Tag Archives: grief

A low key celebration

Today my last baby turns 7. She wants clafoutis for breakfast and green soup (potato/leek) for dinner.

She is delighted that I won’t ask her to do a single chore today because it is her birthday. That’s the rule. On your birthday: no chores.

I miss Noah. I miss him in every second and it is hard to not freak out all the time. I’m actually being pretty stable. I’m keeping my shit together. I’m not yelling. I’m not being overly harsh. I’ve definitely snapped a few times and been sharp. It’s all about degrees? I am being patient. I am wrapping my babies in cotton wool while they figure out what this damage means.

I am making sure that I am not the problem.

I’m figuring out how to get my needs met and how to get support. I’m having difficult and uncomfortable conversations. They are good and important though. They are necessary. I have to learn how to talk to people other than Noah again. It’s been a lot of years of only turning inward to our pod and I can’t ask my kids for support. No parentifying in this house.

My old lawyer told me that I had to make myself happy. I can not pour from an empty bucket. I have to do stuff to make me happy. I have to make that my priority or I have nothing to give my kids. I don’t have babies anymore. I don’t have to put other peoples immediate demands above my need every minute of the day.

I will fail if I continue to try.

My limits weigh heavily on me. I’m getting more kinds of support in. I am trying to lurch towards a new normal that has elements of our old normal but with a lot more support. With Noah, we could muddle through ok with just us. I can’t alone. I am trying to find ways to ask for support but it’s hard. Asking makes me vulnerable and that scares me. I am trying to make small adjustments. It’s hard that I am making in-house adjustments and out-of-house adjustments at the same time but it is necessary. It is all necessary. Necessary doesn’t mean fun or exciting.

I’m building in places in my week where I step out to be me. Thursday mornings I am going to yoga classes then I meet some buddies for a cuppa and a blether. It’s fun. I don’t even know where I get all the pieces of language I pick up. They all feel like mine because people have spoken to me using them. They were gifted to me.

I feel Noah’s loss as a stone in my chest. It weighs me down and makes me want to cry and scream. I want to be hiding in a dark room screaming for days. I won’t. I will go take a shower. Then I’ll make a birthday girl a fancy breakfast. Then I’ll go to yoga. Then I’ll talk to my friends and I’ll smile and laugh. I hope I will feel it. I might fake the whole thing. Do the things until the things feel real. Do the things until you can accept that this is your life now. Then learn how to enjoy it.

I don’t feel ready for this.

I feel like I stopped being an adult when I got married. I feel like I was overly parentified as a child and then I barely survived for 7 years as a quasi-adult. Then I turned over a lot of the adulting to Noah. He was our public face in a lot of ways. He did all the hard parts. I may live here forever on Leave to Remain because taking the next step is probably beyond me. He was the adult.

As I look at the future I understand that paying other people to grown up for me is expensive and I don’t have an actual income. I am not a brilliant writer who can suddenly come up with a new book that will change lives and motivate people to be kinder in a whole industry. I am a useless person. I wanted to say bitch. I’m not really a bitch anymore, though. Well, maybe with special people.

I think the list of people I will go off on can be counted on my fingers and none of them live in this country. I don’t think I have been a bitch in my Scottish time.

Who knows what glory the future might bring? I’m going to be scared. That means I will be more reactive and tense and anxious. The whole time I have lived here I have stayed home when my anxiety was high. I hide. I let Noah be the grown up. I let him do the hard things. As my disability level has increased he has done ever more. He really was taking care of me.

I took care of him, too. His body was frail. It had a lot of surgeries and illnesses. When he went down he went down hard for weeks or months. We cooked for each other. I gave him a lot of foot care because he had a weird skin condition.

At some point when we had tiny babies I mildly observed that I looked forward to the future when I would have the time to properly care for his gross feet. He scoffed at me. He laughed. He said he knew that would never happen.

I am really glad I did that for the last 8 years. I am so grateful it has been this long. I started doing it in the new bathroom in California. It was lovely. It was a way to pay attention to him when I was pregnant and sex was awful. In so many ways, our third child has been placed to the side so I can spend more time with Noah. She has never been the centre of my world. Noah has been home her whole life. My life revolved around Noah. I spend time with her. I have a good relationship with her. Noah replaced a lot of my time with her so that I could do independent things. He was more involved with this child. The one that he decided to have because I was getting too uppity. The one that meant our house there was going to be too small in the long run.

Oh this was a fantastic house for lock down. I’m just saying. For a bunch of sensory sensitive autistics lock down wasn’t all bad. Noah was around 24/7. He functioned as a working mother. He was involved in meal making and cleaning and parenting and schooling. I’ve been treating this like a period of time where I was training Noah, MC, and EC to work with me as a semi-commercial kitchen. The times we all got together and really worked we have created magic. It was wonderful. Those were amazing feasts. We love food.

Noah taught me how to eat. He did so much work to broaden and expand my diet. He inventively prepared any weird vegetable I brought into the house. If I didn’t like how it came out, he would research how to fix the problem. I just had to go back and correct verb tense over and over. Now I can’t see because of crying. It’s fine. Noah always loved that I can type without looking at the keyboard. That was his favourite form of flirting. He would make his eyes all smouldery in an ostentatious way. He was never going to let me pretend there was any amount of subtlety to his approach.

Two years ago in my journal I wrote, “The ceilidh was so very fun! I had a lovely time. Today I ran 5.5 miles, biked 5 miles, and danced for hours. I feel fit and strong and free.”

If I could turn back time I would.

Noah, I miss you so much. This is going to suck really hard. But you made sure I will never be desperately poor again. You made sure I have resources to use as I recover. You made sure I have people who love me in my house for the next few decades if not forever. We’ll see. You helped me be a parent they can respect and love. Noah I am so grateful for you. You made me feel like I am indispensable instead of trash. You made me feel valuable and smart and funny and wise.

I spend a lot of time feeling really stupid because I struggle to follow kinds of nuance or jumps in conversation. I don’t have the same context as other people. It is hard for me to understand how other people see the world. It’s a lot of why my pattern matching skills have been such a focus over my life. I’m trying to figure out how and where I can understand things that people are saying based on patterns from my life. I’m lucky that I have a whole lot of different times and periods and people to think about when it comes to understanding behaviour. I just don’t always understand the connection between what I am hearing/seeing compared to what I already know. Noah would translate for me. I was so much smarter when Noah was in the room. Frankly, he was too. He wanted the same translation from me but for different things.

I think of the ballroom dance lessons we took together. He really loved that I interrupted the instructor and gave the teacher really explicit feedback on how to talk about Noah. “No. You cannot say ‘Feel the music’ to him because he will get angry and shut down his ability to listen. Never ever say that to him.” I shielded him in his tender places too. I was happy to be the one who handled being the authority on what happened to all of the bodies in our house medically, including his. I went with him to appointments and he would look to me to answer questions. He didn’t know what was going on with him. He hadn’t been paying attention. I did though. I knew him like he was my obsessive fandom.

I feel guilty for this, but I’ve read through his old letters and emails and daily reports and conversations with friends in DMs. I’m a horrible person. I have always wanted to consume him whole. I wanted everything in his brain to be in my brain. It’s really fucking cool getting this context from other relationships. I’m seeing things I couldn’t 43 days ago because I was giving him privacy so I lacked context. Now I feel sad that I didn’t do more of this before he died. I could have been a better wife.

It is humbling seeing him describe our problem periods to other people. I am so glad he had these people in his life for support. That is wonderful. He had really good friends who strongly advocated in his defense. That makes my heart feel less pain for a moment because I see the ways he was getting what he needed even though I wasn’t giving it to him. He was being seen. I am glad. I wanted him to be seen. I didn’t want him to be all mine. I wanted to share him broadly and diversely with the world because he was so cool he could change peoples lives.

He wanted me to be a cave troll with him. He wanted me to only look at him and he would only look at me. I see how my push for poly was forcing him to come to grips with things from his past that were not about me and I am trying to forgive myself for making him go through that. It’s hollow comfort now to say “It was for his own good.” Was it? I don’t know. We never actually dated anyone. There was the rape. Otherwise we had 8 years of monogamy. He wanted it to be for the rest of our lives.

I feel really really bad about being me. I don’t know if I would have been naturally monogamous without all the rapes but my body is obnoxious. I like people. I like them more than Noah wanted me to like them. It made him sad.

If I could have made a deal with the devil: monogamy or Noah dies I would have picked monogamy. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.

If I could trade my life for his I would.

I can’t. I can’t get him back and it hurts so much. I know what loss feels like. I know I will keep moving. My life is going to be really small though. I can’t sustain a big life without Noah. I am a fraction of a person. I am not who I was. I have no idea who I will grow to be but I will never take up as much space as I did when I was Noah’s wife. I never wanted that much anyway. The trajectory of our life freaked me the fuck out. I had a hard time in Noah’s circles. I had a hard time with Noah’s friends. I felt less than them and that’s complicated. Less educated, less intelligent, less motivated, less driven, less talented, less competent, less capable, less able, less worthy of respect.

It’s why I had to get out of the Valley. It was increasingly overwhelmed with people who were newly arrived and convinced of their superiority. Part of it is my bullshit. Part of it is that tech people are quite often fucking dickheads. I don’t see that being true here–people here who do tech stuff are paid like normal people so they aren’t arrogant fucks. Well, there are arrogant people here. It’s just different. The social culture is so different I really don’t understand what is going on most of the time.

I want to follow Scottish people around and see what their lives look like from the inside because I have no feckin clue.

Today is a climbing day. That will be good. We can all use the exercise. The future is coming whether we want it to or not. We have to be ready.

I want to stay in Inverness. I am scared here, but I am not as scared as I would be in the US. Scale is a very important thing. I am grateful to be in a place with gun control laws. It’s not that there are no guns. There are guns. People shoot. I know people who own and sell guns. But they are sane. They are tracked. If they engage in any antisocial behaviour they entirely lose the right to own the guns. People who have gun licenses are tracked by their car license plate and they are stopped randomly sometimes to make sure they are following every rule to the letter. If they aren’t, bam there goes their gun license. You have to be a model citizen to have the right to own a gun.

I can live with this.

I am afraid of violence because my life has been violent. I have to admit that the amount of violence I’ve experienced here has not been nearly so bad as what happened in the States. Life is not perfect anywhere. I pick this. I pick here.

My bloodline ran West until they reached the far side of the North American continent. They started in the original colonies. 3/4 of my grandparents have ancestry that arrived in first 20 years of North American settlement by British Isles folk. My people were then in California for a while. Not the 8 generations my mother claimed. We were not people who settled and put down roots very well. The way my people jumped then jumped then jumped again speaks to them not thriving in the places they picked. I have to wonder about that.

I want to thrive. I don’t want to barely survive. I am going to struggle with my guilt around that. I definitely have a piece of me that is struggling with how disloyal I will feel as I take step towards embracing being alive. He needs me to go on for the kids. I can’t do that if I feel I must demonstrate frozen horror out of loyalty.

People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime and you don’t know which until you die. What fucking bitter words those are now. I wanted him for my whole life. We don’t get to choose. Life decides for us. I loved Noah. I will always love Noah. I owe him continuing. I have children to lead. I can’t do that if I am wallowing in my pain. I have to stuff that pain into a backpack I carry around with me. I can let it out in brief moments to gasp and sob and curl around the core of myself. Then I’ll nod and put it back in the pack and I’ll keep fucking moving. I don’t really have a choice. I have less choice now than ever before.

My survival has gone from “optimal” to “mandatory”. Now Mama wants to talk. That’s nice.

What is the point?

I’ve been awake for a few hours. I’ve folded laundry, another load is almost done. Did dishes. Tidied up the school supply area. I’m having a hard time. It all feels so silly and stupid. What is the point of my life now? I keep the set tidy so my kids and I can be ghosts moving around on it? I have no future plans beyond “I’m not allowed to die.” I don’t hope for anything.

It’s weird when people tell me that I could have a chapter two relationship. As if Noah wasn’t chapter three of my life.

