Monthly Archives: October 2019

I tell my kids….

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I tell my kids that if you say something intending it to be a joke and nobody laughs… it probably wasn’t a joke and instead you said an asshole thing. We all do it sometimes.

I tell my kids that if you assign people roles like “bully” or “victim” then you probably aren’t looking at the whole picture: people are more complex than that.

I tell my kids that if you blame other people for your problems then you are deciding you don’t want to fix things.

I tell my kids that if you eat shitty food you will be in a shitty mood.

I tell my kids that if you yuck someone else’s yum they may end up not liking you and they won’t want to spend time with you. You don’t have to like everything that someone else likes, you do have to not be an asshole about it.

I’m to about 8% of my NaNoWriMo goal the day before the event starts. I’m not good at waiting. And my personal goal is more like 100,000 words, not 50,000. This book is not going to be small. These are the lessons and the stories I want my kids to hear from me if I die. That’s a lot of words.

So it goes

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All four showers in the house are jacked up and need repair. That’s pissing me off. The boiler system needs to be replaced. Most of the sinks are draining slow and need to be snaked. So basically, all the plumbing is shit.

Slowly fixing all the electrical shit that’s fucked up.

I’m pretty annoyed about just how much needs to be fixed. And how expensive it is.

Don’t know the results of the biopsy on the melanoma. Results are being snail mailed from the US.

We are working on our diet to be more centered on general cancer prevention though. That’s going to matter if I want to be here for decades.

Working on the book already. Why bother waiting for November? I’m not shooting for 50,000 anyway. I think this will be over 100,000. I have a lot to say to the kids. It hurts.

What do you mean second?

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Well, when I was about 21 I had cancer cells removed from my cervix. Thank you HPV. I caught it fast. I treated it fast. It hasn’t mattered.

But now that I have a second form of cancer… it matters. It is showing a pattern. A predisposition. And I’m very young for skin cancer. It’s a really bad sign that I’m getting it before 40 because even if this round is caught early and treated in a proactive manner… I’m very likely to get it again. It is more likely to spread to being other kinds of cancer in my body.

I am having big feelings about the fact that the man who gave me HPV (he knew he had it and he didn’t disclose it until after I came home sobbing about what a horrible person I was for having this disease and I’m so sorry I exposed you to this, I don’t know which one of my partners gave me this…) also used to enjoy giving me sunburns on my back because it was funny. He liked knowing I was in a kind of pain I couldn’t get away from.

So much for “risk aware consensual kink”. That relationship did a lot to harm my body permanently.

Oh, he’s also the partner who broke my arm.

I HAVE SPENT SO MANY YEARS TALKING ABOUT HOW GREAT HE WAS. Maybe just being better than my rapist/serial pedophile father isn’t a high enough bar.

Ok, it’s time.

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I am probably going to drop the blog entirely for a month or so. I need to write the next book and I am going to take advantage of NaNoWriMo again. Today my kids burst into tears because they realized they know so little about me. I need to tell all the stories from the next 20 years. It’s going to be another hard book to write but for very different reasons. And it’s going to be hell on my arms. I am going to drop the blog, not go on the forums, ignore my support group, avoid Slack, and all idle web browsing. I will be allowed to check email once a day but I will only respond to emergency stuff.

My personal goal is at least 4,000 words per day. This story is long and fucking complex. I will need every ounce of typing ability I have to tell it in a month.

Just in case I die. These are the stories I need my children to know. I hope they can learn from my mistakes and go on to make new mistakes.

Cancer. Again.

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I can’t sleep. Future will eat me.

It’s not a very aggressive form of cancer. Malignant melanoma. But I’m basically freaking out. I had cancer before, when I was 19. Then it was from HPV and on my cervix. It was burned off. This time it will be carved out with a knife and I get to pray I don’t have to undergo radiation.

I’m scared and sad. I don’t want more pain.

I’ve told myself for many years that if I get cancer… I get to just let go and stop trying. I get to die. It’s my right.

But I look at my little 20 month old baby and my 9 year old and my 11 year old… they are not ready for me to go. If it’s worse than expected… I have to fight. I have to fight with everything I am. And I’m told I am a whole lot of extra.

I promise that if I am fighting cancer I will hire house cleaners. Stop bugging me.

Tonight I miss my mother so much I feel like I could collapse under it. I’m crying on and off.

My baby is downstairs crying too. She wants me. I am being selfish. I need to look into my brain and at my feelings right now.

If I have to have radiation, we must wean. That would be hard on so many levels. She loves nursing so much. But she’d prefer to have me whole and alive than to nurse for a few extra months. I know.

It is hard knowing that I can’t give up because I have to keep supporting my kids. I mean, Noah would miss me and that would be terrible. I went to the doctor in the first place because Noah asked me to. Noah told me that I should keep hanging on because after all… he bought me my dream house… I haven’t even put art in it…

I CAN’T DIE WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT THE FUCK LUCREZIA IS DOING AND AT THIS RATE THE GOD DAMN FOGLIOS ARE GOING TO TAKE ANOTHER 20 YEARS TO WRAP UP THIS STORY LINE. (Girl Genius comic book reference.)

But Noah. I have to stay for Noah. He’s even treating his eczema so it can be more fun to rub on him. That’s a lot of effort on his part.

He is trying so hard to be pretty for me. I like the way his hair is growing out. I like how he is trimming his beard. He is working hard on exercise so he can be healthy and strong.

I’m just… really scared of more pain. I feel like I am a coward, a whiner, a pathetic person who just needs to suck it up. Everyone suffers, Buttercup.

Just… fuuuck. I could have used a break for a few years form bad things.

 

Continuing on a theme

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When I say I worry about too frequent contact there are a couple of folks I am thinking about.

There’s this really nice lady in my life. She used to be my next door neighbor. She’s going through a traumatic divorce (her ex is a real shit weasel) and she’s now dealing with his bullshit from India. So when we talk we spend a lot of time with her asking me questions about the legal system. In the past I have had to explain a lot of stuff about the DMV. She’s not super big on answering her own questions with internet searches because she doesn’t even know where to begin. (Frankly, now that I am searching from outside the US I see how much harder it is from a distance. My ignorance is vast.)

It’s not that I get nothing from the friendship. I get a lot. I like her quite a bit and she teaches me about things and I really like being a helper.

But she keeps asking if we can talk every day because she could really use the support. I… call every three months. That’s what I can handle. I feel like a shit weasel because she needs more support and she wants to get it from me but… I would flip out if I tried to talk to her for over an hour every day. I just can’t. It’s a lot of thinking and work on my end to solve her problems for her and she only occasionally does anything to follow the advice she spends a lot of time asking me for. That’s hard. It drains me. I feel exhausted by the end and then I am a less good mother. That’s not fair to my kids every day.

Another friend is an oldie-but-goodie. He was my boss from 16-19 and we’ve stayed in touch over the years. He’s often told me that I’m one of the few people on the planet who is allowed to tell him what he should do because I’m the only one who a)knows him well enough and b)gives good enough advice. He is currently living with his folks because he is retired and his parents require hospice care. He doesn’t know how much longer this will go on because their bodies are failing fast.

