Monthly Archives: March 2020

I should probably take a break.

I have moved my center of social media activity to different places and I think it is stupid. I’m getting really frustrated with a few people and situations. That means I should stop going there because I want to go off on people.

I am in a very mixed place with people at the moment in general. I’m talking to a few neighbors through texts or emails and long distance folks are emailing. I’m trying to be chipper and upbeat. In my head I am failing. I am cranky and irritable and frustrated and I want to scream.

I was pretty sick last week so we were in isolation before the lock down. Everything is on hold indefinitely. I feel like I need to hurry but I’m not sure towards what.

Over 17,000 dead. Almost 400,000 confirmed cases. Some folks are focusing on the country by country numbers. I can’t. This is global. It’s in 192 countries. The death rate is 4.39%. It’s slowly climbing. If we are very lucky we will see a turn in the tide in a month or so, but who knows.

Who knows. I should stop talking to people so much. I’m feeling so much frustration with people.

Lots of people walking past my house. That’s bothering me. I know people are allowed to go exercise but it’s… it feels weird.

This is going to be a very rough spring.

Bubbling with excitement

I get to start training tomorrow. I have a plan in place through October of 2021. That comforts me in ways I can’t properly express. I know how I will get stronger. I have done more in the past. I trust me so much to do this again (barring future massive injury…) and that’s a glorious feeling.

Today we started a bunch of seeds. They are in the boiler room because that is always the warmest room in the house and the seeds need heat to germinate.

I figured out where to get top soil for the most reasonable price. This is good. I think I can have some in a bit over a week which is wildly convenient.

The bookshelf is coming along! The guys are coming back on Monday and they will be here all next week. I will see visible progress by the end of the week. They will sand the rough wood flat part just enough to keep us from getting splinters and possibly add lacquer.

Sleep. Morning comes early and I get to run.

You can only have so many priorities.

I promised Noah I wouldn’t plant in the ground nor buy paint for a year. I have six months to go.

So I’m going to start running again. The doctors here are giving me the side eye about how much weight has creeped on, and frankly given that we don’t have a car… the better of shape I am in the better. I do want to wear my clothes but I’m going to eat any/everything I want to eat in this process so who knows what will happen. I have my schedule on my calendar. It is nice knowing that I have done this before and even with the surgery in December I am starting from a much better place than last time. Maybe I will complete the next marathon in less than 6 hours? A girl can hope. And train. That would be 45 minutes faster than last time. That’s a big fucking jump. At least the air quality will be better…

I have been looking for a dog. The only thing I’ve seen that could be a possibility so far is buying a puppy and that seems like it is supporting puppy mills so I haven’t. Hrm.

It’s not digging in the ground if I go get bags of dirt and dump them in cardboard boxes. It’s cheating and I can live with that. I have seeds. Today I am going to get a bunch of them started. We are almost done shaving down the tree cuttings so we can use them as garden supports and fencing guides. Woo.

We are acclimated to the weather enough that 6C means we don’t wear coats for a lot of outdoor activity. That’s different. Our yard is somewhat sheltered from the wind so if we are doing active gardening work a light sweater is plenty.

The kids and I are practicing going up big hills/small mountains on our bikes. It’s improving.

I’m doing a lot more baking. That is going well.

Ack, food is here

I can only keep so many streaks going at once.

  • Running practice
  • Step count
  • Floors climbed
  • Duolingo practice
  • Making my bed
  • Washing my face and putting on lotion
  • Reading with the kids before bed
  • Having conversations with friends
  • Blogging in a steady way
  • Being “inspirational” about getting everyone in the house to be consistent with chores
  • Cooking
  • Sleep hygiene
  • Cleaning my bathroom
  • Reading new-to-me books
  • Days without time wasting internet
  • Gardening
  • Making art
  • Morning snuggle with the kids
  • Brushing the cats’ fur
  • Drinking All The Water
  • Stretching
  • Updating my financial tracker
  • Avoiding excess sugar
  • Baking (a bunch of this is bread lately…)
  • Being consistent about witchy stuff

I’m tired just looking at that. No, a bullet journal is not the solution. Apparently I don’t like OmniFocus very much. I’m out of focus.

I have approximately five minutes…

Then I need to go take the bread out of the oven and start soup for supper.

