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.

A hysterectomy sounds better all the time.

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My mood is really awful for about 1/3 of the month. It turns on/off like a light switch. When I hit the day my period is actually going to arrive I suddenly have a nose full of snot, I feel like I am about to throw up, and I have vicious diarrhea. I feel like someone is stabbing me in the back with an ice pick. Bending over to pull a clean cup out of the dishwasher is stabbingly painful.

I’ll feel better in a few days. But right now I’m at the peak of bad mood plus bad body and it is a fucking nightmare. I am fairly likely to have ten more years of cycles. With 1/3 of the month being (some of it literally) a shit show.

Bodies are the worst.

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When you put a vine in the ground you have to be patient. In the first year the plant will sleep and look like nothing is happening. In reality under the ground tiny little roots will be slowly exploring and looking at how they can make this place their home. In the second year the plant will creep a little bit above ground and see if this place is really going to be safe. In the third year the plant explodes and puts out tremendous growth in all directions because yes, this is my home and I will show that I live here.

We are into our second year of living here. In the first year I put a little bit of effort into putting out tendrils of growth. I went to a few events and I met a few people and I tried to see what direction it would be wise to put energy. But between health and lock down mostly… I slept.

I am now more than three months into the second year. I am slowly creeping along. I am trying to strengthen and deepen the tiny tendrils of roots I put out here. I am cultivating just a few connections. I am sending my taproot as deep into the ground as I can. I am feeding people. I am contributing to my community. I am planting trees. I am branching out in as many ways as I can… slowly. Just tiny little indications of growth that will come without overwhelming the shallow roots I have at this point.

Depending on the state of the pandemic I may get an extra year of creeping growth. To be fair, it’s not an utterly fixed rule of that plants only need two years to get established. Poor weather or soil quality can alter any expectation. I know it will be ok in the end.

At the beginning of my third year here I will turn 40. The first decade of my life was pretty traumatic and unpleasant. In many ways the second decade of my life was more of the same or worse. My third decade was when I turned the tide and I decided how my life would be and I was no longer just a shell being tossed in the tide. I built a rudder and I steered. My fourth decade has been pretty incredible. I like who I am. I like the skills I have developed. I like the strength and capacity and knowledge I have built.

Wisdom comes from experience. Experience comes from making mistakes. I have made so very many mistakes.

In many ways this last year has been one of the most turning-inward years of my life. I am not depending on friends as much as I have in the past. I do not have a therapist for support. I barely write because I have learned that the consequences of having my feelings out in public are too great to bear. What I have now I cannot risk losing and if that means I must be silent then that is the price I will pay.

Which does not mean that my feelings are more muted or less extreme. I am not sure that I suppress them so much as I have learned how to transmute them into other things. I think this was maybe the goal of therapy all along. I have a lot of compassion for myself in my big feelings. I have the ability to sit quietly and wait for my internal storms to pass without inflicting them on everyone else around me. That does not mean that the storms are smaller–it means that the hand I have on the rudder is made of steel and it cannot be moved by casual breezes. I think it would take a hurricane to knock me off my path these days.

Which does not mean I have no bad days. I just don’t document them with the same rigidity.

I’m sure part of that is about what it means to assimilate and be an immigrant. I don’t feel as safe documenting the ways I suck.

I started this first thing in the morning and now the kids are well into the swing of bed time. We had a sharp negotiation over when kids could get up. I started at 10 am. Middle Child started at 4 am. We settled on 7. Seems fair.

Today was a day of Much Cooking. Breakfast was leftovers because we needed the containers back. Then I made two kinds of soup for lunch. One with chicken broth, celeriac root, cabbage, carrot, celery, tomato, bell pepper, herbs and another with veg broth, cauliflower, celery, carrot, flour, butter, SUPER GOOD cheese, milk, herbs. The vegetarian one was better.

Dinner was a turkey, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, carrots, corn, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, parsnips, and we finished with a cookie. It was good. We have a lot of leftovers.

Right now I am in the kitchen babysitting the turkey carcass so the cats don’t help themselves. The necessary food containers are in the dishwasher. Bless the 1 hour cycle. When the dishwasher finishes then I need to shove stuff in it for another 1 hour cycle (it’ll be full again, don’t worry). Then I get to make the overnight French toast.

Guilt

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Holiday baking is finished. We have: two kinds of buttermilk banana bread (one has butterscotch chips and the other is chocolate/cherry/walnut), apple pie, vanilla doodle cookies (regular snickerdoodles have cinnamon, these are dipped in vanilla powder/sugar), my mom’s sugar cookies, and chocolate chip cookie with pecans.

Our fridge is so packed it is hard to get anything into or out of it. Obviously the solution is to ride my bike around town and drop off packages on peoples doorsteps. It’s not any more dangerous or invasive than the grocery delivery folk. I’ll stand far back from the door.

I might just bring a flask of hot chocolate with me so I can talk from a very great distance for a few minutes with people. I’m really struggling with loneliness. There have been 56 new cases in my entire very large council region over the past 7 days. I will never go more than 3.1 miles from my house. I am struggling with feeling like I am no better than everyone else who is breaking lockdown rules. But I’m stretching the rules.