He’s super depressed. He’s isolated. He has had a whole career focused on culture and the arts and he is absolutely despondent to be back in this one horse small Texas town. There’s barely a movie theater and absolutely no real theatre. There isn’t a good bookstore or library and frankly he doesn’t have the money to buy stuff online. He’s not doing well. I talk to him every couple of weeks for a few minutes at a time. If he wanted longer chats… I couldn’t do it so often. He wants to talk for half an hour or less, but he needs contact. He needs to feel like he was not forgotten. He needs to process how hard and sad and traumatizing the work he is doing is for him and there is no such thing as a support group or available therapists where he is.

I love these people. My old boss with great intensity–he was an important mentor to me at a crucial time in my life. He taught me everything I know about carpentry, electrical work, rigging, and painting. I love this man. I don’t mind offering him support.

But I only have so much to give.

As a dear man has said to me, I’m more of a foul weather friend. It is hard for me to be present for the best times of peoples lives. I am someone that people depend on when everything is going wrong. That’s not all bad, but it is hard. It means I feel less like setting boundaries is a good thing because my friends are hurting. I know I can help alleviate pain.

Because of posts I make on public forum I have a whole bunch of folks who are sending me private messages essentially asking for therapy.

This is complicated! I’m good at it. I do help people feel better. I tend to have a few month cycles where a given person messages almost every day then they move through their crisis and I don’t hear from them much anymore.

I often feel like these dynamics are my fault. I feel like I create a crisis if none exists. I feel like people not wanting to share good times with me is my fault. When Sarah wanted me to be there for her good time (at my expense so she could focus on other people) I kind of made that not go well. I didn’t want to just help her have a good time while I saw her for a few minutes a day. Not given how hard it was for me.

I will put that much effort into helping people through trauma without expecting anything back but I can’t put that much effort into helping someone else have a good time without me. I just fucking can’t.

I feel… broken. I feel selfish. I feel cruel and mean. I don’t know if I actually am or not. I don’t expect people going through trauma to focus on me. I deeply resent when someone wants me to be furniture in the room while they have a good time without me.

I don’t know how to perceive this in myself beyond my default that I am wrong and of course these people I love are better/more right than me.

My old boss could go six months at a time without talking to me when his life was going well. I was never invited to the parties or events. I could have invited myself to some of them… if I found out about them in advance, which was rare.

I don’t know if I have the right to feel used.

I don’t know what to do about always putting myself in these kinds of positions. I am trying to have more boundaries around it all.

Why do people only want to talk to me when their lives are going to shit?

I suspect it is because I emote for people. I also expect people to be working on shit all the time. Most people, when things are going well, don’t want to change at all. They want to hold their breath and stand very still and hope things continue. I can’t do that. To me change is as inevitable as breathing and if you try to crystalize in the “good part” of your life you will cause yourself great pain in the future when you need to know things you don’t already know. You have to keep changing and growing or learning or you are going to create a problem at some point coming up.

What don’t you already know? Hurry up and learn it. Or you will experience pain because of that lack.

My kids and I have been watching documentaries all during their school break. We have a lot to talk about. Netflix has some great ones out at this point! We don’t watch casual, fun things. We try to learn more about what we need to do in the future. How are humans creating problems and what do we need to do about them? What can we do about them?

Don’t stand in one place assuming everything is fine or the ship will sink while you are on the dance floor.

Incidentally my kids want break to be over so bad. They want to go back to school. Ha. They want kiiiiiiiiiiiids.

People don’t often reach out to me to say “Things are going great for me! I’m happy!” I feel like this is because I am such an asshole and I might rain on their parade. I am quite an Eeyore. I feel like this is appropriate. And it makes me feel rather sad about myself. I don’t know exactly what I need to change in myself to be someone that people want to talk to about good things too.

Ugh. I’m up early catching up on the only vlog I follow. I’m making tea to go with it. Time to stop typing.

PS- after watching the vlog for a while I have to smack myself in the forehead. Yes. Sometimes people do put a bunch of effort into sitting around and telling me about the good in their lives.

It’s complicated.

Creating space and shifting norms

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I know I am not alone in struggling to give myself credit for progress. I spent 7 hours making furniture yesterday and on one hand that’s a lot and my hands hurt and on the other hand… that’s a reasonable work day and then I stopped. I really struggle with giving myself credit for taking breaks and resting. But that’s important and I need to do it.

I am trying to figure out what I want from the vast network of people I love. Many of them love me back… but some of them don’t and I have carried a relationship with them to my detriment. I’m deleting chat programs from my phone because once I go to a top-up sim card I don’t want to be using data when I am out and about to chit chat. I want my phone as a utilitarian device, partially because it does a fuck ton of damage to my thumbs. Typing on a real keyboard is just different and better for me even though it isn’t perfect.

But I’m leaving Marco Polo because I can use it in the house on wifi. It’s a fabulous little app where you make videos back and forth at different times so you can have a conversation even though it isn’t real time. It’s great. I have a couple of friends who use it and I’m excited to keep talking to them this way. Very low stress. No coordination of calendars!

I continue to struggle with appropriate enthusiasm for setting my boundaries. There are things I need and things I need to stop doing and I tend to… either not set the boundary or set it overly forcefully in a way that creates problems. I still struggle with this happy medium. It is not wrong or bad for me to have different needs and preferences than my friends… but I feel like it is and then I get harsh. I am frequently harsh with other people when I am upset with myself for setting a boundary. Which is shitty and terrible and totally unfair.

I am absolutely a shitty friend if someone wants to stay in a situation that hurts them and complain about it and never change anything. For the same reason I am brutally harsh with myself for not making progress fast enough, if someone else wants to slowly shift things over years or decades… I am not the best support for that.

“If you can’t look back on yourself 18 months ago and say ‘Wow I really sucked’ you aren’t trying hard enough.”

I am now living in a place where the scale of progress is totally different and I don’t know how I will adapt. Part of it has to be focusing inwards because I can only really change myself. But how do I balance creating relationships with people here?

I had shows on in the background yesterday while I was working (bless you, Noah for getting internet turned on so I can have Netflix back) and I keep hearing the line “I like my own company” go through my head a lot.

I like myself. I like spending time with me. I like how I choose to spend my time. I like what I do and create and think and feel when I don’t have to censor myself for anyone else. The past 25+ years of my life I have tried as hard as I could to avoid me and to always be looking for more contact, more people, more of other people’s interests.

Why?

I don’t want to get out of the house every day. I don’t want to talk to friends every day. Even if I do talk to people every day I kind of need it to be a rotating cast of people so I don’t eat myself alive with anxiety trying to conform to my broken mental picture of what a given person wants from me.

I think I do want to get out of the house every day but I want to go as far as a walk and not really talk to anyone. I am absolutely elated that one mile up my road is the start of a gorgeous trail through the woods. I can walk for hours and only pass an occasional person and we just smile and nod at each other. I want that.

