I feel like I stopped being an adult when I got married. I feel like I was overly parentified as a child and then I barely survived for 7 years as a quasi-adult. Then I turned over a lot of the adulting to Noah. He was our public face in a lot of ways. He did all the hard parts. I may live here forever on Leave to Remain because taking the next step is probably beyond me. He was the adult.

As I look at the future I understand that paying other people to grown up for me is expensive and I don’t have an actual income. I am not a brilliant writer who can suddenly come up with a new book that will change lives and motivate people to be kinder in a whole industry. I am a useless person. I wanted to say bitch. I’m not really a bitch anymore, though. Well, maybe with special people.

I think the list of people I will go off on can be counted on my fingers and none of them live in this country. I don’t think I have been a bitch in my Scottish time.

Who knows what glory the future might bring? I’m going to be scared. That means I will be more reactive and tense and anxious. The whole time I have lived here I have stayed home when my anxiety was high. I hide. I let Noah be the grown up. I let him do the hard things. As my disability level has increased he has done ever more. He really was taking care of me.

I took care of him, too. His body was frail. It had a lot of surgeries and illnesses. When he went down he went down hard for weeks or months. We cooked for each other. I gave him a lot of foot care because he had a weird skin condition.

At some point when we had tiny babies I mildly observed that I looked forward to the future when I would have the time to properly care for his gross feet. He scoffed at me. He laughed. He said he knew that would never happen.

I am really glad I did that for the last 8 years. I am so grateful it has been this long. I started doing it in the new bathroom in California. It was lovely. It was a way to pay attention to him when I was pregnant and sex was awful. In so many ways, our third child has been placed to the side so I can spend more time with Noah. She has never been the centre of my world. Noah has been home her whole life. My life revolved around Noah. I spend time with her. I have a good relationship with her. Noah replaced a lot of my time with her so that I could do independent things. He was more involved with this child. The one that he decided to have because I was getting too uppity. The one that meant our house there was going to be too small in the long run.

Oh this was a fantastic house for lock down. I’m just saying. For a bunch of sensory sensitive autistics lock down wasn’t all bad. Noah was around 24/7. He functioned as a working mother. He was involved in meal making and cleaning and parenting and schooling. I’ve been treating this like a period of time where I was training Noah, MC, and EC to work with me as a semi-commercial kitchen. The times we all got together and really worked we have created magic. It was wonderful. Those were amazing feasts. We love food.

Noah taught me how to eat. He did so much work to broaden and expand my diet. He inventively prepared any weird vegetable I brought into the house. If I didn’t like how it came out, he would research how to fix the problem. I just had to go back and correct verb tense over and over. Now I can’t see because of crying. It’s fine. Noah always loved that I can type without looking at the keyboard. That was his favourite form of flirting. He would make his eyes all smouldery in an ostentatious way. He was never going to let me pretend there was any amount of subtlety to his approach.

Two years ago in my journal I wrote, “The ceilidh was so very fun! I had a lovely time. Today I ran 5.5 miles, biked 5 miles, and danced for hours. I feel fit and strong and free.”

If I could turn back time I would.

Noah, I miss you so much. This is going to suck really hard. But you made sure I will never be desperately poor again. You made sure I have resources to use as I recover. You made sure I have people who love me in my house for the next few decades if not forever. We’ll see. You helped me be a parent they can respect and love. Noah I am so grateful for you. You made me feel like I am indispensable instead of trash. You made me feel valuable and smart and funny and wise.

I spend a lot of time feeling really stupid because I struggle to follow kinds of nuance or jumps in conversation. I don’t have the same context as other people. It is hard for me to understand how other people see the world. It’s a lot of why my pattern matching skills have been such a focus over my life. I’m trying to figure out how and where I can understand things that people are saying based on patterns from my life. I’m lucky that I have a whole lot of different times and periods and people to think about when it comes to understanding behaviour. I just don’t always understand the connection between what I am hearing/seeing compared to what I already know. Noah would translate for me. I was so much smarter when Noah was in the room. Frankly, he was too. He wanted the same translation from me but for different things.

I think of the ballroom dance lessons we took together. He really loved that I interrupted the instructor and gave the teacher really explicit feedback on how to talk about Noah. “No. You cannot say ‘Feel the music’ to him because he will get angry and shut down his ability to listen. Never ever say that to him.” I shielded him in his tender places too. I was happy to be the one who handled being the authority on what happened to all of the bodies in our house medically, including his. I went with him to appointments and he would look to me to answer questions. He didn’t know what was going on with him. He hadn’t been paying attention. I did though. I knew him like he was my obsessive fandom.

