Author Archives: Krissy Gibbs

About Krissy Gibbs

Just your average hippy white trash incest survivor stay at home mom. Is there an average for us? No? Oh well.

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I am not being fair. I am conflating my feelings about a lot of different people and situations and I am bordering on cruelty. I don’t mean in the “everything is all my fault because I suck” way.

When I rant ad nauseum about chosen family letting me down that is taken in very general ways and implies things about people who are not in the group I mean to be speaking about.

I have so many conflicting feelings about the Godmamas. I did not behave entirely, totally honorably there. I liked one of them and I grudgingly, barely tolerated the other. I judged their relationship in ways that were none of my business. As a result the one I didn’t like very much quite deliberately got in between me and my friend. I asked to support M after the head injury and her wife told me she would let me know when that was ok. Then when I contacted M after a while she was very upset I had left her alone. But I did behave in less than supportive ways towards their marriage and it was fair that M’s wife didn’t like me very much. She wanted me to treat her like an authority and respect her despite her having beliefs that were very counter to mine and her being a lot younger than me with very little relevant life experience or education on the topics she wanted to tell me how to manage. I was a dick about it. I don’t think I am blameless. But other than accepting direction that really didn’t work for me or pushing past boundaries that were put up I’m not sure I could have done more.

When I’m ranting about chosen family I am talking about the various people who told me that they wanted to be my mothers or fathers. There were more than a few of them. For a while I collected Daddys. My leather mom wanted me to do things for her and show up for her events and make her feel special. On holidays or in times of crisis she had real children to take care of and I was supposed to go manage my own life. Dad explicitly told me that he wanted to be in my life but I couldn’t ever expect him to do anything to help me because he has biological children to support. When he needs money he comes knocking on my door. To the tune of tens of thousands of dollars and many requests.

I’m talking about people in the poly community who told me I was family and then when I stopped fucking them they never called me again.

I’m talking about Sarah. So. So. So. So much about Sarah. My baggage around Sarah could fill several jumbo jets. I feel like an exploited resource. I feel like my help came with strings of expecting something back from her and that is fucked up of me.

I can’t even begin to parse the ways my expectations of Pam have been inappropriate. I just can’t right now.

I showed up in Scotland with so much pain. I feel full of rage and disappointment and distrust. It’s not a good head space for dealing with Jenny. She has tried to help in the ways she perceives me asking for help while not fully understanding the intricacies of what that means. She has misspoken. She has apologized.

I have not been able to accept that apology nor have I been able to be there for her. I feel like I have been a user. I have felt judged and I have done a fair bit of being vicious in my head. I have mostly contained that viciousness in my head, but not perfectly. I can be so mean.

I am upset about a lot of people and I am taking it all out on Jenny. That is horribly unfair on a lot of levels.

I can go through our history and point out times when I felt belittled by things she said. Did she intend to belittle me? Did she intend to insult me? Did she feel negatively in her head?

Didn’t matter. I felt it. I reacted as if that was her point. I am assigning her motive and intent when I have no way of knowing what is going on with her. I know that she fairly regularly puts her foot in her mouth and says things in ways she doesn’t mean. When she does this in my direction I act like it is a vicious attack and totally intentional even though I see it as a pattern in her entire life so it clearly can’t be about me.

But I make everything about me. I act like everyone is mean to me so that I can be a victim of everything and everyone.

That’s…. really shitty and unfair.

I think I project my dislike of myself onto other people and then get angry with them and act like I should cut them off for being mean to me. I want to get chances from other people but I very much act like other people don’t deserve grace or forgiveness. I am selfish and cruel to people who have done quite a bit to show love for me.

For all that Jenny’s words sometimes… definitely lack grace and can feel very hurtful her actions aren’t vicious. When I hurt myself trying to help Sarah years ago she showed up to help me. When I needed support after the suicides in my family she showed up. When I have directly asked her for help with almost anything… she showed up. She did start out judging me when she didn’t know me and over the years she has learned about alternative lifestyles and she has been supportive of my behavior. She offered to throw me a party in celebration of me hitting a three digit body count. That’s… not exactly the action of someone who thinks I am bad for doing that.

But I judge her so harshly. I assume so many negative things about her intentions and her motivations and that sucks so bad.

I can think of years of times when I have over reacted to things she has said and I have been nasty in response to feeling hurt. In the vast majority of the times I can remember being hurt by her words she has apologized.

She’s spent a lot of fucking time apologizing to me and I don’t act like that matters very much compared to my towering feelings of rage because how dare she offend me.

I feel like such an asshole.

I am not great at setting boundaries with her. That’s a fact. I have been thinking that it is kind of like sexual boundaries with Noah. I don’t set them until I explode with rage and act out in ways that hurt him very badly. I mean, I tried to set them but I wasn’t very clear and I wasn’t direct and I hurt him.

Given how much time I spent talking about wanting and needing a break from my kids it doesn’t seem like a cruel and vicious attack that Jenny pushes me to send them to school. I absolutely act like I need to martyr myself to my children and she pushes back on that idea with force. I act like I need to martyr myself to bullshit repetitive tasks that get on my nerves and she pushes me to consider that I don’t have to do that. And I get really angry with her.

Because being a martyr to my children and boring tasks is part of my core identity? Then I get mad at people who don’t affirm that view. That fucking sucks.

That was where I got to on day one of trying to process this. Now it is the start of day two. I spent yesterday arguing with people I used to respect about UBI and how to survive the pandemic and I got told how stupid and ignorant I am. I’m waking up in a bad fucking mood.

How can I be both a martyr to my children and a big fat meanie pants who expects so much work out of them that other people gasp and tell me that it borders on cruelty? (Uhhhh I have cleared my chores expectations with experts because I am a fucking coward.) Other people think it isn’t worth their time or effort to teach kids how to do things because it is easier to just do it themselves and therefore they think that how I raise my kids sounds super high effort and not worth it.

But my Middle Child (9 years old) made dinner last night. She made a green salad, fried potatoes with leeks, and venison with spring onions. Then she thought it would be good with a wine sauce so Noah talked her through how to do that.

I think the effort I put into teaching my children skills is paying off very much!

Sure, an adult stood nearby the whole time to say things like “this is when you should seasoning, what herbs and spices do you think would go well with this?” and “you need to scrape the bottom of the pan pretty hard or you will end up with a burned layer that will taste bad” and “let’s talk about how to make a sauce…”. But she did the work. We are still around for supervision and advice. My nearly 12 year old Eldest Child does not need such advice or supervision anymore. Sometimes I feel nervous and I stay in the room anyway and keep my mouth shut… but that kid is more competent at cooking than I was at 21. I didn’t have anyone around to teach me.

My kids know with surprising sensitivity the difference between a well swept floor and a crappily swept floor. They know what a good mop job looks like and they can critique the hell out of someone who does a bad job (i.e. their sibling).

They can go through whole maths curriculum books and ask the occasional question and otherwise do the work correctly 90% of the time.

They can go to foreign countries and plop down and talk to people and have interesting conversations. They are getting better and better at asking questions instead of treating themselves as a traveling monologue show. They are curious about people and they are learning how that goes.

They are currently doing a grid layout of the yard for science and looking up what plants we have so that they know what to weed in the future. They are digging a pond (sometimes with whining) because they want our yard to have one. (This was their project suggestion!)

Their unit project is coming along nicely. We are working on it fewer hours a week at this point because with the pandemic anxiety, frankly we are all super exhausted and we needed to trim our academic hours a lot and that’s ok. They have made sample meal plans–checked what that means against the jobs they gave their families, checked it against the dietary needs of the families (they really like giving the people in their families disabilities and food allergies?) and had to start over from scratch with an entirely new understanding of how calories and carbohydrates play in people’s lives. They understand what insurance is and how to use it. They have learned a lot about mortgages. They are having to talk through interpersonal dynamics around family layout in order to explain/justify how things would work in their house.

In short, they are learning what it means to be a grown up and they are doing it at fairly high speed. I am really impressed with how much they have learned in a short period of time. This project covers maths and nutrition and handwriting and typing and internet research as a skill. Hell, one kid is having to learn the layout of a town in the middle of Australia because that’s where she wanted to put her family and that means she’s learning about central Australia’s supply chain and what it means for people who live there and where the kids in the family are likely to go to college.

I feel pretty deeply offended by the idea that my way of raising someone will retard them. Do you know what is coolest about all this learning? Less and less of it is hands-on for me. I sit nearby and I answer questions and I give suggestions about where they can go to find their own answers. I critique work and explain why it isn’t the solution to the problem they were trying to solve and I tell them to start over from scratch over and over and over again.

