Tag Archives: dream

Sleep disturbances

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s… a lot.

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

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

That sounds… awful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ugh, dreaming is terrible

I woke up rather early from an awful dream where I moved to Canada to marry this horrible man I went on two dates with from the dance community. There is zero chance I would do this. Even dreaming about the possibility makes me sick to my stomach. His second wife, the mother of his child, is one of my least favorite people on the planet and I don’t want to ever be in a room with either of them again because how they parent is so repugnant to me. So dreaming that I would be marrying into that shit show… blurgh. Stupid brain. I hate you stupid brain. Why do you even consider such gross options in life? I miss pot and the lack of dreaming it facilitated. I’m a complete moron in my dreams.

Middle Child is having nightmares about school. There’s a boy in her class who tried to knock her down the stairs. On the first week of her being in school she watched him drag younger children around by their hood. Eldest Child says she’s afraid of this kid too because he’s pretty violent.

I told the Head that my children were having bullying problems. She asked me for names. I said I could not give the names but she should ask my children. My children went to school and asked to speak to her. She acted confused why they would think she would make time to speak to them. I’m not happy about that part of how things are going. In my next round of emails I will mention it again. She needs to talk to them about the bullying they are experiencing.

She wants my children to stay in school but she doesn’t want to have to put in effort to find out who is giving them problems. I mean, I know I wrote positive things about the fact that they seem like a better group to work with than other teachers I have known… but it is still school. School is shit and I understand why MC is feeling over it after two months.

EC is feeling pretty annoyed because her class’ performance for the Christmas show involves the kids having to sing very loudly over a recorded song with a loud singer. Most of the kids in her class won’t sing at all because they are not interested in performing. She started off being angry with the kids because their lack of intensity leaves her feeling like she must sing twice as loud to make up for them and she is damaging her throat. She’s been doing some name calling of the kids and insulting their work ethics. I told her that she has not had seven years of being beaten down and constantly forced to do bullshit for school that she doesn’t want to do so she doesn’t understand their position. None of them opted in to this activity and they don’t want to be there. Why are you calling them names because they are engaging in the only form of protest available to them?

I asked her if it would be appropriate for me to call her names when she doesn’t feel like doing all the chores my greedy little heart might like to assign her. Her eyes went wide. Then she said, “Ok well it totally sucks that the teacher picked a song where we have to sing really loudly to drown out the singer–that’s not fair.” I agreed that the teacher made a rude choice. That’s totally fair to criticize. But criticizing people for not going along on an activity they don’t want to do? Meh. I can’t get on board.

It is utterly striking to me what a rule follower EC is. She wants to conform to the demands of authority left, right, and center and she thinks it is shameful when others don’t want to do it. But she’s also starting to notice that authority in school is not at all like the authority she grew up with. In school the authorities set rules based on their convenience or on arbitrary standards and the teachers really don’t care if the rules are appropriate in a given context. Such as: all children must carry a coat out to the playground for breaks and lunch because it is Scotland and it could rain. It frequently doesn’t rain and the children overheat in jackets so the kids leave the jackets sitting around and then they get lost and the children are in trouble. EC has been complaining about constantly feeling overheated and uncomfortable and she can’t understand why the staff wants her to feel that way.

Because the staff doesn’t care about your personal comfort. The staff cares about enforcing “the rule”.

Whether it is raining or not you have to have a jacket on.

Apparently the staff is giving her lip for showing up in shorts and short sleeved polo shirts because it isn’t “weather appropriate” but she is constantly overheated. They don’t think this is possible for someone who is from California because it is colder here. Dude. She lived in her underpants in California because she was always uncomfortably warm. I promise you that she can overheat here. She doesn’t understand why the school doesn’t care that they are making her miserable.

Welcome to school. You wanted to find out what it was like.

There are eight more school days for my kids in before Christmas break due to our trip to the Consulate. I put the chances of MC going to part-time school in January at about 80%. Do I want to do it? Not particularly. But I did not force EC to go to school when she wasn’t ready and I don’t feel ok about forcing MC to go. I am more than capable of teaching the subjects she is struggling with and the teacher is literally unable to provide the one on one attention I can provide. Of course the teacher thinks that MC would learn much better by being in a group of peers and normalizing off of other students. I don’t agree. I find that dynamic pretty fucked up.

