Monthly Archives: September 2019

Today is the day.

In just over four hours my kids will be walking onto a school campus as enrolled students. They will be P5 and P7. Here P7 is the final year of primary school before being sent off to secondary school. There is no middle school here.

I am already enjoying some of the differences in Scottish schooling. We were having trouble finding some of the supplies I consider “mandatory” for school in stores. Jenny told me that schools don’t ask families to buy them after we went to three stores looking. The schools provide what kids need.

You could have knocked me over with a feather. Wut? Schools provide pencils and paper and notebooks? I… You are using words but I am not understanding you.

Schools here do not give parents any contact information for teachers. If you want an appointment you call the office and the office negotiates with the teacher and they get back to you to let you know when you can come in. As someone who used to get calls and emails from the parents of 150 students that sounds amazing! Good for Scottish teachers!

The kids are going to start with half days as they acclimate to school and the teachers slowly learn where they are academically. The school is literally incapable of giving them placement tests to just see where they are because such things don’t exist here. There are occasional national tests but the school doesn’t have access to them and my kids are in the wrong grades anyway. So… there just aren’t big evaluations for their current levels.

I’m telling you, I’m excited.

Middle Child was crying at bed time. They were trying to be quiet about it, but they are super nervous. I pulled them over close to me and I talked to them until they fell asleep. On a fairly repetitive loop I told them that when they don’t feel they have enough faith in themself they can borrow some of my faith in them. I told them that they are strong, brave, hard working, competent, smart, funny, creative, thoughtful, kind (which is not the same thing as nice!), friendly, fun, interesting, adaptable, sweet, loving, patient, and really good at learning new skills. I interspersed this list of adjectives with saying, “And you know I am judgemental and critical. I don’t give praise unless I believe it to be absolutely accurate.” The first time MC giggled when I said that. After that they just relaxed. I would pause sometimes and say “When your belly starts to hurt because you are anxious, remember to smell the flower (pause for big inhale through the nose) and blow out the candle (slow big exhalation through the mouth). You can’t control other people. You can’t control the world. You can control your breath. If you control your breath you will be able to control your body even if your feelings are being rough. I have faith in you. When you don’t have faith in yourself, listen to these tapes in your brain and borrow my faith in you. I know you are….. (long list of adjectives).”

Eldest Child was already asleep or I would have talked to both of them.

And Her Sweetness only had one middle of the night wake up. That’s almost like a full night of undisturbed sleep…. She is feeling much better. I am in a lot of pain.

The kids will start waking up in about 45 minutes, maybe more like 60. I am going to hurry through my shower in the meantime so I can spend my morning on “cheerful cheerleader” mode. You can do it! You are going to succeed at this new life stage the way you have done well on so many others! I know you can!

I am their inside voice. That’s what mothers become for their children. I have not been doing a great job of being relentlessly upbeat for a while here because I am worn down and exhausted. This morning is a (very short) sprint, not a marathon. I can do this for them. Then I can take a few hours to slow down and just be in toddler mode.

When toddler mode feels like a fucking vacation you might just be living your life wrong. Too much work and stress, yo.

Yesterday we bought several more table cloths at the discount store. This is so when Middle Child makes a huge mess on the table they will just change the table cloth and I can stop being a critical brat about their absolute lack of table manners. My kids definitely know that I am critical and judgmental. So when I say positive things, it’s not because I enjoy blowing sunshine up your skirt. We have a handheld dustbuster so that the mess on the floor is not a big deal.

I need to stop being an asshole about messy eating. No really.

Life is a balancing act.

At the end of the positive speil I told MC “You will make mistakes. You must make mistakes. Mistakes are how you learn. Mistakes are part of being human. When you don’t understand something, write your question down in your notebook. Questions are good. You are good. You will mess up as you learn this new process and that’s ok and necessary and part of the process. Don’t be afraid of messing up. It’s like crashing your bike. You learn more from the crashes than you do from always getting it right. You learn what too far means. It’s ok to screw up. You will do better next time.”

After like 10 minutes of this repetitie loop of adjectives and blather about mistakes kiddo wasn’t crying and their body was relaxed. They finally stopped clutching my hand like a life preserver.

Ok, based on the noise from upstairs I don’t have 40 more minutes. Hurry up and shower, Krissy.

Sick babies are so much work.

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Welcome to Scotland! Here is your first illness. It’s predictable. But I would sure like a full night of sleep one of these nights. Between general discomfort, getting kicked in the head, nightmares (mine and other peoples’), waking up to change underwear because I can feel the OH MY GOD GUSH OF BLOOD, and a baby with a fever who wakes up crying while needing to nurse…

I am so tired. I could really use a solid week to just sleep through life. But I have three little kids so suck it up buttercup.

The head teacher (basically the principal for the USians in the audience) for the school we are going to will be leaving at the end of this term and then the school starts the search for a new head teacher so the school suggested we probably should get started now instead of waiting and trying to enter amid the chaos. Fun! We went and toured the school yesterday. I will bring back the filled in paperwork on Monday and the kids will start on Tuesday.

I have to say: the school sounds super fun. There are a ton of community-building programs that to my ear sound like “We know that not all of our kids have all of the support that might be ideal at home so we just provide this to make sure everyone has what they need.” Awesome. I’m happy to be part of it and I will be eager to see how we can donate/contribute/volunteer to help these programs go well for everyone.

We were sent home with three free school shirts so we don’t have to go buy them. That was quite nice.

We met the teachers the kids will be with (well, 2/3 of them because Middle Child’s class has two part time teachers) and briefly waved at the upcoming classmates. I’m excited.

I’d be more excited if I could sleep.

I am still elated to be here but I’m really really weary.

The house continues to come along. I now have 30 baby locks installed. I should have bought 40. We have agreements in place about what will happen if you lock your sibling into a room with a baby lock. (Lines. Lots of lines.) I was pretty harsh with the kids this morning about my feelings about how they have been only doing chores under great pressure lately; it makes my life suck tremendously and then I have no desire to spend fun play time with you. Is that what you want? No? Then don’t make me ask you ten times to do your chores.

The kids have fewer chores right now than they have had in years so I’m feeling pretty cranky about how hard I have to work to get them to do anything. This is not working for me.

I have a bank account. I learned things about Scottish banking and how it differs from the US. We had a really fun chat with the lady at the bank about credit and investments and politics and technology. She says she wants to get in touch with us outside of work and have coffee because she is a recent immigrant to this city too. I think she is also looking for friends. She is from Poland and she had a really refreshing point of view about the world. I’d love to hang out with her again.

I have been pleasantly surprised by how many immigrants I have run into already. This is a vibrant city full of imports. That’s fun.

I am spending so much time talking about the nitty gritty of Silicon Valley company politics. This is my tired face. Lots of folks want to talk to me about Facebook and Google and why social media is complicated. I understand now why my brother told me 20 years ago that I was a very advanced computer user then. I know so much more now. I have these gut level panic reactions to a lot of computer security conversations.

That was a good thing I got from Sarah. I have to acknowledge how much that woman taught me about how to keep myself safe. Life is so complicated.

I am tired. I want to hang out with Jenny but I am exhausted, snippy, bitchy, and this baby won’t get off my boob. (Plus I am super against sharing illness if it can be avoided.) This is one of those times when parenting is not convenient.

Mattresses will arrive in 4 and 6 days. (Two separate shipments.) My super comfy wonderful chair for my bedroom will arrive then too. This chair is awesome for reading and I intend to use it for that as much as possible. (If I miss deleting random periods I apologize; I don’t know why they are happening.)

Internet is still flaky and inconsistent. No video chats yet. We aren’t on proper wifi. Thank goodness for the Skyroam.

I am strongly considering a dog. This is a massive change for me. Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy you might. ask. A few reasons: I could seriously use an exercise buddy, sexual assault is just about the only crime on the rise in this country and I do not feel secure that if I kicked someone like I did my old neighbor things would go well for me, also Her Sweetness tries to follow every dog we see home. She is utterly enchanted with dogs. Additionally: a dog can’t be left for travel. I’d have to stay home! My kids are separating from me in a way they have not done so in the past and I have to stop micromanaging them; it is considered good dog ownership to control a dog. Cats won’t put up with that shit. I literally would have to go outside every day, which would be good for both physical and mental health.

