Category Archives: having limits

Procrastination and longing

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I hit 44,000 (and some) words then I haven’t written in two days. I feel overwhelmed and sad. When am I going to hit the point of feeling like “See! I am awesome! I have done all of the things! It’s amazing that I’ve done so well!”

I don’t know.

I feel sad and small and insufficient. I don’t think I should because I’m rather sufficient. Is there any advantage to being amazing or awesome? Sufficient is how I get through. Just barely good enough, that’s me.

The next chapter I write has to be about the screaming. It has to be an abject apology to my children. An admission that it has absolutely never been their fault when I lose control and I am so terribly sorry. I didn’t know how to create better boundaries so that I would have enough space for me so that I would have a more adequate amount to give to you. That was a huge failure on my part and it is entirely my fault. It is never ever ever ever your fault when I scream.

I love you and I am sorry I have failed you. I have.

This is going to be a rough chapter. I’m not writing it for you the readers of the blog; I write it because someday when my children struggle with feeling like the bad parts were all their fault I want them to be able to read it again. No, my darlings. It was not your fault. It was mine. I am deficient and that is a horrible burden you have had to bear.

It was never because I didn’t love you. It was always because I ran out of cope and that is a terrible, horrible truth.

Today Youngest Child demanded outside time as we waited for yet another package to be delivered so we went out in the yard. I took advantage of this time and got about 1/3 of the grass cut. I am a hippy so of course I have a push mower instead of an electric or gas one. I am having fun with it but I’m not sure the lawn looks “neat”. It would not pass muster if one were intent on a uniform lawn. To be fair I think this is either my very first or my second time ever cutting grass and the previous time might have been more than twenty years ago. Learning curves are real. I will improve, but it will take some time.

I am trying to figure out what I am going to do with the yard as I look outside the window. On one hand, I want to put up large trellises to block view and on the other hand, I worry about making the yard feel more closed off. I think that before I am allowed to plant anything I want to get some string and try to limit the walkways through the grass to start playing with how much grass I want to leave for running on. I want to be able to plant food in the yard. I sort of want to put planter boxes covering the driveway area, we don’t want a car after all, but I think I might regret that. I don’t know yet. It will take me a while. I don’t have to decide today. Or even in the next year.

I’m trying to put boundaries in place so I don’t fuck things up in the same way I have in the past. In the process I might just fuck things up in a whole new way.

Life is thrilling.

Ten days till I go in for my next doctor appointment. She probably won’t be the one to cut more out of me, but it’s still important.

Our boat stuff won’t arrive for another month. I am feeling pretty upset. Our Christmas decorations aren’t going to arrive until a week before Christmas. I may leave stuff up until February.

I’m drinking too much. By which I mean I’m having a drink a day. Well, somehow I need to find the self control and never buy another bottle of whisky. Because alcohol contributes to nine kinds of cancer and I have to be here for people.

All the mother fucking feelings. Oh well. Shut up.

Ok, it’s time.

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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.

Continuing on a theme

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When I say I worry about too frequent contact there are a couple of folks I am thinking about.

There’s this really nice lady in my life. She used to be my next door neighbor. She’s going through a traumatic divorce (her ex is a real shit weasel) and she’s now dealing with his bullshit from India. So when we talk we spend a lot of time with her asking me questions about the legal system. In the past I have had to explain a lot of stuff about the DMV. She’s not super big on answering her own questions with internet searches because she doesn’t even know where to begin. (Frankly, now that I am searching from outside the US I see how much harder it is from a distance. My ignorance is vast.)

It’s not that I get nothing from the friendship. I get a lot. I like her quite a bit and she teaches me about things and I really like being a helper.

But she keeps asking if we can talk every day because she could really use the support. I… call every three months. That’s what I can handle. I feel like a shit weasel because she needs more support and she wants to get it from me but… I would flip out if I tried to talk to her for over an hour every day. I just can’t. It’s a lot of thinking and work on my end to solve her problems for her and she only occasionally does anything to follow the advice she spends a lot of time asking me for. That’s hard. It drains me. I feel exhausted by the end and then I am a less good mother. That’s not fair to my kids every day.

Another friend is an oldie-but-goodie. He was my boss from 16-19 and we’ve stayed in touch over the years. He’s often told me that I’m one of the few people on the planet who is allowed to tell him what he should do because I’m the only one who a)knows him well enough and b)gives good enough advice. He is currently living with his folks because he is retired and his parents require hospice care. He doesn’t know how much longer this will go on because their bodies are failing fast.

He’s super depressed. He’s isolated. He has had a whole career focused on culture and the arts and he is absolutely despondent to be back in this one horse small Texas town. There’s barely a movie theater and absolutely no real theatre. There isn’t a good bookstore or library and frankly he doesn’t have the money to buy stuff online. He’s not doing well. I talk to him every couple of weeks for a few minutes at a time. If he wanted longer chats… I couldn’t do it so often. He wants to talk for half an hour or less, but he needs contact. He needs to feel like he was not forgotten. He needs to process how hard and sad and traumatizing the work he is doing is for him and there is no such thing as a support group or available therapists where he is.

I love these people. My old boss with great intensity–he was an important mentor to me at a crucial time in my life. He taught me everything I know about carpentry, electrical work, rigging, and painting. I love this man. I don’t mind offering him support.

But I only have so much to give.

As a dear man has said to me, I’m more of a foul weather friend. It is hard for me to be present for the best times of peoples lives. I am someone that people depend on when everything is going wrong. That’s not all bad, but it is hard. It means I feel less like setting boundaries is a good thing because my friends are hurting. I know I can help alleviate pain.

Because of posts I make on public forum I have a whole bunch of folks who are sending me private messages essentially asking for therapy.

This is complicated! I’m good at it. I do help people feel better. I tend to have a few month cycles where a given person messages almost every day then they move through their crisis and I don’t hear from them much anymore.

I often feel like these dynamics are my fault. I feel like I create a crisis if none exists. I feel like people not wanting to share good times with me is my fault. When Sarah wanted me to be there for her good time (at my expense so she could focus on other people) I kind of made that not go well. I didn’t want to just help her have a good time while I saw her for a few minutes a day. Not given how hard it was for me.

I will put that much effort into helping people through trauma without expecting anything back but I can’t put that much effort into helping someone else have a good time without me. I just fucking can’t.

I feel… broken. I feel selfish. I feel cruel and mean. I don’t know if I actually am or not. I don’t expect people going through trauma to focus on me. I deeply resent when someone wants me to be furniture in the room while they have a good time without me.

I don’t know how to perceive this in myself beyond my default that I am wrong and of course these people I love are better/more right than me.

My old boss could go six months at a time without talking to me when his life was going well. I was never invited to the parties or events. I could have invited myself to some of them… if I found out about them in advance, which was rare.

I don’t know if I have the right to feel used.

I don’t know what to do about always putting myself in these kinds of positions. I am trying to have more boundaries around it all.

Why do people only want to talk to me when their lives are going to shit?

I suspect it is because I emote for people. I also expect people to be working on shit all the time. Most people, when things are going well, don’t want to change at all. They want to hold their breath and stand very still and hope things continue. I can’t do that. To me change is as inevitable as breathing and if you try to crystalize in the “good part” of your life you will cause yourself great pain in the future when you need to know things you don’t already know. You have to keep changing and growing or learning or you are going to create a problem at some point coming up.

What don’t you already know? Hurry up and learn it. Or you will experience pain because of that lack.

My kids and I have been watching documentaries all during their school break. We have a lot to talk about. Netflix has some great ones out at this point! We don’t watch casual, fun things. We try to learn more about what we need to do in the future. How are humans creating problems and what do we need to do about them? What can we do about them?

Don’t stand in one place assuming everything is fine or the ship will sink while you are on the dance floor.

Incidentally my kids want break to be over so bad. They want to go back to school. Ha. They want kiiiiiiiiiiiids.

People don’t often reach out to me to say “Things are going great for me! I’m happy!” I feel like this is because I am such an asshole and I might rain on their parade. I am quite an Eeyore. I feel like this is appropriate. And it makes me feel rather sad about myself. I don’t know exactly what I need to change in myself to be someone that people want to talk to about good things too.

Ugh. I’m up early catching up on the only vlog I follow. I’m making tea to go with it. Time to stop typing.

PS- after watching the vlog for a while I have to smack myself in the forehead. Yes. Sometimes people do put a bunch of effort into sitting around and telling me about the good in their lives.

It’s complicated.

Housekeeping and illness

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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

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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.

You need to get the chip off of your shoulder

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I have gotten this same advice periodically throughout my life. I need to not be hostile. I always have mixed feelings when someone tells me this. It feels like “I don’t like this personality trait so you shouldn’t have it.” Because it sure isn’t true that having this chip on my shoulder will prevent me from having a happy life or friends or a very positive set of relationships. It may absolutely true that I will not be capable of having a positive relationship with you while I have a chip on my shoulder but that’s the price of doing business. Or being alive. You can’t please everyone.

But I am going to have to change. I have absolutely no idea how my personality will need to change to fit in where we are going. I mean, I know that. I know I can’t say “I am who I am and you have to just put up with me.” I also don’t activate the chip on my shoulder quite as readily as I used to for all kinds of good reasons.

But I feel absolutely sick at the idea that I should give up all of my sharpness because I have a partner and that’s going to protect me. First: I don’t wear a ring (my god damn hands hurt) so when I am not with my children and obviously part of a family unit I lose the Mantle of White Motherhood that protects me most of the time now. I know it’s a thing. I know that it is a privilege rarely afforded to mothers who are not white. Second: I don’t want to be dependent on someone thinking a man is going to come after them if they hurt me. Noah has long been clear that we are not in that kind of relationship. If I am going to be protected I need to do it for myself.

