the house, pay off the (small) balance I’ve been carrying on the credit card for two months because I’m trying to have more liquidity given all the travel, and… pay off the mortgage entirely so they can stop lying and stealing money from us. I hate Bank of America. They are stealing money from me because they claim I don’t have home owners insurance. I do. My broker fights with them all year long. But BofA says I don’t and they take money to put in escrow. It’s robbery and I’m pissed.

Overall the trip to Mexico was nice. Stressful and parts were irritating… but I did have fun.

I’m feeling all the feelings about how I need to support my family through their grief coming up.

A friend reached out to me after a hiatus! This is excellent news!

My neighbor was stalking my mailbox so she noticed that we weren’t picking up our mail and so she brought it to her house. She returned it today. I will miss this neighborhood.

We don’t know where we are moving yet. That’s why it is so unclear. We are wandering.

Math continues to be a struggle in the household.

I have gotten a fuck ton done today. I am being Very Efficient.

So tired. I’d like to stop having graphic nightmares about the men and boys who raped me. I think the Supreme Court nomination process is toxic. I’m flipping out. And I’m unmedicated. Not a great combo.

Given how long I’ve been sober I’m doing really well. That’s pathetic.

Ok. I am feeling marginally less hysterical. Let me see if I can be a hair more clear about this.

If you are confused about where we are going and when… that’s because there isn’t a solid plan yet. I would be unable to clarify for you because I don’t know yet. We have a lot of options and possibilities and things we are thinking about and talking about but no decisions have been made. Beyond Malaysia, no apartments have been rented and no airline tickets have been bought.

Malaysia is the final two weeks of October.

Let me try to be a little clear (with very little time) about what has happened and why my emotions are bouncing.

Eldest Child… does extremely well at maths when she tries. I uhhhh don’t check very often because when she makes a mistake I can put the problem in front of her a second time and she does it correctly without noticing that she had ever made a silly error. When she is unclear she asks because we are around all the time. For a long time I was checking frequently and then in the last few months… uhhh I got lazy.

That’s my fault. Absolutely top to bottom my fault.

She noticed I wasn’t checking.

She started saying she did work when she didn’t.

This went on for a while. Ooops.

Now catching up has been a bit painful because it is so much but she has almost halfway caught up the previous three months of assigned work in almost two weeks.

THIS IS WHY IT IS SO INFURIATING THAT SHE WASN’T JUST DOING IT. YOU HAD THREE MONTHS. ALL OF THIS WORK CAN BE COMPLETED IN LESS THAN A MONTH. WHAT THE CHEESE!?!?!?

Why am I pushing maths this way? Because she wants to transfer back into “regular” school for high school. If she is way behind in maths then the school will make a lot of incorrect assumptions about her general intelligence and that will be tremendously shitty for her personally and will will reflect very badly on me as a home schooling parent. I am vain enough (and she is WAY SMART ENOUGH) that I am absolutely not ok with this outcome. She needs to be at grade level or beyond. She just does. She’s a fairly classic 2E kid. (Twice exceptional: she is incredibly gifted in many areas and she has a learning disability [dyslexia] and a non-neurotypical brain [ADHD] so teaching her is not a straight linear path like it is for many kids.)

She will already have a lot of struggles when she transfers in. I can’t let her be massively behind in the only track of education where that will impact her educational experience until she is a college graduate. It would be my fault. I don’t like the idea of damaging her educational experience. That’s not ok.

Why is she behind? Because she was completely and totally not ready to start book work at 5/6/7. She just wasn’t. She didn’t really start sit-down academics till she was 8. She’s been catching up. She will finish catching up this year. By the beginning of sixth grade, she will be perfectly able to walk into a standard sixth grade class and do the maths.

She and I talked a lot last night about her goals for her life and how I should be helping her.

If I am failing to educate her at home, then she has to go to school. I can’t allow her whole childhood to pass by without education. That’s neglect. That’s wrong.

She was a trifle frustrated with me saying it that way when the only area in which she’s lagging is maths and she’s not that far behind. Fair. (Everything feels like an 11 in intensity right now and that’s not about her.)

We talked a lot about trust and discipline. (Self-discipline, not parents forcing you to do shit.) We talked about how over the past few months there have been a couple of places where we tried to add more trust and uhhhhh we uhhhh went too far. She’s not ready. Which doesn’t mean she will never be ready! She’s 10!

