Tag Archives: food

Don’t make changes when things are bad.

My brain is a fucking asshole right now. I’m isolating a lot so I don’t take it out on people. I’m coming out periodically to do work for people and announcing loudly, “This is my love language. I love you. I am not avoiding you out of dislike. I am keeping my shitty brain to myself until it stops being so shitty. I don’t want to wreck a relationship saying something I don’t mean in the long run.”

This is how I feel deeply privileged in this life. I get to do this. Golly this is amazing. I don’t have to shut up and keep it together at work. That feels like such a luxury.

I hate being depressed. I hate how every single thing comes out harder and more sad and feeling pointless and I feel worthless. It’s stupid. It doesn’t allow me to have reasonable or rational conversations.

Today we hop on a train and go south for immigration stuff. I’m tired and overwhelmed already and I’m not even required to be up for an hour. Another day, another step towards permanent settlement. Holy shit. I might never have to go back to Gunlandia! If y’all somehow get your shit together and oust the fascists and pass serious gun reform I may consider coming back. Those two things seem absolutely impossible. So even though the UK is far from perfect, I’ll stay in the place where my children won’t get shot.

It is actually a clear and pressing and overwhelming worry in my mind. I’m scared of bringing my three loud mouthed trans teenagers (one is a Bonus Kid) to the US if Harris loses in 4 days. I’m freaking scared. This seems stupid and unwise. I may not be able to handle doing this. I may feel like I can’t depending on what happens in the next month or two in the US. If there is more violence in January? How can I justify that?

I don’t know. But I’m pretty scared. Life is hard and a lot and I feel deeply out of control of it. I feel like I won’t be able to get my feet under me till after the trial. I am going to feel entirely out of control until then.

Hey, I started this then walked away for a few days and didn’t hit post. It was an eventful few days! Yesterday was the best day I’ve had in a long time. There were ups and downs and stress points but we had some genuine fun together and we laughed. That was so nice. We have now submitted our biometric information to the UK to help with the process of permanent settlement. All of our paperwork is in. Now we wait for the wheels of bureaucracy to turn.

Then we walked to the train station past racial discord as crowds were outside yelling about fireworks and bonfires. Apparently we were walking on a part of a street we weren’t supposed to be on. Folks were very unhappy seeing white people there. I just held tight to a hand and kept going. If you pass through quickly enough you can get through almost any territory without a problem, at least that has been my experience. As long as you are not staying it’s ok to hurry through while obviously not from around here.

It is hilarious that people really clock me as an American without me having to say a word. It happens constantly. I continue to have weird public shaming experiences in public toilets. This time someone was going off about how disgusting I was for pooping outside of my home. I should only pee in public toilets. She was almost apologetic for being nasty, but then she saw me and said, “Oh an American.” Then her friends cackled about how it is fine to be rude to Americans.

Every single conversation I have starts with “how long are you here”? Folks don’t warm up much when I say the rest of my life. Xenophobia is awesome.

I am at the point where I am watching the US election with frozen horror. It was wild going past all the bonfires, most of which did not look government approved. Only one involved a tense racial situation with the Black folk on one end of the road clustered around their firework display in the park and the white folk just outside the park on a patch of grass with a fucking giant fire that included pieces of furniture. That was a rowdy group and I didn’t feel safe. I got out fast.

I’m having difficult feelings about a lot of the racial tension I see online and that I feel in interpersonal dynamics. I feel like at some point I stopped believing the myth that only white people are racist. The genocides that are occurring in the world right now are not all white people killing other folk. It’s more complex than that. People are deeply xenophobic and racism is an intense part of that and I think it is in every person and in every culture.

Yes, the US and the UK have structural racism problems that need to be addressed in concrete and specific ways. I am 100% behind ancestry-driven reparations. I think there is a legacy of cultural debt that colonialist powers have that we deserve to pay back in ways big and small. Yes. But there are other debts.

It is feeling weirder and weirder to me to act like the US and the UK are a substantial portion of the people in the world and what is true in those countries is The Truth. It is really bothering me. It is making me feel more and more revolted. It’s like how I didn’t vote in the US election this year. First time in my life. Do you know why I didn’t? Because I never want to live there again and it is morally questionable for me to exert influence in two countries because I am just more important and people deserve to have to live under the effects of my choices even if I never have to live under those effects. Why in the fuck should I help pick a mayor for Fremont? Do I know how good of a job someone is or isn’t doing? No and I’m not fucking going to know. Why should I be making choices about who is the board for BART. It’s not my damn business.

I need to be looking to the Highland Council and learning what is going on in the place I live and be a part of that. I no longer believe it is ethical for me to try to control the destiny of a place I have abdicated. I am still required to pay taxes and I’ll do it, but golly. At this point voting in both places feels like trying to be an absentee landlord. It feels like being a colonialist. It feels like trying to have my cake and eat it too.

I do not want to be in the US. I do not want to be tied to its fate. Hell, the main reason I’d ever work in politics is because that is one of the easiest ways to renounce citizenship. I feel sorrow for what my ancestral line came and did to the North American continent. We hurt a lot of people and we participated in a lot of violence.

It’s funny that we started as Europeans who came and hurt the Native Americans/Indians/Indigenous/whichever word fits the preferences of the group and now we are Americans who have to try not to hurt the Europeans. I’m watching the UK go through a different set of issues around racism. Here, the average non-white immigrant came here themself, or their parents did, or their grandparents did because they wanted access to opportunities. They chose this. That is not such a neat and tidy story in the US though we desperately wish it was. We wish we were “a nation of immigrants”. Instead the US is a nation of immigrants, the survivors of the genocide we perpetrated, and people who were kidnapped and enslaved. Like, that’s a fucking different set of issues to have around racism.

It is interesting walking through very different cities in a variety of countries and experiencing very different crowds. The undercurrents are strange to me. I don’t know the history. Almost every single one of these people thinks of their life story as “normal” and “just life” and “just how things go” and they can’t imagine people having an entirely different set of experiences beyond fantasising about being rich. That’s a thing most people try to imagine. It’s not what I imagined when I was young.