I have hurt a lot of people forcing frequent contact because I felt like I “should” even though neither of us truly enjoyed it. When am I going to learn? When am I going to stop insisting on constantly seeing/talking to people even though it creates friction?

I don’t know. I’m getting better about it?

Noah is being super proactive this year and he asked me how I want to handle Christmas cards. It’s going to be complicated with international stuff. I think… our list is going to shrink a lot. If someone has not bothered to reach out to me to initiate contact or conversation in some way in two years… they are falling off the list. That seems fair and reasonable. Someone being willing to grudgingly talk to me when I initiate contact isn’t the same thing. Our Christmas card list is huge and I have put a ton of time, labor, and even money into the project. I think I am done.

If our whole relationship is me reaching out to you then I am going to drop the rope.

And for some strange reason thinking that makes me miss Jill so much. She’s been dead for years. But that woman and I alternated who contacted the other every six months for so long. We both valued the relationship. Letting go of people hurts.

I keep having fantasies about saying goodbye to my family before I cut off my California number. I won’t. You don’t say goodbye to cut off people. It’s cruel.

Today I will do my PT exercises (that don’t require the TRX…. which is on the dang boat) before I start working. I could use the time spent on my body.

EC is reading To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and she keeps interrupting her reading to yell at the book and I love it so much. I like that we spend a lot of time at home doing this kind of thing.

And I have a bunch more I want to write but the day is starting and I’m off like a shot.

Priorities and exhaustion

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Yesterday I asked the kids to do the vast majority of the cleaning up in the house. After every meal you wash the dishes and clear the counters and get stuff ready so that making the next meal is easy. That leaves me room to use my spoons for other things.

So we went on an epic hike. It was really glorious. By the time we got home we had done about six miles, but a ton of it was on hills and I wore Youngest Child for probably 3+ of those miles. Then I got home and made everyone dinner and did a full kitchen tidy. Then food got delivered and I put it all away. Today I feel wasted. My back hurts so much. I can’t find the ibuprofen. Whine. I guess I’m not going on the bike ride the kids asked for today.

I am sitting at the table bleary and weary and just about numb.

Last night I had a chat with a bunch of teachers about schools and affluence and mental health. I love it when I get to stumble upon such conversations. Most folks are teaching/used to teach in the US but there were folks from other places too. The general consensus was children who are pushed to put 100% of their focus on school and grades and Being The Best at academics often turn out to be pretty unhappy and miserable and mostly not great at functioning at life. It was interesting listening to other peoples stories. My point of view was mostly affirmed and shared even from people with wildly different backgrounds.

The folks in the conversation who have witnessed affluence and poverty up close (professionally and/or personally) all have our kids do a lot of non-school work. Chores/volunteering/getting to know people outside your bubble of school are all massively important. Encourage your kids to try to do stuff and then fail and then talk about what they could do differently and then don’t fix it for them.

Eldest Child’s room was neat. Then she babysat and brought the baby in there. Now it looks like a bomb went off again. Ok.

My kids have said a couple of times over the past few days that they can appreciate how much effort I put into helping them have a nice house to live in now in a way they couldn’t in the past. The combination of a bigger space, plus the constant awful tidying of borrowed apartments, plus them going to school and not doing the chores during the week because they are exhausted, plus being on holiday this week and doing a lot of extra stuff just because they can…

Perspective is awesome.

Now I sit around backing up all my schtuff onto a local massive hard drive because that way I can stop paying for iCloud. I want to stop paying for as much as humanly possible over the next two months.

I’m feeling like a super nerd as I search how to get shit out of DRM locked files. I paid for it! I want to store it where you can’t steal it back! Clearly these companies disagree…

Downloading everything from the cloud so I can upload it to the new hard drive is going to take a lot of time and hand spoons. *sigh*

Fuck cheap shitty doors.

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I tried putting a latch lock on my bedroom door. Like, a super sturdy metal contraption that should have been utterly beyond the strength of a toddler.

(I’m feeling super cranky about having to sit in my room to guard all of my possessions full time because I have a toddler.)

Guess what happened when I leaned on the door to test the strength of the lock? All the fucking screws ripped out of the cheap, flimsy ass door.

I am in a really bad mood now.

Christmas, mom, and grief

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We have been talking about whether or not we want to keep celebrating Christmas or whether we want to switch to celebrating Winter Solstice more. The kids and Noah are more pagan than I am. I stopped feeling… safe/comfortable/drawn to paganism in the same way when I was kicked out of the family property when I was 16 for doing rituals. That damaged me in a core way.

I don’t really feel like I want to be part of the Christian aspects of Christmas and it’s uhhh pretty hard to ignore. But it’s interesting how deeply ingrained a lot of it is for me culturally. I will miss holiday songs. I’ll miss the movies. I will miss some of the aspects of decorating.

I really don’t know what we will do. I have far fewer aspects of Christianity in my Christmas at this point anyway because that boyfriend I had from 18-23 told me so often that anyone who believed in G-d was braindead that I got rid of most any overtly religious symbols. That’s a lot of why my house had Christmas By Disney. That was what he wasn’t mean to me about.

But as I think about ditching a lot of the Christmas traditions I realize how much of it is about ties to my mother. So many of our traditions from what we eat to the kinds and types of presents to specifically what movies we watch… I got them from my mother. I keep feeling waves of grief.

I keep feeling like right before I take out my US sim card I want to send a goodbye to everyone in my Do Not Answer call list. But I won’t. You don’t text people who are dead to you.

But it hurts. I miss my family. I miss the things about them that feel like “normal” and “comfortable” that other people just don’t feel like. I know how much abuse is wrapped up in that normal though and I can never expose my kids to it. So I won’t contact anyone. I’ll just keep crying. 35 years and counting of crying for that woman.

Youngest Child is doing really well with sleeping in a separate toddler bed at the foot of my bed. When she goes to sleep she murmurs “Mamamamamamama” and wants me to keep a hand on her face until she is asleep. (She alternates this with Daddy and he has to be touching her too. That is the most heart warming part.) Her wanting me like that connects in this primal way to how much I want my mother.

Every so often it will come up in conversation with the big kids just how much they were wanted and longed for and they are appreciated and liked now that they are here. It’s amazing watching them straighten their spines and they puff out their chests and their faces just… glow. They feel such an assurance about their right to exist. That’s what I wanted to stand near. That’s why I have parented how I have.

I feel bad when I can see a shadow cross their face and they reach out a hand and say, “Mom I am sorry you weren’t wanted so much.”

I wish that wasn’t part of it.

A kid in one of their classes (who is often a behavior problem) announced loudly during class “My mom says I was a failed abortion.” My kid came home that day really sad. “I understand why he acts out now. That’s something that hurts a kid so much. I still won’t let him hit me, but I will try to be more patient with him when he’s just being annoying.”

I am always impressed by how compassionate my children are. They are, of course, feral, self absorbed narcissists as well (which is appropriate and necessary developmentally!) but they notice other people and they care. They are capable of great consideration and understanding. They are sensitive to how other people feel. I have always found it interesting that when most people say someone is sensitive they mean that the person is highly controlling about what people do to them. I think sensitivity is more about the ability to notice things about other people. My children pay attention to what other people feel and they care.