Lots of reasons. I’m still in the considering stage. Not this month. Not next month. Maybe not this year. But it’s on my mind a lot. Maybe after Her Sweetness potty trains? I don’t know. Feelings.

For now I am curled up on the toddler bed with my sick baby. Bless the strong slats.

I should hide my computer, and phone.

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My hands and arms and shoulders hurt like fire. Picking up the baby sucks so much.

I shouldn’t type for a while.

Slowing down

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Noah has been trying to talk me into resting more for a while now. So yesterday I swept and mopped all of the floor that can be swept and mopped and did a couple of loads of laundry and… that was about it. I didn’t bustle through cleaning off the counters. I did move the food that had been in the laundry room into the kitchen cabinets.

I played ball with the baby. I read parenting forum threads. I didn’t comment. I get into trouble (with myself and my emotional dysregulation) when I comment. I wrote an email in response to an old friend who reached out. I’ve had a phone call with my former neighbor who moved back to India.

Today I will take a shower. I will make some progress on the counters in the kitchen and in my bedroom. I will ride my bike to the store before our shopping list gets long and heavy. There is some possibility Noah and I will go into town so we can add my name to the bank account and I can start figuring out how to apply for a credit card. I am 100% not ok with having to ride on his credit. That fucked my mother.

I have retirement accounts in my name only. I was the primary name on most of our credit cards. I was on every mortgage and title document. I am not dependent on him being nice to me for my survival. I utterly refuse.

Being a dependent is scary enough without also being trapped if things go sideways. I always have the power to leave. Not that I want to. Noah is an absolutely top notch partner to have. I don’t want to leave. But it is good to know I could if I needed to. That’s important.

We are kind to each other and we caretake for each other because we want to, not because of need.

I am starting to access that deep well of exhaustion from the overwork I’ve been doing for a long time. I am trying not to do that thing I do where I shove it aside and keep pushing. I don’t need to push anymore. I can just rest. I can putter. I can slowly get things where I want them to be. There’s no rush. My kids are upstairs playing. In between bouts of bickering it is fun to listen to. Kids.

There’s a sprinkling of rain coming down. It’s so beautiful here.

Now I feel like we’ve arrived.

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Today is our first day of being on a normal-for-us schedule instead of a frantic work schedule. We get up and do our morning hygiene, get dressed, have breakfast, do chores, then academics until lunch. Afternoons are free. Ok, Noah has his own schedule slightly separate from the kids and I.

Of course Her Sweetness thinks this sucks because during chore time she pretty much has to play independently. I keep telling her that play is her work and this is her independent work time… She does not yet believe me. She will. I have trained up several children in this manner already.

I am feeling so happy today. I didn’t get the last piece of furniture put together yesterday because my elbow hurts like fire. It’ll get done before Middle Child’s dresser arrives from Ikea. Then those pieces will get put together and I will start haunting the charity shops looking for a dining room table and chairs that will fully meet our needs. Maybe a big chair for the dining room that will hold 2-3 butts if we stack.

We don’t need anything else. At this point we don’t want anything else.

Ok, we still haven’t even opened the garden studio or seriously thought about what we will want out there… but we have time. So much time. That’s not urgent.

Y’all. WE HAVE A WHOLE BUILDING OUTSIDE WE HAVEN’T OPENED YET. Ok so it’s the size of a large room, but still.

We are not going to run out of room here any year soon.

I had a really lovely conversation with our neighbors over the weekend. They agree with my reading of the catchment maps, the fence across the street is the dividing line between the schools I want us to go to (primary and secondary) and the ones I don’t really want to go to. Excellent. All of our neighbors have gone to the schools I would prefer. Excellent. That conversation was friendly and fun and I have more hope than I had after we were less than ideal customers for their vehicle renting company. I don’t think they are holding a grudge. Our eagerness to pay for our mess ups hopefully helps. Also: no more renting vans.

Last night we renegotiated chores with the kids. I am pushing Noah to not look for a remote Silicon Valley job that will expect 60-80 hours a week of work. Our passive income is already in the $20,000-$30,000 range. If he writes another book, if he teaches some classes, if he does some consulting… I think we will be more than fine. The average income in this city is under £30,000/year. I want us to be normal here. I am not shooting for being one of the wealthiest families in the town. I think he will have a lot more fun if he cobbles together income from stuff he is interested in rather than forcing him to work for a big company that will expect him to just about turn over his soul for an obscene amount of money.

So we renegotiated with the kids. We are paying them for a lot less. We also put all of the chores into four separate buckets. Some of the buckets are fairly intense (dishes 3x’s a day) and some are not (vacuum the house and clean the common bathrooms once a week) so each of us have some weeks with a bunch of chores and some weeks with not so many. We have planned that rotation out through the end of October when we will talk about how we are each doing with the schedule.

I am fairly excited that the kids are responsible for their own rooms and laundry and I don’t need to police it because they are not shared areas and I don’t have to look at the work if it doesn’t get done. Sounds like heaven.

If something terrible happened and we couldn’t acquire food from a store we can last a good month on what we have in the freezer/pantry. My prepper heart is at peace.

We blocked the holes at the bottom of the fence. No children will fall into the burn. (A burn is a small stream.) This is good and brings me a lot of peace.

The big kids are still asking to sleep in the same room as us. Right now we have the air mattresses in the lounge and we are all in there together. That feels very ok as we are settling in. They have been through so much in the last year. MC was telling me that they have big feelings because they feel like they “shouldn’t” need to sleep near me at this age because most of their peers are sleeping independently already. I said that just because most parents will not permit cosleeping doesn’t mean the kids are always happy about it. Our family is doing what works for us and it really doesn’t matter what anyone else is ok with. My kids will outgrow needing me this way. I don’t know when, but I have great faith it will happen. Until then I see no reason to force the separation.

Last night I slept better. Being near the end of the chore cycle feels so good. I still can’t wait to get my dreamy mattress.

Today for work I am sweeping all the hard floors and mopping. I cleaned up the table and high chair and I am going to tidy up the counters. I’m feeling pretty happy about being the one to establish the baseline of what a “clean kitchen” looks like.

Our pantry is full, but isn’t bursting. There is still a little bit of room and the downstairs kitchen isn’t full. That feels like a good place to be right now as we figure out what other things we would like to acquire going forward. We have room but we aren’t in need.

Today I think the house will be tidy enough to walk around and take pictures of it to share with friends. I am a neurotic person and I don’t share pictures of the explosions of mess.

I am happy we have a desk for the computers to live on so that screens don’t go in bedrooms. I want us to change our relationship to how we use screens. We have done a lot of “feeling trapped so I will distract myself with the screen” stuff over the past few years and given all the lovely opportunities to go outside and make art and have quiet space around our bodies… I want to change that. We are so very lucky.

I have been noticing a lot of holes and cracks in the walls. Someone else might feel cranky about them. I feel relief. At first I was worried the house was a little too perfect and anything I might do might mess it up and then I am bad. Instead I feel like the house is perfectly imperfect. I can do things. I can improve things. If I make a mistake, well it clearly isn’t the first one and the house is still breathtakingly wonderful.

I haven’t started trimming the garden back for autumn yet. The former owner told me October/November is best for that. We still have beautiful bright flowers all over.

I am so very happy.

Running out of steam… and work!

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The refrigerator is installed. We have four boxes of furniture left to build. Our goal is for each grown up to build one piece per weekend day and then we will be caught up. Three more small pieces are due soon, but I am not sure when. Things keep coming faster than expected. The mattresses may be the very last bits.

Otherwise I blasted through most of the work yesterday. By the end of the weekend the house is going to look lives in and basically settled. The remaining stuff we would like to have is all optional and we can wait until we find it cheap at a charity shop.

We even have the vast majority of our Christmas shopping done.

I am caught up on laundry. The machines ran for 14 hours yesterday with one load left for this morning.

