Monthly Archives: April 2022

The monsters under the bed

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Sometimes you get cocky. You think, “Hey the monsters under my bed haven’t come out for a long time. Maybe I made friends with them and they decided to leave me alone as an act of mercy. Maybe they died of natural causes. Maybe…. one of the many chemical warfare bombs I threw under their killed them. Maybe.”

Then something happens. Maybe you knock a glass off your bedside table and it shatters on the floor. Maybe a support plank in your bed gives way and makes a loud creaking sound when you move. It might be a big sound or it might be a small sound. It really doesn’t matter. There was never much sense behind the monsters coming after you anyway. They have their own agenda.

So you step lightly off your bed expecting to walk peacefully off to the bathroom to brush your teeth.

Even when they came out often you never really learned how to hop off the bed fast enough and far enough away to get away from them. Their arms are so long. They can grab you so hard and pull you so close. Their teeth when they bite you are so sharp–so terribly razor sharp. Their teeth are a bear trap. If you move very much you are going to tear the wound and make yourself bleed out. Instantly your stomach fills with the sharp, acrid, acidic, burning poison of fear.

You are always so terribly terribly afraid that even if the bleeding doesn’t kill you first your body is going to produce so much acid that you will destroy yourself from the inside. You’ve been so close in the past. The acid burned holes in you so that you could barely eat, barely sleep, it burned through the tissues of your body making terrible pain absolutely everywhere.

You will never, ever forget that pain.

So when it starts you have to first go very very still. So still that you calm down all the way to the atoms of your body. So still that it feels like if you are not careful even this paralysis might kill you. You have to slow down enough to figure out how you are going to get help.

You can’t be casual about getting help. If you ask the wrong person they think they can toss you a screwdriver or a metal nail file and tell you to pry it open yourself.

You are stupid. If the only tool that you have to hand is one that will poorly break open the seal and probably slip sideways in the blood and cause you to damage yourself even more terribly… you will use it. You are scared and you are hurting and thinking is almost an impossible task. You are desperate. Thinking requires so much will. So that first decision, “Who can I ask for help?” is maybe the first, last, and only time you will be able to think.

You have to make sure that you carefully only ask for help from people who have the right tools in their toolbox. People who have experience with this kind of atrocity. People who will neither flinch nor minimize the severity of the wound. Probably these are people who climb out of their own beds very carefully because they are currently at a détente with the monsters under their own bed. They know deep in their bones what is at stake if they fuck up.

Make no mistake, that monster wants you dead.

If you choose very carefully and you manage to pick wisely and your dear, wonderful, important friend helps you to get the trap open that doesn’t mean you have to cling to them for all of the healing. They can pack up their tools and head back on their own journey. Someone else will probably be along soon and bandages and medicine are so much easier to get help with.

It’s getting the damn trap open that usually sinks a person. That moment is do or die. That moment decides if you will have more moments. That moment when you go quiet and you pull yourself in and you weigh carefully exactly who you can ask…

It’s everything.

You had better hope you made the right friends. You had better hope they have their toolbag with them when they happen to hear your call.

Sometimes you get lucky. You can limp away. You are reminded that you did not actually kill the monsters. The war is not over. You will have to keep fighting.

But for now you can rest. Rest and heal. Be grateful that you made the right friends. Be ready to help them with their own monsters when the need arises. Because as sure as the sun will rise those monsters are going to keep trying to kill you all.

There is always a cost

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I am so worn out and I am trying to both rest and catch up and it strikes me that they are diametrically opposed. My growing zone has an annual last frost date somewhere between the last 4 days of April and the first 5 days of May. There was snow on the ground last week. Because of the world-wide problems with insect die off it is widely considered wise to wait until the average temperature is 10C or above. This is slightly hilarious to me because only July and August have night time averages above 10C… the average is 11C. Does that mean we shouldn’t ever disturb gardens here? It’s a thought to ponder. (Waiting until the temperature rises is because bugs hibernate when it is cold and if you go out and tidy up your garden you may well kill off a generation of wee beasties unintentionally.)