Having enough money to fix the roof and put food on the table doesn’t remove stress from your life. It doesn’t remove trauma. It doesn’t mean that things always go well or easily, it just means that you have the privilege of being able to fix some things before they become grindingly painful. I can’t fix everything. And I can’t avoid grinding pain. I’m out in the studio right now medicating because my whole body hurts like a motherfucker after the last 36ish hours. We did a lot! I didn’t sleep much. I don’t think I got an hour of sleep last night. I did make good progress in my book and I am really enjoying it.

Those are positive emotions. This is good. I am not out of the woods and I expect to have some shitty days as a rebound. I still have a lot of underlying disordered thinking going on. I can see pieces of it. I’m fucked up around a lot of food stuff right now. I’m having a lot of alienated feelings about my body and desire to hurt it. I am struggling between wanting to fast/starve myself and wanting to eat as much as possible so that men are less likely to be sexually attracted to me. Neither is healthy at all but my brain is flip flopping like a fish between them.

I had a few really positive exchanges with all of the kids. It was a good trip. We got along and had fun together. We went to the Science and Technology Museum and then we found an international food court and got one or two entrees at a time and ate our way around the globe for three hours. We waited a while in between orders to see if anyone was actually hungry enough for more. It was amazing and also expensive. That’s our eating out for November.

It sucks having my brain be a dickhead. I am very lucky that for this rodeo I live with people who love me very much and who are willing to do a lot to show me. I wish that meant that my brain wasn’t a dickhead. That would be so awesome.

Surviving rape

Surviving rape doesn’t happen in one day. You don’t survive by getting the fucker into a taxi and out of your home. Out of my studio. Out of the place that is supposed to be my sanctuary. That is the first step, not the last. It isn’t like surviving a car crash where you wake up and the crash is over.

Surviving rape means being able to look myself in the mirror every morning afterwards. Surviving rape is about thinking that whatever you did to get to the next screen was harm reduction. Every single shitty thing that kept you alive was better than dying. Surviving rape is binge drinking and binge eating and screaming and crying and falling to the pavement when out on a walk because the panic attack made my vision go black. Surviving rape is believing that you do not deserve to be punished and harmed more because you were defiled and made dirty by someone touching you or you touching someone else because you felt like you had to.

Surviving rape means opening yourself up to lots of judgment, scorn, derision, and contempt. Good people wouldn’t survive the shit I have. They die.

My very survival is what marks me as a monster. Good people don’t do the things I do, the shitty, dirty, disgusting things that people like me do. Good people would rather die.

I am still alive. I feel like I owe the universe endless apologies for not having the decency to just fucking die already.

I have screamed so much today that my throat hurts enough that I don’t really want to eat this lentil soup that is the first food I’ve had today. I’d rather not eat. I also haven’t been drinking. I don’t want to.

I want my body to stop.

I want to be good. Good people don’t live through the things I do. That means the only thing I can do to be good is die. That hurts so much. I have tried so hard to be good. It doesn’t matter. When it counted, when I was supposed to display my loyalty I was only loyal to myself and my survival. And that is why I should die. If I will not pick death over disloyalty I am nothing.

I betrayed my family. I betrayed my husband and made myself the lowest of the low. I feel like I want to use a scalpel to flay myself alive. Maybe if I make myself hurt a lot lot lot lot lot more Noah won’t be so mad.

Mama told me I don’t need to stay and let Noah make me feel so bad about myself. I don’t think Noah is making me feel bad about myself. I think Noah is reacting reasonably to the consequences of being married to a nightmare. I’m in this pickle where I can’t act good enough to not hurt him and I can’t leave without hurting him more. I can’t see a path forward that doesn’t involve me wrecking his life even more than I have.

I’ve betrayed him a lot. It’s not like this is a one off. It’s who I am. I am shit. I am worthless and faithless.

But fuck me, definitely no EMDR before the trial. Couldn’t be having that. Fuck the NHS. I can’t believe I had the ovaries to say, “I’d like EMDR. If not that then Ketamine, MDMA, or LSD assisted therapy. If none of that then I want nothing from you.

That was pretty intense. I was freaking out and shaking and clearly not ok and I just blew off one of the higher up doctors at the psych hospital. That was maybe unwise. That smart mouth comment is now in my permanent record. I mean, I started with wanting EMDR? It’s not a controversial treatment? It’s not a drug? It’s not a wacky thing to ask for. That was not inappropriate. I just can’t have it.

I can. I just can’t through the NHS. Curse my internal hierarchy structure. It is fucking inconsistent and I hate it so much. One of the harem actually does remote EMDR already. It’s just a trick in his tool bag. I could probably have a session today or tomorrow if I could just ask him. Hell, I don’t need to ask, I need to say yes to his offer. He wants so badly to be able to help me in some way and I have not been able to let myself receive anything from him.

Someone who has been in love with me for almost 20 years wants to help me because my health care system is letting me down and I can’t let him. I have also basically stopped talking to Travel Boyfriend. I am deep in not-fun-land and I just can’t accept help in this place from people I am emotionally close to. I can pay for it. I can’t get it for free. I don’t deserve it. I do not allow myself to be someone who has consistent support from specific people. Well, not beyond Noah. The few other attempts I made as an adult went pretty sideways.

I am feeling incredibly burned. I miss the God Mama. I miss my mother. I miss Sarah. I miss the Bonus Mama. All these women. Hey look, Katy Perry’s song The One Who Got Away just came on. I’ve been calling Sarah The One Who Got Away on Fetlife. I failed to sustain that relationship.

It’s kinda funny that I don’t miss my sister. Fuck that bitch. I hope she suffers terribly for every day that she is alive and that her death is slow and painful as she fucking deserves for being a child raping piece of shit. She had a chance in this life to break the chain. Instead she forged new links. I wish her nothing but pain. Given her romantic choices I’m pretty sure she’s been punched a lot since then. I wish I could feel bad for her but I really can’t.

