Yesterday I planted. I’m not sure if I can express how happy this makes me. And miraculously, my arms hurt less than normal. Gardening is good for me.

I have less than a week before I need to have a spiel for my shrink. What do I want from her? How do I want to proceed going forward?

I have spent a lot of time over the past few days thinking that what I would like from a therapist for a while is assistance in forming a more regimented schedule. Part of my ongoing issues is that I don’t treat my body like it is worth consistent maintenance care and as a result it sometimes melts down. During the next round of breeding awful (because this shit is brutal in my body) what I want to do to get through it is figure out a way to have an “idealized healthy schedule” and get me and the rest of the family used to all the tasks involved in taking care of a body. We aren’t great at modeling this shit. We aren’t great at doing this shit… but it matters.

For example there are a bunch of things that ideally would be done daily: go for a walk, meditate, stretch; there are tasks that should be on a weekly timer: gardening is better for me than a pill and a couple of weekly dates would help a lot.

I want to figure out a better more consistent socializing schedule. I tend to go in boom and busy cycles of either doing too much or too little and it isn’t very good for me. I’d like to have several days a month where I put more effort into seeing people. I’d like to have more specifically scheduled no-plans days with my family so that we can sit in our house and stare at the wall in between all the hard work and fun we have.

I want help finding balance and figuring out what that means for me. I want to be able to talk about the nitty gritty stuff in detail and talk about how to adjust things slowly instead of going from extreme to extreme like a pendulum.

I want to spend a solid year working on EMDR for my anniversaries. I want to plan sessions around them in advance so I can do specific processing on the stuff that creeps up like a land mine over and over in predictable ways. I don’t want “Oh by the way it is my brother’s birthday” to be what I drop in the last 2 minutes of therapy before I run out crying like normal. I want to write up a lot of difficult anniversaries in advance and plan sessions for them. I need to figure out a better approach to these days. I need assistance managing that.

I’m bleeding right now so I’m pretty clearly not pregnant yet. I have about a week left of my current level of pot pills. When I go in to the dispensary again I’m going to buy 30 mg pills, which are a huge reduction from the 50mg and 100mg pills I often buy. I crept up again towards the end of the remodel. Pot is more effective for pain than ibuprofen and when I am on the daily maximum dose of ibuprofen, yeah my pot usage climbs again. But I feel like that is getting to a better place again. I want to use the 30 mg pills and try to find a routine where I take them more often. 1)Right when I wake up 2)With breakfast 3)With smoothie snack time 4)With lunch 5)With dinner. That would put me at 150mg/day which is a slight reduction from where I have been for a while but it would have a more consistent load in my body so I don’t have the spikes and valleys. If I can get this routine in place, ideally after a month or two I will lower to 20mg doses for the rest of pregnancy and I’d only be using 100mg/day. I would be really really really content with that considering all the other options I have on the table for helping with stability.

I need to get absolutely fascist that I can disrupt my sleep once maybe twice in a week and absolutely never thrice. Dance classes are too damn late at night and I hate it. What the fuck is wrong with all you night people. (I kid.)

I believe I have a permanently malleable brain. I believe that what will change how it works is: repetition, time, and new experiences. I do not believe a pill can fix me. I believe pot helps me relax enough to let my brain explore new channels of reactions instead of immediately jumping to I’VE HAD THIS EXPERIENCE BEFORE AND IT SUCKED. ALL SYSTEMS AT FULL ALERT. I don’t want more medication help beyond that slight chance to try again on processing what is happening to me.

I hope that some day I won’t need pot but I don’t know. I have a fond internal narrative about getting off pot for a while and using it again whether I need it or not when I’m old just because it is fun. If I live to be 80 I’m going to use an awful lot of drugs for fun. Why the hell not?

I imagine how funny it will be to tell stories, “Puking on dxm sure isn’t as much fun as it used to be. I think I threw my neck out retching.”

Ok, maybe it isn’t as funny to you as it will be to me. I’m ok with that.

Hell, I even wish that for a few months my therapist and I could go through a check list of shit like, “How many servings of vegetables have you eaten this week?” I want help going through all of these processes so that I can get them to the point of being automatic and in the back ground. I want help learning how to take care of myself without it being a physically painful, mentally strenuous task. The only reason it is so painful at this point is because I’m stupid about not taking care of myself and I hurt myself. I’m clever and shit.

Bodies are meant to be used. They are meant to go through a range of motion.

Hey, did I mention that my shoulder appears to be genuinely healing? The damage I did when Eldest Child was a baby is getting better, finally. In time for me to fuck myself up with another kid. Good job there, Krissy.

I spend a lot of time lately going whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy do I want another baby? They are so haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaard.

Because my children are why I wake up and go to sleep and I love them so much I feel like I will explode. And they are going to go off and have their own lives. I’m only going to get to share a fairly small slice compared to what I’d like to share. Maybe if there are more of them I will be less suffocating in my need to still be part of their lives.

Sometimes Jenny tells stories about why she is miffed at her mother for her mother’s lack of good boundaries. I cringe internally and think “Oh I’m going to be that asshole. Damnit.”

I have no illusions. I’m going to be a giant pain in the ass.

Maybe if I have more children to share the complaints about how annoying I am then somehow they will manage to put up with me between the group. I know a bunch of families where the mother outlived the father and shuttles between adult children. I could do that. I could get myself a small RV and spend a few months a year in different places visiting folks before I move on.

