Category Archives: parenting

Procrastination and longing

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.

I tell my kids….

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I tell my kids that if you say something intending it to be a joke and nobody laughs… it probably wasn’t a joke and instead you said an asshole thing. We all do it sometimes.

I tell my kids that if you assign people roles like “bully” or “victim” then you probably aren’t looking at the whole picture: people are more complex than that.

I tell my kids that if you blame other people for your problems then you are deciding you don’t want to fix things.

I tell my kids that if you eat shitty food you will be in a shitty mood.

I tell my kids that if you yuck someone else’s yum they may end up not liking you and they won’t want to spend time with you. You don’t have to like everything that someone else likes, you do have to not be an asshole about it.

I’m to about 8% of my NaNoWriMo goal the day before the event starts. I’m not good at waiting. And my personal goal is more like 100,000 words, not 50,000. This book is not going to be small. These are the lessons and the stories I want my kids to hear from me if I die. That’s a lot of words.

Priorities and exhaustion

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Yesterday I asked the kids to do the vast majority of the cleaning up in the house. After every meal you wash the dishes and clear the counters and get stuff ready so that making the next meal is easy. That leaves me room to use my spoons for other things.

So we went on an epic hike. It was really glorious. By the time we got home we had done about six miles, but a ton of it was on hills and I wore Youngest Child for probably 3+ of those miles. Then I got home and made everyone dinner and did a full kitchen tidy. Then food got delivered and I put it all away. Today I feel wasted. My back hurts so much. I can’t find the ibuprofen. Whine. I guess I’m not going on the bike ride the kids asked for today.

I am sitting at the table bleary and weary and just about numb.

Last night I had a chat with a bunch of teachers about schools and affluence and mental health. I love it when I get to stumble upon such conversations. Most folks are teaching/used to teach in the US but there were folks from other places too. The general consensus was children who are pushed to put 100% of their focus on school and grades and Being The Best at academics often turn out to be pretty unhappy and miserable and mostly not great at functioning at life. It was interesting listening to other peoples stories. My point of view was mostly affirmed and shared even from people with wildly different backgrounds.

The folks in the conversation who have witnessed affluence and poverty up close (professionally and/or personally) all have our kids do a lot of non-school work. Chores/volunteering/getting to know people outside your bubble of school are all massively important. Encourage your kids to try to do stuff and then fail and then talk about what they could do differently and then don’t fix it for them.

Eldest Child’s room was neat. Then she babysat and brought the baby in there. Now it looks like a bomb went off again. Ok.

My kids have said a couple of times over the past few days that they can appreciate how much effort I put into helping them have a nice house to live in now in a way they couldn’t in the past. The combination of a bigger space, plus the constant awful tidying of borrowed apartments, plus them going to school and not doing the chores during the week because they are exhausted, plus being on holiday this week and doing a lot of extra stuff just because they can…

Perspective is awesome.

Now I sit around backing up all my schtuff onto a local massive hard drive because that way I can stop paying for iCloud. I want to stop paying for as much as humanly possible over the next two months.

I’m feeling like a super nerd as I search how to get shit out of DRM locked files. I paid for it! I want to store it where you can’t steal it back! Clearly these companies disagree…

Downloading everything from the cloud so I can upload it to the new hard drive is going to take a lot of time and hand spoons. *sigh*

Christmas, mom, and grief

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We have been talking about whether or not we want to keep celebrating Christmas or whether we want to switch to celebrating Winter Solstice more. The kids and Noah are more pagan than I am. I stopped feeling… safe/comfortable/drawn to paganism in the same way when I was kicked out of the family property when I was 16 for doing rituals. That damaged me in a core way.

I don’t really feel like I want to be part of the Christian aspects of Christmas and it’s uhhh pretty hard to ignore. But it’s interesting how deeply ingrained a lot of it is for me culturally. I will miss holiday songs. I’ll miss the movies. I will miss some of the aspects of decorating.

I really don’t know what we will do. I have far fewer aspects of Christianity in my Christmas at this point anyway because that boyfriend I had from 18-23 told me so often that anyone who believed in G-d was braindead that I got rid of most any overtly religious symbols. That’s a lot of why my house had Christmas By Disney. That was what he wasn’t mean to me about.

But as I think about ditching a lot of the Christmas traditions I realize how much of it is about ties to my mother. So many of our traditions from what we eat to the kinds and types of presents to specifically what movies we watch… I got them from my mother. I keep feeling waves of grief.

I keep feeling like right before I take out my US sim card I want to send a goodbye to everyone in my Do Not Answer call list. But I won’t. You don’t text people who are dead to you.

But it hurts. I miss my family. I miss the things about them that feel like “normal” and “comfortable” that other people just don’t feel like. I know how much abuse is wrapped up in that normal though and I can never expose my kids to it. So I won’t contact anyone. I’ll just keep crying. 35 years and counting of crying for that woman.

Youngest Child is doing really well with sleeping in a separate toddler bed at the foot of my bed. When she goes to sleep she murmurs “Mamamamamamama” and wants me to keep a hand on her face until she is asleep. (She alternates this with Daddy and he has to be touching her too. That is the most heart warming part.) Her wanting me like that connects in this primal way to how much I want my mother.

Every so often it will come up in conversation with the big kids just how much they were wanted and longed for and they are appreciated and liked now that they are here. It’s amazing watching them straighten their spines and they puff out their chests and their faces just… glow. They feel such an assurance about their right to exist. That’s what I wanted to stand near. That’s why I have parented how I have.

I feel bad when I can see a shadow cross their face and they reach out a hand and say, “Mom I am sorry you weren’t wanted so much.”

I wish that wasn’t part of it.

A kid in one of their classes (who is often a behavior problem) announced loudly during class “My mom says I was a failed abortion.” My kid came home that day really sad. “I understand why he acts out now. That’s something that hurts a kid so much. I still won’t let him hit me, but I will try to be more patient with him when he’s just being annoying.”

I am always impressed by how compassionate my children are. They are, of course, feral, self absorbed narcissists as well (which is appropriate and necessary developmentally!) but they notice other people and they care. They are capable of great consideration and understanding. They are sensitive to how other people feel. I have always found it interesting that when most people say someone is sensitive they mean that the person is highly controlling about what people do to them. I think sensitivity is more about the ability to notice things about other people. My children pay attention to what other people feel and they care.

I admire them so very much.

I also admire that they have great tact around this subject. They talk to me about what they see in other people, but they are already pretty wise about not just announcing what they see. It’s really cool.

I want to be like them. I will keep growing in that direction.

The feedback is rolling in

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One of the benefits of homeschooling ending is that my children are starting to gain some perspective. My kids are starting to feel like they can evaluate the process and they are telling me how they feel about it in retrospect. I’m sure at some point they will start listing complaints (human nature) but so far they are glowingly positive.

“Mom, I really underestimated how good of a teacher you are.” “I thought you were being mean and picking on me and now that I have a different teacher I see that you were actually sooooo patient.” “I used to think I was just average but you told me I was really good at (subject) and now I see that you were right.” “Mom, you wouldn’t believe how little these kids know about nutrition. They don’t eat vegetables. They think fruit is disgusting. They don’t even know what a carbohydrate is. When the teacher says that you need a little bit of sugar in your diet they assume she means a candy bar. They won’t consider fruit. I really wonder about the state of their bowels.”

I told them to keep their mouths shut about their shock when they know something that other people don’t know. Folks are taught things in different orders and with different intensities all over the place and if you act like there is something wrong with someone for not knowing something that you know then they will be assholes when you run into something you don’t know that is easy for them. Both of them said a variation on (separately because we tend to have these conversations one on one instead of in a group): “Oh I’m being careful with my facial expressions and I’m trying to not say a word about them not understanding this. But mom. NO VEGETABLES?!?!” “A kid was telling me to throw my veggie sticks in the garbage and I said that would be pretty silly because my body needs the fiber. THE KID ASKED ME WHAT FIBER IS, MOM. I COULD NOT BELIEVE IT.”

And we are having great conversations at home about chores, earning money, debt, and interest payments. We are learning about why it is smart to save up for things you want in advance instead of owing money because then you end up having to pay so much more. They feel the pain because I have been letting them feel the pain for a little while. EC said that as much as this process isn’t a load of laughs she is glad she is learning this now instead of when it could impact her ability to pay for electricity or buy food or pay rent. I told her that’s why we are hammering this so hard now. In Scotland you are allowed (not encouraged) to move out at 16. That’s 4.5 years away. That’s not really a lot of time and any day now she is going to decide I am stupid and I don’t know anything so I have to hurry up and get these lessons in before puberty kicks into high gear.