My brother is single and whining about how women use men up and take everything from them. My brother, who never worked full time or even managed to fully pay for his own vices let alone support his three children. Yeah. Poor guy. Fuck the golden boy too. I don’t wish him as much pain. He is suffering a lot from being who our father loved. He will suffer for all of his days. He refuses to believe that our father was evil. He tells people that our dad committed suicide because he was depressed. lol. Yeah, scared of a life of prison rape depressed.

Surviving rape is not pretty. I would argue that my sister’s soul has not survived. When she chose to justify her pain by normalising it and passing it to her children her soul died. What is left is a soulless monster.

I have not raped a child since I was a child. I’m not saying I get a pass. But my children have not been raped by family members. That’s something, I guess.

It’s really hard to eat this bowl of soup. My body does not want to. Why do I keep insisting on eating healthy food and exercising? Don’t I know that this is going to get me lots of years of more pain? 9.821 steps for the day. Even if I did have a panic attack.

I can’t keep getting punished for surviving. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I think maybe punishment is not something I can accept for something like this. I was ok with it when it happened. I consented. I consented, what, days after surgery? I kind of wonder how much I hope that you would hurt me enough to cause those complications I otherwise worked so hard to avoid. Could you have lived with that? Was it worth it? Sure. You think it was necessary to break the fawn.

Fawning is a survival tactic.

What I am doing now is not upping the chances of me surviving. I did that walking on the first day of my period without eating or drinking anything. Am I making good choices? I don’t know. I am flailing blindly. I’m trying not to talk to people more than I absolutely have to because I know that vile bilge will stream from my mouth. I’ve probably cut 80%-90% of my social chatter for the past I don’t know how many days.

Right now the random reinforcement of punishment (sometimes physical with consent in the context of our M/s dynamic and more often verbal in the form of lengthy diatribes about the crimes I’m about to commit) I have received in the past 4 months means I can’t risk talking to someone in a tone of voice Noah doesn’t like or I don’t know what will happen. I am afraid he will think I am fawning. He’s not ok and I’m not ok and I don’t know what will need to happen before either of us are ok.

I guess my sister and I both antagonise our partners to hit us. She does it by yelling insults and degrading their manhood. I cheat.

We both deserve what we get.

I say I won’t do things and then I go do them. Every time. Apparently.

It’s the first day of bleeding. With good luck part of this furious screaming in my brain will stop soon but I am not feeling like I’ve had a lot of luck lately. I feel like if it weren’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all.

I listen to other people talk about family as if it is a permanent fixture that cannot be undone. I think of Bestie and the brothers she hasn’t spoken to in over a decade and my family I haven’t seen in a few years more than that. Family doesn’t feel very permanent to me, in a general way. I am having a hard time with the war in my brain. I have to serve my indenture. Do I really owe many more decades beyond that? Do I really? Why do I owe anyone this much pain?

I reread the book I bought at the Lakota reservation called Keep Going. Man. That’s not a book to make you expect much cheerful shit in life. I think one of the reasons I have never felt comfortable with most pagan community is because I’m not willing to co-opt an old-world-religion-that-was-and-has-been-reinvented. That’s what I see when I see most pagans. The heathen cultures I grew up around were indigenous cultural ones practiced by descendants. I sure as shit never felt entitled to join any of what I saw, but I feel like my ancestors closed their ears to the Gods. I had a Mayflower fucker in my chart and the most recent arriving branch was a bunch of Mennonites that had been running around Europe trying to be the most repressive dickheads around for a long time.

I do not feel entitled to any Gods.

I do believe that Akhilandeshvari chose me. The Hindu temple on the corner was full of people who were a little confused by the white neighbours who came to Hindi classes and who dropped by to pay respects to the Gods and Goddesses occasionally. I have been given the strong impression by every Indian friend that they are totally cool with a Hindu Goddess picking me. They said she obviously knew I needed her. I think that is most diplomatic of them.

Here I am breaking myself and breaking my husband. We had been at a much better place.

I did not deal with being raped in a way that worked for him at all.

I feel like I failed the exam. I do not deserve to stay in the program. This is not my first time failing and being kicked out because my body could not do what was being asked of it. I’m not being kicked out. Noah won’t kick me out. That’s not something I worry about in any way. Just like I don’t entertain the idea of leaving him. This marriage is till death parts us.

Surviving rape over and over and over and over and over is partly done in stutter steps of eventually asking to be allowed to have some kind of agency and autonomy for my body after more than 4 decades of not being allowed to make all the decisions. No. That’s a no, dog. I’m a set of holes and somebody bought them. How dare someone else touch them.

I feel deeply dehumanised. I suppose that is a natural and obvious outgrowth of some of the kinds of play I choose to do. I suppose it is unsurprising that it is a natural and normal state for me to slip into sideways. You think maybe getting kicked out of a community for being a loud mouth who objects to homophobia, and dealing with denial of service from the NHS has something to do with it?

Hell, I’m even freaked out about how far from what I wanted the prosecution process is going to be. I’m going to have to go to court this time. They won’t let him out so he can suicide the morning of the trial. Phew. I have options about how to do it. I’m going to pick sitting in court and looking at him. That’s the least shielded way. Because why in the fuck would I do it by video in a room alone? That would be even more alienating for me. I would be even less of a fucking person just a figment on a screen.

My life is wildly out of my control right now. I can’t even seriously future trip as a hobby because I don’t know when the fucking UK government will finish our paperwork. We are picking this?

Yup. Better than Gunlandia.

I will take every piece of stress dealing with the NHS and the police and the courts and the cultural mismatch and low-key ostracism because I never have to worry about a cop pointing a gun at one of my children. I’ll take it. Most of my ancestors left this island (or the big one right next to us) almost 400 years ago. Yeah, there’s going to be some friction on reentry. I don’t resent that.

Noah is also unemployed for potentially the entire foreseeable future. It’s coming with a massive drop from where we had planned retirement income because otherwise all of the choices suck. I’d rather have his time than more money.

Yeah. Even though I had my door locked earlier tonight because I was not going to fucking talk to him right now. I feel like I want to kick him in the face and tell him to stop sniveling and get his fucking shit together. It is not your turn to fucking melt down right now and you are being a selfish dickhead. It can be your turn for the next 11 years, buddy. Knock it off until the trial. I guess you are right that it means you should just stop fucking talking for a while.

