This lady who is coaching me is really awesome. She’s a no bull shit person. She is a horse trainer (so she’s used to trying to get animals to change their behavior without being able to talk them into it) and she has recovered from a TBI so she deeply understands the frustration of being disabled and not able to just do for yourself the things you want to and are used to being able to do for yourself.

She has some good suggestions about how to manage home schooling stuff that we can’t do exactly how she did it with her family for logistical reasons but I can take inspiration and we can adapt to our circumstance and we will see how her system works. It involves a lot more of the kids getting to free wheel picking their schedule Monday-Thursday and Friday and Saturday have to be available for punting and not doing fun things because you haven’t earned them.

That’s complicated for me because I like making advance plans with Jenny and her family but if my kids have behaved in a way that we can’t go, I feel like I am punishing Jenny’s family. I’m not. That’s not the point. But my kids have to get their stuff done and they have to learn how to take responsibility for it and part of learning responsibility is you don’t get the fun end-of-week pleasures if you haven’t earned them.

I will have to work on my feelings here as much as the kids will have to work on their behavior. I’m not punishing anyone if my kids have to stay home on Saturday to do their work because they haven’t done it during the week. That’s my kids choosing that screwing around Monday-Friday was more important to them than seeing their cousins. That’s not MY CHOICE.

It is not my responsibility to force my kids or bribe my kids through doing their day-by-day work so that they can have fun pleasures. That’s a fucked up dynamic, yo.

That’s not a good preparation for life.

We can’t do the white board/magnet solution that she used. But we can tape an extra piece of paper over their day planner week with the master list of assignments for the week. They can cross things off and write them down on the day they got them done so they can track their progress. I like the idea of having brief check ins at dinner Monday-Thursday to ask how things are going without being controlling or pissy. Friday and Saturday are tentative scheduled things. “If everything is done then we can go to…”

It is a level of bribery but it isn’t minute by minute day by day bribery. The Friday outings will be more academic and the Saturday ones will be more social. (Other social activities aren’t possible on Friday without a home schooling community.)

She wants me to have a master list of my chores that I’m supposed to get done as well. Resting is supposed to be on it. PT exercises. I am supposed to try to develop the discipline to not go help the kids if my taking care of myself isn’t done.

Given that I am currently gritting my teeth and counting the days until I get back to pot because my entire body is on fire with pain…

My current method of coping is not sustainable.

A couple of days ago I had a lively conversation with friends about cleaning ones own house. It was interesting how the motivation to clean up ones own house is not related to salary/house hold income but often about perceived by the self social class. I very strongly view myself as not the type of person who pays other people to do my work for me. It’s not about if I can afford it (I can and Noah wishes we would) but it’s more emotional. It’s about a lot of lectures from my mother about people who won’t clean their houses being lazy. It’s about my sister being utterly unwilling to clean her house to the point of living in squalor. It’s about my overweening lack of self regard. I don’t deserve to have help with basic chores. I should fucking do this work myself because I already take more resources than I deserve.

*sigh*

But I can’t keep doing this much work. My body is degrading faster over the years. Medical care at this point is bailing water instead of fixing the hole in the boat.

I feel really bad about my body needing help.

It isn’t that I judge other people negatively when they get help. I massively supportive when Sarah could finally afford to get cleaning help. I could easily see that she needed it. I can see how my other friends benefit and it adds positive to their lives to get such support.

But I don’t feel like I deserve such support. This is a really hard conversation to have because I don’t ever want to make it sound like I think other people don’t deserve the help and almost any way of framing this conversation has a blast radius of people interpreting my self worth as applying to my opinion of them. That fucking sucks, yo.

It’s kind of like how sometimes my brother Tommy would rage until he literally blacked out because he was so frustrated with requiring help for basic body hygiene. He fucking hated himself because he couldn’t feed himself or do a lot to dress himself or brush his hair or or or or or.

He would burn the shit out of his mouth drinking boiling drinks because having someone else help him and cool it off offended him so much. He got blisters. He injured himself because he didn’t want any more help than the absolute bare minimum.

I am stupid like that.

I know it is stupid.

I know.

I know it is self hating.

I know.

Noah is trying to make deals with me about the rate at which I pick up projects once we move here. I am going to have to write this timeline out or I will “forget” and start doing work I shouldn’t be doing.

I am really freaked out that cleaning is something I probably really should outsource as I am adapting to permanently living without pain meds.

Well, until I can get medical pot in Scotland. It’s coming!

I genuinely don’t respond well to other pain meds. The pain specialist believes my next step is oxycontin and I don’t want it.

I think I will be willing to accept that as a pain reliever when I believe death is imminent. Until then, I prefer having my brain; thank you.

But my entire body is on fire. How much do I believe that is allowed to matter? I don’t know. I’m going to cry as I think about it. Every joint. Many areas are explosions of nerve pain. My neck. My back.

I don’t have a headache though, so no Ibuprofen. That’s the line. As long as I can think, no Ibuprofen. I need it to work in emergencies and if I use it all the time it won’t.

That sense of triage is very hard to live with.

Took a break. Did morning hygiene, went on a walk to the store to get the things we noticed we messed up on the grocery order (it’s a minimum of 2.5 miles round trip so that’s not terrible), and did goals for the kids for the academics for the week.

I am thinking that I will try to get my PT stuff done during nap time. I need to get a template going for myself of tasks. Really I need to figure out something like Noah’s insane Omnifocus stuff but… that takes spoons too. I will start with it on paper.

The problem with paper is that when I kind of forget about it for a while… I forget about it in a semi-permanent way. The computer thing popping up will maybe be harder to ignore? I don’t know.

I will keep thinking about the cleaning hiring out. For now, changing apartments every few months + the kids doing most of it and Noah doing part of it means that I’m not actually doing that much. Yes I still need to be doing less because of how much pain I am in.

This is a process.