Tag Archives: homeschooling

This will be awkward as a transition

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For a while I am not going to know what to say or how to say it. I’ve been carefully limiting my writing for specific social media audiences over the past few years. Now I’m pretty sure some of my hate followers are getting notifications because they are subscribed to my RSS feed. That’s always fun.

It’s hard to figure out how to talk about all the things I need to talk about. I’ve been avoiding talking about parenting for a long time even though that is still the biggest part of my life. I am not feeling like the best parent lately. I’m not the worst but I don’t look at that bar.

I’ve been blow drying Middle Child’s hair when they shower for a while. It’s been one of the best ways for us to have tactile connection that doesn’t involve me being bossy or a controlling. I’m just taking care of them in a way they like that makes them feel special and pretty. (Their hair really is gorgeous after a blow dry. It gets awkwardly tangled when it air dries.) I haven’t really asked if they want me to, I just show up and take over. Maybe I am being an asshole. It’s the only part of their self care I am still involved in. I actually got them a birthday present that is a hair dryer/curling iron set. They might take it in their room and that’s the end of us sharing this. It’s possible. It isn’t my goal. I like playing with their hair. It reminds me so much of my mother’s hair and this feels like the only piece of that relationship I get to keep.

Youngest Child gets the short end of the stick in an awful lot of ways. I haven’t managed to create the same Wonderland for her and I regularly feel pretty bad about her not having the gaggle of friends we had in California. It’s hard to make friends here. I have had good inroads with a few folks but the majority of people I have met are not keen to see us again. I feel like her being my daughter is the worst thing I’ve done to her. How can I create a community around her when I am the problem?

I have some additional worry right this second because I restarted birth control for the first time in 17 years. Ew. But it’s better than having a baby at 43 or 44. I really don’t have it in me to restart the clock again on parenting. I love my kids but I’m running very low on reserves for being patient and giving and understanding around the clock 24/7. I am worried about the hormonal fluctuations that may come. I am not exactly so stable lately that it will be reasonable to tell what is coming from the meds.

I keep having these things happen that make me feel flattened and worthless and empty and then I need to hurry up and recover because there is work to be done. People need support. People need me to be giving and working and listening and supporting and that’s not a thing I do well when I’m flat and feel empty and worthless.

I worked 29 days in June. I had months of intensive work leading up to that. July was supposed to be a recuperation couple of weeks before surgery and instead I was sexually assaulted. Then I had surgery. Then came dealing with the police. I popped a stitch because my blood pressure was so high during the police interview. They rushed us to the hospital at the end.

I didn’t die. Woo. That’s not unexpected event with this surgery. No biggie. Just keep on moving forward. Sometimes there is a sudden massive bleed that stops after a bit in the first two weeks.

I shouldn’t exercise until October according to my surgeon. I’m going to listen to him. This is hard because exercise is the most healthy form of stress relief I have in life. Everything else is harder on my body. I am feeling fairly overwhelmed with stress right now.

I should be restarting interviews for Vicki’s book and I feel overwhelming panic at the thought. I don’t know how to set myself aside to that degree right now. I feel like pieces of me are leaking out all over the place. I feel utterly uncontained. I feel like I have been trying hard to shove all of myself in a box and I just can’t anymore. The closet has not been working well for me.

I am feeling disconnected, like the pieces of me are stored in different rooms all over a hotel and you have to run up and down the stairs a lot to gain access to the different pieces. It’s exhausting. It feels like integration is just too high of a bar to ask for.

I’m struggling with feeling coherence in my brain. I think coming back to my website will ultimately be good because I will get back to feeling comfortable with a full speed brain dump but I’m not there yet. I’m looking forward to it as a contrast with social media.

I like thinking of my writing as a full on stream of consciousness dump. I embrace the inconsistencies and contradictions as part of sharing thought. Part of what is going on for me right now is I am trying to figure out how “in the closet” I am going to try to be going forward. I’ve been pretty closeted, secretive, and evasive since I moved. I’ve tried hard to keep a lid on my history.

Now the lid is lying on the floor somewhere and ooze is streaming out of that hole.

I’m not going to retell every story, I have an archive for that. Instead how about if I just figure out how to talk about who I am now and why I am doing the things I am doing. It’s all so convoluted and stupid. I feel stupid. I feel like I’ve been in a very stable place and I shouldn’t rock the boat. The thing is, I’ve gotten to the point where loneliness is eating me like a cancer. There is so much that I have been suppressing or hiding or avoiding for years that it is a problem for me to continue doing so. I am hurting myself. I have to put significant effort into growing my community here.

That’s going to be hard due to physical limitations over the next few years. I haven’t talked about it here much (or at all) but I’ve had wicked hemorrhoids over the past few years. The surgeon said he couldn’t understand how I ride a bike like that. I shrugged and said it is my normal. Now that the big grape sized bits are gone I’m left with some much more modest skin flaps. These are going to be removed next May. Each surgery will involve a 10ish week time span afterwards where I cannot exercise at all. I can moderately walk but not too far. (Too far being above ~6 miles in a day.) I did walk more than 10 miles recently. I was flattened for 2 days afterwards and it still kinda hurts extra 5 days later.

I’ve got a lot of rest time ahead of me in the next 12 months. Ugh.

Yes, I want all the hemorrhoids gone because I’m tired of bleeding if I have to use regular toilet paper for a whole day. Also I desperately want anal sex back. It’s just not possible with the damage to my anus as it stands. Having kids is rough thing on a body. EDS means all forms of prolapse are more likely. I am going to try to be assertive about dealing with my prolapse stuff going forward. It’s not cool to have things falling out of my body. It’s sorta weird knowing that I am going to need to push to have anyone care about that.

The leaves are changing colours and falling off the trees. It feels too early. It feels like I have simply missed summer this year.

We have a six week block mapped out with a fairly vigorous schedule ahead of us. I won’t be exercising a ton (I am definitely failing to meet any kind of goal for this year) but I will be keeping the trains going and pushing people through their commitments. The kids are all adding additional classes/activities/tasks in ways that will expand their exposure to people in town. This feels really important. A lot of it has to fall on Noah because I can’t cycle. His legs and ass are looking a lot hotter lately. Let me give myself a little pat on the back for helping to push him in that direction. Oh it’s a joyous sight.