The only thing that feels vaguely like hope this morning is wanting to grow more of my food. I want to need less from outside my property. I think I have enough clothing and material that if I get into the kinds of sewing that visually interest me I may never need to buy clothes again. Lots of thread and needles though.

I really wonder if I will ever paint again. Will I finish the house? I’m not sure. I’m still feeling paranoid about being kicked out of the country. Why try harder to create something that won’t be permitted to last? Other people would move into my house and paint everything white again like I was never here.

Last night a buddy observed that she has come to believe that I have actually been cursed. It has felt true my whole life. I feel really bad about having three kids right now but I would be dead if I didn’t have them. Noah wasn’t enough. Now I find out that the kids are enough to keep me working, but my heart is dead. I know I do love them somewhere buried under the numb but I have no idea when I will feel it again. I don’t feel love right now. I feel despair and emptiness and agony. I have been in pain my whole life and it’s just getting worse not better. I thought it was getting better. Then I lost Noah. It turns out Noah was the better I’m going to have in this life.

I should be fair: I’m financially secure. He gave me that. I have three wonderful children to take care of but I’m not doing great at that. We are all safe. We are eating. We are exercising. I’m not a lot of fun though. I am absolutely sobbing through a lot of the day.

The escapism I found when I was young to avoid feeling pain like this was to go find a rando for sex. It mostly worked and wasn’t any more dangerous than my dating life. It’s not an option now. I don’t trust anyone and my body is fragile and I can’t expose my kids to risk.

Noah and I have only gone this long without sex three times: the births of our children. Physically this feels awful. It’s like if someone was used to getting up and running 5 miles in 45 minutes every day and then they manage to pull a hip fracture and they cannot even walk. I feel muscles in my body atrophying. It took years of work with a pelvic floor physical therapist to deal with my vaginismus. Right this minute I am afraid that it is going to be a massive problem again and I live at the ass end of nowhere and I won’t get support for this problem.

All of the things I once aspired to do are ash in my mouth. I am so afraid that I will never actually feel loved again. I’m afraid of what this is going to do to me. I feel like I am afraid of everything.

I just need one

There is no doubt in my mind that if I didn’t have kids I would die today. I am so completely not interested in a future without Noah. I can’t even get my head around it. No. I don’t want it.

My kids keep telling me how much they love me. Then I think of my mother, sitting alone because all of her children hate her and have left her. I don’t feel like I deserve better. I haven’t done what she did, I did other things. I don’t feel better than her.

I feel like it is time to clear everything out of the house and spend the rest of my life wandering with a home. I don’t belong here. I don’t belong anywhere. I feel like my presence on this earth is a curse. I feel like I have been cursed. I will bring pain with me everywhere I go and I can’t stop it.

I don’t have hope for a better future. I have exhaustion and weariness and the desire to stop. Stop moving, stop breathing, stop fighting.

Instead of hope what I have is duty. I brought these people into the world. I won’t leave them. I won’t stay because there are three. I will stay as long as there is one. I just need one. I signed the contract on the debt of care I own them. I will honour it. I don’t need to feel good or happy or hope or love.

I just need duty.

I started doing this so long ago

I’m sitting here making spreadsheets. I vastly prefer making my own in a bullet journal to typing all of it. I like having the scratch work spread around like a web of supporting numbers. It eases my thinking process.

I want to figure out how I can financially manage to stay in this house for the sake of the kids. This is the last home they shared with their father. I need to plan around this being our home. They want me to. I want to. I want us to be secure in this home base. I want that to be Plan A. I think I can do it.

I will never have tech bro money again so I need to make conservative choices. I need to cobble a little here and a little there and cut a lot there. The next three years will be the hardest as I pay off the mortgage. After that I think I can manage ok.

I remember doing this when I was very young, definitely by the time I was 12 though I’m not sure how long before that I started. I would sneak into my mother’s files and I would find the copy of the paperwork for my dog bite settlement. What am I guaranteed to get? How can I make it work on that amount of money? How can I make it to the future I want to have with only these resources? Of course I haven’t followed the plans I made when I was that young. How could I have dreamed how much larger my life would end up? I couldn’t. This is still just a starting point. My life won’t be as rigid as this table indicates.

If the US government doesn’t fall, if Social Security keeps paying out to dependents, I think I see a path forward that won’t be particularly painful but also won’t be lavish and what we have come to expect. Travel is not going to be a part of my life for the rest of the time I have young children. I won’t have extra money. I’m going to be house poor because keeping this thing in good nick is expensive. I will have to ask my inlaws for help, but not nearly as much as I feared when the thought first occurred to me. I’m basically asking them for child support until the kids are grown and then I will figure it out.

It will be around when I turn 55. That will be a whole new chapter of my life. I will shift my income sources entirely that year. I have a plan. Until then I think I can ignore all the investment stuff and let it grow. So far I have exceeded my plans, in most ways, by a great margin. At least financially.

There are so many pieces of this that are out of my hands. I am scared of the future that I don’t control. I know so little about what is coming.

I was trying to write emails to my inlaws and I was crying. Then my sweetie came over and cuddled me and sang to me.

“You don’t need to cry, you are with your family. You don’t need to cry. Cause you’re with your family and that’s never a case to cry. Don’t cry, no matter what struck you. Cause you’re always with your family. Cause you’re always with your friends. Oooooooooh ooooooooh oooooooh.” It repeated a bit more in places, but this is what Shortie sang me this morning.

I know that I am sad and that I will walk in a stilted way for the rest of my life. But she is right that I can’t spend all my time crying. I have to smile because I am with my family and they need to see that being near them makes me smile. They have to see that. They need it. They need to believe that they have that power. Even if I am lying to them. Other people won’t be. Down the line having these kinds of co-regulating and connecting skills will make a big difference for their adult lives. It isn’t their fault that I am so broken.

They are the glue that has put the shards of me back together. Noah may have done a lot of the work of helping me assemble pieces and organise the mosaic but the kids were the glue.

I have a different feeling in my chest. It’s been there for a few days. I usually feel like I have pop rocks in my chest. My anxiety is a vinegar/baking soda volcano that never ceases. Now it is different. It is a steady and insistent pulling. I must go forward. I must continue. I do not look for happiness or to be loved, I am loved. That’s sorted. Move forward. I have people to care for. I don’t feel capable of providing that care–I feel half dead. I feel like I cannot think or act at all but I look at my crossed off to do list and think that I’ve actually gotten a fair bit done. A lot more will happen in this new month.

I did not finish the paperwork. Fuck. I tried. A lot of this takes a ton of time for each turn around. Some of these emails say they will get back to me in 10-15 business days. That’s quite a lag. I did my end about as fast as I could. Now I wait. I still have some stuff to do. I also have a birthday party to get ready for. A little girl is turning 7 and that doesn’t happen every day. She needs to know she is special and loved. A lot of the paperwork will be put to the side for about a week around her birthday. She will be the whole focus.

Today is Imbolc. I want to start seeds. I have assembled all the materials. I just need to bring it inside and do it. These are hot-needing seeds. Some will hide in my dark, warm boiler room. Or the bathroom with the always-on radiator.

It’s hard to commit to the work of starting seeds right now. It sounds way too much like hope and it’s not that I have hope. It’s that I would seriously like to A) stop filling the bird feeders because avian flu is such a bad thing right now and B) have enough flowers and other edibles that I’m taking care of the local wildlife anyway C) start supplementing our diet more seriously with stuff we grow. I think it’s going to matter. I think the US going haywire and the UK leaning towards nationalist grossness means food chain stuff will be impacted.

I’m scared in so many ways on so many levels.

I’m also doing a lot of stretching. My body is unhappy about the change in activity levels. I miss running with Noah. I miss going to yoga with Noah. I miss going on bike rides with Noah. I miss everything. I miss him showing up to join me at 9:30 as a reminder to be ready for bed by 10. I loved the smile he had every night. He was excited to see me. He was delighted. It was the highlight of his day. The kids were in bed and I was all his for a while.

I miss being someone’s favourite part of the day every single day.

I want to feel alive. Instead I am frozen into inaction. I feel like I have nowhere to go and nowhere to grow. I know that is a feeling and not a fact. Someday I will grow again but it won’t be like it was. It will never be like it was. I will never have Noah pushing me, driving me, caring for me, encouraging me, supporting me. He was the scaffolding around me that allowed me to be fixed safely.

Noah gave me the only safety I ever had. The only stability. The only consistency. Now I have to be the only source of that for the kids. It scares me so much I feel like I can’t breathe. It’s funny. I was running one of my freak out worries past EC and he said “The last problem we will ever have is making friends. We show up and work. We listen to people. We show up and give support when people need help. We will be fine in this life.”

I like the self identity my kids have.

I need to stop running my worries past him. This is not cool.

There are a lot that I don’t want to write on the internet. And now it is time to sleep.

Patterns and cycles

Folks keep asking how the kids are doing.

Shorty asked me if something was wrong with her because she isn’t as sad as the rest of us. I said, of course not, she is simply young enough that “forever” doesn’t mean anything to her yet. She hasn’t yet understood in her body what this loss means, but eventually she will and she will have waves of sadness for her whole life. It doesn’t mean anything about her that she is not fully understanding that when she’s about to turn 7. Her brain can’t see that far yet and it’s not supposed to. This is normal. Mostly she is being extra cuddly and loving with everyone. Frankly, it looks a little bit like fawning behaviour to me. She had a tremendous loss and now she’s trying to lock down/ensure that she doesn’t have anyone else leave her life.

Luckily she’s my daughter through and through so I’m not worried about the fawning stuff becoming her whole life approach. She is absolutely still as prickly as a cactus, as she should be.

Middle Child is quiet and withdrawn a bit more than usual. I’m trying to have cuddle time with them, but they are having a hard time with physical contact. They want it enough to grab and demand it from people who are resisting but they also can’t handle being touched a lot of the time. Again, it’s fascinating watching pieces of my behaviour set pop up in the kids. MC is the least verbal of my kids (hilariously still far above average) and the most introverted. We are crying together and talking a lot and sometimes we can get the oxytocin flowing enough to feel a little bit better together.

Eldest Child is, as usual, waffling between trying to over-function and feeling like absolute crap. So far his health issues track the most like mine. Like, I get why the NHS has trouble with someone like me who shows up late in life with a lot of medical trauma and little written record. It’s interesting watching them react in real time to his symptoms. His body acts like mine did at his age. Only I ate less nutritious food so most of my symptoms were worse. He’s wearing a heart rate monitor because the doctors are noticing how dramatic his symptoms are.

Oh, this is what happens when you go through life at a normal pace getting observed as things develop. It is different.

EC is trying to step up more than usual and I keep telling him to knock it off. He is a kid who needs to be taken care of for a while because he goes through the worst trauma of his life. I am deeply aware that, of my children, he is the one who idolises me the most and who *wants* to emulate me the most. So I am being careful to model rest. I am being careful to model that I don’t have to be perfectly strong in every moment to be strong enough overall.

He’s just barely starting to draw again, I’m glad he is finding his way back to the things that are his comfort. It’s been hard watching him for most of the last month as he sat in a daze unable to focus.

We are all manifesting physical symptoms of grief (and we caught a bug) and we are all off our feed. We are all working hard on trying to reduce our quantities when we cook. Noah ate almost as much as the rest of us put together sometimes. He had an enormous appetite. It’s a miracle he didn’t weigh 400lbs. He did a lot more exercise than was probably obvious (because I forced him to) and his brain really did burn through calories at an accelerated rate.

MC and I have dropped weight. I weigh less than I did when I graduated from high school. Good thing I wasn’t skinny then. I’m continuing to watch my body hollow out as I add in more exercise without eating as much as usual. I’m eating all I can. I can usually manage two small meals. My apron is receding. (That awesome flap of belly skin that you have left after losing a lot of weight.) It feels like my body is erasing the evidence of carrying Noah’s babies and that feels really weird and hard. I think I have genuinely stayed a lot fatter over the last 18 years because my body knew Noah wanted me to. He liked how I looked. Now it’s like I don’t need it anymore.