She says she really doubt she will ever think I am stupid. I said, “You used to doubt you would want friends more than you want to spend every minute of your day with me and here we are.” She said, “Hm. That is true. You do have a habit of predicting my behavior really well. Maybe I will start thinking you are stupid after all.” Then she stuck her tongue out at me. Then I talked about why it is developmentally necessary and she gave me her “Hunh I hadn’t thought about it like that” face. I love that face.

MC is feeling super smug because she was gifted with a bed and that made her “setting up her room” budget go much farther so she’s feeling like a whiz at money. I’m trying to caution her against hubris and instead put extra money in savings so that you don’t blow it on candy and toys. In the long run you won’t be happier about those purchases and right now you literally can’t see your floor because of the huge pile of mess. If you add a bunch of new toys you are going to wreck them right quick from stepping on them and then you will be annoyed about your wasted money. She’s considering my point but she sure isn’t picking up the floor and putting anything in her drawers.

She’s going to ride that gravy train of I-am-not-allowed-to-tell-them-to-tidy-their-rooms-for-a-year until it breaks down.

The constant travel meant we had to maintain a level of tidiness that was extreme even for me. When you go through an airport if your bag is a giant mess, you drop things and lose things. If you try to pull a toy out to play with it on the plane and 19 little things fall out, you won’t find them all to put them away. Everything had to be sorted into their proper smaller containment devices so you can keep your things. The kids really chafed at the extra work. They asked if they could have a year of grace to celebrate having their own space. I said fine. Their birthday present for me next year is cleaning their rooms. They said that sounds fair. Ha.

Which makes it funny that Hurricane EC has a room that is tidier than any space she has ever been in for her entire life. She picked out a whole bunch of organizing furniture from the charity shop and her stuff is tidied to within an inch of its life. She says she prefers it this way. I had to stop myself from putting a hand on her forehead and asking if she feels ok. She says that she finally agrees that I am right and it is much easier to find her things this way.

I keep my laughter for behind closed doors.

MCs hand writing has come along super nicely in the past two weeks of actual school. Apparently the teacher erases what she writes and won’t let her turn in stuff that isn’t legible. I said “I HAVE BEEN SAYING THAT FOR SOME TIME.” She says, “Yeah… it’s a lot more embarrassing to have to rewrite stuff in front of my classmates and my teacher tells me that I will miss break to recopy if I don’t hurry up. That’s a lot more motivation than just sitting at our kitchen table all day.”

MC is also receiving a lot of the same lectures on attitude and behavior at school that she has received at home and she is having an interesting time adjusting to that. She keeps feeling like the teacher dislikes her. I ask her if she thinks I dislike her. She says “Oh no, you are my biggest fan.” I tell her to replay in her brain how many times I have given the same damn lecture. Then she says, “Do you think it is possible that the teacher gets upset with me because she wants me to be my best self?” Yeah kiddo, I do.

Every time a teacher says anything rebuking to either child in the smallest way they are convinced the teacher is going to call me so they can get in trouble at home too. I keep telling them that the teacher is very unlikely to do so unless an issue escalates to the point of causing harm to someone and that’s really not what is happening here. The teacher is trying to guide you towards appropriate behavior and that’s not about dislike.

They are learning and that’s good. They are learning that I am not the only one who will judge them and give them feedback. Holy cheese toast they need that lesson.

I feel like overall I got what I wanted from homeschooling. There were times when it was incredibly stressful. There were times when it was overwhelmingly hard. But I wanted my kids to know a certain set of things. I wanted to know that if they didn’t know these things it was my fault. I didn’t want to blame a school for not teaching them things about their bodies and brains and how to function. I wanted to have the time and space to teach them the things I think a person should know.

By and large we have a family culture that has inculcated them in the knowledge I feel is most important.

I don’t think I can or should homeschool my third child to provide the same education. I am going to have to fit my lessons in around the school schedule which will be in many ways much harder. But I am toasty fried and I want my child to make friends and fit into the social order here.

I do not miss the homeschooling community in California. I am happy to be out of it. There is so much dysfunction, so much neglect masquerading as “educational freedom”, so much petty infighting over social rank.

I think there will be bullshit here and I just don’t smell it yet. People are people.

But there is a special flavor of hypocrisy in mostly upper class Californians. I can’t be part of it any more. And that’s ok. I don’t have to be.

I swear I am trying.

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But sleep deprivation is a bitch to catch up on. I went back through my activity tracker (I know it is not perfectly accurate for stuff like sleep) but between travel and anxiety and overworking I am down about 8 full nights of sleep over the past month. This is why I am currently struggling with paranoia, negative thoughts about myself, irritability, and frustration. I also hurt really badly.

But I am trying to reverse the flow. The past three nights I’ve gotten nine hours of sleep. Yesterday while walking home from the community center I just about fell down from exhaustion and dizziness. Trying to catch up is showing me just how deep the reservoir of sleep deprivation goes. I need to try to spend all of this school holiday sleeping as much as I possibly can; my health requires it.

A full night of sleep for me is ~7.5 hours. I’m down over 64 hours of sleep over the past month. That’s a lot.

This move is the hardest of my life and I have moved waaaaaay more than average. Folks in the military are usually dumbfounded by how much I have moved because they feel a lack of stability in their lives and I’ve moved many multiples of times more than them. Not so much recently, but over the long run. This is my first international move and I can’t understand people who do this repeatedly. This is so hard.

We moved into a house that was more than twice the size of our old house with no furniture coming with us. We have had to acquire everything from scratch and mostly build it because we can’t really afford to buy nice stuff, we are buying flat pack. Which means I have spent multiple full days just on building furniture. Noah has helped with this way more than he usually does with building furniture and for this I am deeply grateful. Noah has spent at least six, maybe up to eight solid days building furniture if you add up all the hours. I’ve done at least as much maybe more. It’s all getting fuzzy.

We finally have consistent, good wifi thanks to Noah’s continual efforts at handling the bureaucratic mess. It is still a mess with regards to electricity. All of the advice “Just do A, B, C” has failed entirely. I think Noah is handling the stress of people lying and being deceitful far better than I could. (The main electricity company keeps saying they have done what they need to do for us to move on with the process. When the other company we want to work with checks… nope hasn’t happened. It takes eight weeks before we are allowed to complain. We seriously suspect the first company is going to drag their feet for seven weeks and five days.) Noah has been on the phone and filling out paperwork just about daily trying to handle the electricity/internet/bank/credit card situation. Now that we have internet and we found out we literally can’t get a credit card until we’ve been here six months and we have a (JOINT) checking account and three savings accounts (grown ups + kids who are redepositing their stuff from the states) we can chill on figuring out financial stuff for a few months.

Oh, also we had an appointment with a couple of truly lovely accountants and that’s going to be a whole messy process that will take many hours of labor over many weeks. The UK tax year doesn’t run their cycle from January-December, they run April-March so we will be trying to sort out tax stuff for like six months straight. Hopefully after the first year it will get a little more clear? At least our California accountant used to work at the IRS handling international taxes?

Trying to acquire stuff for the house has been endless frustration. Between not having a car, not having reliable internet, and our US credit cards getting constantly denied for fraud… everything is taking two, three, four, five times as long to get done and the hand strain is absolutely unbelievable.

And I keep hearing my fucking mother’s voice in my head saying that you don’t go out and socialize until your house is company ready. Thus long working days and not sleeping.

Last night I made a list on the whiteboard of the chores the kids hadn’t gotten to this week. I told them they need to finish by bed time. They got it done. I supervised and didn’t help. I’m trying to reduce my arm strain.

They did a great job and they are currently playing with Her Sweetness so Noah and I can each have some quiet down time in our separate rooms.

We have a house phone number and an actual physical phone will be delivered in a few days. I have a sim card in the house for a UK phone number for my mobile and I will be setting it up once I can put the UK house phone number down on forms. I will be going through and replacing my US phone number on all of my accounts. I will be shutting down my US phone number in December after 19 years of service.

I am having so many feelings about that.

The plan with the accountants is to start moving our money out of the US. I don’t feel super ethical investing in a country that moved its slavery from the cotton fields to the prison industrial complex and is currently running concentration camps. Where freedom means the freedom to get shot at school. Where freedom means that thousands of people can be homeless so the uberwealthy can hoard a little more. Where freedom means ruining your entire future if you get sick. Where freedom means eternal debt if you want an education.

I know getting out isn’t an option for everyone. I know it is cowardly to run instead of fighting to change the system. I know.

My children are already walking to school and home from school alone sometimes. It’s so safe here. I spoke to a mom who is terrified of her kids being alone and that’s why she pays for them to have cell phones from really young so they have to text her all the time to prove where they are and she tracks them on her phone.

We will have a house phone. I’m giving up full service internet on my phone and downgrading to a pay as you go plan that I don’t want to use much. I will be deleting most apps so I’m not tempted to be idle on my phone out in the world.