Noah and I have been talking a lot about polyamory. If you don’t know that word, in very short it means having romantic love with more than one partner. When we met we both had other partners. We have opened and closed our marriage a few times for logistical reasons. I refer to our recent, by far longest, span of monogamy as the Choke Chain. It’s capitalised because it’s a formal title for a concept and stage we went through. It was in response to a really bad period where everything around polyamory went shockingly poorly. I’m not rehashing that right now. I don’t have time.

It is hard trying to talk through all of the mistakes we have made and all of the times we have made unkind choices. It feels like a lot of “bringing up old stuff” but it’s important. We are talking about our different sets of reactions and what was spurring us in one direction or another. It allows us to understand more fully why some parts were harder or easier for the other. It gives us a chance to make better decisions going forward. It’s not always as simple as just waving your hands over something and saying “just don’t do that”. Which that? What part? We have been using that to mean having an open marriage but I do not believe that is sustainable.

See, this is where I stop and think “How would I say this to a random stranger in town?”

I believe that human beings are a species with a wide and varied range of sexual appetites. Much like our primate kin we have some who like monogamy and some who like one male and multiple females and some females with a lot of males and some who like to mate through sex with absolutely everyone without regard to sex.

I am no longer physically, emotionally, or mentally suited to having a truly large number of partners at any given time. I just can’t anymore. I don’t think I can continue only having one partner though. I know it is selfish. Literally that’s what makes it such a tremendously good thing. Yes, falling in love with someone who isn’t already part of my family is selfish. It is individuation from the pod. (We refer to ourselves as a whale pod.)

I need more emotional support. Noah is an amazing husband. He gives more support than anyone has the right to expect or demand. People are supposed to have a web of people who support them in ways big and small. I feel ashamed of this, and I shouldn’t, but I do need the emotional intensity in my life of having more than one sexual relationship. Sex does bond people. Well, it can.

This is where it is weird to think about explaining this to a random person in town. Oh golly. Sex creates hormones. It can be done fairly casually to get endorphins and dopamine followed by a high five and a fond farewell. It can also be done to raise oxytocin and fall in love and bond in the way that creates family connections–with or without sharing DNA to create a child.

I am slightly weirded out by the fact that Noah has literally colonised my body and remnants of his DNA and the DNA of our children are now parts of my permanent body. Being a carrying parent is fucking weird. His body wasn’t highjacked. WTF?

I need more intense connection in my life. I need it. I am not managing to create that very well without sex. I am also deeply uninterested in the drama that would come with having sex with someone who lives locally. I just can’t be arsed to care enough about the sex to want to deal with fall out. Nope.

That leaves long distance relationships with people from my past. I have very little interest in being back in the US. That narrows the pool considerably. As it so happens, luck brought someone back into my life. Someone who is quite invested in making sure I maintain my family life.

We are a species that has evolved to handle matters of bonding and creating support networks of very diverse sizes and shapes. Many people are still happy doing pair bonding and having involved grandparents/aunts/uncles/cousins. That is not an option for everyone. It leaves a lot of people out entirely. That’s a complicated situation. I know that in Scotland a lot of the answer is “ask the government for help” but this isn’t that kind of thing. I need community. I need deep emotional connection. I am also a hard nut to crack. For all that I will tell my story to anyone who asks I don’t volunteer it much in person.

I need to be known in an intense and deep way. I don’t trust someone easily. I assume people are not interested in knowing me more deeply because they don’t know what they are signing on for. I always assume that I am going to be too much.

So this is what is going on with me.

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Right now I am on a brief rest break before I either decide if this is a longer break so I can go to the queer social night or if I am going to go outside to work in the garden. Right now I am trying to get the house/garden set up for an open house with the home ed folks so I feel a lot of get up and go for the work. I’m trying to figure out how I can lay out walkways that let people understand clearly where I don’t want them stepping in my chaotic garden full of plants and different kinds of mulch all over the place.

So that is one piece. I have various irons in the fire with the home education community. I’m trying to figure out which relationships I should cultivate harder and which ones are unlikely to be a good usage of my time. I am feeling incredibly scheduled again. Time is, as it will be for the rest of my life, the biggest limiting factor for everything I do.

Exercise is going to be really over-represented in my schedule for the next five months. I am increasingly conscious of just how much cross training I need to build supportive muscles that are not used in running and to relieve tightness. I’m old. I need so much more effort to get to baseline and it fucking sucks. I’m tired.

Which means that if I am going to effectively absorb and use this exercise to actually get stronger I must sleep. Like, a lot. Even though it looks like daytime until almost midnight and then it is dusk for a little while again before it is daytime again. I’ve never been a great daytime sleeper. Which means I have to get up pretty dang early every single day and get in bed before 10 every single night. I don’t do well with adding in a run later in the day. As my runs get longer and longer I need to mostly just start earlier.

Dang, the other day in the park I met this older lady who told me that she ran her first marathon at 51 and she did it in 4 hours and 45 minutes. Fuck. I can’t even. I am really really really really really really hoping that I will be at least 1 minute less than 6 hours. I am not greedy. My previous shitty time was 6 hours and 45 minutes. I would desperately like it to be shorter than 6 hours. But I’m nervous sending that wish into the universe because I kept saying “I would just like to finish labour in 24 hours” for all three births and I never fucking did. That was a giant failure to manage a prediction/hope/goal for my bodily functioning. I actually went into the first marathon thinking I’d be something in the neighbourhood of 5 hours and 30 minutes. lololololsob

Since I am trying to decide if I am going out tonight: I could go find the giant pride flag and figure out the flagpole situation right *now* and have it up for my ride in since it’s pride month. 🏳️‍🌈 And it is pride month. Seems like a great time to be bonding with my local homies before the big event happens with all the folks who travel in from the villages.