I admire them so very much.

I also admire that they have great tact around this subject. They talk to me about what they see in other people, but they are already pretty wise about not just announcing what they see. It’s really cool.

I want to be like them. I will keep growing in that direction.

Aw shuck: two things learned

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First: I need to stop using the AmEx entirely. They have enormous foreign transaction fees. Second: Mint is not supported for UK usage in pounds. Ok.

Have to adapt. I can do that.

I hear good things about YNAB. And they are supposedly UK available. I’ll look into that. One more thing to do.

Oh hey. I started this more than 14 hours ago and never hit post. I don’t think I will be writing anymore. Toodles.

The feedback is rolling in

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One of the benefits of homeschooling ending is that my children are starting to gain some perspective. My kids are starting to feel like they can evaluate the process and they are telling me how they feel about it in retrospect. I’m sure at some point they will start listing complaints (human nature) but so far they are glowingly positive.

“Mom, I really underestimated how good of a teacher you are.” “I thought you were being mean and picking on me and now that I have a different teacher I see that you were actually sooooo patient.” “I used to think I was just average but you told me I was really good at (subject) and now I see that you were right.” “Mom, you wouldn’t believe how little these kids know about nutrition. They don’t eat vegetables. They think fruit is disgusting. They don’t even know what a carbohydrate is. When the teacher says that you need a little bit of sugar in your diet they assume she means a candy bar. They won’t consider fruit. I really wonder about the state of their bowels.”

I told them to keep their mouths shut about their shock when they know something that other people don’t know. Folks are taught things in different orders and with different intensities all over the place and if you act like there is something wrong with someone for not knowing something that you know then they will be assholes when you run into something you don’t know that is easy for them. Both of them said a variation on (separately because we tend to have these conversations one on one instead of in a group): “Oh I’m being careful with my facial expressions and I’m trying to not say a word about them not understanding this. But mom. NO VEGETABLES?!?!” “A kid was telling me to throw my veggie sticks in the garbage and I said that would be pretty silly because my body needs the fiber. THE KID ASKED ME WHAT FIBER IS, MOM. I COULD NOT BELIEVE IT.”

And we are having great conversations at home about chores, earning money, debt, and interest payments. We are learning about why it is smart to save up for things you want in advance instead of owing money because then you end up having to pay so much more. They feel the pain because I have been letting them feel the pain for a little while. EC said that as much as this process isn’t a load of laughs she is glad she is learning this now instead of when it could impact her ability to pay for electricity or buy food or pay rent. I told her that’s why we are hammering this so hard now. In Scotland you are allowed (not encouraged) to move out at 16. That’s 4.5 years away. That’s not really a lot of time and any day now she is going to decide I am stupid and I don’t know anything so I have to hurry up and get these lessons in before puberty kicks into high gear.

She says she really doubt she will ever think I am stupid. I said, “You used to doubt you would want friends more than you want to spend every minute of your day with me and here we are.” She said, “Hm. That is true. You do have a habit of predicting my behavior really well. Maybe I will start thinking you are stupid after all.” Then she stuck her tongue out at me. Then I talked about why it is developmentally necessary and she gave me her “Hunh I hadn’t thought about it like that” face. I love that face.

MC is feeling super smug because she was gifted with a bed and that made her “setting up her room” budget go much farther so she’s feeling like a whiz at money. I’m trying to caution her against hubris and instead put extra money in savings so that you don’t blow it on candy and toys. In the long run you won’t be happier about those purchases and right now you literally can’t see your floor because of the huge pile of mess. If you add a bunch of new toys you are going to wreck them right quick from stepping on them and then you will be annoyed about your wasted money. She’s considering my point but she sure isn’t picking up the floor and putting anything in her drawers.

She’s going to ride that gravy train of I-am-not-allowed-to-tell-them-to-tidy-their-rooms-for-a-year until it breaks down.

The constant travel meant we had to maintain a level of tidiness that was extreme even for me. When you go through an airport if your bag is a giant mess, you drop things and lose things. If you try to pull a toy out to play with it on the plane and 19 little things fall out, you won’t find them all to put them away. Everything had to be sorted into their proper smaller containment devices so you can keep your things. The kids really chafed at the extra work. They asked if they could have a year of grace to celebrate having their own space. I said fine. Their birthday present for me next year is cleaning their rooms. They said that sounds fair. Ha.

Which makes it funny that Hurricane EC has a room that is tidier than any space she has ever been in for her entire life. She picked out a whole bunch of organizing furniture from the charity shop and her stuff is tidied to within an inch of its life. She says she prefers it this way. I had to stop myself from putting a hand on her forehead and asking if she feels ok. She says that she finally agrees that I am right and it is much easier to find her things this way.

I keep my laughter for behind closed doors.

MCs hand writing has come along super nicely in the past two weeks of actual school. Apparently the teacher erases what she writes and won’t let her turn in stuff that isn’t legible. I said “I HAVE BEEN SAYING THAT FOR SOME TIME.” She says, “Yeah… it’s a lot more embarrassing to have to rewrite stuff in front of my classmates and my teacher tells me that I will miss break to recopy if I don’t hurry up. That’s a lot more motivation than just sitting at our kitchen table all day.”

MC is also receiving a lot of the same lectures on attitude and behavior at school that she has received at home and she is having an interesting time adjusting to that. She keeps feeling like the teacher dislikes her. I ask her if she thinks I dislike her. She says “Oh no, you are my biggest fan.” I tell her to replay in her brain how many times I have given the same damn lecture. Then she says, “Do you think it is possible that the teacher gets upset with me because she wants me to be my best self?” Yeah kiddo, I do.

Every time a teacher says anything rebuking to either child in the smallest way they are convinced the teacher is going to call me so they can get in trouble at home too. I keep telling them that the teacher is very unlikely to do so unless an issue escalates to the point of causing harm to someone and that’s really not what is happening here. The teacher is trying to guide you towards appropriate behavior and that’s not about dislike.

They are learning and that’s good. They are learning that I am not the only one who will judge them and give them feedback. Holy cheese toast they need that lesson.

I feel like overall I got what I wanted from homeschooling. There were times when it was incredibly stressful. There were times when it was overwhelmingly hard. But I wanted my kids to know a certain set of things. I wanted to know that if they didn’t know these things it was my fault. I didn’t want to blame a school for not teaching them things about their bodies and brains and how to function. I wanted to have the time and space to teach them the things I think a person should know.

By and large we have a family culture that has inculcated them in the knowledge I feel is most important.

I don’t think I can or should homeschool my third child to provide the same education. I am going to have to fit my lessons in around the school schedule which will be in many ways much harder. But I am toasty fried and I want my child to make friends and fit into the social order here.

I do not miss the homeschooling community in California. I am happy to be out of it. There is so much dysfunction, so much neglect masquerading as “educational freedom”, so much petty infighting over social rank.