But sure, let’s go with the idea that she just meant that my kids lack the social skills to deal with the school environment because they have been blessed with not having to deal with bullies.

I am sure that there are adults in this world who have to deal with school-yard level bullies. I have had many jobs. Noah has had many jobs. Most of the people we know work. I have not had the experience as an adult that primary-school-type-bullying is a thing that extends beyond that age group. Are there some stilted people in the world who try it? Sure, of course. But you can route around them once you leave school. That’s the important part. In all of life there is one period of time where you are locked in a room with bullies and told to not inconvenience adults with complaining about it. Why is that socialization desireable or something to tell me my children must acquire? Why is that something to bring up in nearly every conversation to say that my kids must learn it? Why? Because it is what you experienced? Because it is what you choose for your child?

I’m not teaching my kids to follow your religion why would I pick teaching my children that an artificial education environment is mandatory?

I mean… I actually support public school quite a bit. And if I had to work I would help my kids work through how to survive in that environment. It’s not that I don’t understand that sometimes it is unavoidable. I don’t think everyone has the correct personality or education to home school! I think schools must exist! I think my kids are privileged (insert vaguely negatively-judgemental word because despite making my kids rich I still have negative feelings about the rich) who get to avoid a major trauma that is inflicted on the vast majority of “normal” people.

There is no fair.

My Middle Child is quick to tell me how unfair it is that she has to do chores because when she went to school almost no one in her class had any chores at all and they mostly got more allowance than her and had almost no limitations on screen time when they got home!

I don’t give a flying fuck.

Everyone gets to parent how they can afford and how they see fit.

I can afford a lot of time and energy spent on my kids. Do I spend a lot of money on them compared to average? Well they have a lot of learning materials. They have gotten to travel a lot. They eat very well per my definition of eating well. Do they have a lot of toys? Not really. More toys = more shit for me to clean up and feel angry about. Do they have fancy clothes? hahahahahahahaha they are still wearing third-hand hand-me-downs from the kid down the street in Fremont along with a few cheap replacement items from when we traveled. Do they have expensive electronics? Well, we did upgrade to a nice desktop unit that is shared by the whole family when the hand-me-down 12 year old laptop stopped being able to upgrade to modern operating systems and could no longer run necessary programs. The other kid is still on one of Noah’s old work laptops from several jobs ago. They do technically have phones, one has an old phone of mine where the battery dies in less than 24 hours and the other kid has a phone that was new about five years ago. Neither kid has turned on one of these phones since we stopped traveling because we have our paper books now and they don’t need them. These phones were always about being reading devices…

So they are definitely part of the modern world but they are not tremendously spoilt in the “having stuff” department. They got mocked at school for how out of date their stuff is. I don’t give a shit. I’m from Silicon Valley. I’m not impressed with trying to keep up with the technical standards of anyone because I deeply understand how messed up that process is.

I don’t think 7 year olds should walk around with phones. I think the city we walk around in is about as safe of an environment as can exist and children need to be able to be away from the control of their parents. My kids go on walks and runs without me. They know when to be home and they bloody well make it back in time.

If the school stuff was being pushed because there was the perception that I need a break… well… there are lots of more creative ways to manage that.

Slowing down to the pace of this place and no longer having a bunch of friends I feel like I “should” be seeing has done a lot to lower my ambient anxiety. That is a break by itself. In exchange for the cats (which apparently belong to the kids and not to me) each older kid does 5 hours of babysitting a week so that I now have a reasonable amount of time kid-free. I did join hook-you-up-with-a-babysitter-sites when I moved here. Guess what I got? The privilege of paying for a matching service and a chance to send emails to lots of people who didn’t respond. Basically my entire experience of searching for childcare was duplicated directly from California. Fucking cheers.

But between the big kids helping with the toddler and Noah not having a full time job… I’m exercising independently more. I have more time to vegetate. I’m getting a lot of stuff done that makes me happy. The big kids are pretty close to where I always wanted them to be on independence for school work. When the big kids faff about and refuse to get their chores done when I ask they get to do fuck tons of extra chores until I’m not annoyed anymore and I get way more down time.

I am taking more of a break. And it didn’t require school. So pushing school as the answer to my problems does not feel like a very honest explanation.

So saying now that you never meant medically retarded you meant school dynamics would be hard and you were just trying to help me get a break… feels like gaslighting.

Breakfast is ready and the day must begin. I will come back to this. I need to figure out what the fuck I am doing with this topic in my brain. I need to fully process this so I can decide how I am moving forward. I need to separate how upset I am about this topic from how upset I am about everything else in the world and I’m totally failing by keeping it in my head.

Judgment and safety

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It’s not that I can’t handle anyone judging me. I am well aware that I have been hate followed for over a decade and people take great delight in being nasty about me on troll sites. (I found it and read the conversation once then decided I didn’t need that toxicity in my life.) If you are a loser who needs to read about the lives of strangers just to be mean about them having problems… well that’s on you.

Writing has been my big outlet for years. It is how I organize my thoughts. How I cope with my feelings. How I process things that are too big to get my head around in other ways. I also have done it in part because I wanted specific people to be able to know me in ways that our in -person lives don’t allow for because there literally isn’t time available to share this much speech.

But then I noticed the cracks in the system. You have a personality disorder. Your children are retarded. I wouldn’t have had time to see you anyway.

I’m not going to explain all the context of those statements. But they are… continuing to weigh heavy on my heart and I am aware that I need to get over the illusion that people respect me and love me and think of me like family.

People think I am broken and wrecking my kids and they want to spend time with their real families. Ok. That all makes sense. But I need to stop clinging to the illusion that I am important to you. I am occasionally convenient or amusing or good to get work from or I let you express things that other people in your life don’t want to hear.

Those things aren’t bad. They have value. But I need to stop thinking they have enough value to balance out all the downsides.

I know I am a hypocrite. I judge the shit out of people. I judge whether their actions line up with their professed values. I scorekeep what people claim they are going to do and then I make tally marks about how often they follow through.

I’m not saying that it’s a great thing. It isn’t.

In the past I have absolutely said savagely hurtful things to people as I shared my judgment about their life. At this point, if I feel like I am going to say things that hurt people because I cannot contain my judgment… I think it is better to end the relationship because people don’t want to hear my poison.

I have spent years looking to a tripod for support only to find that all of the legs have wood rot.

I feel like it is my fault. I feel like I have been stupid.

Nobody owes me anything. I need to stop listening to the lie that people will choose to be there for me even though they don’t have to. People will be there for me sporadically. Randomly. When they feel like it. That has to be ok.

I moved partially to sever my own entitlement and expectations. I was wrong to have expectations of people. I know I was wrong.

It makes me really scared for the future. Will I make friends here? How will I become part of the community? Will I ever trust people? I don’t know. I feel so wounded. I feel like depending on people has been a massively unwise undertaking in my life.

If I am open to anyone showing up or not as they see fit I do fine. People do show up. It’s not that I was without friends or connections or support. But it’s rarely the people who make big promises. It’s rarely the people who told me that they would be there forever and ever. Those people… had better things to do.

Or maybe they are ok with being there. But I have to accept that they feel contempt towards me. Will they admit that they feel contempt? Of course not. I will just have to accept that our relationship originated in them thinking I was stupid and slutty and now they think it is my fault that my children are retarded.

I can no longer deny that I see great contempt there.

I can’t model for my children that it is ok for “friends” to talk to you like that. I might as well keep my mother in my life.

Judgement and progress report

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Why do I have such an intense horror of being judgmental? I don’t fully understand that horror in myself. I’ve been judging intensely lately. I backed out of an online social community because of one person. Because I judge her like fuck and I can’t be part of a group that tolerates that kind of behavior. In this case she spends a lot of time being a judgy bitch and bragging about all that she does for other people… but in reality she sits in her apartment with her cats on the internet most of the time doing nothing. I don’t think I would care so much about her bullshit only she spends a tremendous amount of time talking about how much she does for her niblings, who are in a highly abusive situation in another country. Only when she has the opportunity to do something for them… she picks her holidays to Asia (and the Olympics!) and tickets to Hamilton over staying with the kids and helping them deal with nightmarishly hard problems. Now she wants lots of sympathy because Hamilton and the Olympics were cancelled and it isn’t fair that she doesn’t get to go. Oh and she wants to be told how sad it is for her that the kids call her crying because they wish she was there helping them.