Sometimes I wonder if we really understand people in the past as much as we think we do. Like, if I did not practically tattoo “queer” on my forehead every so often I would be entirely unremarkable and perceived as a normal cis-het mother. I really do believe that queerness is an aspect of my personality that is outside of what other people describe as their normal. It is part of the ravenous predatory streak I have. I sit on myself so hard at this point. Although the funny thing is that I don’t feel it as intensely as I used to. I suppose I would describe it as once upon a time I know I would have gone there. I am not going to speculate if that would have gone well back when. That would not go well now. Ok, bounce eyes.

Sex is complicated in a place this small. Holy crap. The dynamics scare me. Like, honestly. I fucked around so casually for so long. I would not understand how to avoid pissing in other people’s cheerios. No freaking wonder most human beings have low body counts. Yikes it could get really challenging in a place this small. I think I lack the diplomacy to do this tactfully. I am glad I don’t have to find out. It will never matter because Noah is not allowed to die before me. He has been informed.

But good golly I’ll dress as a garish motherfucker and wave a flag sometimes and coyly answer questions about for whom am I advertising. Since it really will never get to anything other than friendship I must fly that kind of outrageously if I am going to find my people and I am going to find them and find ways to integrate them into my life. I believe that queers need each other. Many of us don’t have families of origin we maintain contact with. A very large percentage of us do not have children. That doesn’t mean that any of us deserve to be alone. We have to find each other.

I mean, I can literally say: “Hey if you are one of those queers who feels like they really want a place to go and spend time and make deep community… I am going to be buying a tiny piece of land.” A piece of land small enough that we can do the vast majority of work by hand with folks not feeling exhausted at the end. I know so many people who talk about how much they wish they could build something like that. I want to make community. You’ll be welcome to come hang out in the forest you build anytime. The gates don’t lock.

I don’t wanna be Auntie… but I wanna be Auntie. That woman has had a full house of people she has been helping all of her life. First it was foster kids her mom took in and then it was all the stray people having troubles she knew. She raised her sister… and her sister’s kids… and her sister’s grandkids…

I wanna be Auntie with upgrades. She helped people in a way that resulted in a lot of deeply dependent, incapable people. Not all of them. Some of them just needed a safe place to sleep and eat for a couple of months then they went on their way and did fine. But then there are most of the rest of them. Last I knew she was in her late 70’s and working to pay a mortgage to cover the refinances her husband took out and to pay to take care of all three of her children who live with her.

I am not fucking interested in disabling my children.

I want to help people learn more about how they can teach themselves the things they need to learn in order to move forward. I mean physical skills, intellectual skills, emotional skills, academic skills, and most importantly how to set goals and work towards something they want. They get to figure out what that is. As long as you are not able to pick one I’ll push you through picking something for a while and we will both learn a lot as you learn why you end up disliking it. Over time they gradually pick better and better projects for themselves. They still fuck up… a lot… but that is the point. Fuck up now. Fuck up in ways that won’t matter in 10, 20, 50 years. Hell, most of these fuck ups won’t matter in 5 minutes. Just do it. Fuck up. Learn the lesson. Don’t hold back and wait. Don’t waste time. Think of all the better decisions you will make once you learn this. Doesn’t that sound nice? At some point it will be easier for you to figure out which decision will work for you without having to suffer so much at so many junctions.

BUT THEN YOU MOVE TO ANOTHER FUCKING COUNTRY AND HAVE TO LEARN ANOTHER FUCKING CULTURE AND JUST FUCK YOURSELF ALL THE WAY UP.

Cheezits mother trucker.

So I’m sorta categorising my community efforts as:

  • bike
  • queer
  • kink
  • maker
  • community resource sharing
  • gardening
  • political
  • proximity

That’s why I feel like whoa. That’s why I don’t feel like I’m getting to know people quickly. I’m trying to duplicate the full spread of the type of web I had in California and build all aspects of it at the same rate at the same time. While I’m fucking exercising a lot. I suppose the bike community is sorta good for that but a lot of my time there feels super awkward because I am not able to hear that well.

I mean look at the size of the fucking social life I’m planning for the next few decades. I’m going to need to be a fit bitch to ride my bike around to all that shit.

Cause that is what I’m aiming for. I’m going to go do shit. I’m go to make things with people. I am going to invite people to help me with the property.

It’s a whole fucking thing. If you ask people to do something for you they will like you more. And co-working is my biggest love language so I will invite people into my bubble and see who self selects in. And that will be a lot of the inner layers of the core of the web. That’s how it tends to work. It won’t be a perfect alignment, sometimes those very first points on the web are smaller but they lead to a giant nexxus.

That’s how your bestie picked by proximity ends up being the one to tell you “You really should go to the Disaster House Party. I think you will have a very good time.” Reader: I married the guy throwing the party. And then she leaves you to marry an admittedly rather cool guy who happened to live almost halfway around the world. So you name your children after each other because you miss each other so much. Then you decide that 10 years is long enough and you move 2 fucking miles away from her.

I mean, some aspects of my story are pretty hilarious. I follow arcs a long way. I know I should write you an email Pam. Hello, this is my social anxiety voice. You write your journals privately and share them selectively in email. You have what normal people might call “boundaries”.

Hello internet I’ve missed you. I miss this part of my inner story. Most of the time since I moved here I shut it off as fast as I can. In any conversation there can only be a couple of paragraphs and I know that I’d better keep my transition points SUPER FUCKING OBVIOUS while not in any way shape or form seeming to put effort into my, inevitably slightly graceless, transition into the next topic. Cheers, mother trucker.

Fuck every person who has ever told me to just be myself. Dude you don’t even know. Cultivated, curated, deeply thought about choice goes into so much of how I hold my body. I fucking pre-game for social events. I specifically think about what attitude I am supposed to exhibit. I think about how I need to hold my body to get the response I want. It varies based on the crowd and reason for the event. I am not natural but I am comfortable with what I am doing. I have worn this personality/skin-suit mechanism for quite some time. I struggle when I know I’m going to spend a lot of time pin-ball whacking against a lot of barriers. That is the natural and normal early stage of a relationship.

