I feel like I’ve been pulling back from writing since I cheated. I feel ashamed of myself. I feel dirty and bad and like I am not a good person. Things with my relationships haven’t helped. I do so  much looking to my friends for permission to exist; permission to do things and feel things and want things. When my friends stop giving that permission I feel like I run down like a clock.

I looked to Sarah for permission in an outsized way. And that mechanism totally failed. Sarah is not reliable. She asked me what she was supposed to be protecting in our relationship. I don’t know how to explain it. I wanted her to actually prioritize me. I wanted consistency from her to prove that I deserve consistency. She’s really literally unable to be consistent. It’s not me. I am deeply comforted by the people who have contacted me to say, “Seriously dude. This is not you. She does this to everyone.” It’s not that I’m unworthy and pathetic and awful. It’s that Sarah is not consistent for anyone. She is inconsistently wonderful and amazing and astounding. But it’s inconsistent.

The inconsistency makes me crazy. It completely destroys my sense of self. I stopped getting mad at people for being late for dates because I stopped feeling like if I did that I would have anyone left.

I wanted Sarah to prove to me that even though my mother couldn’t be consistent…. someone thought I was worth it.

But I’m not.

Things like: we tried to have monthly in person dates and weekly Skype dates. I cancelled the Skype dates after a few months of trying because I was always waiting around and she couldn’t make it. I felt like I did something inappropriate when I asked to stop having the Skype dates because it was really hurting me to always be not important enough. And then the in person dates… yeah. That sucked. Those didn’t happen consistently and I ended up doing an awful lot of the carrying of the load. Because obviously with multiple children it’s way easier for me to do the work. Duh.

It’s like driving to Arizona to help her. Where is a similar level of support in my direction? Yeah. Right.

It’s not that she did nothing. It’s that I poured energy into her unstintingly and the end result is I am drained and bitter. I’m barely talking to my friends because I’m afraid I will take my bitterness out on everyone.

I don’t want to feel like this.

My neighbor tells me that he’s sad I’m moving. I’m the best neighbor he’s ever had. But we talk for like 2 hours in a whole year. Maybe you could have fucking appreciated me more actively and made me want to stay?

I feel so very lonely and disconnected. I’m barely talking to friends even when they are in the literal room with me. There is no point in me trying to use my voice. My children will just talk over me and drown me out.

I feel less and less like I have a self to exist.

I am so tired. I feel so hateful and worthless and stupid and sad. I want to leave. I am so tired of being reminded that I am not that important to any of these people.

Go. Go. Go. Go. Go.

I need a break. I won’t get one.

I need to feel like I’m important or I’m not going to live that long. Because taking care of me is hard. It feels so stupid to waste time and energy on me.

I feel so sad. I feel like dying would be so much easier than continuing to try and fail at being a person.

I miss Sarah so much that I ache all the time. And we hurt each other constantly. And she is literally incapable of being consistent or dependable and I need to stop looking to people who are inconsistent. This is one of the most toxic patterns still in my life.

I want to be good enough to make someone like that love me and treat me like I’m important. It’ll prove that maybe I was good enough for my mom it was just bad timing.

Just bad timing.

Noah wants to be enough. He wants to give me all the permission and acceptance and tolerance and love. And he’s a white cis dude. That’s so complicated.

I will wipe my ass and go to bed. Because there is nothing else to be done.

I am nervous about having to keep the kids out of the house all day tomorrow. I don’t want to go to the park. I don’t want to see anyone or do anything. I want to crawl into a dark room with no windows and not come out for a week or 50.

There is a scene in a Tamora Pierce book. The mage is trying to spin pure magical energy into a thread so that it can be dealt with. She talks about feeling through the air trying to catch the ends flying in the wind. I feel like that but I’m trying to catch myself.

I am feeling so anxious and insecure. The reasons are many and varied. I am doing too much and there isn’t enough time in the day. I feel judged and I really don’t need to care about anyone’s opinion. These opinions have no impact on my life. But I still feel bad.

My  physical therapist is a really nice lady. I’m enjoying talking to her. She has been the first person who really wants to talk about the physical mechanics of my body AND she wants to hear about how I’m doing emotionally. Maybe not the first person…. but this is weird from medical providers. Especially with the vaginal dilators. She wants to hear a lot about my emotional experience. She says that over and over again I am proving to be a special case. She is telling me to do the exact opposite of what she tells a lot of her clients because I’m just wacky. Things like: when it comes to having better posture she wants most people to start adjusting in their hips/low back first and then move up the spine. If I do that then I crunch myself into a really bad position. I have to imagine a string pulling the top of my head to create space in the spine to allow it to get back into the normal position. If I try to adjust from the bottom I never get the space I need. With the dilators, most people who use them are counseled to have zero distraction while using it; I need as much distraction as i can manage. I’m using them for different reasons. I don’t need the emotional presence to do the work I’m trying to do with my cunt and it actually makes my work harder. I’m trying to break up scar tissue and get used to a casual presence in my vagina. I’m not working hard to create space.

Got distracted. Of course.

Yesterday a lovely lady from Task Rabbit cleaned my bathroom. It has never been this clean before. It gleams. She is not available to come back again this week. Fair enough.

I still need to clean the kitchen: oven, fridge, and I really should do a solid wipe down of everything else. We will sweep the house again on Thursday. Outside I think the kids have gotten most of the little bits of trash picked up. (I hope.) I need to go get more mulch today for the plants. I think I’m about two hours of yard work away from done and I have a dude coming tomorrow. He can do the lifting work.

At this point in the garage we have one 5×5 black shelving unit with all of our food and toys and books on it. We have the dish cabinet with dishes and bathroom stuff and kitchen frou frou stuff. We have the bathroom metal shelf in the garage with computers on it. Computer desk. The armoire will be taken outside today because we haven’t been able to get someone to pick it up for money.

The room is looking pretty empty. I’m almost salivating about the extra floor space. Oh thank goodness we have more room to move around instead of standing in one place rotating.

The house goes on the market in 6 days. We hope to be out of here permanently in 52 days. That’s my goal.

I’m looking at marketing materials. I think we are going to have to start at $825,000 and pray that we get several bids to drive the price up. When I look at what is selling now in our neighborhood…. we missed the peak. Dangit. Oh well. Get out.

And really, if we don’t clean the fridge or the oven before the staging…. no one is taking a picture inside them on Friday.

We are basically at “go”.

That feels so good.

The kids had a moment of panic yesterday when I pointed out “Those cubbies you keep expanding into more and more of? All of that stuff has to fit in your backpack.” They did the cartoon eyes bugging out of the head thing,. “But that’s too much stuff!” Well… you know how I’ve been after you to cull for six months now…. it’s closer than it was!

I read about other slow travel families. One family travels with like five different gaming consoles. We will travel with kitchen supplies. We like to cook. It’s a big deal. Missing out on key cooking pieces sucks. We will have knives and some fat and some containers and portable silverware…. I’m dorky. But goodness I love these collapsible silicon containers. And bathroom stuff is still a lot. And I haven’t packed our daily use stuff! We have too much stuff. And we should all be using mouthwash 5x’s a day until we move. Good grief.