Why the hell do you think I went and took classes to learn how to beat the hell out of people? It wasn’t because I thought it was fun. It was because next time I am going to ensure someone crawls away from trying to hurt me.

But if no one starts nothing won’t be nothing and that’s what I hope for. I don’t initiate violence. I really don’t. Sometimes I am quite shocked by how gentle I am in most of my life. I expected to have a more violent life. If I had stayed living with my family or in the communities I grew up in… there would be more violence. Money is my escape path.

No one wants to hit someone who can afford a lawyer. Honestly that is more protection at this point than being married.

But I don’t want to depend on either factor for being safe. Frankly I rely on Glamour. Not in the sense of being pretty or beautiful and dressed up. More in the sense of being able to go from seeming very inviting and non-threatening to being overwhelmingly intimidating and terrifying with just a switch of my emotional state. I haven’t had problems in a long time. I believe this is part of why. The Mantle of White Motherhood has been the rest of it.

Also, I stay home a lot.

We spent this morning talking about how we are going to approach independence for the kids in Scotland. We talked about schema and navigation and trust and mental maps and exploration and time management and money and safety and strengths and gradually increasing competency.

Middle Child asked if the kids will have to buy their own bikes. I said that I believe that transportation should be a parent’s responsibility when possible until a child is grown. However, if they want a new bike because they want a new style instead of needing a new size that’s on you. I think that is fair. So far kids are in agreement.

It was neat trying to explain schema. Noah tried to talk about it in terms of video games and I could tell that it was going over MCs head. I switched to makeup. Kiddo perked right up. What you need to know to put on eye makeup is different from what you need to know for putting on lipstick. Those are both little subtopics, little schemas inside the big schema of putting on makeup. That clicked. Of course we had to have a detour to get a mini-lesson on the differences between eye makeup and lipstick and why it matters (I did not give the lecture). Just to prove concept and all.

I had an interesting night the other night. I tried to wait until late enough that the kids wouldn’t really hear me but Eldest Child is really enjoying Twilight right now so she was up till like 11:30 reading. I was ranting at Noah about my feelings about a whole bunch of things. I don’t have a therapist right now. I haven’t been writing. I haven’t had a Skype call with a friend in a while where I could talk/process/organize my thoughts… I needed to talk.

EC heard me. She of course thought that when I said “fucking brat” I was talking about her. She said she went to sleep with her stomach hurting. We talked about it at breakfast the next morning. I explained very very loose outlines of about 19 different situations that I am coping with and why I am upset with some people and why I need to be able to talk about it sometimes. It is not healthy to shove all of your emotions into a box and put it in a closet and never deal with them. I waited until late at night and I was in my bedroom with my partner. It has to be ok for me to have feelings and to talk about them without hurting anyone.

She relaxed and said she understands. I asked if she has ever heard me talk about her like that. She said not like that, no. I told her that if I ever feel that strongly about her she will hear about it. She relaxed a bit more.

It’s nice being trusted.

We are all talking a lot about how hard it is going through this many transitions at once. We are all struggling through our feelings about relationships changing and our lives being different and what it will mean.

We keep coming back to why we are doing this: we want to be there. We felt better there. We think we have more potential to be healthy and happy there. We want to feel safe. We want to feel like there are not people with guns potentially all over the place.

We want to be in a place where people think that the best way to protect children is not to inflict PTSD on a generation.

Also, we are really over heat. We want water. So much water. I’m sure I’ll get waterlogged at some point but it is going to take years.

I want to live in a city that was designed to be at scale for walking, not a car. We believe that we can create absolutely no end of stuff to do without having to have it provided by other people. We don’t need to pay for entertainment. We like to make and we like to do. We like to walk.

We are so excited.

I am having mixed feelings about all the doors that are closing. They need to close for a million good reasons. But good things can hurt.

Growth hurts. I tell my children that we go through periods of disequilibrium where everything hurts because that is how we brace ourselves for how hard it is to change. It has to become more painful to stay the same before you really want to change.

I’m turning 38 in two weeks and one day. I am a grown ass woman, but I am still becoming who I want to be. I am still turning all of the different skills and traits I have into the person I wish I was instead of being a reaction to things that have happened to me. I’m a lot farther along the path than I thought I would be.

I am reacting to things more in line with my values. I like that. It’s not that I never mess up an interaction, I do. But it’s more rare and the infractions tend to be smaller.

I am happy about that.

I really appreciate the advice that goes “What I would do is….” then I can decide how much I want to be like this person and how much I like how their life is going so I want to try to emulate it. There is so much respect in such a suggestion. It in no way places any sort of assumption that the logistics of one person’s life applies to anyone else.

I told my kids that we should not expect to feel like we have *friends* in the first year. (Outside of Jenny’s family and my kids have been clear with me that they do not yet feel like they know Jenny’s family… it’s still a growing connection for them.)

I am friends with Jenny. That connection is solid. Everything else is still growing. We know that. If you are honest about your starting place it is a lot easier to figure out what to do to change it. We will put our roots into place slowly and carefully.

Some of my roots will have big chips. That’s ok.

I get to go home in fifteen days. Even though it is a very Christian city I am literally moving into a place where my address includes the word Druidh. I feel like we will grow more witchy.

Do no harm but take no shit. Give all respect and show no fear. Find a way or make one. Only boring people stay bored. We are workers, not shirkers.

We will be fine.

Let me find my crystal ball.

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“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.

This is why I hired her

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“What makes you so special as to not need the same care and consideration as other people? (And I don’t mean the experiences you have had, I mean what do you think is intrinsically so special about you that you don’t need care and consideration. I don’t so much care what other people have told you as what you tell yourself at this point)”

Well, fuck. Thanks for putting me on the spot. Hahaha. Uhm, err…

Ok, this is actually kind of hard to admit and I feel awkward and stupid and silly. I do actually think I am special. I do actually think I am tougher and stronger than other people. I keep going and I keep working long after other people stop because they “can’t” any more. I mean… other people have phrased this in ways that I like and that I agree with, “You have all the force of personality as a star being born.” Yup. I mother fucking do. (Sometimes people say nice things to me in addition to shitty things.)

I believe I am capable of working no matter how much pain or distress I am in. There is a point where I slow down and there is a point that I stop but that point is long long long past the point when all medical tests say I should have stopped months or years ago. I am absolutely freakishly strong. It’s not that I can dead lift more than other people (I can’t) it is that I have a single minded focus and ability to put aside all care for myself and WORK. I am not always a nice person when I do this.

I believe this is part of how my ancestors, who were frankly despised folk a lot of the time, kept surviving when lots of folk wished them dead. We can put our heads down and work and make it through and fuck you very much.

My medical support team (there are a lot of people in it) have been trying to talk me into doing less for literal years. They have been pointing out the growing irreversible damage and hoping that noting this will slow me down. It has had… some effect on my behavior. But then I pick up a project and blow through things like you wouldn’t believe.

Some folks have asked me if they could hire me to do art in their houses. I said no. The way I work is extremely deleterious to my body and you can’t pay me enough to cover the medical care I need to survive it so I can’t give that labor to you and put the strain on my family. It’s not fair.

Why do I take such pride in cleaning my own stupid house? Because when people walk in and gasp and say “Oooooh, I can’t believe how clean and tidy and inviting your house is” I swell with pride. I did that.

I feel like if I am paying someone else to do the cleaning I don’t have as much right to the pride. I want that pride so badly.

My mom spent a lot of my childhood crying because she didn’t have the time or energy or money to have a home she could be proud of. That was a major wound for her. In some way I feel like I take so much pride in my space because I am trying to heal that wound, that isn’t even exactly my own.

But you and Jenny and Pam are right. Paying house cleaners is cheaper than paying for physical therapy and massage and chiropractic care and acupuncture and therapy for my kids after I have hysterically screamed at them to clean their shit up.

This sense of pride really has to evolve. I am struggling with that. It is hurting me and my family at this point.

I can hold on to being nice when my pain level is consistently above a 5. It’s hard and it takes effort, but I can. When my pain levels are higher than that [meaning a lower number on this scale] (I like this scale: https://www.theacpa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Life_Scale_3.pdf ) I don’t hold on to being nice very well. I don’t do very well when I can’t do work. I feel bad about myself.

Like, I should have tapped out of the road trip long before it finished. I was at the point of having a black ring around my vision because I was damaging my body so much that it was impacting my ability to see. I was a bitch. I had no patience. I slapped my daughter when she sat down to rest and I thought we needed to finish work before I got to rest so her sitting there casually was an absolute affront. I am not saying that to be prideful. Slapping her was wrong. But I don’t hit my kids on the regular. That was a major department from my normal control.

I need to change my perception of my ability to work because I need to not get to that point again.

What do I tell myself that makes me so special? Why do I deserve less care and consideration? I tell myself that I am a tool. A tool with an absolutely absurd ability to accomplish work. And you don’t love your tool. You use them up and throw them away. The trouble is that my family really does love me. They don’t want me to be thrown away. They want me to be around for decades. If I continue to damage my body like this… I won’t be. It’s just a simple, literal fact.

“In my own struggle with ADD I’ve learned that sometimes wanting to change the system is just a distraction from whatever I’m trying to actually get done. It’s a handy distraction I can really get involved in and suck up all my time instead of just doing the other things. I consider it a red flag to get too bogged down in reworking the system. Not that l don’t ever change it, but I try and wait to work on the system till after I’ve pressed forward on the thing I’ve been avoiding. If I still want to change it, I will, but often I don’t want to any more”

I know what you mean. My problem is that a lot of things are falling through the cracks right now because for years I had an excellent white board system that kept me from forgetting up coming stuff and currently I am trying to write things down on paper and then I never look at that piece of paper again and… that’s a problem. I do need a system. I am not able to have a wall system while we travel.