She said it as, “Maybe I just don’t deserve any trust yet.” And I said, “Oh yes you do. I trust you to do:………….. (long list of shit)”. She said, “Oh my god. When you list it like that it sounds so exhausting. But yeah, I can do all of that.”

Maybe that long, exhausting list is enough for a ten year old and I need to be providing more scaffolding in new areas for several more years. That uhhhhh seems fair.

She does not want to go to elementary school. She’s pretty sure that she isn’t interested in middle school. (Middle Child feels the same way.) They want to go to high school because they want to go to college and they think that high school will be an important step for them in learning how to be more independent from me.

The fact that they view it that way? That makes my little heart go pitter patter.

Most of the moving around we want to do is seeing if we can find a place where we feel comfortable, where we can make a home, where they can go to high school.

How long will we spend in each place trying it out? It will vary. All of the places we will try out will have appropriate for them high schools. That’s a lot of what we are going to wander around and explore.

What I know for sure is the house is going on the market the first week of January. So Noah can retire at a reasonable age. If I continue to be as good at investing as I have been so far (knock on wood) Noah will be able to basically retire at 45. He will do occasional contract work because it’s fun for him but it won’t be necessary to sustain our life. We will literally be financially independent.

The kids told me that they would like me to stop being so lazy and I need to actually check their progress every single week. Well…. that’s fair. They don’t want to fall behind again and having the self-discipline to keep working without checking isn’t something they are ready to do alone.

Ok. I will make a calendar entry. I will do that for you. Yes. Ok. That’s appropriate and fair.

I’m very sorry I let you down.

Because I did. Then I got mad at you for being a kid. That sucks.

Fuck. I didn’t cause this alone. But I am the grown up. This is part of what I love about home schooling. I don’t get to blame anyone else.

Ok. Middle Child caught up on his maths. So we are going snorkeling together this morning. After lunch Eldest Child will be given a break and we will all go play on the beach together as a family for our last afternoon here. Because we are flying during the day tomorrow… she will be doing maths in the airport and on the plane. Because life is rough. But she wants to be caught up before we go to Disneyland. Oooooooooh boy she wants to be caught up. She is sad she missed so much of this trip. She doesn’t want to miss Disneyland and Malaysia too.

Makes sense. That would suck.

We leave on Monday. Technically we don’t leave until the clock ticks over to Tuesday (12:30am) but we need to arrive at the airport on Monday. Sarah will be coming home from a trip so we will have dinner in the airport together after her flight and before ours.

That feels really special and lovely for my birthday. I feel rather excited about being included in this fantastic person’s busy life.

I am… mostly packed but not entirely. My Google spreadsheet is epic. I should post it. Why do I bring so much? Because having to derail my vacation to go find medical shit sucks and we won’t have transportation nor be that close to a city. I’m going to pay $50 to check a bag with medications and toiletries so I don’t have to bring liquids on the plane.

And that bag is going to weigh 48.5 lbs. I’m going to shift around some of the stuff in there to shave off a few ounces. I will find a way.

I tried a new shampoo/conditioner today on the advice of internet people who heard me bitching about my hair. It’s part of the Function of Beauty website thing. They ask you a bunch of questions about your hair then custom make something. I don’t have perfect curl definition but my hair feels soft and dreamy and really nice.

Packing. Lunch. Errands.

ACK!

Noah is off. He’ll be gone for like 43 hours.

In the past couple of days I have been expressing boundaries everywhere. I’m setting them with my kids, with Noah, with friends, on websites. I have unsubscribed to forums that are increasing my feeling of dysregulation. I have unfriended people I love on social media because that interaction isn’t healthy for me when I’m unmedicated. I am telling neighbors “I am going now” when they won’t shut up. I am…

I am trying to ensure I don’t explode at my kids.

I keep having this mental image from a Tamora Pierce book. In it she has has a character meditate to control her magic, this character expresses her magic through fiber arts, and spinning is a big thing for her. So when she is trying to control her power she visualizes pulling it in and putting it into a nice tight string on a spindle.

I feel like I’m doing that.

Pot allows me to be patient with things that bother me. Pot allows me to ignore minor boundary incursions and small slights and little hurtful things. Without the pot I am raw and wounded and I cannot handle a lot of things.