The teacher did not look like she appreciated it when I said, “As someone who has been a public school classroom teacher the thing I appreciated the most about home educating is the lack of wasted time for transitions. In a class room you are lucky to get ten productive minutes out of each hour because getting all of the children to focus at once is practically a miracle. With home educating that whole hour can be productive and that’s why I don’t start academics until many years later and we blast through many years of progress in a short period of time with far less effort.” School is invested in believing that it must take many years to force large groups through a given set of knowledge. It literally doesn’t have to be that way. It is how school does it. But it is not a necessary part of the learning process.

Home educating (I’m trying to adapt my language because the local crowd is hostile to the “Americanism” of saying home school) is much more concise and effective than school. I can understand school feeling insecure about that. But I don’t care about your feelings any more than you care about my children’s feelings. And thus the world goes round.

I do not exist to provide you with little people to affirm your feelings about yourself. I am here to support my children.

I will have to ask for a formal explanation of the layout expectations so that I can help kiddo figure out how to do it. We’ve been talking about presentation differences for years. It is utterly hilarious to me the way the teachers here are super smug about their layout being standardized in primary schools so every child must be held to it. As if I haven’t already had to learn APA and MLA and a variety of other standards for different earlier schools. This standard isn’t somehow more magically wonderful and correct. It is just what you prefer. Whatever.

Do I want to keep home educating? No. I don’t. I’m exhausted and I’d like to be selfish and have more time for myself. But if it is what my child needs I am going to do it. This is her decision, not mine. And I’m about 80% sure at this moment that she is going to pick home educating because she learned that school sucks.

Yup. I hated school. Your father hated school. School is a miserable experience. I don’t blame you for wanting to opt out now that you have had a taste. The more I think about it the more I feel a little sick about the school trying to say that she should have to spend six more months there before I let her decide. It feels like “We haven’t had enough time to break her spirit and convince her that she’s not allowed to opt-out of abuse. Please keep letting us work on it.” The assertion that you must learn to conform to an arbitrary, abusive environment or you will never be able to have a job is so repugnant and repulsive. I don’t believe that.

My shitty hand writing has never prevented me from getting a job I applied for, no matter what the schools like to tell me. I mean, I didn’t apply for being a college professor… so I guess the timed handwriting aspect of the final exam for my masters did limit my potential… but I absolutely loathed being an adjunct instructor. I hated teaching college students. So was there really a loss of life potential there? I don’t think so.

My hand writing kept me teaching the kids I wanted to teach. Was that really a limitation? I don’t honestly believe my hand writing is going to keep me from future work I want to do. So how about if you fuck right off with your nasty attitude about how hand writing is the measure of intelligence.

“It is clear that MC should be in the highest reading group based on comprehension but her hand writing isn’t good enough so I won’t allow her to be in it.”

And you wonder why she is bored, acting out, and doesn’t want to be in school. Hm. It’s a fucking mystery. You think I should work with you to convince her that she has no option other than comply with your demands or be punished by being forced to work below her intellectual potential. She has to jump through an arbitrary hoop before she is allowed to learn anything interesting.

Or she could stay home.

Yeah. That’s school for you. MC wants to set project goals and work towards them. She knows that she is currently in the grade where EC got to work on a music video (to learn programming) and a big comic (with lots of supportive research because the comic was about California history), she did a couple of big fun real-life based maths projects, there were countless hours spent on art history as a passion project, and we went through three different fun science curriculums. EC spent this year working on learning more like how college classes are run. MC is being told she has to read baby books that are boring as shit because she doesn’t write well enough to learn anything interesting.

I FUCKING WONDER WHY SHE WANTS TO LEAVE SCHOOL.

Home educating is both a real education and fun. School has fun elements too–I can’t provide all of the group access that school can and they have resources I don’t have… but it comes in a whole package with kids who want to knock you down the stairs. It comes packaged with people spitting on you. It comes with constant name calling because you dare to be proud of being intelligent and bookish. Nerd is a constant refrain. And these kids don’t mean it as a compliment. They are trying to be derisive. Luckily my children have not been in school their entire lives so they respond with confusion, “Of course I am a nerd. Why wouldn’t I be? Nerds grow up to be rich and have good lives?” The other kids are not getting the power they would like to have from this exchange.

