10,647.
I kind of feel like I want to write more. I also feel like my arms forking hurt and I should rest.
Sidenote: Greenleaf is GOOD.
I’m not sure how high it’ll get.
2 Replies
Category Archives: arms hurt
Ok, it’s time.
I am probably going to drop the blog entirely for a month or so. I need to write the next book and I am going to take advantage of NaNoWriMo again. Today my kids burst into tears because they realized they know so little about me. I need to tell all the stories from the next 20 years. It’s going to be another hard book to write but for very different reasons. And it’s going to be hell on my arms. I am going to drop the blog, not go on the forums, ignore my support group, avoid Slack, and all idle web browsing. I will be allowed to check email once a day but I will only respond to emergency stuff.
My personal goal is at least 4,000 words per day. This story is long and fucking complex. I will need every ounce of typing ability I have to tell it in a month.
Just in case I die. These are the stories I need my children to know. I hope they can learn from my mistakes and go on to make new mistakes.
Today is the day.
In just over four hours my kids will be walking onto a school campus as enrolled students. They will be P5 and P7. Here P7 is the final year of primary school before being sent off to secondary school. There is no middle school here.
I am already enjoying some of the differences in Scottish schooling. We were having trouble finding some of the supplies I consider “mandatory” for school in stores. Jenny told me that schools don’t ask families to buy them after we went to three stores looking. The schools provide what kids need.
You could have knocked me over with a feather. Wut? Schools provide pencils and paper and notebooks? I… You are using words but I am not understanding you.
Schools here do not give parents any contact information for teachers. If you want an appointment you call the office and the office negotiates with the teacher and they get back to you to let you know when you can come in. As someone who used to get calls and emails from the parents of 150 students that sounds amazing! Good for Scottish teachers!
The kids are going to start with half days as they acclimate to school and the teachers slowly learn where they are academically. The school is literally incapable of giving them placement tests to just see where they are because such things don’t exist here. There are occasional national tests but the school doesn’t have access to them and my kids are in the wrong grades anyway. So… there just aren’t big evaluations for their current levels.
I’m telling you, I’m excited.
Middle Child was crying at bed time. They were trying to be quiet about it, but they are super nervous. I pulled them over close to me and I talked to them until they fell asleep. On a fairly repetitive loop I told them that when they don’t feel they have enough faith in themself they can borrow some of my faith in them. I told them that they are strong, brave, hard working, competent, smart, funny, creative, thoughtful, kind (which is not the same thing as nice!), friendly, fun, interesting, adaptable, sweet, loving, patient, and really good at learning new skills. I interspersed this list of adjectives with saying, “And you know I am judgemental and critical. I don’t give praise unless I believe it to be absolutely accurate.” The first time MC giggled when I said that. After that they just relaxed. I would pause sometimes and say “When your belly starts to hurt because you are anxious, remember to smell the flower (pause for big inhale through the nose) and blow out the candle (slow big exhalation through the mouth). You can’t control other people. You can’t control the world. You can control your breath. If you control your breath you will be able to control your body even if your feelings are being rough. I have faith in you. When you don’t have faith in yourself, listen to these tapes in your brain and borrow my faith in you. I know you are….. (long list of adjectives).”
Eldest Child was already asleep or I would have talked to both of them.
And Her Sweetness only had one middle of the night wake up. That’s almost like a full night of undisturbed sleep…. She is feeling much better. I am in a lot of pain.
The kids will start waking up in about 45 minutes, maybe more like 60. I am going to hurry through my shower in the meantime so I can spend my morning on “cheerful cheerleader” mode. You can do it! You are going to succeed at this new life stage the way you have done well on so many others! I know you can!
I am their inside voice. That’s what mothers become for their children. I have not been doing a great job of being relentlessly upbeat for a while here because I am worn down and exhausted. This morning is a (very short) sprint, not a marathon. I can do this for them. Then I can take a few hours to slow down and just be in toddler mode.
When toddler mode feels like a fucking vacation you might just be living your life wrong. Too much work and stress, yo.
Yesterday we bought several more table cloths at the discount store. This is so when Middle Child makes a huge mess on the table they will just change the table cloth and I can stop being a critical brat about their absolute lack of table manners. My kids definitely know that I am critical and judgmental. So when I say positive things, it’s not because I enjoy blowing sunshine up your skirt. We have a handheld dustbuster so that the mess on the floor is not a big deal.
I need to stop being an asshole about messy eating. No really.
Life is a balancing act.
At the end of the positive speil I told MC “You will make mistakes. You must make mistakes. Mistakes are how you learn. Mistakes are part of being human. When you don’t understand something, write your question down in your notebook. Questions are good. You are good. You will mess up as you learn this new process and that’s ok and necessary and part of the process. Don’t be afraid of messing up. It’s like crashing your bike. You learn more from the crashes than you do from always getting it right. You learn what too far means. It’s ok to screw up. You will do better next time.”
After like 10 minutes of this repetitie loop of adjectives and blather about mistakes kiddo wasn’t crying and their body was relaxed. They finally stopped clutching my hand like a life preserver.
Ok, based on the noise from upstairs I don’t have 40 more minutes. Hurry up and shower, Krissy.
I should hide my computer, and phone.
My hands and arms and shoulders hurt like fire. Picking up the baby sucks so much.
I shouldn’t type for a while.
Work continues.
Settling in is a lot of work. I am done with the van rental. I scraped the paint on the drivers door BECAUSE THE OWNER OF THE VAN RENTAL COMPANY DOES NOT TRIM BACK THE TREE FROM OUR SHARED DRIVEWAY. So that sucks. We have now damaged two of his vans and I will never ever rent from him again and we have made the worst first impression possible. Cheers.
The fridge that wasn’t supposed to arrive until October came today. But we can’t get it through the door until we find someone with better tools to help us take the door off the hinges so the box can slide through. Cheers.
I still have a mountain of laundry and goods to sort through and many pieces of furniture to assemble, but it is feeling like an end is in sight. I suspect that by the end of this weekend I will have a normal day-to-day level of cleaning ahead of me. That’s pretty good news.
The beds won’t be here until October though. Every joint in my body is flaming hot and awful and cranky. My back is killing me. My head is killing me. My feet hurt. My legs are really sore. My hands are killing me. My uterus waited until the rental van frantic shopping was done to release the blood bath. (Thank you uterus, I consider that an extreme kindness.) But now my entire lower body is contorting with cramps. Cheers!
I continue to struggle with moderating my cranky level. I keep trying to be nice. It’s a struggle at the moment.
I have a respectable Brexit pantry and a fairly full deep freeze. Adding a couple of things here and there over the next few weeks will fill everything out nicely and we will be ready to weather the storm of political upset to come. Even if supply lines get cut, we will be able to eat ok for a couple of weeks. Thank you prepper background.
My kids are upstairs working on academics. Noah is doing… I don’t know what but it counts as work.
I am almost to the point where I can just chill out. Not many more days on this work cycle. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and for once… it doesn’t look like a train.
Well that sucked.
Yesterday was the kind of day where everything went sideways. I am still dramatically underslept and as a result my reaction was rage. I was not nice. I didn’t name call, but I did tell Noah mean things. I did have trouble controlling the volume of my voice with the kids. In short: I was an asshole.