I just realised why I don’t like playing games. I don’t particularly enjoy feeling like a loser and I don’t have the desire to prove I can beat people. There is nothing for me in the process but bad feelings. I play because other people want me to. I never play enough to get very good.

Surviving rape never stops. The crazy shit I do that seems so inexplicable is maybe about my dad or Paul or Jeremy or Michael or Kevin and whatever the rest of those bitches names are. Fuck those guys. Fuck all of them. Every last fucking one. Right now I can’t remember the exact number and I really don’t want to try hard to figure it out. I think that would be really bad for me right now. I’m really glad I can’t think at all. Yay not eating or drinking.

The weekend that my rapist was arrested I played the song You Should Be Sad several hundred times. Yeah. That was fucking trippy to find out in the rear view mirror. I had no idea it was happening then. This song is going to loom large in my memory of this experience.

I think I am always going to be trying to survive all this. It’s going to be hard forever. I have a lot of physical pain that I can’t make go away with all the good food and exercise in the world. I am struggling on every level right now.

The most life affirming thing would be to throw myself on the net I have created. Instead I hide and scream and rock and cry. I can do very little right enough to trust that I am not going to get in trouble for it. Hell, an awful lot of this post feels like I am skirting the line of “don’t write about it”.

Wait for the trial to write. Wait for the trial to qualify for EMDR.

It’s like fucking no one wants me to survive.

I know you do. You don’t need to say it. Take it as read. I know. That’s not the point. I’m not whining about my friends doing an insufficient amount of reaching out. I’ve had more contact from old friends since I deactivated than I have in a long time all at once. I am not responding much. I can’t.

All I contain is poison. Am I even surviving? Traci said any amount of harm reduction that allowed you to get to another day was good enough. Traci ODed on heroin after getting kicked out by her wife and losing custody of her son. Yeah. I’ve gotten advice from some wacky ass sources in my life.

I have stopped daydreaming about the trip with TB. It is seeming less like a good idea by the day. I am scared that being in a room with me will be bad for him. I am going to fuck him up because I am so fucked up. 70 days from tomorrow. I wonder how I will feel by then? Fuck.

It isn’t feeling like a life affirming activity. It is feeling like proof of why Noah doesn’t trust me and why he should never trust me.

Just stop, Krissy. Stop being so bad.

Working up to the letter

Cross posted from FB where my MIL can see it.

I feel deeply conflicted about the type of writing I have traditionally done now that I live in a place that has far less encouragement of navel gazing and public introspection. Yet, here I am. Continuing to exist and needing to type out my feelings in order to make progress. This is how I have made all of my progress in this life.

When it comes to “stop sniveling and go work” very few people have me beat. I do a lot of manual labor and I go hard. It delights me to no end when a large man says “Oh let me take that for you; it looks heavy” then they stagger under the weight of the load I was carrying with only a little visible strain. But there is a cost. I do not have a body that is built for hard labor. What I have is a soul with a little extra energy from all the stardust so I push through long past when I should stop.

I understand to the tips of my toes that a lot of what I self-assign is not “necessary” in the sense of it being part of the base levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy. I’m an educated bitch. Instead what I have is a tremendous sense of obligation and purpose. The work I self assign is part of self actualisation. Is it “necessary”? Well… it depends on how well your other needs are being met…

This is what having privilege means to me. I have the space in my life to care about making and creating things because I do not have to worry about having food or shelter or safety ever again. And thus it moves up the triage list. It becomes urgent. It becomes intense and drowning and necessary for being able to cope with other aspects of being alive.

The overwhelming urge to self actualise takes over the same set of energy that used to go into making sure I could earn enough money to have food–a roof wasn’t going to happen on the amount of money I was making so that didn’t even feel like an important worry. I had a car; I was blessed.

I know how crazy it sounds that this set of urges feels equally intense.

But this set of urges is what gives me the deep well of patience to stand there and say for the 8,235,108 time with a level tone and no frustration, “Ok. Let’s talk again about what restaurant manners are and why they matter.” I have a whole house full of neurodiverse kids who do not copy and blend in and conform like a similar group of neurotypical children will. If I want them to learn a thing then me doing it is not even close to enough to influence their behavior. I have to tell them what I want, when I want it, why I want it, and what will happen if I don’t get it.

I can do that because A) I care very much about doing it and B) I have an intensely separate self that is allowed to have goals and plans and things that I make that I can point at and say “See, I am not just boring and shitty and doing something that no one cares about.”

I know I am dancing on a razor’s edge with fucking up my body until it hurts like this. Howdy repetitive stress injuries, howyadoin? I know that upping my exercise substantially is always courting injury. I know that having tremendous social anxiety and not sleeping well for a week and more and continuing to work like I need the money is bad for my health.

I get that. Everyone has to figure out what they need from quality of life vs. quantity of life.

I know that a lot of the work I am doing right now is not going to “work out” in the way that someone else would care about such work lasting in the long run. I am an intensely kinesthetic person and I don’t tend to learn things well until I learn it with my whole body. I like to read and I can absorb a lot from books but I don’t *know* a topic until I have done it with my body enough times to learn the rhythm.

I never really watched a plant go through a full life cycle before I had kids. I mean, I’m sure I did a bean sprouting lesson in class but I didn’t live in a place and have a set routine where I passed by given plants over and over through their life cycle. I then worked hard at learning the California biome I lived in (there are so many others in California that I’m careful with my claim) and now I have a lot more to learn. But I don’t have as many years at the end to enjoy the fruit of my understanding so I want to compact about 15 years of learning (what I did in California) into 5 years.

This year is my fuck around and find out year. I am putting an absolute avalanche of plants into my garden. I’m exploring guild combinations. I’m thinking about ways to intermix perennials and annuals. I’m trying to figure out how I will rotate through the kinds of annuals that have to move from spot to spot.

I feel like menopause is hitting my body with fervor and reminding me that if I want to get to enjoy the Witch Garden of my dreams all the way through my crone years I’d better hurry the fork up because the time in my life where my body is devoted to the Mother phase is counting down with grains of sand that feel like boulders on my head.