Heart racing

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Here’s an Amitriptyline symptom I should note: I’m having noticeable elevated heart rate. My watch buzzes when my heart rate is too high compared to my level of movement. It’s going off almost all day right now. I’m elevated above 120 bpm for hours a day even if I’m barely moving around. That seems kind of problematic. Hm.

Because of the watch I can give specific data about my heart rate compared to exercise over a very long time period. I normally rarely hit 120 unless I’m doing prolonged fairly intense exercise. Now I hit that sitting in a chair over and over all day.

My watch is buzzing enough that the people I live with are noticing and commenting on hearing it. That seems… possibly not good.

Christmas planning

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For a lot of years now I’ve been trying to move towards less gifting. There’s so much emotional baggage around the entire topic of giving shit for Christmas. Almost no one outside our house is getting “stuff” from us this year. My little adopted nieces and Jenny and Noah is doing stuff for his family. We will give baked treats to our youngling friends in town but I’m not worrying about giving stuff to neighbors we have barely spoken to this year.

My big kids asked for a few items to finish their rooms from Santa. Eldest Child wants a box that can lock to keep stuff away from the little siblings and some fake foliage to finish her woods-motif bedroom. Middle Child wants a small table and a tea pot (haven’t found the tea pot yet–gulp) for playing tea party in their room. Other than that they are getting a few books and their stockings are barely half full. Additional presents are a floaty/light weight hippy dress for EC because even in Inverness she is often overheated and she has outgrown most of her clothes and MC got a beautiful hand made wrap in colors that they will love to go with their dressing up fancy obsession.

Last year I got everyone themed night clothes and they asked if we could please do that again so both big kids picked out a style they liked from Etsy. This was not a family tradition before moving here. I am amused that the kids have decided that this is going to be a tradition moving forward. Given that Noah is not usually one for wearing pajamas it may be a little weird for him to have to come along on this one.

Youngest Child is getting a gnome village from Santa and little gnomes in her stocking with some bath toys and hair clips. A couple of books as the only things to unwrap at this point.

It’s seeming a bit hilarious that I’m getting the biggest Santa present because I asked to upgrade the shoe racks as my gift. When we moved in I got a really irritating cheap £20 shoe rack as good enough to last until I knew what I wanted. Now I know what I actually want and Noah ordered it. They are fairly large because with 5 people and actual seasons we have way more shoes than we have ever collectively had before. So my present is a house thing for all of us.

I have a few things for Noah but not a lot and that’s all I can say about that because he reads this. I feel a little guilty about not doing more for him and yet he’s been telling me for years not to get him much. I don’t think he asked for a single thing this year. He doesn’t need any clothing items at all.

We didn’t do the mass Christmas card thing this year. I’m exhausted and sending a card to the US costs £1.70 a pop. We used to send about 100 cards. That adds up, yo.

I’m having a hard time shaking the programming from my youth that giving so little means I don’t love people very much. But we don’t need very much at this point and there isn’t a lot anyone wants. EC genuinely doesn’t want much. She likes having a room that is easy to tidy and she feels like she is mostly past the toys-stage and she’s not a makeup person and she doesn’t use fancy bath stuff and she doesn’t want or need a lot more clothing or shoes. We have all the art supplies we need for quite some time. MC is the sort who would always appreciate more but they have enough toys to keep them busy and they have a bursting wardrobe. They would appreciate being given more things but I can’t think of much they would actually use. YC doesn’t need much more stuff. They have enough to keep my house a constant tripping hazard already. I already rotate baskets of toys in and out of sight because if everything is out it is too overwhelming and just a mess. They would not be impressed by gifts of clothing even though they are the ones who are changing size the most quickly.

I am glad I didn’t get Christmas stuff out super early like I kind of wanted to. YC is breaking a lot of things and that’s feeling stressful. I don’t think things will be up long after Christmas this year. It will be nice to get back to having a lot of empty space in the house. I think I will like Christmas stuff being out more in about three years.

We’ve all been low key sick for the last week and we are all very low energy. It’s a cold, not Covid. Sore throat, barely runny nose, weak ass cough. Mostly just tired. But this year that means absolutely no going to school so EC has been home. After the last few years of starting to shove me away hard for budding independence reasons she has been real cuddly and that’s nice. I get in good snuggles with all three kids a lot these days.

Just plugging along.

Feels like freedom

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When I am out on my bike I always think “I want to go home and write about how good this feels” and then I basically never find the time/space/impetus to follow through. Walking through my front door means my family needs me to transition to their needs basically instantly.

I love being on my bike as my form of transportation. I know that if we had a car the lazy default would be there and I would probably embrace there being less of a process for getting places therefore I am super glad I don’t have a car. I feel strong and free and confident and happy out on my bike. People wave and greet me. I get to be out in all the weather and feel in my body what it means that there is no bad weather only bad clothing. (I would argue that there is no safe way for me to bicycle on ice.) Hail? Meh, ok.