I had two really helpful calls yesterday, one with my Scottish solicitor and I figured out how I can get almost all the rest of the fussy UK paperwork off of my plate. It leaves me with only the disability paperwork and that’s quite enough, thanks. The second was with my brother in law. That call warmed my heart in so many ways.

First, it was really lovely just to get to look at the shape of his face. He looks like Noah and that made me less sad. He was warm and gentle and humorous with the sad. It was a balm to speak with him and share thoughts and feelings. I think we will talk again.

I really am grateful that I have gotten to be part of the Gibbs family. It hasn’t always been an easy connection–we didn’t all get along right away. We have found ways to relate and respect and speak with each other. I get the very strong impression that all of us have put a fair bit of effort into trying to be understanding and kind. I think the proof is in the pudding. They are not abandoning me without Noah being around.

Here’s a “funny” story. When I first met Noah, before I had told him much about my life, he told me that he came from an extremely abusive background. I asked questions like: was he hit often? Called names? Sexually assaulted? Were his parents drug addicts or alcoholics? Were the police frequently involved? The answer to every question was no. I scratched my head and asked him to give examples.

He lived with traumatised people. That’s an ACE point. (www.acestoohigh.com)

I have often mused that Noah did the best he could to marry the woman who most reminded him of his mother. I can see the reasons behind why my mother and his mother had the struggles they had as parents. I read a lot of books and did decades of therapy to get to where I am now. Those women did not have the benefit of such resources.

I continue to be staggered by my growing awareness of what a privilege it was to be a highly traumatised child/young person in California in the 1990’s-2010’s. I did not understand how special that experience was. I did not know how lucky I was. I would have died anywhere else because they would have said I didn’t deserve as much help as I needed. California said, “Ok kid if you need an ocean of support, here’s your wave.”

California paid a lot of money for my brain. Holy fucking shit do I have a lot of compassion for my mother and my mother in law for what they went through and the complete lack of support they received when they were young.

It was nice talking to Noah more over the years about his family history. It was *amazing* that we got to visit his grandmother near the end of her life so I could ask her for lots of stories about her life. My children and I listened. This is their history. This is how their family grew. My grandmother in law was a hard woman. She was a survivor to the bone and she was not gentle about how she did that.

My kids have been talking a lot about what they are carrying forward from the people they have lost. Admittedly, they did not have as close of a relationship with their uncle as we all would have liked so that loss is more abstract for them. I can see my children specifically creating their own place in the stories from their families.

We are survivors. We get through very difficult things even if our bodies are crumbling and in terrible pain while we do them. We are people who reach for healing even when it feels hard because we have seen the results of what happens when people do not. We know in our bones the ruptures and losses that divide us from feeling loved.

I was really glad that I got to visit my grandmother in law at the end and ask her to tell me about the pain from her childhood. I understand why she was so hard. I understand how hard she felt compelled to run to get away from the people who had hurt her so much. I understand why she isolated herself from adult support then demanded it from her children, often so she could go help other people’s children.

I think of my grandmother bringing in foster children and neglecting my mother because my mother’s needs weren’t as important as the needs of those other children who had suffered more. I think of my own experience moving 50 times as a child through more than 30 foster homes.

How are my children doing? Shockingly well all things considered. I am grateful that the requirement for school no longer exists. I don’t have to force them to conform to a huge number of demands. We get to calm the fuck down and be slow and easy for months. Enough exercise to keep our bodies from degrading. Enough outside time and social contact so we don’t get super depressed. A lot of rest time.

My kids like to grin and say that if you measure by how things are going from generation to generation they might not even mess their kids up at all because I’ve only done a tiny bit of damage. This amuses me. I don’t think they should be evaluating how much damage I’ve caused yet. Time will tell. They are still in it with no perspective.

Having a parent who has mental illness is an ACE point. I knew it going in. I knew it deep in my bones. I knew that my tendency towards erratic behaviour was the single most dangerous trait I bring to the table as a parent. Noah became my stability and the person who told me no for a lot of my harebrained idiocy. He kept me from over-working myself to the point of being a bitch. He didn’t want me turning into his grandmother.

How are my kids doing? They are living with the realities of their brains and bodies and what that means for absorbing trauma.

My kids keep saying things like, “He always did seem too good to be real.” But he was, he was real. I wish so many things. I wish he had been able to reclaim the part of his soul he killed off in boyhood. I wish he had been able to see his family the way I did but that’s not fair. Of course he can’t have my perspective, he didn’t have my life.

His family look like people to me. People are annoying sometimes. Meh, but they are trying hard to be good and as the years pass everyone has grown as people and they are more kind. It is hard sometimes that everyone has their own “What I got was too much” metric. This is why folks hate the Oppression Olympics. No one else wants to be held to my perspective. They need to have their own.

It continues to bear down on me like a heavy weight that I cannot turn to my mother ever again in this life. She really did cross the too much line. It’s not all her fault and that sucks but she never stopped doing things that were really damaging. My in-laws have. It has been weird navigating that with Noah.

I loved talking to my brother in law because he reminds me so much of Noah. I loved his laugh and the way he described things. He’s a really great story teller. It runs in their family. So many good things run in their family. I don’t fully understand why Noah had the feelings he did. I genuinely don’t. I wasn’t there when he was small. I don’t understand his story.

Living the way we do all together like a pile of sleepy dogs I am deeply aware of how much Noah and my kids do not have my understanding of how life works. When I feel annoyed for a bit for feeling taken for granted I try to have a giggle. I created this sense of entitlement. That’s kinda awesome.

Look at how far our families have come. We made children who have echoes of trauma but until now, not a lot of their own. They feel allowed to stumble through life until they fully come back to life. We are being fairly gentle with each other. I’m not being perfect. It was noted that I have regressed. It’s true. Part of that is I am back to the full time body load of parenting I had back when this behaviour was previously observed. For most of the time since then Noah has been a more active parent.

I am doing my utmost to try to surrender to the understanding that I am practically back on baby duty because that amount of co-regulation and oxytocin building is most of why Shorty is doing as well as she is. Her bucket is being filled constantly. It’s hard on my nervous system though. I need the exercise. I don’t really know how to regulate off the kids. I have never allowed myself to. I have always done that from Noah. This is so hard.

I have millions of words in my head but if Noah can’t read them, what is even the point? I wrote before I met Noah. I wrote from when I was small. Hell, I went to graduate school for writing before I met him. I am not a writer because Noah declared me to be one.

I do believe that I have only created the art I have created because Noah encouraged and coaxed me into doing it. I never felt justified in doing it for myself. I learned how to do it because I was bored at home with the kids. They watched me go through trial and error and adapting and having to start again. They watched my mistakes and watched me shrug and say “Such is life” and move on.

That feels almost how they are trying to handle this death. Of course this terrible thing happened. Life is full of wonder and beauty and death and suffering. The good is so good partly because of the contrast with how painful life is. I keep telling myself that it is ok that I don’t have hope yet. I have duty. Duty will keep me moving forward. I will have hope again. It’s not fair to pretend or to act like I feel something I don’t. That would fuck up my kids. There are layers to it, but I need to be some level of open. They need to see it for them to feel permission to have the same openness. It’s not always my turn to be open; I STFU and listen quite a lot. That’s, in fact, most of the relationship.

I am very clear that I am here to be the witness to their lives, they are not here to be bit players in my drama. I got to witness the last almost 21 years of Noah’s life. I am really sad I didn’t get more time. I’m glad I was there in the ways that Noah wanted me to be even though it soured my early relationship with my in-laws. I set some harsh boundaries early on because he asked me to. He wanted them set but he didn’t feel capable of doing it himself.

It was really nice hearing my brother in law talk about how for the last 15 years his relationship with Noah has been good in ways it hadn’t been before. Both sides grew up. Both sides made their peace with the hand they were dealt in life in different ways but they appreciated their similarities and common traits. I think things would have continued to improve. Noah really was finding his way to deal with his inner alienation.

I did something I shouldn’t have done. Noah always told me that something was only a sin if you weren’t willing to admit it. I went and read one of Noah’s chat logs with one of his friends. I knew this was the person he had most leaned on for his side support for marriage challenges. That was an experience. I’ve also gone through years of daily reports of what he did to be a good or shitty person that day. Should I have done this? This is like collecting the letters of the dead for study.

All of his criticisms and complaints were fair and valid. I have no rancor for the way his friend was defensive of him. It’s lovely to see. I’m glad he had a #TeamKrissyShouldBeNicerToYou. That’s excellent. I agree. I should have been. I was as nice as I could be as much as I could be and I know that is never really enough. Not when you are walking around with the kind of attachment trauma Noah had. Eventually I believe I will forgive myself for not being able to subsume into him enough to fully fill that ache he had.

I think he would have talked to people less and he would have grown less if I had tried harder. Would that have actually been better? I’m really glad other people got to benefit from him existing. I’m glad I wasn’t selfish and small about him. I’m glad that I pushed him so hard to fully execute his plans. Don’t start shit and quit. He really loved being held to account.

As much as he parented me I parented him. It was a really interesting dynamic. We talked about a lot of the specific ways we needed this support form each other. It was conscious, deliberate, and highly considered.

When I was younger I did a lot to seek out people who would play parental roles in my life. I needed a lot of guidance and mentorship. It is fascinating feeling in my body that I am not open to such a thing again. It is the same thing as when I had my third child I had this huge no fucking way am I going through that shit again. My first labour was 49 hours. My second was 9 days and I had a hemorrhage and nearly died. Neither of those made me feel done. I still felt called to have another child.

Humans are narrative seeking creatures. The timing and placement of our third child was a truly magnificent layered cluster of “it was foretold”.

For many years I patterned off my oldest child; as he went through ages I would have flashbacks and abreactions and struggle with the difference between what he experienced and what I experienced. It was viscerally difficult on a daily basis. My oldest is almost as old as I was when my father died.

I can’t pattern off of him anymore. He’s going in directions I never did and I can’t follow or lead. Middle child I also can’t pattern after because they are at that stage where they must push me away with both arms. It’s developmental. So here I am going through trauma mostly focusing on my youngest.

Her story is not like mine, but she is going to have a hole in her life. My job is to model how to fill that hole without being compulsive, self-destructive, or desperate. My job is also to keep the lessons from her father active in our life. His influence really will live on. We all want very much to honour him.

I truly never expected to spend a lot of my life valorizing a dead father. That was not on my FML BINGO card. He’s really worth it though. Time to catch my second wave of sleep.

I don’t understand how I keep finding out I’m optimistic

I thought I could get the paperwork done this week on my end. Cue hysterical laughter track. It’s going to take a lot longer and be a lot more complicated. I feel really overwhelmed and scared and like I don’t know how I am going to get through this. Noah dying is going to be more expensive than I thought. We weren’t as close to set up as we thought. This is going to suck.

It will end. But it won’t be done in January. I will hope for February seeing the completion, because goodness this is painful and awful to do. Also: most bank accounts are frozen and that scares me. It won’t stay true forever. It’s normal. I have run money for a while. It’s just terrifying because it’s one more thing that feels out of my control.

Gosh if that isn’t thew whole theme of my life recently: I’m not in control.

I’m really struggling.

I feel like I reach for him dozens of times a day to remember over and over again that I never get to feel good like that again. I am not destined to be loved all of my days. I’m not good enough.

Well, that’s not fair. My kids are definitely going to love me for the rest of my life, as are my friends. My friendships have a habit of being tumultuous. Noah was my rock, my stability, my emotional security relationship. I don’t expect to ever trust anyone enough to have a secure attachment again. I need to go through my life with the clear and present knowledge that I am not allowed to need someone to be ok. Never again because they all go. I will always be left. Or I will leave, cause hey my mom is alive.

People keep asking if my family is coming to help. My friends are the closest thing I have to family. Friends who I, mostly, don’t talk to all that often because our lives are very separate. I grew away from everyone. I did what Noah wanted. I tried to learn how to only cling to him. I’m having a lot of mixed feelings about every choice I’ve made over the past 20 years. I wish I had picked Noah every time. I wish I had learned to cling more tightly earlier so he wouldn’t have had to spend so many years feeling insecure and sad.