I spend a really unhealthy amount of time thinking about how horrific things will be for me when Noah dies. No one else can bear very much of my company. I’m hard. Even the people who love me the most can’t really handle too much time with me because I’m hard. I don’t blame them for this and I’m not angry. I’m just glad they put up with me at all. If you can only handle two or three hours in a year with me… at least you come back for those few hours. I’m grateful you think I am worth that much forbearance.

I’m sorta scared that when Noah dies I will be incapable of believing that anyone else wants to spend much time with me and I will spend the rest of my life running away from people. Sometimes I think I want to own this house until I die, maybe rent it out while I galavant around, and sometimes I think that when Noah dies I don’t want to have a tie to a single physical place. I won’t belong anywhere and I will never have a home again when he dies. He carries my home inside of him. Only the kids carry it too. The road trip was so weird. I missed Noah, that was hard. But the kids feel like home.

I want more kids because I want more people who are enculturated to think I’m normal.

Recently I feel guilty for taking the piss out of a friend. She’s really happy about the baby in her life. I’m thrilled she gets to experience the joy of having a kid to love. But this friend is one of quite a few people I knew from the bdsm community who was not real open to hearing about my kids as babies. I have developed a habit of not talking to many of these people about my kids almost at all. Ok, I write about my kids–but that’s different. I write to myself. I write to organize my thoughts. I write knowing that some people read, but I could be writing to no one at all. I don’t write to bond with someone.

Me writing at you is not an exchange. If you feel close to me and bonded, that doesn’t mean I feel the same way about you.

It doesn’t mean I don’t feel bonded with you but that comes from other stuff. I don’t get anything back from this energetic exchange except the ability to feel like I am putting burdens down. I understand me better but I don’t know what you get out of it and I don’t get better understanding of you from this process most of the time.

What matters is how I feel when we are together. If I feel like there is a long list of topics I can’t bring up because you don’t want to hear about them and I feel tremendous anxiety about trying to pretend that huge chunks of my life don’t exist so you can feel more comfortable…. that’s what I impress on. That’s what I notice. I notice that you don’t want to hear about huge chunks of my life.

It’s been hard for years that many of my friends have been hostile to hearing about my children. Many of my friends have made their contempt for my breeding quite clear. About as clear as folks have made their contempt for all “stupid mouth breathers” (which I was one until surgery recently–cheers). (To be clear: different friends are annoyed by the mouth breathing than the breeding.)  I feel wrong all the time. I feel like my choices are offensive. My manner of existing is a problem. How dare I breathe so loudly that they can hear me? I am an affront. I know.

It is very hard if someone who has made a big deal out of not wanting to know about children turns around and wants me to be supportive of their children. That’s hard. It feels incredibly invalidating. It feels erasing. It feels like… it feels like a continuation of this trend where I’m treated like shit but I’m supposed to turn around and be nice to other people because “that’s how it is supposed to be” and it doesn’t matter that I’ll never get it I have to give it.

Like how I went to Camp Everytown and had a horrible, traumatizing experience of finding out I was just about the least privileged/most traumatized person there but I was supposed to shut up and support the kids through finding out that they were in the middle of the pack.

BUT I HAVE THAT WHITE PRIVILEGE GOING FOR ME SO I SHOULD SPEND MY LIFE CONSUMED WITH THE IDEA THAT I’M JUST A PIECE OF SHIT WHO HAS NEVER EARNED ANYTHING, AMIRITE?

I’m not angry at this person at all. I feel sad.

I want to turn around and be generous. Yeah, you couldn’t listen to me but now I should be able to listen to you to model how that should work. So that maybe later you will be able to give that to someone else.

It makes me so grateful for the random neighbors who ask me about my children and who genuinely want to hear the answers. They have known my kids all their lives and they care. Even though they don’t have to. Thank you.

Pam calls me and asks about my children. Pam didn’t necessarily start out wanting a relationship with my kids per se, but she loves me so much that she has created a relationship anyway. She will talk to my kids long distance and read them stories because she wants to be supportive and part of their life.

Almost the first thing Sarah said after getting an apartment that was safe for children to visit was, “Can the kids come for a visit?”

It’s been interesting to talk to the kids recently about trying to live with Aunt Jenny and Aunt Sarah. It didn’t go so well. I was an asshole. I was rigid. I was too controlling. I got too angry about stupid things. We stopped living together because we wanted to try and preserve a relationship and we weren’t going to if we lived together. Sometimes relationships need some distance too. I’ve talked about how Sarah really doesn’t owe me forgiveness. My behavior was wrong. But Sarah has a big heart. Sarah has forgiven me. She’ll probably always have some boundaries up to make sure I don’t hurt her like that again–that’s fair and appropriate–but she loves me enough to talk to me, to spend time with me, to trust me.

D, I am not angry about hearing about your baby. I’m glad you get to have one. I’m glad you get to experience emotionally what the fuss is about. That’s a really good thing. And I just might tie your ass to a chair and make you look at pictures of my next baby. Because at this point it will be only fair.

I don’t feel like I am completely solid on what I want to say to my shrink but my arms are starting to hurt and I have a kid awake. Time to move on to a different activity.

First I’m going to sit here for a minute and go through my mental rolodex of people I love. I am blessed. I am lucky. My life is very good.

I need to write about Taylor. He said that I haven’t really and he brought it up in a way that lets me know it is time. I don’t write about people more because I’m always worried about saying shit that offends someone. I worry about revealing stuff that has been told in confidence. But if my sweet friend says, “I was thinking about it and I don’t think you’ve written about me.” Yes, I have. I wrote about you when we did the garage together. But that was years ago. I’ll do it again. It’ll be easy and fun.

Next time. I need to rest my hands.