Monthly Archives: May 2020

Not other people’s fault

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I don’t blame people in the bay for how stressful the bay was for me, not really. It’s complicated. Nobody owed me support. Not even people who promised support. It’s more that I was not able to calm down and feel ok and I wanted others to make me feel better. I know that was broken of me.

I wanted to be loved enough by others that I didn’t have to love myself; it’s so clear when I look at years of journal entries quickly. I bounced around from person to person. I don’t know that I helped anyone from the goodness of my heart. I wanted to create a sense of obligation in people. I know it was wrong but I never managed to stop.

I have a buddy in the bay. She is currently on the same merry go round I was on. She does things for people and she can’t understand why they don’t volunteer to help her too. She is feeling bitter, rejected, and sad. She wants to look for new people to try again with but she has similar problems year after year.

It’s easier to see the pattern in the rear view mirror or when someone else is doing it.

I have spent seven months traveling. The people I expected to be able to ask for help from mostly didn’t work out but I was massively surprised by who showed up.

I thought Dad and the old babysitter would do a lot; I expected it. They didn’t. To be fair, Dad wanted to but his boundaries changed and I didn’t feel I could accept and be the kind of mother I want to be. That’s not his fault. I didn’t spend 10 years with fanatical boundaries around my drug usage and sex life just so I could let someone I met in a sex club do whatever he wants in front of my kids because “it isn’t illegal.” I don’t bring my kids around people who drink heavily even though it’s legal. I don’t take my kids to houses where people smoke cigarettes inside even though it’s legal. I don’t take my kids around people who are casual with guns even though it’s legal.

It’s not about laws. It’s about what do I want to teach them in life. What do I want to model.

I model trying really hard to improve diet, exercise, and reading books. Not because I am perfect but because I am trying to stay as healthy as possible so I can be there for them.

I use medications in as small and as controlled of a way as I can. I talk about how if you use drugs casually or frequently you develop tolerance and it won’t work when you need it. Drugs are not for fun, drugs are to help when your body can’t cope; whether it’s pain (mental or physical), diarrhea, or sinus problems. You take the minimum. I talk about how it is better to look for other ways of coping before turning to drugs.

Eliminating driving reduces my pain enough that I can cope ok without pot. So I should do that. Exercise reduces pain so I should do that. Eating less sugar reduces inflammation and so forth and so on.

But what about when I must drive? What about when exercise is hard because I don’t have time, space or support? What about when I feel eaten alive by anxiety because there is so much I can’t control?

Well, I make shittier choices. I have eaten waaaaaaaaay too many donuts recently. I literally hurt myself because I needed “this feels good” feelings and I didn’t know how else to get them.

I didn’t use tons of pot in front of my kids to cope. I used some when I was in the states but not much for my body. I used the minimum and when I wanted more compulsively I ate donuts instead. Was it really better? I don’t know.

There is a lot I don’t know. But the day we got the visas I told the kids we had to cut back on bad coping methods. And we did and things are getting better and healthier again.

This is tied to how I looked to friendships. I use my friends like drugs to make me feel better.

Patterns

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Today I am waking up to think about when my sister came over to my house for Thanksgiving after I got married. I provided all of the food. It was the fourth or so holiday I had provided for my entire extended family by the time I was 25. She was going on 40 and had never provided a holiday meal for anyone.

She sat at my table eating the food I provided and loudly and obnoxiously told me about how when our aunt dies she is going to have to be the matriarch because no one in the family other than her is competent.

The staggering contempt in her words, the lack of awareness of our relative levels of competence to provide support (I paid for her children to go to college because she could not).  She asked me to buy her a house so that she could allow me to rent a room from her.

Somehow I invite this kind of behavior and I don’t understand what I do that causes people to feel that showing contempt for me is acceptable.

I’m thinking really hard about this pattern today.

There are your plans, and then there is what happens

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I am so very deep in my feels lately. Gosh this virus stuff is going to be a wild ride. This is going to be one of the defining events for this century.

I mean, then there are personal issues and topics and frankly… after almost 20 years of spilling my guts on the internet I feel like I have finally been burned enough that I want some distance. Is this growing up?