I’m feeling both hecka anxious and really happy. It’s 2019. It’s time for a new adventure. A huge adventure. The biggest adventure of my life.

In 2018 at least someone in my family went to: (domestically) Boulder Colorado, Los Angeles, Austin Texas, Santa Barbara, Nashville Tennessee, and (non-domestically) Japan, Mexico, and Malaysia. In 2019: Nashville again, Minneapolis, probably DC, Japan, Mexico, Thailand, Scotland, possibly Netherlands, and England.

Dang.

Mexico sure was amazing. I want to see the other side of it. And the middle. We’ll be back.

Today I need to work on cleaning up the kitchen slowly. I need to hang out with my kids and snuggle. I need to exercise. I really should sort through the mass of screen shots I took right before midnight. Money last year…. ouch. We spent a lot. We aren’t broke but things are tight. I got us right up to the wire of selling the house. Frankly, I wouldn’t have let petty cash get so low if we weren’t selling. The latest remodel wiped me out. I’m feeling quite anxious and bad about myself. I allow us to go out to eat too much. But it helps, it really does.

Ugh. We live within our means. But I wish we were living within 50% of our means and I’m mad at me that we don’t. Because we always pick the more expensive higher quality choice. Ugh.

WHY DON’T YOU PEOPLE WANT TO LIVE ON MCDONALD’S. (my kids would)

Ugh.

But these are good problems to have. I’m not pressed. Just trying to figure out how to do better next year.

My baby is currently eating a rattle and reading a book. Big kids are in the bath. Noah is out. I have… peace? I should be sorting paperwork. But I have a moment to be in my own brain! Fuck paperwork!

I am not behaving well. I swore *at* a kid today. I don’t think I have ever done that before. I said lazy fucker. That was not ok. That was really not ok and over a line. Literally the next sentence out of my mouth after saying it was, “Shit that was over the line.” And then I spent the next several hours talking about how the problem isn’t even that they are lazy. It is lazy of me to complain that they are lazy. The problem isn’t that they don’t bother trying. The problem is that we are all struggling like mad for focus. We are all hurting. We are all having every feeling every day and we are all done. The kids are on academic break and I’m not asking them to do that much work and doing anything is like pulling teeth. It’s that situation where if they had  a 90 item to do list they could probably get it all done but if they have a 2 item to do list they won’t do either thing.

I fucked up.

I don’t get to explain the full circumstance of why. It’s not an excuse nor a justification and I don’t have permission. But I can say that I did that and it was wrong.

I am not defending myself in proactive, healthy ways. I don’t have space lately. Even when I try it goes sideways. I genuinely NEED more rest than I am getting. I don’t know how to get it. I try. I do. I am nightweaning the baby in an effort to gain more rest at night. That means I am getting far less rest for a while. Sigh. Last night was particularly rough. The roughest in I couldn’t tell you when. I am so exhausted.

It hurts so much that I love people in the bay so much and I could not make it work here to fill my needs.

I am feeling like a giant gaping wound.

I am glad that both Washington DC and Japan (the first two hops) are not places we are seriously considering for long-term. I need to have a rest time where I’m not trying to reach out and create relationships. I can’t bring this bitterness with me. I can’t be the poison in the well. Or everything I touch will fail.

I need to have a time where I’m doing less. Travel isn’t as much work for me as being home. I think people dramatically underestimate how much effort I put into being friends with people. I am looking forward to a time where I don’t have to wonder if I am currently letting anyone down by not calling them at just the right time. I need to have a time in my life where I am not trying as hard I can to create space to go see my friends only to have them cancel on me over and over and over and over until I feel completely worthless.

I need to leave this place where it is more important that I not hurt anyone’s feelings by saying that my feelings are hurt.

Geez. Those other women aren’t talking bad about me. Why don’t I stop saying anything about them. I was assaulted and I did literally nothing in return. You want me to act like I should shut up because they aren’t bad mouthing me? For what?

Avoidance.

I don’t want to be on the home school mailing lists for activities in the bay area because they actively promote my rapist. One of my rapists. Do you know how much it sucks that there are a whole bunch of places and events I don’t want to do because of rapists?

Friends. Rapists. Former friends. Old lovers.

Ugh.

Just get over it. Just get over it. Just get over it. Naw. I’ll move.

There is so much going on in wanting to move.

The inside of the house needs to be clean in six days. In seven days we will be staging and doing photos. On the market in eleven days. Then…. we’ll see….

I pray we get fairly quick bids. Although…. I also… wouldn’t mind another three weeks to slowly get rid of stuff. Hm. I need to stop with the table in seven days. I need to look like a picture postcard outside.

All the yard stuff has six more days to finish. Ugh. My back is… not doing well. I feel better when I do my exercises…. which I haven’t today. Today we got the tree taken down and the floor is swept and mopped through the whole house. It’s not good enough…. but it’s a first pass of construction filth. I am going to be spending hours on my hands and knees; our mop sucks.

I am cleaning the bathroom. Really deep cleaning it in a way I should have done six months ago but sweet cheese where do I find the time.

Six months ago I had a four month old and a cleaning service that was ok but not amazing. It needed a deep  clean.

Houses suck. Cleaning is endless.

We have been going to homeschool park days with the splinter group. The lady who started it is funny to me because we have so much in common. Of course she would be the one to leave and say fuck this. And of course her kids would be targeted.

If you are sitting on the fence I hope a fence post ruptures your rectum.

I was not willing to do a “me vs them” group. Instead I’ll just leave.

People will be abusive everywhere. It’s not just here. I must change; I’ve gotta stop being such a bully. Part of that needs to be managing constant disappointment in the form of people who make and break promises. And I’ve gotta find a way to rest. I will not be able to be nice without rest. And exercise.

2019 is going to be selfish as fuck.

I am really struggling with my feelings. On so many levels. I am struggling with wondering if I am physically capable of expressing them in appropriate ways. I am struggling with wondering if any of my feelings are appropriate anyway. I am struggling with my behavior and the behavior of my children. Being human is really hard.

I genuinely don’t know the right way to handle a lot of things. My friends. My kids. My life. I am feeling so sad. I am so tired of being sick. I am so sick of being tired. I hurt. I am exhausted. I am angry. I don’t want to do any more work. We put the house on the market in 12 days. I don’t know how much work I will get done by then…. but I bet a lot.

I am so weary.

No. No I can’t get into any of the details. If I did… I would go too far. So I can’t talk about this. Not really.

We put the house on the market in 19 days. We need to get pictures done before that. I have about 10 days of work to do. Contractor said they would be done today. I have my doubts. I am starting to suspect they may be here for at least part of tomorrow. They should have been here doing the small side work pieces while the painting happened, but oh well. I feel bad for my contractor. Dude has been sick for all of December and he doesn’t get to stop working because his business partner is leaving the state. He’s doing the work of 2-3 people and he’s visibly suffering. I worry about him. He’s trying to stay afloat in a horribly abusive environment.