Tasks I need to perform:

  • install bike pulleys
  • install trailer pulleys
  • build a better compost unit (my pallets are all rotting and sagging)
  • sift my compost pile and distribute the lovely material around my garden
  • get some fertilizer on my hydrangeas and all the food plants
  • finish taking apart the old shed for boards
  • build the potting benches for my poly tunnel and the raised beds I want to have in there
  • weed, always weeding around the fence borders because the ground elder is fierce
  • get more wood chips and cover more grass with it because by golly in about 4 years I will have subdued it enough to make a serious start on alternative ground covering plants
  • get more seeds because I only had like 5 packets of veg seeds left, and they were mostly gone in any case, and I need to get cracking on starting this year’s plants
  • figure out storage for the mountain of costumes I brought home from Texas
  • respond to cafe owner about holding meet ups for the youth group
  • schedule a walking munch and the 101 workshops
  • clean my dang bathroom
  • tidy up my room because right now it is a royal mess
  • restart the subscription orders from the grocery service
  • do a bit more pushing with the mum bike group to get some activities scheduled
  • figure out when the group camping trip is happening and get myself organized for that
  • install the trailer hitch on the new bike so that I can have towing capacity when I have extra passengers
  • get YC more time out on the balance bike because she has nearly outgrown it and I don’t really want to buy a bigger one I want her to progress to pedals, dangit
  • schedule with a freakin roofer
  • schedule with a plumber for the apartment bathroom (the sink is leaking)
  • schedule getting the retaining walls repaired around the property because it is past time
  • I really should be reading books because, dude
  • don’t forget the damn skin care routine
  • oh yeah I should eventually have sex with my husband
  • all of my kids could do with some one on one time because they are all feeling super needy and emotional
  • I really need to organize group bicycle skill training for my family because my instructions are not adequate to help all of them know what they need to know
  • I need to organize specific training in bike maintenance because this is causing a lot of fighting and fussing and it is driving me insane
  • I should submit data to the national database about when my fucking fruit trees are in flower because tracking this stuff is important
  • the XR people would really appreciate it if I took on more duties, as would the allotment people
  • oh yeah, I also need to schedule some physics experiments because my kids really don’t understand some basic elements that would make cycling go better
  • I need to sit on my kids more industriously about working on their school work because that is literally one of my main jobs
  • I haven’t touched up the sloppy paint areas in my room I was going to come back to
  • I want to move the white board from the kitchen into my bedroom so I can use it to track forking lists like this
  • I also want to change a bunch of how I store things in the kitchen/dining room/laundry room because the current set up is inefficient, sloppy, and difficult to keep tidy
  • I should also be more industrious about exercising and eating vegetables and going to fucking sleep at a reasonable time

Yeah. Fuck me. I still have almost constant headaches and neck aches from the concussion. The sensitivity to light is really bothering me but I have to push through it anyway. I am still feeling stupid and like I am not retaining new information. I feel unmotivated and weary and frustrated at basically every moment of every day.

Visiting Noah’s family was intense. I feel like I understand the dynamics a bit better. I have much stronger opinions about what I would guess for various folks’ diagnostic labels but I try not to say those out loud too much because I am not an expert and I am not seeing any of these people in any kind of professional capacity so it’s a dick thing for me to call out. However, it helps me decide how I should respond in terms of my own behavior and as long as it is my opinion and judgment and it exists in my head and I’m not trying to influence other people I think it is ok. It’s funny to me how much I can now go, “Oh yeah. I’m trying to place a rules system around this topic because that helps me understand it.” I don’t want to make other people agree with me or change… heck I don’t plan to see any of those people again for 3-5 years. I will barely communicate with them through rare letters.

I believe it is important for me to think about things in this way because I have to think in a long term way if I am going to manage the historical trauma my children have inherited. I happen to be a big believer in the epigenetic nature of trauma. The things that happened to their parents impact them. The things that happened to their grandparents impact them. The things that happened to their great grandparents impact them. That said, neuroplasticity and resilience count for so very much. And let’s not discount the benefit of various levels of privilege.

I don’t need to try hard to control other people. I need to know what I need to think about when it comes to my own behavior and what I am modeling for my children. That’s what I am doing here.