We are cancelling all of our out of the house plans and not making new ones. I’m not sure how often we will want to have people over. The joiner will come back in two weeks because the light in my bathroom died and he needs to sand the edges of the bookshelves so we don’t cut ourselves as we load them with books.

Hiding

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I keep wondering if I want to start over with a blog that is entirely anonymous so I don’t worry so much about hurting people. I wonder how much that is about wanting to feel erased. I wonder how much that is about feeling like it is better for me to run from people as hard and as fast and as far as I can.

I censor so many things. I try to be honest. But I’m afraid of the response or the result or the punishment that might result.

Kind of like writing about the Bonus Family. I have danced around so much of that. I dance around things with so many people. I can’t come out right and say why I ended things permanently with my submissive. I kind of wish it had been out of respect for Noah but instead it was because of the resemblance to an issue from my path and I can’t talk about what because other people’s privacy matters too.

I both do and don’t want to make friends here. I want a writing outlet where I don’t feel like I need to be careful about other people’s feelings. Things have been leaking out too much with this nice young lady I’ve been talking to in town. I’m volunteering things about my feelings when I shouldn’t because I talk to her without my kids around and I get so little of that time so I blurt. I don’t get a lot of time to process with Noah. I don’t have a therapist. I feel like writing down my feelings means I’m a selfish, hurtful, nasty asshole who doesn’t deserve to have anyone love me.

I feel like I should be support and kind and gentle with people. I should not share my anger and frustration and my difficulties.

And for the love of cheese I don’t feel I should ever write about a negative situation with my children where anyone who knows them can read about it ever again. I feel sick to my stomach knowing that people judge them based on the teensy tiny snippets I write about. My children are so much more than what I express in writing. They are glorious creatures. Are they also assholes? Well.. they breathe so that’s kind of a given. You are an asshole. I am an asshole. We are all assholes sometimes.

Anyone who tells you different is selling something.

I don’t write about all the things I like because it feels like bragging and trying to show off why my lifestyle choices are better when… it’s not about me. My children aren’t who they are because of any one thing. It’s not because of me. It’s not because of home schooling. It’s not because of travel. It’s not because of reading. It’s not because of video games. It’s not because of food. It’s not because of…..

They are complex creatures who are on a road to discovering themselves. It is 100% mandatory that the process involves times when we have conflict or strife or me not liking something they need to try.

If I write about any of those specifics people will judge them.

They don’t deserve that. It’s funny how I feel like I need to shield them from the consequence of being related to me over almost anything else. No, you can’t meet my family–they are wretched. No, you don’t need to be brough around the large group events my friends go to–I can’t make it safe enough for you. No, I don’t want you to grow up in the place that shaped me.

Be different than me.

Hell, I was in public school all my life, y’all. It’s not like home schooling is trying to make them just like me.

I’m looking forward to time with Middle Child more one on one without Eldest Child around. I think that will be good for both of us. The speed and pace of education will both slow down and speed up.

I feel like everything about me is bad and judged. That’s part of why I lash out. I know I am judged. Fuck you troll site. Fuck you stupid lady in Missouri who I will never write to again.

Why do I care?

If I write for me, for Noah, and so my kids can see it someday if they are interested but sweet cheese they don’t have to…

Why do I care about anyone else? Because I do. Because I defined myself by your opinions for so long and that is a poisoned pill. I want to be pleasing. But I also have no interest in changing anything about what I’m doing to be pleasing. So that’s kind of a non-starter.

But the bookshelves are starting to fill up now that some of the oil is dry enough.

Half the bathrooms in the house are barely usable.

It fucking snowed in the last few days so I’m super glad I haven’t put out my starts yet. I’ve been procrastinating. Turns out it was wise!

I’m hitting 5 miles. I’m not sleeping enough. I feel inadequate and inefficient and like I “should” find a way to feel connected and loved without talking to anyone because I fuck up words so badly.

I am afraid of making friends. I am afraid of keeping friends. I am afraid of not having friends.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

People are so hard.

Of course I need another hand intensive hobby

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I have a few dresses that are a bit too long for me. I want to solve this through two different methods. One: I need to hem them a bit. But I also want to have a petticoat to wear underneath them so that I can use skirt hikes to get them up a bit more. Why? Because I grew up thinking Renaissance Faires were the height of fashion.