I don’t know how to embrace my future. Luckily I have a good 11 years before I need to think about it.

I don’t like me that much

I’ve been a serious asshole to one particular person since Noah died. This is a woman I have had a contentious relationship with for going on 22 years. Us interacting like oil and water isn’t new but I am less restrained this time than I ever have been in the past. In the past I always knew that my Bestie and my husband carried a torch of affection for this woman and that stilled the worst of my tongue.

Not carrying grudges and being willing to forgive people is a really strong cornerstone of my sense of self identity. Savagely reading this woman for filth across several different platforms is not a thing that a nice person would do. I am not always a nice person. Especially when a particular person keeps trying me decade after decade.

I feel bad that I went off publicly but I also don’t. The person I used to vent my spleen to so that I could be civilised is gone and she fucking tried me 3 days after he died. I get my ass handed to me on the regular. When I fuck around I find out. Other people get to sometimes as well.

I don’t owe everyone nice every day no matter how hard they poke me with sticks.

I think I actually got “Be nice as long as you can and then be effective” from Noah. It’s fine for me to want to be nice. It’s great if I can get things to work out that way. Yay! Everyone wins!

I work hard to not be a raging cunt. I really do. I walk away from most fights, hell I run. Sometimes I am a bit of a cunt.

Noah and I spent a lot of time talking over the years about whether or not I should have backed out to give more space for other people, particularly some of the women who are whining about how I stole him. One of those conversations in particular, not that long ago, involved him curling his body around mine and sobbing about how desolate he would feel to lose time with me for other people. He would feel empty and sad and lost.

When I think about the ways our varying attachment traumas wrapped around one another, I know what he meant. I am going to feel that overwhelming sucking black hole for the rest of my life. I am going to spend time with other people and I am going to smile politely and accept the scraps that they have to share. I am always going to know what it means to be filled with an absolute tsunami of want and need and love and understanding. Only now the tide had receded and will never come again.

It’s really weird. I am around the age I should have been when my father died, if my life had anything like a natural course. Instead he died when I was 17. Noah and I had a weird co-raising-each-other relationship for 18 years. He raised me, I guess. I feel cursed.

I feel horribly sad about the future I am going to have. I am going to be a horrible person for all time because I am going to compare and that’s not fair. Noah was not an average person and I have no right in any way to think about him when I am dealing with anyone else on any level. It is unkind for all involved. I feel really bad that I am like this. I will always understand the magnitude of what I lost. Noah was special.

Noah gave me unconditional love. He is the only person who has ever done so. In a much more limited fashion, he gave that feeling to other people too. He was bizarrely messianic. He made people feel loved and important and the person he wanted to spend all of his time feeling loved by was me.

I feel incredibly ashamed of having ever done anything other than adore him. I feel like I displayed a shameful amount of self absorption. I feel sad. I don’t even actually feel a massive amount of self loathing. I feel like I should, but I don’t. I’m tired.

I’m sad. I have to keep walking and it doesn’t matter if I am good or if I made the right decisions or if I would do it all again the same way. I have to keep moving. I don’t have to like it.

I do have to not loathe myself. I have to act like Noah picked a good person to marry and to be the mother of his children. I need to be the person I want my kids to grow up with. That’s a complicated thing.

I knew who that was when I had Noah. What do I do now? Pam is leaving soon, as she should because she needs to get on with her life. More people are coming, but they won’t have the answers either. No one does. This is a riddle I have to solve all by myself. Who am I going to grow up to be? I don’t know yet. I never wanted to meet myself post-Noah. Definitely not at 43. Oh it sucks so hard. I feel some fucking self pity right now and I think it is ok that I do.

Happily Ever After is over and I’m left as a shitty, petty, stupid bitch who is still slap fighting with someone from over 20 years ago. I fucking suck.

So I blocked her. I never block people. It’s a policy. This time I broke it. I genuinely want her to go have a good life. Away from me and I’ll never look again. I need to move forward.

I need to stop having my nose rubbed in how much I never deserved him in the first place. It doesn’t matter at all if I deserved him. He wanted me. I wanted him. I kept him until his body gave out. I gave everything I could.

This hurts in waves of nausea and warmth and cold and rage and emptiness and gasping sobs. It doesn’t hurt in the way that never knowing what being loved hurts though. There are rests between the waves where I remember what it was like to be loved like that. Times when I remember that even if my whole life is in the rear view, I was loved. I was absolutely loved and adored and someone’s best girl.

There is the very real chance that I am going to spend most of the rest of my life alone once my kids are adults. I can’t imagine I will get easier to put up with. I will have friends, but my life is going to be small. I will always be conscious of the mask I have to wear.

I will never be known like that again. I will have a future, possibly, with someone. What I will never really share is my past. It is over. My past is a closed book. Sure, some people might visit once in a while to remind me that once upon a time I earned their love.

It’s different though. We have grown in different directions. We shared only bits in the past.

I’m really sad. I liked being loved the way that Noah loved me. It is very hard knowing that I will spend the rest of my life feeling sad and missing him. He was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Good thing he gave me the second and third and fourth best things to happen to me.

I didn’t get everything for the whole of my life. I haven’t had a lot of good years. Most of the good ones were with Noah. I am glad I got to see what a happy family looks like. I get to carry on creating one even though I don’t feel very happy.

I will again someday. It will always have this shadow though. I wish Noah was holding me. I want Noah. I want Noah and it is hard to want anything else when I can never have him again.

I don’t know where this will go

I don’t know how to get started today. I don’t have a plan or a bunch of sentences I have been rehearsing in my head so I don’t forget them. I’m just sitting here listening to Taylor Swift sing about how she’s alone and always has been. Something bloomed from writing in her room.

I feel almost like I conjured Noah from thin air. I wrote about someone like him. He transformed himself over and over for me over the years. He would accept any feedback seriously and try to become what I needed. He was a fucking unicorn, who happened to be obsessed with The Last Unicorn. Oh gosh I am becoming more like Molly Grue. Noah loved her so deeply. He didn’t cry over much, but sometimes this book could make him cry.

Mostly the only times I saw Noah cry were when he was showing me how afraid he was of losing me. The first time I did not treat it as the gift it was. I was younger and stupid and cruel. I didn’t know what I was seeing. It took a while. When it happened again I was not cruel. I held my love and told him that the idea of losing him hurt me just as much. I didn’t want to lose him.

Oh. I just found the scream. I guess I needed to go to the studio. That’s fantastic to know. That was such a big scream it necessitated a bathroom break. That’s some good screaming. But I’m not coming back in the same headspace.

I still have the same Taylor Swift song because I like a focus I can bounce off of. I have felt alone for most of my life. I also know I was passed hand to hand by people who loved me. Many of them gave me poison with the love but the love was there.

I’ve been reading “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents”. I feel like I’ve got my shit shockingly together by the metrics of this book–yeah I see my failure modes. I see my parents. I see Noah’s pattern with his patterns. I’m having interesting conversations with his mom about his dad.

Noah had a very different impression of his father than everyone else. He left at 17 and it took years before he understood on return visits that he simply knew a lot more. He imprinted on the child view “My parent is Godlike” and it was a very hard fall for him.

I see it coming with my son. I’ve been warning him for years that it is coming and he shouldn’t get upset when it comes to pass. It’s natural. It’s inevitable and I feel fucking proud that he is going to pass me. I don’t want to slow him down in any way. Out fucking run me, kid. Go. Go. Go.

I don’t think I’ve been as alone as I thought. I have this amazing web of people in my life. I wasn’t always alone. I wasn’t always getting the intensity of connection I needed in order to feel fully accepted but exactly one person has sustained that at great cost. I need to accept the lesser kinds of love and just be grateful for what I get. Noah treated me like a priceless work of art.

The trouble is, I mostly wanted to be that because he was looking at me and I didn’t want to shame him. I didn’t want to bring him down to my level. I tried as hard as I could to climb up to him.

I don’t know if I will ever give a flying fuck what anyone thinks of me ever again. I will put on the correct uniform for the kind of role I have to play to get whatever I need done. Then I will come home and take it off.

I wonder how small of a fraction of me people will see going forward. Without Noah, most of me is useless, extraneous, and a waste of energy and resources.

My old lawyer (who did not and can not give me legal advice due to retirement) told me that I need to learn how to love myself enough to make up for him. She said that was the most important thing she learned after a painful separation. Her situation is quite different but the thinking is sound.

I am not on my own. Not only do I have one semi-dependent/semi-independent kid, I have two fully dependent kids. I have access to family resources that will guarantee my security. I won’t be lavishly wealthy but I will be safe, forever.

I’m not on my own. I pick people up as I go through life. I integrate them into the patterns I build of lives and experiences and time spent. I don’t, in general, tend to spend most of my time alone. I have created a life where that has to be stolen from the wee hours of the morning while other people sleep. When I’m really depressed I withdraw a lot. That’s getting ever less acceptable without major supports in place.

I am going to say yes to the people who are offering help. I am going to believe people when they make an offer. I am not in a position where people do it because they have to. They want to.

I have to say yes even though that is scary. Even though not everyone will turn out to be nice. Even though sometimes I will be disappointed. I have to accept that it’s ok for me to have needs right now. I’m not doing something wrong.

I’m fitting into society in the only way that is available. I never was going to be normal.

I am feeling enormous gratitude that my children don’t have to go into school. I’ve been very afraid of that. I was going to fake my good cheer and be upbeat about it. I am glad I don’t have to. This will be hard, but hard in a way that will cause us to dig deeper in the specific places we were already sending down roots. This is better for us. We can engage at our own level instead of trying to fit into a mold. We are not plastic. We are bespoke.

The thing that hit me like a freight train last week was, “My baby will not know what it means to grow up free.” Well, bollocks to that. My oldest is free in his soul in a way I have rarely encountered in a human being. He has some dings and scars from his brief time in school but by and large he has already matured enough to understand it for what it was. He is like his dad. He is willing to go sparkle and be fun just by existing and people respond to that. The right people. He’s building his community in his ways and I’m thrilled.

Middle Child has found access to several different community activities that are helping them feel confident and like people really value them being there. That’s fantastic. They have learned ways to manage their selective mutism and flooding when they are out in public in stressful situations. They do need a lot of downtime to recharge: their favourite way is very long walks. I have no complaints. It has been wonderful, and a blessing to watch them grow through some of the roughest patches of their life with a bulwark of overwhelming love and support. They are the kind of kid who wouldn’t feel loved in most families. They are hard in ways that specifically challenge parental authority. I would have been beaten for their behaviour. Wait, I was beaten for behaviour just like theirs. As they are cresting over to 14.5 they are a lot more calm and self aware. They know how to deflect and avoid explosions. They know how to take time to prepare their body for the process of dealing with humans. They have a lot of useful to understand that a sudden feeling of anger might mean that they will need to set a boundary, but they should not attack. They know how to breathe and calm down their bodies.

What the fuck else is the goal?

“Qualifications.”

I think they have the whole rest of their lives to earn qualifications and exactly one easy developmental cycle for learning the skill of being secure. It happens most easily and most successfully in childhood when it should happen. It takes a lot extra for some people to feel secure. If that need is met when they are children then they tend to not still need it as adults. People who are brushed off as children are the ones who spend the rest of their lives trying to find it through romance.

I’m having so many feelings. Probably because I finally hit skip on the playlist. Now other feelings come up. Ha. Oh man, Teenage Dream. That was a big favourite for Noah. He felt like that about me. I felt like that about him. We did run away and only looked back for funeral.

His body changed shape a fair bit last year because I was dragging him to exercise with me more. I freaking loved having so much of his time. He was getting really fit and hot and he was wearing a lot of 501 jeans because they uhh grab my attention. One of the only pinchy things I never object to. I’ll use my teeth if I have to.

There was someone in this world who could not get enough of me. There was no such thing as enough. He never wanted me to go away. He never wanted a bunch of space. Sometimes I needed it for my processing. Other than work he would have preferred to have one body part touching me around the clock. (Usually just a hand or foot.)

