Category Archives: adult-only

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What does it mean to belong?

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I reach for your hand, your voice, your heart, your screen name.
I want to know who you are, I want to see if we are the same.
In you I see the echo of the love, the pain, the joy I feel.
With you I manage to feel like I might be real.

I wish I didn't need you.
I wish I didn't still want to see you.
I wish I could be with you.

No matter what happens you will always be mine.
We will be connected until the end of our time.

I have touched your soul and you have touched mine and that is all it takes to belong.

Life keeps plugging along.

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Today my toddler was so cute. Saying things like “Babies need hugs because babies get angry. Babies need hugs because babies get sad. Babies need hugs because babies get frustrated. Babies need hugs because babies feel loving. I love you. *big hug*” And: “I finished my cupcake, now it is time for chocolate!” Err, no kid. That’s not happening.

Eldest Child is, in my opinion, fully matriculated from home schooling. If the school goes on lock down and she has to distance learn through them it’s not my dog. I’ve been saying consistently that I am not withdrawing her from secondary school. Once she starts this school it is six years to the finish line. Today was the first day. She was elated. She should be along home… sometime soon.

Middle Child and I worked on their room today. The walls and trim are done. The closet is not done. The ceiling is not done. I cannot buy more paint for the ceiling because the paint store does not have any of the base in stock and hasn’t been able to get a shipment in a while. I cannot finish the closet until the wonderful handyman comes in and finishes the stuff he wants to add. So I’m relieved of painting duty for a while.

We started off the day with a walk to the park. We went out when EC left for school and the youngest two played for half an hour. Then we came back and I did laundry and dishes and we all had a snack. Then we painted. Then lunch. Then more laundry and dishes.

I need to sit down with MC and work out what her next “term” of home school will look like. I need to move most of the paint out of kid bedrooms and out to the shed.

I’m waiting for the handyman to put a backsplash in the kitchen because we are rubbing all the paint off the wall with our frequent cooking. The previous owners didn’t actually paint this house. They just used primer. Cheap fuckers.

Tomorrow we will go to the park when EC goes to school again and I told the littles we could stay longer. When we get home we are going to do a bunch of garden work. A lot of the plants inside the yard need thinning and I’m allowed to rip out grass and put plants along the edge of the road. I think I see a fun way to kill two birds with one project.

I need to figure out where will be the “paint clean up” zone in the future. Once we are completely done with this project I am going to scoop up all the fucked up dirt and put it in the garbage then keep working towards creating a pond.

I am really happy that all of my ongoing projects at this point feel tiny and/or easily contained/managed. They are all either a few hours at a time or they don’t create a cascading horror show of issues while they languish waiting to be finished.

I have a hard time when it feels like I can’t see the light at the end of the over-work tunnel. When I don’t know if I will be done in a week or a month or six months. I’ve been in that place for about a year now. Everytime I think I’m to the end of the big work push something breaks or there is some stall that makes things drag out forever.

I need a reduced work load. I need more rest. I can’t sustain what I have been doing. Not anymore. I’m out of spoons. I scraped the back of the drawer. I went to my neighbor’s house and borrowed all of theirs. I’m just… done.

Steaming pile of mom wrath

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This morning Eldest Child (who is now 12) started off a conversation with “You know how you think gacha videos are a complete waste of time?”

“I don’t think they are a complete waste of time. I think you learn things about youth culture and social interactions and music and video pacing and art technicalities and all kinds of things that I don’t need to learn at this point. So they are very useful for you and not something I want to spend my time on. That’s not the same thing as being a complete waste of time.”

“Uhm, well right now I’m trying to learn come backs for insults. Like if someone calls me ugly I can say ‘At least I don’t have an ugly personality.'”

She continued on with a few other similarly clever responses and I nodded along and smiled a little. Then she got to the humdinger.

“Or like, if the girl saying I am ugly is wearing a crop top I can say ‘At least I don’t look like a stripper!'”

There is this thing I do. If I freeze then slowly rotate my head towards you with a scowl on my face you know you are in trouble. She froze too. She knows. She didn’t know what was coming but she knew it wasn’t good and her whole body tensed up.

“Oh really. So at least you aren’t like my friends. Because you know I have friends who are strippers, right? At least you are better than those people who have jobs. Right? At least you are better than girls who are comfortable with their bodies and their sexuality, right? Those bitches should cover up and be ashamed of having a body and never have sex. RIGHT?” (If anything my volume got a lot lower than usual. This emphasis was all in intensity and not volume.)

She looked like I had slapped her across the face. She was stunned.

“You totally think girls and women should cover up and be modest and ashamed of having bodies, right? That’s your value system?” (For the record she has mini skirts, tube tops, and crop tops. She’s always too hot so she’s had these for years.)

“No… I don’t believe that at all.”

“Then why would you try to shame someone in exactly that way?”

“Oh god. It’s not even 8am and I have stepped in a steaming pile of mom wrath.”

“Well you tell me, what do you believe?”

“I believe that girls and women should be allowed to enjoy their bodies and enjoy sex. I will never say that again. I’m sorry.”

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Recently someone told me that they want to have kids who are comfortable with sex and sexuality so they have open and free conversations about their own sex life. I had a lot of trouble not reacting with repulsion and horror. You don’t have to talk about your own sex life to inculcate sex positivity in children. You don’t have to treat children like a peer in order to show how you live in the world. I am a freakily modest dresser. I cover up. There are a lot of reasons for it, none of them related to morality or shame. My children are not learning that scanty dress is fine by watching me.

But by golly I will go out with a pitch fork and defend someone else’s right to dress that way. I think we normalize and teach our values every single day by what we say and how we say it. I don’t flip out over every stupid thing my kid says (she’s at that age where about half of what she says is gob smackingly stupid) I mostly mildly redirect her or raise an eyebrow or roll my eyes. She will learn.

But in this house it is never ok to shame someone for having a fucking body and wearing whatever clothes they want. In this house it is never fucking ok to shame someone for having a job even and especially if that job involves sex work. Never. You don’t do it. Or yeah, you will step in a steaming pile of mom wrath.

(Note: my kids told me that they wished I was still writing about them in the blog because they want to see what I record someday. Ok lovies.)

So close and yet so far.

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I was done. My share of the project was finished. I had no more painting to look forward to. Then I noticed… Middle Child is really and truly not ready to do her own room. She tried. She did a lot! She did great! She can’t edge to save her life. And she takes the dark edging color and smears the brush all over the super light colored wall when she thinks she has too much paint on it. Insert head smacking emoji.

My hands are in a bad place. Holding a paint brush sucks. I’ve got about three hours of pinchy movement in my hands in a day before I have shooting pains. I did three hours of trim today. I will do three hours of painting on Sunday. And on Monday. Hopefully I will finish on Tuesday. I am both looking forward to and not looking forward to this process.

Eldest Child says she is done and her mural looks fabulous.

Now we get to wait for carpet fitting to be done. ECs room smells strongly of nicotine–that was part of the motivation for her paint job and the carpet is gross too. I don’t like the idea of her having to breathe that crap through another winter so we are making the room less nasty. Apparently the teenage boy who used to live in the room was a heavy smoker. Ugh.

MCs room had a shower/sink wash room taken out of the corner so there is a big patch with no carpet at all and that’s not going to work in the long run.

Neither bedroom has carpeting on the redone closet and they should have. The sub flooring is not meant to see the light of day.

In 34 days we have been in this house for a year. I’d really like to be done with the big fixing jobs. I’d like to spend a lot more time puttering in the yard but by the time I’m done with inside chores I’m so wiped out. I’m still trying to deal with the sleep deprivation I put myself through for the dining room. In 27 days I missed 8 full nights of sleep. That’s too much. Ah well.