Things break. Things go wrong. I know it is life. I know that in two months I will barely remember this. It will be a blip in the rear view mirror. But getting through yesterday was hard. I did a lot of damage to my hand trying to fix things when Plan A went wrong and then Plan B utterly failed and all of that pain was for nothing.
So I flipped out. That was one of the worst melt downs I have had in many many many years. I didn’t punch a wall but it was a near thing. I feel really embarrassed. Nobody in my family deserved to deal with my temper like that.
The interesting bit was: when we got out and started walking, trying to salvage a Plan C, I calmed right down. I wans’t in a good mood but I wasn’t raging anymore. When I am flipping out I need to start taking a walk, literally. Being outside is a balm to my soul. Even when it feels like. I can’t do anything right, I still feel better. Being inside a building makes me feel trapped like a rat; even a building I like as much as this one. We are still working on getting objects to soften the echoing sounds of loud noises. The house hurts my ears still. It will improve, but we literally haven’t had a chance to do the work yet.
There were good parts of the day. We did get the deliveries from the charity shops and we did get the council tax bill. Today Noah can get a bank account; it can’t be a joint account because my name isn’t on the council bill. So I’m seriously just a dependent right now with no rights to a bank account. That doesn’t feel so good.
I think we can fix it but it will take some time. We need a bank account ASAP so we won’t bother to fix it before we get a bank account and credit card; I will just need to be added later. But once we have a local bank/credit card things get so much easier. Noah already has a local phone number. I think he got electricity sorted and he’s working on WiFi and a home phone number.
He’s getting so much done. It is incredibly unfair for me to feel rage when he can’t complete a task in the time frame I would prefer. It’s not fair up one side and down the other.
Didn’t help that every credit card in my wallet was frozen for fraud protection yesterday and everything I tried to get done… failed. It wasn’t just Noah who was hitting road blocks.
I am sorry. But you can’t unsay mean things and sorry bakes no bread. My behavior was shit and Noah was completely patient with me. It really doesn’t help that I am down two full nights of sleep in the last five nights, but that’s not a good enough reason to freak out at him.
I need to do better. I can’t keep asking for passes for being upset. Noah deserves better than that from me.
Housekeeping and illness
I am sick. I am producing buckets of green snot and I get dizzy whenever I walk down into the heat. That means the remaining 57 hours of being in Bangkok are not going to be much more festive than the last few days. That’s a huge bummer because Thailand was the only Asian country I was dying to see. My body is just not that fun.
To keep myself busy in the apartment I have gone back and changed the password on all of the posts that had a password. I am going to slowly go through everything “private” and put it behind a password. Only 3600 posts to go… In the future I will probably put a variety of topics behind a password because my children deserve more privacy than I have shown over the last few years. As we are establishing ourselves in a new country it is better for their classmates to not be able to find my more extreme topics. Not to mention the parents….
That means that if you want to read all the juicy stuff you need to out yourself. No more silent stalkers.
Every single one of those posts requires a minimum of 5 clicks so it may take me a few days to get all the archives updated. It’s hard on my arms. Minimum of 18,000 clicks, y’all. Hundreds of my early blog entries were one or two sentences long. That many stupid clicks to update that shit. LJ was such a mess. I have been on and off Twitter since September 2008. Staying off seems smart for my mental health.
I really don’t have much to report about Bangkok to my sadness. We are mostly eating from stuff we can get from 7-11.
I haven’t reread everything I have updated but I am skimming a lot. So many years of begging for attention, for love, for validation. I am really glad that I have stopped most of that. I am a lot more stable emotionally. I am much more appropriate in my behavior. I am a lot closer to who I want to be.
I am only going to share me with people who deserve me going forward. I feel like moving to Scotland is time for a rebirth. I have a family who adores me, friends who love me and respect me and put effort into maintaining their end of relationships, and enough projects to last the rest of my life.
I’m excited.
Well this sucks; ok not everything sucks
We were just about over jet lag. Then illness strikes. Her Sweetness has a fever and she is super cranky; I assume she is in pain too. Eldest Child is having intestinal problems. I have full body pain (as someone with chronic pain this is enough pain to make me want to sit very still in a chair and cry–I am medicating for pain with tylenol and ibuprofen alternated), a low grade fever, and I am producing a river of snot with the associated coughing, sneezing, and sore throat. If you have followed me for long you know it has to get BAD before I medicate with these drugs because I am so afraid of my tolerance level going up.
I don’t think we will see much of Bangkok and I am very disappointed.
The food has tasted great. The garbage is omnipresent and overwhelming. The traffic patterns are reminding me of Kuala Lumpur only they are very different? It’s closer to KL than Japanese traffic patterns. The gridlock is massive. I can understand why the advice around driving here is don’t.
We are right next to RCA (Royal City Avenue) which is the designated clubbing/entertainment/tourist area. It’s a short walk down a relatively safe stretch of sidewalk. Relatively safe because the motorcycle taxi service has a stand in front of our building so they have to go back and forth on that stretch of sidewalk. If you pay attention and get out of their way it’s ok. And all the motorcycle drivers love Her Sweetness. They want to cuddle and hang out with her.
Her Sweetness is my most reserved child. I used to think Middle Child was incredibly reserved because I compared them to Eldest Child. Holy sauce buckets was I underestimating the amount of reserve a child of my blood can display. When people try to touch HS she cries. She wants her people and that’s it.
I am going to have to stagger downstairs and do laundry today because I am about out of hankies. Dude. I travel with more than a dozen hankies. Hankies are life. (We also have a full laundry basket. But the hankies will be the motivation.)
I was a serious bitch yesterday and I feel kind of embarrassed. I am sick and the kids were pushing me for attention and to do work for them. I blew up about how unfair it is that when they are sick I let them lie still and do nothing until they feel like doing things and I am not allowed any rest. I sort of feel like I “should” have found a nicer way to express this. But I tried a variety of “I’m not feeling well” and “I can’t do that” before I started getting harsh. There is this complicated balancing act where I try to be as nice as I can be to them until they just refuse to recognize that I have boundaries too and then I’m really not so nice. Because fuck that. I get to have rest when I am fucking sick and you can go in your room and play and stop bothering me. No I don’t have to pay attention to you today. You can bloody well cope with me taking care of myself today.
It’s weird. I feel guilty and proud of myself? I need to set these boundaries. I set them as softly as I could. I escalated ,when they completely refused to allow me boundaries, to being more forceful in my language. I did use the word fuck a lot. “I am fucking sick and I need to fucking rest. You don’t fucking need me to play with you. You can fucking play by yourself.” That was after a couple of hours of using soft language and having MC continue to head butt me and be rude and demanding and aggressive about wanting to play.
MC has asked me to use the word fuck less and I’ve been doing pretty well so this flood of fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck was definitely a sign of degrading ability to communicate. But I feel like my head is in a vice and if you don’t leave me alone and stop talking to me I am going to literally melt down and start screaming which would really suck in this tiny apartment. I have limits. I don’t talk to you like this even once a year. But I am sick and I need to be left alone to take care of me.