I don’t have time to waste. Which is kind of funny because I have so very much time. I am incredibly fortunate. I haven’t had to be afraid of not being able to get food in about 17 years. My cells do not yet really fully understand that I will never be hungry again. And part of how this manifests in my behavior is that I *must* learn how to grow enough food that I can pass on a way to ensure that my children will never have that feeling. Sure, we teach them ways to make money too. Money is a necessary thing and all.

My family had a permanent address when I was born–they had been in that home for a long time. My mom lost the house when I was three and I did not have a second permanent address until I moved in with my spouse. I very much hope that I will never leave this house. I’m building a retirement apartment downstairs. When the tenants move and everything needs fixing I’m setting it up more fully for wheelchair access.

And I’m going to have a garden I can move around and putter at and hire someone to do the individual jobs too big for me. But I’ll spend a lot of time puttering so I won’t need *much* help.

If I don’t build it now I won’t have it then.

If I push myself too hard I will not be able to maintain it as well in the long run.

Basically, this is how I meditate. This is how I sort my thoughts so I can evaluate when to pause, when to stop, when to rest. The more I allow myself to feel electrically uncomfortable and overwhelmed and drowning in the words in my head the harder it is to compartmentalise when pushing too hard on long-term projects. Other short or medium term tasks appear (in person socialising, written communication, dealing with the water company, oh the kid wet the bed) and they feel enormous and out of proportion and impossibly hard.

Unless I take just a bit of time to set things down and look at them and see the shape of all the pieces better. It’s hard to put the puzzle together if you don’t have your glasses on because you can’t see the outlines of the shapes well enough.

This process is my glasses.

When you put a vine in the ground you have to be patient. In the first year the plant will sleep and look like nothing is happening. In reality under the ground tiny little roots will be slowly exploring and looking at how they can make this place their home. In the second year the plant will creep a little bit above ground and see if this place is really going to be safe. In the third year the plant explodes and puts out tremendous growth in all directions because yes, this is my home and I will show that I live here.

We are into our second year of living here. In the first year I put a little bit of effort into putting out tendrils of growth. I went to a few events and I met a few people and I tried to see what direction it would be wise to put energy. But between health and lock down mostly… I slept.

I am now more than three months into the second year. I am slowly creeping along. I am trying to strengthen and deepen the tiny tendrils of roots I put out here. I am cultivating just a few connections. I am sending my taproot as deep into the ground as I can. I am feeding people. I am contributing to my community. I am planting trees. I am branching out in as many ways as I can… slowly. Just tiny little indications of growth that will come without overwhelming the shallow roots I have at this point.

Depending on the state of the pandemic I may get an extra year of creeping growth. To be fair, it’s not an utterly fixed rule of that plants only need two years to get established. Poor weather or soil quality can alter any expectation. I know it will be ok in the end.

At the beginning of my third year here I will turn 40. The first decade of my life was pretty traumatic and unpleasant. In many ways the second decade of my life was more of the same or worse. My third decade was when I turned the tide and I decided how my life would be and I was no longer just a shell being tossed in the tide. I built a rudder and I steered. My fourth decade has been pretty incredible. I like who I am. I like the skills I have developed. I like the strength and capacity and knowledge I have built.

Wisdom comes from experience. Experience comes from making mistakes. I have made so very many mistakes.

In many ways this last year has been one of the most turning-inward years of my life. I am not depending on friends as much as I have in the past. I do not have a therapist for support. I barely write because I have learned that the consequences of having my feelings out in public are too great to bear. What I have now I cannot risk losing and if that means I must be silent then that is the price I will pay.

Which does not mean that my feelings are more muted or less extreme. I am not sure that I suppress them so much as I have learned how to transmute them into other things. I think this was maybe the goal of therapy all along. I have a lot of compassion for myself in my big feelings. I have the ability to sit quietly and wait for my internal storms to pass without inflicting them on everyone else around me. That does not mean that the storms are smaller–it means that the hand I have on the rudder is made of steel and it cannot be moved by casual breezes. I think it would take a hurricane to knock me off my path these days.

Which does not mean I have no bad days. I just don’t document them with the same rigidity.

I’m sure part of that is about what it means to assimilate and be an immigrant. I don’t feel as safe documenting the ways I suck.

I started this first thing in the morning and now the kids are well into the swing of bed time. We had a sharp negotiation over when kids could get up. I started at 10 am. Middle Child started at 4 am. We settled on 7. Seems fair.

Today was a day of Much Cooking. Breakfast was leftovers because we needed the containers back. Then I made two kinds of soup for lunch. One with chicken broth, celeriac root, cabbage, carrot, celery, tomato, bell pepper, herbs and another with veg broth, cauliflower, celery, carrot, flour, butter, SUPER GOOD cheese, milk, herbs. The vegetarian one was better.

Dinner was a turkey, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, carrots, corn, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, parsnips, and we finished with a cookie. It was good. We have a lot of leftovers.

Right now I am in the kitchen babysitting the turkey carcass so the cats don’t help themselves. The necessary food containers are in the dishwasher. Bless the 1 hour cycle. When the dishwasher finishes then I need to shove stuff in it for another 1 hour cycle (it’ll be full again, don’t worry). Then I get to make the overnight French toast.

Hanging sadness

I don’t think I am alone. I suspect this feeling is one of the most common feelings in the entire world right now. I am sad. I am scared. So many families are hurting and my heart aches for them.

I am not keeping as current with the news. I am not trying to track what is going on locally. I am putting my head down leaning into the storm. I haven’t responded to emails in a while. I have several from early March I haven’t been able to bring myself to answer and many more from more recently.

I’m spending almost all of my attention on the kids. In their memory this will probably be a bittersweet time. Every day is tinged with anxiety and sadness–people are dying en masse all over the world from one illness. But we are turned inward and we are loving on each other as much as we can.

Yesterday we went on a hike for the first time in a while. We got all the way into the woods and we got off the hiking trail for a while and clambered over moss covered logs and observed still pools hiding under rocks. It was like visiting a fairy story only the kids said, “Now I feel at home.” To complement the day we had some Maruchan at one meal and white chocolate mousse tea with another meal. It was a day brimming with home feeling.