I think there will be bullshit here and I just don’t smell it yet. People are people.

But there is a special flavor of hypocrisy in mostly upper class Californians. I can’t be part of it any more. And that’s ok. I don’t have to be.

I swear I am trying.

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But sleep deprivation is a bitch to catch up on. I went back through my activity tracker (I know it is not perfectly accurate for stuff like sleep) but between travel and anxiety and overworking I am down about 8 full nights of sleep over the past month. This is why I am currently struggling with paranoia, negative thoughts about myself, irritability, and frustration. I also hurt really badly.

But I am trying to reverse the flow. The past three nights I’ve gotten nine hours of sleep. Yesterday while walking home from the community center I just about fell down from exhaustion and dizziness. Trying to catch up is showing me just how deep the reservoir of sleep deprivation goes. I need to try to spend all of this school holiday sleeping as much as I possibly can; my health requires it.

A full night of sleep for me is ~7.5 hours. I’m down over 64 hours of sleep over the past month. That’s a lot.

This move is the hardest of my life and I have moved waaaaaay more than average. Folks in the military are usually dumbfounded by how much I have moved because they feel a lack of stability in their lives and I’ve moved many multiples of times more than them. Not so much recently, but over the long run. This is my first international move and I can’t understand people who do this repeatedly. This is so hard.

We moved into a house that was more than twice the size of our old house with no furniture coming with us. We have had to acquire everything from scratch and mostly build it because we can’t really afford to buy nice stuff, we are buying flat pack. Which means I have spent multiple full days just on building furniture. Noah has helped with this way more than he usually does with building furniture and for this I am deeply grateful. Noah has spent at least six, maybe up to eight solid days building furniture if you add up all the hours. I’ve done at least as much maybe more. It’s all getting fuzzy.

We finally have consistent, good wifi thanks to Noah’s continual efforts at handling the bureaucratic mess. It is still a mess with regards to electricity. All of the advice “Just do A, B, C” has failed entirely. I think Noah is handling the stress of people lying and being deceitful far better than I could. (The main electricity company keeps saying they have done what they need to do for us to move on with the process. When the other company we want to work with checks… nope hasn’t happened. It takes eight weeks before we are allowed to complain. We seriously suspect the first company is going to drag their feet for seven weeks and five days.)  Noah has been on the phone and filling out paperwork just about daily trying to handle the electricity/internet/bank/credit card situation. Now that we have internet and we found out we literally can’t get a credit card until we’ve been here six months and we have a (JOINT) checking account and three savings accounts (grown ups + kids who are redepositing their stuff from the states) we can chill on figuring out financial stuff for a few months.

Oh, also we had an appointment with a couple of truly lovely accountants and that’s going to be a whole messy process that will take many hours of labor over many weeks. The UK tax year doesn’t run their cycle from January-December, they run April-March so we will be trying to sort out tax stuff for like six months straight. Hopefully after the first year it will get a little more clear? At least our California accountant used to work at the IRS handling international taxes?

Trying to acquire stuff for the house has been endless frustration. Between not having a car, not having reliable internet, and our US credit cards getting constantly denied for fraud… everything is taking two, three, four, five times as long to get done and the hand strain is absolutely unbelievable.

And I keep hearing my fucking mother’s voice in my head saying that you don’t go out and socialize until your house is company ready. Thus long working days and not sleeping.

Last night I made a list on the whiteboard of the chores the kids hadn’t gotten to this week. I told them they need to finish by bed time. They got it done. I supervised and didn’t help. I’m trying to reduce my arm strain.

They did a great job and they are currently playing with Her Sweetness so Noah and I can each have some quiet down time in our separate rooms.

We have a house phone number and an actual physical phone will be delivered in a few days. I have a sim card in the house for a UK phone number for my mobile and I will be setting it up once I can put the UK house phone number down on forms. I will be going through and replacing my US phone number on all of my accounts. I will be shutting down my US phone number in December after 19 years of service.

I am having so many feelings about that.

The plan with the accountants is to start moving our money out of the US. I don’t feel super ethical investing in a country that moved its slavery from the cotton fields to the prison industrial complex and is currently running concentration camps. Where freedom means the freedom to get shot at school. Where freedom means that thousands of people can be homeless so the uberwealthy can hoard a little more. Where freedom means ruining your entire future if you get sick. Where freedom means eternal debt if you want an education.

I know getting out isn’t an option for everyone. I know it is cowardly to run instead of fighting to change the system. I know.

My children are already walking to school and home from school alone sometimes. It’s so safe here. I spoke to a mom who is terrified of her kids being alone and that’s why she pays for them to have cell phones from really young so they have to text her all the time to prove where they are and she tracks them on her phone.

We will have a house phone. I’m giving up full service internet on my phone and downgrading to a pay as you go plan that I don’t want to use much. I will be deleting most apps so I’m not tempted to be idle on my phone out in the world.

My kids will be fine here. I am not worried about their safety. We have an agreement: you ask before you take off and you are given a time to be home. You have a watch (without the ability to receive phone calls on) and if you are late, for every minute you are late you owe me a push up.

That’s as much enforcement as I want. That’s as much control as I want. They are big kids. They are responsible. I trust them. The neighbors aren’t going to call the police if they are out walking to the park. I have anxiety about stuff. I am overly controlling in some ways, but I’m trying hard to back off. They will be ok. And frankly the push ups won’t hurt them.

EC forgot her school computer at home one day this week. Noah asked if we should bring it to her at school. Nope. She can accept the consequences for her behavior like a big girl.

It will be good for her.

I went to a couple of activities with Her Sweetness this week aimed at her peer group; these are the kids she will know in school. These are the kids in our neighborhood. It’s good to start getting to know them. She will make friends over time and I will get to know the mothers.

This move is the hardest of my life. Let me write down just how painful this is so that hopefully I remember and never want to do this again. Some day as an empty nester I might want to move to the downstairs apartment with Noah and rent out the big house, but that’s different.

Solstice is going to be interesting. EC has a bunch of needs still. MC has a bunch of wants. YC (I should shift to this at some point soon here because goodness Youngest Child is more fair than just always referring to her as the sweet one–not to mention that she is sassier by the day) has few needs and can’t speak any wants. I am going to start wrapping presents soon just because we don’t have many good stash spots in the house where unwrapped presents won’t be seen.

Oh, and to put the cherry on top of the moving process, we are all learning how to ride bikes as our mode of transportation. This has resulted in at least one, often three or more major crashes per person. We are all sore and wincing and moving slowly. My knee still hasn’t healed from my crash and every time I get up or down to help YC with something I hiss because it forking hurts.

At least MCs lip has healed and they no longer look like an abused child.

It’s a process…

Hardest fucking move of my life. But the house is basically company ready. I want another couch for the down stairs apartment before guests come. I want a real kitchen table for the main dining room with actual chairs we don’t fall off of on a regular basis. EC still needs a bed frame. Then we are done acquiring stuff.