I am trying to set up Omni Focus (a computer based tracking system Noah loves) because I am on my computer and this lets me set up things with greatly delayed notifications so everything doesn’t feel like “Do it today or it will never get done.” Yes, in some way it is a distraction but it is also solving an actual problem I’m having right now. I’m struggling with keeping all the various levels of schtuff in a place where I go back and look at it. It’s been a problem for the past six months since we took the white boards down. A lot of things have fallen through the cracks. The kids are doing ok with their level of commitment on paper, my task lists are really complex and have many sub layers. I need a new system. It’s not a distraction it is important.

Also, I am an organization nerd and I am having fun thinking through whether things are parallel, sequential, or single action. That’s a useful way for me to process the things that are going on for me. It’s also forcing me to think through things like: physical therapy isn’t “one more stupid thing to do” it is mandatory for me to feel good and be happy. It is solving a major life goal because I can’t be a good mother or a good wife or a good friend if I feel bad and I am miserable.

Cleaning the table after meals is one more stupid thing to do.

Getting shoes that don’t rub me raw and give me terrible blisters in the rain is not one more stupid thing to do. It’s part of making sure I feel good so I can be happy.

It’s useful to try and tell the difference between these tasks? I’m trying to think about tasks in terms of what goals are they serving. I don’t think I have done that in this way before. The web copy on the Omni Focus website is absolutely nauseating in how it phrases things but it isn’t wrong. Mind mapping my goals in life is really important. Thinking through how my behavior enables or supports or inhibits different goals is really important.

Like: I truly want to rewrite Outrunning Suicide before the kids start school. I would like to co-write it with them. That means I have 14 months. So I’d better figure out how to schedule that work now. Or I will run out of time and never get around to it. I want to write a book that is teaching life and coping skills for kids in their current age bracket. I can’t think of better co-writing partners. (I briefly mentioned to them quite some time ago that I would really appreciate doing this and they said they would really want to help me do this. Both kids want to help with the phrasing and with illustrations.)

I have a lot of things I get distracted by in my head. It’s useful to be able to map it out, put a due date on it and stop thinking about it until it is time to think about it. Right now with the paper method I am having to keep thinking about it or I will forget entirely and never do it. So we’ll see.

Thank you for challenging me.

Medication and medical care.

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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.

Homework (what do I need to work on)

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This morning I am waking up feeling gooey, schmoopy, overwhelming love for my family. Ok. Time to think about the stuff I need to work on about myself.

What are the whack a mole problems that come up? Many of them are problems in me and related to my thinking as much or more as they are rooted in anyone else’s behavior. Like: I really struggle with feeling like I want/need my kids to be more self motivated than they are. Then I get these reminders that they are actually really doing exceptionally well for their ages and developmental levels and my expectations are almost certainly out of whack. My kids have different things they struggle with: my son tends towards passive aggression and my daughter tends towards executive function failures. Ok. That’s not out of line with fairly normal stuff for kids. What I need to work on in myself is feeling more patience with the fact that they struggle in these areas and I have chosen to not put them into school where there would be teams of other adults teaching them how to manage these issues. I choose to be the one who must solve these problems or it is my fault they still exist. Sometimes I struggle with feeling overwhelmed about the magnitude of difficulty of work I have assigned myself. But it isn’t my children’s fault that I assigned myself this role.

The thing is, even though I struggle with some of their behaviors sometimes… I truly like my children and I feel like I have done well turning them into little people to be proud of. It has been the result of massive, overwhelming work on my part. I watch my children night and day and give them little course corrections, assistance, reminders, and help. NO FUCKING WONDER THEY TREAT ME LIKE THEIR EXTERNALIZED BRAIN. I can look at my Eldest Child and tell what she is thinking about with a greater than 90% accuracy rate. “You are having x feeling about y thing. Do you think maybe you should do z?” Her response is always “HOW CAN YOU DO THAT?!?!?! That’s a good suggestion…..”

I only guess my Middle Child’s thoughts and feelings with a more like 40% accuracy rate and he and I both feel a sting because of that. He consciously and deliberately shields his thoughts more. He works on having a blank facial expression. He works on projecting feelings he is not having. He got that from me. I feel like I am letting him down by not being able to read him better. He feels misunderstood and less appreciated. But he works on making it hard. He wants me to find a way to work harder and still read him so that he can feel as understood as EC. That’s complicated.

He got in trouble this week. He set his assignments on Monday. I didn’t add extra shit. He picked what he wanted to do for the week. He needed to get his work done on Thursday so we could go have a visit with the cousins. He didn’t get his work done. I was pissy and impatient because he really didn’t come close and he spent the whole day dawdling and I lost out on a visit too. (I can’t just leave him home and go without him for a list of reasons.) So I told him that since he wanted to just sit around and not get his work done during work time that he could just sit around and do nothing during play time and he could do it in his room without toys. He didn’t have a fun day.

The next morning when he woke up he had a fire in his belly because he didn’t want to miss out on any of his plans or on EC’s birthday fun. He got up super motivated. He got a bunch of his chores done before I even saw him in the morning. The first time I saw him in the morning was when I was waking up and still sitting in bed. He came in timidly and I smiled at him and invited him into the bed for morning snuggle. (We have much better days as a family when we start out with everyone snuggling for at least a few minutes.) He talked about his plan for getting everything done early so that he had a buffer in case he planned poorly and it took longer than he intended.

He got everything done with time to spare.

We walked over to Jenny’s instead of going on a family walk and taking a taxi. On the way we had an hour to talk to each other. The conversation was wide ranging and interesting. I asked him what he thought about the day before when he was in trouble. He said he spent most of the time trying not to think. I said, “So kind of an extended meditation practice?” He said yeah. He didn’t use the word, but he was trying to not catastrophize. He said (barely paraphrased), “I was so grateful that the first thing you did when you saw me this morning was smile at me. It showed me for sure that I was right to try not to think all the super bad thoughts. I made a mistake and I’m going to be able to get over it and you will get over it and we will move on.” I told him that yeah we will move on. He’s a great kid and I love him very much and I need him to trust me. So when I say “Do x so you can have y” if he doesn’t do x he can’t have y.

He said, “I know. It’s part of why I respect you a lot. I know you work really hard at being someone who is honest with me every day.”

I have a lot of fear that part of his passive aggression is an attempt to get back some control from just how controlling I am. It’s not a healthy way to try to get back some of that control. He has a lot more control over his schooling now, but I think he needs to have just a little bit more. I think that when we get a house again he and EC are going to be allowed to shut me out of their rooms for a full year so they can figure out their own tidying habits without me needing to be so fucking controlling because we are packing over and over.

I truly literally have to be this controlling right now or we won’t be able to get packing done with the travel. It’s rough.

When this is no longer necessary I need to give them a bunch of space to try things for themselves and fail.

I really struggle with the fact that they don’t have much in the way of long-term planning skills… but that’s my problem because they are age appropriate or a bit above. I need to control *myself* more, not them in this area.

We have done a lot of work on getting them to see me as an independent person. Frankly, having Her Sweetness has helped. They can see when I need to not take care of them because I have other obligations and both of the big kids are super mature about understanding that they got to be the whole center of my universe for many years and it is wildly uncool for them to not let Her Sweetness have a similar amount of time and energy. We are still struggling on getting them to let me rest without interruption, but they are better than they used to be and if I were willing to set more boundaries I think they would fall into line.

The struggle is I hate setting boundaries with them because that feels like I am doing a mean/punishing thing. I’m not. I’m valuing myself.

I really struggle with valuing myself. I really struggle with saying, “I need to not do anything for anyone because I have to take care of myself.” I think I went to so many doctor visits because every time I walked into an office the medical practitioner would freak out about how badly my body was doing and give me a tiny little bit of support so I could go back and do more work than I am truly physically capable of doing. I’m not going to have that medical team keeping me on life support here.

I have to value myself enough to say no way more and that’s hard. I get so much of my self esteem from doing things for people. From doing work and supporting people I gain the sense that it’s ok for me to keep taking resources for myself because I am sharing as much as I get or more. But this isn’t sustainable.

I don’t actually think the problem is with my kids behaving badly. They are really amazing children. I think the problem is me valuing myself and my need for rest. I absolutely literally require more down time than I give myself. I have to exercise in a fairly regimented way and I haven’t been doing it because I am exhausting myself providing emotional care for other people. That’s not healthy or a good way to be a role model.

I don’t want to teach my kids to be how I am. Which means I need to change.

I need to spend more time resting. I need to spend more time with just adults not taking care of children. I need to turn down opportunities to do labor (emotional and physical) for people. Not because I hate anybody. Not because I am angry and throwing a tantrum. Because I need rest. Because I need to love on me the way I love on my children. Because I need to spend as much time paying attention to my needs as I do to my children’s needs.

I learn a lot from my kids. They work to set boundaries for themselves. They understand that limits exist in their lives for their benefit. They do better and feel better if they exercise and eat healthy food and turn off the screens at night and get good rest.

I need to learn from my children.

Things I need to write about.

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I fired the online therapist who was not working for me. I asked a buddy if she was willing to do some coaching for me because she gives outstanding advice and she said that sounds like a fun project for a bit. She gave me some stuff to think/write about. I can’t get into it fully tonight but I am going to collect her current questions for me.

She asks/says:

“We need to explore what needs to be different about the kids for the long run, so that can be addressed. Make a list, word vomit, whatever feels good about what you struggle with them on, especially if it feels like whack-a-mole- always popping up.”

“On the “I’m a changing, fluid person and people find that hard to cope with” there are a few things to explore about that.