My kids will be fine here. I am not worried about their safety. We have an agreement: you ask before you take off and you are given a time to be home. You have a watch (without the ability to receive phone calls on) and if you are late, for every minute you are late you owe me a push up.

That’s as much enforcement as I want. That’s as much control as I want. They are big kids. They are responsible. I trust them. The neighbors aren’t going to call the police if they are out walking to the park. I have anxiety about stuff. I am overly controlling in some ways, but I’m trying hard to back off. They will be ok. And frankly the push ups won’t hurt them.

EC forgot her school computer at home one day this week. Noah asked if we should bring it to her at school. Nope. She can accept the consequences for her behavior like a big girl.

It will be good for her.

I went to a couple of activities with Her Sweetness this week aimed at her peer group; these are the kids she will know in school. These are the kids in our neighborhood. It’s good to start getting to know them. She will make friends over time and I will get to know the mothers.

This move is the hardest of my life. Let me write down just how painful this is so that hopefully I remember and never want to do this again. Some day as an empty nester I might want to move to the downstairs apartment with Noah and rent out the big house, but that’s different.

Solstice is going to be interesting. EC has a bunch of needs still. MC has a bunch of wants. YC (I should shift to this at some point soon here because goodness Youngest Child is more fair than just always referring to her as the sweet one–not to mention that she is sassier by the day) has few needs and can’t speak any wants. I am going to start wrapping presents soon just because we don’t have many good stash spots in the house where unwrapped presents won’t be seen.

Oh, and to put the cherry on top of the moving process, we are all learning how to ride bikes as our mode of transportation. This has resulted in at least one, often three or more major crashes per person. We are all sore and wincing and moving slowly. My knee still hasn’t healed from my crash and every time I get up or down to help YC with something I hiss because it forking hurts.

At least MCs lip has healed and they no longer look like an abused child.

It’s a process…

Hardest fucking move of my life. But the house is basically company ready. I want another couch for the down stairs apartment before guests come. I want a real kitchen table for the main dining room with actual chairs we don’t fall off of on a regular basis. EC still needs a bed frame. Then we are done acquiring stuff.

Mostly because I found a tutorial on Pinterest for making bookshelves out of uniform moving boxes and that’s what I’m doing with the books that arrive. I’m not buying bookshelves any time soon. I want artistic fancy-pants book shelves and I don’t want to pay for them now. So I won’t really get all of the boxes out of the house by the end of November, but the stuff in boxes will be out and in use and the boxes will be semi-permanent (until they give out) furniture.

I am struggling with the fact that I need to give myself approval for how hard this move has been because I won’t get it from anyone else. No one but Noah can see what I’m doing and I’m an asshole about not accepting his approval as much as I should. He will give me approval whether it takes me a month or five years. He isn’t judging me based on what I care about. His priorities are different. (He wishes I would slow the fuck down and rest more.)

I have a ridiculous drive to get this done. This is important to me. I need to see this progress so I can sit in the mostly finished house and dream about the art I want to add. I can’t start painting until after my next birthday, but I can make sketches. I can figure out what kind of mosaic backsplash I’d like to make for the kitchen wall where we keep splattering the shit out of it with food. (Did the previous owners cook?! How in the fuck did they keep the wall so white?!) What would I like to do in the upstairs bathtub bathroom?

Art will come, but not until all of the other pieces are in place and I can dream around them.

We still have a few entirely empty cupboards in the laundry room and main kitchen and the downstairs kitchen is basically empty. But we have the stuff we need finally. Those bits will fill in over time as we figure out what other things we want or need.

Realistically it is going to take me many years to finish this house. But I feel moved in now. The art will come. The guest kitchen will come. It’s ok that it isn’t all instant.

I needed to feel settled. Those bits are extra. And I have my name on a bank account so that I can build my own credit. That’s a big deal. Being dependent is hard enough without also being vulnerable.

And proper locks are on the way for every door in the house.

Today is the day.

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In just over four hours my kids will be walking onto a school campus as enrolled students. They will be P5 and P7. Here P7 is the final year of primary school before being sent off to secondary school. There is no middle school here.

I am already enjoying some of the differences in Scottish schooling. We were having trouble finding some of the supplies I consider “mandatory” for school in stores. Jenny told me that schools don’t ask families to buy them after we went to three stores looking. The schools provide what kids need.

You could have knocked me over with a feather. Wut? Schools provide pencils and paper and notebooks? I… You are using words but I am not understanding you.

Schools here do not give parents any contact information for teachers. If you want an appointment you call the office and the office negotiates with the teacher and they get back to you to let you know when you can come in. As someone who used to get calls and emails from the parents of 150 students that sounds amazing! Good for Scottish teachers!

The kids are going to start with half days as they acclimate to school and the teachers slowly learn where they are academically. The school is literally incapable of giving them placement tests to just see where they are because such things don’t exist here. There are occasional national tests but the school doesn’t have access to them and my kids are in the wrong grades anyway. So… there just aren’t big evaluations for their current levels.

I’m telling you, I’m excited.

Middle Child was crying at bed time. They were trying to be quiet about it, but they are super nervous. I pulled them over close to me and I talked to them until they fell asleep. On a fairly repetitive loop I told them that when they don’t feel they have enough faith in themself they can borrow some of my faith in them. I told them that they are strong, brave, hard working, competent, smart, funny, creative, thoughtful, kind (which is not the same thing as nice!), friendly, fun, interesting, adaptable, sweet, loving, patient, and really good at learning new skills. I interspersed this list of adjectives with saying, “And you know I am judgemental and critical. I don’t give praise unless I believe it to be absolutely accurate.” The first time MC giggled when I said that. After that they just relaxed. I would pause sometimes and say “When your belly starts to hurt because you are anxious, remember to smell the flower (pause for big inhale through the nose) and blow out the candle (slow big exhalation through the mouth). You can’t control other people. You can’t control the world. You can control your breath. If you control your breath you will be able to control your body even if your feelings are being rough. I have faith in you. When you don’t have faith in yourself, listen to these tapes in your brain and borrow my faith in you. I know you are….. (long list of adjectives).”

Eldest Child was already asleep or I would have talked to both of them.

And Her Sweetness only had one middle of the night wake up. That’s almost like a full night of undisturbed sleep…. She is feeling much better. I am in a lot of pain.

The kids will start waking up in about 45 minutes, maybe more like 60. I am going to hurry through my shower in the meantime so I can spend my morning on “cheerful cheerleader” mode. You can do it! You are going to succeed at this new life stage the way you have done well on so many others! I know you can!

I am their inside voice. That’s what mothers become for their children. I have not been doing a great job of being relentlessly upbeat for a while here because I am worn down and exhausted. This morning is a (very short) sprint, not a marathon. I can do this for them. Then I can take a few hours to slow down and just be in toddler mode.

When toddler mode feels like a fucking vacation you might just be living your life wrong. Too much work and stress, yo.

Yesterday we bought several more table cloths at the discount store. This is so when Middle Child makes a huge mess on the table they will just change the table cloth and I can stop being a critical brat about their absolute lack of table manners. My kids definitely know that I am critical and judgmental. So when I say positive things, it’s not because I enjoy blowing sunshine up your skirt. We have a handheld dustbuster so that the mess on the floor is not a big deal.

I need to stop being an asshole about messy eating. No really.

Life is a balancing act.

At the end of the positive speil I told MC “You will make mistakes. You must make mistakes. Mistakes are how you learn. Mistakes are part of being human. When you don’t understand something, write your question down in your notebook. Questions are good. You are good. You will mess up as you learn this new process and that’s ok and necessary and part of the process. Don’t be afraid of messing up. It’s like crashing your bike. You learn more from the crashes than you do from always getting it right. You learn what too far means. It’s ok to screw up. You will do better next time.”

After like 10 minutes of this repetitie loop of adjectives and blather about mistakes kiddo wasn’t crying and their body was relaxed. They finally stopped clutching my hand like a life preserver.

Ok, based on the noise from upstairs I don’t have 40 more minutes. Hurry up and shower, Krissy.

Sick babies are so much work.

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Welcome to Scotland! Here is your first illness. It’s predictable. But I would sure like a full night of sleep one of these nights. Between general discomfort, getting kicked in the head, nightmares (mine and other peoples’), waking up to change underwear because I can feel the OH MY GOD GUSH OF BLOOD, and a baby with a fever who wakes up crying while needing to nurse…

I am so tired. I could really use a solid week to just sleep through life. But I have three little kids so suck it up buttercup.

The head teacher (basically the principal for the USians in the audience) for the school we are going to will be leaving at the end of this term and then the school starts the search for a new head teacher so the school suggested we probably should get started now instead of waiting and trying to enter amid the chaos. Fun! We went and toured the school yesterday. I will bring back the filled in paperwork on Monday and the kids will start on Tuesday.