My kids genuinely think I am a river of love and support and work and they can’t understand when I can’t do that. It’s a weird dynamic. I feel both good and bad about it. I am not sure I am presenting them with a healthy, balanced view of what parents should be like. My mother under-responded and neglected me. So I half kill myself doing the martyr schtick so they never know a minute of boredom or want. I am hurting myself so they never have to be bored. That’s not healthy either.
I really can’t wait to have my own bedroom and for them to go to school. We need to start separating. I feel like a mother bird who is exerting more and more pressure to get the baby birds to get the fork out of the nest. I need some space, kiddos. I love you. I need some space for me too. I matter too. I am not the most important person in our family but I am not the least important person either. We need balance. If we sacrifice my health on the altar of “Happy Family” then this family is going to fall apart soon. I have to be healthy enough to carry my side of things.
I suspect this is related to just how hard I pushed my body over the past few months culminating in the last week. I have done a lot of work. We leave Bangkok on the 9th and we arrive on the 10th because it is another 30 hour travel day with getting to and from airports. Today is the 5th. So close yet so far.
The former owner of the house and Jenny’s Super Spiffy Husband (JSSH) both sent us long explanations of how to set up utilities and services. We are so incredibly lucky that we are following Jenny. She has helped in ways big and small that blow my mind. I feel like we are sliding into Scotland on greased rails. This could have been a nightmare. Instead it is a series of steps. Yes, we feel tension and stress as we go through the steps because lots of things are out of our control… but things are actually going as fast as they possibly could. We made the decision to move to Scotland, got absolutely everything done, and now we are returning in less than three months. That is miraculous in terms of government bureaucracy. Greased. Forkin. Rails.
And once we arrive… we have no deadlines to hurry up and get anything done. There are no foreseeable sprints in my future. We don’t need to hurry up and get anything done. We need to get things done as quickly as we get them done. I mean, utilities getting set up might be the most “Uhhh do that now” step. But furniture and cookware and all that stuff can trickle in. We will probably go shopping on the 11th to get some things, but not a lot. Realistically we will go to the store every day for a while and we will get what we get. Sometime in the first week we will probably hire a van and clean out the charity shop of anything we can use and do a massive grocery shop but it’s not a big rush. If it happens on our second day or our fourth day or the seventh day… whatever. We are right between three stores that are all dandy for supplying us with food we can eat without stress. I’m just not worried. It’s a lovely feeling. I will slowly acquire the things we need to keep house. Drips and drabs. It will be easier to do most of this shopping after the shipment of our belongings arrive so I have the big double stroller.
I got a double bike trailer that can be used as a stroller so that I can pull the baby AND groceries. This is my compromise on not having a car. I am already aware of how awesome Tesco’s delivery service is (THANK YOU JSSH!) but I really like going to the store. And I want to experiment between Tesco and Aldi and Asda. I will get a little notebook for comparing prices. We are going to be trying to be that tight with our budget.
I’m not sure if I told y’all this. Noah’s current obscene California salary is going to last till January. Then he’s going to work on books, teaching, and maybe a wee bit of contracting on the side. We have enough money in petty cash for 2-3 years of run time if we are very conservative and we hope we can figure out him working for himself. This is part of why we decided Taipei is not wise at the moment. If we are trying to live on £40,000/year all of a sudden spending $6000 on a trip to Taipei seems… uhhh not in the budget.
I have lived on much less. While snowballing our debt we lived on a similar amount of money at the beginning of our marriage. We will see!
On the money front: I was watching a session of Scottish Parliament yesterday and there was a lot of hand wringing over how they can’t get enough people to work with mental health care for children. The waiting lists are long and they are incredibly stressed out about it. Do you know what I have a unique background on? Helping kids with mental health problems. Sure, I’ll have to hit up the local university for some specific training and degree hoop jumping but that doesn’t scare me. Maybe when Her Sweetness starts nursery in a year and a half we will have four people in school in the house. That would be kind of cool.
I would like to have a job. I would like to have a job specifically because I dream of a conservatory added to the house and if I don’t figure out how to earn the money for it myself Noah will feel like he needs to get a remote job from California for ridiculous money and then he will work 60 hours a week and I will be very sad.
I don’t need to earn the money in the first couple of years. In my head I wouldn’t be ready to start that kind of project for at least 3-5 years. That gives me time to go to school and get started in the field. I will be 100% hiring out the work and the former owner gave me the name of the person who could probably build it for me because he did all the other remodeling in the house.
This is not abandoning the idea of IDB (Incest Database) but it is helping to keep me busy until then and helps me gain qualifications that will help with the research and it helps pay for retirement stuff so Noah doesn’t have to supply 100% of our retirement safety on his own. I still think I couldn’t really get going on IDB for almost 20 years. Not the way I want to. 20 years is a long time and I could do a lot of valuable work between now and then.
I want to be part of the community. This would be a really great way for me to meet people and find a place for myself.
I don’t have a plan yet. I am not rushing. I am waiting to see how things shake out. I am coming up with ideas, potentials, hopes, and dreams.
And nothing is in a big rush. No sprints. Settle in slowly. Exercise. Establish house. Help the kids adjust to school. Wait for HS to be old enough for nursery. Enjoy the next year and a half of extra alone time with my precious last baby. I feel lucky and blessed.
I won’t be doing much today. Noah has a speakers dinner tonight. We have instant noodles in the apartment that will probably be most of our food while he is doing his conference. I should go down to the 7-11 (holy shit these things are ubiquitous internationally) and get some yogurt and juice and maybe other snacky foods. Maybe I’ll do that run while I’m dealing with laundry.
I feel so bad. I did more yesterday than I probably should have. Today I can’t. As I plan to go to the laundromat and do grocery shopping. I am such a twit.
These things have to get done. It’s not optional. Being the mom is not always fun. But it is always worth it. I did not have children because I wanted convenience. I am so very loved. It’s worth it.
Even if sometimes I have to say fuck fuck fuck fuck to be allowed to rest.
I think it is kind of useful that EC is reading these Warriors books because the mama cats take no shit and that is causing her to change how she views me. It’s hilarious.
I have been dizzy on and off for days. My body is so unhappy. Her Sweetness is waking up every two hours to nurse and I don’t feel like it is fair to complain given how sick she is.
Miss Jenny picked up our keys. The solicitor has been paid off. We have a home to go back to. A home that pretty closely matches drawings I’ve been making about my dream home for years. I am so lucky.
We are going to be highlanders! We start this next phase of our lives on the day I turn 38. Seems like a good time for a rebirth.
Traveling is eventful.
First: it was an a small adventure figuring out how to dispose of the expired car seat I was borrowing. Portland does not make it easy. They wanted us to drive over half an hour to a transfer station to pay like $28 to throw it in the garbage because they don’t recycle them. Instead we found a dumpster behind a hotel.
Then when we got to the airport I learned that Her Sweetness and I were not able to have our boarding passes printed for the whole trip. We got boarding passes to Hong Kong and then we got to cross our fingers everything would work out from there. That’s an anxiety producing situation for me. Holy cheese toast. But I tried to stay cool and calm and in the end it just meant an extra 15 minutes of processing in the airport. No big deal. China just has slightly different rules about traveling with a lap infant.