I mean, I can worry about the gardening and the social life and the academics and the house maintenance… but what I am actually fucking doing here is figuring out how to raise people who can come from a fairly intense amount of ancestral trauma and thrive. Their mental health, their resilience, their ability to grow and change and find a better path is what I am fucking doing with my life.

I lose sight of that. I get mired in the weeds (literal and figurative) because it is easier to put my head down and just do whatever is in front of me. When I do that I invite inconsistency and acting out unconscious patterns. I invite the repetition of behaviors that have already damaged their bodies through their inherited genetics and what the fuck am I doing; I know better. I don’t need to shove them through survival. I don’t need to create lists of tasks so long that no lifetime can contain them all and then convince my children that they are inadequate if they aren’t working their bodies into dust.

Life is not about grinding yourself in a mortar and pestle. It’s just not. There are costs to those behaviors and attitudes: impatience, lack of understanding, lack of dignity, unkindness, addictive behaviors, unhealthy bodies and minds.

Noah’s grandmother survived, but the costs her children paid were so severe that they cannot bear her presence. There is duty there, some of them still serve that duty, but there is no love. Her grandchildren can barely tolerate her. Her great grandchildren are split on despising her or on not knowing her. She accomplished fairly impressive things. What was the cost? She lies on a bed alone in a room day after day. Most of the people who have ever known her have no interest in her company. Was what she accomplished worth the cost?

Noah’s mother mostly has good relationships with her children. Noah fleeing the nest as early as he did and with such intensity seems to have made a lasting impression. She worked on her behavior. She came to therapy late in life but she did get there. That’s something. Is she perfect or healed or a person I would want to spend much time with? Oh goodness no. But the difference between how she acts now and how she acted when I met her over 15 years ago is dramatic. Not different enough for me to leave my children alone with her, even though she did ask politely.

I have stopped looking at the long run. I no longer weigh and measure how I behave based on the relationships I want to have with my 30 and 40 year old children. I am sloppy. I am messy. I am inconsistent. I am pursuing short term goals at long term cost. That is stupid. I am not modeling what I think should be modeled. I am not showing how to make better choices with a joyful heart. I am dragging myself through a series of tasks and I am short tempered and impatient. I don’t think I am being vicious but that should not be the bar. Frankly I am not happy with how I have behaved for a while. I’m distracted. I’m snippy. I am not performing the behaviors I believe are necessary because I am wearing myself to the bone on things that matter so much less.

This is not what I want my children to remember. Do I think they need to have some challenges and some difficulties in life in order to build resiliency? Of course. That doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to be outward focused. I want to be focused in on the people I made commitments to.

Krissy, you know who you are supposed to be. Go fucking act like it. Or you will pay the cost.

Put Yourself In The Story

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It’s hard to explain what I mean when I say that I can tell I am not doing very well. Yet I need to explain it to me so that I can change it. I feel out of control. I feel like I lack focus and power to decide who and what I want to be. When I feel like this I tend to fall hard into the helper mode, by golly I will offer to help fucking everyone then I feel like I have nothing left for myself. I will pour out all of my lifeblood into something I don’t care about and at the end of the day I feel exhausted and empty and like I did nothing that makes my life feel like it is worth living. I am not acting like I am the main fucking character. 

I’m not trying to be all narcissistic about this and act like I need to be the main character of everyone else’s story, just my own. It is actually healthy to be the main character of your own story—that’s not maladjusted thinking. Subsuming yourself into everyone around you is a problem. That’s not healthy; it’s a lack of boundaries. Boundaries aren’t rules you enforce on other people boundaries are knowing where you end and where other people begin. Boundaries are knowing what is for yourself and knowing what is for other people and making sure you put enough gas in your own gas tank so that you can keep the damn car on the road.

For example: I am genuinely fulfilled by gardening work. When I keep myself so busy I don’t have time or physical energy to do it I feel shitty. I can feel this shift as spring comes on in Inverness that was a lot more muddy in California. The kinds of work I can do outside are different over the seasons in a way I still haven’t adjusted to yet. Combining this with the fact that bike events are going to increase in frequency and time length means I need to be putting gardening on the calendar in concrete and demanding ways. It’s also competing with kid school/social stuff and that’s a whole long blog post of its own.