And I live in fucking Scotland and it’s pretty cold year round so having layers of clothing just seems smart to me. How will I manage this with a bike? I’ll figure that out later. Shush.

But I am at a point where I don’t really want to buy anything.

My kids asked me to get crafting supplies so I have needles, thread, ribbon, and curtain rings. I also have a huge pile of too-small toddler clothes.

I see a project emerging from the mire of my idiotic brain. I can’t finish other projects yet because of very good external reasons. So I’ll start a brand new project! That’ll make sense!

I commented to my buddy Rose that sewing machines intimidate me so she told me to just hand sew it. I’m wrapping my head around what that means. I can do the maths to draft the pattern. I can look up some tutorials on hand sewing seams. I would use grommets to sew up the back seam of the skirt (I would make it incredibly size variable because I’ve met me.

I have tons of giant art paper for drafting the pattern. (It was used for art, then used to pack things for shipping, now it’s waiting for it’s third act.)

I care a fair bit about the whole “reduce, reuse, recycle” bullshit.

I have spent a lot of today researching what I need to know to hand sew this stuff. You know what? I may not have the vocabulary but I already know most of these stitches. I will do fine.

Why do I think I suck so much? Why do I discount every ounce of competence I possess?

Weather and exercise

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It’s been absolutely gorgeous here and I am forcing my kids to be out in the yard as much as possible. I haven’t started moving all of my plants from the polytunnel to the yard (well, the ones I will move at all) yet because we keep having -1 at night still. I’m hopeful for next week. After next week I think it is do or die.

I’m using the treadmill. I am surprised by how much faster I go on it than I do on the road. I can do 4.5 miles on a treadmill going faster than 12 min/mile. I can’t do that on the road at all at this point. Although, I haven’t been on the road much lately and I don’t really know where I am. I have started using the TRX for PT again. It is fucking killing me. My shoulders are so fucked up. Doing the exercises means hearing grinding and clicking the whole way through. It’s almost exciting only it sucks.

I’ve been pushing too hard on gardening and painting the wood. My hands are a mess. They hurt more than they have since we got here. Ok, I found my limit. 14 hours of painting in three days after building a rock staircase… that’s too much.

I’m super unhappy that yet more things have broken in the house since my last fucking journal entry. This house is ridiculous.

I think we are going to start playing in the burn further up the road a bit. My neighbor is… being mixed in his signals. He tells me it is fine for my kids to go play on the other side of the fence then he erects barriers. I’m not sure if he is worried about us or the random other people I keep seeing on the driveway. Either way I’m going to stop listening to his words because most people are liars.

I broke my glasses and I’m still using them until replacements arrive. The focal point moves around while I wear them and I keep getting dizzy. This is super annoying.

We have gone through just about 5kg of flour in the last two months. Holy saucebuckets of baking, Batman. That’s on top of multiple kilos of self-raising and strong flour. Turns out baking is a stress activity for me?

I hope I stick with this, but when I run out of alcohol in the cupboard I want to not buy any for a while. I should probably pick a plan like T and say I can buy a bottle for my birthday, Yule, pick one or two other holidays during the year and other than that… don’t buy it. I am still not a problem drinker by Scottish standards but I am not happy about the weight I have put on and I strongly suspect it is alcohol related. I am exercising enough that I should see the numbers move. I’m not. Something needs to change and you will pry my cake away from my cold dead hands.

I’ll give up fucking meat before I give up cake.

So. First: booze.

The tap I got to replace the broken one in the bathroom is wrong and cannot be used. The tap I got to replace the broken one in the kitchen doesn’t fit because there isn’t enough space in the cabinet to install it. The lights I got to replace the broken one in the kitchen has the wrong facing on it. The powder room toilet seat just snapped off entirely.

I want to cry. I am so tired and so frustrated.

I don’t want to be nice.

I’m on my period and my back hurts so much I feel like I would like really heavy drugs. And a bath. And I can’t take a bath.

Fuck and fuck and fuck everything.