I feel so much better. I don’t feel scared I will get in trouble.

We are all still struggling with sleep so I am not interested in being pushy with the council about school placement. They will get back to me and we will get that going at some point. I feel no rush at all. The kids are adapting and given the year they have had this time feels important. We are figuring out what having more space means for us.

Right now the big kids are outside putting together planter boxes to block the gaps under the fence so no babies fall in the burn. I promised I wouldn’t garden for a year and EC had a blast picking out plants she wanted to add to the yard and they both really enjoy gardening. We missed planting this spring. I am glad they get to start making their mark on the property like this.

Both big kids are utterly thrilled to be setting up their own rooms.

Now we tread water for up to five more weeks waiting for the boat stuff. That’s easy.

We went to the park this morning. The weather is lovely. It’s a great day. Now I have a sleeping baby on my lap and lunch is almost ready.

Work continues.

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Settling in is a lot of work. I am done with the van rental. I scraped the paint on the drivers door BECAUSE THE OWNER OF THE VAN RENTAL COMPANY DOES NOT TRIM BACK THE TREE FROM OUR SHARED DRIVEWAY. So that sucks. We have now damaged two of his vans and I will never ever rent from him again and we have made the worst first impression possible. Cheers.

The fridge that wasn’t supposed to arrive until October came today. But we can’t get it through the door until we find someone with better tools to help us take the door off the hinges so the box can slide through. Cheers.

I still have a mountain of laundry and goods to sort through and many pieces of furniture to assemble, but it is feeling like an end is in sight. I suspect that by the end of this weekend I will have a normal day-to-day level of cleaning ahead of me. That’s pretty good news.

The beds won’t be here until October though. Every joint in my body is flaming hot and awful and cranky. My back is killing me. My head is killing me. My feet hurt. My legs are really sore. My hands are killing me. My uterus waited until the rental van frantic shopping was done to release the blood bath. (Thank you uterus, I consider that an extreme kindness.) But now my entire lower body is contorting with cramps. Cheers!

I continue to struggle with moderating my cranky level. I keep trying to be nice. It’s a struggle at the moment.

I have a respectable Brexit pantry and a fairly full deep freeze. Adding a couple of things here and there over the next few weeks will fill everything out nicely and we will be ready to weather the storm of political upset to come. Even if supply lines get cut, we will be able to eat ok for a couple of weeks. Thank you prepper background.

My kids are upstairs working on academics. Noah is doing… I don’t know what but it counts as work.

I am almost to the point where I can just chill out. Not many more days on this work cycle. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and for once… it doesn’t look like a train.

My brain hates me

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One of the best parts of using medical marijuana, for me, is that I don’t dream. Which means I don’t have nightmares. I went about ten years without nightmares because of pot and those were some of the happiest years of my life because I didn’t wake up panicked and distressed all the time.

My brain was really awful last night. The baby kept waking up to nurse. I need to nightwean again. I usually give her a week or so of adjusting to a new time zone before I cut her off at night again. Today is our 7th day here.

So I was drifting in and out of sleep into this horrible nightmare that just wouldn’t stop. I notice that over the past couple of years most of my nightmares involve Noah being horrible to me. Noah isn’t horrible to me in real life. I often wonder if these nightmares are my brain playing through what I think I actually deserve from him. He should abase me. He should lie to me and risk my life through disease exposure. He should treat me like I am nothing.

Well, “should” is a funny word. But that’s what I fear I deserve. My brain likes to torture me with what could be if other people hated me the way I hate myself. If other people held my inadequacies against me the way I hold them against myself.

Today is our seventh day in Scotland. I am not feeling as panicked and overwhelmed as I did for the first four or five days. I had an entirely irrational reaction upon arrival. I didn’t sleep for two nights in a row as we traveled (maybe two hours total in little pieces) and I showed up feeling like I was “already behind” on a bunch of work and I just… kind of freaked out. I did that thing where I feel like I am not allowed to stop working until I am caught up. So I worked from 4am till 9pm for many days in a row with broken sleep in between.

I have a hard time with feeling like I am going to be punished if things aren’t “caught up” to a certain level. Clearly my dreams think Noah will punish me if I am not good enough. I am not sure who else I am afraid of.

Someone in one of my online support groups is dealing with a family member being institutionalized because the family member is completely delusional and hurting their children. I feel abject fear when I hear about them sassing members of staff and refusing to cooperate. They do not understand what can be done to them.

I think I have this abject fear that if I do not have a “nice enough” environment for my kids to live in then I will have them taken away and I will be put in a psych ward again. So I spend a few days not able to control the volume of my voice and being really irrational about working until I hurt myself.

Also: trying to get established here has been kind of rough. I can’t order things through most websites because my credit cards are not registered to a UK address. Mostly they can’t be. US and UK credit systems don’t overlap. Well, American Express cheerfully updated our address and they will just move seamlessly into a UK credit card but a lot of places won’t accept them.

I have had a really rough time with trying to use credit cards only to get them shut off for fraud. I have been on the phone with my credit cards almost every day since we got here because I am getting so many denied purchases. I have put flags on all of my cards that we are making enormous purchases in the UK because we have moved here and we are trying to set up house… but fraud protection. I mean, it’s good–right? But it’s also really frustrating. I am just starting to get to the point where I am catching up on sleep from having such a deeply inadequate amount. My running 7 day total went from about 4 hours a night to 6.5 hours of sleep a night. That’s a massive improvement, but sleep deprivation is torture and it makes the brain do a lot of really nasty things to you.

I still haven’t gotten an amount of sleep that counts as restorative. The air mattress I am sleeping on (that I am deeply grateful to have) is really hard on my back and shoulders. And the baby is waking up a lot so my sleep is still massively disrupted. This will end, but it won’t end for a while longer and I feel brittle and bitchy and short tempered. Which means I feel like I am a bad person. Being cranky makes me feel like I don’t deserve to have anyone love me or do anything nice for me.

I am not being nice enough to any of the kids in my life. I feel really bad about myself because I don’t have more patience. But I have no slack to give myself this minute so I don’t know how to find it for other people.

I know things are coming together. I know this sprint cycle is heading for completion. We have a fair bit of furniture in the house (most of it from charity shops so we didn’t spend a lot of money–awesome) and most of what we still need has finally been ordered. (If I walk to a store my credit card goes through pretty easily; I just can’t order online for delivery.) The two really big things I still need to purchase are a full sized washer and dryer. Everything else we must have has been either ordered for delivery or is already in the house. I would like a few other pieces of furniture (like a bigger kitchen table with real chairs instead of folding chairs that Her Sweetness is going to hurt herself on) but what we have could be good enough for quite a long time.

Unfortunately all of the stuff won’t finish being delivered until October 4th. But it’s ordered and on its way. We get a rental van tomorrow for 48 hours and I will be able to zip around town and order the washer/dryer and get the last bits of stuff I want to buy for the kitchen and we can finish filling in the gaps in our wardrobes. I am a bit cranky with myself for putting almost 100% of my warm things on the boat so that I am wearing Jenny’s generously provided hand-me-downs 24/7 because I don’t have much of my own to keep me warm. I have one pair of warm bottoms and one warm top and one sweater. I am stealing Eldest Child’s warm socks with absolutely no shame because she thinks they pinch her toes anyway.

The kids need to have a lot of shoes for school. They will need to have more shoes for school than they have ever owned at once before. 1) Indoor PE shoes 2) Indoor class shoes 3) Outdoor PE shoes 4) Rain boots and possibly 5) Nice shoes for walking to school so they make a good impression? I am not certain about the fifth pair.

Usually they have sandals, a pair of shoes adequate for running, and rarely one pair of nice shoes if we have a wedding to go to in a given size.

I am just grateful that shoes are super cheap here.

They also need more jackets/layers than they have ever owned in their entire lives. It’s feeling like a lot. Noah has almost no weather appropriate clothing because he has been able to dress down exclusively in a hot climate for decades. I don’t think it will be considered as acceptable to dress badly here. Silicon Valley is just… special. You can dress like shit and people still have to be nice to you because you might be a tech CEO worth millions of dollars.