I’m going to stop and take a moment to shout out to my lovely neighbors. They are unburdening me of my possessions and thanking me for the opportunity. We’ve had a lot of great conversations with folks who have never bothered to introduce themselves until now. It’s funny.

The kids and I are sifting our way towards an understanding of how next semester is going to go. This semester has been rough on a couple of levels. Some of it was the result of their choices and I don’t feel so bad. Some of it was because I got into a cycle of flipping out and getting out of that cycle is tough. Some of it was because I got my brain into the mode that we were “catching up” to a particular point in the cycle even though…. uhhhh we aren’t really? EC is super excited that she’s starting 5th grade math because 4th grade math is getting repetitive and boring. Perfect. MC is backed off of the textbook because he needs to be spending a lot more time working on reading for functionality before he can be seriously reading directions to learn. I am feeling very upset with myself that I pushed him in a way I never pushed EC. He needed to wait too and I didn’t. Instead he now has the complex I wanted to avoid in public school. Damnit. It’s my fault for cooperating last year with the charter school. It’s my fault for trying to keep going merrily along from our end point last year. He needs a different sort of schedule.

MC’s next semester is going to be a lot more focus on learning the fundamentals of reading. He’s not behind in math. It’s ok if he falls a semester or so “behind” as he’s getting to the point of being able to fluently read the textbook.

Also: I didn’t nurse frequently enough yesterday and my boob hurts. Ugh. Being a dairy cow is so annoying. Nursing is, in general, going pretty well with this baby. When Her Sweetness has bit me I react with hostility, she feels rejected, then I comfort her and she stops biting. It is what it is. My “hostile reaction” is generally a hostile facial expression combined with turning my body away so I don’t look open to her. That’s enough to break her poor little heart. I can live with breaking your little heart. Don’t bite me. It’s a rare day when she bites me so it’s not common for me to look at her with hostility. I do occasionally say (as I’m meeting her needs) “I don’t WANT to meet your needs. I am VERY INCONVENIENCED by your needs.”

Lots to do today. Home Desperate: I need a toilet seat, 30 concrete stepping stones, rocks, and mulch. Seeing two friends. Dropping off stuff at a thrift store and at the storage unit. I get to spend a bunch of time with landscaping fabric/weed blocker and laying out some walkways in my yard. It’ll be perty. Tomorrow morning before picking up a friend I get to clean the house from top to bottom. If I have time before PT I should also do more landscaping. I have a lot of work and a very short amount of time to do it.

Right now I want to go back and give Past Me the biggest hug ever. A whole bunch of people told me to relax and work more slowly. They were all Wrong And Bad Advice Givers. I would be dying now if I had listened to any of those people. Instead I am plugging along and this is hard but not impossible. I have a lot to do but I am not completely breaking down. I am racing to the finish line of picture day. Then I just hang out and wait until my house is sold. I don’t have anything else big to do at that point.

God that sounds awesome.

I mean… I’ll be down to home schooling my kids and the work of perpetual travel. That’s hardly anything.

My life is unreal and I feel kinda jealous of myself.

I haven’t been blogging as much for a long while now. Mostly because I am trying to respect their frequent off-hand comments about wanting privacy. They don’t know what they want. They don’t know which topics bug them to have people know about. So they are just saying no. And I’m treating that as a blanket prohibition that I can’t talk about myself any more. This is not going to work out.

If I can’t organize my thoughts I get mean. I get vicious. I get incredibly unable to manage my behavior and then I’m a problem; a real one.

Penultimate day of the remodel before we put the house on the market. Ostensibly we are shooting for putting the house on the market in 20 days. No pressure. I plan to spend Monday (Christmas Eve) cleaning the house from top to bottom. No spider webs or dust can remain. Then I need to negotiate with my realtor about what is moving back into the house for staging purposes. A house is for sale down the street and the staging is super nice. They just dropped the price after being on the market for two months. That’s literally why I waited until January. My realtor said that would happen October-December.

I filled 5 green waste bins last night. My neighbors are awesome. Thanks for letting me use your bins. Leaves and blackberry trimmings and redwood logs. Gone. I think I’m 3-5 days of hard work away from the yard being gasp-worthy. It’s rough around the edges (because I prefer it that way) but I’m going to come through and add hard scaping and shape it. I have made a beautiful meadowy garden. I hope I find the right person to love it.

Good lord. I’m 3-5 days away on the yards and 1-2 days away on the house and I have 20 days and in between now and then is Christmas. Woof. That feels so real.

Let’s just call it a solid 10 days of work between now and leaving. Whoa. That’s intense feeling. Guess how many days I have of not driving out of Fremont between now and putting the house on the market? 10. That’s it. That includes Christmas and NYE. It’s convenient not being invited to parties this year.

To be fair, I refuse to work every day I don’t drive so mostly I’m going to be doing the work in between driving. *sigh*

I just can’t start cleaning or organizing again until they finish because the dust is prohibitive. I want a house full of functioning doors. This will be awesome. I haven’t ever had a house full of functioning doors here. There have always been broken doors and doors that were removed because they were so broken. I feel rich as fuck.

Last night Eldest Child and I had a great date. She got her ears pierced (YAY! So big!) and we had a lovely chat over dinner about school priorities. I asked her how she thinks this school year is going (poorly) and what she wants to change (almost everything). We figured out a few ways for her to change it up. And I don’t really have permission to document. This is driving me crazy. Because you expect me to remember shit without writing it down and I don’t know how you think somebody else with a different brain is your mother. I don’t remember shit if I don’t write it down. Ugh.

We are drifting away from highly schooly and back towards unschooling. Still not Radical Unschooling because…. no. But far more unschooly in terms of timing and topics. I need to stop screaming. I have to. This is just mandatory for everyone’s mental health. And part of that will need to be that I’m not kicking and pulling them through fairly standard curriculum. It’s been a shitty year and a half of trying to be at grade level across the board in subjects. My kids have caught up and proven that they can. Now let’s stop because this shit sucks. This program is fairly abusive and why are we trying to conform to it? Because I’m stupid. Because I get afraid that if I don’t force you closer to lock step that at some point your life will be hard. Harder than you can imagine.

That doesn’t mean I’m doing the right thing.

I told EC that she wants me to go back to blogging daily because I scream less when it is embarrassing that I have to go write down every single day that I’m screaming. As long as she doesn’t want me blogging…. I don’t have that public humiliation stop gap and I just go nuts. She’s thinking about it. It’s literally true though. I scream way less when I feel more monitored. I put these monitors in place on myself because it’s a way to work around my shitty impulses.

The baby was up every 1-2 hours last night. I’m so cranky.

Today I need to go buy a toilet seat that isn’t broken. Tomorrow they are doing all the flight of the bumblebee last minute adjustments. I’m looking forward to that. Like: installing doorknobs.