I have to say: the school sounds super fun. There are a ton of community-building programs that to my ear sound like “We know that not all of our kids have all of the support that might be ideal at home so we just provide this to make sure everyone has what they need.” Awesome. I’m happy to be part of it and I will be eager to see how we can donate/contribute/volunteer to help these programs go well for everyone.

We were sent home with three free school shirts so we don’t have to go buy them. That was quite nice.

We met the teachers the kids will be with (well, 2/3 of them because Middle Child’s class has two part time teachers) and briefly waved at the upcoming classmates. I’m excited.

I’d be more excited if I could sleep.

I am still elated to be here but I’m really really weary.

The house continues to come along. I now have 30 baby locks installed. I should have bought 40. We have agreements in place about what will happen if you lock your sibling into a room with a baby lock. (Lines. Lots of lines.) I was pretty harsh with the kids this morning about my feelings about how they have been only doing chores under great pressure lately; it makes my life suck tremendously and then I have no desire to spend fun play time with you. Is that what you want? No? Then don’t make me ask you ten times to do your chores.

The kids have fewer chores right now than they have had in years so I’m feeling pretty cranky about how hard I have to work to get them to do anything. This is not working for me.

I have a bank account. I learned things about Scottish banking and how it differs from the US. We had a really fun chat with the lady at the bank about credit and investments and politics and technology. She says she wants to get in touch with us outside of work and have coffee because she is a recent immigrant to this city too. I think she is also looking for friends. She is from Poland and she had a really refreshing point of view about the world. I’d love to hang out with her again.

I have been pleasantly surprised by how many immigrants I have run into already. This is a vibrant city full of imports. That’s fun.

I am spending so much time talking about the nitty gritty of Silicon Valley company politics. This is my tired face. Lots of folks want to talk to me about Facebook and Google and why social media is complicated. I understand now why my brother told me 20 years ago that I was a very advanced computer user then. I know so much more now. I have these gut level panic reactions to a lot of computer security conversations.

That was a good thing I got from Sarah. I have to acknowledge how much that woman taught me about how to keep myself safe. Life is so complicated.

I am tired. I want to hang out with Jenny but I am exhausted, snippy, bitchy, and this baby won’t get off my boob. (Plus I am super against sharing illness if it can be avoided.) This is one of those times when parenting is not convenient.

Mattresses will arrive in 4 and 6 days. (Two separate shipments.) My super comfy wonderful chair for my bedroom will arrive then too. This chair is awesome for reading and I intend to use it for that as much as possible. (If I miss deleting random periods I apologize; I don’t know why they are happening.)

Internet is still flaky and inconsistent. No video chats yet. We aren’t on proper wifi. Thank goodness for the Skyroam.

I am strongly considering a dog. This is a massive change for me. Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy you might. ask. A few reasons: I could seriously use an exercise buddy, sexual assault is just about the only crime on the rise in this country and I do not feel secure that if I kicked someone like I did my old neighbor things would go well for me, also Her Sweetness tries to follow every dog we see home. She is utterly enchanted with dogs. Additionally: a dog can’t be left for travel. I’d have to stay home! My kids are separating from me in a way they have not done so in the past and I have to stop micromanaging them; it is considered good dog ownership to control a dog. Cats won’t put up with that shit. I literally would have to go outside every day, which would be good for both physical and mental health.

Lots of reasons. I’m still in the considering stage. Not this month. Not next month. Maybe not this year. But it’s on my mind a lot. Maybe after Her Sweetness potty trains? I don’t know. Feelings.

For now I am curled up on the toddler bed with my sick baby. Bless the strong slats.

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.

Traveling is eventful.

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First: it was an a small adventure figuring out how to dispose of the expired car seat I was borrowing. Portland does not make it easy. They wanted us to drive over half an hour to a transfer station to pay like $28 to throw it in the garbage because they don’t recycle them. Instead we found a dumpster behind a hotel.

Then when we got to the airport I learned that Her Sweetness and I were not able to have our boarding passes printed for the whole trip. We got boarding passes to Hong Kong and then we got to cross our fingers everything would work out from there. That’s an anxiety producing situation for me. Holy cheese toast. But I tried to stay cool and calm and in the end it just meant an extra 15 minutes of processing in the airport. No big deal. China just has slightly different rules about traveling with a lap infant.

American Airlines website said they would only give us 1 meal on the flight. Instead they served 3 and we got to throw away a lot of food. That could be worse. But the AA flight was… not amazing. It felt budget and unfriendly and not very helpful. I have dreams about the kindness of Philippine Airlines. Such a lovely airline. I mean: AA expects you to go back and self serve on snacks and drinks instead of them coming by and offering them to you. But they also don’t want you out of your seats unless you MUST. So that’s not a fun situation for a 14 hour flight.

No more 14 hour flights in our future!

I liked the Hong Kong airport. The shops were top notch and folks were very patient and low key. That’s a relief after the US. It felt a little bit like the DMV only nicer? Like, people were just doing the thing and it’ll get done and you can wait… it’ll be fine…

The Bangkok airport was fine. Getting the taxi was fine. Then we got to our apartment. I looked 9,837 at the confirmation information I had and… no information about how I was to get into the apartment. So I started calling the host and sending her messages. This continued for an hour in the blistering heat. I had been awake for most of the previous 48 hours (If I got 6 hours of sleep added up in cat naps I’d be surprised) and I was not really feeling patient.

Eventually she woke up and asked why we didn’t call the guy who was waiting in the apartment. THE GUY YOU NEVER TOLD ME ABOUT AND YOU NEVER GAVE ME HIS NUMBER? THAT GUY?!?!?!

Then it turns out that the guy DIDN’T GIVE US A FUCKING FRONT DOOR KEY, JUST THE ELEVATOR PASS.

So that sucked. Noah was dispatched a few times to acquire food since we couldn’t all go. We ate. We rested. We bitched.

Eventually the lady had someone bring us a key and she gave me phone numbers for local people who can help with problems. I told her, “May I suggest that in the future you send an email 24 hours before check in with the name and phone number of the person a guest is supposed to meet?” She thought that was a good idea. Oy.

The apartment came stocked with 1/4 of a roll of toilet paper. Good thing there is a convenience store down stairs. But we are back in the land of bidets so my hemorrhoids are feeling better than they have in months.

Apparently my time in Kuala Lumpur was not real indicative of Malaysia in general because I didn’t see almost any garbage. Here in Bangkok I feel like garbage is raining down on us and flooding the pathways. So. Much. Trash.

Folks in Fukuoka would have a heart attack. Then get up from their hospital bed to start cleaning.

God damn different Asian countries are different. I am such an ignorant fucker. I didn’t realize it would be quite this dramatic.

When you drive into the city from the airport there are large signs telling you that speaking ill of the king will result in jail time. Also: being disrespectful of the Buddha or getting a tattoo of his image will result in jail time. They don’t fuck around.

Fair enough.

I come from a crazy ass country where every man, woman, and child in Texas owns 6+ guns and that’s not including the rest of the fucked up states. We never get to judge another country negatively for having…. views.

The food. *Fall over drooling* the fooooooooooooooooooooooooood. We are a 5 minute walk from a night market that serves absolutely amazing food. I could live happily forever on the variety of offerings they have. Middle Child and I had different types of tasty noodles in soup. Noah and Eldest Child had rice dishes from a different stall. Her Sweetness ate off of everyone’s plate until she realized how spicy Noah’s food was. Ha. We had fun drinks. They weren’t as sugary as we are used to from home but they were intensely fatty in a way the US doesn’t favor and frankly it tasted way better. MC had a “unicorn” which was sugar, condensed milk, two kinds of coloring, and flavors of I don’t know exactly what sort. Then there were a bunch of candies shoved into the top with sprinkles. I had a more plain caramel drink. It wasn’t a lot of caramel. But it was super good? Noah and EC had Thai iced teas with boba. Mmmmm.

Our lunch at a perfectly decent restaurant was around 900 baht. Our fabulous, wonderful, over the top good dinner at the night market was about 350 baht. Then this morning our breakfast at the grocery store cost around 600 baht just for the food (we got other staples and paid more like 1400 baht overall). 1 baht = .033 US So the lunch was around $30, the dinner was around $11 and breakfast + staples was around $45.

The night market is just so gosh darn cheap.

The traffic pattern is a bit intimidating to us: it is reminiscent of Kuala Lumpur but slightly less terrifying? Fewer motorcycles running up on sidewalks to go around cars. Here the motorcycles mostly only go up on the sidewalk if they are parking or dropping off passengers?

I am finding it fascinating that Her Sweetness is Not. Fucking. Interested. in being popular with all the local folks who would love to pick her up and chatter at her about how cute she is. She is getting a very effective “Fuck off” face. Good for her.