This is an adjustment. I am feeling incredibly self conscious about how all of our hair looks as we are growing it out. We look messy. And I don’t think I can do much about it.

I would need more hand spoons and time to be braiding my hair nicely right now. I am working too hard to manage. Buns it is.

Today Noah and Middle Child are heading out to try and acquire necessary clothing. This is the last good day for them to try for a few days and we are all chilly enough that we don’t want to keep putting it off. I am not letting the children turn the heat up in the house so they can just wear underwear. For one thing, it’s hella expensive. For a second thing, we would have to have lights on in every room with the blinds closed because our house is not private. People have a clear view into most rooms of our house and folks go by frequently. Wear clothes. You are not in California with a huge privacy hedge and most windows facing the backyard anymore, Toto. Adapt.

For the next two and a half weeks someone has to be home at all times because we have a delivery scheduled for every day between now and October 4th. This is good.

I am really tired. But this cycle of work will end. I think that starting on October 5th I am “going on vacation” where I do the absolute minimum for several weeks and binge watch movies and don’t type and just rest. I need it quite badly. That feels really far away right now. Just keep plodding along.

We are also walking 4-9 miles a day. I wish that were helping me sleep more. It’s not. It just increases how sore I am. Pushing the stroller makes my elbows pop out of socket in a really heinous way. Wearing the baby makes my shoulders and back hurt.

I can’t wait for the boat stuff to arrive. I have a different (much larger for carrying groceries) stroller in there. The new stroller is so easy to push. It feels like sliding a knife through warm butter. With 50 lbs of gear in it I feel like I am pushing a feather. I want that stroller. (It’s also a bike trailer.) We have up to six more weeks of waiting for the boat stuff. Then I get to figure out what to do with all of that. At this point I feel like I barely remember what we own that we put in storage. I know there is no furniture… Clothes. Books. Christmas decorations. My giant fuzzy blanket that T made years ago. The set of silverware that my ex gave me for a birthday present after I broke up with him. (He ordered it long before we broke up and it was back ordered. Awkward.) I don’t even know what else.

Breakfast is almost ready. I feel like I can stop crying now. I need true sleep. I need rest so bad. But there is no rest for the wicked.

Well that sucked.

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Yesterday was the kind of day where everything went sideways. I am still dramatically underslept and as a result my reaction was rage. I was not nice. I didn’t name call, but I did tell Noah mean things. I did have trouble controlling the volume of my voice with the kids. In short: I was an asshole.

Things break. Things go wrong. I know it is life. I know that in two months I will barely remember this. It will be a blip in the rear view mirror. But getting through yesterday was hard. I did a lot of damage to my hand trying to fix things when Plan A went wrong and then Plan B utterly failed and all of that pain was for nothing.

So I flipped out. That was one of the worst melt downs I have had in many many many years. I didn’t punch a wall but it was a near thing. I feel really embarrassed. Nobody in my family deserved to deal with my temper like that.

The interesting bit was: when we got out and started walking, trying to salvage a Plan C, I calmed right down. I wans’t in a good mood but I wasn’t raging anymore. When I am flipping out I need to start taking a walk, literally. Being outside is a balm to my soul. Even when it feels like. I can’t do anything right, I still feel better. Being inside a building makes me feel trapped like a rat; even a building I like as much as this one. We are still working on getting objects to soften the echoing sounds of loud noises. The house hurts my ears still. It will improve, but we literally haven’t had a chance to do the work yet.

There were good parts of the day. We did get the deliveries from the charity shops and we did get the council tax bill. Today Noah can get a bank account; it can’t be a joint account because my name isn’t on the council bill. So I’m seriously just a dependent right now with no rights to a bank account. That doesn’t feel so good.

I think we can fix it but it will take some time. We need a bank account ASAP so we won’t bother to fix it before we get a bank account and credit card; I will just need to be added later. But once we have a local bank/credit card things get so much easier. Noah already has a local phone number. I think he got electricity sorted and he’s working on WiFi and a home phone number.

He’s getting so much done. It is incredibly unfair for me to feel rage when he can’t complete a task in the time frame I would prefer. It’s not fair up one side and down the other.

Didn’t help that every credit card in my wallet was frozen for fraud protection yesterday and everything I tried to get done… failed. It wasn’t just Noah who was hitting road blocks.

I am sorry. But you can’t unsay mean things and sorry bakes no bread. My behavior was shit and Noah was completely patient with me. It really doesn’t help that I am down two full nights of sleep in the last five nights, but that’s not a good enough reason to freak out at him.

I need to do better. I can’t keep asking for passes for being upset. Noah deserves better than that from me.

Very briefly

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We are in Scotland. We are running around like chickens with our heads cut off trying to set up house in a country where we can’t get a bank account. This is complicated! (We will be able to get one soon… once the council decides to send us a tax bill.)

Furniture is trickling in. Luckily my wonderful Jenny helped us out by giving us some stuff to make the entry easier. Today we pick up a car hire and zip about all over town picking up things that we need. Such as brooms, mop, vacuum, toilet bowl cleaner, garbage cans… you get the drift. We need a lawn mower and getting one home on foot would suck so today is the day.

It’s beautiful here. I am having some anxious feelings but not that many considering the magnitude of what we are doing. We are just plugging right along….

Things are different this time

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Last time it took almost five years after MC before I had renewed interest in sex in a sustained way. This time Her Sweetness is only 18 months old and I feel like I am crawling the walls. I have initiated sex several times this week and I haven’t done that in years. I don’t think I have been this interested in sex since the last time I was in full hunt mode. I am not sure how this switch flipped. I suppose it is for the best that I am only thinking about Noah.

I wonder if getting more privacy is going to result in a renaissance in our love life. I have hope.

I am not just interested in vanilla sex. I am thinking about all sorts of depravity.

I am reading the book Come As You Are and I am thinking about stress and anxiety. I am thinking about what things were like after the older kids were born. I felt so much pressure to hurry up and perform. So much worry about holding appropriate boundaries for the kids. I don’t feel either now. I feel pretty confident that I am a good mother and I have definitely sheltered my kids from my sex life.

They regularly declare things like “You haven’t hit anyone in years.” I think about cutting my submissive open and licking up his blood. They really couldn’t come close to guessing. That’s good.

I don’t know how much I will hang out with local kinky people in the Highlands. I worry about my attraction to people with poor boundaries. I clearly have some scene friends with good boundaries. But the entire city of Inverness is so much smaller. I am trying to think about how to leave space for my kids too.

I have some suspicions about the apples and the tree and all that.

We will see. For now I am just enjoying feeling desire.

How did we get here?

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I was asked how Jenny got to Scotland. That’s actually a fairly simple story. Jenny got into online chatting years before I did. She was super into making friends through chatting when we were in high school. That’s why I have followed her from platform to platform on the internet. I am not sure I would have started blogging if I were not following her.

She met her spouse on Twitter through mutual friends. They talked for a long time remotely. Eventually they decided they wanted to meet each other. So they met up… in Canada. Which makes a lot of sense for folks from Scotland and California, right? (It did make sense at the time.)

That meeting went spectacularly well. So Jenny went and spent six months in Scotland to see how much they got along. That trip was great! So they decided to get married. Many hoops were involved.

A whole bunch of us from California all went to Scotland for the wedding. That was the Scotland trip when Eldest Child was 3 years old and Middle Child was 9 months old.

Now Jenny has a 6 year old and a 2 year old. I have kids who are 11, 9, and 1.

What I’ve been looking for

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I have spent a lot of time reading forums about abusive families over the past few years. Reading back over my old journal entries from 13 years ago reminds me… I basically coaxed myself through the process that many people need help with. Reading the emails between my siblings about my father’s will (oh that was gross and scary), reading about how my mother treated me as I was becoming a mother myself (hello complete lack of healthy boundaries), and all of the ways I tried to create family out of friendships…

I am so very textbook. I know that. I have known that for a long time. But skimming the oldest entries I have as I lock things down behind a new password… phew.