He loved me with the same fierce clingy need of my first child and that has struck me over and over and over. He really struggled when I was touched out at first and I couldn’t be a sex machine while dealing with a child who wanted to have their mouth on my nipple 24/7. It was really hard.

Knowing what I know about his mother and her mother and the “wisdom of the age”. I bet Noah screamed as a baby and was left in a cot. I just about lost my mind with how much my kid demanded. I paid the price because Noah and I wanted to make children like us and then love them so much, all around the clock, for the whole of their childhood then maybe they would turn into people who didn’t feel like no one could ever love them?

Instead my older two children grin and say, “I’m a niche interest and I’m good with that.”

My baby is still in the jagged years. She is going to need a lot of very bespoke care and experiences to come through this with her sense of self intact and still full of love. It’s going to be hard, mostly on me because I’m going to have to do a lot of it alone when I was really really burnt out on doing most of it. Do you know what Noah did with a solid 4 hours of every day after he got laid off? He played with Shorty. He went wherever she wanted to go with her. He was at her disposal.

I found him so fucking attractive.

Seeing that put a lot in my metaphoric bucket. I got to spend all day watching the Daddy I never got to have. It feels really unfair that I don’t get to see more of this. I had been starting to join sometimes even though a lot of the games are hard for me right now.

I still can’t believe I beat Noah at chess for the first time ever in the last month of his life. That feels really shitty and weird. I wish he had immediately demanded a rematch and smashed me. He didn’t. He grinned like his kid just one first prize in the contest. He was so proud.

There were ways he was petty. He was occasionally cruel or spiteful. With every year that passed he made sure that he only did things in ways that fit how we wanted our relationship to work. I felt really loved and seen. He wanted to help me cultivate a separate part of ourselves behind closed doors away from all the rest of our life. Most of our life was kin keeping.

I feel conflicted about whether or not I am going to treat Noah’s permanent permission as a permanent green flag to do whatever the fuck I want or if I am going to believe that the last person who had the right to say they wanted me to stay and over ride what I wanted is gone.

I am used to getting all day every day constant verbal affirmations. It’s really kind of ridiculous. That was just how we talked to each other. We were silly and upbeat. It made us happy. It made us feel connected and loved. Noah looked at me with great tenderness most of the time. He really was besotted. It never dimmed. I mean, I spent like 15 hours a week coaching him how to handle shit with his job even though I loathe coding and everything about the tech industry. I was of more merit than a rubber duck. I tracked how long something dragged on and told him when to stop wasting effort on a losing thing. I helped him figure out how to handle sticky conversations. I listened to a lot of his big talks and helped him with pieces of them.

That was how I showed my equal dedication and fervor. I don’t fucking care about coding. I cared about Noah getting to be one of the conductors on the information railroad and I’ll helped him get there. He told me that was what he wanted to do with his work life and he really did it. I am proud of him. I am as proud of him as he was of me.

I wish that we had gotten to have a lot more years of that mutual admiration society. No one gets to choose what they get. They can make choices that make it more likely. But there are always the bit where it is just a roll of the dice. We all die.

Yeah, part of my life did die. I am not Noah’s wife anymore. I am Noah’s widow. Mostly I will just be Krissy. I will just be me as a person alone. I will have people in my life because I am a big believer in community. I will have time to fill. Other people will too.

Noah took up most of my time. He wanted me to be here with him.

I carry that part of me forward. The part that was good enough to make someone like him be that fascinated for that long. I guess maybe I am something special.

He spent his life on adoring me. That’s what he wanted to do. He worked to build a secure future where he could spend decades adoring me in retirement. He had always had several monitors and his screen saver was pictures of me and the kids. We were why he was there and if he needed motivation, there we were anytime he stood still for 90 seconds.

It was weird having people stop in town when they saw us. I didn’t know who they were but they explained that they worked with Noah so of course they recognise me and they want to tell me how amazing it is to work with him. They admire him so much. Gosh, tell him they said hi.

It was a weird moment every time it happened. I moved him away from that.

He wanted this. He wanted me. I’m glad we didn’t wait. I’m grateful that he got us the permanent right to not be in the US. He set us up for being safe, then he burnt out. It is horrifying and grotesque and nauseating. I did not want this, not like this. Noah, you were my #1 priority on my list. I wanted a partner so I could have a co-parent. That was my big fucking thing.

You were always so insecure and it’s so weird. Why did you feel like you were easily replaceable? There is fucking no one else like you. Ok, there’s the deep keening. That’s it. That’s what I don’t let myself do when people are around.

White people don’t do that. So I’m told. And told. And told. If they shamefully do it at all they do it behind closed doors where no one has to hear. Get your shit together and stop acting disorganised.

Noah and I had such a weird cross section of background similarities. I will feel like an alien for the rest of my life. I will always be a weird curiosity that is never to be understood because no one will care enough to remember much. That’s the social contract. People don’t want intensity. They want casual. They want light hearted and entertaining. They want fun, not drama or suffering or grief. Don’t be a downer. Or just stay the fuck home.

I won’t create a new Wonderland here. I think that ability came from Noah. The endless wildfire growth was his special magic power. I have a lot, but I don’t think I can burn it like that anymore. Now I need to settle in and focus on what it will take for me to make my life here work for me. It will not be managed if I stay home alone.

I have always liked the quote “If you need to go fast, go alone; if you need to go far, go together.” I will need a community. I will have to make one. And I won’t have childcare so that’s going to shape a lot of it.

Time to go start the day. Editing is a thing of the past.

One month has passed.

I feel like so much happened that it has been many months, not one. Maybe even years have passed in the last 31 days with how slowly I felt the movement of time. I am tremendously not ok and I have no anticipation of being so anytime soon. Pam worries a lot about me not feeling hope at this point.

In my relationship with Noah there was a fair bit of insecurity on both sides. We were both worried that the other wouldn’t want to stay with us. We need constant reassurance and it went in both direction. We never relaxed into feeling safe for more than a few minutes at a time. Luckily we loved giving each other that reassurance so we had good days more than not. Noah wanted me to live for him and that’s a complicated thing. There was always this balancing act. I don’t want to die because I don’t want to hurt my kids, but maybe I hurt them more by living. Maybe it would be better if I weren’t here. Noah wanted me to just stay alive for him and I certainly have so far but it was a thing that lived in the back corner of my mind: do I ever get to choose when I stop feeling pain?

Now I don’t. It isn’t a question. I must fight to live for as long as possible.

I wish the price had been smaller.

I cannot ask my children for reassurance that they really love me. It’s not ok. I say that I love them. They say it when they feel so moved. I can’t ask. It’s not ok. I am allowed to say, “May I have a hug?” That’s fine. I can’t ask them to prove to me that I have value. Not ever. That is going to be weird and hard. I am going to have to learn how to carry this giant black hole of pain without having anyone tell me that I’m great all the time. What I got from Noah during our marriage has to be what I get in this life. I can’t look for a replacement.

I am going to be my own source of reassurance and comfort and that sounds really sad and lonely. Literally, I don’t need anyone else’s approval. I am still Noah’s good girl and he gave me a permission slip. I get to be here. He bought me this house, which is not solely legally mine. He gave me three wonderful children who fill me with pride and delight every day. He got me out of the US.

It’s kind of funny. I have always told my kids that I can’t make sure bad things never happen to them, but I can be there with them while they go through it. Noah didn’t ever manage to make it so bad things never happened to me. Last year was pretty rough. I knew he would walk through fire with me if I had to go there. Now I am going to do an awful lot alone.

I am not going to be looking for an intense friendship for years. I’m going to make it clear that my plan is to continue to talk to people in Meat Life as if they didn’t know I was raped and my husband died last year. People in this town don’t owe me shit and messy displays of emotion are not done. I will keep it as low key as I can but holy fucking shit I’m going to cry a lot. I really can’t help it and I also can’t stay home until I get it under control. That would be really bad for me physically. I need to move more than that.

You store grief in your lungs. I do a fair bit of exercise. Yeah, there will be a lot of crying. I cried like a little bitch through most of yoga. He had just started coming with me to classes in November. There are so many layers of upset and shitty here. He was retiring to hang out with me.

I feel so empty. No, I don’t have any personal hope right now. Someday I will have hopes for my children but I don’t know what I will ever hope for again and that needs to be ok.

I am showing up. I am doing my duty. I am serving my indenture. I am talking to the kids about their hopes. I am talking to them about how as painful as this is–it’s an origin story and they have the vast majority of their lives to go make their life into whatever they want. I don’t have the vast majority in front of me. I have less than half of it left, in all likelihood.

One of my buddies shares my alphabet soup of genetic issues and has been sending me research. One of the tiny insignificant pieces of it is that one of the *single best things* for me to eat is: liver. Preferably lamb but beef is acceptable. Chicken isn’t ideal.

Do you want to know one of the only things my mother ever bullied and pressured me into trying? Fucking liver. “It’s good for you, Krissy. It will help you feel better. Yum, yum.”

I feel horrible for how I judge her. She did try and I was a really hard kid. I was super non-compliant and hostile and argumentative and demanding. Just like my kids. She lacked the wherewithal and resources to handle someone as challenging as me. Shit, I can understand that feeling.

I have a Valentine’s Day card in a box somewhere that I bought 18 years ago. It says something about how I turn more into my mother with every year. It’s the sort a daughter is supposed to give. I didn’t remember to give it to my mother before I divorced my family and then shit happened. I think it managed to get mailed across the sea.

I feel very temped to write in it that I have always loved her. Thank you for telling me to eat liver. Turns out you were completely correct.

I wouldn’t put a return address on the envelope or a phone number inside. It’s not an invitation to a relationship.

My grief is and always has been so very complicated. Am I ever just mourning one thing or does it bring the avalanche of mostly unresolved grief crashing down again. It’s never fully gone, it’s just in a box out of sight because it bothers other people. I sort of wonder if some day, after my indenture is over I will spend a whole year wandering around weeping for a full year because I have that many unshed tears hiding in me. I can’t let it out now. It’s not safe for me or fair to the people around me if I lose my shit right now. They need me to cope.

I feel like garbage. I feel wrecked. I feel empty and like I will never be filled again. A whole month without Noah. What a fucking nightmare. I never wanted this. I wanted to serve Noah for all of my days. I wanted more years of taking care of his gross feet. I wanted to chase him up the hill and yell “what?!” because he mumbles all the time. I wanted to properly explore Scotland with him. I wanted to adore him and bask in his brilliance. I wanted to talk him through the best ways to solve different social situations. I loved how much he respected me. I don’t think that is something I will ever feel again.

I am afraid that my ability to be an expert died with him. I required his confidence in me. I think I am going to contract in so many ways. I will never believe in myself the way he believed in me. Yes, I will be more timid.

I am so scared

30 days out

Tomorrow makes it a month since I lost the person I loved the most in the world. I’m still crying on and off in bursts all day. I can feel a dramatic lessening of tension since the sexual assault trial was cancelled. It’s better for me not to go through it. It’s terrible for me that two governments have informed me that rape doesn’t count when it happens to me.

I wish Noah was here. I wish we were getting on with the fun of retirement and getting ever more intertwined.

Sometimes I write poetic things about how we were two trees too weak to stand alone so we leaned in and became one entwined entity.

Let me fucking tell you it is not god damn poetic feeling torn asunder because my love is gone. My soul hurts so much. I was not this hopeless when I was crouched naked, puking from the alcohol my dad gave me. I was not this hopeless when he held the gun to my head and asked me if I deserved to live and then told me to prove it with my mouth on his cock. I was not this hopeless when I decided that I could figure out how to get people to stop raping me–I’d take several boxes of sleeping pills all in a go and that would solve that. It didn’t. That just brought ever more fascinating levels of humiliation and debasement into my life.

Hopeless is not the water I swim in. I burn with hope intensely. But I had a magic man who made all my dreams come true. Then I lost him. I still want the satisfaction of seeing our science experiment through–will we create people who want to be in relationships with us as adults when they don’t have to? We’ve managed to miss the worst offenders that would make it likely. Now I get to find out how bad my fuck ups feel for the kids when their dad isn’t here to run interference.