American Airlines website said they would only give us 1 meal on the flight. Instead they served 3 and we got to throw away a lot of food. That could be worse. But the AA flight was… not amazing. It felt budget and unfriendly and not very helpful. I have dreams about the kindness of Philippine Airlines. Such a lovely airline. I mean: AA expects you to go back and self serve on snacks and drinks instead of them coming by and offering them to you. But they also don’t want you out of your seats unless you MUST. So that’s not a fun situation for a 14 hour flight.
No more 14 hour flights in our future!
I liked the Hong Kong airport. The shops were top notch and folks were very patient and low key. That’s a relief after the US. It felt a little bit like the DMV only nicer? Like, people were just doing the thing and it’ll get done and you can wait… it’ll be fine…
The Bangkok airport was fine. Getting the taxi was fine. Then we got to our apartment. I looked 9,837 at the confirmation information I had and… no information about how I was to get into the apartment. So I started calling the host and sending her messages. This continued for an hour in the blistering heat. I had been awake for most of the previous 48 hours (If I got 6 hours of sleep added up in cat naps I’d be surprised) and I was not really feeling patient.
Eventually she woke up and asked why we didn’t call the guy who was waiting in the apartment. THE GUY YOU NEVER TOLD ME ABOUT AND YOU NEVER GAVE ME HIS NUMBER? THAT GUY?!?!?!
Then it turns out that the guy DIDN’T GIVE US A FUCKING FRONT DOOR KEY, JUST THE ELEVATOR PASS.
So that sucked. Noah was dispatched a few times to acquire food since we couldn’t all go. We ate. We rested. We bitched.
Eventually the lady had someone bring us a key and she gave me phone numbers for local people who can help with problems. I told her, “May I suggest that in the future you send an email 24 hours before check in with the name and phone number of the person a guest is supposed to meet?” She thought that was a good idea. Oy.
The apartment came stocked with 1/4 of a roll of toilet paper. Good thing there is a convenience store down stairs. But we are back in the land of bidets so my hemorrhoids are feeling better than they have in months.
Apparently my time in Kuala Lumpur was not real indicative of Malaysia in general because I didn’t see almost any garbage. Here in Bangkok I feel like garbage is raining down on us and flooding the pathways. So. Much. Trash.
Folks in Fukuoka would have a heart attack. Then get up from their hospital bed to start cleaning.
God damn different Asian countries are different. I am such an ignorant fucker. I didn’t realize it would be quite this dramatic.
When you drive into the city from the airport there are large signs telling you that speaking ill of the king will result in jail time. Also: being disrespectful of the Buddha or getting a tattoo of his image will result in jail time. They don’t fuck around.
Fair enough.
I come from a crazy ass country where every man, woman, and child in Texas owns 6+ guns and that’s not including the rest of the fucked up states. We never get to judge another country negatively for having…. views.
The food. *Fall over drooling* the fooooooooooooooooooooooooood. We are a 5 minute walk from a night market that serves absolutely amazing food. I could live happily forever on the variety of offerings they have. Middle Child and I had different types of tasty noodles in soup. Noah and Eldest Child had rice dishes from a different stall. Her Sweetness ate off of everyone’s plate until she realized how spicy Noah’s food was. Ha. We had fun drinks. They weren’t as sugary as we are used to from home but they were intensely fatty in a way the US doesn’t favor and frankly it tasted way better. MC had a “unicorn” which was sugar, condensed milk, two kinds of coloring, and flavors of I don’t know exactly what sort. Then there were a bunch of candies shoved into the top with sprinkles. I had a more plain caramel drink. It wasn’t a lot of caramel. But it was super good? Noah and EC had Thai iced teas with boba. Mmmmm.
Our lunch at a perfectly decent restaurant was around 900 baht. Our fabulous, wonderful, over the top good dinner at the night market was about 350 baht. Then this morning our breakfast at the grocery store cost around 600 baht just for the food (we got other staples and paid more like 1400 baht overall). 1 baht = .033 US So the lunch was around $30, the dinner was around $11 and breakfast + staples was around $45.
The night market is just so gosh darn cheap.
The traffic pattern is a bit intimidating to us: it is reminiscent of Kuala Lumpur but slightly less terrifying? Fewer motorcycles running up on sidewalks to go around cars. Here the motorcycles mostly only go up on the sidewalk if they are parking or dropping off passengers?
I am finding it fascinating that Her Sweetness is Not. Fucking. Interested. in being popular with all the local folks who would love to pick her up and chatter at her about how cute she is. She is getting a very effective “Fuck off” face. Good for her.
Sleep. Oy sleep. It’s all over the place. None of us are sleeping well. The AC helps, but it is still uncomfortable and jet lag is a bitch. Resetting a babies sleep pattern is not the same as an adult just “toughing it out”. You can’t do that to her. She melts down. She starts wandering back and forth screaming about all the things she wants but she doesn’t really want because the second she has it she is screaming about something else she wants. Sleep is the only remedy. She was super upset when Noah decided to stay downstairs and work in the common area so we don’t all have to be quiet. She wants her Bigs with her all. the. time.
Once we got through the fuss, I quite like this apartment. It is small but well laid out. The couch is awesome (it is pretty rad that I wanted to buy this couch from Ikea for our new house, I made everyone go on a pilgrimage to Ikea to sit on it in Portland. Now that we have used it for a few days everyone is fully on board with this being an awesome couch for us. This one.) and we are glad to have it here. The bed is pretty comfy. I am not sure when I became such an intense devotee of firm mattresses, but I am. Firm is great.
I am tapping my fingers waiting until Noah is done with work for the day. There are 5 or 6 Thai massage places within a 10 minute walk. Hell yeah. They all cost 300 baht or less. So… less than $10/hour. Can I have like 11 hours straight?
I had my last dose of pot on the plane. My intention (If I put this in writing, maybe I will stick with it) is to not buy alcohol at all until I genuinely feel like I have a small surplus of money in the food budget and that could not happen until October or November. I’m almost out of Ativan and I don’t intend to get more.
I’m about to be cold turkey on all of my drug dependencies.
Did I mention I plan to run a lot in Scotland? Like, when I am having feelings and I want to reach for a chemical crutch… go run instead.
I am going to learn how to be a healthy role model if it fucking kills me. I have made a tremendous amount of progress but I am not where I am going to get. Tea is going to be my big vice and I need to reduce how much sugar I put in it. (Jenny’s eyes got So Big when she watched me sugar my tea… yeah… I use a lot.) I should probably buy cubes and I get one per cup.
I am not going to buy soda again to have in the house until I also buy whiskey because I like drinking them together. Or maybe I will learn to drink my whiskey neat. We’ll see. One way or another I don’t plan to have the money to buy whiskey often enough to be a big influence on my life. Luckily I live with someone who thinks that alcohol should be served in roughly 1/2 a shot glass portions.
Yesterday was our anniversary. 13 years of marriage. I am glad we have had these adventures together. I am even more glad we are about to settle down for the foreseeable future. I want to be chilly. I want to exercise. I want to stop fucking packing.