  • One, if a person has unclear boundaries (like we’ve talked about on the general board in regards to the attacking you) sometimes you suck up things that are actually not fine, and sometimes you get upset. This makes it hard for people, especially if you bring up the times they were wrong and you didn’t tell them. They get confused. So- the lines are the lines, and pushing on them should always be noted. (Boundaries can absolutely change over time too)
  • Two- if people have a wife/mom/employee appliance concept of a person, they can’t cope with changing needs on a day to day basis. Rosie the Robot maid doesn’t live here.
  • Three- anyone who score keeps, even a little, even in a very deep down place, will have trouble with changing needs. It’s too hard to add up if they are getting what they are giving (or more, depending on the selfish bend to it). So it’s frustrating for them to have you constantly need different things.
  • Four- of course people with certain types of a-typical neurological patterns will have trouble, but that’s not the majority of the people we are talking about
  • Five- children can have a hard time with a parent’s changing needs, because they don’t always recognize their mother as a separate person from themselves. Coming to terms with this is part of the developmental stages.
  • Six: “guessers”, from the ask vs guess culture have trouble since if you change all the time they have a hard time getting it right.
  • Seven: the opposite of ask vs guess might be declare vs expect. So if a person isn’t taking responsibility for declaring their needs, and instead expects people will just “figure out out”, that is confusing for people because they can’t get that right.

:point_right: I might even think of some more later, but that’s certainly a start for you to chew on as far as thinking about some past relationships and what patterns they might have had that need to be changed for better future relationships.”

“Are you aware of your needs as they come on, or only as they become urgent? Basics like food, toilet, water, sleep? Others like privacy, quiet, time for self, relaxing, rest, connecting to Noah? if the answer is yes, are you speaking up in the moment it starts? Or at least acting on it yourself? Or does it need to become urgent in order for you to act?”

I will try to get some sleep tonight and come back and more fully answer these tomorrow. But if I fail to get to them tomorrow… they are here and I know I need to be respectful of my friend’s time and energy. It is very kind for her to do this when it isn’t her job. (I offered to pay her for her time, but this isn’t her career. She’s being nice to me. Like when my friend asked me if she could pay me to listen to her and give her advice. The circle goes around.)

Not dreaming, chores, screens and friends

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Apparently the way my brain decided to handle “I am sick of fucking nightmares” is “I am not going to let you get into REM sleep because I am going to wake up every half hour.” It was a rough night for me.

Yesterday was mixed. It was mostly good with some frustration in the middle around fucking screen time. I hate computers. (Yes, I recognize the irony that I am typing on one and typing is basically my inside voice.) Yesterday Middle Child and I got up early and got on a bus to go downtown to rent a car. On the bus we worked on homework and snuggled and it was fun. It was frustrating on the way back because Google Fi has decided that I get phone service everywhere…. and data when I am on a wifi network and that’s it. Noah’s phone has data all over the island. Urgh. So I had to call Noah and have him talk me through getting on the freeway. Luckily he is a patient man.

Middle Child and I stopped on the way home and had a snack. Eating together on dates is like a thing.

I dropped him off, picked up the baby and the laundry and headed to the laundromat for two hours. Woo. It took so long because only one washer was available while I was there. That’s ok.

When I got back… it got frustrating. With the recent introduction of Parental Controls… a lot of websites aren’t working anymore. Netflix isn’t working because it is tracked in so many ways that Parental Controls blocks it. (I am sorta unhappy about Google and Facebook tracking my Netflix usage anyway now that I know it is happening. Fuck Google. Fuck Facebook. Evil motherfuckers.) I started getting loud and Noah told me this wasn’t worth yelling about. He was right.

I decided it was better to make the kids go outside for a while. Noah and I looked at the controls again, decided that because the kids get 4 hours and that’s long enough to whine about not getting everything I will let them have 1 hour a day on weekdays (it will mostly be used for school time) and 2 hours on weekends, which will let them play a game or two but not long enough they will demand movies.

Because I am god damn sick of fighting over their computers.

I waited until I chilled out. Then I went outside and talked to each kid separately about why they lost unfettered access. At the end of these conversations they both hung their heads and said they agreed with the restriction because they have not been polite at all about their computers. (They were supposed to set their own timers and limit their screen time. Never happened. They were supposed to do school stuff…. that was mixed.) They both agree that they have not been responsible and I need to take that responsibility away from them. They also understand that me standing over them to monitor them while they are on adult accounts isn’t fair either. So here we are.

I mixed in talking about things I was frustrated about in other areas (each kid got very different feedback because they are frustrating in such different ways) and how I am off my medication and I will be for the foreseeable future and let’s talk about how that is going to impact my body and my mood. Phrased that way they both said, “I’d rather be limited and deal with that frustration myself than keep making you track my screen time. That will go poorly.” Yup. It will.

After that Noah was done with work for the day and we drove up to explore the western edge of the end of the highway on Oahu. We played there for about an hour then drove down to Pokai Bay so Noah and the three kids could play in the water while I talked on the phone to one of my friends. (No data= no video chat. Dangit.)

I don’t have consent to talk about her in detail so I won’t. I will say that we have been friends since the 7th grade. When I talk about how Noah’s friends are rich and mine are poor…. she’s on my mind. She is someone who I think about a lot. I don’t write about her for lots of reasons around her privacy and people being judgmental pieces of shit. But it’s really nice talking to her. She asked why I don’t call more often. I said, “well… I do this thing where I find people who are really crazy like me and I try to enmesh with them and then I get really anxious about bothering my less crazy friends and I withdraw.” She said, “Well I’m a little bit crazy so you should call a little bit more often.” Then she laughed. It was nice. She has a tremendous amount of experience with kids and I learn a lot from her. She’s one of the most giving people I’ve ever known. Her kid has had some interesting life experiences and she has told me she was really glad she’s always known me because she learned about a lot of things from me and when it came up with her kid she felt calm and collected about going with the flow.

I am grateful for her perspective and time. I will try to call more often.

I need to schedule a call with my other buddy in Salt Lake. He completes the trio of my middle school friends I’m still in touch with. His mother in law hates me and he finds that delightful. Ha.

And I get to see Jenny soon. I am trying as hard as I can to put my intensity in a box because I can’t explode all over Jenny and her family. They are all very reserved people. It is overwhelmingly important to me that I create a healthy connection with her kids and they are sensitive souls. I have to meet them where they are. I am the adult. That feels like a lot of pressure. It’s self imposed! Mostly? I want this meeting with my namesake to go better than the first one. I feel pathetic about it, but I want her to like me. I was too assertive the first time and she was like “Fuck you stranger lady” and that was fair… (She was under 2. The fuck you was entirely body language.)

I earn people pushing me away when I am too intense. But I am really fucking intense. That’s just a fact. How much can I put that intensity in a box and still be an authentic piece of me? I struggle with that balance.

You know, like how can I diplomatically talk about my feelings so I order my brain versus how much do I get to the point of screaming “Fuck you, fuck you, and fuck you. Who’s next?”

Sigh. Balance. I continue to lurch towards it.

Last night I had a chat with Middle Child about his allowance savings. He said he feels like he doesn’t deserve to have it because we are walking past so many people who have nothing. I talked about how sometimes he uses his allowance to pay for things he breaks, sometimes for things he wants and I will not buy, sometimes just for splurges and if he gives all the money away he won’t be able to meet any of those needs he has for autonomy.

I talked about trying to find the middle way. (Thank you Buddhism. I am not a true follower, but every faith/religion/cultural path has some value for me to learn from. That’s what California Woo means to me.) I talked to him about trying to find the balance between saving up for yourself so you can meet your needs versus sharing what you have extra. I asked him what would happen to our family if I gave away 80% of his father’s income every month because I don’t feel like I deserve it. His eyes got big as he processed what that would mean in terms of housing, food, medical care, everything changes. So instead I share 10%.

We can meet our needs with 90% and we don’t have to stockpile the last 10%. We can share it and help other people have lighter loads. I can’t really give away more because I have a lot of medical expenses that are going to go up as I age. I have to prepare for that or I am deciding that I need to die early.

But it’s not about giving it away because you don’t deserve it. It’s about recognizing that our life is really good and we have the ability to share…. so we should.

He’s working on writing up his feelings about the values in a book called Islamic Values for Children. (DUDE! It’s online! Oh that’s awesome!) It’s neat helping him process what he agrees with and disagrees with in this book. Like, he said that we need to pursue (I’m paraphrasing slightly) understanding creation because if we don’t we make bad decisions and we hurt ourselves and the people around us: like killing off 80% of bugs in the world. Humans have used pesticides for a long time and now we face the possible extinction of our species because food is going to have a hard time growing.

I love hearing where his values differ from mine. But he has been raised hardcore in an environment where “Enlightened Self Interest” is a big deal. Being selfish isn’t wrong, but you need to be selfish in the concept of helping yourself be ok loooooooooong in the future.

It’s neat seeing how that plays out for him.

One of the hard things about Noah’s job is that he always feels like he isn’t quite doing enough to earn all those buckets of cash and all the conference invites so he works… constantly. Today and tomorrow he is taking off work! We get to go play on the island. I’m happy about that. I don’t have a plan for what we will do. I want to take the kids all the way around the island because then the kids get into these intense chats about how the plant life and rocks change. They are observant in ways I never was as a kid. Yesterday Eldest Child was talking about what the rock formations mean in terms of lava because she learned about it in one of her books. That’s so awesome.

“Hey, the plants aren’t so brown. That means this side gets more rain. Hm, I wonder why this is the line where that changes?”

This kind of thing didn’t occur to me as a kid and I love standing near this. I like them so much.

But first… we should pack 90% of our stuff this morning. In 48 hours we go to the airport.

I need to spend most of my time focusing on my family because I need to feel what that means. But I won’t forget my friends.