I can’t say a single nice thing to her so… I’m saying nothing at all anywhere that she hangs out.

She was the last person to tell me that I am fucking up my kids. Her reasoning? Because I don’t guilt trip them enough for normal kid behavior so they are going to have terrible lives and it will be all my fault.

Every single person who has told me that I am going to fuck up my kids, wreck their lives, or retard them has been spectacularly unqualified to evaluate such a metric and the people who are qualified to evaluate children think my kids are having a charmed, fabulous life.

It’s not just that my friends tell me what I want to hear. Professionals who spend their lives evaluating children think my kids are doing well. Judgy non-professionals who don’t know what they are talking about like to tell me how shitty I’m doing. Awesome.

Is that about me or them?

The school started off telling me that my kids weren’t doing so hot academically. Then it turned out that they have shitty handwriting but they are otherwise doing well. Do they handle other children hitting them well? No, they don’t. I’m not sure that is a bad sign about them. I cannot count how many people are traumatized by the school experience. It’s not that my kids suck. It’s that schools are brutal and unhelpful about bullying.

The home education movement here in Scotland is growing by leaps and bounds. The two primary reasons people pull their kids out of school: the schools won’t help children with special needs or bullying. It’s not just my family thank you very much.

But sure, the problem is that I’m wrecking my kids by not just putting them in school and telling them to figure it out on their own.

K.

Yesterday the kids and I walked in the woods for three hours. It was really cool. The only downside? We should be wearing fucking hiking boots, not Wellies.

Oh! Yesterday was a milestone day! The cats were outside for a long time. The cat who is very people-attached was very scared and did not stay out long. The cat who is less people-attached had a great time and was out for hours and hours. I don’t think she went farther than our garden but it was cute watching her out the window.

The kids made cupcakes on their own. They also made a pretty good ganache to go on top.

I have gained 20 lbs since arriving in Scotland. That was not the direction I intended to go with that. Hahahaha. Even with all this exercise. I am now well above my previous lifetime maximum, even while pregnant. I think maybe I could do with less sugar. Maybe it is the calories from alcohol. Who knows.

My alcohol consumption still feels high to me and it still falls well below the line where my doctor would be concerned. Perspective is a funny thing.

My kids now think 17 degrees is oppressively hot. That’s 62F. We have acclimated.

Still not sleeping well.

Today’s garden task is apparently to work on constructing the stairs up to the front garden area next to the driveway. The kids are feeling a wee bit bored of working on digging the pond. I’ve started a bunch of seeds, we’ll see how they go. I should probably take stuff from the house to the polytunnel. At this point I think the tunnel is hotter than the house. I have high hopes for my tomatoes.

I think my watch has charged enough. I am out of excuses for sitting still. Blurgh. I’m sore. I’m tired. I don’t really want to be productive. But I want these things done and if I don’t move… no one else in the house will. Sigh. I feel like I am the motor.

I wonder if it will take a full year

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Settling into the house is a process. There are still books in boxes and closets because they can’t be on proper shelves. We are still acquiring things for baking and cooking because we haven’t gotten our full repertoire replaced yet. I’m still getting home schooling supplies because I hadn’t anticipated continuing to home school and so that wasn’t an early priority. I’m having to reimagine pieces of the house/property because we are using it more and differently than I thought we would when we first bought it. This is mixed. I’m glad I haven’t started painting at all.

Given how many things are still breaking in the house I am so glad I haven’t started painting. Looks like the ceiling in the kitchen and the dining room will have to come down because there are so many plumbing problems with the upstairs and we have tried all the second (first?) floor fixes that can be done and we still have massive leaks that are causing damage to the drywall. Plasterboard? Language is hard. So that’s exciting. And expensive. And inconvenient with lockdown.

I’m still in that existential exhaustion phase. It is good and bad that I can’t be making friends at this point. This Sunday is the usual last frost date for my gardening region. I’m going to start some seeds this week. Saturday is supposed to get down to 1 overnight. This week the high is 16. That’s feeling so balmy over here.

I have a lot of dirt to move around. Seedling soil. Top soil to put on top of where the herb garden is going to go. But I’m tired. It is going to take three or four weeks to dig the pond at the rate we are going. It may take all summer for me to finish the stairs I am putting into the hill in the front of the house. I am doing a few hours a week on each project. And by “a few hours” I mean two or three. I am doing so many different things that I am not focusing hard on any one thing.

I am baking a lot. Cooking is taking up a lot of time. Cleaning the kitchen is my largest time sink. Rhubarb crumble is becoming a weekly thing as we get big bunches from the veg box. I had no idea I would like it so much. I’m making cinnamon everything because I don’t like the store bought versions here. I make stuff that tastes more American.

I’m being a pill because one of my friends teased me and said she has never seen me make anything other than macaroni and cheese. She didn’t think I could cook; she thought I had Noah do all of it. This is like when the kids made a comment a few years ago about how only Noah knew how to cook because I was in the middle of a huge project and I hadn’t cooked in months. If you only come over on days when I am working 10-12 hours a day on a project no you don’t see me cook.

So because I am an insecure nitwit my cooking is getting elaborate and intense. I cook a lot of vegetables. I am elaborate with my seasoning. I am doing things that take many steps and multiple hours. Why? Because that way I prove that I am not just a user taking advantage of Noah. Also because he and I cook very differently and I appreciate the variety in diet.

Not long ago I heard the term “flexitarian” to refer to people trying to use fewer animal products in food. We are not vegan (or even very close) but it’s a process. Cooking vegetables and making them taste good is harder than just doing meat and starch.

Also baking. Lots of baking. I am doing my part to fatten the curve.

I feel like balancing everyone’s needs will always be a process. Different people change what they need as time goes by and adapting and figuring out what is reasonable and what is possible and what we can actually sustain is ever shifting. As soon as I think we have a pattern we blink and everything changes.

I’m taking this isolation period as a good time to try to remove sources of stress in my life. It’s a process. But I have three children. So I will always have stress. ha.

I’m really struggling with what I can write about going forward. If I write about my difficult moments or issues then people will be cruel. I used to accept that as the cost of doing business. These days… I don’t feel the same way. If people are going to be cruel I can just retreat into the positive family experience I am creating in my house. I no longer have any need to have any desperate need to have people in my life at the price of being put down. I’m not desperate. That’s a nice feeling.

But people are cruel. So what can I write about.

Hanging sadness

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I don’t think I am alone. I suspect this feeling is one of the most common feelings in the entire world right now. I am sad. I am scared. So many families are hurting and my heart aches for them.

I am not keeping as current with the news. I am not trying to track what is going on locally. I am putting my head down leaning into the storm. I haven’t responded to emails in a while. I have several from early March I haven’t been able to bring myself to answer and many more from more recently.

I’m spending almost all of my attention on the kids. In their memory this will probably be a bittersweet time. Every day is tinged with anxiety and sadness–people are dying en masse all over the world from one illness. But we are turned inward and we are loving on each other as much as we can.

Yesterday we went on a hike for the first time in a while. We got all the way into the woods and we got off the hiking trail for a while and clambered over moss covered logs and observed still pools hiding under rocks. It was like visiting a fairy story only the kids said, “Now I feel at home.” To complement the day we had some Maruchan at one meal and white chocolate mousse tea with another meal. It was a day brimming with home feeling.

The unit project is going along swimmingly. I am glad I didn’t already put an end date on it because this is going to take us a long time. The kids are learning so much about how complicated and expensive life is. Eldest Child thought her family budget was complete if she knew about the mortgage payment and grocery costs and gardening expenses. Then I explained about all the other things that must be paid for every month. And your household has six children! (Four parents in the house.) What about clothing and school expenses and toys and…

They are learning a lot about insurance and saving and what things have to be part of owning a car. Middle Child thought it would be perfectly reasonable to expect the twenty year old eldest child in her family to perform full time childcare for the three youngest children in the family for Aus$100 every month. Ha ha, no. That’s pretty much slavery, kiddo. This is quite an education for all concerned.

We are learning tons of skills and how our expectations for the future will have to shift.

We are cooking so very much. I am cooking more than usual. A buddy said, “What are you cooking? You only know how to make stuff like macaroni and cheese, right?” I wanted to smack her. And call her names. And stick my tongue out at her.

This week I made braised red cabbage with apples and broad beans and leeks and carrots and onions. There was a soup with beets and turnips and carrots and leeks and venison sausage. I made a rhubarb crumble with dairy free custard. An Eton mess cake. A sweet potato puree with carrots. A few curries including a saag with paneer and red cabbage. The veg box is somewhat overwhelming in the intensity of veg it requires us to eat. Youngest Child is nearly on a veg strike. It’s normal but gosh it’s getting old. Our meat consumption is going down and our veg consumption is going up.