Emotionally I feel like I’m all over the place. I’m touching base with a lot of friends. That’s so fraught. I love these people intensely and I want to be the source of good feelings in their lives. I don’t want them to feel bad about our relationship. If I talk about not getting enough from my friends here… people feel like I’m saying that *they* let me down. Oh honey.

I’m so anxious about this.

I need so much. And I’ve tried so hard here. And balanced between hundreds of people it isn’t working. It can’t be any one person’s fault.

I think this feels so viscerally painful because of losing Sarah and touching base with the home school group. I failed at the bay area. I need to go.

Because it isn’t just Sarah. It’s the Bonus Family and the Godmamas. It’s all feeling so incredibly painful right now. I want to go. I want to go away from this place where I have begged and pleaded for people to be my family.

I have emails in my inbox I ought to respond to. I can’t. I feel so flattened. I have so little to give. I gave my friends everything I had. I’m empty.

I am seriously struggling with how much the kids don’t want me to write about them any more. It makes sense. They are allowed to not want all their business on the internet. But I’m with them just about 24/7. Effectively that means I’m not allowed to write about myself much anymore because I don’t have that many interactions in a day that are not 100% centered around them. This is feeling really hard.

Trying to figure out how to talk to people about why I am leaving is tricky. I don’t want to make people feel bad or rejected or inadequate. Folks are generous with me. Folks share what they can. But I’ve had to carefully construct a web of hundreds of people in order to get a small fraction of the support and attention I want. I can no longer deal with having to go to that many people to get my needs met because everyone has so little going spare.

It’s kind of like the difference between moving the beehive around or expecting the bee to travel through an entire forest to pollinate. I need to move my beehive. I’m tired. I can’t keep traveling this far to get what I need from folks. The bay area is too spread out. The distance is brutal. In the bay there is always at least 3 things competing for folks’ time and attention. It’s too big and too much.

Which doesn’t mean people are doing anything wrong. Just that this is no longer the place for me.

Three weeks till we list the house for sale.

I want to write about home schooling stuff and what I’m doing and why. But I don’t have permission.

It’s hard not to feel angry and irritated and fussy. My kids talk over me all day long. They constantly tell me that I’m wrong about everything (WHEN I’M FUCKING RIGHT). They correct my language. And I’m not allowed to write about my life anymore.

I’m having some fucking feelings.

So the mother of the boy who kicked me in the throat doesn’t spend a lot of time trash talking me and neither do her friends. Ok. Do you want me to give them a cookie? Literally the only thing I did to that mother was get kicked by her son and then tell her there was a problem. That’s what I fucking did.

But I’m supposed to give her a pat on the back for not talking shit about me?

Really? You think that? Oh my. Well. Guess what, honey. I am fresh out of fucking cookies.

You told me that you can’t take a side because you didn’t see the assault. Well. You know how I’ve been sympathetic for years and years as you tell me about the abuse you suffered? I no longer believe you. I didn’t see any of it; therefore I can’t take your side or be supportive. How about if I go sit with the people who hurt you. After all, they haven’t been trash talking you to me so clearly I should sit on the fence and hang out with them a lot.

That hurts you?

Oh well.

I walked away from the group because I didn’t want to face people like you. People who would tell me that they are my friend…. but they really want to still be friends with the person who kicked me in the fucking throat.

Go! Be friends with them!

And stop telling yourself that we are friends. We aren’t fucking friends. You are the mother of someone my kid likes. That’s what we are to each other. So I’ll send you fucking Christmas cards and you can feel liked and whatever bullshit you want to say to yourself about our relationship. But the fact is: we aren’t friends. We stopped being friends when you couldn’t take a side and instead you expected me to play nice at your kids birthday party when you invited both families. Guess what, bitch. That was taking a fucking side. And it wasn’t my side.

You picked the side that said, “My son did not do that and if he did it is your fault.”

If you feel sad about being called out for your behavior…. tell someone who gives a shit. I don’t fucking care if you are sad.

You can keep your daughter around him. I will get my children the fuck away from him. Given that he is just hitting the teen years and he’s putting knives up to girls eyes when they have the audacity to argue with him? Yeah. It’s gonna get bad.

And I will be thousands of fucking miles away. Because if I were within 50 miles you would probably want my god damn sympathy when your kid is the next target. I wouldn’t like myself very much if I said to your face “Ahhhhh, do you want sympathy now? Do you want to be believed? Well I didn’t see anything. Sorry.”

When I went to the fucking park and someone told me the story of the altercation on the camping trip I didn’t tell her that I didn’t see it so it didn’t happen. I said, “I believe you. That’s horrifying.”

But I’m the big terrible meanie because I talk about this. Because I express strongly that this is a fucked up situation and this mother is creating a monster. I can live with that.

You think that being nice means not making waves, not pointing out issues, not making people feel uncomfortable. Fuck your comfort.

I’ve been wildly uncomfortable for years now. I have known that weak ass bitches like you claim that you are my friend. With friends like you, who needs enemies. (I’m pretty sure I don’t have an enemy. There are people I won’t talk to… but I wouldn’t fight them. I don’t care enough.)

I have grown up a lot. I might snark here in my blog… but I haven’t started a fight in a very long time. I have ended relationships. I have walked away from a lot of people. I won’t bother to fight. Whatever it is that you are doing that bothers me: the best solution is to not be near you. Because I don’t need you.

It’s really weird having this bone deep confidence. I will be ok without any of the people I know. Like, I would cry like a little bitch of Jenny or Pam broke up with me. Like I’m crying like a little bitch over Sarah. It fucking hurts. But I will be ok. As ok or better than I would have been with her. Why? Because I’m a bad ass motherfucker. Because I have a family now. Because after the loss of my mother basically no ending can hurt that much. Because I can make more friends.

My kids have been expressing sadness about leaving the neighborhood. I keep telling them: I built this community and I can do it again. It will take me time and effort, but I will have both. I am a community-oriented person. I will always find a way to make relationships.

It’s a gift.

I know this about myself. I am extremely gifted at making new relationships. I put myself out there. I’m a trier. I am codependent as fuck and I love people. I will be able to form new relationships as sure as the sun will come up.

If I have 99 problems, inability to make friends isn’t on the list. I like to look at people. Folks like being looked at. I mean, I have my favorite people to look at.

I wonder if I will stop crying for Sarah before I stop crying for my mother. Maybe not. But we are hurting each other.I don’t want to hurt Sarah. I really don’t. And I do. I hurt her with my anger. I hurt her with my impatience. I hurt her with my expectations. I hurt her with being inflexible and rigid. I hurt her by absolutely requiring a kind of consistency she isn’t suited for.

I take so much responsibility because I am not big on blaming other people for my problems. Could I rant about ways that Sarah let me down? I could. But it wouldn’t make me feel better. It wouldn’t heal my heart. It might trickle down and hurt her more.