The unit project is going along swimmingly. I am glad I didn’t already put an end date on it because this is going to take us a long time. The kids are learning so much about how complicated and expensive life is. Eldest Child thought her family budget was complete if she knew about the mortgage payment and grocery costs and gardening expenses. Then I explained about all the other things that must be paid for every month. And your household has six children! (Four parents in the house.) What about clothing and school expenses and toys and…

They are learning a lot about insurance and saving and what things have to be part of owning a car. Middle Child thought it would be perfectly reasonable to expect the twenty year old eldest child in her family to perform full time childcare for the three youngest children in the family for Aus$100 every month. Ha ha, no. That’s pretty much slavery, kiddo. This is quite an education for all concerned.

We are learning tons of skills and how our expectations for the future will have to shift.

We are cooking so very much. I am cooking more than usual. A buddy said, “What are you cooking? You only know how to make stuff like macaroni and cheese, right?” I wanted to smack her. And call her names. And stick my tongue out at her.

This week I made braised red cabbage with apples and broad beans and leeks and carrots and onions. There was a soup with beets and turnips and carrots and leeks and venison sausage. I made a rhubarb crumble with dairy free custard. An Eton mess cake. A sweet potato puree with carrots. A few curries including a saag with paneer and red cabbage. The veg box is somewhat overwhelming in the intensity of veg it requires us to eat. Youngest Child is nearly on a veg strike. It’s normal but gosh it’s getting old. Our meat consumption is going down and our veg consumption is going up.

I’m really glad we got the cats. Stormy tolerates me and prefers cuddling with the kids. Fluffy is my shoulder kitty. As in she rides around on my shoulders while I do things. I read about that in books but I have never before seen it in real life. It’s quite an experience. She’s bigger than Puff ever was and she is likely to keep growing. We think they will be a year old in July. These are going to be giant cats. Fluffy sleeps with me most of the night and she snuggles me during the day. I feel very lucky that she likes me so much.

And now I need to get up to start the day.

Cross posted unit plan

Well, we tried school for three months. My kids got hit a lot. The head teacher was more upset that my kids fought back than they were that kids hit them. We decided that home education is the way forward for our family for the foreseeable future.

I am trying to adapt my language. We have moved to the UK and here the preferred terminology is “home education” as opposed to “home schooling” for all kinds of reasons. However, I have been home schooling in the US for many years so I’m sure I will slip up at times. I’m trying.

Like many people who do not send their kids to brick and mortar school I find that our approach changes year by year. There isn’t “the way we home educate”. Things change because the developmental levels and abilities of my children change. Things have to shift as life circumstances shift. I know that in the past some people in our lives have deeply resented the fact that we have a more fluid life than they prefer and I need to not let it slow me down.

Up until the age of 7 I do full on unschooling. I don’t do any focused, formal, sit-down work with my children. I believe that the best way for very young children to learn is to be exposed to as many situations as possible and be encouraged to play hard. My family lives in a word-rich environment. We don’t have a television and we read constantly as a family. We read a fairly staggering range of books and we talk all day long. There is very seldom a quiet moment and we like it this way.

My children are currently 11, 9, and 2. It’s going to be a new adventure to buckle down a bit more while giving my 2 year old the freedom she needs. I love having three children and this feels like the most fabulous family configuration I can imagine for us. It wouldn’t work for everyone and that’s ok. We are all very high intensity and we don’t have an extended family network to share that with. We have friends and connections in the community but we are all a lot. We like that within our little family pod we aren’t too much for one another.

We have done years where we work on individual skills and years where we work on major projects in a more college-oriented fashion. Then we traveled the world and were much more unschool focused for a while. I have spent a lot of the last couple of years pushing my kids too hard because I had a lot of personal anxiety around them “not being at grade level” if they had to go to school.

Ha. Hahahahahahahaha. Ok. Well, now that they have attended school that anxiety is over. Sure, their handwriting is super not awesome but their actual subject knowledge is well over grade level in every way. My 11 year old cannot be tested by local age-appropriate schools because she is so far off their charts. We have some local buddies who are in their senior year of university and they have commented that her writing is easily on the level of most of their peers.

Right. We are doing fine. I need to relax more.

But I am not a permanent unschooler at heart. I was a classroom teacher for a long time and we have a house full of ADHD and I am autistic and my children thrive best with a loose structure. We are at our best when we have patterns and flow but not rigid demands.

So. Lesson planning. For the first part of this school year we were deep in survival mode. We didn’t do a lot of formal academics at all because we were traveling then adjusting to moving permanently to a new country. That was a lot. Then the kids went to school for a while. Now they have been out of school for over a month and we have spent the last few weeks doing a slow drift out of the school mode back into a more eclectic style. But I don’t feel that our current methodology is going to result in a lot of long-term progress. I care about them making progress towards their future, not grade level skills per se.

Thus we are talking about moving more in the direction of unit studies for a while. Right now they are selecting whatever they feel like learning out of a larger umbrella topic day by day and there isn’t a ton of building on previous growth. I want to see growth.

I gave a loose summary of what a unit could potentially look like using shopping as a sample topic. After talking about it for ten minutes they are super enthusiastic and they want that to definitely be our first topic. Oh, ok. I hadn’t actually intended to just go that way but why not.

So here is my initial for-myself brainstorm on this idea. I am literally thinking this up as I type and it may change as we go forward. But I really like to talk/type to myself as I work out my thoughts and I felt like this was a good place to put this. With no further ado…

Shopping Unit

To begin with we will do some research on local salary levels and how much of a percentage of average salaries people tend to spend on food. I intend to ask them to each pick three different cities in three different countries and get an average idea of how things vary across the globe. (This will allow us to build on this general idea as we go further with other budgeting type conversations over the years.)

Once we have a solid idea about the variance among the six different places we don’t live in we will look together at the average for our city and then we will place that next to our actual family budget over the past few months. I keep records so this won’t be complicated. We will talk about why our family budget is or is not close to local standards.