I’m really glad we got the cats. Stormy tolerates me and prefers cuddling with the kids. Fluffy is my shoulder kitty. As in she rides around on my shoulders while I do things. I read about that in books but I have never before seen it in real life. It’s quite an experience. She’s bigger than Puff ever was and she is likely to keep growing. We think they will be a year old in July. These are going to be giant cats. Fluffy sleeps with me most of the night and she snuggles me during the day. I feel very lucky that she likes me so much.

And now I need to get up to start the day.

Drifting

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Hi. It’s been a while. Things here continue. Tomorrow we go back to doing school work after a period off. We have been getting chores done in the house and trying to manage setting up new routines around dealing with quarantine.

I am intensely aware that I am not one of the people who are suffering the most in this pandemic. There are people who are desperately ill and doctors who have to live with making life or death choices for patients. There are store clerks and delivery people who have to deal with the public all day long. There are people who work essential jobs in shipping, construction, and utilities.

I’m… I’m so fucking privileged it makes me sick. So few people get this safety. I feel like my entire life is an over pouring of survivors guilt. I shouldn’t have this safety if other people can’t have it.

The news stories about India are absolutely gutting me. There are so many people suffering. There is literally nothing I can do. But I wish I could. I am so small. I have so little to offer. The things I have to say and do in this life won’t impact very many people. I have done that on purpose.

Small fish in a small pond. It is more true than ever. I worked very hard at that.

I feel like there was a rush of contact with people and now I am struggling with feeling like I can’t maintain it. I feel so sad. I’m not sleeping well. I stay up absurdly late reading new articles and crying. It’s not helping.

I logged off of one of the forums that I have been on a lot for a couple of years. I deleted my access. One of the women in that forum is currently the nastiest person in my life and given that I am doing a fair bit to cut down on contact with people who speak poorly to me, about me, or about my children… that internet person needs to go from my life. I have no sunk cost fallacy going on with online forums.

I feel like things in the house and the yard happen in waves. There’s a burst of activity then the slow receding clean up from the project. I always wonder if I will hit a point where the projects feel… less disruptive? Less like an imposition to daily life?

We are resuming the unit project tomorrow. I’m looking forward to that. It’s neat seeing what the kids come up with.

I feel so small and so unimportant. And like I am insulated and protected and safe. Those things don’t even conflict. Being unimportant is a lot of why I can be insulated and safe.

Our lockdown cooking is pretty epic. I’ve been cooking mass quantities of veg so that lunches are just reheating. The garden is coming along. Everything is blooming and putting out shoots and flowers. There are a lot of different kinds of daffodils in our yard. The tulips are sprouting. I’m slightly annoyed that it isn’t raining a touch more often–I have to water the new plants! What the heck!

I just want to sleep and stop feeling sick to my stomach. Is that too much to ask?

I should probably take a break.

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I have moved my center of social media activity to different places and I think it is stupid. I’m getting really frustrated with a few people and situations. That means I should stop going there because I want to go off on people.

I am in a very mixed place with people at the moment in general. I’m talking to a few neighbors through texts or emails and long distance folks are emailing. I’m trying to be chipper and upbeat. In my head I am failing. I am cranky and irritable and frustrated and I want to scream.

I was pretty sick last week so we were in isolation before the lock down. Everything is on hold indefinitely. I feel like I need to hurry but I’m not sure towards what.

Over 17,000 dead. Almost 400,000 confirmed cases. Some folks are focusing on the country by country numbers. I can’t. This is global. It’s in 192 countries. The death rate is 4.39%. It’s slowly climbing. If we are very lucky we will see a turn in the tide in a month or so, but who knows.

Who knows. I should stop talking to people so much. I’m feeling so much frustration with people.

Lots of people walking past my house. That’s bothering me. I know people are allowed to go exercise but it’s… it feels weird.

This is going to be a very rough spring.

Bubbling with excitement

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I get to start training tomorrow. I have a plan in place through October of 2021. That comforts me in ways I can’t properly express. I know how I will get stronger. I have done more in the past. I trust me so much to do this again (barring future massive injury…) and that’s a glorious feeling.

Today we started a bunch of seeds. They are in the boiler room because that is always the warmest room in the house and the seeds need heat to germinate.

I figured out where to get top soil for the most reasonable price. This is good. I think I can have some in a bit over a week which is wildly convenient.

The bookshelf is coming along! The guys are coming back on Monday and they will be here all next week. I will see visible progress by the end of the week. They will sand the rough wood flat part just enough to keep us from getting splinters and possibly add lacquer.

Sleep. Morning comes early and I get to run.

You can only have so many priorities.

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I promised Noah I wouldn’t plant in the ground nor buy paint for a year. I have six months to go.

So I’m going to start running again. The doctors here are giving me the side eye about how much weight has creeped on, and frankly given that we don’t have a car… the better of shape I am in the better. I do want to wear my clothes but I’m going to eat any/everything I want to eat in this process so who knows what will happen. I have my schedule on my calendar. It is nice knowing that I have done this before and even with the surgery in December I am starting from a much better place than last time. Maybe I will complete the next marathon in less than 6 hours? A girl can hope. And train. That would be 45 minutes faster than last time. That’s a big fucking jump. At least the air quality will be better…

I have been looking for a dog. The only thing I’ve seen that could be a possibility so far is buying a puppy and that seems like it is supporting puppy mills so I haven’t. Hrm.

It’s not digging in the ground if I go get bags of dirt and dump them in cardboard boxes. It’s cheating and I can live with that. I have seeds. Today I am going to get a bunch of them started. We are almost done shaving down the tree cuttings so we can use them as garden supports and fencing guides. Woo.

We are acclimated to the weather enough that 6C means we don’t wear coats for a lot of outdoor activity. That’s different. Our yard is somewhat sheltered from the wind so if we are doing active gardening work a light sweater is plenty.

The kids and I are practicing going up big hills/small mountains on our bikes. It’s improving.

I’m doing a lot more baking. That is going well.

Ack, food is here

I can only keep so many streaks going at once.

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  • Running practice
  • Step count
  • Floors climbed
  • Duolingo practice
  • Making my bed
  • Washing my face and putting on lotion
  • Reading with the kids before bed
  • Having conversations with friends
  • Blogging in a steady way
  • Being “inspirational” about getting everyone in the house to be consistent with chores
  • Cooking
  • Sleep hygiene
  • Cleaning my bathroom
  • Reading new-to-me books
  • Days without time wasting internet
  • Gardening
  • Making art
  • Morning snuggle with the kids
  • Brushing the cats’ fur
  • Drinking All The Water
  • Stretching
  • Updating my financial tracker
  • Avoiding excess sugar
  • Baking (a bunch of this is bread lately…)
  • Being consistent about witchy stuff

I’m tired just looking at that. No, a bullet journal is not the solution. Apparently I don’t like OmniFocus very much. I’m out of focus.

I have approximately five minutes…

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Then I need to go take the bread out of the oven and start soup for supper.

I’m thinking really a lot about how I want to structure my goals over the next few years. Because I won’t talk about this in front of my kids, here I will admit: I want to lose weight. I will not, however, go on a diet. I don’t want to lose weight because I think I look better I want to lose weight because I can’t wear my best clothes and that is pissing me off. I don’t want to spend the money on larger replacements. To that end I want to set the goal: run another marathon when I turn 40. That gives me 18 months of training time. I need to do this independent of the kids running with me. If I do it based on everyone feeling healthy enough I won’t do it.

Fuck diets. Yay running. I think running around this town will be a proper treat. I should figure out a realistic schedule for that, but I don’t have time this entry.

I want to paint the interior of the house starting in September. I have six months to plan. I think the interior paint job is going to take over a year. Each room will take a minimum of a month. That’s pretty fucking daunting, yo. I need to start sketching on that.

I have a perty new polytunnel. I want to grow tomatoes even if I’m not supposed to plant in the ground. Home grown tomatoes taste so much better it isn’t funny. Also I am allowed to work on hard scaping….

Shit. I had less time than I thought. Toodles.

PS: I can’t wait to turn 40.

The thing about sand castles… you can’t live in them.

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This is the chapter I couldn’t write in November for Part 2 for the kids.