Had a chat with EC about how much it costs to maintain cats. She wants to have two. She started panicking when she heard how much Puff used to cost me. And she wants two. We negotiated that she can do 5 hours a week of babysitting to pay for her cats. Seems like a good trade to me. We are starting with mothers helper work (she is NOT responsible for MC) and we will go from there.
It is neat hearing her strategize how she wants to do her room. She is highly cognizant of how expensive her plans are (she wants a custom built loft bed that looks like a treehouse) and she is trying to figure out which parts she can do, which parts she wants to ask me to help with, and which parts she will need to have the £ to pay someone else to help her. I feel so proud of her. Her planning skills are still nascent but she’s going to be fucking bad ass as an adult. She thinks things through. I mean, she’s still impulsive as fuck because she has ADHD like whoa but she can also plan. It’s amazing.
MC is more focused on the school part of moving. Setting up a room is not really on the radar yet. School supplies, uniforms, how to make friends, how to write in cursive… kiddo really can’t move past those details and that’s totally ok.
Her Sweetness is learning words at a blistering rate. She is going to be closer th ECs curve with talking than MCs. Doesn’t matter, they are all fine and normal and doing what they ought to be doing. But holy cheese she says a lot. People keep asking me if she is 3 or 4 based on her size and talking. Nope. 18 months. And she’s my smallest baby. Cue the bug eyes.
Folks have asked me if I am pregnant more than once. I laugh it off and tell them I am just fat. If I got upset I think the interaction would be tense but instead we all have a good laugh and move on about our day without strife. I am trying so hard not to let other peoples judgments of me impact how I view myself.
I am pretty fat at this point. I’m riding the 200 lb line and on my frame… that’s not small. The lightweight pants I have that zip off into shorts are so tight they are really uncomfortable. No bueno. My dresses barely fit. I am not going to fit into my flannel lined jeans unless I lose some weight.
It’ll be ok. My body does this. I bounce between the 150’s and the low 200’s. I have done this over and over and over since I was 16. This is my range. It is all normal for me.
I hope I can go to bed early tonight and I hope I actually sleep through. I sure could use it.
We go home in six days.
Our house is paid for and legally ours. Miss Jenny will be picking the keys up this week for us. I am elated. I feel really glad that she gets to be the first one to take possession of our house for us. I feel so welcomed. I feel so wanted. She is being super awesome about telling us to go ahead and start ordering things to her house and we will get it over to my place lickity split once we are there. She wants us to feel comfortable and happy.
I know there will be days we struggle and feel home sick because that is part of the journey of change. But I want this change with my whole being. My entire family wants to be there for a wide variety of reasons. I have great faith we will figure this out.
We figure a lot of things out. We are pretty cool like that.
Oh no
My poor big girl is sick. It’s nasty. 38.7 temperature (about 101.7). That’s not high enough to need a doctor but it’s high enough that she has a nasty headache and she feels terrible. She is having uhhh other symptoms. Let me pretend she has a wee bit of privacy here. She feels just awful. I am trying to push fluids and rest. I have all the food options she could/should possibly have on standby. I may want to walk down to the store again today to get more fizzy juice.
ALL THE SPRITE AND 7UP HERE HAVE ASPARTAME. UGH.
No.
So fizzy juice it is.
Today will be an ALL THE LAUNDRY sort of day. I started the first load at 4:30am. When this one finishes I am putting Eldest Child in for a long bath and I’m going to boil her sheets like whoa. All the towels need washing.
I was excited to see a full size separate washer and dryer in the house.
I am worried my kids are going to fall like dominoes with illness. Ugh. We leave in 10 days.
So many feelings right now. Gratitude. Trepidation. Worry. Concern. Appreciation.
Noah is absolutely ridiculously wonderful. Most of the visa application stuff falls on his shoulders because it is about selling how awesome he is. He is adding that work to his mountain of work and doing it with a smile.
It’s interesting to me how much my kids have fallen in love with Scotland. They keep telling me how grateful they are that they get to come back. They want this place for their home. Most of the places we visit feel like a stop on the road and it’s nice and all…. but not for us. Scotland feels comfortable.
And by golly we can talk about the weather all day so we’ll do ok.
Art, writing, climbing, walking. We will get used to hill walking. I am excited about the biking opportunities.
So far the whole paying-for-chores thing is going well. My kids are feeling really excited about the link between “I didn’t do much this week so I didn’t earn a lot but last week I worked a ton and I put a bunch into savings.” They are both looking forward to the future where they will want more clothes and toys and they don’t think that a bunch of sweeties are a good plan. We (the grown ups) are still providing two desserts a week and they don’t feel deprived. We also aren’t constantly fighting over candy or crappy food. They have their eye on toys they would like to have in their long-term bedrooms that they can’t have now and they are counting and recounting their growing hoards like Smaug. It’s funny.
They are starting to think hard about how they want to furnish their rooms. We took a quick trip to the charity shop and they were overjoyed by the offerings. And I quote “Even Ikea seems overpriced! I could furnish my whole room for £100 and have money left over for art supplies and toys!”
Our current plan is to start at the charity shop with the absolute minimum we need to get by, get nice mattresses, then just… wait and accumulate money and see if we truly want or need things. After a year or so I will do a lot more evaluation of what I think we need. In my head, putting permanent installation bookshelves from floor to ceiling on one wall of the lounge with a moving ladder would be awesome. (It’s a tall ceiling.)
Apparently futons want replacing in five to ten years depending on weight of the person and how heavily they are used. I am not sure how long Middle Child will continue to want to sleep with us. Eldest Child has said that for the first month or two she might do it half the time then after that she thinks she is ready to just move into her own space. I strongly suspect MC will want to be in the same room as us at night for at least the first year in the new house. I don’t think he has five years of room sharing left in him. Her Sweetness… that’s going to be a longer time.
With five family bedrooms, the annex, and the studio it is interesting thinking about how we will use space. Her Sweetness won’t be big enough for the studio to be a playroom for several years yet. I wouldn’t be comfortable just kicking her out to go play for a solid four years. Maybe until she is much bigger the studio will be the art room?
AND THIS COULD ALL FALL THROUGH AND MY DREAMS MIGHT BE FOR NAUGHT. I get that. But I want to dream anyway. I like this part of the process. I’m not getting my heart set. Just dreaming.
But I feel like all of us big people are going to really benefit from a place where we can make big messy projects that don’t have to be instantly cleaned up because they are in the main living space. EC and I can start experimenting with oil paint. MC wants to try a lot of art mediums that really require being able to leave stuff out for a few days.
Noah is going to turn his office into a video recording room. We will figure out sound stuff and lighting and he won’t have to take it down when he is done for the day. It will make working a lot more simple and relaxed. Fewer steps.
I suspect that the family sleeping room will morph into Her Sweetness’ room over time. That seems like the most logical process. Her toys will start out all over the house, of course. That’s how toddlers roll. Big kid toys will have to live in their rooms because a lot of their toys are things they won’t want to share for many years. They are so far past the toddler stage.
My bedroom will be by invitation only and mostly kids just can’t come in. I’m sure that when we are transitioning out of Her Sweetness’ room it will be complicated and involve some sneaking into my room.