I have hurt Sarah enough for one lifetime. She gave me a second chance after I scared the shit out of her. I didn’t deserve it. And I lost it. I don’t believe in third chances.

Noah got a second chance. So did my first fiancé. I tried a second time with both of them. It didn’t work out with Steve. Noah is hanging on.

I focus on what I did wrong because I can’t control anyone else. And I will keep existing. If I want to do it differently in the future I need to be real honest about what I did this time. If I lie to myself I will just do it again. That’s inevitable.

I am trying with this expectation problem. I am not doing well. I am being too much of an asshole with the kids. I don’t have faith. I don’t trust. I’m grouchy and suspicious. I am dismissive and negative.

I’m not like Sarah’s mother. That doesn’t mean I’m doing well enough. That doesn’t mean I am giving my children what they deserve from me. Sarah’s mother is not the bar. The bar is not refraining from hitting them with weapons. The bar is not screaming for weeks.

I did scream for weeks. Months. Stupid, fucking math. I am worried that I am going to care so much about this that I create big permanent problems. That could totally happen. Parents do that shit.

I *did* hurt Sarah with my screaming.

Am I hurting my kids? They still say no. Their shrinks still say that it isn’t great but the kids seem ok.

Which thing that I do is going to break them?

I backed off on math for Middle Child. I found a different set of books for him. He’s pretty excited about this set up. He is doing well so far. I found three different workbooks, none of which are vaguely adequate alone. One is a step down (2nd grade) so that he can establish a bit more confidence for a few weeks. He’s upset that he keeps failing whole weeks of work. It has happened a few times this year. He’s not reading the directions and that makes it hard to do the right thing. It’s not an arithmetic problem. It’s a reading comprehension problem. He is still working on reading. His decoding skills have increased substantially; that’s most of what he got from the reading program that the school enforced last year. He learned decoding and copying. This will take years to fix. I’m not happy.

But it’ll be fine. He will spend a lot more time reading and he’ll learn to understand and he will learn how to express his own ideas in writing instead of just copying someone else’s writing. It may not be how his sister learned, but it’s ok. It’s pretty normal. It just…. wasn’t part of my fantasy. I wanted to wait until he was old enough to write the way I did with EC. I blame myself. I shouldn’t have signed him up for the charter even if I did EC. Bad call.

I regret that.

Nothing to be done for it now. Except to get off his g.d. back.

I can’t control other people and I can’t chase friendships that aren’t working. I have to concentrate on the people I brought into the world.

This is my job.

That was a nasty fall! Good grief. I have seen my chiropractor and my massage therapist. I’m doing better but I still don’t feel good.

My thoughts are swirling round in a blender.

When I talk about things I’m upset about the least offending people think I’m talking about them and get upset. So instead of processing being upset about person A I am comforting person B.

I understand why POC have no time for white nonsense.

Looks like there will be a break in the rain today. I should get some yard work done. If the kids get their academics done (it is looking like a maybe) we can go to the park this afternoon. I’m seeing the contractor today because hopefully work starts on Monday.

The kids aren’t behind but they are struggling to learn pacing and I’m not being as nice about this process as I should be. I need to give an apology during breakfast. They are going to fuck up. If they were in school they would have to fuck up in order to find out all the bits and pieces. I take this shit so personally and it really isn’t about me. *sigh*

We are so very close to an empty house. I will probably do another cull today because the kitchen drawers are going to have to be emptied out. There are only two drawers of stuff plus the refrigerator plus a container that sits on the counter left in the kitchen. All the cabinets are empty.

I placed an order this morning. I think I’m done Christmas shopping. If I’m good I will take boxes to the post office this morning and then I won’t have to feel so guilty about my niblings. I’m getting presents for my children, my niblings, and my spouse. No one else this year. I just can’t.

I keep thinking about things like cooking and sewing. I’m not sure why.

I keep having these whispers of stories run through my head.

I keep thinking I need to get a graduate degree in psych stuff so that I can manage my imposter syndrome better. I don’t think I’ll learn that much more than I know. I think I’ll have a piece of paper to point at.

So tired. I slept pretty well. I’m healing. In an 8 hour stretch I think Her Sweetness only woke up once.

She’s close to night weaning. Muahahahaha

Today’s tasks:

1. yard work
2. take boxes to the post office
3. box up the porn and take another run to the storage unit (want to dig out Lego’s) (So this is like three tasks in one)
4. finish getting the last bits out of bedrooms and the kitchen
5. more tidying in the garage
6. take pictures of the furniture to put on Craigslist
7. create CL ads
8. maybe schedule another date with the neighbor who wants to babysit Her Sweetness before we move
9. finish PT exercises
10. meeting with contractor
11. laundry
12. oh yeah, help my kids with school
13. write a postcard or three
14. figure out what I am making for dinner while Noah has the night off
15. make it to the park? we reallllllllllllly should
16. snuggle my baby and let her know that she is the most important creature in the history of ever
17. help Her Sweetness learn how to stand

gosh that’s enough.

I don’t feel like I did much yesterday. I went to PT and had a hard conversation in the morning. I fell and hurt myself on the way out. My arms are doing quite poorly today as a result of the fall.

Yesterday:

• PT exercises (yes these are up to a fucking hour)
• Went to PT (including driving this is a 2+ hour experience)
• Took the next pile of stuff for storage out to the van to clear space in the garage
• Did dishes and loaded the dishwasher (once? Twice?)
• Spent 2+ hours providing emotional support to the kids (puberty is sucking)
• Made breakfast (a deeeeeelicious scramble: eggs, garlic, butter, jalapeño, bell pepper, cherry tomatoes, ham. It was excellent.)
• More general tidying and shifting stuff around
• My online shit. Some of which feels like work and some doesn’t.

Why does that feel like a day where I did nothing? That simple list shows at least six hours of work and realistically many more. That’s not laziness.

My standards for myself are very unhealthy.

Today we have had two breakfasts already. I made the first: steel cut oats, apples, cinnamon, vanilla, and brown sugar with cream. Nom. Second breakfast was apple pie. mmmm

I need to do laundry again (I did five damn loads on Monday). Tidy the kitchen. Her Sweetness is teething. Top two front teeth are coming in and she’s an unhappy baby because of it. In between bursts of rain I should probably try to do a little bit in the yard.

I’m feeling sad and low and depressed. I am hurting a fair bit. I’m thinking about Sarah all the time. Usually I talk to her all the time so it makes sense. At first this break up was feeling almost like a relief (we put way too much on ourselves trying to be there for the other and having less that I feel I owe someone *is* a relief) but it’s feeling less of a relief already.

I will miss Sarah forever. But I seriously don’t know that we are capable of being healthy for one another. She needs a level of not-angry that I can’t provide given how much she promises and drops. That’s not a dynamic I can be in and be nice and healthy. I will fail. I will fail over and over and over. I get angry when I’m disappointed. That’s a fact. Sarah makes promises she can’t keep. That’s a fact. If I am not allowed to get angry with Sarah as part of the contract of our relationship then we can’t have a relationship. Because she can’t keep the promises she makes and I am not capable of not reaction.