Oh, by the way: the place in Longview fell through. The AirBnB host said that we couldn’t have the independent apartment that long but we could rent two bedrooms in her house and share her kitchen and living room for the same price! Uhhh… no. That’s not a good deal for us. My kids are essentially nudists. They need to be able to have their own space where they can unwind without having to perform certain behaviors for a host. So I found a place closer to downtown Portland that is actually about $600 cheaper for the whole stay. It is in a much more crowded neighborhood, which will be mixed. Less ability to just “GO OUTSIDE” and more ability to walk to grocery stores. That’s a balance I will cope with. The house is sparsely decorated and one floor. That was shockingly hard to find in the region. The houses on AirBnB available for a long stay are mostly multi-story or decorated to within an inch of their lives. Yeah, I’m not dealing with that shit with a nearly-walking-baby.

Last night we had pho for the third time since reaching the island. We are really on a kick. I ordered the spiciest one on the menu then added three heaping spoonfuls of chili because it just wasn’t spicy enough. I wanted my lips and tongue to burn. It was awesome. Afterwards we had our first dessert since reaching the island: shaved ice with ice cream on the bottom. I added mochi balls to mine. We all had very different flavor profiles and it was funny how much the differences really are indicative of our personalities. EC had caramel ice cream with mango shaved ice, MC had coffee ice cream with cherry shaved ice, Noah had gosh I can’t remember his ice cream but he had guava and passion fruit shaved ice (with coconut sauce). I had cookies and cream ice cream with vanilla/pineapple/pina colada. The other three of us had mochi balls instead of sauce.

The baby went nuts trying everyone’s. She thought it was the best thing that’s happened to her in a long time. She is starting to understand “We look at a menu, then people go away and bring us good things to eat.” It’s fun to watch. She does a lot of intently looking at the menu then pointing at pictures. We often order what she points at. She is certain that the world is working as it should. Ha.

D–you didn’t do something terrible when you left that comment. The timing and the phrasing were not my ideal. But that happens in relationships. I am almost done being an exploding asshole. I am so sorry you got swept into all the upset about other things and other people.

Some of my grief is legitimate and real and totally deserved. That doesn’t mean I should lash out at everyone. Sometimes I do though and that is really fucking shitty. I try as hard as I can to limit my explosions to being here. I love you and I appreciate that you have tried to share what you have spare over the years. That wasn’t a lot and that’s ok. I don’t get to demand more from anyone who doesn’t have it going spare. Really I don’t get to demand more from anyone.

My black hole is not your job to fill. It really isn’t. I know that. It’s why I try to retreat when I am being inappropriate. Sometimes that retreat involves inappropriate yelling in my space. I imagine that is not easy. You don’t want to feel like you are hurting me. You don’t want to feel like you did something wrong.

I try to withdraw when all you have to do to be wrong is be near enough to hear me as I am screaming about being in pain.

Well, therapy isn’t an option. Try to talk it out.

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Why am I so depressed? Well. I built a lot of my sense of self worth around my value to people. Quite some time ago Sarah said that she was tired of having me publicly humiliate her when she made mistakes so I didn’t write as much about how she was treating me. I gave too much. I hate feeling like I am one of those assholes who justifies treating people badly or stalking by saying “I just love too much”.

But I went and did physical labor for her when it was literally causing me physical damage. I spent thousands of dollars helping her. Because I was trying to give her the kind of support I wish someone wanted to give me. She had me block out lots of time for her on my calendar and she showed up when she had nothing better to do.

Dad only offers help (that I have to pay hundreds of dollars for because I have to buy the plane tickets and send food money for my kid and send money for activities…. why aren’t I just sending her to sleep away camp–that costs less money?) when he also wants to ask me if he can borrow $25,000. But he doesn’t invite me to Thanksgiving or Christmas unless it is an Orphan/Leather Friends event. When he has holidays with his family I am not invited. I might be able to crash it… but he doesn’t invite me. Years ago when I asked him if he was willing to have a relationship with my kids he told me that I needed to know that all of his investment properties, all of his ability to help in this life is going to his kids. But I should loan him $25,000? Uhm. No. That kind of loan is for family. And you are letting me know that I am a Leather Family member… not a family member.

The folks we came to Hawaii to see talked about how much they missed us and how much they wanted to spend time with us. They have been begging us to visit for two years. And the daughter has totally flaked (she’s 20 and going through some shit… I get it) while the mother is manipulative, whiny, and cruel to my children all while asking me to fund her lifestyle. “I want to throw you a vegan feast to show you how much I care about you… but you have to pay for it.” Well a vegan feast is only welcome if it comes from t&T because their household is the only vegan household I fucking trust to make me food that will taste good. Your offering sounds like I am going to leave hangry and mean. And I get to pay for it. You will hang out with my kids and tell them that if they are not demonstrating enough gratitude that they don’t deserve to have as much food or money from their mother for play. WHAT THE FUCK? She mocked the size of my daughter’s ass because it didn’t fit in a climbing unit designed for fucking 5 year olds.

But I feel this terrible, overwhelming shame about cutting off people who treat me this way? They are willing to be my friends so how dare I judge what they have on offer?

Being really upset about these bigger boundary violations mean that smaller things feel more threatening. I *know* the CPS comment wasn’t intended as a threat. I *know* she didn’t mean to hurt me. But CPS is a deeply triggering topic and I am already wild with upset and I don’t have the ability to process that kind of thing without flipping out on top of everything else.

I don’t feel entitled to demand better treatment. I feel like these “friends” are treating me this way because this is what I deserve. Because I deserve to be treated like an ATM. If I don’t buy love I don’t deserve to receive any.

I deeply believe that my children don’t owe me anything. It is supposed to be a one way trip of support but that means I feel used all of the time by a lot of people and that’s hard.

I am still grieving Marcie. Her wife would not allow me to visit when Marcie was injured. Marcie felt abandoned. Marcie broke up with me because she couldn’t cope with feeling abandoned. I get that. I hope her wife is treating her better now. I will never know.

I am not blameless in any of this. I wanted too much from Sarah. I could watch her patterns and guess that she wouldn’t keep her promises and she would continue to want/take money and never think about how she was impacting other people. She is consistent with lots of people. I kept making stupid choices.

But I hurt. I feel like my hurt is stupid and I should just get over it and how dare I act like I have problems when I am not poor any more.

How dare I act like I ever deserve any support at all now that I have so much fucking money. I *should* have to pay for all help I get. And if people treat me badly as they take my money… isn’t that what I have always believed rich people deserve? Isn’t that justice?

I never meant to get this rich. I really didn’t. And now I don’t know how to view myself.

I don’t feel bad about the financial help I give to a lot of people. I bought Y a car and I don’t feel bad. I gave M a car and I don’t feel used. I have paid for people’s schooling. I have helped people start businesses. I loaned a friend money so she could get an apartment when she got her first corporate job and she couldn’t afford a place in the city she got the job in.

I don’t feel used by any of those situations at all.

I feel used by Sarah. I feel used by Dad. I feel used by the lady here in Hawaii.

Feeling bad about these people does not entitle me to treat other people badly. But I’m not coping well. I feel like I have to pretend I am not hurting and I am not capable right now. I don’t feel entitled to be sad about how these people treat me.

I abandoned my mother and my aunt when they needed help. I left them with a bunch of users, abusers, and takers. I feel like that means I deserve all the bad in the whole world. That means that Sarah treating me like shit feels like justice. And I hate myself for being someone who deserves this.

When I got my accident settlement when I turned 18, my sister told me that I had to use it to buy her a house and she would let me live with her.

How can I teach my children how to be in relationships without being users if that is all I understand?

It isn’t that all of my friends are users. Not even close. And it isn’t that I think I deserve endless support or financial help or…

I babysat for a lot of people hoping for trades. I was told that it was “easier” for me. They couldn’t handle having more than their own children in the house. But me providing free child care was so nice. It worked with the Bonus Family until it didn’t. Then my kids told me that a lot of her discipline was threatening to hit them and putting them in time outs for hours. I already knew that she expected my kids to come clean up after her kids because my kids are “more mature”.

I feel like almost every child care situation I have found has turned out to be shitty and abusive. I fear that it is happening because only shitty and abusive people want to be around me.

Only that isn’t true. I have friends who aren’t shitty and abusive. Well. I have people who want to talk to me for a few minutes or hours a year who aren’t shitty and abusive.

I feel like I should have known that my children would be treated badly by caregivers, as if it is a generational curse.

I don’t want to be bitter or angry or pissy with new people because I hate how this has all gone down.

But that means I have to lie about how I feel all the god damn time because I don’t trust people and I assume people are going to use me or treat me or my kids like crap.

M came through for my last birth. I need to never ever do anything again that puts me in such a vulnerable position. Because I can’t ever again need that much help. I can’t guarantee it. I am sure that people will help me in the future but they will help me randomly and when and how they feel like it and it won’t be based on my needs or issues. It will be about what makes them feel good that day.

That has to be ok. That has to be enough.

Which means I need to not try to be bigger. I need to not try to accomplish things. I need to just sit around and do nothing and wait for my kids to have needs because they will have needs and I am the only one who will be available to help them. I can’t ever believe anyone who tells me they will help again. If someone offers to be a penpal I need to to not believe them. If someone tells me they want us to come visit because they want to spend time with us I need to assume they are a liar.

I am so fucking grateful that Jenny said she has maybe a spare hour one day a week. Maybe. That is not consistent and I cannot count on it.

Thank you.

I hate that I need to assume that people are lying to me all the time. I need to assume that people are telling me what they wish was true, not what is true.

And I wonder why I feel depressed?

I really don’t want to live near the ocean. I don’t like it at all. I learned that, at least.

Comfort and creatures

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The worst part about the house we are staying in is the mattress quality. My back is very sore. I would say that I still haven’t crossed the pain threshold which feels magical to me. I have not been doing my PT exercises and that’s a problem. My body is degrading again. I am having a hard time doing them in the main room of the house with everybody present (I don’t know why, no one cares) and there literally isn’t floor space to do it in a bedroom. I have less floor space in this bedroom than I had on the cruise ship. I said I would investigate a massage yesterday and instead I took the kids (the younger two) to the beach. This was good for my relationships with them (I have not been having enough fun with my kids) but it means I am, as usual, prioritizing my kids over myself. I really struggle with this balance.