That’s where you have to refine your mental image of this person to progressively more specificity as they become more and more of an actual specific ensemble cast member instead of being part of the chorus in setting B. This is an especially graceless stage for me. Because I am shifting through everything I remember about someone as I talk to new people. I’m trying to come up with every detail of every conversation for the first long while. That way I can follow up on specific topics and build a sense of connection. What? You don’t think through this process? You think I just know so much about you because I happened to have that for you? Nah, babe. I am far from perfect but good golly I work hard. It’s hilarious how often whatever that person’s name is doesn’t make the connection. It depends on how often I hear other people talk about them. It depends on how well embedded in the web they are from multiple directions. If I hear their name I place it in a storyline in a way that I don’t from talking to someone and looking at their face. I will remember all the feelings I’ve had with them and I can sometimes, when I’m lucky, get people to also have that glimmer of oh yes. We had fun. I’m fun. Then we go on with our lives without even having to get into it. But goddess that takes time.

I’d really like to figure out how to figure more rhythm around my efforts in various places based on moon stuff just so that I have to synch with it more. I think it would benefit my garden tremendously. There are a lot of gardening tasks that want about a month in between the next thing. I need to build that feeling into my body and associate it with other definitive parts of my routine and that means I need to tie it in with patterns in the house.

I get to play with building a system. The funny thing is that it will go best if I make a plan and organise and make whatever decisions I want to make then I inform the kids what work they will be doing the next day so they’d better make sure they don’t have an emergency project to do tomorrow morning. Planning and making an agreement about what you will do 100% OF THE TIME RESULTS IN SOMEONE BEING EXTREMELY ANGRY AND FURIOUS.

See, I’m teaching them life skills. Muahahaha.

We have a real live group project all around us every day. We are all working on projects big and small all day long. We bounce around talking to one another and then going off to do one on one with someone for a while then we have another most-of the group contact for a while then the whole family again. We do it over and over all day. They are all managing different pieces of it.

Dude. I need to start clearing off one wall at a time in the studio and deep cleaning it. Cause then I can invite other people to scribble on the wall when they come over. I’ll clean it very slowly adding new nice white space only gradually. That way if people ever want to come claim a new place much further around the room their part of the weft will show up brightly.

But right now I feel absolutely knackered. I feel like I have a 20lb sack on my head; I am so tired. I am going to be running 3 miles tomorrow morning. I am going to be running 6 miles on Saturday morning. I uhhh think that I probably ought to stay home tonight and not go out. Ok, one decision made. I need to be in bed by 9, not in a bar in town starting home at 9.

Yeah. I think I am out of typing. That’s all I can be semi-coherent about and I doubt any of that was coherent. But I feel better. And that is good enough.

It’s not about you, David.

Time to get back on track.

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I really like it when Noah is on vacation. I will like it when Noah is retired. I know more than a few relationships that have ended after lockdowns because people found out they didn’t like each other as much as they thought. I like Noah more with every passing year. I like alone time too, and time with other people. Every single day I am reminded that I am blessed because Noah is my person. He annoys me. He tells absolutely ridiculous jokes. He squicks me on a regular basis but in a way I apparently find incredibly endearing.

No one else in the whole world wants me to be as big as Noah does. Err, Ironically I do mean that in the feeder sense as well as in the spiritual sense. We were talking about some of the ways in which he is socially deferential, to the point that folks in the local bdsm community are assuming our dynamic is very different than it is. People are complicated. Noah wants me to be complicated and he doesn’t mind that it means my needs keep changing.

I am super scattered this morning. I can’t get into a flow. I stayed up too late, mostly through inertia. I need to get into the house a little early this morning. Time for Noah to go back to work and I need to be trying harder for fewer things, more consistently. I have been really needing, and taking, a fair bit of time off but if Noah needs to be working then I need to check back in.

Get ready for the day, wake the big kids, help Shorty with the morning chore, do planners with the kids. It’s time to teach backward planning. If you need to get all of these things done, when should you do them and how are you going to remind yourself? Getting too big for me to be the one who decides and reminds. It’s your turn, darlings.

Easier to do it with a smile on my face after yesterday’s delicious date. I like my husband a whoooooole lot.

The class should be able to run without you

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I just thought of something. A long time ago, when I was doing an assistant teaching gig in a middle school, my mentor gave me a book about how one of the most important things you can do as a teacher is to have thoughtful systems for how things will be done throughout the class day that you follow absolutely rigidly. This is so that going through the experience is so rote that you don’t even need to tell them to do whatever the next step is after a short time–they know.

I have been doing very poorly on that lately. As I say often to my oldest when he is trying to solve a problem, you are getting stuck in the weeds instead of looking at the big picture of the forest.

I am not modeling coping skills for living in a neurotypical world as a neurodiverse person in a conscious and deliberate way. I am hiding to do all of my regulation and that is opaque to kids.

It’s kind of interesting because we do talk about other aspects of mental health. Every so often a child (ambiguity there) will start acting out in some way and we will have a chat where I remind them that we don’t have easy access to therapists here so we have to actually talk to each other and figure things out. I acknowledge that I am not their therapist and I never can be because I am not a neutral party who is entirely on their side. I have my own agendas and biases so that means I am not the same thing and I’m not as good… but I am what is here. So far these sorts of conversations have ended with someone feeling like they are a little bit more ok and that’s all I can hope for.

But I’m not showing them how I organise information in my house. I narrate it quickly on rare occasions and that just isn’t the same thing. It’s not fair. I’m not always regulated the way I should be and I have a lot more experience being taught how to regulate myself. We don’t always figure these things out intuitively.

When did I learn these skills? I was always a real sucker for a school planner. I filled those bitches out. That allowed me to information dump like I do in my blog in the most nascent of forms. I blame you, middle school. My kids haven’t really had that experience. We do use Google Calendar but it is not the same. It doesn’t force you to organise your mind every time you look at it. You have to go turn on a computer/phone and check it. Yeah with a paper planner you have to open it and look at it but that part was always the easy step for me. I compulsively had the fucker out. Every hour or two I had new shit.