I’m thinking really a lot about how I want to structure my goals over the next few years. Because I won’t talk about this in front of my kids, here I will admit: I want to lose weight. I will not, however, go on a diet. I don’t want to lose weight because I think I look better I want to lose weight because I can’t wear my best clothes and that is pissing me off. I don’t want to spend the money on larger replacements. To that end I want to set the goal: run another marathon when I turn 40. That gives me 18 months of training time. I need to do this independent of the kids running with me. If I do it based on everyone feeling healthy enough I won’t do it.

Fuck diets. Yay running. I think running around this town will be a proper treat. I should figure out a realistic schedule for that, but I don’t have time this entry.

I want to paint the interior of the house starting in September. I have six months to plan. I think the interior paint job is going to take over a year. Each room will take a minimum of a month. That’s pretty fucking daunting, yo. I need to start sketching on that.

I have a perty new polytunnel. I want to grow tomatoes even if I’m not supposed to plant in the ground. Home grown tomatoes taste so much better it isn’t funny. Also I am allowed to work on hard scaping….

Shit. I had less time than I thought. Toodles.

PS: I can’t wait to turn 40.

The thing about sand castles… you can’t live in them.

This is the chapter I couldn’t write in November for Part 2 for the kids.

Occasionally people will ask me why I am so focused on friendships. Why do I pursue them with such vigor and to the point of my detriment. Because I am both trying to replace and replicate family relationships. Because without my friendships, for many years, I felt like I had nothing. As much as my romantic partnerships have tried to form “family” feelings with me… I’ve always been deeply aware that they could end at any time. I am tremendously aware that I am lacking in many ways and even with Noah I am always kind of holding my breath waiting for someone to leave me. But my friendships lasted through so many romantic relationships. They had more staying power. What was the price?

I spent many years talking about the tripod of women who supported me and made me feel like I could keep going through anything. In order to do that I had to be in an awful lot of denial. I had to do a lot of pretending problems weren’t happening.

All of those relationships are in a state of collapse. It is hard for me to wrestle with how much of it is “my fault”, how much of it was ever in my control, and how much it was inevitable if I ever developed a higher level of self love.

Sarah I’ve been writing about for quite some time. Sarah used the shit out of me and made big promises and didn’t live up to them. When I got angry she would tell me that I have a personality disorder. She had almost ten years of using me to partially fund her vacations. She literally took money from me (intended as food money for the household) and used it to go visit her sister. She said she would be there to do the hard work of raising children. She lied up one side and down the other. Instead she took from me until she wrung me dry and then I was the problem because why did I have these outrageous expectations of her–it wasn’t her job to support me. No. It wasn’t your job. But you told me you would do it because I did so much to support you.

Pam has always been in my life in flighty hit-or-miss ways. I spent over a decade dropping anything I was doing (at work, at school, with friends, with people I was dating…) when she wanted attention because “she only had a few minutes to spare in between her exciting life.” I always felt honored she wanted to know me. I was the only person in her life who was supportive of some aspects of her behavior and she wanted access to that support 100% on her own timeline. The couple of years when she consistently came over to our house in Fremont? That happened because she was otherwise an around the clock care giver for her elderly grandmother and she wanted a break and no one else had that kind of time available to spend with her. I loved seeing her! Don’t get me wrong! I appreciated all of the time she chose to share with me. But I can no longer pretend it was ever about my needs–I was there for her when she wanted me to be. We were supposed to go see her in December. We didn’t go because the flights were going to be over $5,000 and right now I just don’t have that going spare. After the fact she said, “It was a good thing you didn’t come to Taiwan because it turns out I wouldn’t have been able to spend any time with you.” I feel utterly gutted. I am glad she sees that she wouldn’t have spent time with me, at least she is that self aware. I am glad that I now know that I will never ever prioritize going to see her like that because if I try to ask for time on my own schedule I can go fuck myself.

And I have not been writing about Jenny. That’s been very much on purpose. If I look back in time… I have chased Jenny from the beginning. When we met I basically begged her to be my friend. I always called her. I asked to come over. I offered her a chance to go swimming in my pool. (It wasn’t my pool, but I lived in a house that had a pool and she was a competitive swimmer.) She thought I was super rude because I thought she was judgmental but she described me as being a stupid slut and she thought that was totally ok. Through high school I chased her. Through college I chased her. After college I chased her into hobbies and blogging and social groups.

