I haven’t been blogging as much for a long while now. Mostly because I am trying to respect their frequent off-hand comments about wanting privacy. They don’t know what they want. They don’t know which topics bug them to have people know about. So they are just saying no. And I’m treating that as a blanket prohibition that I can’t talk about myself any more. This is not going to work out.

If I can’t organize my thoughts I get mean. I get vicious. I get incredibly unable to manage my behavior and then I’m a problem; a real one.

Penultimate day of the remodel before we put the house on the market. Ostensibly we are shooting for putting the house on the market in 20 days. No pressure. I plan to spend Monday (Christmas Eve) cleaning the house from top to bottom. No spider webs or dust can remain. Then I need to negotiate with my realtor about what is moving back into the house for staging purposes. A house is for sale down the street and the staging is super nice. They just dropped the price after being on the market for two months. That’s literally why I waited until January. My realtor said that would happen October-December.

I filled 5 green waste bins last night. My neighbors are awesome. Thanks for letting me use your bins. Leaves and blackberry trimmings and redwood logs. Gone. I think I’m 3-5 days of hard work away from the yard being gasp-worthy. It’s rough around the edges (because I prefer it that way) but I’m going to come through and add hard scaping and shape it. I have made a beautiful meadowy garden. I hope I find the right person to love it.

Good lord. I’m 3-5 days away on the yards and 1-2 days away on the house and I have 20 days and in between now and then is Christmas. Woof. That feels so real.

Let’s just call it a solid 10 days of work between now and leaving. Whoa. That’s intense feeling. Guess how many days I have of not driving out of Fremont between now and putting the house on the market? 10. That’s it. That includes Christmas and NYE. It’s convenient not being invited to parties this year.

To be fair, I refuse to work every day I don’t drive so mostly I’m going to be doing the work in between driving. *sigh*

I just can’t start cleaning or organizing again until they finish because the dust is prohibitive. I want a house full of functioning doors. This will be awesome. I haven’t ever had a house full of functioning doors here. There have always been broken doors and doors that were removed because they were so broken. I feel rich as fuck.

Last night Eldest Child and I had a great date. She got her ears pierced (YAY! So big!) and we had a lovely chat over dinner about school priorities. I asked her how she thinks this school year is going (poorly) and what she wants to change (almost everything). We figured out a few ways for her to change it up. And I don’t really have permission to document. This is driving me crazy. Because you expect me to remember shit without writing it down and I don’t know how you think somebody else with a different brain is your mother. I don’t remember shit if I don’t write it down. Ugh.

We are drifting away from highly schooly and back towards unschooling. Still not Radical Unschooling because…. no. But far more unschooly in terms of timing and topics. I need to stop screaming. I have to. This is just mandatory for everyone’s mental health. And part of that will need to be that I’m not kicking and pulling them through fairly standard curriculum. It’s been a shitty year and a half of trying to be at grade level across the board in subjects. My kids have caught up and proven that they can. Now let’s stop because this shit sucks. This program is fairly abusive and why are we trying to conform to it? Because I’m stupid. Because I get afraid that if I don’t force you closer to lock step that at some point your life will be hard. Harder than you can imagine.

That doesn’t mean I’m doing the right thing.

I told EC that she wants me to go back to blogging daily because I scream less when it is embarrassing that I have to go write down every single day that I’m screaming. As long as she doesn’t want me blogging…. I don’t have that public humiliation stop gap and I just go nuts. She’s thinking about it. It’s literally true though. I scream way less when I feel more monitored. I put these monitors in place on myself because it’s a way to work around my shitty impulses.

The baby was up every 1-2 hours last night. I’m so cranky.

Today I need to go buy a toilet seat that isn’t broken. Tomorrow they are doing all the flight of the bumblebee last minute adjustments. I’m looking forward to that. Like: installing doorknobs.

Emotionally I feel like I’m all over the place. I’m touching base with a lot of friends. That’s so fraught. I love these people intensely and I want to be the source of good feelings in their lives. I don’t want them to feel bad about our relationship. If I talk about not getting enough from my friends here… people feel like I’m saying that *they* let me down. Oh honey.

I’m so anxious about this.

I need so much. And I’ve tried so hard here. And balanced between hundreds of people it isn’t working. It can’t be any one person’s fault.

I think this feels so viscerally painful because of losing Sarah and touching base with the home school group. I failed at the bay area. I need to go.

Because it isn’t just Sarah. It’s the Bonus Family and the Godmamas. It’s all feeling so incredibly painful right now. I want to go. I want to go away from this place where I have begged and pleaded for people to be my family.

I have emails in my inbox I ought to respond to. I can’t. I feel so flattened. I have so little to give. I gave my friends everything I had. I’m empty.