So here we are. And it hurts like a motherfucker because I love her with all my heart and soul.

I can’t keep having someone tell me that they will do things for/with me and then tell me that I am just like their abusive mother when I’m upset about them flaking. Nope. Can’t have that in my life. I can’t be your proxy to be mad at your mother forever. I can’t. Just like it isn’t fair to be mad at you for being the latest person to make and break promises, like my mother.

Baggage is real, yo.

My friends tell me I take too much responsibility on myself. But that’s all I have control over. If something is all someone else’s fault the only lesson in the situation for me is “Avoid that person” and that’s not a great lesson in general. I want to know what I can do/change to have better outcomes in the future.

I can’t ever let myself fall in love this hard with someone inconsistent again. Not because they aren’t worthy or lovable. Sarah is worthy and lovable in the extreme. She’s great. She’s a wonderful, fantastic person and I admire her deeply.

But we aren’t compatible and that’s really hard.

I’ve been worrying a lot about how this is going to impact my relationships with Pam and Jenny. Will I pull away because I’m afraid of leaning on people? Will I lean too hard and break the bond? Mostly I’m not reaching out because I’m afraid that absolutely any action on my part will be the wrong one. That’s hard. That’s scary.

My tripod of support lost a leg. What do I do about that now?

I have to be selfish about this to a degree. I have a lot of support to provide in this life. I need to figure out how to support myself enough to provide the support I have agreed to. That’s reality.

I love Sarah. That’s not going to change.

How do I get up and start walking away from this wound and focusing on the people who are still here? That’s hard.

My arms hurt so bad. My elbows and wrists and upper arms and shoulders are all aching really badly.

We have approximately 5ish weeks until we put the house on the market. I do not have the mental nor physical energy to chase all the hundreds of people I know in the bay area. If you want to see us before we go… it would be wise to reach out. Or you won’t see us before we go. Cause that’s how the cookie crumbles.

I love you. It’s not about lack of love.

I just… I’m trying to pull in the pieces of me that I have flung to the wind. I’m trying to sew them up into a canopy that will slow my fall as I jump off this cliff. I want to survive this jump and that’s going to need a well sewn canopy. I’m going to need every piece of me back that I can get back.

And that means I need to stop begging people to love me.

I am feeling utterly overwhelmed. Just talking to the PT about the vaginal dilation stuff she wants me to do is flipping me out and I’m coming home unsettled and kind of fragile and bitchy and that sucks. And I don’t even know how to talk to my kids about the fact that I kind of want to scream and break things because I am overwhelmed by talking to someone who is so emphatic about wanting me to change how my cunt works.

This shit is intense. I feel scared and nervous and upset. I feel like I need to shut down and tighten every muscle in my body for a fight.

Because I’m supposed to put some god damn plastic not-a-dildo up against my vaginal opening and not move it around.

I can’t begin to express how viscerally and existentially upsetting that is right now. Like, I’m literally clenching my legs closed as I type because I feel so upset.

It’s not supposed to be sexy. It’s supposed to be teaching the muscles to recognize being touched as not an attack. My PT stressed repeatedly that the clients who fail to make progress are the clients who say, “I can shove things in even if it hurts.”

Dat me.

I’m supposed to find 20 minutes every day in peace and calm stillness to gently stimulate my vagina. And now I’m crying.

Right this minute I’m feeling very overwhelmed about all the shit on my plate.

Home schooling continues. For the past couple of days I have been having the kids make up their own daily schedules and it has reduced my yelling in very useful ways. The kids are managing their time a little, but it’s a lot of time and brain power from me still. I weirdly enjoyed all the grading I got to do this week.

Packing and getting rid of our stuff is a job.

I have to start doing yard work more seriously to prep for sale. I put in a few hours yesterday and I should be doing an hour or two every day for a while. This is only annoying because the baby is hard core in separation anxiety and she doesn’t want to be put down much while I work.

My kids are needing a lot of emotional coaching right now. It’s a normal part of parenting, but we are having intense therapy level talks almost every day and sometimes multiple times a day. Processing how to appropriately explain the stuff they want to hear about puberty and sex and mental health is hard. Professionals train for years to be able to give the lectures I’m giving and most parents just refuse to answer these questions.

The baby is 9.5 months old and the whole first year is always overwhelming and hard. I’m not sleeping enough and my shoulders are wrecked from night nursing again. But it’s better than it used to be.

And I’m not going to chiro or acupuncture or much massage. Why? Money. Time. Energy. It is hard to do all the work to support my body feeling better. That’s a fucking job and I just don’t have time.

I have been….. partly through idiocy (choice) and partially through absent-mindedness not medicating on a regular schedule. I’m taking pills occasionally but not consistently. I might have to learn how to function without meds when we move. This is hard. I use this drug for a fucking reason.

The PT exercises other than the vaginal stimulation aren’t that hard but they do take time. At least 30 minutes. And now I’m supposed to add 20 minutes/day of vaginal pressure. And I should be out walking a lot. So at this point I should be spending a minimum of two hours/day on exercise. Oh that’s easy to do.

I’m trying as hard as I can to cook more. Noah needs less work on his plate. I keep thinking I’m almost done with packing and things will get easier. Hasn’t quite happened yet. I am praying that when we move and I don’t have as many house and outside chores this will be easier.

Is that it?

I feel a lot of pull to write more. Both fiction (oddly, because that’s not my normal thing…. but I have a couple of stories kicking around in my head and I want to see where they go) and non-fiction. I want to fix the second damn book. Ugh. Frustrating.

I’m still trying to establish a routine with hygiene stuff. Whyyyyyyyyyyyy is this so hard? Because I’m autistic and I have ADHD and PTSD and it’s very well documented that folks with any singular one of these diagnoses struggle with hygiene. IT’S NOT JUST ME.

And then there are all the relationships I feel like I should be doing a bunch of work to maintain. This is feeling so hard.

I’m overwhelmed and trying not to over react. I think that mostly for the past few days I’ve done ok. Today is hard. My kids don’t understand why I want to cry.

Noah would really like sex. He’s being super polite about it. He hasn’t pressured me or bugged me in any way. And we haven’t had sex. I have so many feelings about this.

I don’t know how to center myself right this minute.

Also: administrative note: I am going to try to post more from my phone because the talk to text works best there. It hates the adult-only tag and that makes my blog entries kind of annoying to track. I’m trying to figure it out.

I had dinner with a buddy’s family last night. The couple/grown ups are former students and I adore them. We haven’t gotten together in almost a year because of how overwhelming life has been. It was great seeing them.

They are getting ready to move out of state too. They are just done. I asked her if she feels a little bit mad at her friends and she was taken aback. For her, her friendships are what are carrying her through. I told her that I’m struggling with feeling a little bit mad at my friends. Not because they’ve done anything wrong, not because they deserve it. Because life is so hard and everyone I love has such a small amount to give. That’s feeling so hard. It feels like I don’t deserve to be around my friends because I am not solely overwhelmed with gratitude that people bother to see me at all. That’s a rough combination of feelings. I can tell I am to some degree avoiding people because it’s not ok for me to express my frustration.