I am happy to the core of my being that my children are not building their sense of self-identity on the other children at school. Kids suck. Kids are assholes. Kids want to keep each other at low levels so that no one will be expected to work that hard. Fuck the expectations of kids. Keep reaching. Keep growing. Keep having high standards for yourself. You will be ok in the long run.

Sometimes people make comments about how if I have an abrasive personality I won’t have friends so I should conform more. Hahahahahahahahaha. I am abrasive as fuck. I have absolutely all the contact with friends I can possibly handle and sometimes too much. Our first overseas visitor is here and it’s going super well. It’s absolutely perfect that she can have space in the apartment to herself when she wants it and she can opt-in to conversation and food and companionship when she wants it. I’m really glad she is spending so much time sleeping. She desperately needs it. When she wants to come out our topics are ranging from education to philosophy to psychology to remodeling projects to books to cooking/food to animal training to parenting to cultural mores to group dynamics to stress management to nutrition to exercise to limiting our children having access to time wasting entertainment. I’m utterly thrilled.

But sure. If I don’t learn how to be more conformist and people pleasing I won’t have friends. Right. That has sure been demonstrated over my lifetime. Not. Yeah my 98 person Christmas card list is evidence that my behavior is totally off-putting to all people. Why don’t I get my shit together so maybe someone will like me.

Dude I need to be more abrasive so that I cull the damn list of people in my life because I’m overwhelmed trying to pay attention to so many people. Shut up.

I am going to do fine making more friends in Scotland. I am always fine at making new friends. The adults I talk to here tell me that rather than conforming to authority the expectation here is that you will just lie to any authority that questions you. I get that.

I already have a list of local people I need to follow up with for our next round of contact. But I’m tired and I haven’t wanted to get to it yet so I haven’t. It’s not a requirement that I hurry up. I plan to be here for a while. I’ll get to it. Maybe I will get distracted because it will be more important that I devote my limited energy to building connections to the home education community. We’ll see.

I’m tired and I should be asleep. But dreaming about following that annoying douchebag to another country is so obnoxious that maybe not sleeping is better. Stupid brain. ugh. He wasn’t even a good lay, what are you doing stupid brain? He’s a terrible parent. He’s whiny and self important and self aggrandizing and ugh. No. All the no. Ew. Never. Blurgh. It makes my stomach recoil in utter panic. Not for all the tea in China.

My brain is an asshole.

It’s kind of funny: having this lovely guest and having MC tell me fervently that my company is better than anyone else’s company… it reminds me that yes, my company is lovely and I would like to have more of it. Hahahaha

Ok. And now my frequent flier miles are gone because I have booked three friends coming to see us. Schweet. I’m really happy that all of our traveling has been rewarded with such a delightful outcome.

Dreams and being stared at.

This morning I woke up in the midst of a very cool dream about and ‘s new house. There was a secret room (that was really more like a secret wing) with all kind of nifty features. I told “How can you not find a secret room!!” She said, “No one expects a secret room.” I said, “That’s like saying ‘No one expects the Spanish Inquisition’–they bloody well should have.” It was one of those cool dreams with flying and such.

And when I got up and checked my email I had an email from a reporter wanting to come on the freak breeder outing to interview people. I responded and said that was not a good idea. I don’t want people to show up to this event and be put on the spot for being weirdos, thankyouvermuch.

Bad dreams

Lately I’ve been having this dream. It’s almost a recurring dream but it picks up where the last left off and continues. Usually I love this sort of story dream. Not this one.

In it Noah keeps telling me that he made a mistake and he wants me to leave. Parenting and being a husband aren’t what he thought and he doesn’t want me or Shanna in his life. I woke up and talked to Noah about it. Of course he doesn’t actually want me to go anywhere.

I can’t shake how bad I feel though. I’ve spent the morning cuddling my daughter reminding myself that I will take care of her no matter what.

I hate feeling this way.

Very odd.

This morning I woke up to see a twitter post about how there was a Jonathan Coulton concert last night. I did not know yesterday there was going to be a concert last night. Yet, in my dream there was a Jonathan Coulton concert and all of my friends were going and I wasn’t allowed to have a ticket. Everyone stood on the balcony and jeered me.

How very odd.