I have new glasses! They are amazing! I can see better than I have in such a long time. I like the cool grey metal.

I’m having more interactions with young people here than I am used to. In California my friends group skewed noticeably older and here I seem to be finding a lot of folks in their 20’s. I suspect it is related to people my age being busy and not having time to go meet new people. This is leading to a lot of feelings. Some of the folks are really stellar–don’t get me wrong. I’m truly thrilled about some of the folks I have met. Ironically the ones that please me the most are the in person ones.

I’m having a fair number of online interactions that I’m struggling with. I am a judgy motherfucker. When I was 19 I had this interaction with a 39 year old woman who told me I shouldn’t be in the scene and I should go off and have normal people sex for a decade or so. Now I get it. These kids scare the hell out of me. They… sigh.

They scare the hell out of me. I’m not going to get into what they are doing.

I worry a lot about them as individuals and how their behavior will contribute to their community. I worry about the girls and young enbys in the community and what they have to put up with from the macho “lad” crew. I feel like I can watch this chat room for a couple of days and go “Ah. You either already have or will have a bad reputation because you are dangerous.”

These are instincts I totally lacked 20 years ago.

I have so many mixed feelings about myself these days. I have come so far.

Recently I pissed someone off when I said that I didn’t feel like 9/11, the 2008 financial crash, or this pandemic are going to be the central life changing traumas of my life. I was told that saying that meant I was rubbing my good luck and privilege in other peoples faces. 9/11 happened across the country and I was at least two or more degrees of separation away from people who were really effected. I would feel like a poseur if I said it really changed my life.

I mean, this explosion in Beirut isn’t going to be a formative trauma for me either even though it is absolutely a horrifying trauma. It isn’t mine.

Most of my friends were either above or below the 2008 financial crash. I was in the process of quitting teaching when it happened. Teaching was a career that was insulated from the results. Is that all luck or privilege? A lot of my friends were in marginal jobs or retail or child care and they weren’t impacted. Is that luck or privilege? I lived in a house that had been purchased long before the crash so my housing was secure. That was both luck and privilege.

I feel weird about having white people who started out in the exact same place as me at the brink of adulthood tell me that my life is different from theirs now because of privilege. I think almost everything that has happened to me since I got married has been about privilege. But there was this gap period that I have funny feelings about. I lived a hair above the national poverty line for the first seven years of being an adult in one of the most expensive places in the country. I definitely had times I went on dates in order to eat. Being told that everything that happened to me in that time period was because I was so privileged is complicated. I’m not saying it is wrong.

Sometimes I’m not sure what privilege means.

I’m ready for slower days. I’m ready for shorter days. I’m ready to stop with the fucking pinchy work. I am pretty sure I can finish the painting this week. When I do I think we are entirely done painting for a long while. That’s good. This year has been so slammed and I am so utterly exhausted. I feel half dead.

I want this toddler to stop waking up three times a night and climbing in my damn bed.

Oh, toddler sayings I want to remember: “I have a pooty” for I have a poopy booty. “Clean the pipes!” is emphatically screamed when I am cleaning her up after a pipe. It’s time to go to sleep.

Home schooling vs pandemic schooling

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A buddy in the US indicated they would be interested in hearing my thoughts on dealing with educating their child through this experience. I am writing this from cool, comfy Scotland where the numbers are lower and the leadership is more sane. (Sturgeon is more sane. We are trying to mitigate the damage BoJo would like to cause.)

We are going through a once in a century global event. Education is going to be disrupted for all people between the ages of 4 and 25. Given that never before in the history of humanity has education been so wide spread and so standardized… this represents a fairly unique situation for coping with. Even the kids who are being allowed to go back to school because numbers in their area are low are not going to be educated how they normally would, their teachers are going to spend a lot of the day talking about basic hygiene and “stop touching your mask”.

I am watching the United States as an outsider at this point. I am reading the opinions of parents and educators all over the country. It is fascinating seeing the range represented, but I suppose that is the point of the United States, right?

The data gives me a lot of feelings.

I am thinking about sending my oldest to school next month because she really wants to go and there are single digits of new cases in this country at this point and they aren’t happening in our council.

The US is a different story. I would be pulling my kids out of school no matter what the district says for a few reasons. Namely: the numbers are climbing out of control, there is mass denial about what is happening from the federal government, teachers are being expected to be all things to every person while their budgets are being slashed, and if people try to go back the most vulnerable in society are going to be in great danger.

My oldest is asking to go to school because she wants a more intense social experience. I have mixed feelings about this because other than letting her do that (which represents a lot of exposure!) I intend to live like lock down is still happening until well into next year. We are seeing very few people. We avoid stores and mask up if we have to go. I fully expect December/January/February to get bad and I’m hunkered down.

So, if you are in the US, my suggestion is to home educate your kids for the next school year. But keep in mind that home education rarely looks like what kids are doing in school. The first and most important suggestion to getting through the next year: try to relax about standards. No one is going to hit a big stride and progress several grades in the next year. Everyone is scared and off their game. That doesn’t mean you are doing anything wrong. If you can get through the next year without an anxiety disorder, well fucking done. Pat yourself on the back. You are a rock star.

My approach to home education has changed a lot from year to year as the needs of my children and the needs of my family have drifted. In talking to other home educating families it seems to be the norm instead of the exception.

Right now in this Time Of Our Covid 2020 my standards involve trying to get as much normality and consistency as possible while not pushing for excellence. I focus more on chores and interpersonal skills than academic skills.

We are watching more screen time than normal. But in order to get the screen time you have to: do your house chores to my satisfaction, exercise, do your academics, and eat some healthy food.

Right now I have a 2 year old, a 9-almost-10 year old, and a 12 year old. 2 year old can have the iPad if she is dressed, her hair is brushed, her teeth are brushed, and her toys are picked up. If she throws a bunch of stuff on the floor the iPad goes up on a shelf because it is now play time. She does ok with this expectation.

Middle Child has maths five days a week. Right now they are working on three curriculums: Houghton Mifflin a year below their expected grade (they asked to start with this level and they are blasting through it quickly), Life of Fred which is a home school very story based alternative approach to maths–I highly recommend it, and supplementary Khan Academy. They spend 20 minutes a day on each curriculum because that way they are making progress and not getting so bored or frustrated. I started my oldest on this type of approach when she was a bit younger than MC is now, but life got in the way. MC works on handwriting by writing letters and stories. They do science work a few days of the week. Science is pretty loosy goosy right now. Sometimes it is botany stuff (sometimes we do yard work and look at the plants and look them up on identifiers and talk about their needs and sometimes we walk in the woods), sometimes they do cooking experiments, sometimes they do anatomy puzzles, sometimes we read about space and I do little pop quizzes, sometimes we watch documentaries… I’m open to a lot of things counting. Both kids have been working on a unit project for a few months about budgeting and shopping.

Eldest child’s extra maths curriculum is a pre-algebra book. So she’s roughly two grades ahead. When she turned 9 she was a full grade behind. In three years she has completed six years of maths and she’s working through the seventh year now. There were a few traumatic months early on when she did a lot of lying to me and the punishment cycle was wicked bad. In retrospect I should have given her less trust at the time because she did a fairly normal set of pushing boundaries and I wasn’t watching closely enough. I will not repeat that error. Her writing expectations are longer and more sophisticated. Her essays resemble those of my high school sophomores and she should be going into (US) 7th grade. Whatever we do for science she has to do write ups that explain what she knew before we started, what she learned, and what she would do differently in the future. She also spends a lot of very focused time on maths and computer animation skills.