I’m scared I will open my big stupid mouth and say something that reveals the frustration I feel.

I mean, I am losing one important relationship this year because I got angry about how I was being treated. That’s a lesson.

People don’t want my authentic self. I’m loud, aggressive, demanding, bitchy, and absolutely unwilling to compromise. Instead people want the high effort front I put on of being kind and gentle. Bah.

I feel like my end result of leaving the bay is knowing that no matter how hard I try I am not capable of fitting in to a group even if some of the people love me. I will always be the problem. I’m having really big feelings about always being the problem.

I feel pathetic that I still worry so fucking much about other people liking me or not. Grow the fuck up, already.

But this is part of the cycle. Me showing anger means I do not deserve friendship. I am not going to be capable of never showing anger. That means I deserve nothing, forever.

This is why Noah is so consciously tolerant of my anger. If I’m not allowed to be angry I’m not allowed to set boundaries and then I’ll just explode in other ways and that’s all bad. But it’s not great that he lets me get angry at him. I suspect “Must Be Respectful” as a rule slightly helps. It definitely restrains me from calling him an asshole more often.

Blah. Blurg.

I didn’t hear Beautiful at the door so we missed a visit. That sucks. I feel so embarrassed.

The remodel is supposed to start tomorrow and I haven’t finished the house. We have plans today so that’s going to be festive. Given that they need to fix our bedroom walls before the other stuff I think it’ll be fine if I’m still moving out of the house on Monday.

We have found three classes on Outschool for Eldest Child that will involve her meeting other children remotely and doing lessons together. It’s not a perfect solution but it might be a step in the right direction.

The kids and I are going to struggle with the speed of academics over the next few weeks. Not because it is too much, but because figuring out the flow and speed and order of operations is rough. It might be too much too. But the kids can get it all done in 2-3 hours when they feel motivated. The fact that when they aren’t motivated it takes all day…. yeah. Tricky.

My kids would love to spend all day playing. They have great imaginations and they never get bored. I am boring though. I’ll take your good time and interrupt it with math. And spelling. Neiner. It’s still more fun than going to school would be. Maybe. Maybe it isn’t and they should be in school. I’m open to this idea. Let’s see where we land.

I’m doing the PT exercises and I feel like they are kicking my butt. And we restarted walking after a break for the terrible air quality and my legs forking hurt. My whole body is pissed right now, from the core out. I’d say that I’m at a 4. It is interrupting and rude but I can function. It’s just distracting in every minute.

I am craving sugary bread like an addiction. It’s not cool.

I’m processing my feelings about my friends still. Trying to compartmentalize. I’ve been getting the same advice over and over and when that starts happening I like to pay attention. Paraphrased from the half a dozen people who have expressed this sentiment in the past few weeks: “You are good at taking responsibility for the problems in your relationships with people. That’s bad. Stop it. Ok, maybe sometimes you bear part of the responsibility, but you never bear all the responsibility and you act like you do.” Yeah that’s true. I act like the problems are all my fault. If only I had tap danced faster. If only I had managed to suck up my disappointment and never expressed anger. If only I had a shorter memory and I didn’t notice promises that were never intended to be kept….

I can tie that back to my step father screaming at me that if I didn’t make something happen it was because I didn’t want it bad enough. My failure to influence other people into behaving how I want them to behave is my fault.

Always my fault.

So if everything is all my fault because I am such a terrible angry person I will just walk away with my terribleness.

For all of my flaws, and there are many, I do not tend to inflict my presence where it is not wanted.

It’s been a lot easier to sigh and relax into Noah lately. Noah may run down like a watch that needs to be wound but he doesn’t make 15 other promises that cut into his ability to keep the first promise he made. He just… really wishes he got to have sex more. It’s complicated. It’s complicated in so many ways, many of which are feeling shockingly healthy. I am not forcing myself to have sex. I’m nervous about the vaginal dilators on my counter. The physical therapist spent a while fingering me. Not an experience I felt super thrilled about but it was ok. Her experience was that the longer she had anything inside of me the more tense and tight and rigid my cunt became. (Clearly she used clinical language.) I don’t relax how I am supposed to. This makes me want to go find the first Users Guide I wrote. I documented pain and tearing from sex as unavoidable all the way back then. I think it was 15 years ago.

That’s just what sex is like for me. Pain and tearing and bleeding. Super fun, yo.

But maybe it doesn’t have to be like that. Maybe there is another way. It’s going to be hard though.I feel sad and overwhelmed. I feel broken and unfixable. I feel like I will let Noah down because it is never going to get easier.

All I can do is try.

I’m starving. I feel like I’ve been starving for days. Freakin cold.

There’s a whole bunch of stuff I feel like I’m bursting to write about because I’m trying to get my head around it but I’m afraid of hurting people. So I’m hurting myself. Like I do. Balance is not easy.

How do you handle it when you aren’t good for someone? I’m not good for Sarah. This is true in a myriad of ways in a myriad of areas. There is no shortage of love in our relationship…. but there’s a lot of hurt. We turn to one another (in my judgey as fuck opinion) to be the mother that the other lacks. Sarah genuinely needs me to not get angry and not show disappointment. She needs me to be unfailingly accepting and loving. I can’t do that. I need her to be dependable in a way that she’s not physically capable of being and she can not emotionally handle admitting that she can’t do.

We bash ourselves against one another.

I have harmed my children because I believed promises that weren’t really made in good faith. I knew the promises weren’t made in good faith (this is not my first rodeo) but I wanted to believe so much that I made plans around the promises. Then I hurt myself trying to keep up my end of the deal and that’s a problem.

Why do I keep trying to believe these promises? Oh it’s complicated. Partially for the love. Partially for the same reason she believes I will be able to hold my temper enough to be safe for her–we want it to be true.

And in my mercenary as fuck way I can admit… she was the only person who made noise about actively pursuing a relationship with my kids independently. She didn’t always/usually follow up on the noise she made… but she made the noise. Which is more than others do. My friends mostly acknowledge my children in a limited way as an extension of me. Sarah loved them for themselves.

I don’t feel real good about what I have to offer my children in this life in terms of support or community. I just have to be better/more to compensate. That’s hard.

But just like I can never ever believe “I will take you to Magic Mountain” again I can no longer listen to “Let’s make a standing date” because I will hurt myself if I believe that. It won’t come true. I have to face the reality and not what I wish would happen. No matter how much I wish it would happen.

Love is not enough.

Which doesn’t mean that anyone is being bad or failing. But it can show a lack of compatibility. Compatibility is real and hard.

And now my daughter wants to sit next to me to show me how snowflakes are made.