Mostly because I found a tutorial on Pinterest for making bookshelves out of uniform moving boxes and that’s what I’m doing with the books that arrive. I’m not buying bookshelves any time soon. I want artistic fancy-pants book shelves and I don’t want to pay for them now. So I won’t really get all of the boxes out of the house by the end of November, but the stuff in boxes will be out and in use and the boxes will be semi-permanent (until they give out) furniture.

I am struggling with the fact that I need to give myself approval for how hard this move has been because I won’t get it from anyone else. No one but Noah can see what I’m doing and I’m an asshole about not accepting his approval as much as I should. He will give me approval whether it takes me a month or five years. He isn’t judging me based on what I care about. His priorities are different. (He wishes I would slow the fuck down and rest more.)

I have a ridiculous drive to get this done. This is important to me. I need to see this progress so I can sit in the mostly finished house and dream about the art I want to add. I can’t start painting until after my next birthday, but I can make sketches. I can figure out what kind of mosaic backsplash I’d like to make for the kitchen wall where we keep splattering the shit out of it with food. (Did the previous owners cook?! How in the fuck did they keep the wall so white?!) What would I like to do in the upstairs bathtub bathroom?

Art will come, but not until all of the other pieces are in place and I can dream around them.

We still have a few entirely empty cupboards in the laundry room and main kitchen and the downstairs kitchen is basically empty. But we have the stuff we need finally. Those bits will fill in over time as we figure out what other things we want or need.

Realistically it is going to take me many years to finish this house. But I feel moved in now. The art will come. The guest kitchen will come. It’s ok that it isn’t all instant.

I needed to feel settled. Those bits are extra. And I have my name on a bank account so that I can build my own credit. That’s a big deal. Being dependent is hard enough without also being vulnerable.

And proper locks are on the way for every door in the house.

Like Ursula I am wasting away

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I have lost a solid 10 lbs since I left California. I am eating cake when I want it, candy bars, daily massive quantities of tea with 3 teaspoons of sugar in every cup. I am not on a diet. But even with days that I barely move from exhaustion I am up to averaging 4.5 miles/day. As my tolerance builds that average will go up and I will have fewer collapsed from exhaustion days. I am working on meeting the neighbors. I have now met a few houses down the road (no one up the hill yet) and I have chatted with several of the folks who walk past our house for exercise or to commute.

I got to the school super early yesterday and talked to several parents/grandparents. “Hi I’m Krissy and I’m new here.” It’s like old times. Only now I follow up with, “What should a new person know about this community?” I am getting some fascinating answers I won’t write down because if people find my blog and see themselves quoted it could go sideways. But the answers are great.

The general consensus is that yes I should get a dog if I want to do a lot of exercise on my own because no it would not go well if I defended myself like I would in California. But a dog is allowed to attack someone on my behalf. Social mores, yo. I am happy that I was reading that right. I am a bit freaked out that it is true. I will be getting a dog. But first: cats. I want the dog to come into a house with cats so that the dog adjusts to this being the norm. Which means we should get cats soon. Our house is going to be pretty insane for a while as all of the humans and felines and canines adjust to one another. I am going to need to spend a fair bit of time at home helping everyone learn appropriate behavior. Everyone involved will need to understand that I am the alpha. Mama sure wears the pants in this family. I wear them under my skirts.  (Noah gets to wear pants too. Trousers as well!)

Noah is working on meeting people for his purposes as well. He is less focused on neighbors and more focused on computer nerds far flung around the country. The kids are having a great time meeting kids at school. One of ECs new buddies suggested that if we (ECs parents) are willing to pay for the airline tickets that EC could go to Spain with them for school holidays. I declined that gracious offer. But I think the kids are sliding into place at school just fine. My kids are really unhappy that there will be two weeks off of school after this Friday. They want to be in school. It’s hilarious and wonderful.

I am diligently working on getting the recycling out of the house now that I know where I can walk it to. I would like the back log of recycling to dwindle before the boat stuff arrives because then I am going to be swimming in a sea of cardboard. I will be advertising that lot on freecycle because they are all lovely standard sizes and super sturdy.

I think we will use the school holidays to start seeing about getting cats. And to practice bike riding. And to rest and read books. Excellent. For once I am not sad at all about the Christmas creep. Given that we want to go slowly with our budget we bought four pieces of garland and two strings of lights yesterday. We have a huge house and no decorations. It will be fun to have stuff trickle in. Time to eat.

K had a point

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There was a lot to dislike about my former therapist. I could criticize things she said and did for hours. But even a broken clock is right twice a day. Once I said something to her about how much little self esteem I had. She laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed. She told me that I have some of the highest self esteem of anyone she has ever met. Maybe she is right.

I like me. I like that I continue learning things and growing. I don’t change exactly, but I do adapt and take on new characteristics and personality traits and language that will better suit my needs and desires. I am an intensely hard worker–to the point that it becomes somewhat problematic and one of the big things I need to focus on over the next decade is actually taking rest breaks. I feel intense pride in the things I am capable of doing.

I think one of the reasons that I don’t want someone else to clean my house is that when you pay someone to do something for you… you have to accept how they do it. I had a conversation with a buddy years ago, her child was being potty trained in preschool. She didn’t like how it was being done but she told me, “I have to accept that when you are paying someone to do something you have to let them do it how they see fit.” In a nutshell that is why I am so intensely happy about how I have parented my children.

My children are adaptable, plucky, emotionally aware, capable of managing their own feelings in a variety of healthy ways, physically fit, and very self confident about their ability to get shit done.

A buddy asked me if I am going. to continue to supplement with curriculum since Scottish schools are not that academically intense. I just about laughed my ass off. Fuck no. But I am going to continue to parent and my way of parenting is incredibly hands on and intense. This morning after breakfast I had my kids get notebooks and pencils. I told them to write down everything they would like to buy between now and January. Guesstimate how much these things are going to cost you. Put them in a priority list. Then go count how much money you have left from setting up your rooms and getting settled for school. So. Do you feel confident you will be able to do everything you want to do? How much money are you going to put into long term savings? What sorts of things do you want to be able to do when you turn 18? How many of those things do you incorrectly assume I will just fund for you?

The kids grimaced a bit. One child is much further towards these goals than the other. But that kid didn’t have to buy their own bed which has put a serious dent in the other child’s budgeting.

I asked the kids if they have been making forward progress towards these goals lately. The kids just about exploded with frustration. NO I HAVEN’T MADE PROGRESS BECAUSE EVEN THOUGH I HAVE BEEN DOING THE FRIGGIN WORK I HAVEN’T BEEN TRACKING IT SO I HAVEN’T BEEN GETTING PAID. 

Life lesson, kid. You are now in school. If you do 100% of your homework but you don’t turn it in… you get a 0 on the assignment. If you do all of your work for your job but you don’t give it to your boss… you get 0 money. You may not be doing everything my lazy heart secretly wishes you were doing around the house, but you have been working. You have both been getting a lot done.

How much money have you made?

Yeah. Not much. Doesn’t that suck?