Sleep. Oy sleep. It’s all over the place. None of us are sleeping well. The AC helps, but it is still uncomfortable and jet lag is a bitch. Resetting a babies sleep pattern is not the same as an adult just “toughing it out”. You can’t do that to her. She melts down. She starts wandering back and forth screaming about all the things she wants but she doesn’t really want because the second she has it she is screaming about something else she wants. Sleep is the only remedy. She was super upset when Noah decided to stay downstairs and work in the common area so we don’t all have to be quiet. She wants her Bigs with her all. the. time.

Once we got through the fuss, I quite like this apartment. It is small but well laid out. The couch is awesome (it is pretty rad that I wanted to buy this couch from Ikea for our new house, I made everyone go on a pilgrimage to Ikea to sit on it in Portland. Now that we have used it for a few days everyone is fully on board with this being an awesome couch for us. This one.) and we are glad to have it here. The bed is pretty comfy. I am not sure when I became such an intense devotee of firm mattresses, but I am. Firm is great.

I am tapping my fingers waiting until Noah is done with work for the day. There are 5 or 6 Thai massage places within a 10 minute walk. Hell yeah. They all cost 300 baht or less. So… less than $10/hour. Can I have like 11 hours straight?

I had my last dose of pot on the plane. My intention (If I put this in writing, maybe I will stick with it) is to not buy alcohol at all until I genuinely feel like I have a small surplus of money in the food budget and that could not happen until October or November. I’m almost out of Ativan and I don’t intend to get more.

I’m about to be cold turkey on all of my drug dependencies.

Did I mention I plan to run a lot in Scotland? Like, when I am having feelings and I want to reach for a chemical crutch… go run instead.

I am going to learn how to be a healthy role model if it fucking kills me. I have made a tremendous amount of progress but I am not where I am going to get. Tea is going to be my big vice and I need to reduce how much sugar I put in it. (Jenny’s eyes got So Big when she watched me sugar my tea… yeah… I use a lot.) I should probably buy cubes and I get one per cup.

I am not going to buy soda again to have in the house until I also buy whiskey because I like drinking them together. Or maybe I will learn to drink my whiskey neat. We’ll see. One way or another I don’t plan to have the money to buy whiskey often enough to be a big influence on my life. Luckily I live with someone who thinks that alcohol should be served in roughly 1/2 a shot glass portions.

Yesterday was our anniversary. 13 years of marriage. I am glad we have had these adventures together. I am even more glad we are about to settle down for the foreseeable future. I want to be chilly. I want to exercise. I want to stop fucking packing.

Had a chat with EC about how much it costs to maintain cats. She wants to have two. She started panicking when she heard how much Puff used to cost me. And she wants two. We negotiated that she can do 5 hours a week of babysitting to pay for her cats. Seems like a good trade to me. We are starting with mothers helper work (she is NOT responsible for MC) and we will go from there.

It is neat hearing her strategize how she wants to do her room. She is highly cognizant of how expensive her plans are (she wants a custom built loft bed that looks like a treehouse) and she is trying to figure out which parts she can do, which parts she wants to ask me to help with, and which parts she will need to have the £ to pay someone else to help her. I feel so proud of her. Her planning skills are still nascent but she’s going to be fucking bad ass as an adult. She thinks things through. I mean, she’s still impulsive as fuck because she has ADHD like whoa but she can also plan. It’s amazing.

MC is more focused on the school part of moving. Setting up a room is not really on the radar yet. School supplies, uniforms, how to make friends, how to write in cursive… kiddo really can’t move past those details and that’s totally ok.

Her Sweetness is learning words at a blistering rate. She is going to be closer th ECs curve with talking than MCs. Doesn’t matter, they are all fine and normal and doing what they ought to be doing. But holy cheese she says a lot. People keep asking me if she is 3 or 4 based on her size and talking. Nope. 18 months. And she’s my smallest baby. Cue the bug eyes.

Folks have asked me if I am pregnant more than once. I laugh it off and tell them I am just fat. If I got upset I think the interaction would be tense but instead we all have a good laugh and move on about our day without strife. I am trying so hard not to let other peoples judgments of me impact how I view myself.

I am pretty fat at this point. I’m riding the 200 lb line and on my frame… that’s not small. The lightweight pants I have that zip off into shorts are so tight they are really uncomfortable. No bueno. My dresses barely fit. I am not going to fit into my flannel lined jeans unless I lose some weight.

It’ll be ok. My body does this. I bounce between the 150’s and the low 200’s. I have done this over and over and over since I was 16. This is my range. It is all normal for me.

I hope I can go to bed early tonight and I hope I actually sleep through. I sure could use it.

We go home in six days.

Our house is paid for and legally ours. Miss Jenny will be picking the keys up this week for us. I am elated. I feel really glad that she gets to be the first one to take possession of our house for us. I feel so welcomed. I feel so wanted. She is being super awesome about telling us to go ahead and start ordering things to her house and we will get it over to my place lickity split once we are there. She wants us to feel comfortable and happy.

I know there will be days we struggle and feel home sick because that is part of the journey of change. But I want this change with my whole being. My entire family wants to be there for a wide variety of reasons. I have great faith we will figure this out.

We figure a lot of things out. We are pretty cool like that.

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.

Tapping toes

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In 4 days my middle child turns 9.

In 6 days we leave the country; Noah has plans to come back for work… the rest of us don’t. Hello Bangkok!

In 9 days we legally own a house in Scotland and my wonderful, sweet, helpful friend will be collecting keys from our solicitor so there is no delay!

In 16 days we arrive in Inverness and the fun truly begins.

Jenny really wants us there. I can tell. She has offered to let us borrow (possibly keep) a very large number of items, including: dishes, a kid bed, an adult mattress, duvets, a crock pot, sheets… It’s like this woman wants me to stay and feel comfortable!

She’s got a 10 year head start on me, but we get to learn how to be Scottish together. This’ll be grand.

I slept meh last night. If I hadn’t missed the night before it would have been plenty, instead I’m still tired.

Ikea then a housewarming. Wake up, Little Susie.

Noah sent out a goodbye email to pretty much everyone we have ever sent an email to. Now folks are coming out of the woodwork wanting to say goodbye. Uh, we left the state already. You missed your window. Where were you all those years we lived there? Busy? Ok. We will take one more possible obligation off your plate.

I want chill. I want green. WHERE IS ALL THE DANG WATER FROM THE SKY!? My body hates this heat wave so much.

Noah and I are making plans. We are going to be living on a much reduced income so we can’t spend money the way we have learned to in the valley. Our food budget is getting cut in half. Really… a bit further than that. It means cakes, cookies, candy, and drinks are going to be very rare treats. Bath stuff and random things can no longer “sneak” into the grocery budget. It’s going to take us a bit to start properly having a tiny savings so that we can make more interesting purchases.

Fitness stuff is going to be a lot of what we do. We are definitely people who like to spend time on our computer but we are also keen walkers. And our house has lots of space for the exercise equipment we favor. I have a TRX set up (it’s a strap system) that helps me through all of my PT and Noah heavily favors kettle bells. We can set these things up in the lounge as a permanent installation and then we won’t have the excuse of “there is no where to do the work”. I’m up a good 25 lbs since we started on this journey and I’d like my clothes to be more comfortable again. Given that I do not intend to waste money on a scale that means I want to start exercising so that I fit my clothes better and I have no idea where I will end up.

Health at every size. Right now I can’t do my exercises (both logistical reasons and strength reasons) and that’s bothering me.

Besides we have more fun fucking each other when we are in better shape. We both hope that with all of the increased access to privacy our sex life might reemerge as a fun hobby we share.

Sex has come a long way. Right now we don’t have sex very often. Like, once or twice a month has been our average for a while. We have no privacy and that’s a big barrier for me. But I’m thinking about sex more than I have for a while. I am not sure it will take a full five years postpartum this time for me to be really interested.

I am 99% certain that my next period will be in my own house. That sounds really wonderful. If it is not too freakishly cold (we’ll see!) I sort of intend to spend several hours on my “Oh my god is that a period or a hemorrhage” day sitting outside with no pants (or trousers!) on. I’m going to bond with the earth, yo. I hope it will be the most relaxing cycle of my life. And less laundry. Bonus.

I am going to get family cloth and a little bucket for every single bathroom in the house. Septic systems are no joke, yo. (With some supplemental paper for getting poop.)

Her Sweetness is absolutely talking up a storm. She tells us “no!” and “stop!” when she doesn’t want something. She says, “Help!” and “please” and “mine”. It’s so funny. She is starting to get colors. She can talk about her getting dressed and clean process in a combination of words and signs. She is super keen to communicate and be part of the pod. She likes carrying a bag when the rest of us are doing so. She loves to laugh.

I am so very grateful I got to have a third child despite the challenges. She is a really wonderful person. It’s so lovely to break the “my kid/your kid” assignation of behaviors and traits and personality bits. She’s like all four of us. She’s completely herself. We all have to work on our petty jealousies and pissiness because she’s a baby and we chose to bring her into this world. We need to be nice about it.