I love my battery assisted bike. Am I cheating? Fuck you with a two by four. Sell your fucking car before you fucking call me a cheater. It makes it possible for me to pull 60-80lbs up a fairly massive hill on a regular basis. It means that I can decide how much strain my legs can handle on a day by day or even minute by minute basis and adjust based on my own feelings of strength or weakness. When I start the day out I rarely use much assist and when I come home tired I can use a lot. It’s great. It doesn’t make me go a lot faster it just makes it a lot easier to go as fast as I want to go. I’m not a fast rider and I don’t try to be.

I think I could get the kids on board with liking bikes more if the pandemic weren’t making life hard. I don’t know that I will ever get Noah to feel ok with riding the bike and I worry a lot about the strife that will cause in the long run. (Not an invitation to debate that here, Noah.)

Things are going okay in general in the house. Two is a rough age. I have cut the oldest kids off from the screen because they were being really unpleasant. You know what happened? They fight less (they do still fight…). They play together more. They are reading more. They are doing more projects. They do more chores. In general I like living with them more. This is complicated. On one hand I feel like they need to learn how to have balance about these sorts of things on their own. On the other hand… they are still children and they need to be parented. I am very clear over and over that the screens are owned by adults and the children are allowed to use them at our discretion. It’s not like their stuff in their room. To me that feels like an important distinction but maybe I’m just being a hypocrite.

Parenting continues to be hard and demanding and draining. I don’t find myself with a lot left to give to any other aspect of myself. And with being in a lot of pain my capacity is seriously diminished right now. Ah well. I stumble through.

Maybe I can sleep now.

Well I stopped tracking…

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The onramp to this medication is magnificently easy. I am stunned. I have never had such an easy time with a psych med (ok it’s considered a 4th line antidepressant so it’s not mostly a psych med but… it’s a psych med).

I saw the doctor for an in person exam. She basically said that the placement of the wound means I am almost certainly not experiencing nerve pain as a result of the surgical site. She thinks it is muscular, which tracks with my previous general experience. (My old long-term medical massage therapist and good friend thinks that it is fascia related and he sarcastically says “It’s not like I’ve watched the progress of your body up close and personal for over a decade or anything”.) For the record he was one of the early people to suggest Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.

So the doctor wants me to stay on this medication in large part because it is giving me one of the benefits I got from cannabis that is anxiety/depression/ADHD related-ish. Specifically: I really struggle with impulsive reactions to things. On pot I have this pause in my brain that allows me to stop and consider how I want to react to things that happen to me. I’m getting the same pause with this drug. It’s not that I am generally speaking super slowed down or dumber… I’m not losing words and I can still be funny and respond fairly quickly. I just have… the ability to decide how I want to react to things again and I really like that effect. Given that this drug is free from the NHS it may be almost worth the price of admission.

Other side effects that are ongoing: I’m slower to wake up than normal and it isn’t putting me to sleep much earlier or more reliably after being on it for a few weeks. I can take elephant level quantities of tranquilizers and just shake them off. Sure I can stay up all night cleaning, why not?

She doubled the amount to 20mg. I’ve now been on this a week and I’d say I’m very acclimated and it’s a mild overall impact.

She also wants me slathering gel Ibuprofen on a few times a day and I would say that is helping somewhat… if I do almost nothing with my arms. If I do much with my arms in a day it hurts about as much as normal. If I do almost nothing the Ibuprofen brings the pain level down.

I’m feeling incredible distress over the level of pain I’m experiencing because I had months of almost no pain. I’m not entirely sure what kicked it up to full speed again. It started getting bad in September/October and it’s been bad since.

I’ve been super low energy for the last week but I think it is more related to my sore throat and mild cough. Everyone in the house feels lousy so I don’t think it is medication related.

I’m having enough trouble sleeping that I used one of my last Lorazepam tonight and I had some brandy.

I just… metabolize drugs like whoa. And it’s 9:10 and I’m a little tired but not really sleepy at all. I took the Amitriptyline at around 6. The Lorazepam at 8. I’ve been nursing a glass of brandy for about 4 hours. I’m not even anxious I’m just… not sleepy. I crave interaction.

On the fourth day of med trial my body gave to me…

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I slept from 8pm to about 6am. I woke up earlier with the vague belief that I should probably get up and pee… but I didn’t bother and went back to sleep instead. That’s nearly unheard of for me.

So… last night I had some cocodamol and two glasses of wine. I have very mixed feelings about how hard my body resists sedatives but I’m fucking tired and if it takes a lot sometimes I’m going to knock myself over the head with a hammer.

I’ve had a few bursts of severe pain in my hand/arm/elbow/shoulder. I attribute that to working. Which… is a mixed bag. I don’t need pain meds tonight. My back is sore and icki but I don’t feel like I want to cry.

Today I have been alert and energetic and I’ve gotten a lot of chores done. I haven’t felt slow or impeded. I don’t feel the same sense of time distortion. I feel a little tired in the “Jesus I’m years in the hole on sleep deprivation” sense but not bad or worn out for me.

I have 15 books and 32 days to go on my reading challenge. I’m almost done with one. I may even be able to finish tonight. We’ll see….