Luckily we have practiced that anyway because he wasn’t around all day? I am deeply proud of my kids when they tell me I am speaking in a way that isn’t ok and it needs to change. Fuck yes. A long time ago I saw some sort of meme-thing that said something like, “Speak so well to your children that they will be indignant when someone doesn’t.”

That’s a mixed thing. Obviously as white people with financial stability we don’t need to be spoken to like we are better than anyone else. We fucking aren’t. Everyone should be treated with a base level of civility. When you observe someone giving less than that to someone else, speak up. I had a lot of conversations with Noah, and we did a fair bit of active role play, for him to learn how to make room for the voices of people who were not white men. He learned how to give all credit for ideas to the originators while amplifying their voices and expressing admiration for the excellent solution.

I was surprised when I heard my son rattle off to someone, “Of course I can tell you fifteen different reasons I think you are autistic. My whole family is and social interactions is one of our biggest special interests.” Like, I don’t know that I had really thought about it that way but it’s accurate.

I feel so overwhelmed by the magnitude of the struggle I have in front of me. I got a really great email from our old lawyer (who is now retired and unable to help) where she gave me a lot of advice about loving myself because I have nothing to give if I don’t feel cared for.

I don’t really have hope for any kind of future where I feel loved and cared for by a special person. I think I will get drips and drabs from many people and I will turn them into a glorious kaleidoscope of a quilt. Collectively it will be almost enough.

Noah will never hurry to bed smiling because he needs to metabolise for me so I don’t feel cold when I climb in after brushing my teeth. I will never grin like a fool and giggle with delight because I get to climb back in bed with Noah after my first wake up. The best man in the world picked me. I was so happy. I had so much hope spilling out of me for adventure and learning and growth.

In the widow group some folks were talking about how 9 or 12 months in they are still unable to do basic care stuff for themself and they are really struggling. I am feeling incredibly lucky that even though I don’t have hope I have a whole tanker vessel full of duty.

I am not judging these folks. They have not had giant really bad things happen very often in their lives. They don’t know how to adjust their self perception that quickly. They are struggling with how to evolve. They feel intense guilt about accepting that evolution will be necessary.

It’s been kind of lovely, actually, getting to the point where I see that and I feel a softness in my belly. I’m so glad you have overall had such a good life.

I lost the love of my life. That was just Tuesday. I was declared an unrapeable whore. That was just Tuesday.

It’s fucking amazing and hilarious that it’s true. Both things did happen on Tuesdays. I’m not going to bother looking back in my shit sandwich of a life to see how many of my shit anniversaries started on Tuesdays. I’m not feeling that masochistic.

Terrible things happening to me is simply par for the course of my life. I have had fairly brief periods where nothing bad happened. Even when nothing bad is happening my life is a hamster wheel of constant change in a way that would give most people vertigo. I don’t think people should be more like me. The training grounds are inhumane.

I am realising that I need to look at our calendars and think of them both separately and together because I don’t think the 4 of us can work perfectly in synch anymore. I think we need a lot more of people doing their own. I’ll still track with Shortie most of the time but I need to get some support so I can be an adult outside of parenting.

I am going to have to find ways to fill my own bucket. I don’t think I’ll get it close to full, but even 50% would be a big upgrade. I went climbing on Tuesday. I’m going to yoga today. Both things require cycling. I’m going to add social time with friends. Pam leaves in 7 days and that feels scary.

Luckily, she filled my freezer with dumplings because she wants me to have glorious vegetables to eat. Nom.

I need to get my head together enough to email the folks who are coming. I’m learning more about the shape of what I need. This is good. I feel sick but there’s no way out but through.

I’m afraid I am going to spend every morning for the rest of my life hiding and rocking and saying “I want Noah.” Well, I guess he has replaced longing for my mother. He gave me so much more comfort and love than she did and he knew me less time. I want Noah so much I feel like I will explode. I know it’s only been 30 days. Time will dull the knife edge of this pain.

I’m trying to pawn off my alcohol. I’m keeping some for cooking. Mostly though I am not permitted to do anything to drown my sorrows. I have to focus on health, stability, strength, resilience, and avoiding all things that compromise any of those traits is the first step. Time is all I have to throw at this horrible pain.

I wish I got to live a different story.

He was my grown up

I’m having terrible thoughts. Did I need him to die so I could finish growing up? I definitely am struggling with all the tasks I’m having to learn at speed. I handled money once it entered our family bank account. He couldn’t handle paying bills–it freaked him out. But he did the accountants, and lawyers, and financial advisors and immigration stuff. I’m having to notify all of these people and explain my abject ignorance and lack of knowledge for how to move forward.

Did you know that people who earned close to 6 figures from working with you are very nice about writing out a primer that even my ignorant, autistic, immigrant self can follow. Money well spent. They know that I am helpless and pathetic and they are taking mercy on me. This is going to be expensive but it’s worth it to make sure I don’t fuck things up with two governments. Right now I am close to the end of the first cycle. There was a massive list of companies to contact. I think I only have one more that needs first contact and it’s another joint account.

Now I wait and send in documentation when demanded.

I don’t think there is a lot more I can push forward right now. So of course I was twitchy and difficult with the kids. That’s not nice. I was going to lose the ever patient ability at some point.

But I feel like I have more information to go on. I feel like I can see a shape we can learn how to fill.

The Crown has informed me that they do not believe a jury would rule in my favour so they are declining to prosecute my sexual assault. That means I don’t need to plan my whole year around making sure my kids have months of 30+ hours a week in child care.

Oh.

This makes the second government who has decided that I am an unrapeable whore. When men rape me, meh it doesn’t count.

Scotland is better in many ways. In other ways it is just the same. It’s not worse. But in some ways it is just as bad. Hey, fewer guns!

It means I don’t have to keep trying to force the Council to accept my obnoxious request for placement of high needs kids. I can just stop. I can accept help from people who offer it. There are a lot of retired grandparent-like folks who are happy to help us. I need to say yes. I need to start having standing dates for kids around town with folks so they develop relationships.

I also need to fundamentally alter how I react to the idea of scheduling my life. I need to be building in massive buffers of nothing because we are going to have times when we just fucking can’t.

I suppose it is for the best that I am still an unrapeable whore. I don’t have to waste my year on being a good victim. I can work on being a good mother. I won’t be distracted by being a good wife. That was such a massive time commitment in my life. Making sure I paid enough attention to Noah was a serious priority and his desire for attention was vast.

I am starting to realise that I have been going harder than I can sustain. I thought I was pushing until school started. Nope. I’m just… doing this. I need to push less. I need to rest more. I need to cuddle more.

Today’s task list included:

  • 2 calls with solicitors
  • 4 emails to solicitors/lawyers
  • 1 call to obtain old tax returns from old company
  • 1 call with 2 accountants to work towards streamlining my tax situation going forward
  • filled out the monstrously evil forms for a bank and insurance company. ew much words.
  • emailed and messaged with 2 people trying to obtain cleaning assistance
  • sat on chat for 48 minutes in order to figure out how to tell one bank Noah is gone
  • uploaded a fuckton of documents to banks, insurance companies, government websites
  • got the plumbing bill and paid it
  • finally responded to a WhatsApp message after a week
  • physically filled out a bunch of forms for kid-things
  • there were a lot more messages and emails about various stages. Most of these things took multiple iterations of coming back to it. I have a lot still in progress.
  • I negotiated poorly then less poorly with the kids.
  • We got absolutely plenty of housework done.
  • poked people who said they wanted to do stuff with kids but haven’t set it up yet.
  • decided we really need 3 at home days a week to counteract the 4 we have to leave the house

How in the fuck did I think my kids would adjust to school? They barely think a 3 day weekend is long enough to handle 1/4 the stimulation of school. Our life is so very bespoke. We do stuff. We just don’t like a lot of background noise or interference or interruptions. Without Noah’s piano the house is so quiet.

Mostly what I do is try to keep my bursts of sobs to a minimum. Keep moving. There is more to do. Also: I have to rest or I’m going to hurt myself.

Balance is tricky.

I need to build time with local friends into every week. It needs to be a priority. I cannot only be with my children. That’s insane. I can’t only be with their friends–that’s unhealthy. I will say things I shouldn’t because I won’t be able to help myself from loneliness. I need adults to talk to. And not just online or on the phone. I need Meat Life. It matters.

I am so scared and so sad. I miss Noah. I want to wake up from this nightmare. I miss him so much I feel like my heart will crumble into dust.

I’m not doing enough to take care of my exercise needs. It is part of why I am getting pissy. I restart yoga tomorrow. I’ve been to one climb so far. I have cycled 20 miles in the last 7 days. That’s not nothing. I’m not eating enough vegetables. I’m struggling with sleep regulation. I’m waking up super early because then I can masturbate and cry.

Like, this is the most sad, pathetic masturbating of my life. I think of Noah and cry. I feel like I can’t get off. Sometimes I couldn’t until he finished and that is what it feels like all the time right now and he is never going to finish in me again. That feels so unbelievably bad. I keep reaching for him in my sleep. Please be there. Let this be a terrible, vivid dream that shows me how badly my life could go if I am stupid enough to ask you to go ice skating.

Please come back.

You can’t. I know. I have your rings. You only took them off for a few minutes at a time and then you hurried to put them back on. You were so happy to have two. We had a marriage that was a blend of my cheap ass practicality and your highfalutin ways. You insisted on the fancier rings. You said they were my insurance. I have them. They aren’t worth enough to smuggle my family out of the country so I don’t see what kind of insurance they actually are. Not that I’m looking t o get out. I’m just sayin’.

You wanted me to have the experience of walking into Tiffany’s and having the salesclerk go “Oooooooh, that’s real.” I did not know that was a thing that could be determined at a distance. You were elated. You referred back to it many times over the years. See. You put your mark on me. Fancy people look at me and go real. Ok.

Only I will never feel entitled to wear your rings again my love. I am not your wife. I am your widow. It makes me feel so sad. I want you with my whole soul. I want to hear you giggle and see your glee. I want to feel happy again. My love I don’t know what the future is going to bring. I’m scared.

I’m doing all the grown up things you usually do. I’m trying to keep notes. I should go put all of this in your Dropbox. I may fix your shitty organisation finally. Now that it feels less like a really invasive version of needing to face all the bills in your wallet. He was a “searching is faster” guy. I was a “I worked in libraries pre-computers” gal.

Dad did most of the first level of cleaning up Noah’s room. I am so grateful. I went through paperwork. We haven’t fully cleaned it out or changed it for a kid. I think I would specifically like to wait for a day past the one month mark.

This is so much and so little and so hard and so awful. Life will never feel fair again. There is no fair here. Noah, I will miss you for my whole life. You were right that I am not ok without you. I feel like a walking corpse.

The walking part is the important part. Hey, now I can get therapy. Ha, ha, ha.

Limbo is the worst

27 days of waking up without Noah. I haven’t managed to get the kids in school yet. Over the weekend someone sent me an email telling me where I need to get the process started, 11 days after my first email. I think the schools are in the middle of big tests? Not an easy time to integrate a high needs home educated kid.

Do you know how hard I worked for the life that is ending? I spent 10 year preparing to be a teacher before I had kids. Then I spent 16.5 years home educating/being home. I was part of a partnership and we worked together like we were made for each other. Now I am a solo parent and my need to go to school.

I’m holding on by a thin thread right now. The trial is hanging out in the back of my head making me crazy every day. I can’t “educate” on top of barely staying alive right now. My brain won’t cooperate. I can’t focus on them and be entertaining and fun and light so they remember the material. I will scream at them to hurry up and then they’ll remember nothing.

I said we need to finish this year and go through all of next school year and if it isn’t working out I’ll pull Shortie and we can figure out home education together. She will be my only one and we can be more adventurous at her speed without the older “I’m too cool to play” kids along. I’m not getting rid of home ed materials for two years. I’ll decide that in two years when I decide about the house. Exactly two years from *today* there is a note on my calendar.