I feel guilty for this, but I’ve read through his old letters and emails and daily reports and conversations with friends in DMs. I’m a horrible person. I have always wanted to consume him whole. I wanted everything in his brain to be in my brain. It’s really fucking cool getting this context from other relationships. I’m seeing things I couldn’t 43 days ago because I was giving him privacy so I lacked context. Now I feel sad that I didn’t do more of this before he died. I could have been a better wife.

It is humbling seeing him describe our problem periods to other people. I am so glad he had these people in his life for support. That is wonderful. He had really good friends who strongly advocated in his defense. That makes my heart feel less pain for a moment because I see the ways he was getting what he needed even though I wasn’t giving it to him. He was being seen. I am glad. I wanted him to be seen. I didn’t want him to be all mine. I wanted to share him broadly and diversely with the world because he was so cool he could change peoples lives.

He wanted me to be a cave troll with him. He wanted me to only look at him and he would only look at me. I see how my push for poly was forcing him to come to grips with things from his past that were not about me and I am trying to forgive myself for making him go through that. It’s hollow comfort now to say “It was for his own good.” Was it? I don’t know. We never actually dated anyone. There was the rape. Otherwise we had 8 years of monogamy. He wanted it to be for the rest of our lives.

I feel really really bad about being me. I don’t know if I would have been naturally monogamous without all the rapes but my body is obnoxious. I like people. I like them more than Noah wanted me to like them. It made him sad.

If I could have made a deal with the devil: monogamy or Noah dies I would have picked monogamy. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.

If I could trade my life for his I would.

I can’t. I can’t get him back and it hurts so much. I know what loss feels like. I know I will keep moving. My life is going to be really small though. I can’t sustain a big life without Noah. I am a fraction of a person. I am not who I was. I have no idea who I will grow to be but I will never take up as much space as I did when I was Noah’s wife. I never wanted that much anyway. The trajectory of our life freaked me the fuck out. I had a hard time in Noah’s circles. I had a hard time with Noah’s friends. I felt less than them and that’s complicated. Less educated, less intelligent, less motivated, less driven, less talented, less competent, less capable, less able, less worthy of respect.

It’s why I had to get out of the Valley. It was increasingly overwhelmed with people who were newly arrived and convinced of their superiority. Part of it is my bullshit. Part of it is that tech people are quite often fucking dickheads. I don’t see that being true here–people here who do tech stuff are paid like normal people so they aren’t arrogant fucks. Well, there are arrogant people here. It’s just different. The social culture is so different I really don’t understand what is going on most of the time.

I want to follow Scottish people around and see what their lives look like from the inside because I have no feckin clue.

Today is a climbing day. That will be good. We can all use the exercise. The future is coming whether we want it to or not. We have to be ready.

I want to stay in Inverness. I am scared here, but I am not as scared as I would be in the US. Scale is a very important thing. I am grateful to be in a place with gun control laws. It’s not that there are no guns. There are guns. People shoot. I know people who own and sell guns. But they are sane. They are tracked. If they engage in any antisocial behaviour they entirely lose the right to own the guns. People who have gun licenses are tracked by their car license plate and they are stopped randomly sometimes to make sure they are following every rule to the letter. If they aren’t, bam there goes their gun license. You have to be a model citizen to have the right to own a gun.

I can live with this.

I am afraid of violence because my life has been violent. I have to admit that the amount of violence I’ve experienced here has not been nearly so bad as what happened in the States. Life is not perfect anywhere. I pick this. I pick here.

My bloodline ran West until they reached the far side of the North American continent. They started in the original colonies. 3/4 of my grandparents have ancestry that arrived in first 20 years of North American settlement by British Isles folk. My people were then in California for a while. Not the 8 generations my mother claimed. We were not people who settled and put down roots very well. The way my people jumped then jumped then jumped again speaks to them not thriving in the places they picked. I have to wonder about that.

I want to thrive. I don’t want to barely survive. I am going to struggle with my guilt around that. I definitely have a piece of me that is struggling with how disloyal I will feel as I take step towards embracing being alive. He needs me to go on for the kids. I can’t do that if I feel I must demonstrate frozen horror out of loyalty.

People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime and you don’t know which until you die. What fucking bitter words those are now. I wanted him for my whole life. We don’t get to choose. Life decides for us. I loved Noah. I will always love Noah. I owe him continuing. I have children to lead. I can’t do that if I am wallowing in my pain. I have to stuff that pain into a backpack I carry around with me. I can let it out in brief moments to gasp and sob and curl around the core of myself. Then I’ll nod and put it back in the pack and I’ll keep fucking moving. I don’t really have a choice. I have less choice now than ever before.

My survival has gone from “optimal” to “mandatory”. Now Mama wants to talk. That’s nice.