I told Noah that if one of us was going to have their “alone time” this week be doing the laundry at the laundromat it should be him since all of my other “alone time” is medical care and his “alone time” is usually drawing or playing games. I did have three whole video chats with friends this week. That was tremendously helpful for my mental health. I feel less like a fuck up who can’t ever get anything right.

There is a balance and it is hard. If you look up advice for parenting with most of my medical conditions the first or second piece of advice is to have a trusted support team so that other adults can take care of my children and I can have a lot of alone time to rest and recharge. Ha. Haha. Hahahahahahahahahaha. Fuck you. I completely and fucking totally failed to find support. So that piece of advice is basically worthless to me. Which means that in the eyes of what authorities I can find… my basic existence is too much stress for anyone to handle well. That does not excuse my failures or make it ok that I am a bully who dabbles in abusive behavior.

I tried to go get my nails done because it is one of the very few activities within walking distance of where we are renting. A pregnant mama was ignoring her 4 year old so she could get some me-time and I ended up entertaining the kid because she was talking to me. Sigh.

I want to be able to keep writing about my fuck ups. Not because I am bragging: so my children have the ability to go back and check their memories against what I was writing at the time. If they grow up and tell me that I hurt them… I won’t be able to deny it. I will have to say that yes, I did those shitty things. I wrote it down so that I could never minimize your pain. I hurt you and that is terrible.

My mother and sister rewriting history and telling me that they supported me when I prosecuted my father was really damaging. I want that to be literally impossible for me to do.

I will say, “Yeah. I was a complete fuck up for about a year there. I failed in a bunch of ways for a bunch of reasons. Maybe we can talk about those mistakes so you don’t have to repeat them.” Like my friend did for me recently. She told me “When my kid was (age) I did x because y and z were going on and it damaged them.” My friend was trying to warn me.

It is hard the way the needle is moving generationally. Many of my older-than-me friends made mistakes around hitting their kids. I am not allowed to let my kids have the option of kneeling on rice twice in their life to find out what being uncomfortable feels like. The path to being correct grows narrower over time and I am not allowed to leave my kids alone the way I was nor can I find anyone to help me so that I can have stress relief. I am not asking for pity. I am trying to find a way to give myself enough grace so that I am capable of doing better.

If all I do is hammer on what a failure I am… I will do worse and worse because I will freak out. My comfort matters. I can’t excuse bullshit. That’s not ok. But I am doing a hard thing under hard circumstances (they were hard standing in one place so please don’t tell me this is all because of travel–I feel better here than I did in California) and whereas sometimes I will do well… sometimes I will fail.

Perfection can’t be the only option or I need to kill myself because I will never be perfect.

Sometimes we need to fail so that we can learn a lesson. That means I need to be imperfect.

I think the way we have been handling school for the past two years was a necessary failure for us. I tried to live up to what my kids asked from me when they didn’t understand what they were asking. We all regret this. Maybe this regret is a necessary part of the process of learning about learning for us. They don’t truly want what they think they want. They are kids who have never been in school. They don’t even know what they are asking for me to do.

Her Sweetness is 13 months old. Over the next 5 months I will be able to pull away for longer and longer spans of time as she eats more food. Noah and I will have to find a way to each get more alone time. It may be that we trade weekend days off. Frankly we could each use a 6-8 hour stretch once a week where we are not responsible for working or doing anything to interact with our kids. No shopping for the family or doing laundry or medical care with that time. But we aren’t there yet. #goals

One of the things I am enjoying the most about travel is seeing the animals. The different birds (I have traditionally felt very confused by people who traveled to look at birds, but they are actually quite interesting? I baffle myself.) and reptiles and mammals are so cool! I could not fucking tell that was a real crocodile. I thought it was a statue. Which is why my stupid ass does NOT APPROACH WILDLIFE. Seals came up on the beach right by where we were swimming. I have had sea turtles bump into me in the ocean–the babies seemed super curious. I have seen crabs that range in size from about 2″ tall to about the size of Middle Child’s head. It is so cool that there are so many kinds and sizes. Cockroaches as big as my thumb (oh I’ve seen those before). Today MC and I watched a couple of birds have a knock-down-drag-out fight and I said, “Doesn’t that remind you of you and your sister?” He grinned sheepishly.

Lizards crawl on our walls (I think they get in through the hole where a fire detector is supposed to be… and isn’t… The ants are both super tiny, way smaller than we saw in California in our house and much much larger.

And yeah yeah, fish. Duh. Nothing brilliant or exciting looking. We haven’t been snorkeling or anything.

I just read an NPR article about Inuit parenting. It had some excellent points about anger. I feel that when I am on my game I am in this direction. I try. But I have a lot to learn.

It is hard learning how to give the exact opposite of what you got.

But… that’s necessary. Hard is not impossible. It is just hard.

Perspective is hard.

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I struggle with receiving advice from people who have kids in the same age range as my kids. It’s kind of like how I don’t think anyone should write a parenting advice book while their kids are under 18: you don’t know how your methods work out in the long run.

Today a friend who has an adult daughter just a bit younger than me wrote to me about her concern. She didn’t phrase it at all as if she was criticizing me. She said, “This is what I did wrong and these are the long term consequences for me and my child.” I really appreciate that.

I need to have course corrections from outside sources. It’s important. It’s mandatory so that I don’t fuck up entirely.

Some days I am making the best bad decision I can because I do not have the ability to make a good decision.

That is absolutely shitty. My children will pay for that.

“All that I wanted from you was to gimme
Something that I never had
Something that you’ve never seen
Something that you’ve never been
But I wake up and everything’s wrong” – “Work”, Rihanna

My friend says she is afraid I am regressing (because she does) and I’m lashing out at my children (like she did).

I cannot imagine a kinder way to criticize me.

I live in abject terror of ignoring my kids, because my mother was severely depressed and she paid almost no attention to me, positive or negative, for months or years at a time. So I give my children negative attention when it might be healthier to take space from them. Because of my wounding.

There is no fair here.

And most of the people who told me they would help my kids by showing up…. they didn’t. And I don’t feel like it is ok to demonstrate my disappointment to them. I have to assure them that they are fine. Even though I am not fine partially because people keep fucking lying to me. Then I flip the fuck out and my kids bear the brunt of that.

It is not fair.

Today the plan is to do two hours of academics then the kids are going outside to play, whether they are done or not. I need down time. I need to rest. They don’t NEED me to pay attention to them all day. If they get their stuff done they can go spend time with their friend. If they don’t, they can choose being alone.

That is the best bad decision I can make today.

And I feel like this is so much crueler than soap in the mouth or kneeling on rice. Because that is my perspective. But folks are arguing with me. Folks I respect.

I don’t know the right thing to do. I went from one form of abuse to another to another. But I’m supposed to know the right thing to do. Even as people tell me that the right thing is boundless energy and give… and they will support me so I can do that…. then they don’t and I have to keep giving no matter what I am or am not receiving.

Ok.

Growing pains and mistakes

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Many of my friends are traumatized people. When they respond to me or give me feedback… they are not taking careful stock of what I am doing and reacting to my actions. They are responding from a place of wounding. That’s not wrong and it’s not bad and it’s not always irrelevant… but it’s important for me to keep in mind so I don’t flagellate myself to death because they are upset at what I am doing. Their reaction is more about them than me. But I take it hard.

I try hard to ask a lot of different kinds of people about my behavior for that reason. I try to ask people with a wide range of backgrounds and experience. I try hard to regulate myself more strongly off of people who have actual relevant experience in whatever issue I am trying to deal with at the moment.

Sometimes I really fail at that and I spend days raging at myself and feeling like there is absolutely no hope of me ever being better because I have triggered a traumatized person. That’s not very useful for me, my husband, my kids, or even my friends.

I’ve been reading more psych books. Because I’m trying to find the middle path.

No, offering my children a variety of not-so-comfortable inducements that they can try and reject at will is not the same thing as spanking them for being bad. It just isn’t. We are trying things because I am out of cope and some of the things we try are going to be less than optimal and they will fail.

That’s fucking life and it isn’t the same thing as child abuse.

We tried it. The first day they thought it was very useful to them and they wanted to try again. The second day they didn’t like it and they felt kind of bad about it and they said they didn’t want to do that again.

Ok. We won’t do that again. My goal was not to inflict pain or punishment on them. It was to create a less comfortable environment.

The fact that folks would be totally ok with me drugging the shit out of my kids to have a similar kind of behavioral impact is utterly bizarre to me.

I am trying to figure out what lines need to be held. I am going to mess that up sometimes. We renegotiated academic goals about a month ago. We halved the work load. I tried to hold the kids to what they agreed to because that is my job. But it may be that once again the goals we set are not the right ones and we will have to adapt.

I am freaking out partially because I have not stood next to people who did this well. I am faking it. I don’t know what the hell I am doing. All my classroom experience did not prepare me for this part. In a classroom, the standards are arbitrarily set by the state and the students measure up or they fail. I am not setting arbitrary standards for my kids. I don’t have “You must be x proficient” goals for them and thus we are flailing really hard as we figure out what our goals should be and how hard I should insist on meeting the goals the kids claim they want to reach.

This is a process.

But I need to stop screaming.

I don’t have rest. I don’t get much support. Almost everyone who says, “I will help you by doing x” has turned out to be fucking lying and I need to stop allowing anyone to claim they will help me with my kids. It just results in me hating my friends with the fire of a thousand suns because almost no one follows up on what they say they will do.

The people who have absolutely rigorously met the standards they set for me are rare. I can pretty much count them on my fingers. I think that the fact that they go off of one hand is something that I should be celebrating instead of being so upset that the number of people doesn’t reach my toes.

But people keep making promises and not keeping them and that hurts me.