I don’t say any of this to brag. I say this as a lead in to: I do not do formal academics with kids before they are 8/9 years old. If your child is 5, 6, 7, and maybe even 8 right now… I would strongly recommend doing as much as you can to relax and not worry about the “standards”. Talk to your kids. If you can afford to buy books, buy them on a wide variety of topics and read them to your kids. If you are able to check books out from the library get at least 20 a week. If you have friends who have a good library in their house: both of you keep good records and borrow things as fast as they will let you. For kids under 8 my general guideline is 2 hours or less of computer time. I might make an exception during lock down schooling of 2 hours of mindless watching and more time if it is focused and involves thinking and doing. Outschool classes are great. I would allow 2-4 hours of Minecraft right now because it’s shocking how much that teaches.

But I sincerely believe with my whole heart that the day should start with chores and exercise. In my house I deliberately organize my kitchen so that my small children can unload the dishwasher. Setting the table for meals is a great job for little kids. Clearing the table is a great job for little kids. Depending on age and ability scooping a cat litter box or giving food to pets. Tidying up their own room. These days I insist on a basic making of the bed because our cats have potty accidents and it’s easier to use a different blanket when you find a surprise “Eww gross” present at night than to have to strip the whole bed right at bed time. I think 8/9 is a great time to start taking turns cleaning the bathroom. A 7 year old can run a vacuum or sweep. This is a good basic list of chores by age. That said: my 9 year old puts a meal on the table about twice a week and does a good job.

Last night’s dinner was 9 year old made. We had venison cooked with oranges, honey, paprika, and salt; sweet potato chips; jalapeño poppers; and salad. It was delicious.

In this time of lock down I think it would be reasonable to have a once a week big baking project that supplies all of the sweets for the family. Have the kid do half or more of the work as they are able. Doubling recipes counts as maths. I love having a white board in the kitchen because I have the kid practice writing the recipe, then do the maths to double it, then check it off as we go through to double check their steps.

Read to your kids as much as you can without going insane. Raise them around literacy and even if it comes later, it will probably come. It’s not a 100% guarantee, but it’s not uncommon for kids to wait until 8, 9, or 10 to read if they have parents who will read a lot to them. They do catch on at some point because they want to play video games or go off and be part of the world faster than their parents will help out with. Video games are a great spur to better grammar. I let my kids get on RPGs with chat rooms at 10 because they have to practice their spelling and grammar because people online are vicious. It’s awesome.

Skip worksheets. They make life hell and impart very little actual knowledge. This is a great time to start writing to pen pals. This is a great time to talk about maths in the world. There are super fun manga books with maths concepts. Bedtime Math has some good stuff.

Increase responsibility. Increase connection. Eat all of your meals together and in the morning ask what the kid wants to do today. In the evening talk about your favorite and least favorite parts of the day. Work on a journal together where you write a short paragraph and the kid illustrates it.

Don’t worry about being perfect. There is no perfect in a situation like this. You are going to be anxious and scared. So will your kid. In my opinion the best thing you can do is get through this with as much grace, love, and patience as you can. If you don’t get through everything don’t beat yourself up. The best possible outcome is having another tomorrow so you can fix your mistakes.

I love you. You can do this.

Hey, hi there, hello

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I am running again. It’s a slow process. I was getting into a good rhythm for a while there then I fell down the stairs and jacked up my foot and took two weeks off. In the last seven days I covered 25.7 miles (that includes my daily walking around the house–separating the distance is hard). Given that in the past four weeks I’ve only covered 78.9, a fair amount of that was this week with the return to running. I’m having trouble with my tech so separating out just the “runs” isn’t working that well. I’m not too worried about speed at this stage so just increasing my mileage is where I am.

Meh. But last night’s run felt great. Until I stepped into a slick of mud and fell down a little hill. Luckily I landed in a lot of mud so it didn’t hurt. Sigh. Maybe I will have to run in the neighborhood during rain periods instead of the trail even though the trail is more fun.

Paint arrives today. I should walk around and take before pictures. I have not followed Noah’s request to avoid big projects for a year at all. I would feel really bad only a lot of the construction is not my fault and I was being a total dick when all I was allowed to do was clean and stare at the kids not doing their chores as fast as I would like. I have more hope for the second year of living here being a bit restful? Ugh. It’s not my fault that the plumbing in the whole house was fucked up. I am not good at looking at bare drywall. Hell, we still aren’t done with the basic repairs. This house has been a giant pain.

I am grateful that Eldest Child wants to go to secondary school when things open up. Homeschooling three levels is utterly exhausting. EC is very much at a higher academic level these days. Middle Child is still cruising through the elementary level work. And now I have a budding preschooler. These are very different types of curriculums and they all take full attention. I told EC that once she goes back to school she is in it until she graduates because I’m not taking her out again no matter how rough it is. You get to finish.

It’s time.

I absolutely will not force a kid to start if they don’t feel ready. It’s a principle. But by golly I am not withdrawing you again.

I think it will be good for MC to get a lot of extra academic attention. She is running into that thing where she has been smart enough to “just know the answer” for her whole life and I am starting to not accept it from her. She has to show me the work. She’s not thrilled but she’s coping. We talk a lot about why the work needs to be done, not just arriving at the answer. It’s a process. In particular her emotional growth lately has been truly astounding. She’s like a new kid. She has so much more self control than she has had in the past. When she’s frustrated she huffs a little then gets on with it. That’s massive. She hasn’t thrown a screaming fit in months. I’m having a much easier time with her and I’m grateful because everything else still feels annoyingly rough.

Emotionally I’m… mixed. On one hand I am clearly very depressed. My energy levels are low and I feel very little motivation. I have a lot of discipline. I have almost zero motivation. I’m holding it together with the kids very well all things considered. I am cranky and a bit snippy but I’m not yelling and I’m not being nasty. I have been known to be a bit hostile as I say, “Don’t make me repeat myself.”

Generally speaking running a much larger house is going ok. I am delegating so much stuff. *pat self on back*

I’m writing because when I run I compose long blog posts in my head. But today I don’t actually have the courage to write about what I was thinking. I feel vulnerable and raw and like I can’t handle backlash.

So I can write about things that don’t matter very much. I am slow and I am sad but I am working hard and I am getting through intense amounts of work. I have more work coming and I will plow through it.

Now I need to go dress a two year old.

In today’s “shit my kid says”

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My 12 year old did me a favor today. Here in Scotland you have to carry glass items to a centralized recycling unit, often near a store. She was taking her allowance over to get some candy and she offered to bring recycling. Sounded great to me.

While she was there a 25+ year old man noticed that she was putting a wine bottle in the recycling and said “Drinking already, huh?” and winked at her.

She said: “First of all, it’s my mom’s. Second of all, I’m twelve. Third of all, I’m lesbian. Bugger off.”

She said he was a bit startled and said “Damn.” But he walked away and made no more of it.

I have rarely felt so proud. I want to grow up and be like her.

It’s a lot

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In lieu of proper emails to the people who have expressed concern, here’s a blog entry.

I’m not doing so hot. It’s a whole bunch of things. This PMDD cycle is ridiculously brutal. I’m on day fucking 35 and I wish I would just god damn bleed already. I think I would be doing poorly even if everything else was going well. But everything else is not going well.

The pandemic is not hitting my area hard at all–there haven’t been new cases in a while and we’ve gone a few days without a death in the whole country. There will be a few more deaths as this trickles to an end, but Scotland as a whole has managed this pretty darn well. I am terrified of when tourism opens up again. That’s going to fuck us. But I also recognize that an awful lot of the industry exists around supporting tourism so it’s a double edged sword.

All the stuff in the US. I feel ashamed for not being there to participate. I feel grateful that I am not part of it. I feel fear for all of the people on the ground doing the work. I feel scared for the future. I am watching the revolution on tv because I was a coward and I got out.

Things in my house. Stuff with Noah is at a weird/hard point. We are having some troubles. I don’t know how to fix them and I don’t know what the way forward looks like and I’m really scared. I am really really scared. I feel so hurt. I feel wounded. I feel sad.