I have been chasing Jenny and begging her to be my friend for most of my life. She was the person I went to when my dad and my brother both killed themselves. I thought that meant she was there for me. I never wanted to look at what that meant I had to put up with.

I wrote about her when I first arrived here in Scotland. I said she was a ride or die friend who was doing so much for me. All of the stuff she so thoughtfully provided to ease our transition? Was stuff she didn’t want anymore but she didn’t want to deal with doing the work to donate it without owning a car. Most of it was broken or has broken since. She was here when one of the glasses finished shattering. She said, “It’s ok I won’t be mad at you.”

She said that my children are retarded. She said that anyone who is home schooled is going to end up retarded–she doesn’t mean that in “the mean way” she means it in “the medical way”. So she constantly tells me that I have to make my kids go to school so that I can stop fucking them up.

She has almost zero Scottish friends. Her friends here are all American Ex-pats but she constantly tells me all of the things I am doing wrong and why I have to change in order to assimilate. SHE HASN’T ASSIMILATED. But she is right and I am wrong and I need to stop being like me. You know how chatty and sociable and outgoing I am? That’s wrong and I need to stop it. Whatever I am doing that gets people to open up to me is wrong and I need to stop it.

I don’t think Jenny actually likes me very much. Hanging out with her makes me feel terrible about myself. I leave visits with her and feel like I want to cry and cut myself. I am just so fucking wrong. Nothing about me is ok or admirable.

Oh, but can I make a cake for her daughter’s birthday? Thanks.

Pam has literally talked to me a couple of times since I got here. I still send her emails. Why do I chase these fucking women? Pam only wants to talk to me if by chance I happen to stumble upon a topic that is part of her hobbies.

In general my anxiety and depression have been better since I got here. I only see Jenny about once a month and I think that is going to end. I called child protective services on her. That’s a story. She came over for a visit and she was telling me about how her seven year old was having a tantrum (it sounded like an anxiety attack) and she didn’t want to deal with it so she spanked the kid. That’s literally illegal in this country.

I was talking to a buddy about this (I do have some people I am still talking to a fair bit–I really like the Marco Polo app) and she told me that she thinks it is really weird the way white people are so anti-spanking. She’s from China and in her experience parents are considered abusive if they don’t spank their kids. You are neglecting your responsibility to shape their character. I told her that in my opinion there is a difference in result for kids who are spanked in a society where freaking everyone gets spanked and it is the norm and a place where spanking is not acceptable and you now have to hide your parent’s secret. I think that the secrecy and the shame of “I am so bad that my parents are forced to break the law to deal with me” is as big or a bigger problem than the spanking. The fact that Jenny doubled down and defended it because “There was nothing else she could do to stop the behavior and it had to stop right now” when the behavior wasn’t hurting anyone else it was just annoying and inconvenient really put up a whole passel of red flags. So now her kid’s doctor and school and everyone is on notice that the family isn’t coping.

I think I may have just burned that bridge to the ground and I don’t feel bad. I didn’t make the call because I wanted to nuke the relationship. But I was not going to live in Jenny’s fantasy world where she is “always right” and she can do whatever she wants to her kids because they belong to her. Fuck that. The kid has rights. It’s not ok to spank a child just because you don’t like them having a tantrum. Gain some new god damn skills.

Ok, full disclosure time: I spanked Middle Child once. She spent months beating on Eldest Child to the point where EC was bleeding. We tried a lot of things. She was in therapy. We tried a variety of interventions. We did a whole bunch of fucking things. I talked to her therapist about it. I finally told MC “If you do this again, I am going to have to spank you because apparently nothing else I do is going to convince you that being hit sucks. You don’t get to beat on your sister every time you have a bad mood.” She beat on EC again. We separated. We all went to different spaces to calm down so that nothing was done in the heat of the moment or as a rage reaction. When I was fully calm I went back in and asked her what happened and why. I asked if she understood what was going to happen now. Over her clothes with my bare hand I swatted her.

She has since said that it didn’t hurt physically almost at all but she felt emotionally devastated. She continues to fight with her sister verbally and in normal snotty kid ways like throwing things, but she hasn’t made her sister bleed again. I’m glad. I don’t ever want to do that again.

You can’t beat your sibling until they bleed forever without consequences. If I allow that I am neglecting my other child and I can’t do that.