I don’t feel entitled to that hurt and that’s part of the problem. I don’t let myself admit to myself just how much these people are hurting me until I am exploding with rage all over the place because I can’t suppress my feelings anymore. I try hard not to get angry about people saying “I will do x with the kids” and then never doing it because I want to honor that people mean well. They want to be helping me. But the reality is that most of the time they want to feel helpful not be helpful and I need to stop looking to those people. Really almost any people.

We need to find a way to balance this so we can be self sufficient. That is not what I have been trying for…. ever.

The psych book I’m reading right now Born To Be Good talks about how in the US people define themselves as individuals (I’m an artist, a runner, a dancer, a writer) and people in other countries tend to define themselves through their relationships (I’m a daughter, a mother, a wife, a friend, a cousin) and a lot of my problem has been that I have been trying as hard as I can all of my life to define myself through my friendships because the daughter/sister/niece roles failed so abjectly for me.

But my friends have not been able to turn and be stable for me the way that family relationships do for other people and that’s been really destructive to my entire mental health.

Leaning this hard on my friendships for my identity and my self worth has resulted in decades of feeling worthless and like I should kill myself because no one is ever going to prioritize me like I do them. I hurt myself showing up for friendships when I should be selfish and care for myself and that’s stupid.

For the last couple of days I have been trying to process for myself that 50% of all people who hit grade 12 in school are below proficiency. My 5th grader is already writing essays that rival many of the 17 year olds I taught.

Maybe I don’t need to be so worried about them being “at grade level” and doing all the busy work of going through school. My kids have a very solid grasp of grammar and math. They are approximately at grade level. They would probably be B students if they went straight into school right now for the last few months of this school year.

Why am I so freaked out every moment of every day about failing them as a teacher and not preparing them for what they need to know? Because nothing I did was ever good enough to make my friends show up for me in the ways they constantly claimed they would so how can I know if what I am giving my kids will be enough for their future so they can show up and do what they want to do?

Maybe that isn’t entirely my battle to fight.

My kids have been digging in their heels and doing less and less. They were told weeks ago when we reset the metrics that they had to be current in order to go hang out with the babysitter. They then messed around on the boat and did nothing and got a week behind. They have not been interested in catching up since they got here.

Why am I wearing myself out trying to force them through the work necessary to earn the free time they want to have? This is so stupid.

I know that they can get all of their work done in 2 hours a day with time to spare. Maybe I need to give them two hours to do it then kick them out to play outside by themselves while I have down time. If you don’t get your stuff done so you can go with your friend, sucks to be you. Play by yourself and get out of my face. I act like I owe them constant stimulation and entertainment and so do they. And it is turning me into a psycho harpy. This is not working. I can’t be 24/7 stimulation for 3 kids and have anything left for my own health.

I don’t think we should lower the standards to nothing and completely unschool. But I also think that if they want to fail and not earn rewards…. I should let them. I have not been letting them. I have been hurting myself dragging them to their rewards.

Why. What am I teaching them?

That I care way more about their happiness than they have to. I care more about their happiness than my happiness or Noah’s happiness or my health.

Why.

Because I am afraid that if I don’t they will treat me like my friends.

You know what? I am leaving the fucking country because I am so angry about how my friends treat me. I have chased people for years begging for their love. I’m doing the same thing with my kids.

This is stupid.

Maybe less hysterical, we’ll see.

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This year… the kids don’t want to do academics. But they have lofty goals. If my kids told me they wanted to grow up and be a hair dresser and a mechanic I would not be so obnoxious with them about academics. They want to be engineers and politicians according to their stated goals and that means you fucking have to do academics.

Why am I freaked out all of the time? Because I’m never doing one thing. I’m taking care of a nursing baby (which is a lot of fucking work), cleaning up, helping with homework, being a travel agent, and I’m supposedly disabled and I should be doing many hours a day of body maintenance. Do you know what I haven’t done in a week? Any of my fucking exercises because there is fucking always three things more important. Dealing with rental cars and shopping. More baby care. Big kids refusing to do academics unless I stand over them and scream. I am back up to 121 emails (like half of them are requests for me to review every stupid company I touch. They don’t want my reviews. Y’all suck.)

I feel like I am always a day late and a dollar short.

Like a month ago we negotiated with the kids to slash their workload massively. Much lower daily goals for work. What happened when we negotiated that? They stopped doing absolutely anything and are now three weeks behind again and I want to put my head through a window.

So they don’t get to see their babysitter until they get their shit together. They have already blown 7 possible days with her and they may not bother to work today and miss more days. We are here for 27 days.

I can’t make them care. If they don’t get it in gear by the time we are in Japan, we will have to shorten the trip to Scotland and come back to the US. Our traveling adventures can’t happen if they refuse to make any forward progress. I’m not asking for up to grade level. I’m not asking for a normal “school” work load. But you must do something. If you refuse to do anything productive at all, we are not fucking doing this. We will move somewhere cheap because I am not going to enjoy anywhere we move and it might as well not cost a lot of money. Which means the schools are going to be rough. I’m sure my kids will get the crap beat out of them for being weirdos as is the standard American experience.

Oh well. I can’t save you from you getting consequences and I am tired of trying.

I’ve been talking to a buddy who is a horse trainer. She tells me their lives are too comfortable and I need to start making it very uncomfortable to not comply. Don’t hit them. Don’t abuse them. But… they have a lot of comforts and they don’t need any of them.

She’s not wrong.

I don’t think they need to get so much choice and freedom for a while. They currently think they are the bosses of me and I don’t fucking think so.

If this shit continues I am absolutely going to kick them out at 18 and say “I don’t talk to people who treat me like shit.” And that would suck all the way around. Maybe some soap in the mouth so they realize that dressing me down all day long isn’t ok is the lesser evil.

So yesterday we talked to the kids about how things are going. The kids know they aren’t doing what they say they will do. Like EC didn’t do 1 day of work out of the 10 days we were on the boat despite spending 6+ hours a day “working on homework”. I am infuriated because this shit fucking sucks. Being stuck in the room doesn’t bother her. She has a lot of fun. My buddy suggested kneeling on rice for 15 minutes to keep her from doodling and having fun the whole time.

Today her math is done by 9:45am because I told her at 10 we would start 15 minutes of rice to help her not be distracted.

I don’t want to enact negative consequences. I want them to just want to do the thing. But they don’t. They set up long term goals, and they ask me to help them reach those goals. Then I have to be the heavy being a butthead to drag them kicking and screaming towards their stated goals. This is not fun for me.

I think we should figure out an online math tutor. Maybe if she had outside accountability and someone else saying they are disappointed in her…. she would care more?

MC has been treating me really badly. When the old babysitter arrived for dinner (I barely let the kids talk to her, she was here to visit me not you) she commented on how shocked she is that their behavior has gone down hill so much. They are incredibly rude to me and it’s not ok. The other day I was eating lunch and grading MCs homework and he sat in a chair in front of me and just started kicking me. For entertainment. This shit is his norm right now and I am about to explode and beat him.

Maybe soap in the mouth isn’t so bad.

He says he wants to be respectful, but currently he is not managing that at all. He is too comfortable in his established routines. Something needs to change.

I desperately hope these negative consequences are not going to be long term strategies. I desperately hope we can do this for a few weeks or months and change our patterns of interacting.

We’ll see. If things aren’t different in 6 weeks I’m picking some town in Oregon or Idaho or Washington and we are just moving there. Not into a fun forever home. Into somewhere cheap so they can attend public school for a year and we’ll spend that year figuring out what to do next.

We wanted to spend 2 years traveling so we could find a forever home that feels good. Maybe we can’t get our poop in a group and we don’t get to do that.

Life is complicated.

I can’t help but feel like part of this is fall out from the fact that if I had tried to hold boundaries with Sarah I would have lost her years earlier. I had to accept whatever shitty treatment she felt like giving me or I would have lost what minimal support she gave and that was too painful.

I don’t feel good about myself. But. Time to do more work.

Maybe if I write it down I can put it down.

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I heard the end. I kind of recognized it as it happened and I kind of recognize it in the rear view mirror.

I like doing things for people. I like feeling useful and valuable and like I am of service. It’s a pretty overly core part of my identity. Many of my relationships involve a lot of me doing work for benefit of other peoples lives. I like being a supporting character in your story. I love you and I want you to have a glorious story arc that has nothing to do with me. So I’ll show up and clean your house.

I’ll drive across state lines to unpack and repack you while you are too depressed and in pain to do it for yourself.

I’ll take you with me on major vacations, even to other countries.

I’ll buy a fucking time share so you can have the vacations you want that you can’t afford.

But when you spend a week ignoring me on the week that was supposed to make up for you ignoring me for a year and you turn to me and casually say, “Oh by the way I need to talk to you about using next years points for a trip with my family” that I am clearly not invited on….

I just because an ATM to you.

No. Done. Stop. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

Nobody gets to treat me like an ATM. Especially not a rich white person. I don’t think so.

That right there is my line. I can see it very clearly. You stopped seeing this as a relationship where you have to give back. I’m supposed to keep giving to you no matter how shittily you treat me. No matter how much you cancel plans with me because everyone and everything else is more important.

It was a solid year of you canceling 80%. You wanted me holding time open for you so that you could cancel at the last minute. That makes you feel wanted and loved and connected. You could show up if you felt like it. I feel like you very rarely fucking prioritize me while expecting me to prioritize you greatly physically, spiritually, and financially.

Never make someone your priority when you are their option.

I wanted to be as important to you as you are to me. I was an important source of labor and money. You didn’t show up to be support for me.

You promised me that you would have strong relationships with my kids. I can count how many times you’ve seriously spent time with them in the last three years on my fingers.

Stop acting like I can’t track things and notice patterns. I’m not stupid. You make promises you won’t deliver on and you broke my fucking heart.