I think that it’s going to be interesting having a dynamic with Noah where it isn’t our room. But I seriously don’t want it to be. I mean, I am sure he will sleep in there with me the vast majority of the time. But that will be because I want to invite him in not because that is simply his place.
This feels so achingly important to me. His office will need to have a place where he can sleep. He could potentially sleep in the annex sometimes if he doesn’t want to be in his office and I need space. We have years before Her Sweetness will want to be alone.
I. Will. Have. A. Space. For. ME.
When I am being a grumpy bitch I will have somewhere to go so I don’t feel like I am a piece of shit who doesn’t deserve to be in a family. I am part of a family. And sometimes I need to be alone in a room because I’m overstimulated as fuck. I won’t have to ask anyone to leave a space that is theirs in order to get room for me. My room is going to be so completely and totally off fucking limits.
I don’t have any real idea how I want to decorate it or use it yet. I want to spend a year just… waiting for the room to speak to me. I don’t want to get started quickly.
I don’t want to do almost any serious long-term work quickly. I want to have the picture fully formed in my head before I do anything. Like my tattoo. I dreamed about it for years before I got started. I’m impulsive and I’m not.
Like, the opposite wall in the lounge from where I think the bookshelves will ultimately go… the wall with the tree I think that one will be a mural wall. I am certain there will be trees involved to go with the trees that are already in the house. I am interested in having another tree bookcase possibly. But the size and shape and details are going to take a long time to percolate in my brain. I am going to do a lot of sketches. I won’t get started for a year or three.
I don’t want to put a single plant in the ground until I have been there for a year and I see how the light hits the ground. I want to learn how much care the current plants already take.
Sleep, creep, leap. I anticipate years three through five being very busy with projects.
In five years Eldest Child will be 16. Oh golly. Middle Child will be turning 14. Her Sweetness will be 6.
Hey USians, did you know that in Scotland 16 is when you are allowed to move out and be independent without emancipation? Holee shit. University students here can start at 16. It is utterly terrifying that my baby is five years away from adulthood. My baby isn’t such a baby anymore. I can’t wait to see how her art has progressed in that time. She is so much better than I was as a child. MC is better than I was too. They are both all of a sudden getting into drawing on the iPad. I am really excited to see their work. I will not permit unfettered access to video games. Drawing? Yes. Even on a screen.
I’m such a fucking control freak.
It’s not that they can’t play games at all! There is value in games! But balance, yo.
I need to stop typing. My fingers hurt. I have so many more thoughts though.
PT
I did it. I haven’t done the dilation yet. It takes privacy. I should have done it in the bath tub but frankly I am feeling overwhelmed with all the “must do” stuff. I made seven phone calls today. Only four of them turned out to be useful. (Two important confirmations; two appointments with solicitors.)
I feel on the verge of tears. I go through cycles of dealing with my feelings around disability. But the plain truth is I have been in pain for almost 30 years. I need to give zero fucks what anyone else thinks about how I live with that. But I’m not there. I feel ashamed. I feel like I am stupid and pathetic and I should shut up and just work harder.
But I would be this degraded if I had stopped working harder years ago.
It’s a Catch 22.
When Her Sweetness wakes up we will walk over to Jenny’s. I will put one, maybe two plants in the ground because that makes my soul feel better. I will decide after the first one how my arms feel. Middle Child will get to play with his cousins. We will get in our daily walk going one way and we will take a taxi back. We shouldn’t stay very many hours. Tomorrow will be an incredibly long day going to Aberdeen to meet a solicitor. But, this is the process.
Do it.
Rough morning.
Go to sleep crying, wake up crying. Why not.
Noah wanted me to listen to a chapter of this Buddhist book he gets a lot of value from. The point (very roughly) is that pain and discomfort are lessons and you shouldn’t hide from them you should face them.
But I can’t really get over hearing this from the point of view of being a person who has degenerative, chronic health problems. If I spend all of my time thinking about how much pain I am in I am going to spend my life walking around weeping. And then I am very unpleasant and uncomfortable to be around and people won’t like me very much. I made breakfast pretty shitty because I couldn’t stop crying.
Noah is very much looking forward to retirement. It will mean that he no longer has to do boring work for a pay check and he can instead do fun work for free. He can help people who cannot afford to pay him.
I am looking forward to decades of decreasing ability where I can do less and less of tasks that are basic to keeping me alive and I definitely can’t do any fun extra work because it will hurt my body and decrease my longevity.
I would kill a dog who was in as much pain as I am in. It would be cruel to keep them alive to suffer.
But I need to do everything possible to extend my life. Which means I need to do less work that gives me any pride in myself. I need to do less work that has any physical cost. My coach person was going through lists of things including moving wet laundry from the washer to the dryer and talking about how I need to weigh these costs and think about whether it is worth decreasing my long-term functionality so I really just shouldn’t do any of these things.
But I should spend a lot more time being fully present with how much pain I am. Watching stupid tv to pass time and distract myself from crying… somehow makes me a lesser person. I’m on a full on self-pity trip today, lemme tell you.
I am on palliative care until I die. Most people don’t enter palliative care until they have a few months to live. I am supposed to be doing everything I can to turn this into 30 or 40 or 50 years of life.
Because I owe my family that.
My buddy is right that it’s pretty stupid for us to look at big pretty houses with room for enormous gardens and lots of space to pick up and tidy and clean.
That will shorten my life.
When we have a house I do need to immediately hire help. Or I will shorten my life.
She asked me how many years I think I have left at this functionality. I don’t know. I am in a much worse place than I was 10 years ago. I already demur a lot of activities. I need to spend less time with Jenny than I have so far because it wears me out.
Not because she is bad. I really love her and I’m glad I’m here. I’m glad I will get to spend my declining years getting as much of her company as I can physically handle. But the amount I can handle is lower than what I’ve been doing. My pain levels are absolutely through the roof right now.
And I feel ashamed. I feel stupid. I feel bad. I feel useless. I feel like I can’t do anything right. I am supposed to work and I am supposed to not work. I am supposed to do things that make me feel good about myself and I am not supposed to waste spoons.
When we go to Portland I can’t bebop around spending lots of time with everyone I love. I need to see people once or twice a week and that’s it. Especially for the first three weeks when I am alone with the kids and I have to do all the grown up work. I don’t have anything left over to give to friends and that hurts.
Yeah, I need to do the PT exercises more religiously so I preserve what strength I have left. But there is no more regaining of strength. I’m not really ever going to improve. I’m just trying to slow the rate of decline.
I am feeling incredibly bad about myself today. What is the point of spending this much money on help and being this idle so that I can extend my life?
I would kill a dog who was in this much pain.
Let me find my crystal ball.
“How long do you think you have at the current level of physical function, and are you taking that into account as you look at the next x years of your life. That house seems to have a lot of steps, for example. Besides getting more rest because you consciously rest, are you thinking about how your environment impacts you in the long term? For example- in our new house we put a 3/4 bath on the main level, and planned a path to retrofit an elevator if necessary in the future. The doorways were planned to be wheelchair friendly on the main level. We’ve had enough short- medium term health things that have required avoiding stairs to know how important that is. Are you planning for the house to help you be in less pain?”