My oldest child is truly into puberty now. Woo! In the process of trying to celebrate her having a big milestone (in a way we have been discussing for three god damn years) she told me that I am the most embarrassing thing ever and there was a whole lot of “you are gross” face and body language. I’m totally butt hurt. I know it is normal. I know it is to be expected. I know I shouldn’t let it get to me. But I’ve already been crying for a few days so that was just not something I could shrug off in that moment.

Middle child is… she’s having a hard time with everyone taking care of their own needs right now. She is angry and being difficult because she still wants to be catered to like a little kid and no one has that to give her right now. We are all tired and doing stuff to deal with our own shit. I’m trying to talk her through how to meet her own needs a bit more and it’s just hard. So she’s getting in trouble a lot because bad attention is better than no attention.

Youngest child is an adorable little shit head. She has taken to yelling at us all because she wants to be top dog. YOU. WILL. NOT. SAY. THAT. TO. ME. (When we say something like, please don’t kick me.) She’s starting to get more consequences and she’s learning that when mama says something it fucking stays true. If you get into the fridge and steal multiple pieces of fruit and take one bite and leave them to rot, no you don’t get a slice of cake when the rest of us do. We don’t do that with food in this house. If you take the fruit you eat it before you move on. Sorrynotsorry.

Well, I’m writing behind this password because Jenny promised me that I could write what I needed to write and I didn’t need to password protect it–she would choose not to read it. Then she read it and yelled at me. So awesome. Jenny is trying to rewrite history. “I’ve said one wrong thing.” Oh fuck that. You started out our relationship 26 years ago calling me a stupid slut. There have been incidents like this for over two decades. You don’t get to say that calling my kids retarded was saying one wrong thing. She also clarified that she didn’t spank her daughter for a panic attack she spanked her because she was being defiant and screaming in Jenny’s face. Hello? You have rewarded her for bad behavior and defiance all her life and now all of a sudden it is not ok to the level you have to hit her for it? Yeah I don’t find that more excusable.

I don’t want to end the relationship. But I don’t know how close I want to be either.

I am not doing well at responding to anyone’s emails. I feel trapped inside my head. I feel unable to reach out because I feel wrong and bad and stupid and unwanted all over the place.

There was drama in some online forums. A couple pieces in a couple of places. In one of the womens-support groups there was this one woman who was really fucking antagonistic and when I got sick of being bullied I left. The one person from the group who has remained my friend then wanted me to spend weeks helping her process her feelings about being bullied by the one problematic woman. I’m like, this is not good for me. So she left the group too. Some of the other members came to her and asked about forming a new group without the problematic woman and I feel rejected, unworthy of defense, and really unimportant. I feel fucking bad. I provided a lot of emotional support to those people for over a year and me being chased off was fine but once it is this other gal all of a sudden the bully is a problem. I feel like shit.

I’ve been chatting with some of the bay area kinky folk. Some dude was making “jokes” that weren’t funny about covid at at ime when one of the members had a mom who was doing quite poorly and she was terrified. A few of us called him out for not being funny and told him he should apologize. He then proceeded to go on this extensive tirade about how pointless it is to apologize to mentally ill fuck ups. He said that the request for an apology was tantamount to him being falsely accused of rape. WTF? Now one of my friends is his new submissive. I’m like, “well. That’s fucking awesome.” I’m trying to just set boundaries with her about how I don’t want to hear about him and it’s only so successful. I may end up having to stop talking to her and that will be sad.

I don’t know why emails feel harder.

House stuff continues……..s…..l…..o…..w…..l….y….. which means I can’t just be done. I am in this constant state of waiting for the next step and it feels awful. This house will be great when everything works. And I just want to cry.

Sleep is not going well. I do get a fair bit sometimes but mostly I don’t get enough sleep and I feel poorly. I’ve had more than a few days lately where I got almost nothing done because I feel so awful. I’m depressed and I’m definitely getting the full-body malaise.

That said, I have been completing my miles. If I feed the kids, get my miles in… that’s enough to count for a day right now. I’m only up to 16 miles/week right now. I’m adding 1 or 2 miles every other week (mostly 1 but there are a couple of jumps) until September of 2021. My birthday week next year will be my peak week: 54 miles in a week. Then I start ramping down again (hopefully for a marathon the first weekend of October, we’ll see) the week of the marathon I only do 35 miles. It’s more in a day than I did during training, but the hope is that my body will be so accustomed to just going and going that it will be fine. Knock on wood for no injuries. I am a little worried about how often I will need to use the treadmill over the winter because it just isn’t the same as running outside, but it’s a lot better than injuring myself on ice or not running.

I am 10lbs below the peak weight I hit a bit ago. I have done pretty well about cutting sugar from my tea (only had one teaspoon one time) and I’ve not 100% eliminated alcohol (it’s not a great coping method and I get that but I don’t *have* a great one) but I’ve gone from drinking 5-6 days a week to having some 3 times in the past two weeks. I am also running out of stuff and I think I will be good about not buying more for a while. I mean, I have a whole bottle of whiskey sitting there I haven’t touched yet so I won’t be out out for a while.

We have some tenants and they are super sweet. I found them through the mosque. A bit ago my heart was moved to reach out to the mosque and tell them that if one of their members ends up in a tough spot because of job-loss in the pandemic and they need emergency housing, I have an empty apartment. The kind doctor who talked to me at first said he didn’t know of anyone at the moment but he’d keep me in mind. Almost a month later I got a call. They are a really sweet couple, she’s pregnant and her cooking is mind bendingly good. They are not paying rent yet (that’s the whole out of work + being an immigrant means you can’t get government support thing) but they are giving us stuff they make and offering help around the yard and being super gracious. The long-term goal is they will pay rent once jobs happen again. I am willing to extend some faith here. These are rough times all over the place. We are having really fun conversations and they love playing with youngest child when she’s outside. The young lady moved here just over three months ago and basically doesn’t know anyone. We are talking as best we can with her emerging English and my bad Hindi which is close enough to Urdu that we can communicate some.

Seriously, just having those smells wafting through my house from her cooking is worth the price of admission. Oh golly. It smells like home.

The yard has come along quite a bit and I feel like I am ready for the growing season. I still have a long way to go before I figure out all of what I need to do and what I need to prune and when. It’s a process. The yard is feeling overgrown and more jungle-like and I love it.

I mean, I’ve been feeling pretty crappy. But instead of feeling suicidal I have self mutilation ideation. It’s still not great (and I’m not doing it) but after so many years of “I should die” being my first impulse it is in fact an improvement. I’m sad. I feel bad about myself. But I have work to do and I need to wait for this wave of sadness to pass so I can get back to it.

Not other people’s fault

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I don’t blame people in the bay for how stressful the bay was for me, not really. It’s complicated. Nobody owed me support. Not even people who promised support. It’s more that I was not able to calm down and feel ok and I wanted others to make me feel better. I know that was broken of me.

I wanted to be loved enough by others that I didn’t have to love myself; it’s so clear when I look at years of journal entries quickly. I bounced around from person to person. I don’t know that I helped anyone from the goodness of my heart. I wanted to create a sense of obligation in people. I know it was wrong but I never managed to stop.

I have a buddy in the bay. She is currently on the same merry go round I was on. She does things for people and she can’t understand why they don’t volunteer to help her too. She is feeling bitter, rejected, and sad. She wants to look for new people to try again with but she has similar problems year after year.

It’s easier to see the pattern in the rear view mirror or when someone else is doing it.

I have spent seven months traveling. The people I expected to be able to ask for help from mostly didn’t work out but I was massively surprised by who showed up.