Sleep disturbances

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I get the impression everyone is having sleep disturbances lately. I had a really sad, overwhelming dream about Harry Potter having a very different ending with Draco martyring himself to save everyone. It was intense.

I feel like I could sleep for a solid four days before I caught up on my sleep deficit.

More things have broken in the house over the weekend. And orders for parts have been cancelled so it is going to take much longer to get the house back to a state of not-under-construction. Not being able to clean up and put things away is making me feel crazy. I picked a real lemon of a house. Once we get EVERY FUCKING THING IN THE HOUSE fixed it will be great. But we bought a house at the very top of our price range thinking that we would be able to get away with not having more house spending for a while. Instead we have spent over a year of expected living expenses on fixing things and no sign of a slow down. My anxiety is creeping up massively. We are starting to talk about when Noah will have to get a job again because his runway for getting product-selling up and going is going to come to an end. That feels absolutely nightmarish right now.

Something that I have noticed about many of my friendships from the past. The ones that I am continuing and that feel like they are going ok are with people who understand that when they send me an email it might take two or three months for me to respond. Sometimes six months.

I think my anxiety has generally decreased because I have lost that constant feeling of not-doing-enough for my friendships. In California I knew so many people that I always felt like I was letting a tremendous number of people down by not doing more to keep up the relationship. I “should” call people more. I should have every day of the month booked to sending a certain number of chats/emails to cycle through the hundreds of people I know. I should host events many times a year so that I get enough face time with allllllllllll the people.

Then I moved here and literally the only “should” person is Jenny. Historically speaking we have not done all that well seeing one another often. We are both prickly. We have never had that much in common. We have done best seeing one another a dozen or so times a year and not talking every week.

Then I moved here and she had a massive backlog of being lonely. And I am absolutely used to feeling like I am supposed to put a ton of energy into maintaining relationships and trying to contact people so I transferred a lot to her. We talked a lot about weekly or several times a month in person contact with online chatting being basically daily.

That’s… a lot.

Would things have blown up in the same way if we had slowed our roll substantially when it came to contact? Would we feel like we have to talk about touchy subjects so much if we weren’t using one another for daily support?

It is really rough for me that Jenny wanted me to shove my kids away so that I could instead spend my time with her. Do I need breaks from my kids? Absolutely. Do I need to force my older children into school for 30 hours a week and figure out how to get my toddler into preschool early so I can have a part time job amount of time by myself that I then fill with social visits with her?

That sounds… awful.

Not because Jenny is awful. That’s not my point. Do I get annoyed with my kids? Yes. I just shouted at them to stop fighting over my PT equipment.

There are so many layers of complexity to space from my kids for me. Finding a healthy balance there is not the same for me as it is for other people. I mean, that sounds ridiculous. Everyone has to find that balance; I’m not special. But the things that play into it are different for me. My mom sending me away when I was a kid was super traumatizing and I am not even close to over it. I decided I wanted to homeschool my kids at seventeen so giving that up because I’m tired or want a break is a different thing for me than it would be for someone else. It’s a failure to live up to what I dreamed. I want to home school my kids until they are ready to move off into the world at their own speed.

EC feels fully ready to hit the ground running in August and she knows there will be no more take backs. She is ready to graduate from home school. She did not think that finishing primary school in a public school was right for her. I am trusting her.

MC does not want to go back to primary school. She wants to find activities and make friends that way. I trust her.

YC does a lot of singing about wanting to go to school because her signing program does a lot of singing about how great school is. But I don’t think she is actually aware of any of what it means and I don’t think she would be happy with being separated from the family for 16-30 hours a week anytime soon.

I do not have a job. I am lucky. I choose to be available for this. I do not have to earn a pay check. That means the calculus is different for our family than it would be for someone else’s family. Not that my choice is right. Not that other people are doing something wrong if they make a different choice. If I had to work (for a million good reasons including if I just plain fucking wanted to) then I would figure something else out and I would help my kids learn how to adapt.

We also have such a strong genetic history of severe trauma in the bloodline that this is not the same conversation for us as it is for other families. That matters.