Both of the older kids will get to pick whether they want to make up a budget for a single person or a family (they can pick the size) and we will sit down and talk about a nutritionally balanced meal plan. They can use a variety of recipe books and online websites to figure out what kinds of meals would allow them to eat in the healthiest way possible for their needs. (One child is mostly vegetarian and the other child really prefers to eat more meat and fewer meals.)

Once we have our proposed meal plans we will head off to local stores to see what they can buy with their budgets. This will involve many trips to stores as they are not all in one area and the store trips will double as PE because we will have to walk/ride our bikes for many miles just to get this data. I will also be saving the store ads I get in the meantime. I will suggest they look into alternative ways of getting food (delivered veg boxes, restaurants, or big online delivery places like Amazon) and compare how they can do on value for money.

While we are in the stores collecting the data on prices we will also track where the various food items come from. On many separate days at home the kids will use the information about where the food comes from to do geographical research. I want them to see where in the world the food must be grown, which countries could it come from. What are the labor practices in the various countries like? What is the GDP of the different countries involved and what is quality of life like for the citizens (particularly the farmers)? How are global warming and pollution impacting the food production in those countries? I want the kids to be able to draw maps of where these countries are in relationship to their continents; they don’t have to be perfect. Where does the water come from for this food growth?

Now go back and look at your proposed meal plans and budget. How are your choices impacting people in more vulnerable positions? Do you feel like you are making ethical choices? How could you adapt your choices to be more respectful of the totality of the needs of the planet? This will have to involve some longer pieces of writing (hand writing!) as we will also go through and cover ethics as a sub topic here. We have several books on ethics that we will read and consider in an abstract way in the process of being able to apply them to this topic in particular.

We will make more progress on gardening efforts and we will talk about soil nutrition and balanced growing efforts. We will look at whether the various countries that are producing our foods focus on monocrops or if crop diversity is implemented. We will talk about the differences between doing a little bit of gardening versus having to do large scale farming for a living. We will visit local farms to talk to actual farmers about how their lives are structured.

We will research how building houses impacts farm land and we will look into how farms impact wildlife and biodiversity.

Through the course of this unit I want to make notes for myself so that we can have a unit test at the end. The test will cover any and all of the research we do together. I hope to find 20–50ish questions (probably slightly different questions for the two kids because they are not at the same developmental level) to check how well they are retaining this information and whether they can apply it at a later point.

They will be doing a fair bit of short writing efforts throughout the unit because they will have to do a lot of note taking and maths work. I think we will have a weekly short response writing effort summarizing what they feel they have learned that week so they can refresh their own learning.

I think we will need multiple longer writing efforts. It would be nice if they each wrote a fairly detailed graphic story that shows various parts of the food production process and why it works the way it does (they really like doing this; in the past my oldest did a fabulous comic on immigration to California as part of history). This will be both art as well as working on neat handwriting.

As the final project I will help them assemble a long report on food production, how they will utilize the money they have for their budget, where they want to try to buy food from and where they want to avoid food from as they explain the ethics of food buying, and talk about the global conditions that are likely to impact the food chain as they grow into adulthood. I will be involved to help them in this process and I will guide them on formatting and I will help with editing but the writing will be theirs. The final report will go through at least three versions: rough draft, second draft with all of the spelling/grammar/major logical issues addressed, and if the second draft is really good enough a typed third draft. If the second draft gets a big fat raised eyebrow they won’t type until the fourth draft. The final written draft must be written to be legible and neat. But they need the typing practice as well.

I don’t know for sure how long this will take us. As a rough guess at a minimum we will spend six weeks on this but it might take a fair bit longer. We tend to fall into research holes and we love our tangents.

I know this will need refinement as we go and I will ask the kids for their feedback but this feels like a starting place.

Fud

I suspect I am thinking about food so much because I am bored. I am not really enjoying sitting around waiting to heal. I am doing ridiculously bad at it. I just want to go work, damnit.

I used to date this guy who wanted to play with my genitals for a few hours without me ever getting to the exciting part. After twenty or so minutes of this I would dissociate and I couldn’t even feel what he was doing anymore. It was really boring. Thinking about what I want to do in the garden is starting to feel like that. It’s not feeling like the fantasy bathroom I didn’t really think I would ever get to do. (But I did it.)

So today I made a big raw spread for lunch. Then I made cock-a-leekie soup and I started the stock for potato leek soup. I made a French toast casserole for the morning. For lunch tomorrow we will have the potato leek soup and steak (if the steak isn’t bad because we missed the use-by date; damnit). Then dinner is cock-a-leekie soup (we didn’t eat it tonight….) and haggis and neeps and tatties because it is Burns Night. We will be reading poetry and being silly with it.

This week we are doing a big spring cleaning for Imbolc. We also want to make a cake and a feast to go along with the holiday on next Sunday. The cake will be made ahead.

I have unpacked that which I can unpack until the bookshelves are made. This is… not feeling like enough. I want to be done. I want to be fucking moved in. I loathe cardboard boxes. I mean, I will keep some around to play with because they are dead useful but having my belongings in boxes feels like an affront to my spirit. Either get fucking rid of it because obviously you don’t love it enough to take it out of the box or UNBOX YOUR STUFF. Moving has been such an intense thing in my life. I’m not saying that no one else should be allowed to own stuff in boxes; this is a me-thing.

I’m ready to take down the winter twinkle lights. As of my wee one’s birthday in a couple of weeks we will be down to a measly 10.5 hours of night. That’s how much time my house should probably be dark anyway. Ok, so it isn’t quite there yet… but it’s spring cleaning time! Get the house tidied!

Whyyyyyyyyy?

Because I always do a spring cleaning and it makes me feel like a hard worker and I take pride in that. For each thing there is a season and at the end of the season I take it down and put it away so that it feels special again next year. This is my one dust a year, dangit.

I have my bike trailer now. And my back is still open and strained and unhappy and I can’t go anywhere with it. My impatience knows no bounds.

I should be in bed. It’s bleeping 11. But tomorrow I will get to take care of YC for 4.5-5 hours alone while Noah and the big kids go off to the theatre class. Noah will get to have some down time while the big kids play. Ah well. I will play with my lovely little girl. She’s frustrated I am not taking her out but I can’t. Not until I heal.