I thought Dad and the old babysitter would do a lot; I expected it. They didn’t. To be fair, Dad wanted to but his boundaries changed and I didn’t feel I could accept and be the kind of mother I want to be. That’s not his fault. I didn’t spend 10 years with fanatical boundaries around my drug usage and sex life just so I could let someone I met in a sex club do whatever he wants in front of my kids because “it isn’t illegal.” I don’t bring my kids around people who drink heavily even though it’s legal. I don’t take my kids to houses where people smoke cigarettes inside even though it’s legal. I don’t take my kids around people who are casual with guns even though it’s legal.

It’s not about laws. It’s about what do I want to teach them in life. What do I want to model.

I model trying really hard to improve diet, exercise, and reading books. Not because I am perfect but because I am trying to stay as healthy as possible so I can be there for them.

I use medications in as small and as controlled of a way as I can. I talk about how if you use drugs casually or frequently you develop tolerance and it won’t work when you need it. Drugs are not for fun, drugs are to help when your body can’t cope; whether it’s pain (mental or physical), diarrhea, or sinus problems. You take the minimum. I talk about how it is better to look for other ways of coping before turning to drugs.

Eliminating driving reduces my pain enough that I can cope ok without pot. So I should do that. Exercise reduces pain so I should do that. Eating less sugar reduces inflammation and so forth and so on.

But what about when I must drive? What about when exercise is hard because I don’t have time, space or support? What about when I feel eaten alive by anxiety because there is so much I can’t control?

Well, I make shittier choices. I have eaten waaaaaaaaay too many donuts recently. I literally hurt myself because I needed “this feels good” feelings and I didn’t know how else to get them.

I didn’t use tons of pot in front of my kids to cope. I used some when I was in the states but not much for my body. I used the minimum and when I wanted more compulsively I ate donuts instead. Was it really better? I don’t know.

There is a lot I don’t know. But the day we got the visas I told the kids we had to cut back on bad coping methods. And we did and things are getting better and healthier again.

This is tied to how I looked to friendships. I use my friends like drugs to make me feel better.

Patterns

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Today I am waking up to think about when my sister came over to my house for Thanksgiving after I got married. I provided all of the food. It was the fourth or so holiday I had provided for my entire extended family by the time I was 25. She was going on 40 and had never provided a holiday meal for anyone.

She sat at my table eating the food I provided and loudly and obnoxiously told me about how when our aunt dies she is going to have to be the matriarch because no one in the family other than her is competent.

The staggering contempt in her words, the lack of awareness of our relative levels of competence to provide support (I paid for her children to go to college because she could not).  She asked me to buy her a house so that she could allow me to rent a room from her.

Somehow I invite this kind of behavior and I don’t understand what I do that causes people to feel that showing contempt for me is acceptable.

I’m thinking really hard about this pattern today.

There are your plans, and then there is what happens

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I am so very deep in my feels lately. Gosh this virus stuff is going to be a wild ride. This is going to be one of the defining events for this century.

I mean, then there are personal issues and topics and frankly… after almost 20 years of spilling my guts on the internet I feel like I have finally been burned enough that I want some distance. Is this growing up?

We are cancelling all of our out of the house plans and not making new ones. I’m not sure how often we will want to have people over. The joiner will come back in two weeks because the light in my bathroom died and he needs to sand the edges of the bookshelves so we don’t cut ourselves as we load them with books.

Hiding

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I keep wondering if I want to start over with a blog that is entirely anonymous so I don’t worry so much about hurting people. I wonder how much that is about wanting to feel erased. I wonder how much that is about feeling like it is better for me to run from people as hard and as fast and as far as I can.

I censor so many things. I try to be honest. But I’m afraid of the response or the result or the punishment that might result.

Kind of like writing about the Bonus Family. I have danced around so much of that. I dance around things with so many people. I can’t come out right and say why I ended things permanently with my submissive. I kind of wish it had been out of respect for Noah but instead it was because of the resemblance to an issue from my path and I can’t talk about what because other people’s privacy matters too.

I both do and don’t want to make friends here. I want a writing outlet where I don’t feel like I need to be careful about other people’s feelings. Things have been leaking out too much with this nice young lady I’ve been talking to in town. I’m volunteering things about my feelings when I shouldn’t because I talk to her without my kids around and I get so little of that time so I blurt. I don’t get a lot of time to process with Noah. I don’t have a therapist. I feel like writing down my feelings means I’m a selfish, hurtful, nasty asshole who doesn’t deserve to have anyone love me.

I feel like I should be support and kind and gentle with people. I should not share my anger and frustration and my difficulties.

And for the love of cheese I don’t feel I should ever write about a negative situation with my children where anyone who knows them can read about it ever again. I feel sick to my stomach knowing that people judge them based on the teensy tiny snippets I write about. My children are so much more than what I express in writing. They are glorious creatures. Are they also assholes? Well.. they breathe so that’s kind of a given. You are an asshole. I am an asshole. We are all assholes sometimes.

Anyone who tells you different is selling something.

I don’t write about all the things I like because it feels like bragging and trying to show off why my lifestyle choices are better when… it’s not about me. My children aren’t who they are because of any one thing. It’s not because of me. It’s not because of home schooling. It’s not because of travel. It’s not because of reading. It’s not because of video games. It’s not because of food. It’s not because of…..

They are complex creatures who are on a road to discovering themselves. It is 100% mandatory that the process involves times when we have conflict or strife or me not liking something they need to try.

If I write about any of those specifics people will judge them.

They don’t deserve that. It’s funny how I feel like I need to shield them from the consequence of being related to me over almost anything else. No, you can’t meet my family–they are wretched. No, you don’t need to be brough around the large group events my friends go to–I can’t make it safe enough for you. No, I don’t want you to grow up in the place that shaped me.

Be different than me.

Hell, I was in public school all my life, y’all. It’s not like home schooling is trying to make them just like me.

I’m looking forward to time with Middle Child more one on one without Eldest Child around. I think that will be good for both of us. The speed and pace of education will both slow down and speed up.

I feel like everything about me is bad and judged. That’s part of why I lash out. I know I am judged. Fuck you troll site. Fuck you stupid lady in Missouri who I will never write to again.

Why do I care?

If I write for me, for Noah, and so my kids can see it someday if they are interested but sweet cheese they don’t have to…

Why do I care about anyone else? Because I do. Because I defined myself by your opinions for so long and that is a poisoned pill. I want to be pleasing. But I also have no interest in changing anything about what I’m doing to be pleasing. So that’s kind of a non-starter.

But the bookshelves are starting to fill up now that some of the oil is dry enough.

Half the bathrooms in the house are barely usable.

It fucking snowed in the last few days so I’m super glad I haven’t put out my starts yet. I’ve been procrastinating. Turns out it was wise!

I’m hitting 5 miles. I’m not sleeping enough. I feel inadequate and inefficient and like I “should” find a way to feel connected and loved without talking to anyone because I fuck up words so badly.

I am afraid of making friends. I am afraid of keeping friends. I am afraid of not having friends.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

People are so hard.

Of course I need another hand intensive hobby

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I have a few dresses that are a bit too long for me. I want to solve this through two different methods. One: I need to hem them a bit. But I also want to have a petticoat to wear underneath them so that I can use skirt hikes to get them up a bit more. Why? Because I grew up thinking Renaissance Faires were the height of fashion.

And I live in fucking Scotland and it’s pretty cold year round so having layers of clothing just seems smart to me. How will I manage this with a bike? I’ll figure that out later. Shush.

But I am at a point where I don’t really want to buy anything.

My kids asked me to get crafting supplies so I have needles, thread, ribbon, and curtain rings. I also have a huge pile of too-small toddler clothes.

I see a project emerging from the mire of my idiotic brain. I can’t finish other projects yet because of very good external reasons. So I’ll start a brand new project! That’ll make sense!