Occasionally people will ask me why I am so focused on friendships. Why do I pursue them with such vigor and to the point of my detriment. Because I am both trying to replace and replicate family relationships. Because without my friendships, for many years, I felt like I had nothing. As much as my romantic partnerships have tried to form “family” feelings with me… I’ve always been deeply aware that they could end at any time. I am tremendously aware that I am lacking in many ways and even with Noah I am always kind of holding my breath waiting for someone to leave me. But my friendships lasted through so many romantic relationships. They had more staying power. What was the price?

I spent many years talking about the tripod of women who supported me and made me feel like I could keep going through anything. In order to do that I had to be in an awful lot of denial. I had to do a lot of pretending problems weren’t happening.

All of those relationships are in a state of collapse. It is hard for me to wrestle with how much of it is “my fault”, how much of it was ever in my control, and how much it was inevitable if I ever developed a higher level of self love.

Sarah I’ve been writing about for quite some time. Sarah used the shit out of me and made big promises and didn’t live up to them. When I got angry she would tell me that I have a personality disorder. She had almost ten years of using me to partially fund her vacations. She literally took money from me (intended as food money for the household) and used it to go visit her sister. She said she would be there to do the hard work of raising children. She lied up one side and down the other. Instead she took from me until she wrung me dry and then I was the problem because why did I have these outrageous expectations of her–it wasn’t her job to support me. No. It wasn’t your job. But you told me you would do it because I did so much to support you.

Pam has always been in my life in flighty hit-or-miss ways. I spent over a decade dropping anything I was doing (at work, at school, with friends, with people I was dating…) when she wanted attention because “she only had a few minutes to spare in between her exciting life.” I always felt honored she wanted to know me. I was the only person in her life who was supportive of some aspects of her behavior and she wanted access to that support 100% on her own timeline. The couple of years when she consistently came over to our house in Fremont? That happened because she was otherwise an around the clock care giver for her elderly grandmother and she wanted a break and no one else had that kind of time available to spend with her. I loved seeing her! Don’t get me wrong! I appreciated all of the time she chose to share with me. But I can no longer pretend it was ever about my needs–I was there for her when she wanted me to be. We were supposed to go see her in December. We didn’t go because the flights were going to be over $5,000 and right now I just don’t have that going spare. After the fact she said, “It was a good thing you didn’t come to Taiwan because it turns out I wouldn’t have been able to spend any time with you.” I feel utterly gutted. I am glad she sees that she wouldn’t have spent time with me, at least she is that self aware. I am glad that I now know that I will never ever prioritize going to see her like that because if I try to ask for time on my own schedule I can go fuck myself.

And I have not been writing about Jenny. That’s been very much on purpose. If I look back in time… I have chased Jenny from the beginning. When we met I basically begged her to be my friend. I always called her. I asked to come over. I offered her a chance to go swimming in my pool. (It wasn’t my pool, but I lived in a house that had a pool and she was a competitive swimmer.) She thought I was super rude because I thought she was judgmental but she described me as being a stupid slut and she thought that was totally ok. Through high school I chased her. Through college I chased her. After college I chased her into hobbies and blogging and social groups.

I have been chasing Jenny and begging her to be my friend for most of my life. She was the person I went to when my dad and my brother both killed themselves. I thought that meant she was there for me. I never wanted to look at what that meant I had to put up with.

I wrote about her when I first arrived here in Scotland. I said she was a ride or die friend who was doing so much for me. All of the stuff she so thoughtfully provided to ease our transition? Was stuff she didn’t want anymore but she didn’t want to deal with doing the work to donate it without owning a car. Most of it was broken or has broken since. She was here when one of the glasses finished shattering. She said, “It’s ok I won’t be mad at you.”

She said that my children are retarded. She said that anyone who is home schooled is going to end up retarded–she doesn’t mean that in “the mean way” she means it in “the medical way”. So she constantly tells me that I have to make my kids go to school so that I can stop fucking them up.

She has almost zero Scottish friends. Her friends here are all American Ex-pats but she constantly tells me all of the things I am doing wrong and why I have to change in order to assimilate. SHE HASN’T ASSIMILATED. But she is right and I am wrong and I need to stop being like me. You know how chatty and sociable and outgoing I am? That’s wrong and I need to stop it. Whatever I am doing that gets people to open up to me is wrong and I need to stop it.

I don’t think Jenny actually likes me very much. Hanging out with her makes me feel terrible about myself. I leave visits with her and feel like I want to cry and cut myself. I am just so fucking wrong. Nothing about me is ok or admirable.

Oh, but can I make a cake for her daughter’s birthday? Thanks.

Pam has literally talked to me a couple of times since I got here. I still send her emails. Why do I chase these fucking women? Pam only wants to talk to me if by chance I happen to stumble upon a topic that is part of her hobbies.

In general my anxiety and depression have been better since I got here. I only see Jenny about once a month and I think that is going to end. I called child protective services on her. That’s a story. She came over for a visit and she was telling me about how her seven year old was having a tantrum (it sounded like an anxiety attack) and she didn’t want to deal with it so she spanked the kid. That’s literally illegal in this country.

I was talking to a buddy about this (I do have some people I am still talking to a fair bit–I really like the Marco Polo app) and she told me that she thinks it is really weird the way white people are so anti-spanking. She’s from China and in her experience parents are considered abusive if they don’t spank their kids. You are neglecting your responsibility to shape their character. I told her that in my opinion there is a difference in result for kids who are spanked in a society where freaking everyone gets spanked and it is the norm and a place where spanking is not acceptable and you now have to hide your parent’s secret. I think that the secrecy and the shame of “I am so bad that my parents are forced to break the law to deal with me” is as big or a bigger problem than the spanking. The fact that Jenny doubled down and defended it because “There was nothing else she could do to stop the behavior and it had to stop right now” when the behavior wasn’t hurting anyone else it was just annoying and inconvenient really put up a whole passel of red flags. So now her kid’s doctor and school and everyone is on notice that the family isn’t coping.

I think I may have just burned that bridge to the ground and I don’t feel bad. I didn’t make the call because I wanted to nuke the relationship. But I was not going to live in Jenny’s fantasy world where she is “always right” and she can do whatever she wants to her kids because they belong to her. Fuck that. The kid has rights. It’s not ok to spank a child just because you don’t like them having a tantrum. Gain some new god damn skills.

Ok, full disclosure time: I spanked Middle Child once. She spent months beating on Eldest Child to the point where EC was bleeding. We tried a lot of things. She was in therapy. We tried a variety of interventions. We did a whole bunch of fucking things. I talked to her therapist about it. I finally told MC “If you do this again, I am going to have to spank you because apparently nothing else I do is going to convince you that being hit sucks. You don’t get to beat on your sister every time you have a bad mood.” She beat on EC again. We separated. We all went to different spaces to calm down so that nothing was done in the heat of the moment or as a rage reaction. When I was fully calm I went back in and asked her what happened and why. I asked if she understood what was going to happen now. Over her clothes with my bare hand I swatted her.

She has since said that it didn’t hurt physically almost at all but she felt emotionally devastated. She continues to fight with her sister verbally and in normal snotty kid ways like throwing things, but she hasn’t made her sister bleed again. I’m glad. I don’t ever want to do that again.

You can’t beat your sibling until they bleed forever without consequences. If I allow that I am neglecting my other child and I can’t do that.

Is that different than spanking a kid because you don’t like their temper tantrum and buying their cooperation didn’t work this time? I don’t know. I don’t sleep easy at night knowing I did this. I don’t feel good about myself. I sure as shit am not going to stand up and say that I did the right thing. I know that we worked on it for months. I don’t really feel like I have moral superiority. I did it in a place where it was a legal parenting practice for me to do. Does that make it more ok?

I don’t know.

But the only things Jenny has tried are offering toys, candy, and money as bribes and when that doesn’t work she said “Ok fine then I have to hit you”. She won’t set boundaries because that’s “too mean and she is supposed to be their safe place where anything is ok.”

My kids have thrown a lot of tantrums. I have never decided in the moment to hit them to make it stop. I don’t know that it is morally superior, but I have a fuck ton of tools in my tool belt for handling misbehavior without having to hit a kid. I ran out of tools when it came to making other people bleed on a regular basis. That was my failure. Has every parenting tool I have ever tried been good? Oh hell no.

When my kids tell me that a thing we are trying makes them feel bad we don’t do it again. I apologize for failing. I don’t act like it is their fault for failing to comply in a way that is easy for me. I am failing to figure out how to meet your need in whatever manner it is coming up right now. I am sorry that I fail so much. It isn’t your fault. Sometimes my best is genuinely not good enough.

