I feel like I am trapped in a Meatloaf song. I want to do things to be pleasing. I want to show my love. But I don’t want to do that. What is that? I don’t know. What do I want? I don’t know. I want to not feel how I feel right now.

I keep thinking I didn’t have kids because I wanted a convenient life. If I insist on my kids staying in school it means I am ok with their classmates hitting them, spitting on them, elbowing them, telling them that they are fucking morons–shits–stupid–pathetic. It means I am ok with little girls telling my little girls that when they gain weight in preparation for puberty they should really go on a diet. It means I am ok with the authorities having a bigger problem with my children standing up to bullies than with the bullying behavior. It means I believe that my children should have to put up with low level harassment a lot of the time because it doesn’t rise to the level that a teacher considers worth paying attention to so stop complaining.

“It is preparation for the real world.” Bitch, if someone did that to me in the real motherfucking world I would either punch them or press charges. I wouldn’t shut up, put my head down, and take it.

You aren’t preparing them for a healthy adult life. You are preparing them to be victims and you feel quite sanctimonious about how it needs to happen.

I’m not yanking them out immediately. I am going to start emailing the fucking head every day with a report of what bullshit happens. Then when I deregister the kids I will have a paper trail of allllllllll the shit the school doesn’t think is important enough to deal with.

If I had a full time job and I had to work I would tell my kids to start punching people. But I don’t and I don’t and I don’t really want my children to have to toughen up in that manner. I have not put this much time and effort into helping them verbalize problems instead of hitting to give it up now. Sure, they are annoying to authority figures in a school who don’t want to hear it. But fuck the fucking school authorities. Their priorities are shit.

And really, there are a lot of things I miss. I miss not wasting so many hours on “Get up. Do your chores. Eat faster. Get ready to go. Pack your bag. Go. Hurry up and unpack. Do your chores. Eat faster. Go to bed because we have to wake up early and do this all again.”

We can get a lot done home schooling. But we do it at odd hours and when we feel like it. Is it a lot of stress? Absofuckinglutely. I feel less like I need to ride the kids super hard though. They are doing more than fine compared to their peers (Except for hand writing and fuck hand writing. Ok, we will work on it…. but seriously. Fuck hand writing.) and that was what kept me up at night worrying. Yeah, I hate having to push them through work.

But I love having hours a day to read together. I love having time to sit around and draw together. I love watching the neat projects they build with all of the time they have. I love knowing that they get to play with dolls and be imaginative when kids their age in school have already given it up because they are trying so hard to be “big”.

I am making contact with the home education community. I’m finding kids their age who are into Minecraft and Scratch and art and reading. Do you know what they aren’t finding at school? Kids who play Minecraft or who use Scratch or kids who are as obsessed with art and reading as they are. At school kids call them names because they don’t play Fortnight. At school kids mock them for not having an expensive brand new phone. At school the kids make fun of them for not being on social media.

Fuck school.

A mother told me the other day that she is getting her 7 year old an iPhone 6 for Christmas because the kid is getting mocked at school for not having one. What the absolute fuck? She said that she doesn’t want to waste money on toys because her daughter is only interested in perfecting her selfies anyway. Uhhh my 9 year old is getting a doll house and the thing will be played with constantly.

Yeah. Different strokes.

We are working on some fairly big changes in our marriage. It’s complicated. I don’t want to bitch about it here. I just want to write down for myself that this is when the contract ended.

I don’t know how to properly advocate for myself without throwing tantrums. I don’t know how to feel like I am being treated how I want to be treated. I don’t fucking know how I want to be treated.

I keep thinking about that doctor who told me that I just need to focus on keeping the bus on the road. (It’s a long metaphor.) He said Noah knew what he was getting into with marrying me because I was honest about my trauma history so he doesn’t get to bitch about it being hard. I don’t agree. I think Noah gets to bitch.

But sometimes keeping the bus on the road is hard even when I don’t have a good reason to point at. Sometimes just being me is hard. I feel like a whiner. I feel annoying and high maintenance and a whole lot of other rude descriptors. I definitely definitely definitely don’t think I am worth the effort.

But I throw tantrums if the effort isn’t put in because I am a fucking bitch. Apparently I have an incredibly high sense of what I deserve.

I think I am depressed. Noah thinks he is depressed. We aren’t the sorts of depressives who stop working. We put our heads down and plough on feeling little to no joy in anything. I don’t think it is SAD. I think we have been working so hard for so long without resting that our bodies are collapsing. Our spirits are collapsing.

Both of us feel like the other isn’t doing very much for us even as we can rattle off the ridiculously long chore list that we know our partner is doing… it just… feels inadequate. We are productive, just not content or happy or satisfied. We keep waiting for a long enough break to breathe.

I now have definite confirmation that our stuff is in the UK. It’s going to sit in a warehouse till December 30th when a company will go pick it up and a few days after that they will call me to arrange delivery. Our stuff will be in transit for 19 or so weeks. The estimate was 4-12 weeks. I feel glad that I can stop worrying that our stuff is lost. That’s been really bothering me.

I want my socks. And my long johns. And my books. And and and and and. I WANT THE GOD DAMN BIKE TRAILER.

This is my third night in a row of not really sleeping until absurdly late. It’s almost 1. This isn’t helping my mental health. Tomorrow I need to take a sleeping pill.

Fork.