There’s a whole bunch of stuff I feel like I’m bursting to write about because I’m trying to get my head around it but I’m afraid of hurting people. So I’m hurting myself. Like I do. Balance is not easy.

How do you handle it when you aren’t good for someone? I’m not good for Sarah. This is true in a myriad of ways in a myriad of areas. There is no shortage of love in our relationship…. but there’s a lot of hurt. We turn to one another (in my judgey as fuck opinion) to be the mother that the other lacks. Sarah genuinely needs me to not get angry and not show disappointment. She needs me to be unfailingly accepting and loving. I can’t do that. I need her to be dependable in a way that she’s not physically capable of being and she can not emotionally handle admitting that she can’t do.

We bash ourselves against one another.

I have harmed my children because I believed promises that weren’t really made in good faith. I knew the promises weren’t made in good faith (this is not my first rodeo) but I wanted to believe so much that I made plans around the promises. Then I hurt myself trying to keep up my end of the deal and that’s a problem.

Why do I keep trying to believe these promises? Oh it’s complicated. Partially for the love. Partially for the same reason she believes I will be able to hold my temper enough to be safe for her–we want it to be true.

And in my mercenary as fuck way I can admit… she was the only person who made noise about actively pursuing a relationship with my kids independently. She didn’t always/usually follow up on the noise she made… but she made the noise. Which is more than others do. My friends mostly acknowledge my children in a limited way as an extension of me. Sarah loved them for themselves.

I don’t feel real good about what I have to offer my children in this life in terms of support or community. I just have to be better/more to compensate. That’s hard.

But just like I can never ever believe “I will take you to Magic Mountain” again I can no longer listen to “Let’s make a standing date” because I will hurt myself if I believe that. It won’t come true. I have to face the reality and not what I wish would happen. No matter how much I wish it would happen.

Love is not enough.

Which doesn’t mean that anyone is being bad or failing. But it can show a lack of compatibility. Compatibility is real and hard.

And now my daughter wants to sit next to me to show me how snowflakes are made.

Side note: I’m super thrilled that academics feel like they are finally coming together. The kids are doing more math than they feel thrilled about, but it’s a manageable level to get the kids 100% up to grade level by the end of this school year. EC is going to have a very easy next year in comparison. She’s excited. But we now have enough time and mental bandwidth to add in grammar work and more history and spelling again and more religion… the kids are writing several days a week and I like the stuff they are producing.

EC has to produce fan fic every other week and religion writing every week and she’s working on a larger essay about Malaysia. MC is just on the religion writing and a story about Malaysia. Frankly he’s still working on practicing putting words on paper so they are legible. It’s a process.

They have some grammar workbooks they are plugging along with. Science is creeping back in (Thank you air quality index for returning to just the yellow zone today) and there feels like lots of room in our week for doing other things again. Chores are happening more seamlessly again. We are getting back towards a routine. We aren’t exercising enough (not our fault!) but we will get back to it.

Always more to work on.

In looking around at various places to stay and spots we want to try out… my kids were very open to trying the Shetlands. Truly remote is interesting to them. We can try it.

I am looking forward to next year.

Inverness is not that cheap for rented digs. The Shetland Islands have some very cheap places to stay. But Scotland is only a permanent option if they pull out of the UK. We’ll see.

We’ll see about a lot of things.

We are concerned about access to pot, as we should be. But the kids said that they would be interested in a tiny little local school. I don’t know what we need.

Let’s go find out.