On the third day of med trial my body gave to meeeeee

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Very little notice that I am using anything new. I would say that today I felt incredibly close to normal. I feel like I was a little slowed down but in the “I need more sleep and I’m working too hard” sense rather than in the “Holy shit I’m swimming through molasses” sense. I probably feel less of a malaise of depression. Today I was more patient with the kids than I have been on a lot of days lately.

I didn’t do as much exercising as yesterday (only walked 2 miles but I rode my bike almost 5 miles and that didn’t feel hard at all–more than a mile of it was up an extremely steep hill). We went out and picked litter with a group who has been moving around the city trying to help out in different areas every weekend. It was very productive and nice. Gotta meet our local hippie comrades.

I took the pill at 5:30 tonight because 6pm last night didn’t have me feeling sleepy till 9. I also took some pain medication tonight because my back and neck are in full on fuck-you mode and I can’t keep this up.

I don’t know that it is making a big difference in the nerve pain. My hand is still going numb quite easily. My elbow is on fire. My upper arm is numb until you touch it then it tingles and hurts. I can’t reach the wound site to see how tender that is by myself.

Overall I would say that right this minute I think this dosage is not a serious/permanent solution to the problem but the side effect profile is not so bad that I am terrified of upping the dosage to play with it. I am currently taking 10mg and up to 75mg/day is within normal expected range. Apparently it is expected that it might take 6 weeks to be effective as a pain killer. As of this evening I feel very comfortable with being willing to test that long. That’s actually a pretty resounding endorsement from me. Normally 3 days into a drug means I’m already trying to figure out how to get the fuck off it.

So I’d say a C+ or B- right now? I’d like more impact on nerve pain. It could definitely do more for actual depression and anxiety. But it is a start and it’s not a bad start.

And this is all fucking free.

Another day, another chance to record what’s happening

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Med responses are very important to me. I am upset that I have so few written records of my previous drug attempts. Oh, by the way my oldest heard me make a crack about having a hangover from the drug and she flipped out. She thought I was using hard street drugs because I had just run out of cope.

Serves me right for not telling my kids in advance absolutely everything I do with my body I guess?

Today was different. Less exhaustion. I woke up at 4 for a trip to the loo. I didn’t get back to sleep for close to an hour then I was up by 6:30. I took the pill at 7 last night and was asleep by 8:30.

Tonight I took the pill at 6.

Today we had already made plans to go for a walk in the woods with a family who lives about 1.5 miles away from us who are new to home education. They have a 9 year old boy and an 11 year old girl. The two of them both turned up saying that they were hoping for a kid of their gender. I said, “How would a non-binary kid who is not a boy and not a girl who likes to do things regardless of gender fit?” They had about two questions then they both went with it. For the record: that’s where middle kid is at again.

Anyway, I was… more calm than usual? I felt like my brain was slower and on the sluggish side. It was a less pleasant experience than pot but not completely dissimilar? I didn’t have any of the uplift I get from pot but I got a little bit of the “pause” between having a thought and reacting.

My feet are going to sleep ridiculously quickly. If I kneel down to put stuff in a drawer it doesn’t take 2 minutes. Usually I can kneel for 10-15 minutes before my feet fall asleep.

My back has been hurting quite badly all day. Of course I have walked 6.5 miles after it hurt when I woke up. Cause yeah. I carried the littlest home for the final mile because she was utterly wasted.

I’m still having some nerve pain in my arms if I tweak them up to use them in an unusual position. (Putting the baby in the back carrier was a bit festive.) I feel a lot of tightness and general arm unhappiness. I have fairly deliberately not typed much today trying to rest. (Really the last couple of days.)

I have very much wanted to not add more medication to this in the first few days. So I’m not taking anything for the back pain or headache. I want to have a really solid idea of what is coming from the Amitriptyline. Normally I would definitely be medicating for those at this point because it hurts.

I’m having massive time dilation. I can check and see this is the end of the second day. It feels like a lot more than that. I labeled the pill packet with the exact date I am supposed to take each pill because I am worried about taking too much or skipping a day and not noticing.

I am utterly out of patience with the kids but I think that was happening before the meds. Right now it is hard to remember.

In unrelated news: I have 17 books to read in 34 days. Time for some graphic novels (Neil Gaiman’s American Gods 1 & 1). In another day I can finish The Cooking Gene, and I need to sit the kids down and finish Odd Girl Out. That will leave me with 14 books to go. Eep. Maybe my goal was a tad ambitious for this year…

New med tracking

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Started Amitriptyline last night, primarily for nerve pain. I got a solid 8 hours of sleep, which I don’t always do and that seems nice. As I was going to sleep I felt like I got to watch a firework show on my eyelids. Lots of bright white lights dancing. As is typical for me it took more like an hour and a half to really hit me instead of an hour.

ETA: Yeah, I barely stayed awake long enough to eat a little breakfast then I almost passed out on the table so I crawled back to bed. I was in and out for a while making sure that oldest got to school. Then I slept hard until 10:30 when I could tell that I needed to go to the bathroom to deal with blood (it’s the heaviest day of my period. What glorious timing).

My dreams were super intense and overwhelming and constant and highly sexual which I did not expect on a medication known for lowering libido.

I am so groggy that middle kid has been talking at me for a while and I have literally not retained a word of what has been said. I feel slow and stupid and exhausted.