I am using each one of these points of irritation as a guide. Maybe I have been allowing myself to be hurt more than I should and I’ve been dissociating from that pain using pot. That seems totally possible. Even likely.

Let’s find out which relationships suffer from these boundaries. I need to set them though. I cannot accept the amount of going up and down the roller coaster I’m doing if I am going to be nice to my kids.

Being nice to my kids comes before accepting upsetting statements from adults. If I have to get to where I can’t hear the adults, ok. That’s the price.

I feel like a fairy walking around yelling, “A BOUNDARY FOR YOU, AND A BOUNDARY FOR YOU, AND HOW ABOUT TEN BOUNDARIES FOR YOU.”

It’s a process.

But I feel happier than I expected. More calm. I feel ok.

I’m conflating things in a way I don’t like. Clarity matters when you want to ask for change.

In general Noah prioritizes me above everything else in his life. To an absolutely unhealthy degree. He prioritizes me over sleep and work and friendships. This is not ideal. When I’m bitching about him sleeping through the weekend…. that’s a shitty thing for me to do. He goes short on sleep most of the time because I wake up so fucking early and I want to eat breakfast and he wants to cook it for me.

Yeah. It’s awful for me to bitch about the naps he takes to make up for going short on sleep because he is making me breakfast.

He used to stay up all night playing video games. I would say that has happened at most twice in the past year. I really don’t think it has happened twice. Maybe once. When he stays up all night… he’s working. His job involves a lot of people on the other side of the world and he has very few markers to give him confidence that he’s doing his job well. Someone in Japan saying, “Hey Noah–fix this” is one of the few things he has to look at and see that he is actually being perceived as successful at what he’s trying to do. I get why sometimes he needs to respond instantly. It’s not fair for me to get mad.

It’s ok for me to be overwhelmed and feel sad when we don’t meet up perfectly. It’s not ok for me to be mad about Noah doing his job.

For the record, I am proposing that I take over breakfast again so he can work later and sleep later. I suspect that’ll help him get some time when we aren’t as demanding. Days are hard. All of us want his attention basically all the time.

I spend so much time being grateful that he has a brain that is worth so much money on the open market that we can have this much of his time. I feel sad that this isn’t available to everyone. I know that everyone isn’t interested in this much togetherness, but I wish it were an option. It’s one of the most unfair things in life that people have to work so many hours to survive. Capitalism is fucked up.

I want to support Noah better because then he is able to support me better. I’m selfish. And I like him and want to keep him for decades. That means he needs upkeep and maintenance.

He’s worth it.

He does need sleep. I know I need sleep and there is no fair in this world. My sleep issues are pervasive and constant and he can’t do anything to protect my sleep and make me sleep more. It’s literally impossible for him. The only thing he can do for my sleep is be in the room so I feel safe.

I can make space for him to sleep so that he can be more physically and mentally healthy. He is capable of sleeping when we make space. So yeah, that’s important. If I could nap he would protect my sleep with equal vigor.

No one is screwing me here.

EVEN WHEN I WANT TO BECAUSE TINY BABIES ARE COCK BLOCKERS.

Sarah and I are trying to be smart. We noticed that our next date is overlapping a weekend when she’s supposed to visit my kid. The last time we attempted that the whole weekend collapsed under the weight of too many plans and expectations and not enough spoons. So we moved it to be the only thing in a weekend so we can have the energy to really pay attention to each other. I’m not going to be here much longer. This matters.

I have been having a really intense amount of thinking and feeling about Sarah. I’m thinking about queerness and “dating” and what a relationship is. Not long ago I said to Noah, “Are we ever going to talk about Sarah being my girlfriend” and he kinda hurumphed in a way that acknowledged that there is there there but… yeah. We can’t do poly so we can’t label or name this or describe it or…

She’s my Sarah. I’ve loved her for 14 years. We almost broke up once and it was devastating to both of us. I hope we never fuck up so much again.

I know a lot of hetero “dating” couples who don’t have conventional sex. Sarah and I have had more sexual contact than some people who “date” do. So what does that mean?

Fuck if I know. But she’s mine. And I’m so grateful. When I am sad she is one of the few people I trust absolutely. When I am flailing and I feel out of control and I feel like I don’t know who I am or what I am doing or what I want Sarah can say, “Dude. I know you.”

That… is so much.

But Noah needs to be absolutely centered.

Complicated.