I didn’t move here so that I could give up the commitment I made to my kids and replace it with hanging out with Jenny. I feel like I am being pressured in that direction. I don’t know that she intends to put that kind of pressure on me–that’s outside my ability to know. But I feel it. And I have responded very negatively to it.

In the past month I have spent as much time talking to people as I did in a week in California. And it’s only that high because of forums.

I do need a break from people, from expectations, from having to do a lot to maintain friendships. I feel like I am hurting Jenny by needing that and it’s really complicated.

This doesn’t feel simple to me. I know that I have cut a lot of people off. I have done so to such a degree that it feels… almost callously simple. It is never simple. I don’t want to end my relationship entirely. I also don’t know how to carry the weight of it.

I feel like I am doing wrong no matter what I do.

Can’t you just visit as adults?

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This gets complicated. Jenny and I don’t have that much in common anymore. We both lead fairly small lives that are fairly hyper focused on our families. Our hobbies don’t overlap much at all. We have fairly different values about how we want to live.

I genuinely don’t believe my way is the One Twue Way but I am also not very open to being questioned or argued with about what I do. I have worked very hard to reach the set of lifestyle habits I have and I am not interested in defending them. Jenny, even if it isn’t intentionally hostile, often questions me in ways I have a hard time with.

It is hard to talk about these kinds of differences without sounding like “my way is better”. For me, for her, for almost anyone. I don’t think I recognized just how different we were until I got here and stood more face to face with it.

I am a workaholic without a job. So my kids, my house, and my garden are the things I hyper-work on. Jenny wants more downtime than that. She seeks out ways to hire or acquire help so she can do less and she can spend more time relaxing.

I tried relaxing for a while here. It was incredibly unsatisfying to me and Noah has decided not to hold me to that whole “I’ll spend a year with no projects” thing because I was freaking out all the time keeping the house spotlessly clean. I wasn’t allowed to focus on anything bigger so I was an asshole about small, stupid details. Now I’m working in the yard more and dealing with the construction projects (I got to spend 14 hours so far painting oil in the bookshelves for preservation) and I’m not being a neurotic asshole about cleanliness.

I’m kind of like those dog breeds who need to work a lot or they destroy your house.

I’m still doing pretty well with keeping my exercise quantity up. The TRX is now installed so I get to restart my PT exercises. That will be good for my shoulders. They hurt quite a bit.

But Jenny and I have opposite approaches to work. I seek out more work with an almost maniacal focus and she… would prefer to do as little as she can get away with.

What do we talk about?

I am so high energy I feel like I burn with unexpressed energy. The idea of sitting still for hours knitting and watching telly makes me twitch.

If Noah wants to read to us for hours I usually do 2-3 other things while I listen. I watch television programs while I clean or cook. I take intense pride out of my house and my yard looking the way they do because of the work of my hands. I don’t like that I’ve had to pay for as much help as I have had to since I got here.

An awful lot of what they are doing I could do but I’d have to buy all the tools and my hands would go numb. This frustrates me.

Jenny hires someone to come change her lightbulbs and put together her Ikea furniture.

Very different attitudes towards work.

What do we talk about? I don’t know. I don’t say this to be an asshole I mean… I don’t know what we can build a friendship on at this point. We can’t talk about our kids because we parent very differently and sharing our different perspectives sounds like judgment. We can’t talk about how we spend our time unless we take turn monologuing while the other is chewing their tongue off because they don’t understand why someone would want to work so much/little.

We don’t read the same books. We don’t watch the same shows. We don’t make the same kinds of things with our hands. We can’t even talk about food because we eat so very differently.

And so much of this does come down to: I cannot spend time around someone who has negative judgments about home schooling despite doing basically no research. If you are well researched and you have concerns, I can engage with that. I can’t even deal with negativity that springs from ignorance. Just shut the fuck up about things you don’t understand.

Which is not a great attitude when it comes to ones friends!

Did I expect to have more of a friendship? Yes. Is it working out? Well, we have grown apart. In California we would have drifted apart long ago with little fanfare or objection on either side. The fact that we maintained a bond over great distance and great time means that now being in the same place makes it all so much more complicated.

And I genuinely don’t know how to bridge this gap. I don’t know that I want to suck it up and bite my tongue and put up with things that offend me. Which means I am hurting Jenny because I am crushing her dreams and that makes me feel pretty bad about myself.