I commented to my buddy Rose that sewing machines intimidate me so she told me to just hand sew it. I’m wrapping my head around what that means. I can do the maths to draft the pattern. I can look up some tutorials on hand sewing seams. I would use grommets to sew up the back seam of the skirt (I would make it incredibly size variable because I’ve met me.

I have tons of giant art paper for drafting the pattern. (It was used for art, then used to pack things for shipping, now it’s waiting for it’s third act.)

I care a fair bit about the whole “reduce, reuse, recycle” bullshit.

I have spent a lot of today researching what I need to know to hand sew this stuff. You know what? I may not have the vocabulary but I already know most of these stitches. I will do fine.

Why do I think I suck so much? Why do I discount every ounce of competence I possess?

Weather and exercise

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It’s been absolutely gorgeous here and I am forcing my kids to be out in the yard as much as possible. I haven’t started moving all of my plants from the polytunnel to the yard (well, the ones I will move at all) yet because we keep having -1 at night still. I’m hopeful for next week. After next week I think it is do or die.

I’m using the treadmill. I am surprised by how much faster I go on it than I do on the road. I can do 4.5 miles on a treadmill going faster than 12 min/mile. I can’t do that on the road at all at this point. Although, I haven’t been on the road much lately and I don’t really know where I am. I have started using the TRX for PT again. It is fucking killing me. My shoulders are so fucked up. Doing the exercises means hearing grinding and clicking the whole way through. It’s almost exciting only it sucks.

I’ve been pushing too hard on gardening and painting the wood. My hands are a mess. They hurt more than they have since we got here. Ok, I found my limit. 14 hours of painting in three days after building a rock staircase… that’s too much.

I’m super unhappy that yet more things have broken in the house since my last fucking journal entry. This house is ridiculous.

I think we are going to start playing in the burn further up the road a bit. My neighbor is… being mixed in his signals. He tells me it is fine for my kids to go play on the other side of the fence then he erects barriers. I’m not sure if he is worried about us or the random other people I keep seeing on the driveway. Either way I’m going to stop listening to his words because most people are liars.

I broke my glasses and I’m still using them until replacements arrive. The focal point moves around while I wear them and I keep getting dizzy. This is super annoying.

We have gone through just about 5kg of flour in the last two months. Holy saucebuckets of baking, Batman. That’s on top of multiple kilos of self-raising and strong flour. Turns out baking is a stress activity for me?

I hope I stick with this, but when I run out of alcohol in the cupboard I want to not buy any for a while. I should probably pick a plan like T and say I can buy a bottle for my birthday, Yule, pick one or two other holidays during the year and other than that… don’t buy it. I am still not a problem drinker by Scottish standards but I am not happy about the weight I have put on and I strongly suspect it is alcohol related. I am exercising enough that I should see the numbers move. I’m not. Something needs to change and you will pry my cake away from my cold dead hands.

I’ll give up fucking meat before I give up cake.

So. First: booze.

The tap I got to replace the broken one in the bathroom is wrong and cannot be used. The tap I got to replace the broken one in the kitchen doesn’t fit because there isn’t enough space in the cabinet to install it. The lights I got to replace the broken one in the kitchen has the wrong facing on it. The powder room toilet seat just snapped off entirely.

I want to cry. I am so tired and so frustrated.

I don’t want to be nice.

I’m on my period and my back hurts so much I feel like I would like really heavy drugs. And a bath. And I can’t take a bath.

Fuck and fuck and fuck everything.

Sleep disturbances

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I get the impression everyone is having sleep disturbances lately. I had a really sad, overwhelming dream about Harry Potter having a very different ending with Draco martyring himself to save everyone. It was intense.

I feel like I could sleep for a solid four days before I caught up on my sleep deficit.

More things have broken in the house over the weekend. And orders for parts have been cancelled so it is going to take much longer to get the house back to a state of not-under-construction. Not being able to clean up and put things away is making me feel crazy. I picked a real lemon of a house. Once we get EVERY FUCKING THING IN THE HOUSE fixed it will be great. But we bought a house at the very top of our price range thinking that we would be able to get away with not having more house spending for a while. Instead we have spent over a year of expected living expenses on fixing things and no sign of a slow down. My anxiety is creeping up massively. We are starting to talk about when Noah will have to get a job again because his runway for getting product-selling up and going is going to come to an end. That feels absolutely nightmarish right now.

Something that I have noticed about many of my friendships from the past. The ones that I am continuing and that feel like they are going ok are with people who understand that when they send me an email it might take two or three months for me to respond. Sometimes six months.

I think my anxiety has generally decreased because I have lost that constant feeling of not-doing-enough for my friendships. In California I knew so many people that I always felt like I was letting a tremendous number of people down by not doing more to keep up the relationship. I “should” call people more. I should have every day of the month booked to sending a certain number of chats/emails to cycle through the hundreds of people I know. I should host events many times a year so that I get enough face time with allllllllllll the people.

Then I moved here and literally the only “should” person is Jenny. Historically speaking we have not done all that well seeing one another often. We are both prickly. We have never had that much in common. We have done best seeing one another a dozen or so times a year and not talking every week.

Then I moved here and she had a massive backlog of being lonely. And I am absolutely used to feeling like I am supposed to put a ton of energy into maintaining relationships and trying to contact people so I transferred a lot to her. We talked a lot about weekly or several times a month in person contact with online chatting being basically daily.

That’s… a lot.

Would things have blown up in the same way if we had slowed our roll substantially when it came to contact? Would we feel like we have to talk about touchy subjects so much if we weren’t using one another for daily support?

It is really rough for me that Jenny wanted me to shove my kids away so that I could instead spend my time with her. Do I need breaks from my kids? Absolutely. Do I need to force my older children into school for 30 hours a week and figure out how to get my toddler into preschool early so I can have a part time job amount of time by myself that I then fill with social visits with her?

That sounds… awful.

Not because Jenny is awful. That’s not my point. Do I get annoyed with my kids? Yes. I just shouted at them to stop fighting over my PT equipment.

There are so many layers of complexity to space from my kids for me. Finding a healthy balance there is not the same for me as it is for other people. I mean, that sounds ridiculous. Everyone has to find that balance; I’m not special. But the things that play into it are different for me. My mom sending me away when I was a kid was super traumatizing and I am not even close to over it. I decided I wanted to homeschool my kids at seventeen so giving that up because I’m tired or want a break is a different thing for me than it would be for someone else. It’s a failure to live up to what I dreamed. I want to home school my kids until they are ready to move off into the world at their own speed.

EC feels fully ready to hit the ground running in August and she knows there will be no more take backs. She is ready to graduate from home school. She did not think that finishing primary school in a public school was right for her. I am trusting her.

MC does not want to go back to primary school. She wants to find activities and make friends that way. I trust her.

YC does a lot of singing about wanting to go to school because her signing program does a lot of singing about how great school is. But I don’t think she is actually aware of any of what it means and I don’t think she would be happy with being separated from the family for 16-30 hours a week anytime soon.

I do not have a job. I am lucky. I choose to be available for this. I do not have to earn a pay check. That means the calculus is different for our family than it would be for someone else’s family. Not that my choice is right. Not that other people are doing something wrong if they make a different choice. If I had to work (for a million good reasons including if I just plain fucking wanted to) then I would figure something else out and I would help my kids learn how to adapt.

We also have such a strong genetic history of severe trauma in the bloodline that this is not the same conversation for us as it is for other families. That matters.

I didn’t move here so that I could give up the commitment I made to my kids and replace it with hanging out with Jenny. I feel like I am being pressured in that direction. I don’t know that she intends to put that kind of pressure on me–that’s outside my ability to know. But I feel it. And I have responded very negatively to it.

In the past month I have spent as much time talking to people as I did in a week in California. And it’s only that high because of forums.