Picking friendships with people who try to control me by telling me I need to behave how they want me to behave or I have a personality disorder? That is utterly, perfectly textbook for someone with my background. I will abase myself and beg and hurt myself doing labor if someone reminds me of my family because that was my role.

Seeing this in the context of moving on from the bay is so illuminating. Mostly because Jenny is providing a level of support for us moving that I never would have asked for, never would believe I deserve, and frankly it makes me feel uncomfortable. But in that good healthy growth sort of way. I have put 25 years into chasing Jenny and mostly she let me chase her and she didn’t chase back all that much. Now she is returning the full force and whoa. Is this how I make her feel?

I wouldn’t expect this from Jenny because she is very reserved and she doesn’t make big promises.

Frankly, this is what Sarah promised and never delivered.

It’s not fair to say Jenny hasn’t done things for me in the past. When I overextended myself taking care of Sarah (driving to a different state to help her with packing and unpacking because she couldn’t/wouldn’t do it for herself due to mental and physical health reasons) Jenny is the person who flew out to drive my van home. Because she loves me and she didn’t want me to get hurt.

When I needed a place to go when I moved out of my ex’s house, Jenny figured out how we could live together. That didn’t work out because I am a ridiculous control freak and Jenny is not going to adapt how she lives for anyone. She knows her limits in a way that I deeply admire.

I feel like I am heading for a rebirth. I am no longer going to be chasing people who will watch me drain my life blood for them while giving me a flippant thanks and not living up to the promises they make. Jenny under promises and over delivers.

I need to not create any of the same patterns with Scottish folk. I will make friends slowly, gradually, with a lot of boundaries. Jenny and I will be able to have civil, adult conversations about boundaries and needs and what is ok to ask for. Jenny has never had a hard time (from my point of view) with telling me “No that doesn’t work for me.”

I know that I don’t have to show up and start performing a bunch of labor in exchange for the help I have gotten in the past few months. Jenny knows better than almost anyone that I need to slow down and not take on new big tasks for a while. She will sit and wait, like she is coaxing a cat to like her. She knows I am drawn to her like a magnet. I will absolutely find ways to spend time with her and share love that work for both of us. And maybe for the first time in my recorded history…

I can slow down enough to let my body heal from everything that has happened to it. I am going through old blog entries. My body has endured so much. My soul has endured so much. As my dear friend said to me, most people are broken down by what happened to me and my soul broke open. I have had a hard time not flooding people with love and affection hoping they would return it. I have provided acts of service and labor long past when it was healthy for me because I wanted to be worthy of love.

Jenny loves me even when I am not doing labor for her. If I go back through my blog I can see just how much labor I have put forth trying to buy love. Having kids has changed this dynamic so much. Children need that kind of labor from their parents. It is a requirement for building healthy attachment and safety. Children need a flood of labor and attention and affection.

Healthy adult friendships do not. I do not need to flood Jenny for her to know I love her. She tells me to back off.

I feel like I am tarnishing everyone with this brush and it isn’t fair. I have friends who love me and support me without me having to do tons of labor for them. The friendships that have endured for decades and I feel like they still support me… honestly they aren’t the people I flooded. J in Portland did so much to support us landing there that I was stunned. I have not done labor for J since I braided her daughter’s hair for her wedding nearly 20 years ago. A in Portland helped even though the only labor I have provided was helping her load a truck 12 years ago one time. A has flown to another state to support me in large endeavors.

I was accused of scanning for signs of betrayal. Well, sort of? I am scanning to see what are the results of my behavior. I am scanning to see if people respond to me how they say they will. I am scanning to see if people are treating me like my family or not. I am scanning to see if people are safe for me to pour my love into. I am scanning to see if people are healthy to introduce to my children.

Many of the people who have volunteered the hardest to be in the lives of my children are some of the least appropriate people I have had relationships with. I only see this in the rear view mirror.

Maybe you think I should be able to figure this out without looking at these people and matching up their words and their actions over and over and over again but I am not smart enough. I do not have enough self love to move towards safety instinctively. I have to work at it. I have to put time and effort and mental work towards trying to evaluate if I am making good choices or not.

Given what I have reread in the past couple of days… my choices are improving but I am far from perfect. I need to exercise a lot of caution as I integrate into a new community. Instant family feelings really… yeah. I can’t do that again. When I think of the number of people in the bay who told me I was “chosen family” within a year of us meeting…. well, that’s a red flag I will never miss again. I will never say that to someone again.

Jenny is chosen family because for 25 years when I have had a crisis and I appear on her doorstep she lets me come in and cry until I am done. When she needs help or support I will do what I can to provide it. I will shower her with attention because she fascinates me and she has for most of my life.

Jenny is who I went to when my father and brother suicided. Jenny helped me get back safely when I was stupid enough to strand myself. Jenny is helping me move continents.

I believe her when she says she will do something. I can count on one hand my adult friendships who I trust to the degree I trust her.

In the bay I had a vast shallow network. I could ask the whole network and someone would probably show up on a given day but I could never predict who and many of the people would show up once and never again. That’s not evil. That doesn’t mean any of those people were doing anything wrong. But it isn’t what I was looking for.

There were people who promised me the moon and didn’t come close to delivering and that hurt. There were people who would have been more stable and consistent support in exchange for me letting their other, more important to them, friends treat me like dirt.

Is it scanning for betrayal if I am willing to examine the truth of someone’s behavior in comparison to their words? I can live with that. I must live with that. I will live with that.

I am trying to figure out what living with integrity means for me. I am trying to figure out how much I have to give while maintaining enough energy for me to give to myself so that I can be healthy.

It’s kind of funny thinking about it in terms of the threads on these forums. I can see my growth curve the way I can see the growth in people who come back to their own threads for years and years.

Even a stunted tree reaches for the light.

We fly out of Bangkok in 39 hours. Nearly time to go find what I have been looking for.

Housekeeping and illness

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I am sick. I am producing buckets of green snot and I get dizzy whenever I walk down into the heat. That means the remaining 57 hours of being in Bangkok are not going to be much more festive than the last few days. That’s a huge bummer because Thailand was the only Asian country I was dying to see. My body is just not that fun.

To keep myself busy in the apartment I have gone back and changed the password on all of the posts that had a password. I am going to slowly go through everything “private” and put it behind a password. Only 3600 posts to go… In the future I will probably put a variety of topics behind a password because my children deserve more privacy than I have shown over the last few years. As we are establishing ourselves in a new country it is better for their classmates to not be able to find my more extreme topics. Not to mention the parents….

That means that if you want to read all the juicy stuff you need to out yourself. No more silent stalkers.

Every single one of those posts requires a minimum of 5 clicks so it may take me a few days to get all the archives updated. It’s hard on my arms. Minimum of 18,000 clicks, y’all. Hundreds of my early blog entries were one or two sentences long. That many stupid clicks to update that shit. LJ was such a mess. I have been on and off Twitter since September 2008. Staying off seems smart for my mental health.

I really don’t have much to report about Bangkok to my sadness. We are mostly eating from stuff we can get from 7-11.

I haven’t reread everything I have updated but I am skimming a lot. So many years of begging for attention, for love, for validation. I am really glad that I have stopped most of that. I am a lot more stable emotionally. I am much more appropriate in my behavior. I am a lot closer to who I want to be.

I am only going to share me with people who deserve me going forward. I feel like moving to Scotland is time for a rebirth. I have a family who adores me, friends who love me and respect me and put effort into maintaining their end of relationships, and enough projects to last the rest of my life.

I’m excited.

Ride or die.

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Jenny wants us in Scotland. I feel utterly gobsmacked by how much she is doing to make this process go more smoothly.

Today was funny. I emailed the school we want to go to. They said according to the map we need to go to school #2. Emailed school #2. They said according to the map we need to go to school #3. Emailed school #3. They said according to the map we need to go to school #1. So Jenny went to the office of school #1 to show them a screen shot of where our house is on the map.

She also had all the stuff we were storing in her garage delivered to our house; that means we have warm clothes waiting in the house so we won’t be shivering in our Bangkok gear. She is giving us a whole bunch of stuff to start setting up house: dishes, a bed, extra warm things she knitted so it will be warm and love all at once.