Ok. The last two methods of tracking chores we have been trying have failed. Let’s try a new way. I broke down every single chore that can be done into tiny little pieces and I wrote every piece on a popsicle stick. On the back of the stick I wrote how much you get paid for doing it. The kids rescued buckets out of the recycling and wrote their names on them. The to-be-done chores are in the yellow plastic tub. Once you do something, drop it in your cup. That is easier than having to remember to track things in your day planner. Maybe you need more scaffolding at this stage and that’s reasonable. But you have to move your sticks. I won’t do it. I’m thrilled when you want to do a bunch of work for me and I don’t even have to pay you for it. Makes my life more simple. But you have things you want.

Let’s talk about the flow of our day. School really is going to change how you use your energy. How will you learn to get little bits of chores done in the middle of your time? We wake up super early because if we don’t have some awake time before breakfast we don’t eat enough and then our energy depletes partway through the day. So the kids wake up at 6am even though we don’t eat that early. Do you really need to spend all of the time when your parents are making breakfast sitting on a chair watching us? A lot of the chores are little and can be done in five or ten minutes. Could you do one or two before breakfast? If we finish breakfast with over an hour left before we have to start walking could you do another small chore then? When you get home from school, could you set an alarm FOR YOURSELF I AM NOT DOING IT so you read and relax for 30-60 minutes and then you get up and do a few chores before dinner?

Your life is never going to stop being work.  (Because we unfortunately live in a civilized society--a more civilized [in the best of ways] one than we left by a large margin.) It’s going to increase pretty much until you are old and then you will still have work, but it might be less as your body degrades and you have less functionality so managing your time and energy will be even more important.

Life is hard. Life is work. I am not covering for you. I am not going to allow you to think that you sitting around all the time while a more-poor-than-you person comes and cleans your house is a fair trade.

I mean, I am not opposed to people making money by cleaning houses. I have done it.

But my children are not going to expect it. Fuck. No.

They don’t need to. They are highly competent little people. They are skilled at a wide range of types of labor. Do they drive me nuts sometimes? Of course. They are human beings. Do I worry and have a lot of anxiety about how they are going to turn out? Of course. I was diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder long before I had children. If anything I am more serene about this process than anyone could have expected.

It truly helps that my children knock my socks off on a regular basis. Am I hard on them? Yeah. Am I demanding? Yeah. Would they be this awesome if I were less of a hard ass? I don’t know. I know that my children are some of the only people on this planet I genuinely try to emulate. They have internalized the lessons I try to teach. I fake it while they are the things I want to be. Are they perfect? Fuck no. That’s part of what makes the so amazing. They fuck up and get up and try again. They learn from their mistakes. They can narrate, “I tried x and it went really poorly. I think that next time I will try y because that way I am correcting for x mistake but I think it still may not work and I will have to try z.”

I periodically make sure people who have lots of training and experience evaluate my children. The results are always glowing. I am not the only one impressed by my children. Are they perfect? Fuck no. I probably couldn’t bear to live with them if they were. They are perfectly imperfect. They are sassy and tenacious and opinionated. I am here for it.

I love that my children have internalized that our house is supposed to be a theatre backdrop. They have a mother who took set design classes and it shows. I love that the way they look at the world is formed around how to  improve and refine the things that are already there. They want to change things and inspire themselves and others to not stay the same.

I like my children so very much I feel I could burst. Someday they will go out into the world and I can’t wait to see what they do with their lives. This is why I must work on resting more, so I can be around to see it.

I like me. I want to see what I do over the next few decades. I like Noah. I want to see what he is going to do.

I like that when I feel put down my response is to start listing off in my head all of the ways and reasons I like myself. It doesn’t matter if anyone else likes or approves of me. It doesn’t matter if someone else tells me I am broken.

I am broken open with all the kinetic energy of a newly born store. I can work with that.

New normal: long walks in the rain

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The kids wanted to get school sweatshirts (EC is entitled to wear a hoodie which is a big deal here) so we walked over to the uniform store. We (Noah and I) wanted to get some good boots for walking in the rain so after the uniform store we headed into the downtown area. We also checked out a couple of other stores and had dinner at the Jamaican restaurant. It was fascinating that the guy running the restaurant was very friendly with everyone who sounded like a tourist… except for us. He barely spoke to us. I didn’t get the drink I ordered. I don’t think he likes folks from the US.

All this after a plumber came and fixed the broken sink faucet in the kitchen and the broken toilet in the downstairs bathroom. Oh, and we did a fairly major house clean because the kids did basically zero chores all week.

All told we walked a hair shy of 9.5 miles. The walk home was in the dark and it was raining quite a bit. Except for the fact that Noah is getting sick it was fun. I have a growing appreciation for wool.

Today Noah is napping after making a lovely breakfast and the big kids have Her Sweetness outside for some play time. My “rest” has involved making a new email address so I can make a new Apple ID and I ordered a Sim card for the mobile phone provider I want to use. My phone costs are going to go from around $100/month to £10/every other month or so. Sweet.

I logged into my bank account for the first time. The system here is quite different and a serious pain in the ass. I have 3 or 4 pin numbers for various services and none of them can be the same. I also need to have special words that go with my pins. So that’s not going to be confusing in the slightest. I also opened a savings account and transferred the money into the kids’ savings accounts. Plugging right along.

My bed is breaking, which sucks a lot. I need to get some braces for the bottom support legs.  I also need to order a toilet seat and a handle for the upstairs bathroom. So much stuff is breaking. (Added two hours later: these pieces are now ordered.)

Grocery order made. I am doing so much thinking about my feelings about hiring help. I will hire a plumber. I’m having my groceries delivered. Why am I getting all butt hurt about hiring help cleaning? Because there is something in that experience that just… I can’t. I can’t. I don’t know what the fuck it is. Noah sure would like me to. I can’t.

I’m a hypocrite; I know.

I am super close to being done with Christmas. I am giving fewer presents this year than usual. I am not dealing with shipping or online orders for most people. I am just so tired and moving was so expensive.

I am getting genuinely close to the point where we don’t need or want anything else. That’s nice. Well, after Christmas we won’t want anything for a while. A bunch of want stuff is sitting in Noah’s closet. I should go ahead and wrap things soon so the kids don’t “accidentally” find things.

I figured out that there is a recycling point right next to the primary school. I will be pushing a load over there every day when I drop the kids off for a while. The boat stuff is due to be delivered within the next 24 days. I will cross my fingers that it doesn’t take that long, but with all the storms in the Atlantic… we’ll see. I’d rather the boat went super far out of its way to be safe than take a more direct path and lose everything (mostly I care about the lives of the sailors. My stuff is just stuff. The people matter).

I have barely moved today. Only 1200 steps. I took over 20,000 yesterday. Surely it evens out…

Grace and grabbing

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Yesterday I was chatting with the head teacher for a moment as I picked up the kids. She is in the process of packing up because she is leaving the school after next week. She has had a 35 mile commute for years and it is wearing her down. I was generally encouraging in that way that I am, “Go for it! You have a life to lead. Don’t wait for the things you want.” She said, “I want to be like you. I want to grab life with both hands.”