But that’s not the only thing. And Jesus this next bit is going to sound cunty and this is the kind of thing that makes it feel scary to write anymore. There are pieces of being married that chafe sometimes and I need to find a greater degree of peace with them. We went to a rope workshop (we meaning Noah and I… not the kids… obviously) and I want that to continue and I want us to figure out how to deal with some of our challenges in that department. It’s kind of funny that most of the time I feel like I am the complainer in my marriage and then there are times when I feel pretty fucking rude in my judgment of Noah’s complaints. It’s not an attractive trait on my part. There are times and ways that Noah really struggles with being able to explain or understand things and he launches into these long winded rants about why it’s impossible or unfair or almost malicious on other people’s faults that he can’t learn from an explanation someone else is giving. God damn in those moments I notice that he and MC have that in common so maybe MC’s complaining style isn’t entirely inherited from me. It’s dramatic to me because I really struggle with being patient with him in those moments; I feel a lot more comfortable telling MC to just knock it off. I cannot listen to the rant right now. Rope, dancing, some of the challenges around travel are all pinch points where I think God damn you are autistic. There are ways that Noah really struggles to understand why he needs to explain something in a certain way in order to solve a problem. To be fair I know that I have places where I am absolutely shit at solving problems because I get stressed out and I just can’t do a thing and sometimes those are situations that Noah is preternaturally gifted at getting into the zone and he can just solve the thing. 

It is really hard when I feel like I am in a moment where I have to solve all of the things and the thing I could do to be the best wife and mother in that moment is to stop looking for help or support. I fucked up some steps in figuring out the trip we are on right this minute. (Side note: going to Texas. On a plane right this minute but we will be on the ground when I post this. Noah’s grandmother is in her last days on earth. More about this in a bit.) I did a crappy job of task sharing for the planning and as a result we had a few problems that could have been ameliorated. I absolutely should not have expected that he understand all of the levels of preparation needed but I did. I fucked up several layers of planning because all of the covid shit is a god damn nightmare and I did not understand how hard that was going to be. I landed us in a very stressful position through ineffective planning then I turned and wanted him to fix some pieces while knowing that he is not that effective at remembering/understanding all of the pieces he has to communicate in those situations. 

I need to go back to the beginning on this. It’s rather a complicated story with layers of stupid that are absolutely completely my fault. Booking was really shitty and I couldn’t understand why to begin with. I think American Airlines was just doing a website upgrade and I happened to be trying to book last minute at the absolute worst time. It took a series of phone calls over a couple of hours to research flights and book with points. Going back and forth between different credit cards because some chunks were in one currency and other chunks were in a different currency. I did this booking on Tuesday expecting to fly on Thursday. Wednesday I took off to take YC to her class for the day and track down our car seat. That took hours because we had to ride all over town tracking down the car seat cause the dude who is borrowing it was out of town and his ex, my friend, and I had to ride up a big hill to get the key to his van then ride across town to get to where the van is parked and get the actual seat. It was a very demanding ride and she was a great sport about it but we probably did 8ish miles at the very last minute. It was tiring and I couldn’t be grumpy with her to go faster when I have a battery and she doesn’t. I did not explain to Noah before I left just how many steps we had to go through when I got home. Instead I got home and said “Ok everybody let’s go” thinking we could just go get the covid test for the flight done.

First stupid: I thought I could get a covid test at a local pharmacy for flying since I see ads for them all the time. Turns out that the pharmacy offers that service in other cities but not in our city since we are so small. I figured this out while everybody was standing in the driveway with their bikes while I frantically searched on my phone. It started fucking hailing. Insult to fucking injury. Ok, put the bikes away because in our city literally the only place that does the covid test is the airport and they don’t start doing that service until the hour after the plane I booked us on for getting to London and they were out of appointments for the day before so we couldn’t grab a taxi and head over to do it that day. In retrospect in the moment I realised what I did wrong I probably should have just called AA and told them about the problem and rebooked the whole damn thing. That’s my fuck up. Instead I figured out how to get us to London Wednesday night on a different airline very late so we could be at the airport for tests at 6am so we had a 4 hour window for the flight to the states. 