Is that different than spanking a kid because you don’t like their temper tantrum and buying their cooperation didn’t work this time? I don’t know. I don’t sleep easy at night knowing I did this. I don’t feel good about myself. I sure as shit am not going to stand up and say that I did the right thing. I know that we worked on it for months. I don’t really feel like I have moral superiority. I did it in a place where it was a legal parenting practice for me to do. Does that make it more ok?

I don’t know.

But the only things Jenny has tried are offering toys, candy, and money as bribes and when that doesn’t work she said “Ok fine then I have to hit you”. She won’t set boundaries because that’s “too mean and she is supposed to be their safe place where anything is ok.”

My kids have thrown a lot of tantrums. I have never decided in the moment to hit them to make it stop. I don’t know that it is morally superior, but I have a fuck ton of tools in my tool belt for handling misbehavior without having to hit a kid. I ran out of tools when it came to making other people bleed on a regular basis. That was my failure. Has every parenting tool I have ever tried been good? Oh hell no.

When my kids tell me that a thing we are trying makes them feel bad we don’t do it again. I apologize for failing. I don’t act like it is their fault for failing to comply in a way that is easy for me. I am failing to figure out how to meet your need in whatever manner it is coming up right now. I am sorry that I fail so much. It isn’t your fault. Sometimes my best is genuinely not good enough.

That is the part that never feels reciprocated in my friendships. Not Sarah, not Jenny, not Pam can admit that sometimes the best they can put into the relationship is not good enough and they are failing and doing wrong. I am the problem if I am not willing to describe whatever they offer as the best.

That’s the part that is toxic as fuck. They are right and I am wrong. I know that I am fucked up and I often create that dynamic in my head without help but a number of people have heard me describe these relationships over many decades and in general that is feedback that other people give me. “Why are you always wrong and that person is always right? I don’t think that is true.”

Sarah would absolutely act that way. Jenny literally has it as part of her internet presence that she is “always right” and she moves through the world that way. Pam would never ever admit out loud that she uses me.

I’m the one with the fucked up expectations. It’s totally reasonable to expect your friends to just be happy funding your lifestyle or to have to drop whatever they are doing if you want attention or to accept being told how stupid and damaging to my children I am.

I am the one who isn’t ok. Duh.

I circle back and back and back to these women.

I think it is time to let the waves knock these sand castles down.

In vapid news (and less vapid news)

My neighbor is making their set up fancier and nicer so they are off loading some of their mediocre gardening stuff. This means I just inherited a pretty dang decent giant poly tunnel. This is wonderful for me. Free is the best price. Now I can grow tomatoes. I bet if I got some bags of compost and put seeds in them it wouldn’t really count as planting things…

Also: I got to take a bath for the first time since surgery. That was December, y’all.

We have found some folks we are hanging out with about once a week. I always worry that we are overwhelming them but they keep coming back… There’s another (pagan) family we see about once a month. We have Ostara plans together and I’m looking forward to that. The average outside temperature at that point is 9C. (That’s 48F for the rest of you.) It won’t resemble the Easter parties we used to host basically at all. At least we have a giant house now? A bigger house and fewer friends. It’s kind of ironic.

I am at the heaviest (non-pregnant) weight I have seen since I was 21. I am having a lot of mixed feelings about that. I am looking forward to less ice on the road. I am looking forward to being 100% healed so I can start full on doing chores again. I really want to wear that skirt again this spring. I think I’m a solid 40-50 lbs away from being able to do so. Fuck. I’m sure as shit not going on a diet. (I’m literally eating a candy bar right now.) I want to get back to exercising. I want to get to the point where I can do a half or full marathon again. I want exercise to feel easy again. I’m not there yet. Fuck healing. Fuck getting old.

I have been spending a lot of time lately thinking about why I like to pick relationships with people who put me down. Why am I so completely drawn to people who only want me as a convenience. Why do I pick people who want me as long as I serve them? Why do I love people who speak so negatively about me? If my child had a friend who talked to them that way I would say “That person doesn’t actually love you.” But I have built a lot of my self-esteem around being “loved” by people who put me down or who say fairly terrible things to me. That’s utterly consistent.

It’s pretty clear to me that I don’t hate myself like I used to. That’s progress. I am no longer interested in putting myself in situations where I feel bad at the end of them. That’s good.

Time to go for a walk in the sunshine.