Ha, the day before my cunt sister turns 58. How can such a waste of skin and cells be here and Noah is not? There is no fair in this life. Wanna know something funny? When my Uncle died the cunt came to me and asked, “Has anyone close to you ever died before?”

Like our brother and father had not both committed suicide like 10 years earlier. Like we hadn’t had a whole series of family friends die. Today I think I know what she meant. Noah’s death hurts more than every other death put together time a million. This feels so much more painful than everything that has ever happened to me. Because this, for the first fucking time, is the death of my hope. I held on to hope by my fingernails all these years. If I worked hard enough my life would get better. I worked so hard.

My life will be better than it is today, someday. I won’t be awaiting a trial. I won’t have as much to do that I hate.

My life will never be better than it was on 23 December, 2024. That was my last truly good day. I went with Noah and the two younger kids to hang with Bestie and her youngest. We rode the Santa VR ride and it was very silly and fun. It was just a day. Noah was hobbling around with crutches but so cheerful with it. He so seldom complained. When he complained I would jump like I’d been electrocuted to go figure out how I could fix something for him.

I was the complainer, not him.

I remember standing with him and watching the kids interact and play. We leaned our head together and he whispered, “We made those.” I said, “I know!” We grinned and nuzzled in for a hug while we watched.

No one will ever look at my children with overwhelming pride with me again. That feels so terrible. When Noah was alive I made a point to avoid “we” language as a parent. Rarely did I say “we think”. Now I just say, “We love you. We are so proud of you.” Now, yeah he’s a monolith of feelings that agree with mine. If you don’t think so, fuck off.

It is hard for people this cool to be children. They have too much sense of self and being controlled while a child sucks.

I am not in a good position mentally or emotionally to home educate. I may not ever be again. Over the years Noah has expanded his portfolio of parenting time to “cover” a lot of the roughly 15 hours we have awake children with high needs. He probably covered a good 6 hours a day with me completely checked out. Between volunteering for organisations in town, Vicki research, art projects, writing, and general body maintenance he insisted on me taking those hours. He wanted me to feel like I had an identity outside of us like he did in the Ruby world.

Now my time is going to be different. I will orient around the school year (that part is actually easy for me). I have never been great about getting up and out the door on time for school. I was publicly humiliated for my poor attendance in schools. I wonder why I didn’t come when every day I went I was hit.

I am not looking forward to the drumbeat of regulation. It is going to mandate that most of my odd habits and patterns be abandoned, at least for a few years. I suspect I have three years ahead of me of needing to walk Shortie. I think the year after that she would start insisting that she’s not a baby and she wants to go alone. It’s not a dangerous walk by any measure. Only one big road to cross and there’s a light.

I will not be able to get into hyperfocus and do one huge project at a time. I am going to have to carefully slice up my day. I think I should spend 2-4 hours a day exercising. That sounds like a lot, but walking Shortie to school will take ~1 hr/day. Cycling to and from town to run other errands will fill close to 45 minutes. A 2 hour minimum is not a lot more than existing for me. I need to get back to taking several yoga classes a week. I should rock climb a couple of times a week–I need the strength in my shoulders desperately. I should start taking weight training seriously. I should cycle on longer routes sometimes just for training–my buddy who lives on the Black Isle can’t drive right now so I need to get over to see her. It’s really easy for a visit to a friend who is mildly out of town to require 3 hours of exercise. Also, gardening.

I am going to be a body in motion. I can’t keep sitting still near Noah. There is no Noah to stay with. There is no Noah to chase me up the hill saying I’d better move faster because he wants athletic sex, thank you. He was working out a lot and he was getting so fit. I loved our life so much. I loved him so much. He was the source of all the joy and good luck and happiness in my life. It all came through him. Yes, I love my kids–but he gave them to me.

I’m starting to get low key upset that everyone but me is having visions/dreams/think they hear him auditory hallucinations. I’m not seeing him. My only dream was trying to dig an enormous tick out of my thigh with just my fingernails. It was not a fun dream.

I am scared that something is coming that I’m going to have to deal with and I would not have been able to get the job done if I was happy. It is only because I am a miserable, lonely motherfucker that I will be able to be of real value. I’m afraid that is going to become my conditional state for entry to the social contract. I don’t like being the “There but for the grace of God go I” person. I hate being inspiration porn. Sometimes people have said things like, “I was really upset about X happening but then I thought of your life and I didn’t feel ok being upset anymore.” Don’t fucking do that. Don’t do that to me and don’t do that to you. We each have our own scale. They aren’t transferable. You bear shit I can’t.

Right now from where I’m sitting, there is the high probability I will keep the house. My kids want to be able to come and go. I want the garden. If the kids are gone I will invite lots of guests over. I’ll do things. I’ll make things. I will be part of a community and it will be lovely.

I will always feel unseen and lonely in my soul. My Perfect Witness to my life has died. Now it all feels like grains of sand running out a hole in the side of a timer. Never again will this unit mark time along with everyone else. Minutes, and later hours and days will vanish and not really exist.

This is my new pain level 10. This is worse than being picked up by your pectoral muscles before being shaken like a dog shakes his toys.

Dad is leaving today and I will miss him terribly. He has been a wonderful companion and helper during this first stage. He is a fantastic Grandpa. He is a completely stress-free house guest. I continue to treasure this friendship. We became friends in 2000. I’m really glad that I have been able to keep him in my life.

Pam’s giant mountain of a man is going home tomorrow. He’s really nice. It’s been incredibly heart warming seeing the two of them be so gloriously in love. Pam is here for another 11 days. I really freaking hope we can get school sorted in that time. I’m also hoping to be done talking to governments, legal people, and financial people. Set it up, knock it down.

I am not going to carry a bunch of work from cleaning up my old job as Noah’s wife forward into my new life. I need to finish and move on. I need to find a rhythm I can keep like a drumbeat.

I need to be the mother I needed to have when my life went sideways and there was a tremendous amount of overwhelming change and pain happening in my life.

Do you know what I watched Noah learn how to do? Take a deep breathe, channel his inner chaos and power into a think he could squeeze smaller with his fingers, then he pushed it down into the center mass of his power to rejoin all of its friends to be recalled later. He wasn’t “stuffing his feelings” he was controlling when it was useful to use them. He was choosing who to share them with. He was choosing when to share them.

That’s a lot of how he managed to have such great mentor energy with every fucking person in the Ruby community. He had a lot to give and he was humble about offering it. I am going to have to take on a lot of Noah’s steadying role. It’s going to be hard. I am used to being allowed to be impulsive to a noticeable degree because I made him be the adult. (He was impulsive in his ways, too. I did adult, too.)

I just don’t know what my safe place to let them out will look like yet. It feels like an endless pool of pain and I am kicking as hard as I can but I can’t keep my face fully above the water line.

Time to go kiss people awake.

Time to start moving forward

Today I have an appointment with our solicitor. I need to update my will and remove all DNR language. I am no longer allowed to peacefully and easily when something comes for me. I have to fight like hell. I have to manage chronic conditions and I have to fight cancer no matter how much it hurts. I’m sad about this. I wanted my next near death to be my last. Not anymore.

This was not what I wanted. This was not the outcome I wanted. I didn’t want to have to give up on the idea of a peaceful death because Noah is gone. I am going to spend the entire rest of my life stuck because Noah is gone. It makes me feel so bad that I didn’t have this feeling while he was alive to relish it.

I can’t make my kids orphans.

Today I bug the schools to get enrollment going. I will get over to the Whole Foods collective to get stuff we are running low on. Time to catch up on my bullet journal and figure out what the cheese is happening. Not anything good I had planned. Oh well.

Today is the first day of the rest of my life

Noah’s funeral was yesterday. It went fine. People were kind. Promises of help were made. Offers of commutative friendship were made. Single parents offered help learning the ropes.

Today I am quiet and withdrawn. I’m scared and I feel like I should be able to jump into action. I can’t. I am exhausted. I have gone totally limp. I need to start the process of becoming unpopular at two schools. I’m going to show up with big asks and schools love that in the middle of the year. I have been that kid a lot of times.

I am so scared that my babies are going to have another rough entry. I think that tomorrow I will send an email in the morning to both schools as a follow up. I can’t today. I really literally can’t. I am so overwhelmed.

I am processing the layers of my loss in fresh waves of horror and grief. Oh goodness Noah, what am I going to do without you? You were the sun I revolved around. Now I have to care for myself instead of off-loading that onerous task onto you. I would much rather look after you in trade.

A fucking broken ankle. Like that’s good for my ambient paranoia about injury.

I feel like I am not able to consider other people very well right now. I feel like my entire theory of mind evaporated. I can kind of do it with the kids, as long as its not all day because then I get overwhelmed. I put on a front and I smiled and hugged everyone at the funeral. I thanked everyone for coming.

Now I am empty and hollow and I just want Noah. I want him to hold me and tell me I did a good job. I want him to tell me that he is proud of me. I miss sex. I miss the way he specifically fucked with my head to make me feel like I was a very good person because of our sex. I feel like I have lost the ability to feel good. Now I feel empty. Not just my vagina. I feel empty in my mind. There are clearly still words, but instead of 6 screens going in the drive through there’s one and the picture keeps flickering and the audio is spotty.

I think my weight is at a plateau.

I was happy I could physically wear the fancy wedding rings Noah insisted on buying. He meant these expensive gestures very well. He wanted me to know that I was worth an investment. I think he was silly. I think we could have paid off the house like five years faster. He wouldn’t hear of it. He insisted on the gestures.

It’s not a set of rings I’ve ever enjoyed wearing every day. They are heavy and they hurt my hand even on the best of days. I am still wearing the plain band. I don’t know when I will take it off. I did fulfill the contract: I stayed until death parted us. I wanted so much more time. I’m scared. I’m scared of who I will never be because I don’t believe in me as much as he did. I’m sad about the things I won’t do because he won’t be there to do them with me.

I am sad that he will never be inside of me again. That was such a massive part of our relationship. I didn’t have very many hours in a day where we didn’t touch each other. We were so excited that this amazing person is willing to let me touch them! I need to prove it again. Over and over, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade. The magnetic attraction between us never waned.

I long for Noah with every cell in my body. It’s hard to believe that I will ever feel ok again. I’m having a hard time believing that I have a future that is going to feel like it matters to me. What could ever be important after losing Noah?

What was important to me outside of Noah? I can’t remember. There’s got to be a reason that folks are lining up to take care of me for a year. None of them are coming here because they feel they owe it to Noah. I feel pretty fucking good about insisting on maintaining relationships now. I’m not as stupid as I look.

Walking past little old couples wrecks me. I will never have that. I won’t get to fuss at Noah to stop getting distracted and hurry up.

I feel so empty.

Humbling. That’s the word for the year.

I know that Noah would be very upset if he knew I used his death as a reason to beat myself up and hate myself. That was not something he wanted at all. He wanted me to like myself as much as he liked me. Like I wanted him to like himself as much as I like him. He never did.

Today I am not going to be able to power through and be strong and upbeat. I feel exhausted to the marrow of my bones. I did not get up and have breakfast on the table by 7 today. I’m letting someone else make food. Luckily I have amazing kids who love to cook.

My baby is now looking for stories about what happens when a parent remarries after losing a spouse. This freaks me out and scare me. I don’t want to bring in a new person so we can “be a family again”. We are a family already.

In the past 7 months I have lost 11 lbs. My waist is 3″ smaller. Every measurement (except for my boobs) has gone down by at least .25″ (calf) or a full inch (almost everywhere else). I really am shrinking away. I am basically the same size, but 4lbs heavier than when I ran my first marathon. I wish I still had all of those clothes. Soon Noah’s jeans won’t be able to stay up well even with a belt.

Another morning, still no hope

I am angry that I was summoned to the NHS psych department today. I was summoned so I could be told in detail that this tragedy still doesn’t qualify me for support because I am stupid enough to prosecute a rape. This country is barbaric. But, no guns! Homeless people are given housing! They have basic (shitty) health care without going bankrupt! They have lots of water and are not vulnerable to fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, or tsunamis.