I am feeling especially pent up on the swearing front. I’ve been feeling so bad about all swearing around the kids that I’m doing way less and feeling weird about it. Also: conservative people in this community will judge. So, hello anxiety.

So yeah. I need to do that. Come on Krissy, get your shit together.

Pacing

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I am sure there are many people who would not appreciate me saying this: but I miss lock down. I didn’t have to worry about balancing the various needs of my family members with various outside the home activities and people while also figuring out when to get chores done. I slept more and more consistently. Lately my sleep is shit again.

One of the problems with the age spread of my children is that the shape of providing “structure” for each of them is different. Youngest Child is still small enough that she should mainly be around kids through classes and they all want to start mid-morning and last for around an hour before popping the kids out on the other side expecting snacks and a trip to the park. Most parents of children in similar ages are either nearly in nursery or already in nursery and they are specifically training the kids around having the habit of being out of the house 5 days a week for most of the day so the children manage the transition to primary school.

I get it… but I also find that doing that in the morning mostly shoots my wad and I’m too tired to come home and do a big project of my own unless I do it after dinner and give up sleep. If I am out for the morning the mid-afternoon to dinner chunk is mostly me interacting with the older kids around their school stuff and my brain is just not currently capable of doing something for me while I talk to them. Yay ADHD medication? It feels like too tired because I can’t push my brain into doing many things at once on this medication unless I am super well rested.

If I get a good night of sleep and I start my project early in the day then I can normally handle talking to the older kids about a second thing while I work. (Most projects of this type being garden or cleaning related.) I can talk to them about their literature reading progress first thing in the morning while we continue working on removing nails from the old shed boards because we are going to repurpose the wood. But if I try to do the exact same thing starting at 1 or 2 I get confused and befuddled and irritated and angry. My brain says I can fuck all the way off.

So I’m not making forward progress on a lot of the outside projects I want to do since YC started classes and that’s feeling frustrating. The older kids have enjoyed the descent into too-much screen time that happened during my last painting project and they are absolutely loathe to give it up. They really won’t come out in the mid-afternoon and help me. I can push it in the mornings.

This pacing is not working and I feel exhausted and crappy most of the time. It doesn’t help that Noah’s work schedule is hard to figure out and manage. Working for a company that is 5 hours behind us in time zones gets to be pretty challenging.

I am almost to the end of this session of little kid classes. I am going to try and move the timing. If I can get her into classes that are more like after lunch and less like after breakfast then maybe I can get the big kids through helping me instead of getting on video games first thing then fighting to not have to get off later.

I am getting to the point where I am low key signaling distress in ways I don’t mean to and that’s a problem. Fairly random strangers keep asking me if I have any support because it sounds like I have a lot going on. It depends on what you mean by support but mostly… no. I have been shoving my mental health care needs in a box for a couple of years now. Every so often I open the box long enough to shove something else in then I quickly tape over it again. I’m not ok. I know that lots of people aren’t ok and I don’t have it bad in the scheme of things.

I’m not ok and I don’t have a way to cope with that right now. Therapy isn’t an option–I spoke with my GP recently about head injury stuff. In the course of the conversation she asked me how I was overall coping and I told her not that well. I had previously believed that I would be a lifer in therapy then I moved here and that’s not an option. She told me that she thinks I am being very kind to notice just how limited the access to therapy is here and deliberately not put myself on a waiting list. She told me that she has seen me enough times now to have a sense of me and she thinks that any of the therapists in town could be nothing other than a kind and sympathetic ear because they don’t have more training than I do after how much therapy I’ve had.

This is not the first local expert who has told me that I am the best source of support, tools, and tactics for managing my issues and those of my children in this area. Apparently I put those decades of living in the bay and having access to experts to very good use. Every so often one or the other of the older kids has something challenging happen with regard to mental health because they are people and life is complicated. When that happens I ensure that we have privacy and we get into the heavy stuff. Both kids have said, “I’m sure if I tell you about (_____) you will be upset with me.” I tell them to give me a minute so I can fix my face. Then I put on the “I will not judge you; I will be supportive and unsurprised by anything you say because it’s ok for you to be a person on your journey” face. We talk about their big feelings and the situation and why it is both normal and ok that they are struggling. We talk about the fact that it is hard that we can’t hire therapists to be there through these sorts of things going forward. We talk about what things they can imagine doing to change the situation. I ask if they want to hear about any other options I know about–sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. Boundaries, yo.

I am not your therapist. I will never be a completely neutral party. I will never be 100% on your side because I am often the person you are in the most conflict with. That is rough. But I am not going to judge all of the things you think I will judge. I am not going to be upset about even half of the things you think I will be upset about. And as you get older I will have to be less and less of who you consider when you decide how you will solve a problem. That is the way forward. I am not and I can never be your therapist but I can help you talk out some of what is bothering you. I definitely don’t have all of your answers but pretty often I do have useful questions. I have been very lucky in my life and the state of California made sure that I had access to lots of people who asked good questions.

I need to start writing even if I am afraid of consequences. I am going to be the closest thing to a therapist I have going forward. That process doesn’t work well without the blog. As my Eldest Child says: “When I write something just for me I delete it or rip it up most of the time because it never seems worth keeping. When I just go ahead and post it right away then even when it isn’t perfect I get feedback and I have to act like it was real and I have to carry on forward as if it has happened and can’t be taken back.”

Of course, she is talking about the status of her fanfic and she’s posting on Wattpad so it’s slightly different. I’ve gotta say that her comments are probably more vicious than mine ever are. I worry about the consequences of my writing because working out my feelings is not a pretty process. Sometimes I hurt people when they know what is going on inside me. If I just shut my stupid mouth and stand near them then they don’t know what an asshole I am and things carry on without too big of a problem.

Being real about all the strife inside my brain is scary. I just about always have as much pull towards people as I have push away from them. My magnetic polarity is really confused.