Middle Child has confessed they didn’t know what they were getting into and sometimes it is hard to not be the baby anymore. That makes a lot of sense. They are still so wonderful with their sister. They try hard to be gentle and helpful. They play together. Kiddo is trying so hard and I am so full of love and respect for the efforts.

My kids are growing up and it’s pretty amazing.

The kids are in a funny place with money and chores. They are still doing chores but they keep forgetting to write it down. I tell them that they can work for free or they can get paid for keeping track of their work. Lately I’ve been getting a ton of free work. So they are sad that they are not accumulating more money. Dude! WRITE DOWN YOUR STUFF ON A DAY TO DAY BASIS AND I’LL BLOODY PAY YOU! We sat down yesterday and priced out a basic back-to-school-kit and uniform selection. Now they feel nervous. They kind of slacked off over the last month. They would have been in a great place for all of these purchases but… they stopped writing anything down. Whoops.

It’s a learning experience.

School won’t give you credit for doing your homework if you bring the math worksheet home, do all the work on the separate piece of scratch paper then throw away the scratch sheet and try to turn in the blank worksheet. “But I did the work!” Yeah… that’s not how it works. If you have a job and you neglect to clock in… you can’t just go back at the end of the week and say, “Yeah I was totally ontime every day; you should pay me all the monies!” “But surely I did all of my hygiene this week, pay me.” “I clearly remember you skipping it on day A, B, C, I had to yell at you 7 times on day D…”

Write it down on the day you do it. That’s why you have a day planner. Are you choosing to skip that step? Then you are choosing to make the work free. Cheers and thank you so much for all your hard work. You are definitely working.

It’s a process! Follow through is hard for a bunch of unstable ADHD folk.

Thus Eldest Child is on Pinterest trying to learn about organization systems so she can get one started right when we arrive. It’s glorious.

I am tired and the day is just beginning. That’s ok. I don’t have a lot of proper work to do. I’m day dreaming lists of stuff I will want in the house. Here is a possible list. (We will not show up and buy all of these things instantly, I expect we are going to be Good Customers at the charity shops and we will buy things new as we have to.)

Obviously we have a long way to go.

Kitchen

Dining room

Family bedroom

Bathrooms

Noah office

Krissy bedroom

Shanna bedroom

Orion bedroom

Lounge

Jennabeth bedroom

Laundry room

Miscellaneous

Hall

Garden Studio

Kitchen stuff

Refrigerator

Table and chairs

mattresses

toilet paper

Kettlebells

Bed

tumbling mats

Detergents and soaps

Kid school uniforms

baby gate

Seating?

2 large frying pans

Cleaning tools (sponges, mop, broom)

Additional silverware/dishes

Blankets

soap

Monitor

clock

alarm clock

couch

Shoe rack

Lunch boxes

Shoe rack

Grill

1 small frying pan

Dish soap, dishwasher soap, hand soap

Pillows

Printer

coat rack bars for the wall.

chest of drawers

Personal water bottles

Coat hooks?

nanny cam

1 wok

Food storage devices

Clock

Plungers

Caffeine brick

Bed

Tables and chairs

Vacuum

Replace fence along burn

drafting table

1 large stock pot

child safety locks

Sheets

Toilet brushes

Standing desk

Desk w/ ergonoic setup

Desk w/ ergonomic setup

Projector

bed

Replace driveway gate

easel

1 medium stock pot

Knives

whiteboard for calendar

Toilet paper holders?

Monitor stand or swing arm

WiFi Router etc.

paper

1 small sauce pan

tea pot, sugar bowl, milk pitcher

Towels

whiteboard

dresser

electric drill

art supplies

1 large roasting pan

Clock

black out curtains

4 cookie sheets

shampoo/conditioner

2 bread pans

rice maker?

insta pot?

eggcarton and curtain soundproofing

cutting boards

Crock pot

Lighting for video

potato masher

Big soup/stock pot

grater

Roasting pan for turkey

veggie peeler

collander

KitchenAid Mixer

mixing bowls

Ice cream machine

measuring spoons/cups/pitchers

Deep-dish pizza pan

Obviously I have not accounted for everything. It is going to take many years to accumulate this stuff at the rate we plan to spend money.

It’ll be ok. We have time and patience. In my experience it is a lot easier to do without if you are living with joy in the meantime.

Part 3’s title

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“I am hypocritical and inconsistent.”

That’s the book on being a parent.

Countdown already.

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142 days until we will come back and do the beginnings of setting up house and paperwork and all that fuss.

The road trip was 167 days and we were so done with that. To the best of my knowledge we will only be separated from Noah for a 3 week stretch and a 4 day stretch. So 25 days alone with the kids in that 142 days. That’s not so bad.

Looks like the former owners are not up for the fuss of renting temporarily from us. They have a lot going on and that makes a lot of sense. They want 8-10 months in one rental without more issues. I totally understand.

That means that we will try to have our stuff shipped directly to the UK from California because we will take possession of the keys (our solicitor will at least) and when we have to come to the UK to handle paperwork in October we will spend a month starting to set up house. I won’t cry about this. (Really 3.5 weeks.)

207 days until we get to move into our house permanently and we won’t be traveling for quite some time.

We will get to go see Pam and her family in Taiwan for a month at the end of traveling there.

So many things keep changing. I feel like keeping track of the plan is hard. That’s because the plan keeps changing.

Luckily, when we go to Taiwan we will only need to bring the bare minimum of stuff we need for a month in warm weather. Golly that sounds so restful and light.

The plan has changed a lot as we have had to look at the realities of dealing with laws and visas and processes we don’t control. I’m a bit sad that we aren’t going to be traveling for the 18-24ish months I had hoped for.

I AM NOT THE TINIEST BIT SAD MY CHILDREN WILL BE ENTERING SCHOOL A LITTLE EARLIER THAN PLANNED.

I mean, things have gone ok for the past couple of weeks. And we have set up a summer full of Outschool classes that will mean I don’t feel like I need to do almost anything for their academics for a solid two months. I won’t be on vacation but I will have a reduced load. Ahhhhhh.

They have a bunch of classes set up in Minecraft where they will be doing a variety of learning activities through the game (it’s actually incredibly well done, we have tried such classes before and they learn a lot) as well as classes on healthy boundaries in relationships, being savvy consumers and ad aware, how to socialize with new people (kiddo said he really wanted this class–ok), and cyber safety. The kids will keep up with their Duolingo too because they like it and that’s on the list of chores they earn money for and they really like that part.

Middle Child never has more than one class scheduled in a day and Eldest Child only has two classes scheduled on a day for a couple of the weeks. I told them that I want them writing notes for the classes as their academic writing for the summer. What do you plan to do, then after the class write up how it went, what you changed, and what you think you might like to change in the future. Then get up and try again with the next day.

Plan, do, reflect.

And they have unlimited time on their kindles so they will hopefully go through a lot of books. I bet I could do some sort of reading challenge to encourage them to each be reading more. (EC doesn’t really need the push, but MC might benefit. He’s a fairly standard little boy–he’d much rather be doing than reading.)

MC will be receiving a pedometer watch when we get to Portland. It’s already arrived.

I think our summer challenges will be: whoever has the highest step count for the week gets to pick a family movie over the weekend. And for reading…. maybe for every 10 books you read I will add… £20 to your start of room budget? (I was going to give each kid £500 to start with for furnishing their rooms.)

We’ll talk about it at lunch.

It’s not for you…

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Her Sweetness is bringing Noah a bunch of water bottles hoping that he will trade her for the Monster he is drinking. She also got into the Aquafor this morning and liberally coated herself in grease.

Hi. We live with a toddler. Dangerous. I had forgotten.

Handing off the externalized brain

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Question: “Kids self motivation/executive functioning/need for control- how do you do the schedule for the week? Do you personally just make it up in your head and dole it out? Talk about it as a family? Once a week? Every morning? How do the kids get input? How to you decide what’s happening? How is it communicated to the kids in an ongoing way?”

We have, of course, tried a whole bunch of different ways of setting up their task list. We all have a lot of resentment over having worked with the charter school because both kids sat down and gamed out a whole year of curriculum for themselves (long-term planning around projects, how subjects would be evaluated after study, and what books/methods they would utilize to pursue different educational goals) and the Educational Specialist said “Wow you are my only family who actually did all the required work.” We are really bitter. The kids super struggle with “What is the point” after that experience.

For a while post-charter school I insisted on continuing to follow a long-term planning method and the kids just dug in their feet with a big “Fuck it.” No matter how much they had scheduled they did less and less of the work they were supposed to do. Not because it was too hard, not because they couldn’t… they would rather stare at a wall and get punished because “What is the point”.