We are not family. We have no background of shared experiences nor shared future goals nor shared culture.

I feel like a bully and a selfish person. I feel like I “should” just suck it up and figure it out and try. I also feel like I don’t have much energy to throw at situations that give me so little back.

Needing a break

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I find it kind of interesting that I do a lot of processing my feelings about Sarah and very little really going into the situation with the Bonus Family. I think it is relevant to what is going on now so maybe it is time to start.

I would say that set up came the closest to being “chosen family” for us as a family unit over the past decade. We really shared the four kids. We really gave one another assistance and breaks. That was by far the most help I got with my kids and it was a very mixed bag.

The mom and the dad in that family both had a fair number of issues as individual people. I strongly suspect the mom was pretty far on the autism spectrum but she grew up in a time and place where as the quiet daughter of an immigrant she just got flunked out of school and that was that. Even though she was very intelligent. The dad had PTSD from growing up with a violent alcoholic mother and a father who completely abandoned him despite living only a few miles away. He then went into the military and things got worse for him. When I met them (I didn’t know this at the time, it came out through the course of the relationship) they had already been in a very physically, verbally, and emotionally abusive relationship for a long time. Then they had kids because surely that would fix everything, right?

Things were complicated. I did as much advocating for the kids as I could from 30+ miles away. When the kids came to my house for their weekly stay (we pretty much split custody for a few years there. We each had all four kids for 24 hours a week meaning their children spent one 24 hour block at my house every week and every other weekend my kids spent a full weekend at their house) the kids would do these epic roleplays in the back yard. They were clearly trying to cope with what they were seeing. Screaming fights and divorce threats and hitting each other and calling each other really mean names. When I would come out to be like, “Uhhh, dudes… what is going on” they would all drop role instantly and say “This is just a game. We aren’t really saying any of this.” I would blink. They would resume roles.

They told me they were playing family.

I let it go on longer than I should have. I needed the breaks from my kids. I needed the support time for going to therapy. I really couldn’t access any other childcare for most of that time period. Things cooled off when I finally found a babysitter.

We met through a hippy dippy parenting forum. I have a whole bunch of crunchy things I try to do as a parent but when things aren’t working I am open to changing. My youngest child got raging diaper rashes from cloth diapers so despite being fairly fanatical about them for years, I stopped. I do long-term breastfeeding except I will cut it a bit short when my kid is biting me and I just don’t fucking think so anymore. We eat hippy granola food except when it isn’t easily accessible then we just eat fucking food.

My friend… she was not open to reconsidering her ideals. Her kids had open, bleeding wounds on their bottoms because cloth diapering wasn’t working and she wouldn’t entertain the idea of doing anything else. She couldn’t nurse for medical reasons so she drove all over the state collecting donation breast milk to the point where she was probably actually putting her children at risk because they were in the car seats so much. And a lot of it hadn’t been properly stored and it smelled off and she expected her kids to drink it anyway because she had gone to so much trouble to get it. She structured her entire life around getting hippy granola food and that was all she would let her kids eat but she would eat a box of donuts on the way to the long-way-away pickup because she just couldn’t deal. Her children were absolutely not allowed to have the unhealthy foods because she was fat and she didn’t want her kids to be fat.

She told me she gained so much weight on purpose so she could outweigh her husband (who was 6’7″ tall when she was 5’3″ tall) and win when they physically fight. She was well over 300lbs.

My kids told me later that she regularly controlled their behavior with threats of beatings. They said they didn’t bother to tell me when it was happening because they were sure I wouldn’t care and I would tell them they had to go because “family”.

I didn’t end the relationship. The other mother ended the relationshp because I told the dad that the kids couldn’t home school. She didn’t work with them. The kids’ language regressed every week in between visits to my house because she wouldn’t speak to them. (She’s a pretty non-verbal person.) She would not help them with any fine motor activities because she either found them boring or sticky and she wouldn’t touch anything that made her skin feel weird. To the point where she would cook food in dirty pans because she couldn’t handle washing them.

I’m not talking about seasoning cast iron.