The thing is: I do shitty things to hurt myself when I don’t work through the stuff in my brain. I am long past the point of the kinds of self-harm that would land me in a psych ward but I am not kind to myself. I do not take good enough care. I do things that will cause long-term damage through neglect or lack of love. It’s little, cumulative things but nothing dramatic that will force other people to intervene. I am smart and I don’t want intervention so let me tell you I will stay below that fucking radar for the rest of my life. There is a lot of room under the radar line to hit a bird and have it destroy an engine.

I am not acting like I am a creature I love who needs to be taken care of. That means I can’t model what that means and that’s a problem. I am very certain that I will never again have a person I talk to all the time to help me sort out my brain. So I have to do it. I need to start doing it a lot again. Which also means I need to stop sitting in this damn chair and use the standing desk. That’s going to have to be step one, Krissy.

An affirming phone call

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I want to write this down so that in the future I can remember this feeling. I talked to a buddy in town yesterday; she works in special education in an autism class. This is sometimes complicated for her because her training is entirely in language teaching (usually foreign language to mainstream kids) but this was the job she could get around here. She has been given very little additional training/teaching so she is figuring it out as she goes and reading books on her own to help her in her job. Also worth mentioning that her daughter is Middle Child’s best friend.

We talked a lot about what I’m seeing and what I’m trying to figure out with regard to helping MC. We talked about the areas of severe academic delay (specifically: MC is effectively reading about 4 years below grade level and writing 5-6 grades below level) and the complications that occurred in the classroom when MC attempted to go two years ago. We talked about dynamics in our house around chores/getting stuff done.

She was very clear that she didn’t have a lot of specific advice but she was a sympathetic ear and she talked through her experiences working with families in her classroom. She understands why I am not super keen on pushing more in the direction of the National Autistic Society help and why I have the worries I have. I talked about Auntie who is in her 80’s and has her three adult children living with her because none of them can take care of themselves and live independently. I talked about my brother Tommy and the way he physically abused his entire family and why the tantrums/violent outbursts are so triggering for me.

Side note: in the past couple of weeks it has come to my attention that pretty much all of the friends I have met here have basically no idea that I have/had siblings and they know nothing about my traumatic family background. I made a couple of comments recently in context in conversations in completely different groups and they all responded with extreme shock and complete surprise. “How have I been talking to you for this long and I had no idea any of this happened?” Well… I don’t trauma dump anymore. I don’t share my mental state by and large with newer friends here. It isn’t relevant to mention any of these things if I’m not going to talk about anxiety/depression/trauma. So I don’t. This is part of my strong feeling that I am never again going to make a close friend where I talk about the really hard stuff. I will have surface friends and basically shut the fuck up about my brain going forward. It’s not safe to talk about. I can no longer absorb the consequences of being honest.

But I do sometimes need to talk about educational stuff and I need some amount of support around that. We talked about classroom strategies that she uses and how functional/useful they are for my child. We talked about the possibility of Youngest Child going into school here and the likely outcomes of that.

It is her professional opinion after working in special ed in local schools for several years that my children really are better off at home. The resources are thin on the ground and are only available for the most extreme cases. MC has already been on a waiting list for assessment for over two years and it could be another year or more before they are seen. YC would be looking at four or more years given how the waiting list has expanded over the past two years and possibly more like six years. The resources for private assessment are many hours away and their waiting lists are closed because they will not be able to get through any additional patients any year soon and they don’t want to have a waiting list that goes beyond two years. When they do reopen their waiting lists they will have a strong preference for siblings of children already in their system. Even if/when my children managed to be assessed there are very few resources available for kids at their levels. (She knows my family and is comfortable stating that.) Autism resources are only available for kids at the most extreme/non-verbal end. AHDH resources are pretty much limited to medication or being taken out of a mainstream classroom and not taught much. Other Pervasive Non-Verbal Learning Disorders are pretty much ignored entirely.

She and I have had many a chat over the years about our classroom experiences with special needs and the differences between what is given to 504/IEP kids in the bay area and what is available here. She contrasts this with what is given in her native (other European non-English speaking country that I won’t name for a vague gesture in the name of privacy) country and she is of the opinion that my level of training is higher than any co-worker she has ever worked with. She thinks American understanding of education and specifically special education for disabled kids is head and shoulders higher than anything available in Europe. She is stunned by the sheer variety and kinds of books I have read in order to be a more appropriate teacher for my children. I had previously mostly focused on the ADHD/dyslexia/general atypical neurodevelopmental needs reading stuff in conversations with her.

We shared the perspective that there is a very careful balance with special needs/disabled children and adults between giving them the help they need and enabling/infantilizing them to the point where they fail to learn skills that would allow them to be more independent as adults. When you are in the family you lack the objectivity to see the larger arc and how your actions are impacting your family. When you are in the classroom/an outside observer you lack the ability to see all the nuances and decisions that are creating the entire situation so you are ignorant of the full reasoning behind what is happening and whether it is necessary or not. We talked about how difficult it is for parents to hold the line and insist on many of the pieces of development that work towards independence because fighting every battle all day long is exhausting.

Then I said “And I get to be the parent and the teacher and be with my children for nearly all of their waking hours! It’s great!” She kinda choked for a minute and then gushed about how amazing it is that I do what I do with my kids because she sees the results and she sees us interact and man do I keep it together.

That was so fucking validating. She hosts MC for sleepovers pretty regularly. Her daughter is an only child and she’s pretty happy to have a friend over quite a bit. Her daughter has other local friends but has an easier time with MC than with a lot of the kids from school because my buddy and I have fairly similar perspectives on manners and appropriate ways to interact. Because of the one on one social dynamic and the fact that MC is highly motivated to be liked by people outside the family MC really shines in these visits as they get to show off their pride in being able to help with household chores and how to speak with people.

It’s really fascinating seeing how my personality plus my parenting techniques interact with my childrens’ personalities and needs. MC has a very strong basic need for control and a lot of anxiety around demands being made of them. However they have been raised in a 24/7 environment where there are very specific high standards about how we talk to one another and “we are workers, not shirkers” is the family motto so they have adapted their need to not be directed in somewhat surprising ways. The PDA profile fits them to a T and I can go down the list explaining all the ways they resist/avoid work… yet they still manage to do a significant amount of work because of the desire to be a “good citizen of the household”. It’s complicated/complex.