She is bringing groceries over before we arrive.

I’m crying, but it is for joy. I feel so lucky that I get to follow Jenny to Scotland. I have followed Jenny all over the place. I am basically her stalker only she likes me. I used to follow her home in middle school. I followed her to g-blog then livejournal then facebook then twitter. She is the reason I learned how to dance. I went to Renaissance Faires because of her, and Dickens Fair. She introduced me to some of my favorite books and tv shows.

I am lucky. I am happy. Our flight leaves Bangkok in 73 hours. I feel less like death.

I was looking through old blog entries today. I have been exhausted and depleted and run down since at least 2006. I can’t wait to slow my life down. I can’t wait to follow Jenny again. She makes such lovely choices.

I don’t know what is up with the formatting right now.

“But you had the perfect life”

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I really didn’t. I don’t feel like I have ever gotten to truly calm down and heal from all the shit that has happened to me. I have been running at full steam ahead for decades. Almost four decades. That’s not hyperbole, that’s reality.

All the moves. Trauma. Schools. Jobs that I worked 50-70 hours/week. Pregnancies that sapped the nutrients from my bones. Traveling. 24/7 care of my kids.

I could really use a break.

Noah is scared of us trying to live on a low quantity of money. He doesn’t feel the relief I feel. Having money and knowing you can spend money changes the entire focus of your life and the pressure on you. Knowing that you don’t have the money to do things…

Well, I’ve been there before. If your basics are covered and you do not feel stress over losing your home or food… it’s pretty chill. I like that feeling. Our house is paid off. We will definitely be able to afford food. But we may not be able to travel much for a long time. Right this second that sounds awesome. We won’t be eating out much; we will probably save up and eat out every other month. That’ll be a massive lifestyle change for us. I think it will be healthy.

I wonder how much my current illness is related to just collapsing under the weight of everything I have been doing. I want to slow down so much. I am not doing much today. Probably not tomorrow either. I am so dizzy that walking around our tiny apartment requires breaks to sit down. It is literally unsafe for me to try to go walk around Bangkok like that where I cannot communicate and I have three children to keep safe. I also wonder how much this feeling of illness is related to the truly deep tissue Thai massage I had the other day. That lady broke up super deep adhesions and ground out knots that have been there for six months and more. My body was literally flooded with all the stuff that has been stored up in my muscles. That can totally make you sick. (Yes my pee is totally a massively dark brown despite me drinking twice the amount of water I usually drink.) It was a much harder massage than I have gotten almost ever before in my life. Next time I will say “gentle”. Notice in that article where it says that EDS might make this problem worse? Yeah. I have that. I think I should stop requesting deep tissue work.

Putting my oxygen mask on means knowing that today I have harsh limits. I felt like death the day after the massage. I can’t do that any more.

There are so many things I want to help with in this life. I need to heal first though. Or I am not going to be able to live up to the obligations to my children that I already signed on for. That’s just a fact. It is hard being realistic about that.

I am not entirely sure what healing means at this point. Having real energy? Not feeling tapped out and exhausted before I open my eyes?

Even though I feel sad about not seeing Pam this December I feel very excited for having a family winter time in our new home. I don’t know what I want to do. I keep talking about it with my family. We are not Christians and Christmas is not much of a secular holiday in Scotland. They care about NYE (Hogmanay). But we don’t have attachment to Hogmanay at this point. Maybe it’ll grow for us in our spirits, but right now it still feels like almost appropriation?

I wonder about Winter Solstice. We are all pagan-adjacent in our spirituality. I wonder if shifting focus will help us build a different future around who we want to grow into being?

Well this sucks; ok not everything sucks

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We were just about over jet lag. Then illness strikes. Her Sweetness has a fever and she is super cranky; I assume she is in pain too. Eldest Child is having intestinal problems. I have full body pain (as someone with chronic pain this is enough pain to make me want to sit very still in a chair and cry–I am medicating for pain with tylenol and ibuprofen alternated), a low grade fever, and I am producing a river of snot with the associated coughing, sneezing, and sore throat. If you have followed me for long you know it has to get BAD before I medicate with these drugs because I am so afraid of my tolerance level going up.

I don’t think we will see much of Bangkok and I am very disappointed.

The food has tasted great. The garbage is omnipresent and overwhelming. The traffic patterns are reminding me of Kuala Lumpur only they are very different? It’s closer to KL than Japanese traffic patterns. The gridlock is massive. I can understand why the advice around driving here is don’t.

We are right next to RCA (Royal City Avenue) which is the designated clubbing/entertainment/tourist area. It’s a short walk down a relatively safe stretch of sidewalk. Relatively safe because the motorcycle taxi service has a stand in front of our building so they have to go back and forth on that stretch of sidewalk. If you pay attention and get out of their way it’s ok. And all the motorcycle drivers love Her Sweetness. They want to cuddle and hang out with her.

Her Sweetness is my most reserved child. I used to think Middle Child was incredibly reserved because I compared them to Eldest Child. Holy sauce buckets was I underestimating the amount of reserve a child of my blood can display. When people try to touch HS she cries. She wants her people and that’s it.

I am going to have to stagger downstairs and do laundry today because I am about out of hankies. Dude. I travel with more than a dozen hankies. Hankies are life. (We also have a full laundry basket. But the hankies will be the motivation.)

I was a serious bitch yesterday and I feel kind of embarrassed. I am sick and the kids were pushing me for attention and to do work for them. I blew up about how unfair it is that when they are sick I let them lie still and do nothing until they feel like doing things and I am not allowed any rest. I sort of feel like I “should” have found a nicer way to express this. But I tried a variety of “I’m not feeling well” and “I can’t do that” before I started getting harsh. There is this complicated balancing act where I try to be as nice as I can be to them until they just refuse to recognize that I have boundaries too and then I’m really not so nice. Because fuck that. I get to have rest when I am fucking sick and you can go in your room and play and stop bothering me. No I don’t have to pay attention to you today. You can bloody well cope with me taking care of myself today.

It’s weird. I feel guilty and proud of myself? I need to set these boundaries. I set them as softly as I could. I escalated ,when they completely refused to allow me boundaries, to being more forceful in my language. I did use the word fuck a lot. “I am fucking sick and I need to fucking rest. You don’t fucking need me to play with you. You can fucking play by yourself.” That was after a couple of hours of using soft language and having MC continue to head butt me and be rude and demanding and aggressive about wanting to play.

MC has asked me to use the word fuck less and I’ve been doing pretty well so this flood of fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck was definitely a sign of degrading ability to communicate. But I feel like my head is in a vice and if you don’t leave me alone and stop talking to me I am going to literally melt down and start screaming which would really suck in this tiny apartment. I have limits. I don’t talk to you like this even once a year. But I am sick and I need to be left alone to take care of me.

My kids genuinely think I am a river of love and support and work and they can’t understand when I can’t do that. It’s a weird dynamic. I feel both good and bad about it. I am not sure I am presenting them with a healthy, balanced view of what parents should be like. My mother under-responded and neglected me. So I half kill myself doing the martyr schtick so they never know a minute of boredom or want. I am hurting myself so they never have to be bored. That’s not healthy either.

I really can’t wait to have my own bedroom and for them to go to school. We need to start separating. I feel like a mother bird who is exerting more and more pressure to get the baby birds to get the fork out of the nest. I need some space, kiddos. I love you. I need some space for me too. I matter too. I am not the most important person in our family but I am not the least important person either. We need balance. If we sacrifice my health on the altar of “Happy Family” then this family is going to fall apart soon. I have to be healthy enough to carry my side of things.

I suspect this is related to just how hard I pushed my body over the past few months culminating in the last week. I have done a lot of work. We leave Bangkok on the 9th and we arrive on the 10th because it is another 30 hour travel day with getting to and from airports. Today is the 5th. So close yet so far.