That is the part that never feels reciprocated in my friendships. Not Sarah, not Jenny, not Pam can admit that sometimes the best they can put into the relationship is not good enough and they are failing and doing wrong. I am the problem if I am not willing to describe whatever they offer as the best.

That’s the part that is toxic as fuck. They are right and I am wrong. I know that I am fucked up and I often create that dynamic in my head without help but a number of people have heard me describe these relationships over many decades and in general that is feedback that other people give me. “Why are you always wrong and that person is always right? I don’t think that is true.”

Sarah would absolutely act that way. Jenny literally has it as part of her internet presence that she is “always right” and she moves through the world that way. Pam would never ever admit out loud that she uses me.

I’m the one with the fucked up expectations. It’s totally reasonable to expect your friends to just be happy funding your lifestyle or to have to drop whatever they are doing if you want attention or to accept being told how stupid and damaging to my children I am.

I am the one who isn’t ok. Duh.

I circle back and back and back to these women.

I think it is time to let the waves knock these sand castles down.

In vapid news (and less vapid news)

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My neighbor is making their set up fancier and nicer so they are off loading some of their mediocre gardening stuff. This means I just inherited a pretty dang decent giant poly tunnel. This is wonderful for me. Free is the best price. Now I can grow tomatoes. I bet if I got some bags of compost and put seeds in them it wouldn’t really count as planting things…

Also: I got to take a bath for the first time since surgery. That was December, y’all.

We have found some folks we are hanging out with about once a week. I always worry that we are overwhelming them but they keep coming back… There’s another (pagan) family we see about once a month. We have Ostara plans together and I’m looking forward to that. The average outside temperature at that point is 9C. (That’s 48F for the rest of you.) It won’t resemble the Easter parties we used to host basically at all. At least we have a giant house now? A bigger house and fewer friends. It’s kind of ironic.

I am at the heaviest (non-pregnant) weight I have seen since I was 21. I am having a lot of mixed feelings about that. I am looking forward to less ice on the road. I am looking forward to being 100% healed so I can start full on doing chores again. I really want to wear that skirt again this spring. I think I’m a solid 40-50 lbs away from being able to do so. Fuck. I’m sure as shit not going on a diet. (I’m literally eating a candy bar right now.) I want to get back to exercising. I want to get to the point where I can do a half or full marathon again. I want exercise to feel easy again. I’m not there yet. Fuck healing. Fuck getting old.

I have been spending a lot of time lately thinking about why I like to pick relationships with people who put me down. Why am I so completely drawn to people who only want me as a convenience. Why do I pick people who want me as long as I serve them? Why do I love people who speak so negatively about me? If my child had a friend who talked to them that way I would say “That person doesn’t actually love you.” But I have built a lot of my self-esteem around being “loved” by people who put me down or who say fairly terrible things to me. That’s utterly consistent.

It’s pretty clear to me that I don’t hate myself like I used to. That’s progress. I am no longer interested in putting myself in situations where I feel bad at the end of them. That’s good.

Time to go for a walk in the sunshine.

Strike a match and watch it burn

See what the light lets you learn

Are you loved or are you reviled

Are you talked to like a stupid child

Strike a match and watch it burn

Is the destruction really your concern

What if everything you worked for was a big mistake

Maybe destruction is the chance you must take

Strike a match and watch it burn 

Is there anything left to learn

From people who treat you with great contempt

And all of your self confidence they try to preempt

Strike a match and watch it burn

Maybe this bridge wasn’t meant to endure

Is that a flaw in the basic design

Or is it merely the wearing of time

Strike a match and watch it burn 

When will it be your turn

You get to think you are ok

Even if that’s something they won’t say

Strike a match and watch it burn

Sometimes fire is needed for the turn

From hatred to growth and life

It doesn’t have to be about spite

Strike a match and watch it burn

Even though it makes your stomach churn

Don’t let them put you on the funeral pyre

Even if they do it with a smile

Strike a match

And

Watch

It

Burn

Cross posted unit plan

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Well, we tried school for three months. My kids got hit a lot. The head teacher was more upset that my kids fought back than they were that kids hit them. We decided that home education is the way forward for our family for the foreseeable future.

I am trying to adapt my language. We have moved to the UK and here the preferred terminology is “home education” as opposed to “home schooling” for all kinds of reasons. However, I have been home schooling in the US for many years so I’m sure I will slip up at times. I’m trying.

Like many people who do not send their kids to brick and mortar school I find that our approach changes year by year. There isn’t “the way we home educate”. Things change because the developmental levels and abilities of my children change. Things have to shift as life circumstances shift. I know that in the past some people in our lives have deeply resented the fact that we have a more fluid life than they prefer and I need to not let it slow me down.

Up until the age of 7 I do full on unschooling. I don’t do any focused, formal, sit-down work with my children. I believe that the best way for very young children to learn is to be exposed to as many situations as possible and be encouraged to play hard. My family lives in a word-rich environment. We don’t have a television and we read constantly as a family. We read a fairly staggering range of books and we talk all day long. There is very seldom a quiet moment and we like it this way.

My children are currently 11, 9, and 2. It’s going to be a new adventure to buckle down a bit more while giving my 2 year old the freedom she needs. I love having three children and this feels like the most fabulous family configuration I can imagine for us. It wouldn’t work for everyone and that’s ok. We are all very high intensity and we don’t have an extended family network to share that with. We have friends and connections in the community but we are all a lot. We like that within our little family pod we aren’t too much for one another.

We have done years where we work on individual skills and years where we work on major projects in a more college-oriented fashion. Then we traveled the world and were much more unschool focused for a while. I have spent a lot of the last couple of years pushing my kids too hard because I had a lot of personal anxiety around them “not being at grade level” if they had to go to school.

Ha. Hahahahahahahaha. Ok. Well, now that they have attended school that anxiety is over. Sure, their handwriting is super not awesome but their actual subject knowledge is well over grade level in every way. My 11 year old cannot be tested by local age-appropriate schools because she is so far off their charts. We have some local buddies who are in their senior year of university and they have commented that her writing is easily on the level of most of their peers.

Right. We are doing fine. I need to relax more.

But I am not a permanent unschooler at heart. I was a classroom teacher for a long time and we have a house full of ADHD and I am autistic and my children thrive best with a loose structure. We are at our best when we have patterns and flow but not rigid demands.

So. Lesson planning. For the first part of this school year we were deep in survival mode. We didn’t do a lot of formal academics at all because we were traveling then adjusting to moving permanently to a new country. That was a lot. Then the kids went to school for a while. Now they have been out of school for over a month and we have spent the last few weeks doing a slow drift out of the school mode back into a more eclectic style. But I don’t feel that our current methodology is going to result in a lot of long-term progress. I care about them making progress towards their future, not grade level skills per se.

Thus we are talking about moving more in the direction of unit studies for a while. Right now they are selecting whatever they feel like learning out of a larger umbrella topic day by day and there isn’t a ton of building on previous growth. I want to see growth.

I gave a loose summary of what a unit could potentially look like using shopping as a sample topic. After talking about it for ten minutes they are super enthusiastic and they want that to definitely be our first topic. Oh, ok. I hadn’t actually intended to just go that way but why not.

So here is my initial for-myself brainstorm on this idea. I am literally thinking this up as I type and it may change as we go forward. But I really like to talk/type to myself as I work out my thoughts and I felt like this was a good place to put this. With no further ado…

Shopping Unit

To begin with we will do some research on local salary levels and how much of a percentage of average salaries people tend to spend on food. I intend to ask them to each pick three different cities in three different countries and get an average idea of how things vary across the globe. (This will allow us to build on this general idea as we go further with other budgeting type conversations over the years.)

Once we have a solid idea about the variance among the six different places we don’t live in we will look together at the average for our city and then we will place that next to our actual family budget over the past few months. I keep records so this won’t be complicated. We will talk about why our family budget is or is not close to local standards.

Both of the older kids will get to pick whether they want to make up a budget for a single person or a family (they can pick the size) and we will sit down and talk about a nutritionally balanced meal plan. They can use a variety of recipe books and online websites to figure out what kinds of meals would allow them to eat in the healthiest way possible for their needs. (One child is mostly vegetarian and the other child really prefers to eat more meat and fewer meals.)