MC has very much internalized that a lot of the ways I am strict/intense in my demands are because of my internal terror that I will fail them as a parent and they love me; this makes them spotty in how they learn and follow through on what I ask but there is this undercurrent of wanting to try. They may take 6 fucking hours to sweep the kitchen most of the time because it is not ok with them on an internal level that they are being told to sweep the kitchen but when they go to someone else’s house and they want to show off they can do it in 5 minutes and tell their little friend all the specific tricks that make it easier/faster because they get to feel like a teacher and they fucking love that.

Hunh. I just had a thought. I kind of wonder if MC is going to finally be interested in learning to write when they get to feel like they are showing YC.

It is quite a challenge to get them to practice reading out loud to me but they do love to do it with YC. When they babysit (more like “mother’s helper” because everyone else is in the house but distracted with video calls or taking a bath) they do a lot of reading/talking about learning. Very much “Having someone read to you is the best…. let me show you.” So much of my teaching approach relies on careful observation and figuring out how to turn my kids personalities to my advantage. That and one to one teaching gives a level of intimacy that simply cannot be matched in a larger classroom. That is not a slam on classroom teachers in any way. I was not as good of a teacher to anyone in particular when I had 150 students. I did my best and it wasn’t what I can give my children.

I feel so much insecurity and anxiety about whether or not what I can give is good enough. I worry so much about letting my children down. It does so much to increase my confidence when I can periodically touch base with another teacher/educator and I can go through my approach and methodology. I do have a fairly extensive education when it comes to child development and what different special needs entail. I have worked very hard on understanding theory.

Towards the end of the call I said, “Something I am very conscious of with regards to my teaching and parenting is that I literally have more will and force of personality than most people. If I believe I am doing the right thing it doesn’t really matter how hard it is or how much time it takes I will do it. It is part of how my brain acts out hyperfocus. When I feel secure that I’m doing the right thing I have just about unlimited energy. I know that if my children were in a classroom they would lose out on that for a big part of their educational support because teachers by and large don’t have that intensity for a myriad of appropriate and healthy reasons. My kids do have special needs and I knew they would before they were born and I am fully committed to doing whatever I have to do to meet them. It is just hard and scary when I feel like I am flailing and I don’t know what to do.” She said that matches what she sees and my kids are lucky to have me.

I feel a lot better after the phone call. I do cycle through novelty. I do renegotiate how things are taught and what things are taught. I do hold the line on “You have to learn a basic level of functionality in order to be an independent adult and we are going to get you there.” I do push/encourage my children through learning and growing in ways that overall result in them liking themselves the vast majority of the time. Even when my kids struggle with anxiety there are usually pretty obvious organic/social reasons that I am not directly to blame for (obviously with the exception of genetics). I am not mean to my kids. I don’t beat them down. They are pretty happy and healthy and secure. Even when they are struggling for a while it is usually in ways that are predictable and appropriate developmentally and I help them pivot towards the path they want to be on.

I am not the shitty parent I sometimes fear I am. I am not perfect because there is no such thing. I do pretty well though. I refuse to stop learning and growing and increasing my ability to meet their needs. When I fail for a while I use that as motivation to push through towards a deeper level of understanding so I can better succeed as their needs change as they grow.

Part of the modeling I want to do for my children is showing that these periods of disequilibrium mean that you keep trying and learning and growing. You don’t give up and declare yourself a failure. As long as you are alive you have the chance to keep growing. Don’t give up on yourself. If we aren’t going to meet my personal goal of having my kids basically ready for complete auto-didact learning to finish the growth necessary for adulthood by 13 that doesn’t mean you can’t hit that mark by 15 or 18. It’s ok that you need the growth curve you need instead of the growth curve I had in my head as ideal. That is not a failure. It is a miscalibration and we’ll just keep going.

Frankly the way that MC needs to reassess every few months and needs a tremendous amount of novelty in order to keep doing things… looks like how I have managed my adult life. I go through intense bursts of focus in different areas. I have to restructure chores and tasks and hobbies regularly or I burn out. You know what? I’m not a failure. I do cool stuff.

MC will too.

Maybe that’s it?

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It’s not a secret that I have long had struggles with my middle child. I adore them and love them and worry a lot about whether or not I am doing the right things for them. I tried to get them evaluated by Stanford before we left California and they got a 15 minute yes/no questionnaire that wasn’t at all useful for data on understanding them. I was frankly pissed off. When they enrolled in school here after a month the school asked for permission to refer them for extensive neurological testing because something is going on. We’ve now been on that waiting list for a bit over two years and every sign points to the likelihood of it being another two years before we get answers. But kiddo is rapidly running into puberty when everything is going to get exponentially harder. My window for effecting major change is closing.

Due to all of that I’ve been doing more research. I am heading in the direction of Pathological Demand Avoidance. (Sometimes referred to as Excessive Demand Avoidance because pathological has a bad reputation. I mean… the definition isn’t awful. The word seems appropriate. I get that colloquial associations can be complicated.) It’s not really diagnosed in the states, this is a UK recognized syndrome. But holy shit when you read up on it: https://www.childrenandfamilyhealthdevon.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/pathological-demand-avoidance.pdf Oh. That’s my baby. I read it and felt strong recognition. I showed it to Noah and he could illustrate each section with repetitive conversations we’ve had in the past. I read it to kiddo and they said, “Oh wow. That sounds like me.” So whether or not we ever get to an official diagnosis we are treating that like Plan A going forward at this stage.

This has some potentially wide ranging implications for the future. How we home educate needs to change pretty broadly because neither of us can handle more years of crying all the time from frustration that they just won’t fucking do as I tell them to do. We need to find new strategies for figuring out how to get stuff done together and separately. And frankly my plan had been to use our investment money till we die and have the will put everything left towards charities. That may… not really be an option if my kids are not going to be 100% able to support themselves and work. I’m still in the preliminary stage of course but I’m looking into stuff written by adults with PDA and mostly they are not independent and able to work.