I told the dad that if he allowed her to continue to neglect the kids the way they were being neglected it is equally 100% his fault that it is happening. He said they can’t go to school without vaccines and she won’t vaccinate. I said you are equally their parent.

That was over her line. She was afraid of vaccines. Like, couldn’t have a rational conversation about them and was going to severely educationally and emotionally neglect her kids afraid of them.

He told me she might divorce him over it. I asked him if he cares more about his kids or supporting his crazy wife.

She didn’t talk to me again. Fair enough. I earned that cut off. The only thing I would do differently at this point is call CPS sooner. I feel a lot of guilt and shame that I subjected my kids to that environment because “I needed a break.” I miss those kids so much. I am really sorry I didn’t get to be close to them as they grew up. I loved them a lot. But their mother has the right to decide who she exposes them to.

I put my kids in school here because they wanted to try and because I needed a break. They got beat on. Adults came on campus to threaten them.

I will not put my “need for a break” over my children again. I don’t feel I can be a moral person and do so.

And I have some really intense feelings about pushing “chosen family” on my kids ever again.

We spent ECs birthday last year with Jenny’s family. It went remarkably poorly. Jenny’s oldest child spent the evening… being a kid who was annoyed about not being the center of attention. We tried a couple of other visits after that. After a couple of these EC said, “I don’t want to spend time around that kid again and if she is in my house I will feel like I have to supervise because you want to talk to Jenny and she’s not very nice to YC.”

I can’t do this to my kids again.

So Jenny is pretty upset with me right now. (I asked her not to read my blog for a while so I could try to process this without making her feel like shit.) Jenny feels like I have spent years complaining about how much I want family and years saying I want breaks from my kids and years talking about how my friends aren’t there for me and she wants the same things and she has been so alone here for ten years. She feels absolutely devastated that I have had a huge number of boundaries and I have not launched into hanging out with her and I have flat said my kids don’t like her kid and that’s a problem.

I don’t know how to solve this.

She is absolutely being hit with a ton of backlash that is way bigger than the situation with her and I agree that it isn’t fair. I am hesitant and standoffish and distrustful. I look for tiny red flags and I turn and run like a honey badger is chasing me.

I don’t know what fair would even mean in this situation. It’s not that I don’t love Jenny. It’s not that I think people have to be perfect in order for me to be in a relationship with them. It’s not that I think I am perfect. I have made whopping mistakes and in many cases my children paid for them. I am afraid to treat my children getting hurt like it is just the cost of doing business and my kids need to put up with whatever friend of mine I am choosing to call “family” today.

They have been very hurt by the actions of people who made promises to them and then didn’t keep the promises because of me. I mean, that makes it seem like I think I am more important than I am… it’s complicated.

The godmamas wanted to have more control over the kids lives or no deal.

Dad wants to have a relationship where I chase him and loan him money and provide him all the support a child gives their doting parent… without him having ever done anything to earn that from me.

The Bonus Mama needed me to tolerate her being abusive and neglectful without ever calling her on it.

I can’t ignore mothers hitting their kids when the kid has a panic attack ever again.

I can’t not call CPS when I am concerned ever again.

Sarah promised she would spend a lot of time with the kids then she cancelled because she was too tired from hanging out with her boyfriend.

The list goes on and on.

Has Jenny let me down? No. She hasn’t. She has been there for me in ways big and small. Has she said things that hurt me? Holy fucking shit yes. Are there some red flags in how she parents that worry me? Holy shit yes. I am very worried about getting involved with another family where I see dynamics that trouble me. I am very worried about forcing my kids to deal with kids who have a bunch of behaviors they are not ok with.

I don’t know how to solve this. So yeah. I have been pushing Jenny away and she is hurt. I don’t know what else I can do in this situation.

My big kids are old enough and competent enough that I do get breaks now because the three kids can play together. Do I feel the need to push really hard for more breaks no matter how it impacts my children? Not at all.

I feel like if I need a break from anything it is from obligation to “chosen family” who bring more strife than joy to my life. And that doesn’t feel very nice at all to my friend who was so happy I was moving here. It feels downright cruel.

I don’t want chosen family anymore. I have a family. And they are enough.

Is that cruel?