Nowhere is all good. I really miss the California therapy culture but as I watch the state go up in flames again I worry a lot that there will not be capacity for supporting all the pain that exists there. I feel lost in my grief. I feel like I am a horrible bitch because I don’t know how to feel love and support from the people who are showing up. I’m going through the motions. I know the role I am supposed to play. I feel empty though. I feel like I will never feel positive emotions again.

I am so scared. I don’t want to talk to the NHS today. It will be degrading and awful. Oh shit, I should call about flowers. Fuck.

I feel awful.

It’s been 16 days and I am plowing through work as fast as I can. Folks are trying really hard to be helpful but I am not good at being helped. It took so many years for Noah to learn how to help me without setting me off into a rage. My friends are wonderful and I am grateful for their presence. Also: it is hard having people here. It is hard accepting help because people don’t do it how I would. It is hard accepting that I am going to be required to accept help for the rest of my life.

I’m feeling overwhelmed by waves of different flavours of grief. I am really struggling with how much I am only allowed tiny moments of feelings before I have to shove that shit in a box or people will start acting towards me in ways I don’t want.

When I am really upset it is hard that people rush to hug me. I want to fling people away from me. I go hard into the fight reflex and I am required to go still and limp and let other people feel better by hugging me even though it makes me feel sick. It took years for Noah to fully understand that when I am freaking out I want someone to sit near me but not to touch me. I want them out of reach. If it feels like they can reach out and touch me I am going to feel threatened and scared.

I hate that I have to perform sad in the right way. I hate that I have to accept “comfort” that makes me feel alienated and uncomfortable and kind of sick. There are times I want to hug when I am upset and I initiate at those times. It’s why I try so hard to ask people if they want to be hugged.

I am not accustomed to touching people outside my family anymore. It’s not natural at this point. It feels weird and uncomfortable. I still feel like I am wearing the Choke Chain and I am going to get in trouble if I even look at someone too long. It doesn’t matter that Noah told me that part of our relationship was over months ago. He said it and we stayed in our house together and didn’t change anything.

I miss you Noah, I’ll stay in the house with just you forever. Just come back. I was wrong when I thought I needed more than you. I need you. I just need you. My chest hurts so much I feel like I have been hit by a truck. I don’t know how to accept that he isn’t coming back.

I am having a really hard time with this whole “being strong” bullshit. I just want to go to bed for months. I don’t want to think for other people. I don’t want to help people feel like they are helping me. I don’t want to ask for help. I don’t want to be touched. I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want any of the things or options or people who are available. There is a reason I moved to the edge of nowhere to live with Noah far from anyone I knew.

I want Noah.

I hate being me so much. Noah made it bearable. I don’t know how to endure being me for lots more years without him. I don’t want to keep walking the shithole road that is my life. Yes, I have good friends. Yes, I love my children.

How many more rapists are going to come knocking at my door? I am so scared I feel like my head will explode from pain. I am not ok at all. I feel like I will never ever feel ok again. How could I be ok? Noah is gone.

I don’t feel like I have the special place in history that he had. He truly changed the course of a lot of lives. I feel pathetic, useless, and like a burden. It’s fucking humiliating filling in forms here for disability recognition. I’m not even trying to get treatment. I want the bitches to admit on paper that I am in intense pain and dramatic emotional stress every fucking day and that way I will have a UK medical record.

It is humbling having to list out all the ways Noah took care of me. I have no idea how I will survive. My life will contract and then contract again and then contract again. Whoever I had the potential to be will shrivel up like a raisin in the sun.

Noah, how could you ever fucking think I wished for your death? I didn’t want to ever live through a day without you in the world.

It’s almost like you knew that I would need a much younger tether because you knew you couldn’t outlive me. There are so many lines to be drawn between his actions in the past and this outcome. It’s like he knew how to trap me into living as long as physically possible. He stole my ability to commit suicide. I can’t ever leave these people on purpose; the cowards route is not open to me.

I am a coward though. And a weakling. And pathetic.

Noah, I am so sorry for the ways I took you for granted. I’m sorry I skipped any days of having sex. I have never before wanted to relive part of my life so I could do it better. I’ve always believed it was hard enough once. I would go back when it comes to you. If I could go back to March of 2006 I would do the whole thing differently. I’m not sure it would be better in the long run. I would have destroyed myself trying to give to you because I would not have paced myself. Maybe we wouldn’t have had kids. Maybe we wouldn’t have stayed married. I don’t know.

I just know that I miss you so much I feel like my soul is crushed under a glacier. Noah I miss you. I want you so much. You are the only one I want to have touch me. It makes other people feel better to hug me so I will accept it anyway. It doesn’t really matter. I don’t think I can feel better so maybe I shouldn’t try. I hurt so much. Time to sleep.

Keep moving

Waking up for the 12th day of Noah being gone. It’s a weekend; the last weekend before I have to sign the kids up for school. Middle Child is very confident they are going to ride through the rest of secondary school because getting qualifications will simplify later life. Shortie isn’t sure about school. She is scared. I told her that we are going to try through the end of the next school year and if she has not settled, then we will discuss a return to home education. Eldest Child has plans and he is figuring out his forward facing routine. He is scared but ready to figure out his future.

The older kids are scared I will sell the house. They are really overwhelmed by this idea. That means I need to be careful with that option. It has to be only at absolute last resort. I think I am going to need to work very hard to keep this house. I think the kids are going to need that stability for a long time to come. This was our final home with Noah. Leaving here is choosing to leave him behind. I’m not sure we will ever be ready for that. We will make the decision in two years but the kids are acting like it would be a problem if we left. I need to consider that.

I love him so much. I am going to have a rough road. Missing him is going to be a blessing and a curse for the rest of my life. I’m going to know how much I was loved and I am going to know how much I lost. Even if it isn’t my fault it is my loss to deal with. It is a loss for my children to deal with. I am going to have to push my babies forward alone with no one adding to my bucket.

I feel bad because there are so many thoughts in my head that will never be spoken again. I won’t ever believe anyone cares. It makes me feel lonely in my soul. Sure, yeah, I will talk out loud to Noah but it’s not the same. It’s going to make me feel very disconnected from life that I am only safe talking to myself alone in a room.

Tomorrow is when we were supposed to wake up to go on our holiday alone after the aborted negotiation with TB. I don’t even know if TB is in the country. I don’t care. He poisoned that well this year when he told me he didn’t need to be upset about me being raped because I wasn’t his wife. That’s disgusting and nauseating.

I really do wonder if I am going to turn into my mother and just give up sex. Either that or I will cause problems. I struggle with believing I will find a healthy medium. I’m used to having sex every day, often two or three times a day. I can feel in my body that it is not happening and my body is not pleased. I would be literally pawing at Noah by now if for some reason I hadn’t jumped him already this morning.

It is hard going back to bed after my early morning trip to the bathroom. That’s when I would get excited every single morning because I could wake Noah up for sex. He would warm me back up from the chill of the bathroom and the process would lead into melting together.

Yeah. Last night was the last night a person who snores can be in my bed. I love you with my whole soul Pam but I need to be able to go back to sleep at 1am. I can’t lay awake for hours listening to snoring and thinking about how much I am scared. It’s not healthy. I need to be able to go back to sleep.

I had someone who wanted to know about every weird gurgle and blip in my body. Someone who wanted to know every discomfort because maybe he could help. He could help in so many ways. I am overwhelmed with sadness. I want to take care of him. He was so delighted with the ways I am confident. He made me feel special. Pam and Dad are trying hard to get me to feel special.

It’s not working very well. I feel like I failed the boss level at life. I didn’t protect Noah. I hurt inside my soul. Noah, I am so sorry. Noah I am sorry for every time I didn’t do what you deserved.

The only way I can continue in his service is to give our kids a good life. That starts with the building block of sleep.

Shortie and I were talking about that last night. She was annoyed because all the grown ups are harping on her to go to sleep. She was complaining about how it is stupid because sleep doesn’t do anything anyway. I told her she was so wrong and I started explaining what sleep does for your brain and body. It’s necessary for learning, growing, and healing. She asked a lot of follow up questions. She is so clever that it is really uncanny at times.

I am scared that she is going to end up being the kid who is most like me. Middle Child is firmly in the PDA camp with me and I’m absolutely certain beyond all measure that Shortie is too. When she is asked to do something she responds with snarls and a vicious physical retaliation if you physically try to push her into something. I’m going to have to talk to the school. She always comes back and apologises for these rapid bursts of emoting. That’s not how she wants to act it is just instinctive and utterly compulsive. If you have compassion for her and deescalate without taking it as a challenge then things can smooth right out. She is not mean or vindictive or unwilling to help. She has a really strong automatic anxiety reaction to being ordered about. I can’t judge.

She has also taught herself to read at 6. My other kids did not do that. She’s far further into maths than her siblings were at her age because she finds it fun and engaging. She is more than halfway through the elementary curriculum set I have. I’m a little worried that she is going to be advanced enough to really struggle in school. Or maybe they will let her read like I did?

I’m scared on so many levels. I’m scared of so many things. I’m sad. I feel this horrifyingly swelling well of sadness and depression. I want Noah and I will never have him again. Noah was my life, my happiness, my home. This house is just a building for me. My home was him being inside of me. It was the only way I ever felt fully secure. That is gone. I never get to feel like that again. I miss him.

I will keep going though. I have to. The older kids are processing in waves what it means that their dad is gone. My baby is flailing and uncertain and having all the feelings. I can’t be mean to her about the way she is feeling. I love the bones of her. That’s a thing I’m worried about–she is losing weight and that’s not ok. She’s already extremely slender. I can’t give on the candy front because she is super compulsive but I need to massively bend on controlling her food. She is so much like me and she struggles with digestion stuff because her diet isn’t varied enough. Right now I need to give her a lot of leeway around picking stuff that can give her what she needs. Mostly I need to stock my kitchen with stuff she is welcome to have at any minute and encourage grazing. She’s not great at meals.

It was worth arguing over when it was our biggest issue. It isn’t anymore. Survival is. I’m not giving up on the process of helping her learn to eat more food but I am going to push less.

I have to go limp in a lot of ways. A lot of things I would normally correct or criticise I can’t for the next 6+ months. I am waking the kids up every day and having chats with each of them or singing a cheerful song. Everyone gets a private moment with me to start the day. We are also touching base later in the day for directed attention outside of group stuff.

I have to take care of them. I am who they get to have. I think that sucks for them and is really unfair but it’s true.

I’m struggling with my shame around having chosen to have kids when I struggle so much with mental illness. When I had Noah to cover my fuck ups it felt more justifiable. Now I have to regulate myself more than I ever have in my entire life. That’s really hard. I have to do it while struggling with the worst things that have happened to me in decades. I believe they are worth the effort and I need to put my money where my mouth is.

I know that it isn’t healthy for me to spend the rest of my life living for my children. I’m pretty sure it is healthy for the next year. Maybe that’s all I can handle thinking about right now. Maybe I am not able to think past that to what will come in the next chapter of my life. I don’t actually want another chapter. I liked the one I was in. Noah. I miss you, Noah.

But it’s over. Life isn’t fair. There is no such thing as fair. No one gets what they deserve.

For a time I had Noah. It was really wonderful.

Frozen hell

I’m going to have a hard time crawling out of the hole in which I believe his death is all my fault. Noah being gone feels like the end of hope, joy, love, and being cared for in this life. I lost it because I didn’t protect him enough. I let his fragile body be damaged. I loathe every aspect of myself. I pushed him too hard. I am a monster.

Is it actually all my fault that his body gave out? No. I am not in charge of the cells in other peoples bodies. However, if it’s all my fault then I deserve to be punished and that feels like the only justice possible given what happened to Noah. I deserve to be punished for the rest of my life because I didn’t keep him alive. My life will be a punishment of its own. I will not have Noah.

11 days without Noah. The longest we have gone without seeing each other since we got married was 6 weeks. I think that happened one time on the road trip. Usually we didn’t go longer than 3 weeks on that trip and never longer than a week and a half since. We don’t like being apart. We have never liked being apart.

I miss Noah so much. I have no idea how I will ever recover from this.