Side note: I’m super thrilled that academics feel like they are finally coming together. The kids are doing more math than they feel thrilled about, but it’s a manageable level to get the kids 100% up to grade level by the end of this school year. EC is going to have a very easy next year in comparison. She’s excited. But we now have enough time and mental bandwidth to add in grammar work and more history and spelling again and more religion… the kids are writing several days a week and I like the stuff they are producing.

EC has to produce fan fic every other week and religion writing every week and she’s working on a larger essay about Malaysia. MC is just on the religion writing and a story about Malaysia. Frankly he’s still working on practicing putting words on paper so they are legible. It’s a process.

They have some grammar workbooks they are plugging along with. Science is creeping back in (Thank you air quality index for returning to just the yellow zone today) and there feels like lots of room in our week for doing other things again. Chores are happening more seamlessly again. We are getting back towards a routine. We aren’t exercising enough (not our fault!) but we will get back to it.

Always more to work on.

In looking around at various places to stay and spots we want to try out… my kids were very open to trying the Shetlands. Truly remote is interesting to them. We can try it.

I am looking forward to next year.

Inverness is not that cheap for rented digs. The Shetland Islands have some very cheap places to stay. But Scotland is only a permanent option if they pull out of the UK. We’ll see.

We’ll see about a lot of things.

We are concerned about access to pot, as we should be. But the kids said that they would be interested in a tiny little local school. I don’t know what we need.

Let’s go find out.

I read the first chapter of the Buddhist book. I caught up on Mint. I loaded the table in the front yard.

Tidying the house is never ending.

I’m looking into the travel for the next year. Woof. The kids only want to be in Japan for three weeks in between Washington DC and Noah needing to go to Minneapolis. I am wondering if when he goes back to Minnesota if the kids and I will just go straight to the UK. I’m looking into it.

So many factors. How expensive is rent in a given area. How much does it cost to get to that place. How long can I handle not being medicated? How many hops should I do alone with the kids while Noah is off doing work hops?

Lots to consider.

Today I am going to move more stuff out to the driveway. And I will police my children’s behavior. And we will drive to Mountain View, of course. Like we do.

I am having mixed feelings about all the stuff going. It’s both freeing and terrifying. I find it funny how many people want to know why I’m not obsessively trying to get every dollar back that I can. That would take so much time and energy and I will get so little back.

The kids are caught up on academics! We can plan an advent season! I’m thrilled! We debated if we wanted to have anything on the calendar that centers around friends. We elected not to. If we see friends, great. If we don’t–that needs to not be something that makes us sad. I expect to not see people much before we go.

I am struggling with wanting to make noise about breaking ties and wanting things to just blow over quietly. I’m feeling sad but not in ways that I feel justified for. I feel like this breakup is largely my fault so I don’t get to be sad. But every breakup is sad. I notice the gap when I want to talk to someone effusively about Christmas presents. There isn’t anyone else for that. So I kind of sort of talk to myself and move on with my day.

There is going to be a big hole in my heart.

It has to be ok because it is going to happen no matter what.

I am glad I have Noah.

I should get moving. I’m so tired.

The kids are caught up. We have a weekend free of academics. It feels like magic.

Today I have done a whole bunch of Christmas shopping because a bunch of websites are having sales. I think I might be done with Noah. I think I might be done with Eldest Child. I have most of what I want for Middle Child but I feel like he needs one more thing; I just have no idea what. Her Sweetness has a few things and I’m not too worried about her getting more. If she does, cool. If she doesn’t… oh well.

I have now ordered vaginal dilators for my PT. I have also done my exercises for the day. I will figure out how to have a stronger body. Damnit. I’m still shocked by how intensely painful these slight exercises are. The awful spot in my lower right back is throbbing. That’s where I get the awful spasms and I have for decades. She (the PT) said that it is almost certainly the end result of my body compensating for not using the proper movements/muscles. That seems quite probable.

I have feelings about ordering from vaginismus.com though.

Noah is home! I have taken a few hours off because it seems super wise right now.

Ok. Time to go see my family again.

Because otherwise I’m going to start listing Christmas presents and that’s not wise.

I read a great article on suicide today (here) and it made me think about how I use this blog. I don’t get a lot of comments. They come in weird spurts then my friends stop responding again. So I’m not throwing these words into the void because I get a direct response.

I’m trying to talk myself into hope. No one else can talk me into hope. Into feeling like there is a point in my life… goodness knows some well paid professionals have spent decades trying. Instead here I am, trying to make my own hope.

My emotions aren’t someone else’s fault. They can’t be. My emotions aren’t things that other people can control. Other people can have influence…. but that’s the limit. For the past year I have been bouncing off my friend and getting more and more distraught… then it hit a fevered pitch and it’s all my fault and now I need to pick up the pieces and keep going.

I did this to myself. I look to my friends to provide a form of stability that is very hard for anyone to maintain for themselves… let alone for a tie that is so distant as friendship. That’s not fair. I mean, there is no fair in this life…. but it wasn’t fair of me to need so much from her. But I will never stop needing that form of consistency so I need to back away from the relationship entirely because consistency is the thing she is least capable of in this life. Keeping promises just isn’t an option.

So what do I do now? Do I get harder and more bitter because I feel let down? Do I turn my grief to other people and hope that other people can be what she could not be?

No.

There will never ever be anyone who touches my heart the way she does. She is special and wonderful and I will love her until I die.

I love my mother, too.

Sometimes, love is not enough.

But I am grown now. I keep saying “When I grow up” and I have to admit to myself…. I am grown up. This is it. I am as grown as I am going to get. I will deepen and mature. I will spread and become more…. but I’m grown.

I am grown up and now I do not need to have other people reflect constantly to me that I should be alive. I know it for myself. I can point at reasons big and small. I know my purpose. I have a few different roles. It’s not that I am just a tool that can be used and discarded. I am special and useful and necessary in a way that is not easy to replace. The things I know, the collection of experiences I have had… cannot be duplicated. My usefulness is not like other peoples. Not because I am better! Because there are a million different niches of need and it’s hard for anyone to be replaced in their usefulness.

Incest. Suicide. These are things I am good at talking about when other people can’t. I have a strong interest and a lot of tools in my tool belt for coping when others can’t. I like troubled children. They don’t bother me with their outbursts.

But even aside from these things, it would be ok if I were just a wife and mother with friends. That would be ok. I don’t owe the world more than that. Not really.

I will have other friendships. I have other friendships. I give in varying amounts. I receive in varying amounts and that’s ok. It becomes a problem when the relationship promises far more than it can deliver on. This is why I am so adamant about not wanting people to promise me anything. I understand that most people won’t deliver. Then I will get upset. Then it will be my own fault that I am upset. And things don’t improve from there.

I feel absolutely overwhelmed with gratitude that I get to have the relationships I’m having with my kids. Are there hard parts? Yes. Oh goodness…. yes. But hard is ok.

How I let people treat me teaches my children how the world should work. When I am deciding what is good enough for me… I am modeling relationships.

That stops me in my tracks.