It’s a very good thing I homeschool my 10 year old and Noah works from home because I don’t know how I could have provided care for the 2 year old today while alone. Scary thought. Woof.

I have a really intense headache at the back of my head near the top of the spine and it shoots straight through the skull to make it throb hard on my left temple. My mouth has been throbbing, which is a weird ass feeling. I keep feeling like I am falling only I’m lying prone at the time.

Strangely it was easier to sleep than usual because even though my neck/head hurt quite badly my shoulders already feel a little easier. It didn’t instantly hurt lying on my side. If I reach back gently the surgical wound site still hurts.

The headache is absolutely massive but I am worried about taking another medication on top of what is in my system.

I am sad because my lack of help today is going to mean that Noah has to work more days into December. (He was going to take the month off.) But at least I think it’ll only be a couple of days next week and not the whole month.

Also of note: my typing has been super shitty. It’s taking me 3-8 tries to figure out how to spell a lot of basic words. Yay spell check preventing me from looking in writing as stupid as I feel.

Everything hurts

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I’ve been trying really hard not to complain. Things are tough all over right now.

I’m having problems with my shoulder. Almost 11 months ago I had surgery to remove skin cancer. I had fairly extreme wound dehiscence. If you don’t know what that is (lucky you) it means after a surgery the healing wound site pops open. It was pretty fucking gory and bloody and resulted in a giant, garish, ugly scar. I don’t care that much about it being ugly.

I care that it still hurts. If I lean back on a chair a little too suddenly it hurts. If Noah gently strokes my back and he gets to within an inch of the wound I feel so much pain that my knees turn to jelly. I am not a wimp. I can endure significant pain.

My shoulders have been in bad shape for over 11 years due to nursing all night long with my oldest child and sleeping on my side in a rigid position. But it’s so bad now that I feel pretty constant pain. I miss chiropractic care and massage but with Covid it doesn’t feel like a good idea to be pursuing these sorts of intimate treatments.

Instead I endure. My brain feels cloudy. I know I am more irritable than I would be otherwise. It’s harder dealing with my general feelings of depression.

When I say it hurts I mean lifting a pot of tea to pour a cup hurts. Sometimes there is burning and stabbing pain all the way up and down my arm. Washing dishes is really painful; the pinching movement of holding things as part of the process is nasty.

To give you a bit of perspective… I have finally cracked. House cleaners are going to start coming to the house. That’s a pretty gigantic admission of defeat for me. I need help because I can’t do as much anymore because it hurts too much. I feel really despondent about this. I feel pathetic. I feel sad. I feel weak. I feel like a failure. I literally cannot carry my third child the way I did with my first two. She has to walk. Pushing a stroller is horribly painful. She has to walk. Luckily riding my bike is fairly comfortable because I have worked hard at adjusting the positioning of everything so the only time I really put pressure on my hands is when I am actively braking.

I often wake up with intense, nearly blinding pain in my neck and shoulder. I feel so embarrassed when I take pain medication first thing in the morning. It’s not that anyone in my family judges me. But I didn’t want to grow up and be like my mother.

I think I should probably reach out to the medical staff, dermatologist probably? But with Covid and cancer patients and people with urgent medical problems not being able to access necessary-for-life care I don’t feel at all comfortable raising my hand and asking for help.

So instead I sit in my house and I take the over the counter pain meds and I cry. I don’t feel any hope about ever feeling good in my body again. I am very scared of the degradation that is coming. There is nothing I can do about it. I just get to endure it. I made commitments and I take them very seriously. I will be here as long as I am physically capable of clawing my way through.

It’s going to hurt so very much and I’m scared.

Tree notes

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I’m looking up trees I want. I know I want some natives. (Looking here for natives: https://www2.gov.scot/Publications/2002/06/14891/5585) I am thinking hard on placement for them. I may go outside of strictly native. I should draw a diagram with the root complications mapped out. Trees I think would be suitable that have no human food benefit:

  • Willow (exactly what kind is eluding me.) I would put this over near the burn, perhaps between the pond and the burn? The pond is going to shed a lot of excess water over time. Osier looks like a good choice. I can use it to make baskets. Maybe Almond? Hm. Looks like by the pond is a bad idea because that is near the septic plumbing system. Right-o. Maybe that’ll be the one closer to the shed. I should definitely not get what I think of as a weeping willow because the suckers can spread 50′ tall and wide and the roots go even wider. Gulp.
  • I think a Rowan tree would be quite nice. Rosiness type?
  • I already have some birch on the property but more would be nice. Research is showing that a weeping birch would be the best bet for the space requirements
  • Pendula Rosea (an ornamental cherry) or Pendula Rubra
  • Hawthorn
  • Acer palmatum ‘Osakazuki’

Definitely or possibly food bearing:

  • cherry ‘Kiku-shidare-zakura’
  • Morello cherry
  • Stella cherry
  • Fig because I love Noah sooooooooo much. (He loves them and I hate them.)
  • Malus domestica ‘Discovery’ apple
  • Bloody Ploughman apple
  • Grenadier apple
  • Hoods supreme apple
  • Lord Lambourne apple
  • Pear Conference
  • Pear Moonglow
  • Cherry Kordia
  • Cherry  Summer Sun

I need to make a chart and figure out which are self pollinating, which need a buddy (and when!), and when they produce fruit so I don’t get a shit-ton all in one month and nothing else in other months.