So over the course of this year we have gotten less and less structured because they are really bitter and long-term planning was truly killing their love of learning. This is tricky on a variety of levels because my kids previously had a really deep love of learning and trying to jump over hoops for the sake of jumping over hoops made them burned out and bitter.

What we are doing now is sitting down on Monday with a day planner and talking through “What would you like to learn this week?” They still have a variety of learning methods and subjects they cover. It is not consistent from week to week. Some weeks they do a lot of math and some weeks basically none. Some weeks they work on other languages a lot and some weeks they barely touch it. Some weeks they study a lot of history stuff. Some weeks they ask for a lot of science documentaries. Some weeks it is tons of art history and drawing practice.

I have been trying really hard to let them set their goals. I don’t decide how much work they have to do. But once we spend an hour sitting together and planning they need to do it. I am really rigorous about follow through. It’s ok to set a few small goals. It’s ok to set big goals. You will do the work you lay out for yourself. Some weeks their work takes them an hour a day and some weeks it takes closer to four hours a day. I think this practice is important because they are learning what amount of time things take them. They are learning how to take into consideration “We have x plans and we will be tired after them so what do we want to do the next day?”

They track what chores they do and their homework in day planners. We have tried a bunch of other methods and this is the way they can be most consistent. Doing it online did not work out at all.

“Let’s talk about some systems that would give him more control over his time right now, there isn’t a need to wait for a house. With both of the older children you are in the throws of the transition from parenting young children to parenting teenagers. It’s not an easy time. So much managing, so much letting go, so many balances to get right.”

They control most of their time. They decide when they are going to get their stuff done. I am available to help with academics until around 1/2 in the afternoon and if you haven’t gotten your stuff done at that time you need to do

I ask questions like “Are you sure you can get all that done in two hours?” (Our purported goal for academic work in a day.) I will say things like “You haven’t done any (subject) in a while. Do you think maybe adding some this week would be good so you don’t forget?” Sometimes they agree and add some and sometimes they say they say they really don’t want to and I let it go.

I am big on project based learning. I am really into things like them drawing a comic book about a historical topic which means they have to do a bunch of research so they can explain what was going on. They’ve done different programming projects (EC made a really neat animated music video… that was taken down because she picked a song with a swear word. *smack forehead*)

We have a bunch of different approaches to math and they kind of move around and through them. They are not linear in their approach and this is going pretty well at this point. Text books were killing them.

House chores are renegotiated every so often (sometimes weekly, sometimes every few months, sometimes when we move). I list of what chores have to be done and they volunteer to do what they want to do. At this point they are getting paid for their chores and that is a mixed incentive. They are more prone to get up and do their chores without asking (which is great!) because they get a monetary penalty for me having to nag. But there are days when they just don’t care and say “I don’t care about earning any money today.” Last night I told MC that it was great that he didn’t want to get paid for his chores, he still got to do them and I just wouldn’t have to pay him. He said that sucked. I grinned. (It was about 10 minutes of basic tidying after dinner. He had been out of the house for about 28 hours. It was a good plan for him to do a chore even though he didn’t want to. He drops habits easily and doesn’t like picking them up.)

(Fuck. I lost a chunk of text here and recreating it is hard. Or it moved around and now this is repetitive? I don’t know. I need to get off the computer and I don’t have enough brain to fix it.)

I wait around in the mornings to help them. If they haven’t done it by 1/2 in the afternoon I say you must do it on your own because I have moved on to doing my own work and you don’t get to interrupt me to help you at that point. I kind of hang out doing interruptible stuff in the mornings so that they can have academic support at need. They pick what academics they do. They pick when they do chores. They pick which chores they are responsible. But once they say “X is my responsibility for the week” I hold them to it even if they kind of change their mind by Thursday. You can entirely renegotiate on Monday.

“They also need to be allowed to develop long term planning skills. Like multi step projects, using to calendar, lots of ways to encourage it if you’re afraid they are having trouble.”

They absolutely can do this. But the charter school made them bitter. The ES put together their portfolio to hand in to the state before they were done with their projects and she said she didn’t care about seeing the end results. They were completely fucking crushed. It hurt them so much. They worked so hard and she acted like the end result was pointless. They internalized that in damaging ways. But they know how to break a project down over months. They know how to plan it out on a calendar and they can do that like 80% independently. My job is mostly to say “I think you need to build in buffer time here, here, and here because projects always run over.”

“I’m going to caution you about your use of the term “self esteem”. Doing work for other people and thinking that makes it ok to take resources is a transactional relationship. “Self esteem” is valuing yourself because you are an individual who deserves to be valued, regardless of her productivity. You don’t have to pay for your existence. If you and Noah used to scorekeep, that’s just an additional layer of transactional. You’re still scorekeeping, it’s just more about yourself. That needs to be let go.”

I am super duper achingly transactional. I had to earn my keep in foster homes or I was kicked out. This is absolutely bone deep. I know it is a problem and I do not know how to let it go. I really struggle with my growing disability. I have bought my friendships over many years and I don’t know how to trust that they will continue if I don’t do work.

I don’t know how to let that go.

You are right that EC needs to learn how to come and ask for help with stuff instead of me volunteering the help. That’s going to be hard on both of us. But we are definitely to the point where I am enabling her not having to learn how to ask for help. MC does get more practice with deciding which of his emotions to share and he is better about speaking up when he is distressed as a result.

“Exercise, rest, your projects and things you want to get done in this life- I want to hear more about how you guys plan your time so I can help with that.”

We have different seasons. Sometimes a season lasts weeks and sometimes months or a whole year. I’m definitely in the multipotentialite realm. We have some goals as a family and we sit down and game them out (like travel. We have long conversations about where to go and why) and we each have our separate goals. Exercise comes and goes for a lot of reasons. When I am pregnant… my body decides that the parasite is the only thing I can support and as the pregnancy progresses I spend more and more time in a chair and everyone else struggles to cope with that. When I overdo and my body decides it is time for a long rest period whether I like it or not, everyone else slows down too.

We like going for long walks as a family. We tend to split into pairs and have intense chats. It’s really nice. We all come home from walks happy and feeling connected. (Which pairs changes sometimes by the week or month or day. We rotate a lot.) When one person is injured (like MC twisting her knee on the way into Japan) everyone else tends to slow to a stop. We are not good at leaving someone behind.

The PT exercises I am supposed to do take time, space, and focus. I often struggle to find all three at a time. I have not been consistent about doing them since we left California and I can tell that my body is degrading again from the strength I had built up.

We alternate between planning things out on paper or sending emails back and forth to track planning conversations for longer term stuff. The kids really like email planning conversations because they give the kids a feeling of importance.

My projects are kind of dumped on the family every so often. I found my old pictures! I cried with joy. Proof of all the huge house art projects, the gardening progression, the marathon training, all the places we travel to…

Sometimes I sort of ditch folks for a few weeks and expect them to just keep going without me. Like when I was laying out tile for the bathroom. I… didn’t do much directing or helping with homework for a bit. Get your chores done. I’m busy. The kids still did the vast majority of their stuff but some things fell through the cracks and I had to just accept that.

I read a book when I was first preparing for teaching. It explained that the very best teachers don’t have to be present in their classroom every single day and their students keep on learning without them. This was how I handled teaching and this is how I try to handle parenting. I teach a lot of structure, rhythm, and routine. Now you keep it up whether I am standing over you glaring or whether I am busy, ok? But pretty much everyone in my family has ADD. (MC was not diagnosed but the evaluator spent 15 minutes talking to him in his favorite “You are giving me all of your attention” environment and that was not very useful as an evaluation.) Look a squirrel is a big problem. But we all form new systems and follow them for a while really easily. We just want to change the system frequently or we get bored. Thus planning every Monday because longer than that gets boring.

We have layers of systems. There are hygiene/sleep layers. We have exercise patterns (morning/afternoon or what kind we are doing for a while). We have food preparation/planning/eating/cleaning up systems. We have academic/learning goals and methods. There are chore patterns.

The trouble is triage. How do you keep the same priority system over a truly long period of time? We do various shuffling based on why something becomes more or less important for a while. Consistency is not our strongest suit but we aren’t that bad either.

I worked with a lot of families as a teacher. We truly aren’t that bad. But getting us back on track isn’t my easiest work and I struggle with resenting it.

Our sleep cycles drift a lot with light patterns. We stay up much later (more like 9) in the summer and in the winter I am often in bed around 7pm. Breakfast is usually around 8am except when it isn’t. I struggle with feeling like flexibility is good and feeling like flexibility is bad.

So tl;dr the kids do their own planning in many parts of their lives. They buy their own clothes with a set budget. They figure out how to spend their money for school supplies and books. (Previously these were just set parts of the budget and now they are trying to earn how much money they get so they can decide how to spend a larger chunk of money at a time.) They set a lot of their socializing schedule with other people but sometimes they get dragged to what I want to do.