Once we have our proposed meal plans we will head off to local stores to see what they can buy with their budgets. This will involve many trips to stores as they are not all in one area and the store trips will double as PE because we will have to walk/ride our bikes for many miles just to get this data. I will also be saving the store ads I get in the meantime. I will suggest they look into alternative ways of getting food (delivered veg boxes, restaurants, or big online delivery places like Amazon) and compare how they can do on value for money.

While we are in the stores collecting the data on prices we will also track where the various food items come from. On many separate days at home the kids will use the information about where the food comes from to do geographical research. I want them to see where in the world the food must be grown, which countries could it come from. What are the labor practices in the various countries like? What is the GDP of the different countries involved and what is quality of life like for the citizens (particularly the farmers)? How are global warming and pollution impacting the food production in those countries? I want the kids to be able to draw maps of where these countries are in relationship to their continents; they don’t have to be perfect. Where does the water come from for this food growth?

Now go back and look at your proposed meal plans and budget. How are your choices impacting people in more vulnerable positions? Do you feel like you are making ethical choices? How could you adapt your choices to be more respectful of the totality of the needs of the planet? This will have to involve some longer pieces of writing (hand writing!) as we will also go through and cover ethics as a sub topic here. We have several books on ethics that we will read and consider in an abstract way in the process of being able to apply them to this topic in particular.

We will make more progress on gardening efforts and we will talk about soil nutrition and balanced growing efforts. We will look at whether the various countries that are producing our foods focus on monocrops or if crop diversity is implemented. We will talk about the differences between doing a little bit of gardening versus having to do large scale farming for a living. We will visit local farms to talk to actual farmers about how their lives are structured.

We will research how building houses impacts farm land and we will look into how farms impact wildlife and biodiversity.

Through the course of this unit I want to make notes for myself so that we can have a unit test at the end. The test will cover any and all of the research we do together. I hope to find 20–50ish questions (probably slightly different questions for the two kids because they are not at the same developmental level) to check how well they are retaining this information and whether they can apply it at a later point.

They will be doing a fair bit of short writing efforts throughout the unit because they will have to do a lot of note taking and maths work. I think we will have a weekly short response writing effort summarizing what they feel they have learned that week so they can refresh their own learning.

I think we will need multiple longer writing efforts. It would be nice if they each wrote a fairly detailed graphic story that shows various parts of the food production process and why it works the way it does (they really like doing this; in the past my oldest did a fabulous comic on immigration to California as part of history). This will be both art as well as working on neat handwriting.

As the final project I will help them assemble a long report on food production, how they will utilize the money they have for their budget, where they want to try to buy food from and where they want to avoid food from as they explain the ethics of food buying, and talk about the global conditions that are likely to impact the food chain as they grow into adulthood. I will be involved to help them in this process and I will guide them on formatting and I will help with editing but the writing will be theirs. The final report will go through at least three versions: rough draft, second draft with all of the spelling/grammar/major logical issues addressed, and if the second draft is really good enough a typed third draft. If the second draft gets a big fat raised eyebrow they won’t type until the fourth draft. The final written draft must be written to be legible and neat. But they need the typing practice as well.

I don’t know for sure how long this will take us. As a rough guess at a minimum we will spend six weeks on this but it might take a fair bit longer. We tend to fall into research holes and we love our tangents.

I know this will need refinement as we go and I will ask the kids for their feedback but this feels like a starting place.

Things I’m proud of

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When my kids come home from a sleepover they say “The next meal has to be entirely vegetables because holy moly that was quite a night. Meat. Starch. Sugar. I need veggies really bad.” I was not able to feel that kind of thing in my body when I was a kid. My children can.

We don’t talk about food in terms of calories at all. They are about as ignorant of calories and weight control as a 21st century person is capable of being. I’ve worked really hard on that. We talk about fiber. We talk about slow burning energy and quick release energy. We talk about what you need in order to poop. We talk about how different organs in your body need different nutrients and that’s why we eat a rainbow. We talk about how sugar is an inflammatory and it makes it harder to deal with your emotions and have patience and feel good. Sugar increases pain in your body.

They can tell when they have done things to make their bodies feel icki. I taught them that. I feel really good about that.

My children can cook. They know about balancing food groups and timing things so they finish at the same time and they are getting better at cleaning as they go so they aren’t left with a huge mess at the end. They can do a bunch of work to convert recipes including multiplying and dividing fractions. It’s beautiful. We covered a whiteboard with math equations for our last cake.

Their handwriting has improved in the last couple of weeks again. I think that would have happened in school too–they are just ready.

They are taking a bunch of initiative with their learning process because they are so happy that they aren’t being controlled by an outside force anymore.

They are kids and they fuck up and they break rules and they make mistakes and when they do they are fairly good at being able to learn from the mistake and figure out what they want to do next time. I know adults who can’t do that.

They are self reflective. They actively work on growing and doing better. That doesn’t mean they never backslide–of course they do. Growth involves regression. But they try so hard. They are open to becoming something new.

I love that we are back to devouring books at a furious rate instead of barely having time to read because school takes up so much time. I love that we have time to do our chores when we aren’t tired so it doesn’t take as long and we can have more relaxation time at the end of the day.

I love that my children aren’t in a race to grow up and leave behind “baby” activities. The big kids are back to a ton of intense fantasy play and I am so glad. They have no inhibitions about what kinds of toys are “for their age”. I truly admire how fearless they are about trying art techniques. They are better than me at a wide variety of techniques and I’m super thrilled to watch them shine.

I love that my children cannot imagine living more than a mile away from me. By their ages I was already planning how to get away from my family. They like me.

I like that when I want them to behave I can say, “If you feel yourself wanting to bicker or start a fight I suggest that you think “Four hours of yard work per day until mom is no longer cranky.” I hope that will help you hold it together” then they are polite and they work out their differences in a reasonable way.

I love that they feel safe enough to share the really hard stuff.

I love that this baby will say things like “Not ok a be rough! Be gentle! Don’t push!” and “No kisses a baby, just snuggles.” (she uses “a” for “to”/”for” at this point; that’s ok) I like that she is so fierce about defending herself and asserting boundaries. You just keep that right up. She apologizes when she hurts someone on accident without being prompted.

I love that my children feel free to sass me until I give them the look then they back right the fork off. There is a line of respect and I’ll let you know when you cross it. I don’t disrespect you and you don’t get to disrespect me.

I like that we still say “yes ma’am” to each other.

I like that they think really hard about the balance of ethically made/materials used/cost of items. I like that they think really hard about what it means to be in a world with a lot of other people and how can we be polite to as many people as possible?

I like that they are making their own friends here despite complications and speed bumps. It is taking time and we are learning how to be ok with that. It’s healthy.

I really like my kids.

Shades of gray

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I was in therapy for such a long time. I feel like part of what the point of a lot of it was to help me mature into the idea that not everything in life is black or white. I spent a lot of time and money trying to get to the point where I could wrap my brain around complexity and see that not everything fell into good/bad dichotomies. Occasionally I run smack into someone who still has such a view of the world and it surprises me. I feel like it was drilled into me because I was trying to get to the point of being like everyone else. But maybe not.

The only way to live a black or white life is to limit what you actually do. Once you get into the nitty gritty… people get complex. Good people do bad things. Bad people do good things. People are redeemable. People are worth effort even when they fail to be perfect.

People don’t improve or get better in a black or white dynamic; there is no reason to keep trying. There is no reason to bother trying to do better if you are forever damned by the worst thing you have done in life. It’s important to remember that people only improve or get better if they want to. You can inspire people to change; it rarely works out to force people to change. Forced change is rarely for the better. Forced change often makes people feel dead inside.

Recently I was arguing with someone on the internet about a specific of parenting (for the record, THEY WERE WRONG) and we were debating how to handle a misdeed on the part of a very young child. In her mind she has to force the child to not have that behavior. I said I am utterly incapable of forcing my children to be a way. I can inspire them to be a way. I can coax them towards having the behaviors I want them to have. I can model the behaviors I want them to have. I cannot force them to have or not have behaviors. People are not clay.

Probably the single biggest thing I have learned from parenting (and I bless the fact that I have been able to do this basically 24/7 for over 11 years now) is that if I want my children to behave a way I have to figure out how to model it. I can’t tell them to do something and expect them to do it. I really can’t expect them to be better or have more self control than me. (Which is utterly infuriating sometimes.) They have had a child’s limited set of life experiences and if I want them to have a set of perceptions I need to live in a way that shows it.

In home schooling, if your child doesn’t know something it is all your fault. It’s a lot sometimes.

My children struggle. My children have hardships in their lives even if I kind of wish that they didn’t because I have given up a lot to make the ease that they have. Life is struggle. Life is suffering. I cannot save them from that; not even with home schooling.

