This is the weirdest fucking pregnancy.

(Side note about swearing: recently someone [can’t remember who] pointed out that swearing is often used in place of words that would be differently offensive: such as ableism. Swearing is thus a choice to move who you are offending. That reframes whether swearing is good or not in a way that really works for me. Anyway.)

I have the feeling in my body like I had when I was marathon training. I can feel my body eating itself. My weight is staying strangely level. I’m not eating 2100 calories every day and according to the fitbit I’m burning 2600-2700 most days because I’m exercising like a fiend. I feel myself gaining muscle (which weighs more than fat) and I can feel my body shifting the eating-fat-storage around.

When I was marathon training I got used to this particular feeling where a fat deposit would start hurting and then shrinking. That’s going on right now in my body. Particularly my upper belly. The fat deposit that is over the diaphragm/stomach portion of my torso is aching in the way that usually means I’m about to have a flat stomach again. Only this is a bad time for that.

I’ve attained a flat abdomen for a few individual months of my life. Then I gorged on ice cream till that shit ended.

Being thinner is NOT A GOAL.

It’s fine if you care about losing weight. Your body is yours. I’m done with the abusive cycle of dieting and acting like my body is anything other than a mighty tool which needs CALORIES, MOTHERFUCKER.

I want to constantly be on the phone with blacksheep asking nosey/weird questions about how her body feels while exercising but she’s busier than a one legged man in a butt kicking contest.

I highly suspect that I’m going to be in perfectly good shape to run a 10k while 6 months pregnant. Like blacksheep did. At the time I told her she was bizarre. Now I feel like a huge giant terrible asshole for implying that what she did was wrong. She does what her body needs. It isn’t usually similar to what my body wants and I need to get my head out of my ass.

Goodness. There’s been a couple of times lately where I’ve had cause to do the sit-back-and-evaluate-your-parenting thing lately.

Do you know me? Do you know my kids? If you seriously thought I was abusing my kids I would hope to god you would turn me in to authorities. My children deserve that. Even if it would be traumatic for me.

I am not the best parent ever. Far from it. I’m too mercurial. I’m not consistent enough. I’m not good at facilitating what it means to be “normal” or teaching people how to fit in. There are a lot of mothering skills where I just flat fail. But I’m not sure if I do so in a way that is abusive.

I make different choices than most of the people I know who parent. It’s not because I’m better and it’s not because my children are turning out better. Neither are at all true. I know a lot of mothers who manage to juggle jobs and independent lives and their children and they do it with aplomb. They don’t need to spend this many hours a week treating being a parent like being a job with constant high effort training.

When I talk about how many hours I put into this job I’m not doing it to brag about how superior I am. I’m not superior. I’m trying to develop an honest perspective around the fact that it takes this much work for me to be good. Not great. Not the best. Good. I have to treat this as a full time job in order to not tank completely.

I am proud that I can teach myself so many things and I can instruct my kids. That doesn’t make me a better mother than someone who had a good mother and who parents from instinct in a way that is respectful, kind, and loving. I just can’t compete. That is more healthy. That is better. But I try to convince myself that if a piece of shit can improve… that’s something.

Ok. Now it’s a new adventure. I just signed the kids up for a home school charter school. I’m still going to be the primary teacher, but they will have oversight from someone other than me. Accountability to someone other than me. Oh it sounds glorious.