Fuck healing! Hurry up! This is ridiculous! What, has this wound been healing for 14-24 days depending on how you look at it?! Isn’t that long enough?!?!?!

Bodies are annoying. I FEEL LIKE THE CASTLE IN THIS COMIC. But three years from now… watch out! I will do things!

Menu

I used to put myself to sleep dreaming about the bathroom I wanted to build one day. Now I’ve done that. So now I put myself to sleep thinking about shorter term goals because that process was hell-ish. (I also suspect I’m avoiding nightmares about my sister, but that’s another story.)

breakfast: steel cut oats with cherries

snack: oranges

lunch: a variety of cheeses; cut up bell pepper, carrots, celery, and cucumber; hummus; green and black olives; some other kind of spread–artichoke?; olive bread; balsamic vinegar and olive oil

dinner: roasted and mashed sweet potato mixed with lots of creme fraiche (I want to pipe this around the bottom of the bird) topped with chives and parsley, roasted Brussels sprouts, roasted carrots, and roasted game bird cooked with a lemon, thyme, and rosemary

dessert: lemon cake

I don’t even know why I want this so bad. But someday soon… I’m doing it. The whole shebang.

I am a lot happier with my cooking these days.

I made a thing!

The recipe makes five layers and Jenny’s family only wanted two layers. Then EC wanted me to set aside half a layer for her with no frosting. This is what I did with the rest. I was trying for a Monty Don style garden. The bottom green was getting too warm, so it doesn’t have grass peaks but it was getting close to midnight and I didn’t have the patience to chill it before I finished. I still really like how it turned out.

Souper impressive

Tonight EC asked to make dinner. She started with a base of turkey stock and water (I make my bone broth super concentrated and diluting it is wise) then she added in tomato, beets, carrots, and potatoes. Herbs and spices followed. She cooked that for a bit and decided it needed a bit of something more and added sausage followed by cream. It was faaaaaabulous.

She’s so big and capable. I’m absolutely thrilled.

maybe I should keep running.

The kids broke open the bag of chocolate chips (the penultimate bag in the house–we'll see how long the last one remains) and I couldn't keep my hand out of it. So I made cookies. I figure this way I can make the chocolate chips last more than a day.

I can't cut any more. I'm going to go have another cookie. Fuck you brain.

Adventures in milk and sugar

I went out for a while on Saturday night leaving Noah alone with the girls. This meant defrosting some milk for Calli, just in case. Apparently she didn’t actually want it during the night, but it was already defrosted and you can’t refreeze. So I helped her with the cup on Sunday. (We do have bottles but I’m lazy.) She sucked the milk down so fast it was startling. And then I got the rest of the milk from the bag and brought the cup back towards her. She saw the cup and started *whining* and lurching for it. She wanted it bad. I was impressed. So much for thinking she has zero interest in food. If I were a more giving mother I would pump more often so she could drink from a cup because she obviously wants to. But I’m lazy so she’s going to have to wait for a bit. 🙂

This reaction and her current slightly increased fussiness is making me wonder about me eliminating sugar from my diet. I know the milk is adequate still but I kind of wonder if the flavor is less awesome because she is used to me having a fair bit of sugar. My mood also sucks donkey dick. I am being a viper. 🙁 I do still think doing this for a month is a good choice because health-wise neither of us will suffer. I’m just unfun. 21 days to go.

Keeping it real

I have decided that January is the month of no sugar. We have gotten to the point where sugar is not an occasional treat but instead it is a major dietary staple. That’s all kinds of bad. I am no longer pregnant and there is no need to be trying like mad to up my caloric intake. 😛

So. After a month of getting sugar out of our collective systems we will make more of a decision as to how to figure out a better balance with it. But yeah. I think we need a detox. And I’m the one who buys groceries and does most of the cooking. 😛 (Not breakfasts, to be fair. Noah does almost all breakfasts cause he rocks mightily.)

Whoo!

I have managed to acquire a mothers helper! She is starting tomorrow. This is perfect timing because my fridge is brimming with tasty wonderful veggies all ready to be cooked up into fabulous food. I’m so excited I can barely stand it. 😀 I should probably defrost some beef to go with the awesome veggies because I have been craving meat like mad. This is unusual for me, so it’s great that I still have half a cow. 😀

Our bounty overfloweth

The wonderful people who have been bringing us food have brought enough that at this point we are moving stuff to the freezer because there is no way we can go through it all fast enough. This is such a wonderful problem to have! We don’t need any fresh influx for at least four days. I’m going to be a little surprised if we are running low then. We are so incredibly lucky! The only thing I’m going to add is we need to pick up some super spicy Indian to go with the home made yogurt we were brought. The home made yogurt made with half and half. It’s so good it’s insane but it’s kind of overwhelming just by itself. 😀

I’m feeling so much love right now. 🙂

It’s the little things

Today is our fourth anniversary. Obviously we will not be going out to celebrate. So instead my wonderful, considerate, thoughtful husband made me breakfast in bed. Not just any breakfast in bed! He went to my favorite tea shop and got my favorite tea and their spectacular home made lemon curd and we had scones with all the trimmings and cucumber sandwiches. I feel so loved. 🙂

Rousing success.

We just bottled two batches of mead that we started last July. Oh man. The Lotus Blossom honey is smooooooooooooth and extremely drinkable. It is perfect for right now by Noah’s estimation. The Mesquite honey we mixed with cinnamon and vanilla and cloves is absolutely divinely perfectly sweet in my opinion. Noah thinks it will be absolutely perfect once it ages a bit and mellows more. My first exclamation was, “That’s candy!” And I mean that in all the best ways. 😀

I think we have plenty of good alcohol for the next year or two. 😀

Meat!

So I picked up the cow yesterday (that was with the help of two wonderful ladies). I have 1/4 of a cow to sell. 😀 This big ass chunk of meat is 1/2 ground beef and then a mix of all the cuts in a cow. I would love to set up some appointments for people to come shopping in my freezer. 🙂