I do need a break from people, from expectations, from having to do a lot to maintain friendships. I feel like I am hurting Jenny by needing that and it’s really complicated.

This doesn’t feel simple to me. I know that I have cut a lot of people off. I have done so to such a degree that it feels… almost callously simple. It is never simple. I don’t want to end my relationship entirely. I also don’t know how to carry the weight of it.

I feel like I am doing wrong no matter what I do.

Can’t you just visit as adults?

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This gets complicated. Jenny and I don’t have that much in common anymore. We both lead fairly small lives that are fairly hyper focused on our families. Our hobbies don’t overlap much at all. We have fairly different values about how we want to live.

I genuinely don’t believe my way is the One Twue Way but I am also not very open to being questioned or argued with about what I do. I have worked very hard to reach the set of lifestyle habits I have and I am not interested in defending them. Jenny, even if it isn’t intentionally hostile, often questions me in ways I have a hard time with.

It is hard to talk about these kinds of differences without sounding like “my way is better”. For me, for her, for almost anyone. I don’t think I recognized just how different we were until I got here and stood more face to face with it.

I am a workaholic without a job. So my kids, my house, and my garden are the things I hyper-work on. Jenny wants more downtime than that. She seeks out ways to hire or acquire help so she can do less and she can spend more time relaxing.

I tried relaxing for a while here. It was incredibly unsatisfying to me and Noah has decided not to hold me to that whole “I’ll spend a year with no projects” thing because I was freaking out all the time keeping the house spotlessly clean. I wasn’t allowed to focus on anything bigger so I was an asshole about small, stupid details. Now I’m working in the yard more and dealing with the construction projects (I got to spend 14 hours so far painting oil in the bookshelves for preservation) and I’m not being a neurotic asshole about cleanliness.

I’m kind of like those dog breeds who need to work a lot or they destroy your house.

I’m still doing pretty well with keeping my exercise quantity up. The TRX is now installed so I get to restart my PT exercises. That will be good for my shoulders. They hurt quite a bit.

But Jenny and I have opposite approaches to work. I seek out more work with an almost maniacal focus and she… would prefer to do as little as she can get away with.

What do we talk about?

I am so high energy I feel like I burn with unexpressed energy. The idea of sitting still for hours knitting and watching telly makes me twitch.

If Noah wants to read to us for hours I usually do 2-3 other things while I listen. I watch television programs while I clean or cook. I take intense pride out of my house and my yard looking the way they do because of the work of my hands. I don’t like that I’ve had to pay for as much help as I have had to since I got here.

An awful lot of what they are doing I could do but I’d have to buy all the tools and my hands would go numb. This frustrates me.

Jenny hires someone to come change her lightbulbs and put together her Ikea furniture.

Very different attitudes towards work.

What do we talk about? I don’t know. I don’t say this to be an asshole I mean… I don’t know what we can build a friendship on at this point. We can’t talk about our kids because we parent very differently and sharing our different perspectives sounds like judgment. We can’t talk about how we spend our time unless we take turn monologuing while the other is chewing their tongue off because they don’t understand why someone would want to work so much/little.

We don’t read the same books. We don’t watch the same shows. We don’t make the same kinds of things with our hands. We can’t even talk about food because we eat so very differently.

And so much of this does come down to: I cannot spend time around someone who has negative judgments about home schooling despite doing basically no research. If you are well researched and you have concerns, I can engage with that. I can’t even deal with negativity that springs from ignorance. Just shut the fuck up about things you don’t understand.

Which is not a great attitude when it comes to ones friends!

Did I expect to have more of a friendship? Yes. Is it working out? Well, we have grown apart. In California we would have drifted apart long ago with little fanfare or objection on either side. The fact that we maintained a bond over great distance and great time means that now being in the same place makes it all so much more complicated.

And I genuinely don’t know how to bridge this gap. I don’t know that I want to suck it up and bite my tongue and put up with things that offend me. Which means I am hurting Jenny because I am crushing her dreams and that makes me feel pretty bad about myself.

We are not family. We have no background of shared experiences nor shared future goals nor shared culture.

I feel like a bully and a selfish person. I feel like I “should” just suck it up and figure it out and try. I also feel like I don’t have much energy to throw at situations that give me so little back.

Needing a break

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I find it kind of interesting that I do a lot of processing my feelings about Sarah and very little really going into the situation with the Bonus Family. I think it is relevant to what is going on now so maybe it is time to start.

I would say that set up came the closest to being “chosen family” for us as a family unit over the past decade. We really shared the four kids. We really gave one another assistance and breaks. That was by far the most help I got with my kids and it was a very mixed bag.

The mom and the dad in that family both had a fair number of issues as individual people. I strongly suspect the mom was pretty far on the autism spectrum but she grew up in a time and place where as the quiet daughter of an immigrant she just got flunked out of school and that was that. Even though she was very intelligent. The dad had PTSD from growing up with a violent alcoholic mother and a father who completely abandoned him despite living only a few miles away. He then went into the military and things got worse for him. When I met them (I didn’t know this at the time, it came out through the course of the relationship) they had already been in a very physically, verbally, and emotionally abusive relationship for a long time. Then they had kids because surely that would fix everything, right?

Things were complicated. I did as much advocating for the kids as I could from 30+ miles away. When the kids came to my house for their weekly stay (we pretty much split custody for a few years there. We each had all four kids for 24 hours a week meaning their children spent one 24 hour block at my house every week and every other weekend my kids spent a full weekend at their house) the kids would do these epic roleplays in the back yard. They were clearly trying to cope with what they were seeing. Screaming fights and divorce threats and hitting each other and calling each other really mean names. When I would come out to be like, “Uhhh, dudes… what is going on” they would all drop role instantly and say “This is just a game. We aren’t really saying any of this.” I would blink. They would resume roles.

They told me they were playing family.

I let it go on longer than I should have. I needed the breaks from my kids. I needed the support time for going to therapy. I really couldn’t access any other childcare for most of that time period. Things cooled off when I finally found a babysitter.

We met through a hippy dippy parenting forum. I have a whole bunch of crunchy things I try to do as a parent but when things aren’t working I am open to changing. My youngest child got raging diaper rashes from cloth diapers so despite being fairly fanatical about them for years, I stopped. I do long-term breastfeeding except I will cut it a bit short when my kid is biting me and I just don’t fucking think so anymore. We eat hippy granola food except when it isn’t easily accessible then we just eat fucking food.

My friend… she was not open to reconsidering her ideals. Her kids had open, bleeding wounds on their bottoms because cloth diapering wasn’t working and she wouldn’t entertain the idea of doing anything else. She couldn’t nurse for medical reasons so she drove all over the state collecting donation breast milk to the point where she was probably actually putting her children at risk because they were in the car seats so much. And a lot of it hadn’t been properly stored and it smelled off and she expected her kids to drink it anyway because she had gone to so much trouble to get it. She structured her entire life around getting hippy granola food and that was all she would let her kids eat but she would eat a box of donuts on the way to the long-way-away pickup because she just couldn’t deal. Her children were absolutely not allowed to have the unhealthy foods because she was fat and she didn’t want her kids to be fat.

She told me she gained so much weight on purpose so she could outweigh her husband (who was 6’7″ tall when she was 5’3″ tall) and win when they physically fight. She was well over 300lbs.

My kids told me later that she regularly controlled their behavior with threats of beatings. They said they didn’t bother to tell me when it was happening because they were sure I wouldn’t care and I would tell them they had to go because “family”.

I didn’t end the relationship. The other mother ended the relationshp because I told the dad that the kids couldn’t home school. She didn’t work with them. The kids’ language regressed every week in between visits to my house because she wouldn’t speak to them. (She’s a pretty non-verbal person.) She would not help them with any fine motor activities because she either found them boring or sticky and she wouldn’t touch anything that made her skin feel weird. To the point where she would cook food in dirty pans because she couldn’t handle washing them.