Something that is both exciting and terrifying is watching my children go through things that I had to go through. They are not me. They have a different set of expectations and experiences than I had but they also have half of my genetic experience and many similar tendencies. Parenting is an opportunity to give someone else what I wish I would have gotten.

Sometimes they trigger the shit out of me; I am fully back in a moment of extreme trauma and it is very difficult to react to the moment I am in. Other times they upset me or behave in a way that leads to me feeling a lot of rage. I get to decide what I do with those feelings. They frustrate me on the regular.

I get to show them what it means to be a grown up and have to deal with hard feelings. They are going to have to grow up and handle hard feelings too–how do I want them to do it? How do I want them to feel about themselves as a result of having these big feelings?

There are a bunch of things I want to write about in specifics right now but I can’t. My children are not little amoebas anymore. They are fully people and people deserve privacy even if I want to write about myself because they influence me. People don’t like to be talked about. I learned that from Sarah. Even if people tell you that they like being talked about they are lying. People lie so much. And if I decided to talk about my children because I didn’t care about their privacy it would lead to other people judging them harshly in ways that aren’t balanced or fair. People judge the shit out of each other.

People perceive others in black or white. You are good or bad. Broken or whole. Defective or normal. Inappropriate or appropriate. Shitty or excellent.

People are all of those things; it just depends on which minute of their life you look at.

Sometimes I wish I could mold people like clay. I want to give them feedback “If you did x more like y things then you would get closer to the result you want.” But help that is not wanted isn’t help it is interference. I mean, I think it is important to give feedback that a specific thing is not a good choice sometimes… but that doesn’t mean you can correct the behavior and tell someone what to do. It’s a balancing act. “It is not ok for you to _______. There are many other things you could do instead. If you want help brainstorming a list I’d be happy to help you figure out what your options are so that next time you are in a similar situation you can find a different path through it.”

Getting better is a choice. It is a choice you can make. But you have to decide for yourself. Nobody can force you. If you get to being old and you have never decided to improve or look at why your behavior causes the problems you have… well… I have some judgmental words for that. When does the cut off line start though?

If you have a shitty coping method before you are 10, that doesn’t make you an asshole, right? What about if you still have that coping method at 20? 30? 40? 50? 60? 70? 80? I believe people can always change if they choose to, but what does it take to motivate change at different stages of your life?

As a diagnosed autistic person I don’t get to be shitty and say “Well I’m autistic so you have to put up with it.” It may be harder for me to learn what I need to learn to change but I don’t have an excuse for not trying.

These are not rhetorical questions for me. I have some shitty coping methods. I’m almost 40. Am I damned because I have not fixed everything already? I have fixed a lot of my shittiness but I have not been able to get everything fixed already. Am I damned because I didn’t have a different priority list?

If I hadn’t worked on a lot of my shittiness I wouldn’t be where I am to complain about the shittiness that remains. Maybe I didn’t have your priority list for dealing with my flaws but I have been on a grueling path of unrelenting self improvement. That’s a literal fact. I can trace my history through massive changes in personality and behavior.

Some people like to sit back and not do much with their own life and judge the shit out of other people for failing at things. At least we tried.

Drifting

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If I didn’t feel so afraid I would have a lot to document. Life is being quite eventful but I feel like talking about it will cause problems that greatly outweigh how stressful it is. This is the least therapized my life has been… I don’t know, ever? I’ve been pulling back from my US friends. Not because I love them less but because I am utterly exhausted and weary and pursuing them takes enormous energy. I’m not able to put much into creating new friendships here in Scotland. I’m trying, but it feels like swimming uphill through a river of molasses.

My body feels so desperately tired. I’m sleeping a ton–that’s not like me. I’m sleeping 8, 9, 10 hours a night. Historically it is difficult for me to get more than 7 hours of sleep. After these longer stretches I am so weary getting up from a chair feels like a struggle. Is this a deeper manifestation of depression than I am used to? Is this the result of still healing from surgery? Is this trying to actually unwind from the years of anxiety in California/traveling? I don’t know but I feel existentially exhausted. I feel empty.

I don’t know how to fill my bucket. I want to feel more whole. I want to feel like I am thriving instead of treading water to survive.

It’s hard that I am not cleared to go work with plants yet. It’s hard that I feel like I’m not allowed to do much. I’m still in the “spending money to get established” stage (we don’t have enough bed-sized blankets… we have a ton of baby blankets though…). We found some teeny bugs in the food storage area, so protective containers must be acquired or we risk food spoilage. Not stuff we can just not buy. I mean… we could burn more oil keeping the house hotter. That’s penny wise and pound foolish.

There’s a lot I wish I could document for my own sake. But pieces of it aren’t my story to tell and I am deeply afraid of the consequences for other parts.

So I don’t talk much about how I’m feeling with my voice and I write about it even less with my hands.

Is this bone deep discomfort how other people feel? Finding a therapist isn’t really an option for a variety of reasons. Living here may mean that I am permanently out of therapy for a variety of reasons. Well, unless I pursue a degree and it becomes a mandatory part of my job. Wouldn’t that be a funny reason to become a therapist? It’s a way to make sure I have to be in therapy too?

I think a lot about the massive waiting lists in this country for mental health support. I think about what it meant when I was a kid that I had help even though some of it wasn’t the best. It was a lot better than nothing.

Comparing one’s life to other people’s lives is such a complicated and tricky thing. Sure, other people may have X, Y, and Z that you don’t have… but they also have A, B, and C that you don’t have and would you really prefer that balance? This isn’t a fence with one side or the other. It’s a grid with many many many different squares and balances and problems.

I like that often every ends up in my room a bit before bed time to curl up together and read. MC has decided to read Tamora Pierce books. They are a bit above her reading level, but if she sits close to me and asks for occasional help with words she is making her way through. She absolutely loves them. She is stunned that even in a magical temple school there is still bullying. Yeah honey… people jockeying for dominance is absolutely universal. That’s just life.

Today we have our first health visitor experience to check on YC’s growth. I have two doctor appointments next week: a pap smear and a trip to my GP to go over genetic testing results and talk about next steps for EDS assessment. I get the impression that beyond the genetic testing (that’s super fucking expensive to run) Scotland wants to rerun all assessments because they are not interested in foreign medical records. That’s going to be interesting. At least I have the results of 35 years of forcing my way through the US system like a determined train to use as a guide.

My hands hurt really badly. I am trying various handicrafts because I’m bored as fuck. Arthritis is going to be my forever nightmare.

I feel like a fucking whiner. I am definitely in the “but you don’t look sick” camp but my body is degrading really fast. It’s hard feeling like if I don’t talk about how poorly I’m doing I just look like a lazy lump but if I do talk about it I’m a whiner. I’m not lazy; I’m in pain.

I’ve gained weight again. Ha. Good thing I bought my trousers so large.

It’s time for a day.

Anxiety management

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Yesterday I was told that I have three months ahead of me where I am on restriction for arm exercises. That means no yard work until May or June. That means when the bookshelves finally get built I shouldn’t put books on them. That means I really shouldn’t be doing so many house chores.

It’s time to hire a house cleaner and I feel really upset about it. I hit that level of disabled and I can’t expect my family to carry my weight of chores on top of their own for so long. Not in a house this size.

I did a big batch of cooking a week ago and my hand is still swollen. I have to buy and get into the habit of using a food processor. My arthritis is that bad.

I am not feeling good about my body, my self worth, or my general competence. I feel pathetic. I feel like I am seeing my usefulness as a tool slip away.

I was cleared for riding a bike and for going out and doing walks. The doctor was quite firm that I must not pick up my nearly-two year old at all and pushing a pram is… not really wise. I can’t swim but I could supervise my older children swimming.

But I can pull her in the bike trailer and attaching the trailer to the bike is dead simple and no real strain. So that’s something.

I feel absolutely horrid about myself. All of the things that make me like myself are falling away and I am left with the bits I despise.

And that means I want to get into stupid arguments on the internet over paper plates. I didn’t. I walked away. I know it is a stupid control issue. I am anxious as fuck. I want to be stupidly defensive of my choices and there is really no point. It doesn’t matter if this stranger agrees with me or not. I did what I did and… there is no value to arguing. I am not going to live how they live and I don’t need to argue about it.

I feel stupid and useless and I want to not feel so bad about myself. I won’t get that from stupid arguments about consumer choices.

I’m not sure I am going to feel better about myself from anything this morning.