Thank you so much my dear friend. You know who you are.

Yesterday a friend who was homeschooled and who went on to work in K-8 education… who is also autistic and understands some of how my brain works… gave me a bunch of book recommendations and blog suggestions to help me reorient how I am looking at education. That’s a bunch of highly actionable work for me.

I have often cited the statistic that in the average elementary classroom there is approximately 45 minutes of real learning per school day… then I proceeded to flip out about my kids doing less than two hours because… because perspective is hard. Because I get lost in soup in my brain. Because I feel like if I don’t I will fail them. Because I fail to have the friendships I want and I fail to find the support I need so I need to work them harder so they are prepared to have a future by themselves with no one to help them.

Because I am exhausted and I am not making good choices. Because the way I am melting down is not surprising or unusual in context. Because if they wanted to transfer into school tomorrow and it wasn’t easy for them to be A/B students I would feel like a failure.

So much ego. So much bullshit.

It isn’t that I fail at all friendships. That’s not it at all. I really wanted enmeshed-pseudo-family friendships. But only reallllllllly unhealthy people are interested in that at all. And when you try and enmesh with reallllllllly unhealthy people there are fireworks.

He suggested that Step Zero of working towards Big Goals should be spending a while researching whether that goal is even worth attaining (what does that job actually entail) and research for the kids into what other people have done to reach the goal. Long before I start holding them to a path because holy shit they are little kids and they really don’t get it.

This is so much more effective than “Stop doing that or people will call CPS on you.”

Do you know how fucking angry it makes me that people threaten me with the authorities left and right and I was left in my psycho family to be raped and beaten for decades? Rage. Blind fucking rage. I must be perfect or I deserve to lose everything but I don’t deserve protection myself because I am not worthy. That dynamic does not help me be kinder and more gentle with my kids.

My mistakes are too big to be forgiven. No matter what those mistakes are. Because I am a piece of shit who shouldn’t be here anyway.

That doesn’t help me act better. It makes it harder to ever do better and it makes me feel more frantic and sick in my belly all of the time.

It’s not that I want people blowing sunshine up my skirt and telling me I’m perfect. I’m not. But threats are threatening, not educational.

I don’t know about you but I operate less well when I feel threatened than when I feel safe and supported.

I haven’t felt very supported in a while. I had to flip out extra bad to figure out how to go find different people to talk to because the people I have been leaning on the most in the past few years either… treated me like shit or they just don’t have relevant information to share. It’s not that they are bad, but this isn’t their area of expertise.

I have always had long stretches of time where I put my head down and I just barrel through. I just have to pray I set my course correctly when I got started. I am not sure doing the charter school was actually the right decision when I was pregnant. It started us on a whole downhill sprint towards standards I don’t even believe in.

I feel ashamed of that. But the terror of CPS taking my children away for neglect, or because I am doing too little educating, or because I am educating them wrong, or because I am too harsh one day…

That’s fucking real. That’s held over my head in big ways, even by people who profess to care about me.

I feel like at some point in my brain it became less about “What is best for my kids” and instead became “What do I have to do to avoid being punished” and that does not provoke healthy behavior from anyone.

My fucking ES (Educational Specialist–basically the teacher who coordinates stuff for the charter school) telling me constantly that this MASSIVE stack of work was mandatory fucked me up. When we got to the end of the school year and she said, “Wow you are the only family I work with who actually did any of this….” that fucked me up.

I have a hard time with black and white thinking. I struggle to perceive gray areas and the middle path.

Let me tell you, when I’m convinced I’m bad and I can’t do anything right… I make that true over and over and over.

And then I feel like I am bad because the people who were effectively threatening me were doing it because they mean well and how dare I not respond to that as if it were the same thing as positive feedback. That’s a poisonous dynamic. I turn around and do the same bullshit to my kids and… negative feedback and threats don’t work very well.

fuck.

It’s kinda like how dare I get upset about Sarah promising real support with the kids and then never showing up.

If I get angry about how people talk to me or treat me that is a defect in my character. I should just be grateful they acknowledge me at all.

That does not give me the energy to do better.