This is a hard one. I have absolutely no way of predicting when my body is going to fail. But yes, I need to be planning around a ground floor bedroom for me even if everyone else is up stairs. No doctors have been able to give me a timeline on my failing body. Frankly mostly they express shock that I am still moving.
I’m not planning around this how I should be.
I need to be honest that the reason I can handle coping with this apartment only being cleaned to the level the kids and Noah want to clean it is because it is half the space we are used to and we are leaving soon so the corners of muck aren’t my problem.
I am way past the point where some rest is going to restore my vitality. My vitality is gone. I am playing a losing game until I die. But will that be a fast five years or thirty years of a slow but steady decline? Will I last fifty years?
I don’t know. I know that my great grandmother was considered too mean to die. I like to think I will live long enough to be a torment to my grand children. I’ll be the grandmother who says no and means it. Ha.
I’m actually finding this upsetting to think about. I don’t know how long I will have this level of functionality. I know that keeping as much movement as possible in my day to day life will increase how long I keep this level of function. Any movement in the direction of being sedentary causes me problems. The more I sit the more I hurt. Stairs are a mixed bag but walking upwards of three miles a day really helps. My hips hurt, but they hurt more when they are locked.
I’m really sad thinking about the ticking time bomb of my body.
I travel like I do right now because I will almost certainly not be able to do this when I am old.
Medication and medical care.
It was occurring to me this morning that I’m doing surprisingly well for the level of medical care I have been receiving. It helps that I am very consciously doing less. There is less cleaning on the road. I am not gardening much. I am not running around socializing as much as I did in CA and I don’t feel the internal pressure to be helping my neighbors. (I loved my neighbors–don’t get me wrong. But I put a lot of pressure on myself to show up for them when I should have been sitting at home resting.)
Noah agrees that I am doing very well at not exploding. I am not crying all the time. That’s really good.
I am in tremendous pain. But instead of continuing to do lots of work anyway I am going limp. My arms are doing quite badly. My back and hips hurt so much that I am gritting my teeth a lot of the time. That’s not great.
But I am doing incredibly well at not taking it out on anyone else. Given how poorly I feel… I am proud of myself. I am doing quite well at keeping my poop in a group. I have not been screaming. I have not even been shouting much. I am quiet a fair bit. I alternate between mild exercise (I need to be doing my PT and I’m not) and a lot of resting/talking to the family.
The apartment is absolutely always less tidy than I would like. I am choosing to watch extra Netflix instead of cleaning it up because I need to not do more to wear myself out.
I am being a grown up. It’s kind of weird.
I am having some mood swings. I absolutely always feel like I “should” be doing better. But all in all I’m not doing shittily. How long have I been doing ok? I don’t know. Hard to judge.
Goal for the day.
I am going to close the computer. I am going to use my hands for art and not typing.
*cross fingers I stick to it*
THIS IS WHY IT IS SO HARD
I went in my room for a little packing reshuffling (looked at temperatures expected for the trips… errr… maybe the pants need to move around a little) and zoning out…
GUESS WHO FOLLOWS ME IN HERE BECAUSE SHE WANTS TO DO HER MATH NEXT TO ME BECAUSE BEING WITH ME IS ALWAYS BETTER THAN NOT BEING WITH ME.
The desire for enmeshment doesn’t just come from me, yo.
I love her so much. I think she is wonderful and kind and thoughtful and sometimes lazy and obnoxious as shit and absolutely perfect. I like knowing that she is alive. Even though she gets on my nerves. I have to keep trying to be a better person so I can deserve her.
I wanted these people so much that I feel like I am going to explode.
I get to have three children.
I’m going to go cry with joy now.
Even as I’m also irritated. Because that is life.
Something needs to change.
Ok. I’m in a cafe with music I like playing. I have my braces on. I need to be home in 90 minutes. Let’s see if I can defrag my brain.
I had a great therapy session today. We talked about the difference between PTSD and autism and how my various issues are compounding on one another. We went through which of my choices they were responding to last week (yes they were in fact biting their tongue to not say WHY ARE YOU MAKING BAD CHOICES) and why I am making them.
They are worried about Malaysia because a melt down there could have bigger consequences than in many other locations. That is a valid fear. But I have pretty good reason to think that I’m at risk if I melt down in a lot of places and I don’t honestly think Malaysia will be harder than a lot of other places. I believe that I will keep a lot more to myself. I will have to go rest faster because the consequences are extreme for a fuck up.
Why am I going? Because Noah was invited! How often is he going to be invited to a Muslim country? Probably not that often and I want to find out what it feels like in my bones. I want to taste the air and meet all the wonderful people who are living full and complete lives that don’t resemble lives I already know about.
The lack of medication is going to be hard. Sarah says I should get Prilosec and she’s not wrong.
But bigger than that trip is how we live our lives over the next few years. Sarah points out that I’m doing this thing where I completely deprioritize myself and I have done so while breastfeeding before. My shrink was adamant that my experience of decentering myself and my needs is absolutely board standard for breastfeeding parents. This hormonal soup is hard. But this is going to stay true for another few years and I need to manage my big kids. I can’t treat them like they are as important as an infant. Well… importance doesn’t feel like the right word. Their wants aren’t urgent. Their needs can be somewhat delayed without a problem. They are old enough that we should start having times when they come second or third and that’s healthy and appropriate.
It’s not healthy nor appropriate for me to always come in fourth or fifth place.
I am proposing a basic change to our schedule. I want to request that we all have one hour off in the afternoon without screens or the right to ask anyone for anything. No snuggling. No questions. Unless you are bleeding, figure it out for yourself for one hour. My big kids are 8 & 10. This is absolutely appropriate.
Also, we are talking about mixing up the order of our day a bit. Noah is not getting enough uninterrupted time to be creative. That’s a problem. I absolutely understand how hard it is to be creative when you are interrupted every 15 minutes for bullshit. His job requires near constant creativity. It’s not ok that we are acting like we don’t get to set boundaries with the kids. This is an extreme over correction.
I am proposing that I take over breakfast again and Noah work in the evenings after dinner and he gets to sleep in. That after dinner time is a great window for the kids getting predictable screen time (if they get their chores done) in a way that allows me to rest when I’m most tired. Noah is more of a night person and he likes those evening hours for creativity. My best creative hours are 4-8am. We are very different people.
I feel like we have been flailing and failing to create the structure that allows the kids to know what to do and when. I’m tired of having to be a jerk to get them off of the screen in the middle of the day. If they get the screen at 2pm, I am usually getting nasty to get them off for dinner around 6. Sometimes they tell me they don’t need to eat. That’s not good.
I am really struggling with how much my kids blow me off unless I get nasty and throw a tantrum. Everything short of that is worth ignoring.
I am not ok with this dynamic. It means I get to be an abusive bully or I get to be abused. Both suck.
I don’t want to abuse anyone. I need to learn ways to defend myself without being nasty and the last two weeks I have *sucked*
I am having a hard time setting boundaries all over the place and part of it is how worn out I feel. I feel like I’ve been massaged with a cheese grater. That’s not a great feeling. I’m exhausted. Taking care of a baby is draining as fuck. The whole first year is hard. I could seriously use a night of sleep and I am not going to get one for months. That’s hard to contemplate. My body has needs and those needs are not going to be met for months.