And you told me that you dropping me was all my fault because I got too angry. A lot of why I was angry is because you make promises and don’t keep them. So this cycle is all my fault.

Ok. I will step out of it. I don’t need to be in it. Then it won’t continue. Then it won’t be my fault. That is the power I have.

I know. It is never your fault you cancel. You are disabled. Hi. According to the very expensive team of people I pay I am disabled. And I am hurting myself by trying to show up for people who have no regard for me or my limits.

When will I decide that I am worth treating like a person of value? Because as long as I keep getting myself into situations where I believe I must stay in the relationship because I have known them for X time and I need them to stay in my life or it means I am bad and unworthy of having relationships…. that’s not a good dynamic. I should keep people in my life if I feel better about myself with the relationship instead of worse.

I turned hard to her when the cheating debacle went sideways. I was not allowed to pour myself into romantic relationships. I tried to have a major non romantic relationship.

It was never as major on the other end. I am very optional. That’s healthy! I need to… understand that this is very optional.

And stop picking the option that makes me cry. Cause hey dumbass, if you keep doing the same thing over and over hoping that someday someone will finally treat you well… fuck it. Move on with your life. There are 7 billion people. Don’t chase people who are going to treat you like an ATM. That’s not psychologically healthy.

What a day

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Yesterday, for all kinds of reasons, was awesome. Middle Child decided that instead of lots of academics he wanted to clean the whole apartment. He spent an hour and a half on it. I allowed it. He was doing work for the family and it is unusual. I’m not sure why he decided to spend his morning that way but I appreciate him taking the workload off of me. Eldest Child got 18 pages done. That is by far her best day. She’s two days behind now. She’s feeling really excited. She won’t be caught up by the time we go home because we are taking some time off of academics to look around but it’s feeling pretty good.

I feel so much more calm and relaxed about it than I have in a long time.

I’m trying to figure out how to write about something and not be mean because being mean isn’t the point. I don’t want to inflict pain; I want to record my process.

I think this needs to not be a break with Sarah. I think this needs to be the end. Something I have struggled with for years–it was the primary reason living together failed–is that Sarah chronically over promises and under delivers. She always has a good reason for her not doing what she promised. It’s usually health related. And then if I get mad then everything is all my fault and she has to retreat because she is triggered and she drops more promises and she hotly defends herself and blames it all on me.

This relationship is not healthy for either of us. She needs me to never get angry about how she drops things. She needs me to not notice and to just show her a happy face all of the time and I can’t do that. If I get angry she tells me that I am triggering her, which is a reference to her mother.

For the record her mother beat children.

But frankly she is just like my mother. She likes making promises she has no ability to keep just because making the promise is as good as doing the thing in her mind.

We hurt each other so much.

For her, intention is as good as delivering. But I half kill myself keeping my end of bargains because intention is absolutely nothing to me. I get the work done. Even if I’m a nasty bitch in the process.

But then she doesn’t want to be near me because I’m a nasty bitch. Fair. Then her share of the work doesn’t get done and I’m left holding the bag and everyone in my family is left dealing with my hysterical anger.

This is so incredibly unhealthy and I need off this train permanently.

That sucks because I love her so much I feel like I will crumble into a ball of pain without her. But my children need me to be consistent and that’s not possible if I am ever looking to Sarah for anything. Because I don’t have enough spoons in my drawer to cover her just…. not doing what she said she would do and never ever admitting that she didn’t show up.

I can’t.

This sucks. I wish this could be a break. But it can’t be. We can’t be close friends. We hurt each other. I hate having to be an adult. I hate that I have to never come back to this because my children need me to not be on this roller coaster.

I’m glad she has found a partner. I hope it lasts. I hope he meets her needs. I’m glad she has many other friends. I hope they take care of her. She deserves to be taken care of.

But I can’t do it. I hurt myself trying to be dependable for her. I hurt my kids when she doesn’t do what she says she will do.

Neither is ok.

Fuck.

It’s not that she does nothing for me! I’m not claiming that! But she makes a lot of promises and keeps a few of them and that’s not something I cope with well. The complete and utter inability to be honest about it destroys me. I am angry for months. My kids don’t deserve to deal with that.

In order for me to be the person I want to be I have to be honest about my behavior. I am a basket case when I am looking for Sarah and she’s “too busy” and she makes plans and breaks them. When I’m not looking for her, I manage my spoons better.

And frankly in the last year I haven’t seen many friends because I budget most of my friend-time for Sarah and then she frequently cancels and I don’t get to see anyone at all. That has been hurting me a lot and it is good that she sent me a “Fuck you, you can’t fire me; I quit” email. I’m not sure if I could have made the break. I love her so much. I’m ride or die. But if you quit on me I can respect that and stop chasing you.

Now I will never need to show up and do a ton of work for her again. Wow. How many things could I do for myself with the energy I’ve spent on her? Soooooooooooo much.

Much like how the Bonus Mama firing me was a really good thing for my family, we’ve all done so much better without the drama the Bonus Family brought into our lives…. we will be more stable without Sarah. Without her promising things to my kids she won’t deliver on.

My kids already know that when Sarah promises something they have at best a 50/50 chance of getting it and that really sucks.

That’s what I grew up with.

My kids know that if I don’t deliver on a promise I will acknowledge it, apologize, and make it up in some very specifically delineated way.

Sarah doesn’t do that. She can’t. She makes too many promises to too many people and she spreads herself too thin to make it up to anyone. And the apologies? Heh. Ha. Yeah right.

This is a gift of freedom and I need to take it.

It’s time to go.

I think if I am ever going to know in my bones that I deserve better than my mother gave me that I need to stop replacing her with friends who will treat me the same way. It’s not that I don’t love Sarah or my mother. It’s that the way they are in the world hurts me. It doesn’t hurt everyone. Some people are good enough with their boundaries that they don’t believe the promises or leave space for them in their lives and they can do fine with the disappointment.

I don’t do well with disappointment.

And that’s really something I need to be aware of and deal with. I need to insulate my children from that. I need to not invite it into my life constantly. Constantly. CONSTANTLY.

I need people who under promise and over deliver. And I think Sarah was the last person left who is completely the opposite. I loved her too much to do anything about it. I guess I got mad enough that I caused the break up? Was that passive aggressive of me?

I didn’t get mad because I wanted the break up. I got mad because I was promised attention but because I was grumpy she spent the trip in her room and then told me it was all my fault because she was triggered and has to flee my ill temper.

That’s fair. You shouldn’t have to be around an angry person.

But yeah. I’m not an angry person all the time. I have absolutely been grumpy for a while because of math and Eldest Child, but my fury is different.

I take responsibility for my side. The best part about the break up email is that there was only blame. Everything was my fault because I wasn’t cheerful enough.

That’s clear. That’s a pattern I can’t ignore.

I need to take that as the sign it is. And be done.

I don’t know if I was right.

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My daughter very consciously and deliberately misled me for months. Like, took active steps to pretend she was doing something mandatory… while not doing it.

Because she’s a completely normal kid.

When I discovered this my response was to giggle. Because she’s screwed. She is going to be sitting in our hotel room in Mexico making up what she lied about. Cause that’s how life goes sometimes.

She didn’t appreciate my giggling. She screamed that she was going to punish me. She got in my face and loomed and told me she was going to humiliate me in front of every person I know.

Uhhhh. Well. I put my hand on the back of her head, pushed her to her knees and growled, “I. Don’t. Think. So. Go. Out. Side.”

Was that the right thing to do? God I don’t know. That was so minor compared to everything that happened to me. I didn’t hit. I didn’t yank her hair out. I didn’t spend a lot of time screaming at her.

I remember once I told my mom I was going to make her sorry. She grabbed me by the hair, yanked me through the house to my bedroom, and threw me against a wall.

I pushed my daughter to her knees. Then made her go outside for a little while.

These are dominance challenges. I can’t imagine that letting her win every single one is going to be good for our relationship or her character. But is that too harsh? It’s not abuse according to any statute in my state. But is it wrong? There are so many things that are legal and still wrong.

My friends hit their kids.

I feel despicable for putting my hand on her head and pushing her to her knees.

Perspective, yo.

I went outside to talk to her after I calmed down. I asked her what response would she like from me? Would she like me to scream and rage about her lying? Would she like me to spank her like my friends do their kids? Would she like me to cry and feel guilty because it is all my fault I haven’t taught her to be an honest person?

I giggled. I giggled at your sheer audacity. (She then asked me to define audacity. I said, “Your balls. Your nerve. Your stupid bravery.”)

She apologized for threatening to punish me. I apologized for putting my hand on her. But good grief I don’t know another way to handle someone getting in my face like that.

No. You don’t get to do that to me. Just….. NO.

My kids correct me a lot. They call me on my bullshit. They feel free to criticize me. But there are limits. You don’t shout that you are going to punish me because you got caught doing something wrong. That’s not ok.

I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING TO DESERVE BEING PUNISHED AND THAT IS NOT OK.

The thing is… if I had put my hand on her to begin with and she had told me that she was going to punish me for putting my hand on her? I don’t think I would be so angry. I would feel I deserved it. But I giggled. No. You don’t get to punish me for giggling. That’s not ok.

It is so hard to figure out scale. Everything in my life was so much more violent than that.

According to every statute, it isn’t abuse. No bruises were left. No hairs were removed. She was not harmed at all.

But it was a dominance challenge and I won.

I don’t feel good about that.

I am writing this down because I am not proud of it. If my daughter ever says, “Remember when you…” I need to be able to say, “Yes I remember. And I documented that I was not happy with myself for doing it. But it happened.”

I can’t rewrite this shit. I owe her honesty. Even if she isn’t honest with me. That’s not important. This is a one way road of obligation.

I will never run out of what I owe her.

I wish that I didn’t feel like part of what I owe her is teaching her not to scream at people when she is in trouble.