But it is after 1am and I should not try to start that now. Tomorrow (or later today…) the plan is to do a bunch of yard work so sleep would be helpful.

The list

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It occurred to me lately how news of deaths filters down through cracks in my community. I found out about so many of the deaths 3rd and 4th hand and sometimes feel stunned that it even got to me.

Not that I’m planning to off myself: I have children that I committed to. Ideation is as far as I’m allowed to get… forever. But I am going to die. That’s the most inevitable thing about my whole life. What do I want to have happen when I die? How much of that do I want to leave to be a surprise for the people I love?

I’ve read about Swedish Death Cleaning. It seems like a good idea. (Basically once you start getting pretty old you start owning less and less to make it easier to deal with your stuff when you die. It’s a gift to you and your loved ones.)

But what is it going to mean for me? Death Cleaning is not intended to be something you do in middle age (I’m almost 40, yo–I’ll be surprised if I go past 80… this is the middle of my life). But there are things I can start doing even now because death is a sudden creature. It comes when it wills instead of waiting for a precise day.

One thing that occurs to me… I should make my own damn email blast list. That way people don’t have to hear it through the grapevine.

I should make a list of all of my online accounts with procedures for deleting them because I don’t want a hanging digital presence.

I should do some research as to which company might be happy to come get the books and take them away so my family doesn’t have to (after everyone takes out the ones they want to keep, of course).

I should find a charity that is willing to come bag up my clothes and take them away.

I should write it all down in one place so that Noah doesn’t have to do any work arranging it.

He’s going to be hurting a lot and he doesn’t think very clearly when he’s in pain. This is the last gift I can give him. Make space in his life so he can move on and figure out what to do with it.

I think he will do better at moving on than me. I really hope I go first. And I don’t want that to be a huge burden on him.

For some reason this death is hitting me really hard. Michael and Seth going from cancer in their mid-30’s didn’t hit me this hard. Wendy suiciding feels like a scythe through my soul. I’m drinking too much and sleeping too little. I’m really worried about how her husband is coping and it’s bringing my own mortality so much to the forefront of my mind.

Who do I not want to have learn this news second and third and fourth hand? Hell, I want to write all but the last few lines of my own obituary. That means I need to write it and keep updating it every few years.

But I should hope that you all know by now how it will start: Krissy was a badass motherfucker.

Loss

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I support your right to make this choice.
I understand that you did not have a choice.
I don't truly respect your choice.

The cessation of pain is what matters though, right?
I am so glad you are not hurting anymore.
Now I hurt more; there's nothing I will do to ease this burden.

I miss your voice.
I miss your smell.
I miss the possibility that things could change and we could love each other without hurting each other.

I miss you.
And I miss you.
And I even miss you. Though only the Gods know why.

You only caused me pain when I asked very nicely.
You never caused me pain in any single way.
I don't know what you did except hurt me. 

It doesn't seem to matter how much I love you or miss you.
Your story was really and truly never about me; I was a witness.
Even though your life could have been about me and it wasn't.

I grieve so hard for you.
Any piece of fresh grief touches the memory of you and reignites the pain afresh and the waves feel like they will swamp me.
"Have you ever lost anyone close to you?" Dripping with scorn and implication that I am not allowed to grieve for anything to do with you.

It's all tied up. 
I can't separate one grief from another today.
What I know is that there are no more chances to fix anything.

There is no way to find you more help.
There is no way to find you new treatments.
There is no way to find our way to a new way of being.

You are gone. 
You and
You and

Time has run out.

That is the deal.

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My oldest child is off having adventures on her own. Separation is great! She loves getting to come home and tell us all about her day. Of course she’s an intense person and she isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and she’s having to deal with social friction. This is important for a lot of reasons and I have no desire to take this experience away from her. She needs to learn who she is.

The trouble is, when someone starts some shit she retaliates just a little enough to keep a slap fight going. She doesn’t want to be perceived as a coward so she feels she must respond but she also doesn’t want to be a bully so she doesn’t want to escalate. We’ve been talking constantly for weeks about how that just encourages the situation to keep going at a simmer and she’s obsessed with talking and thinking about her negative experiences all day long. She feels like when she is at school she never stops looking over her shoulder. She’s developing a lot of anxiety and her stomach hurts most of the time. It’s making it hard to eat.

She keeps telling me that she wants to be a badass like me so she has to respond, she can’t just run away from the issues or people. One of her new buddies at school is the tallest boy in her grade and his response to bullying is to run away 100% of the time. She is very conflicted about watching his response.

I told her that as long as she sits on the fence she is going to encourage the problem to keep happening. Either get in a serious fight and really hurt someone… or decide you are committed to non-violence and start running. I will support you in whatever you decide. Sitting on the fence is going to go really poorly in the long run because it will egg the situation on and it will never improve.

She told me that she feels like she is letting me down if she runs because she wants to be brave like me.