How do I find space for that? How do I find space to be gentle with myself as I cope with being pushed well past bearing? How do I find space to be nice to the most important people in my life?
How do I stop feeling hatred because I am so far past capacity I have nothing but hate left. That is the worst feeling.
I never want to hate my loves. But frankly, when I feel like I’m losing my mind… I do. I hate the whole world. I hate every person who wants me to think or interact or work. I get so tired and empty.
And filling my bucket feels so hard these days. I don’t even know what I need. I need time. I need to feel interesting. I need to feel like I have potential and worth and value. Not from working.
That’s so hard.
What kind of worth do I want?
I know I spend so much time on advice forums because I want my shitty ass life to help someone else have a better life. Not that my life is currently shitty. Past tense. I want to feel like the experiences and wisdom I have are valuable. Not because I serve you. Because it is wonderful that people exist who share what they know with the world.
I want to feel like I am more than a mommy/wife appliance. I want to be something that impacts other people. That is a big part of filling my bucket. I adore my family–don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to stop home schooling. I don’t want more space from Noah. I want to have a self outside of them the way Noah gets to but my available hours for such an existence is so small.
I need to take my writing more seriously and I feel like I have danced around that for years. I am so afraid of trying to be an authority about anything. I actively hide from being allowed to be authority.
Sometimes I wonder if my kids are disrespectful in the ways they are because they are learning from me that I’m not really worthy of respect. I sure act like that. But I don’t know. They are their own people and sometimes their behavior really sucks. Because they are people. Because they are kids. I don’t think they suck extra hard or anything. They are very normal. And I need to teach them how to treat me and I’m sucking at that.
This is tied into appearance stuff. I have to care more about how I look because I have to show people how to treat me. That’s so hard. I have been asked to leave businesses because I didn’t look good enough to be a customer. I’ve had the police called on me because I looked like a vagrant on the road trip. I am not imagining it that I ping a lot of “icki person” buttons for people and quite a lot of people are innately programmed to be mean to people they perceive as lower than them. It’s absolutely normal. And hateful. And cruel.
I remember when D told me years ago that if I don’t want people to be mean to me for looking bad then I had better do the work to look better.
The unstated implication there is I deserve the mistreatment if I don’t jump through hoops to be “pretty enough”. That feels degrading. I feel angry about this situation. But my anger doesn’t do me any good and it doesn’t change the fact that the world is full of abusive monsters.
This weekend someone told me that she thinks that something isn’t abuse if it is common/normal. I accept that she has this perspective. I wildly disagree. I used to know a woman who is part of a very specific culture. In her culture people with mental illness are to be entirely shunned so they don’t hurt the rest of the tribe. Guess what? That’s abuse.
If your community thinks it is ok for you to die because you aren’t good enough that’s abuse. Ableism is pretty standard in this country. It’s abusive. It’s normal for doctors to provide shittier health care to black women in this country. It’s abuse.
A great many traditional parenting practices are completely fucked up. I’m not going to get into them. Because shit I don’t want to argue. This is my opinion. You are allowed to have yours.
I need to create more space between me and my family so that I get to exist. Or I am not going to be able to be a healthy member of this family and that will mean that I have to go.
Ok. Time to create space.
The video game stuff. Ugh. Ok. So. When I say that video games are triggering what I mean is that when the topic comes up I am instantly full body flooded with adrenaline. I want to fight. I want to hit. I want to scream. I want you to get the fuck away from me before I hurt you. My early experiences with video games often revolved around people hurting me if I wanted to play. My body learned that this experience, this hobby, are not safe for me. Could I unlearn this reaction? Probably. With time, effort, and a lot of EMDR therapy.
Do you know what I don’t fucking care to pay for a bunch of therapy to fix?
My issues with video games. Therapy is expensive as shit. I can’t manage to fix everything.
When people are sitting around discussing their video games in a completely chill way I spend my time fantasizing about head butting them so that I can break their nose.
It’s not fun to be in my head through this process. Feeling this nasty, this angry, this much need to FIGHT hurts me. I feel sick.
It’s not fair for me to have to go up and down this roller coaster just because someone else wants to have fun. That’s not ok. So I finally said that I need that to be a boundary entirely. The kids are trying. EC asked me if she has done ok in the last few days and I told her yes.
My kids do want to be considerate. They just don’t always succeed. They are kids.
I need to teach them. And being a nasty bully isn’t the way.
And it also isn’t ok for me to have to beat myself in the head in order to accept what is happening me. That is also not ok.
This could be fun. Or terrifying.
Hey, know how I have that habit of throwing myself into situations with strangers? Ha. Uhhhh yeah. So I’ve been throwing most of my hand spoons into forums for a while here. I’m at a sort of pause point in therapy and there’s some stuff I’m working through that I don’t feel comfortable writing about here. So I’ve been writing in a private forum there and getting to know folks.
We are going on an adventure together. Looks like in the first weekend of November I’ll be running off to Colorado.
So Malaysia Oct 15-30. Dad is visiting Nov 1-2. I’m flying out on the 2nd to go to Colorado to see these fascinating folks.
I’m just kind of flabbergasted at my life right now. I’m trying to be nice in the limbo period leading up to the excitement.
My life is an awesome life. I am blessed beyond on all possibility of deserving it. But I get it anyway. Nyah.
Everyone has a price.
I’m pretty sure that everyone who reads this knows I have issues with control. Selling the house is hard on a number of levels. I have put so much physical and emotional labor into this space. It’s complicated because I never wanted to live here… but I grew where I was planted.
I was willing to accept half a million dollars below market value so that I could visit my art in the future and I could feel appreciated for having made these cool things.
My friend came over yesterday and told me that their intention is to paint over the whole house. I think they will keep the tile in the bathroom, but I got the impression that even the trees might be painted over.
I felt like I was punched in the gut.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
I can’t devalue how much of my body and life went into this house. I can’t fuck my family financially so you can erase me.
They are going to paint over it with a nice cream.
A nice cream.
I mean, that’s a lovely thing to want. But you can pay market value for wanting that. Market value in my neighborhood starts at $1.2 million, not $750,000. Shitty condos in my area are selling for more than $750,000.
I am cannot subsidize your dreams at the expense of all of my own. Accepting that much less money means Noah will have to wait longer to retire and one of our biggest stated reasons for selling the house is so that Noah can retire earlier.
No.
I can’t accept that offer. I will hate myself until the day I die for accepting that my work here was worth so little money in the scheme of what things are worth in this valley.
The house was a nice cream when I moved in. (Not really. It was a crappy white. But what-fucking-ever.)
No.
I can’t subsidize that. I can’t. It would be violent erasure of myself for me to accept that. It would be accepting that I only deserve to get the actual money I’ve already paid back and my improvements are worthless.
No.
That’s… no.
Apparently my price to be erased is higher than that.
Spoon math
I would like to put my hair up in a cute hair style. But my shoulders hurt so bad from sleeping curled around the baby (the only position in which she will sleep for an extended period) that I can’t hold them up that long. And I have to hold the baby all day so I really shouldn’t spend hand spoons I don’t need to spend on anything.
This is why I’m not typing almost at all right now.