Dream

I have had this dream off and on throughout most of my life. A brother figure (I don’t think he is one of my actual brothers) and I are playing in the woods somewhere and we manage to stumble into a witch. She keeps us prisoner but not in a completely malicious way. She has a daffy husband who is no help, but who does no harm who kind of tries to make things easier for us. She is evil, but I hurt her and punch her and lash out nearly constantly and she doesn’t punish me. Eventually she tells us there is a way out if we really want to leave her.

By this point my brother isn’t real enthused about leaving. The witch is far kinder to him. I think she doesn’t punish me to show him that she is wonderful and like a boy he is stupid enough to believe. We have to run to the far side of her land and find our way out through the right door in a house. There is no such thing as day or night in this land so we run and run and run and I don’t know how many days we run for. Sometimes my brother carries me because he is bigger and stronger but when he does the witch catches us. She runs with us the whole way to taunt us. We have the right to get to the house and she can’t stop us till there. But most of the time I pull at my brother to make him run faster and we leave her behind at least for a while.

Last night I got to the house. Sometimes I don’t. Last night when I opened the door into the house I found a hallway with three doors. I picked the door in the middle. This lead into another room with two doors and I picked the door on the right. When we got ‘outside’ the house on the other side it looked like a backyard. We hopped the fence to get out of the yard, but then there was another fence and we hopped that too. When we got to the ground it looked like a very generic suburban neighborhood. We started walking and my brother got real excited. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew we had picked wrong and i started screaming and throwing rocks at the windows of the houses.

Then the witch appeared and started taunting me. We were instantly back in her home area of her kingdom and she asked me if I was going to be stupid enough to try and leave again. Usually I have this dream over and over getting more and more frustrated with making the wrong decisions. I don’t really want to get into this cycle.

{insecurity}Off kilter

I woke up this morning from a dream in which four men were trying to rape me. I managed to get away because the sheer fierceness of my fighting back momentarily startled them enough that I escaped hands and ran. In the dream got to a fairly safe place and tried to call 911 and was put on hold indefinitely. I felt totally invalidated, much like I did when I was date raped when I was 18 and the police officer later asked me what I expected when I brought a boy to a party with alcohol. 🙁

I want to cry. I feel uncertain and off-balance and just rather disturbed. I have a great deal of work to get done today though so I need to suck it up. But I feel very lonely and scared. I hate waking up to nightmares.

I want Daddy. But there isn’t a Daddy. There is just me. I know I am strong enough to get through feeling this way, but I don’t want to have to be. I want to be just a little girl right now.

my dream

I’m a young geeky boy (earlierin the dream I was the girl flirting with him.) Throgh my own frustration I manage to toss my streo down the side of a hill. I seem to live in the moutains, but they must not be the mountains I grew up in because I don’t recognize the vegetation. I started going down the hill to see if I could find the stereo and it just went down and down and down. Eventually I reach a room. It is a small room with a connected chamber below. I can see water in a channel along one side of the room (when I walk in it is on my left.) The water is in a beautifully tiled/stoned channel. I follow the water to the connected chamber and find an enormous pool that is also tiled beautifully. I say tiled, but it looks very primitive and it isn’t modern tile. I notice how the water is low in the lower chamber right now but it seems like it might go all the way to the ceiling…

I don’t know why, but I ask God to mak the water rise. Immidiately you can *see* the water rising really quickly. I start clamoring out of the chamber quickly. Right then a bunch of my male friends and the girl I love wande rinto the top room. They start taking their clothes off intending to go into the water because the climb down the hill was hot and dusty. I have to basically drag them out one by one because they don’t seem to be able to see the water rising. I push them all the way up the hill. The next day that side of the mountain is an enormous river.

I don’t understand.

Nightmare

I was a teenager again and I was going to a new high school. Little Thea showed me around. Everyone in my life was there and teenagers again. Rebecca looked damn skinny. Everyone smiled at me very benevolently, but I was being shy and wandering around alone.

Eventually I was standing at the end of a long hallway of lockers and I saw four people standing in a line. Someone standing in front of them shot all of them then ran away. I ran towards them as fast as I could. Each person was shot twice, once in the chest and once kind of in the hip. Neither wound was fatal. I tried to help one person and then started screaming for help. I turned around when I heard snarling. The “person” who had shot them looked like a zombie and told me to leave or I would join them. He started dragging them one by one towards the parking lot.

I woke up crying.

I don’t understand.