Oh baby.

I fought when I was your age because I had a dad who raped me and a mom who mostly didn’t want to talk to me and I had been in foster situations for most of my life and I had gone to 19 schools and moved like 40 times. I fought because I was a highly traumatized feral animal who was trying to not die.

It didn’t make me a badass. It made me a traumatized feral animal.

She said that sometimes it is hard that she is so exceptional that sometimes I act disappointed when she is only average. I agreed that it sounded very hard. I can’t identify with that struggle. People expected me to be shitty and worthless and were shocked when I demonstrated anything else. I cannot understand what it feels like to let down your parents by not being perfect.

I told her that I don’t ever get to be the judge of whether her life has been highly traumatizing because my perspective is so fucked up and extreme that I am not in any way qualified to decide if her life experiences have been abusive. If she needs to react to the trauma she has experienced with violence… I am going to try hard to not judge. I’ve tried hard to give her stability and love and support so she doesn’t need to but there is the real chance I have failed.

I told her she is heading for a crisis of faith because sometime very soon she is going to figure out that her parents are fucked up assholes and she is better than us and she should not be aspiring to be like us. She has every chance of being so much better than us that we can’t even imagine what it is like to be her.

Aspiring to be like me at her age…. is not #goals. It’s not an improvement over who she is right now. I was worse, and meaner, and less loving, and less caring, and less educated, and less equipped in basically every way.

I told her that I try very hard to be like her. Because I can see which direction is an improvement in this house and it’s not being more like me.

I asked her if she feels I am more brave and badass on days when I lose my temper and scream and I behave like a bully towards helpless little people? Or am I more brave and badass on days when I can redirect and help my kids move towards their own aspirations of who they want to be?

I asked her what things make me a badass at this point in my life? I gave up fistfights more than 25 years ago. She said what makes me a badass is being brave and going on adventures and making things that other people say “I can’t do that”.

I asked her what part of me being a badass is making other people hurt and feel small?

She said none of it.

I asked her if she really wants to be aspiring to be the wounded traumatized part of me that had nothing better to offer the world or if she wants to be working towards the me that had a lot of therapy and a lot of privilege and a lot of time to pick and choose who I want to be and how I want to live in the world.

We cried together and she said that I really see the worst of me and I’m a lot less of an asshole than I think.

I said maybe. I said if I am less of an asshole than I think and I have treated her better than I fear I have then maybe she doesn’t need to lash out at people who are sitting in their own trauma; people who have nothing better to offer the world.

I asked her how she wants to remember this time of her life when she looks in the rear view mirror? Do you want to take pride in hurting people who don’t have a better way of living in the world or do you want to be someone who shows other people a better way?

I will support you and love you as you stumble through either path. I love you. I accept that you are not perfect and you have to make your own mistakes.

On the day that you were born I forgave you for everything you would ever do wrong. Because that is the deal.

It just drags on

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Depression sucks. I feel no joy or satisfaction. I feel no ambition or pride or desire to work. I just want to crawl into a ball and do nothing.

It’s not that I actually do nothing but my workload is 1/10 of my normal right now. I don’t have it in me to put my head down and plow through no matter what. I feel so empty. I feel like I have nothing to give. I feel like I am nothing.

Depression is not about your life circumstances or things that people can see from the outside.

Another turn

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Today I am 39. I feel like I should mark this for myself somehow. I used to care so much about seeing who I am reflected in words. It seems less and less wise as the years go by. I destroy relationships with my words. I hurt people when I share my thoughts. I hope and I dream for understanding when I pour my heart out.

It doesn’t work that well though.

I feel like this might be the most inward facing period of my life. When I was a child I had times when I was more isolated and more alone but it’s not the same thing. I am not out frantically trying to communicate. I am not trying desperately for understanding. I no longer have hope that I will find it and I am out of energy to try.

It’s kind of funny that I feel sad and withdrawn and depressed but about as far from suicide as I have ever been. I have made commitments and it doesn’t matter how I feel it matters how I act. I will show up for them.

I will smile and act pleased when all I want to do is curl up in a ball in a closet and cry. Because my problems are mine. Because it feels like the inability to feel happy is my fault and I should not inflict it on anyone else. It is no one else’s fault that I feel so empty. But I will do the dishes and sweep the floor and listen to the stories that other people tell and I will try as hard as I can to not think about how I feel.

Because it doesn’t matter.

It’s funny that being away from the large community of people in California both feels alienating and like a relief. I put so much effort into so many people. I’m exhausted and drained. Here I do not do that. It’s not that I am utterly friendless here, I’m not. But I’m not pouring out buckets of energy begging people to love me anymore.

That feels better and worse. In some ways that begging feels so integral to my personhood. Cheezeits this house and yard are so much more work than I had there that I couldn’t put so much energy into a social life if I wanted to. I feel worn to the bone. I feel like this move half killed me. So much has gone wrong this year. And I feel like I am a terrible liar because I didn’t take a year of rest. I don’t know how that could have happened. Not with everything that has happened that has been entirely outside my control. The only thing I could have done to seriously lower my work load would have been not painting the dining room. That was the expendable thing. Even my puttering in the garden was never a big drain, not really.