I’m not talking about seasoning cast iron.

I told the dad that if he allowed her to continue to neglect the kids the way they were being neglected it is equally 100% his fault that it is happening. He said they can’t go to school without vaccines and she won’t vaccinate. I said you are equally their parent.

That was over her line. She was afraid of vaccines. Like, couldn’t have a rational conversation about them and was going to severely educationally and emotionally neglect her kids afraid of them.

He told me she might divorce him over it. I asked him if he cares more about his kids or supporting his crazy wife.

She didn’t talk to me again. Fair enough. I earned that cut off. The only thing I would do differently at this point is call CPS sooner. I feel a lot of guilt and shame that I subjected my kids to that environment because “I needed a break.” I miss those kids so much. I am really sorry I didn’t get to be close to them as they grew up. I loved them a lot. But their mother has the right to decide who she exposes them to.

I put my kids in school here because they wanted to try and because I needed a break. They got beat on. Adults came on campus to threaten them.

I will not put my “need for a break” over my children again. I don’t feel I can be a moral person and do so.

And I have some really intense feelings about pushing “chosen family” on my kids ever again.

We spent ECs birthday last year with Jenny’s family. It went remarkably poorly. Jenny’s oldest child spent the evening… being a kid who was annoyed about not being the center of attention. We tried a couple of other visits after that. After a couple of these EC said, “I don’t want to spend time around that kid again and if she is in my house I will feel like I have to supervise because you want to talk to Jenny and she’s not very nice to YC.”

I can’t do this to my kids again.

So Jenny is pretty upset with me right now. (I asked her not to read my blog for a while so I could try to process this without making her feel like shit.) Jenny feels like I have spent years complaining about how much I want family and years saying I want breaks from my kids and years talking about how my friends aren’t there for me and she wants the same things and she has been so alone here for ten years. She feels absolutely devastated that I have had a huge number of boundaries and I have not launched into hanging out with her and I have flat said my kids don’t like her kid and that’s a problem.

I don’t know how to solve this.

She is absolutely being hit with a ton of backlash that is way bigger than the situation with her and I agree that it isn’t fair. I am hesitant and standoffish and distrustful. I look for tiny red flags and I turn and run like a honey badger is chasing me.

I don’t know what fair would even mean in this situation. It’s not that I don’t love Jenny. It’s not that I think people have to be perfect in order for me to be in a relationship with them. It’s not that I think I am perfect. I have made whopping mistakes and in many cases my children paid for them. I am afraid to treat my children getting hurt like it is just the cost of doing business and my kids need to put up with whatever friend of mine I am choosing to call “family” today.

They have been very hurt by the actions of people who made promises to them and then didn’t keep the promises because of me. I mean, that makes it seem like I think I am more important than I am… it’s complicated.

The godmamas wanted to have more control over the kids lives or no deal.

Dad wants to have a relationship where I chase him and loan him money and provide him all the support a child gives their doting parent… without him having ever done anything to earn that from me.

The Bonus Mama needed me to tolerate her being abusive and neglectful without ever calling her on it.

I can’t ignore mothers hitting their kids when the kid has a panic attack ever again.

I can’t not call CPS when I am concerned ever again.

Sarah promised she would spend a lot of time with the kids then she cancelled because she was too tired from hanging out with her boyfriend.

The list goes on and on.

Has Jenny let me down? No. She hasn’t. She has been there for me in ways big and small. Has she said things that hurt me? Holy fucking shit yes. Are there some red flags in how she parents that worry me? Holy shit yes. I am very worried about getting involved with another family where I see dynamics that trouble me. I am very worried about forcing my kids to deal with kids who have a bunch of behaviors they are not ok with.

I don’t know how to solve this. So yeah. I have been pushing Jenny away and she is hurt. I don’t know what else I can do in this situation.

My big kids are old enough and competent enough that I do get breaks now because the three kids can play together. Do I feel the need to push really hard for more breaks no matter how it impacts my children? Not at all.

I feel like if I need a break from anything it is from obligation to “chosen family” who bring more strife than joy to my life. And that doesn’t feel very nice at all to my friend who was so happy I was moving here. It feels downright cruel.

I don’t want chosen family anymore. I have a family. And they are enough.

Is that cruel?

Why am I not over it.

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I don’t like how long it takes me to deal with my feelings. I want to be done already. I want to know how I will feel in the long run. I am impatient.

But today I am managing three children. I made smoothies to use up the fruit before more arrives in the box today. I made lemon bars (part of using up stuff from the fruit drawer). I have done a bunch of cleaning. I’ve done a load of laundry (with some assistance from kids). I’ve done a bunch of cleaning dishes. I’ve had to have several conversations about the next stages of fixing house stuff.

Turns out the plumber we hired to fix the leak in MC’s bathroom didn’t bother to use any silicone sealant around the shower. So effectively he charged us a bunch of money to set a new shower frame inside the existing shower frame (he didn’t feel like tearing out the old one) then he just kind of left it like that. It leaked like a sieve. Our options are to A) rip out the new shower, old shower, and build an entirely new one from scratch B) be like the old owners of this house and just use it as a closet or C) rip the entire thing out and give up on having a shower in that bedroom.

That shower also was added well after the original house and the plumbing for it all goes waaaaaaaay around the house to come up the outside wall so it is basically impossible to keep it warm for any length of time. If we want it to be an effective warm shower we would have to add an electric boost and the shower is already so tight that I don’t think I could take a shower in there and wash my hair without knocking the door open with my elbow. That would cost a bunch of extra money. It would take up a bunch of space in the shower.

Fuck it, rip the bitch out and all three kids can share the one main upstairs bathroom.

Bonus: Middle Child will no longer have a bedroom that is effectively much smaller than her siblings.

One of the dudes is going to do all of the sanding of the bookshelves today. I am going to start the oil process myself because they are showing up intermittently and paying their hourly wage is adding up pretty fast. We are starting to have anxiety about how much fixing this house is costing. I think it will take me somewhere under 24 hours of labor (not including the time it takes to let the oil dry in between coats) to do all of the shelves I can reasonably reach for myself. That’s a fair bit of cash to save.

I am indefinitely putting off the idea of painting the house in fun ways because I can’t justify spending the money if it means Noah might have to get a job this year. I need to give him a full and complete runway to launch his products and that means I can’t be selfish.

Talking to people through forums is resulting in me feeling overwhelming rage a lot of the time. Almost every piece of major social progress in human history has been deemed impossible right up until the minute that it happens. We have the ability to make peoples lives easier. We choose not to. As a species we prefer to have a majority of people suffer so a few people can be fantastically wealthy. It’s immoral. I need to not be part of any online discussions for a while because I am rapidly growing to despise people I have loved for years.

I am once again in that mode where I feel like I have to move everything I own back and forth and back and forth and back and forth because every fucking area of the house is broken and I can’t put anything in a permanent home.

Did I mention that the kitchen tap broke for a second time? And the bathroom tap?

Fuck everything.

I am so overwhelmed. I don’t know how to process my feelings about people and how I need to be treated in order to be in a healthy relationship.

I don’t think I know what a healthy relationship even means right now.

And I have three minutes until the next stage of work begins.

I have a lot to get done today. How in the hell do I find time to break down all of my feelings so that I can turn around and be support to other fucking people. Because that’s what it feels like is expected. How dare I have distanced myself such that I’m not providing support.

Dad sent me a video. “I haven’t heard from you in a while.” Dude, I think this is the second, maybe third time you have initiated contact in our more than two decade long relationship. I don’t have the spoons to reach out and console you right now. Even though that is our norm.

I feel so much rage.