The former owner of the house and Jenny’s Super Spiffy Husband (JSSH) both sent us long explanations of how to set up utilities and services. We are so incredibly lucky that we are following Jenny. She has helped in ways big and small that blow my mind. I feel like we are sliding into Scotland on greased rails. This could have been a nightmare. Instead it is a series of steps. Yes, we feel tension and stress as we go through the steps because lots of things are out of our control… but things are actually going as fast as they possibly could. We made the decision to move to Scotland, got absolutely everything done, and now we are returning in less than three months. That is miraculous in terms of government bureaucracy. Greased. Forkin. Rails.

And once we arrive… we have no deadlines to hurry up and get anything done. There are no foreseeable sprints in my future. We don’t need to hurry up and get anything done. We need to get things done as quickly as we get them done. I mean, utilities getting set up might be the most “Uhhh do that now” step. But furniture and cookware and all that stuff can trickle in. We will probably go shopping on the 11th to get some things, but not a lot. Realistically we will go to the store every day for a while and we will get what we get. Sometime in the first week we will probably hire a van and clean out the charity shop of anything we can use and do a massive grocery shop but it’s not a big rush. If it happens on our second day or our fourth day or the seventh day… whatever. We are right between three stores that are all dandy for supplying us with food we can eat without stress. I’m just not worried. It’s a lovely feeling. I will slowly acquire the things we need to keep house. Drips and drabs. It will be easier to do most of this shopping after the shipment of our belongings arrive so I have the big double stroller.

I got a double bike trailer that can be used as a stroller so that I can pull the baby AND groceries. This is my compromise on not having a car. I am already aware of how awesome Tesco’s delivery service is (THANK YOU JSSH!) but I really like going to the store. And I want to experiment between Tesco and Aldi and Asda. I will get a little notebook for comparing prices. We are going to be trying to be that tight with our budget.

I’m not sure if I told y’all this. Noah’s current obscene California salary is going to last till January. Then he’s going to work on books, teaching, and maybe a wee bit of contracting on the side. We have enough money in petty cash for 2-3 years of run time if we are very conservative and we hope we can figure out him working for himself. This is part of why we decided Taipei is not wise at the moment. If we are trying to live on £40,000/year all of a sudden spending $6000 on a trip to Taipei seems… uhhh not in the budget.

I have lived on much less. While snowballing our debt we lived on a similar amount of money at the beginning of our marriage. We will see!

On the money front: I was watching a session of Scottish Parliament yesterday and there was a lot of hand wringing over how they can’t get enough people to work with mental health care for children. The waiting lists are long and they are incredibly stressed out about it. Do you know what I have a unique background on? Helping kids with mental health problems. Sure, I’ll have to hit up the local university for some specific training and degree hoop jumping but that doesn’t scare me. Maybe when Her Sweetness starts nursery in a year and a half we will have four people in school in the house. That would be kind of cool.

I would like to have a job. I would like to have a job specifically because I dream of a conservatory added to the house and if I don’t figure out how to earn the money for it myself Noah will feel like he needs to get a remote job from California for ridiculous money and then he will work 60 hours a week and I will be very sad.

I don’t need to earn the money in the first couple of years. In my head I wouldn’t be ready to start that kind of project for at least 3-5 years. That gives me time to go to school and get started in the field. I will be 100% hiring out the work and the former owner gave me the name of the person who could probably build it for me because he did all the other remodeling in the house.

This is not abandoning the idea of IDB (Incest Database) but it is helping to keep me busy until then and helps me gain qualifications that will help with the research and it helps pay for retirement stuff so Noah doesn’t have to supply 100% of our retirement safety on his own. I still think I couldn’t really get going on IDB for almost 20 years. Not the way I want to. 20 years is a long time and I could do a lot of valuable work between now and then.

I want to be part of the community. This would be a really great way for me to meet people and find a place for myself.

I don’t have a plan yet. I am not rushing. I am waiting to see how things shake out. I am coming up with ideas, potentials, hopes, and dreams.

And nothing is in a big rush. No sprints. Settle in slowly. Exercise. Establish house. Help the kids adjust to school. Wait for HS to be old enough for nursery. Enjoy the next year and a half of extra alone time with my precious last baby. I feel lucky and blessed.

I won’t be doing much today. Noah has a speakers dinner tonight. We have instant noodles in the apartment that will probably be most of our food while he is doing his conference. I should go down to the 7-11 (holy shit these things are ubiquitous internationally) and get some yogurt and juice and maybe other snacky foods. Maybe I’ll do that run while I’m dealing with laundry.

I feel so bad. I did more yesterday than I probably should have. Today I can’t. As I plan to go to the laundromat and do grocery shopping. I am such a twit.

These things have to get done. It’s not optional. Being the mom is not always fun. But it is always worth it. I did not have children because I wanted convenience. I am so very loved. It’s worth it.

Even if sometimes I have to say fuck fuck fuck fuck to be allowed to rest.

I think it is kind of useful that EC is reading these Warriors books because the mama cats take no shit and that is causing her to change how she views me. It’s hilarious.

I have been dizzy on and off for days. My body is so unhappy. Her Sweetness is waking up every two hours to nurse and I don’t feel like it is fair to complain given how sick she is.

Miss Jenny picked up our keys. The solicitor has been paid off. We have a home to go back to. A home that pretty closely matches drawings I’ve been making about my dream home for years. I am so lucky.

We are going to be highlanders! We start this next phase of our lives on the day I turn 38. Seems like a good time for a rebirth.

Traveling is eventful.

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First: it was an a small adventure figuring out how to dispose of the expired car seat I was borrowing. Portland does not make it easy. They wanted us to drive over half an hour to a transfer station to pay like $28 to throw it in the garbage because they don’t recycle them. Instead we found a dumpster behind a hotel.

Then when we got to the airport I learned that Her Sweetness and I were not able to have our boarding passes printed for the whole trip. We got boarding passes to Hong Kong and then we got to cross our fingers everything would work out from there. That’s an anxiety producing situation for me. Holy cheese toast. But I tried to stay cool and calm and in the end it just meant an extra 15 minutes of processing in the airport. No big deal. China just has slightly different rules about traveling with a lap infant.

American Airlines website said they would only give us 1 meal on the flight. Instead they served 3 and we got to throw away a lot of food. That could be worse. But the AA flight was… not amazing. It felt budget and unfriendly and not very helpful. I have dreams about the kindness of Philippine Airlines. Such a lovely airline. I mean: AA expects you to go back and self serve on snacks and drinks instead of them coming by and offering them to you. But they also don’t want you out of your seats unless you MUST. So that’s not a fun situation for a 14 hour flight.

No more 14 hour flights in our future!

I liked the Hong Kong airport. The shops were top notch and folks were very patient and low key. That’s a relief after the US. It felt a little bit like the DMV only nicer? Like, people were just doing the thing and it’ll get done and you can wait… it’ll be fine…

The Bangkok airport was fine. Getting the taxi was fine. Then we got to our apartment. I looked 9,837 at the confirmation information I had and… no information about how I was to get into the apartment. So I started calling the host and sending her messages. This continued for an hour in the blistering heat. I had been awake for most of the previous 48 hours (If I got 6 hours of sleep added up in cat naps I’d be surprised) and I was not really feeling patient.

Eventually she woke up and asked why we didn’t call the guy who was waiting in the apartment. THE GUY YOU NEVER TOLD ME ABOUT AND YOU NEVER GAVE ME HIS NUMBER? THAT GUY?!?!?!

Then it turns out that the guy DIDN’T GIVE US A FUCKING FRONT DOOR KEY, JUST THE ELEVATOR PASS.

So that sucked. Noah was dispatched a few times to acquire food since we couldn’t all go. We ate. We rested. We bitched.

Eventually the lady had someone bring us a key and she gave me phone numbers for local people who can help with problems. I told her, “May I suggest that in the future you send an email 24 hours before check in with the name and phone number of the person a guest is supposed to meet?” She thought that was a good idea. Oy.

The apartment came stocked with 1/4 of a roll of toilet paper. Good thing there is a convenience store down stairs. But we are back in the land of bidets so my hemorrhoids are feeling better than they have in months.