I had intended to spend a lot of this year working on fitness. I am so depressed and overwhelmed and out of cope that I have not done so, which may be part of why I feel so bad. I’m not sure what to do about it though.

I was talking to T last night and we were discussing the climate crisis and political crisis stuff going on around the world. He said that he kind of pities me because he has it much easier than me. He’s 50 and he expected to die long ago and when he goes it will make a few people a little bit sad but it won’t really alter anyone’s life much. I have kids. I have to work like a dog to extend my life and keep giving to them long, long past when he is allowed to just quit. I can’t quit, not ever. I have to rage against the dying of the light and do everything in my power to help these little people be safe and ok in the future.

I am absolutely convinced that I wouldn’t still be trying so hard without them. I have mixed feelings about that. And our sweet baby extended the childhood period by a decade. I will spend thirty solid years with children I need to house and feed and take care of. I’ve already been doing this for over 12 years. It’s a lot. I’m not that far into the second decade and I have a third way off in the distance. It is daunting to think about sometimes. Will I be a withered husk with no genuine emotions left at all?

I would say it’s just a bad day. But it’s been a bad week in a rough month in a worse year.

But I love the trees I see out my window. I am grateful I will soon have room for more fruit trees. I have every intention of donating whatever I can’t can/use. I like seeing the hills and the firth off in the distance. I see plants and some sort of flowers almost around the calendar here. It’s becoming autumn and the trees are slowly beginning to change. It’s nice.

For a couple of months now I have wanted to decorate for Christmas. I don’t know if it is that I want to borrow Christmas cheer or if I want the year to just hurry up and fucking end already or if I want to feel like I am getting ahead on my to do list so maybe I can rest more. To be fair, I have rested a lot more over the last week and some. I caught a cold. It’s not fucking corona but I have to take the test anyway because otherwise EC can’t be at school. One of my buddies as a nurse and when I described my constant fall/winter funk she said it sounded like chronic bronchitis. Meh. It doesn’t really matter. I won’t do anything about it.

I am so tired. I sleep. Not worse than in the past and maybe even better. Doesn’t matter. I miss massage and chiropractic care. I like not spending very much money on life though. I feel like I’m doing a lot of waiting for time to pass. Waiting to see if I have hope again. Waiting to see if I will ever feel better.

Right now I doubt it.

Scraping the bottom of the spoon drawer

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Well fuck everything. The last two ish weeks have been absolutely horrid. I mean, there’s all the things (*wave arms in the direction of the whole world*) and then my body is being a real nightmare. My PMDD symptoms this month have been utterly unreal. My pain levels have been sky high. My mood is in the toilet. (Or rather in the scalpel drawer–not that I did anything. But I thought about it. Hell I don’t even own a scalpel at this point.)

And then when I did start my period my mood got worse and the pain got worse and I passed some clumps that were the size of golf balls and that’s just not fucking ok.

I’m watching two very different communities go through growing pains. I’m learning a lot about myself as I watch them process. I’m thinking about Sobonfu. I will never find a community; I have to make it. What are my values?

I’m more than a little bit of a dick. So my line can’t be that people can’t be dicks. I can be a bully so that can’t be the line either. Ah shit.

I try so hard to lift people up but right this minute all I can see are my failures.

Coming full circle

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I will never forget when I said to a therapist that I felt like I didn’t have high self esteem and she burst out laughing and said I had the highest self esteem of any client she has ever seen.

Oh.

I come at it sideways. I doubt myself. I question my decisions and my beliefs. I do not believe I am always right. I do not believe I always come to the correct decisions on the first try. I think I need to keep trying and keep growing and keep changing because being correct is never a fixed position.

But you know what? I really fucking like me. I really like who I am. I think I reach a lot of correct decisions. I think I am an ethical person. I think I have worked really hard at becoming a person I could respect.

Two things can be true. I can be open to the idea that I am wrong and I need to change/grow while also believing that I am really fucking cool. I can believe that I make a lot of correct decisions while also knowing that I still fuck up.

As my beloved Jenny said in the birthday book (paraphrased) I look at myself and see how far I have to go and she looks at me and sees how far I have come. Those can both be true.

I feel like I have had several days lately where I have felt extreme doubt about my moral compass and about my coping skills. I moved to a new country and the rules are different. But I did what I do and I went and talked to a lot of different people about the mixed feelings I am having and what I heard consistently over and over and over from a variety of different sources was: don’t change everything about you because you are really great. Figure out what you want to add on to who you already are.

That is so much more attainable than “You are wrong and you have to change everything.” I don’t hold back. I will tell you how I really feel. Even if that isn’t the British way. I have always loved having friends who were immigrants because they challenged me to look at myself and my life through new eyes. Maybe I can be that here. I will change a little to adapt. And other people will change a little to accept me and we will meet in the middle.

Do you know what I have no doubt about in any way shape or form? I will make friends and I will build a community.

It’s what I do.

I like that about me.

All communities pick a side. No community is neutral. No space is safe for everyone. I am very clear about who I will pick. I am very clear about who I want to make safe space for.

I know who I am. And today that feels very good.