It’s kind of amazing that people perceive me that way after one week of acquaintance. Yes. I do.

People keep asking us if we are settled yet. My response is, “Our stuff hasn’t even arrived from the boat yet.” Their eyes go wide in shock. We don’t have electricity figured out yet (here in the UK they don’t shut off your electricity between registrations they just charge you triple, which is fun) and our internet is a travel unit that’s horribly expensive and doesn’t work very well and causes a great deal of frustration. The real internet company keeps “losing” our requests to get service. I just got a bank card yesterday. Everything about applying for credit cards is a nightmare (there is no transference of credit history between countries… it’s like we have no credit history at all) and the US cards are being awful. Yes I have travel notices with them. Doesn’t help.

But last night Her Sweetness slept in a toddler bed and the big kids slept in their own rooms. Can I really complain?

We all make mistakes. We all say things wrong. We all trip and knock into someone. We are all stunted trees leaning towards the light. If we don’t give each other grace and patience on that journey we will not be able to have love. I am going to make a lot of errors as I integrate into this culture. Despite the fact that people look like people I would see in the US they don’t act the same. Their expectations of me are quite different. I am going to fuck up. I need forgiveness. I will need forgiveness from myself and from other people. That means I must forgive people who mess up towards me.

When my kids fuck up and feel really bad sometimes I tell them that I forgave them on the day they were born for every mistake they will ever make. I will be cranky sometimes because fixing mistakes is hard, but forgiveness is not in question. You are forgiven.

It’s harder and more complicated with adults. For one thing, you aren’t my crotch dropping and they get a level of grace no one else will ever get from me. Sorrynotsorry.

And I have to be honest with myself that Sarah burned me hard. The frequency with which she used accusations of having a personality disorder if I behaved in a way that made her feel bad about herself (you know… noticing that she made promises she wouldn’t keep…) means that a lot of the grace I want and need to give to other friends is… not there at the moment. It will grow back, but it’s going to take time. Healing from burns takes time. As I’m working on healing it is not ok to hurt other people.

When I’m having big feelings it is ok to say that I’m having feelings. It is not ok to name call or retaliate or be nasty.

It does not make me bad if I am upset or sad or angry.

My feelings do not mean that I am bad.

Angrily packing does not make me bad.

Kicking the cabinet door off the wall… that was bad. Calling someone names is bad. Breaking something that belongs to someone else is bad.

Having the feeling does not mean I have a personality disorder. And someday I will get to the point of not hating myself for having feelings when a friend does something that hurts me.

We all fuck up sometimes. We say things poorly. We are vague in a way that causes pain. We choose words that may have an impact we don’t intend. This is where grace comes in. If you are going to grab life with both hands and chase your dreams sometimes you will grab too hard and leave a bruise. Sometimes your hands will slip (fucking greasy lotion) and you will drop something important. Sometimes you will be trying to grab with both hands and the damn lid of the tea pot will break on the counter.

Shit happens.

That is where grace comes in. Love. Forgiveness. Try to sleep it off then get up and try again. Life is an adventure. Sometimes adventures make you cry.

+/- part the 9,345

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– I am still neurotic and insecure

+ My bed was delivered a day early; COSLEEPING ENDS TONIGHT

– My arms hurt like fire, and my hips hurt, and really just about every other part of me

+ The britches I could not close around my belly the day I arrived are just a bit snug (this is good because I need the flannel lined jeans a lot right now)

+ First voluntary pee on the potty

+ I am being kind to myself about my big feelings and I didn’t take them out on anyone in my family

+ I am inviting my Discord buddies to come visit me because I have a lot of frequent flier miles that will expire in less than 12 months and I am super sad I didn’t see them over the summer

+ I am hitting at least 6 miles a day and often more than that. This is good for my health

– I am not stretching or doing the PT exercises I should be doing

+ I am hammered as shit from a truly excellent whisky; I didn’t mean to consume that much? I added a little bit to my tea? But I am feeling waaaaay less pain

+ My neuroticism can be overcome with sincere apologies and the desire to really figure out how to love each other; someone did not accuse me of having a personality disorder because I was upset

– Why in the fuck is my keyboard adding extra periods in the middle of all of my sentences!?

+ I love my house and the people in it

– One more damn piece of furniture to assemble

– Our recent attempt at chore distribution failed. We will have to try again. Going to school changes everything

+ My husband is super cute

+ I love my grey hair

+ I am doing great at skin care

An absolutely glorious meeting

4 Replies

I met with both teachers, the classroom support worker, and the deputy head teacher (basically the vice principal). Everyone was upbeat, positive, and complimentary. The general verdict is that my children have incredible social skills–they are settling in shockingly well. They have seamlessly joined the pack of kids playing games and the teachers expected more culture shock. They are extremely appropriate in class and have not been asked to settle down once. All of the things that could use some extra help are things that are basic differences between the US and Scottish school systems so nobody is batting an eye.

As I have long told EC, she is far above grade level. Her math skills exceed the school’s ability to test and the teacher was quite surprised by just how fluently she is able to explain everything she knows. Her reading comprehension is untestable by their standards. She could probably move into secondary school level one and be at grade level or above. (That wasn’t explicitly stated, just repeated mentions of “We can’t even test her level.”) I want her to have a year of primary school. Her handwriting isn’t perfect but it is average. She is enjoying the fact that she is already the first one done with math assignments and she is turning around to explain things to other kids. The teacher says it is clear her reading comprehension is much higher than she chooses to express in writing at this time. I said wait until she has a computer in front of her; she types like the wind. (She will be assigned a Chromebook tomorrow.)

MC is already sharing at school that they doubt their abilities because they are not at ECs level. I said, “Yup that is a constant struggle and it has been lifelong.” For math they are a couple of months behind where the dead average is, but given that we abandoned math entirely six months ago… that’s dandy fine and no one in the room doubted that they will catch up super fast. For reading comprehension there is a drastic difference between what they can express verbally and what they can write. So for homework they are going to focus on writing and skip most of the otherwise assigned stuff like spelling. The teacher knows that for reading ability and general comprehension MC is very much at the top level but thinks it is wise to put kiddo in the middle group for now so that kiddo can finish the reading lightning fast and spend the extra time working on writing.

I did bring up some of the gender stuff. I said that MC is very gender fluid and that’s an adventure we are fully on board for. The whole staff said that sounds great and they will support that in every way possible.

The staff expressed that my tour of duty of educating the children is over. (Not their language at all. I am paraphrasing because it is going to take a long time before I can mimic Scottish cadence.) They expressed that the best thing I can do is listen to how their day is and encourage them to keep trying their best at school. The staff will handle all of the support they need and they want the kids to just relax and play outside of school. I’m pretty sure my relief was palpable. Homework will be very minimal compared to US standards and it really is up to the kids to do.

I am absolutely in love with this school. The staff is kind, supportive, and enthusiastic. I feel like it will be easy for us to be successful here. I think my kids are going to do well. They already have a few kids in class they think they would like to develop friendships with.

Awesome.