Second massive fuck up on my part: now I am questioning myself. I went through about 5 different sites trying to figure out how to get the covid testing done and at least one of them said YC couldn’t be given a test so I thought that meant she didn’t need one. Yeah I was completely and totally fucking wrong. She needed a test. I booked the other 4 of us in. If I had booked all 5 of us in then we would have totally made the original flight and it all would have been fine. The lines in Heathrow were absolutely insane because it turns out that Wednesday at about 2 they had a giant fucking software problem and they had to cancel all British Airways flights. Nightmare! We waited in lines so long that by the time we figured out the fuck up with YC we didn’t have time to get on the original flight. We were in fucking lines for 4 hours and got back up to the front about 5 fucking minutes after the time we needed for security and getting across the terminal. The terminal is huge. 

Third fuck up: I should not have sent Noah to negotiate fixing this on his own. We had two reservations and he didn’t bang hard enough on that point so the employee he found who fixed the reservation for the other four of us didn’t fix his part. Then we waited in endless lines again and didn’t figure out the fuck up until we were minutes away from missing the rebooked flight. Holy.Fucking.Shit. AA booked the original tickets (on a BA flight) so BA said they couldn’t fix the reservations or rebook us. We had to go to go over to AA. AA could fix the reservations but they couldn’t print the boarding passes. So we were expected to wait in the multi-hour lines on both sides of the terminal. Fucking awesome. It was a zoo of hysterical people because they were all trying to figure out how to fix up everything that happened the day before. God damn nightmare.

In that last few minutes Noah was actually great and he went right up to the front and insisted the problem be treated like an emergency. That’s not an easy thing for him to do and it’s important to recognise in my head how much he struggles with exactly that type of problem and he came through. The kids and I caught up just in time for me to tell them about the two reservations so they could finally get it right because his explanation wasn’t helping them understand why it wasn’t working. A fucking awesome AA employee grabbed a BA person and said “You are printing this pass. Right now.” Then she walked us through security to get there faster. Thank you Jenny! We got to the gate in time to grab a few drinks because we were all super dehydrated and get on the plane. We didn’t have time to sit down in the terminal. We were at the airport from 6am and we got on a flight at 2:40. We were in lines just about that whole time. The poor kids were really amazing. Noah was patient. I tried hard to be patient and only think my impatience. 

Out of battery.

Alright, finishing this in the hotel room while Noah and EC are sleeping and MC and YC are loudly playing with dolls.

Right around the point we got on the plane from London my watch started beeping at me that it was almost out of battery and I realised I forgot the charging cable. Damnit.

We barely made it through customs and lines in Phoenix to jump on the plane to Houston. Our bags did not follow us to Phoenix. We all sat separately on all of the flights. YC was my buddy, Noah sat alone, and MC and EC said they got through the flights without fighting at all. That’s great. YC did super well; she has no memory of previous travel and her behaviour on this trip shows me really dramatically how different her life has been. She has no habits around keeping her voice down or staying near me in crowds. She does not know how to manage her body so she doesn’t kick other people in tight quarters. She is not used to strangers and she’s really shy in a lot of circumstances. It’s fascinating not being able to tell what parts of her behaviour come from her different personality and what parts come from the different nurturance because our life is completely different. 

Got to Houston and put in a baggage claim report. Now on the computer I am not able to look up anything on the computer. This sucks. I need to call the airport and I don’t have an American sim card so I don’t have a phone for calls or data. We couldn’t pick up the rental car last night because it was closed by the time our flight landed so we took a shuttle to the hotel. I think my next step should be leaving Noah and the kids in the hotel and going back to the airport on my own to get the rental car. Noah doesn’t need to be with me because his American license is expired and he doesn’t have a UK one yet. I will be doing all the driving. Then I need to go buy a booster seat because we can’t take YC in a car without one and I don’t think the car seat is going to show up for days. We also don’t have toothbrushes or clean clothes. This is going to be fun.

Another day, another adventure. It’s probably time for me to get moving.