They have more control over their lives than I ever had until I was basically an adult. I struggle with this not being enough.

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.

I have an 11 year old.

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I am grateful every day for my daughter. I like her very much. I enjoy her company. I enjoy watching her grow and develop and separate from me. She has her own personality and interests. She gets to enjoy the things she wants to enjoy that I do not enjoy.

She also appreciates that I put a lot of effort into trying to please her. I appreciate that she notices my efforts. I appreciate that she is very sensitive to the feelings of other people. She doesn’t need to share the mood someone else is having, but she notices. That’s a really cool thing.

She’s gracious and kind. She’s thoughtful. She will go out of her way to try and help other people feel special.

I feel honored that I get to know someone like her. I really admire her and when I watch her behavior I learn a lot about who I want to be.

On one hand I want to list off all of the things that are going on for her… but it no longer feels appropriate in the way it does to list the milestones for my toddler. She’s a person who deserves a greater level of privacy. If she chooses to announce her height, weight, or favorite things on the internet she has the right.

I don’t have that right any more. She has grown beyond being observed in those ways by me.

I am really grateful I get to have this relationship. I am learning a lot. I look forward to getting to learn more from her over the next many decades.

15 months and what do you get?

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A cute little toddler, that’s what. Her Sweetness is 15 months today so I thought I would write down some milestones. She says mama, baby, hi, nigh nigh, sometimes dada/daddy, and no. She signs more, food, all done, milk, up, and yes (sometimes). Am I missing any, Noah?

She started walking this week and she is really enjoying that process. Her first attempt at walking up a hill resulted in her falling backwards in slow motion first onto her butt and then all the way onto her back. She was smart enough to keep her head up so she didn’t get a head bonk though! That was well done.

Like all of my children have done she has a big bruise on her cheek from slamming her face into something when falling. It’s a right of passage.

She is starting to try to help me dress her. She can use a spoon or fork if we help load it, otherwise she is still eating with her hands. She loves showers.

She is usually taking one nap a day and most of the time it lasts two hours. Sometimes if she goes to sleep early (by 10) then she will only sleep for an hour or an hour and a half and take a second nap later in the afternoon. If she doesn’t go to sleep till 11 or 12 then she gets a solid two hour block and she’s good till bedtime. She usually naps in the stroller which is the best.

She usually goes to sleep at 9pm which… I feel is way too late. She sleeps till 5:30, wakes up to nurse and then sleeps again till 7:30 or 8 depending on when we get up for breakfast. We are all skewing later here.

She truly loves to color and I find that kind of incredible. At this age her older siblings had no such inclination at all.

She likes cuddling her dolls and she hands them back and forth so everyone can get a cuddle.

She wakes up first thing in the morning and reaches for her toy phone if she can’t get her hands on an adult phone. I find this hilarious.

She is not big on meat but she will eat some if it is well covered in beans or fruit goo. She loves bananas, raspberries, blueberries, oranges/tangerines, watermelon but she’s sometimes not interested in strawberries or pineapple. She loves baked beans. Loves them. She is iffy on bread but she loves oatcakes. Rice is the best thing ever, she will gorge on it till her tiny little tummy is super round. Pasta is sometimes good and sometimes she picks at it–she is totally happy for it to be covered in sauce. She likes apple pieces and not so much apple sauce. She prefers breakfast cereal to be wet and fed to her over eating dry pieces on her own. She will drink whole cow milk (out of an open cup) and she drinks a lot of water (out of an open cup or from a camelback water bottle). She is very excited when she can occasionally bat her eyes long enough and I give her a sip of tea or juice but that doesn’t happen even once a week. Ice is great fun. She likes most veggies we give her but she’s not big on them cooked into eggs. She’s not super into eggs in general and will generally only eat any if they are covered in… baked beans. You are sensing a pattern here, right? She will eat anything if it is covered in baked beans: bacon, sausage, crumpet, toast, eggs, grilled tomatoes… even if she is highly dubious of those things separate. She loves yogurt with fruit and granola. If we eat a cookie in front of her she is adamant that She Gets Some.

She absolutely adores her siblings and will gently stroke their faces and nuzzle them. She likes to lean in and pat them. (She does this with her parents too, but it’s way cuter with her siblings.)

She is still incredibly prone to diaper rash so we change her at the absolute tiniest sign of wetness. We go through so many nappies. But it is better than her poor little but being irritated. She really couldn’t handle cloth diapers–she’s too sensitive.

She is still in 12-18 month clothing. I am not sure if she will still be solidly in them enough that we should take them to Portland or if she will bump up to 18-24 month stuff. I will definitely be leaving all the colder weather stuff here because Portland will be a massive increase in temperature for us and she’s not that cold here. (We are going from 2-12C in Inverness to 14-27C. That’s a big jump. She’ll only need sweaters if we are out at night and during the day she’s not going to need outer layers at all.)

She likes looking at her board books but she doesn’t have the patience to be read to from them. She loves chasing balls and rolling toys around the room.

If I scold her at all she closes her eyes and looks sad. So I try to keep that to an absolute bare minimum and follow up any boundary setting with kisses and cuddles. I can tell you not to throw your food on the floor and still love you and think you are the best thing ever.

When the big kids and I roughhouse at all she gets very upset and tries to make us stop. She does not think fighting games are ok. She wants everyone to be loving.

I have fully night weaned and I’m grateful for the sleep. She still nurses quite a bit during the day and I will keep it up for quite some time longer. She needs the stability and comfort.

She’s great.

And this morning I got my first postpartum period. I’m actually happy about that. I can start doing more mood tracking. It’s very useful to know my hormonal cycle.

That’s how I feel about you.

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My kids and I were talking about negative moods yesterday. I spent a lot of the day crying and when I wasn’t crying I was mostly grumpy. I’m depressed. I fucking hate Mother’s Day. I am over extended as a lifestyle and there are consequences. This is normal cycle for my shitty brain. Negative moods are part of life.

They said that they have each had thoughts wondering if life would be better if they were dead. I said, “Well–do you feel like your life would be better if I were dead?” “NO NO NO NO NO” “Well, that’s how I feel about you. I feel like the world would turn dark and grey and I would never be fully happy again. I made you because I wanted to see you have a different childhood than mine and I wanted to see you grow up and I wanted to be part of your life events. Losing out on that would basically mean the end of hope for me. So no, it would never ever be better if you were dead.”

They both got that deep thinking slightly pained face.

Life is hard. Life hurts.

I talked to them about us having a family history of suicide and how that means we have brains that are oriented towards hopelessness and depression and we have to find bulwarks against those feelings. We have to find ways of coping on our dark days. We are not in the same position our relatives were in when they gave up hope. They asked me questions about the people who died and I told them about the lives of the family members who suicided. We don’t really know for sure if my grandmother suicided or if it was an accidental over dose the way it was for Grandpa’s wife, the lady Eldest Child is named after. We know that those two women were in tremendous pain and they felt empty and lonely and like nobody cared very much about them.

I asked my kids if they feel like nobody cares about them and if they spend their days alone and hurting? They said sometimes they hurt, but they know they are liked and they can barely find a few minutes to be alone. We talked about how I effectively ended my pre-kid life to ensure that they didn’t feel alone or abandoned. That got a little smile of acknowledgment.

I am there for them in a way I have never experienced and will never experience. They know I struggle with needing a few hours a week away from them and not feeling like that is an ok thing to need.

I told Middle Child that part of the reason I am so militantly supportive of his trans stuff is because I don’t want that to be part of why he gives up hope on life and I know it can work that way for a lot of trans folk. I accept you. I love you. I approve of you being whoever you are in this life.

I can’t make everything easy for you. I wouldn’t if I could because someday despite my best efforts I will die and you will need to be ok without me and I need to prepare you for the fact that life is hard. Life involves a lot of suffering. That’s just… life.

But for every single day that I am alive there is at least one person who desperately hopes you will cling to the tendrils of hope and keep trying.

They said they feel that way about me too.

So I’m still here.

They asked me how my mother responded to me having bad days as a kid. I told them she would say terrible things about what a burden I was. They said I have never told them that they are a burden; I say they are a lot of work and I am tired… but they don’t feel like it is the same thing. I said I agree. I don’t think they are a burden. I think they are a gift.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: parenting

Procrastination and longing

I tell my kids….

Priorities and exhaustion

Christmas, mom, and grief

The feedback is rolling in

I swear I am trying.

Today is the day.

Sick babies are so much work.

Well this sucks; ok not everything sucks

Traveling is eventful.

You need to get the chip off of your shoulder

Part 3’s title

Countdown already.

It’s not for you…

Handing off the externalized brain

Homework (what do I need to work on)

I have an 11 year old.

15 months and what do you get?

That’s how I feel about you.