Apparently my time in Kuala Lumpur was not real indicative of Malaysia in general because I didn’t see almost any garbage. Here in Bangkok I feel like garbage is raining down on us and flooding the pathways. So. Much. Trash.

Folks in Fukuoka would have a heart attack. Then get up from their hospital bed to start cleaning.

God damn different Asian countries are different. I am such an ignorant fucker. I didn’t realize it would be quite this dramatic.

When you drive into the city from the airport there are large signs telling you that speaking ill of the king will result in jail time. Also: being disrespectful of the Buddha or getting a tattoo of his image will result in jail time. They don’t fuck around.

Fair enough.

I come from a crazy ass country where every man, woman, and child in Texas owns 6+ guns and that’s not including the rest of the fucked up states. We never get to judge another country negatively for having…. views.

The food. *Fall over drooling* the fooooooooooooooooooooooooood. We are a 5 minute walk from a night market that serves absolutely amazing food. I could live happily forever on the variety of offerings they have. Middle Child and I had different types of tasty noodles in soup. Noah and Eldest Child had rice dishes from a different stall. Her Sweetness ate off of everyone’s plate until she realized how spicy Noah’s food was. Ha. We had fun drinks. They weren’t as sugary as we are used to from home but they were intensely fatty in a way the US doesn’t favor and frankly it tasted way better. MC had a “unicorn” which was sugar, condensed milk, two kinds of coloring, and flavors of I don’t know exactly what sort. Then there were a bunch of candies shoved into the top with sprinkles. I had a more plain caramel drink. It wasn’t a lot of caramel. But it was super good? Noah and EC had Thai iced teas with boba. Mmmmm.

Our lunch at a perfectly decent restaurant was around 900 baht. Our fabulous, wonderful, over the top good dinner at the night market was about 350 baht. Then this morning our breakfast at the grocery store cost around 600 baht just for the food (we got other staples and paid more like 1400 baht overall). 1 baht = .033 US So the lunch was around $30, the dinner was around $11 and breakfast + staples was around $45.

The night market is just so gosh darn cheap.

The traffic pattern is a bit intimidating to us: it is reminiscent of Kuala Lumpur but slightly less terrifying? Fewer motorcycles running up on sidewalks to go around cars. Here the motorcycles mostly only go up on the sidewalk if they are parking or dropping off passengers?

I am finding it fascinating that Her Sweetness is Not. Fucking. Interested. in being popular with all the local folks who would love to pick her up and chatter at her about how cute she is. She is getting a very effective “Fuck off” face. Good for her.

Sleep. Oy sleep. It’s all over the place. None of us are sleeping well. The AC helps, but it is still uncomfortable and jet lag is a bitch. Resetting a babies sleep pattern is not the same as an adult just “toughing it out”. You can’t do that to her. She melts down. She starts wandering back and forth screaming about all the things she wants but she doesn’t really want because the second she has it she is screaming about something else she wants. Sleep is the only remedy. She was super upset when Noah decided to stay downstairs and work in the common area so we don’t all have to be quiet. She wants her Bigs with her all. the. time.

Once we got through the fuss, I quite like this apartment. It is small but well laid out. The couch is awesome (it is pretty rad that I wanted to buy this couch from Ikea for our new house, I made everyone go on a pilgrimage to Ikea to sit on it in Portland. Now that we have used it for a few days everyone is fully on board with this being an awesome couch for us. This one.) and we are glad to have it here. The bed is pretty comfy. I am not sure when I became such an intense devotee of firm mattresses, but I am. Firm is great.

I am tapping my fingers waiting until Noah is done with work for the day. There are 5 or 6 Thai massage places within a 10 minute walk. Hell yeah. They all cost 300 baht or less. So… less than $10/hour. Can I have like 11 hours straight?

I had my last dose of pot on the plane. My intention (If I put this in writing, maybe I will stick with it) is to not buy alcohol at all until I genuinely feel like I have a small surplus of money in the food budget and that could not happen until October or November. I’m almost out of Ativan and I don’t intend to get more.

I’m about to be cold turkey on all of my drug dependencies.

Did I mention I plan to run a lot in Scotland? Like, when I am having feelings and I want to reach for a chemical crutch… go run instead.

I am going to learn how to be a healthy role model if it fucking kills me. I have made a tremendous amount of progress but I am not where I am going to get. Tea is going to be my big vice and I need to reduce how much sugar I put in it. (Jenny’s eyes got So Big when she watched me sugar my tea… yeah… I use a lot.) I should probably buy cubes and I get one per cup.

I am not going to buy soda again to have in the house until I also buy whiskey because I like drinking them together. Or maybe I will learn to drink my whiskey neat. We’ll see. One way or another I don’t plan to have the money to buy whiskey often enough to be a big influence on my life. Luckily I live with someone who thinks that alcohol should be served in roughly 1/2 a shot glass portions.

Yesterday was our anniversary. 13 years of marriage. I am glad we have had these adventures together. I am even more glad we are about to settle down for the foreseeable future. I want to be chilly. I want to exercise. I want to stop fucking packing.

Had a chat with EC about how much it costs to maintain cats. She wants to have two. She started panicking when she heard how much Puff used to cost me. And she wants two. We negotiated that she can do 5 hours a week of babysitting to pay for her cats. Seems like a good trade to me. We are starting with mothers helper work (she is NOT responsible for MC) and we will go from there.

It is neat hearing her strategize how she wants to do her room. She is highly cognizant of how expensive her plans are (she wants a custom built loft bed that looks like a treehouse) and she is trying to figure out which parts she can do, which parts she wants to ask me to help with, and which parts she will need to have the £ to pay someone else to help her. I feel so proud of her. Her planning skills are still nascent but she’s going to be fucking bad ass as an adult. She thinks things through. I mean, she’s still impulsive as fuck because she has ADHD like whoa but she can also plan. It’s amazing.

MC is more focused on the school part of moving. Setting up a room is not really on the radar yet. School supplies, uniforms, how to make friends, how to write in cursive… kiddo really can’t move past those details and that’s totally ok.

Her Sweetness is learning words at a blistering rate. She is going to be closer th ECs curve with talking than MCs. Doesn’t matter, they are all fine and normal and doing what they ought to be doing. But holy cheese she says a lot. People keep asking me if she is 3 or 4 based on her size and talking. Nope. 18 months. And she’s my smallest baby. Cue the bug eyes.

Folks have asked me if I am pregnant more than once. I laugh it off and tell them I am just fat. If I got upset I think the interaction would be tense but instead we all have a good laugh and move on about our day without strife. I am trying so hard not to let other peoples judgments of me impact how I view myself.

I am pretty fat at this point. I’m riding the 200 lb line and on my frame… that’s not small. The lightweight pants I have that zip off into shorts are so tight they are really uncomfortable. No bueno. My dresses barely fit. I am not going to fit into my flannel lined jeans unless I lose some weight.

It’ll be ok. My body does this. I bounce between the 150’s and the low 200’s. I have done this over and over and over since I was 16. This is my range. It is all normal for me.

I hope I can go to bed early tonight and I hope I actually sleep through. I sure could use it.

We go home in six days.

Our house is paid for and legally ours. Miss Jenny will be picking the keys up this week for us. I am elated. I feel really glad that she gets to be the first one to take possession of our house for us. I feel so welcomed. I feel so wanted. She is being super awesome about telling us to go ahead and start ordering things to her house and we will get it over to my place lickity split once we are there. She wants us to feel comfortable and happy.

I know there will be days we struggle and feel home sick because that is part of the journey of change. But I want this change with my whole being. My entire family wants to be there for a wide variety of reasons. I have great faith we will figure this out.

We figure a lot of things out. We are pretty cool like that.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Monthly Archives: September 2019

Today is the day.

Sick babies are so much work.

I should hide my computer, and phone.

Slowing down

Now I feel like we’ve arrived.

Running out of steam… and work!

Work continues.

My brain hates me

Well that sucked.

Very briefly

Things are different this time

How did we get here?

What I’ve been looking for

Housekeeping and illness

Ride or die.

“But you had the perfect life”

Well this sucks; ok not everything sucks

Traveling is eventful.