(Very briefly if you don’t want to read the whole description on that web page: Pathological Demand Avoidance is very related to autism but there is no certainty whether it does or does not fall under the Autism Spectrum Disorder label. It has enough specific quirks around sociability that it seems to be related but not the same. It is a syndrome where anxiety is the dominant part of the difficulty and the stress of being told what to do is so intense one shuts down. By golly if that doesn’t describe my baby. I’ve been saying for years that when they have a list of things to do the most likely way for them to spend the day is staring at a blank wall, numb. Or huge violent tantrums. It’s a wild card sort of option.

I don’t say any of this to complain, criticize, or put them down. I am looking to understand better so I can figure out how I need to change my parenting so my child can have the maximum level of mental health and support available. If this is what is going on I want to see what needs to happen so they can thrive not so I can figure out which levers to pull to make them change. They are who they are. I accept them and love them. But I have clearly not been handling things in the best way and it’s a problem and it needs to change. We both feel bad a lot of the time and I believe with my whole heart it doesn’t need to be that way.

We are both smart. If we understand what direction we need to head in we will figure it out. One of the ways I am that I believe verifies my own autism diagnosis/autistic personality is that I need to have a set of rules/labels that tells me how to behave or I flail and I experience a fair bit of distress. If I can figure out what label is most accurate then I can do research on what works best then I can act it out. Work with what you’ve got and the whole thing goes better.

Another day, another chance to record what’s happening

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Med responses are very important to me. I am upset that I have so few written records of my previous drug attempts. Oh, by the way my oldest heard me make a crack about having a hangover from the drug and she flipped out. She thought I was using hard street drugs because I had just run out of cope.

Serves me right for not telling my kids in advance absolutely everything I do with my body I guess?

Today was different. Less exhaustion. I woke up at 4 for a trip to the loo. I didn’t get back to sleep for close to an hour then I was up by 6:30. I took the pill at 7 last night and was asleep by 8:30.

Tonight I took the pill at 6.

Today we had already made plans to go for a walk in the woods with a family who lives about 1.5 miles away from us who are new to home education. They have a 9 year old boy and an 11 year old girl. The two of them both turned up saying that they were hoping for a kid of their gender. I said, “How would a non-binary kid who is not a boy and not a girl who likes to do things regardless of gender fit?” They had about two questions then they both went with it. For the record: that’s where middle kid is at again.

Anyway, I was… more calm than usual? I felt like my brain was slower and on the sluggish side. It was a less pleasant experience than pot but not completely dissimilar? I didn’t have any of the uplift I get from pot but I got a little bit of the “pause” between having a thought and reacting.

My feet are going to sleep ridiculously quickly. If I kneel down to put stuff in a drawer it doesn’t take 2 minutes. Usually I can kneel for 10-15 minutes before my feet fall asleep.

My back has been hurting quite badly all day. Of course I have walked 6.5 miles after it hurt when I woke up. Cause yeah. I carried the littlest home for the final mile because she was utterly wasted.

I’m still having some nerve pain in my arms if I tweak them up to use them in an unusual position. (Putting the baby in the back carrier was a bit festive.) I feel a lot of tightness and general arm unhappiness. I have fairly deliberately not typed much today trying to rest. (Really the last couple of days.)

I have very much wanted to not add more medication to this in the first few days. So I’m not taking anything for the back pain or headache. I want to have a really solid idea of what is coming from the Amitriptyline. Normally I would definitely be medicating for those at this point because it hurts.

I’m having massive time dilation. I can check and see this is the end of the second day. It feels like a lot more than that. I labeled the pill packet with the exact date I am supposed to take each pill because I am worried about taking too much or skipping a day and not noticing.

I am utterly out of patience with the kids but I think that was happening before the meds. Right now it is hard to remember.

In unrelated news: I have 17 books to read in 34 days. Time for some graphic novels (Neil Gaiman’s American Gods 1 & 1). In another day I can finish The Cooking Gene, and I need to sit the kids down and finish Odd Girl Out. That will leave me with 14 books to go. Eep. Maybe my goal was a tad ambitious for this year…

Home schooling vs pandemic schooling

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A buddy in the US indicated they would be interested in hearing my thoughts on dealing with educating their child through this experience. I am writing this from cool, comfy Scotland where the numbers are lower and the leadership is more sane. (Sturgeon is more sane. We are trying to mitigate the damage BoJo would like to cause.)

We are going through a once in a century global event. Education is going to be disrupted for all people between the ages of 4 and 25. Given that never before in the history of humanity has education been so wide spread and so standardized… this represents a fairly unique situation for coping with. Even the kids who are being allowed to go back to school because numbers in their area are low are not going to be educated how they normally would, their teachers are going to spend a lot of the day talking about basic hygiene and “stop touching your mask”.

I am watching the United States as an outsider at this point. I am reading the opinions of parents and educators all over the country. It is fascinating seeing the range represented, but I suppose that is the point of the United States, right?

The data gives me a lot of feelings.

I am thinking about sending my oldest to school next month because she really wants to go and there are single digits of new cases in this country at this point and they aren’t happening in our council.

The US is a different story. I would be pulling my kids out of school no matter what the district says for a few reasons. Namely: the numbers are climbing out of control, there is mass denial about what is happening from the federal government, teachers are being expected to be all things to every person while their budgets are being slashed, and if people try to go back the most vulnerable in society are going to be in great danger.

My oldest is asking to go to school because she wants a more intense social experience. I have mixed feelings about this because other than letting her do that (which represents a lot of exposure!) I intend to live like lock down is still happening until well into next year. We are seeing very few people. We avoid stores and mask up if we have to go. I fully expect December/January/February to get bad and I’m hunkered down.

So, if you are in the US, my suggestion is to home educate your kids for the next school year. But keep in mind that home education rarely looks like what kids are doing in school. The first and most important suggestion to getting through the next year: try to relax about standards. No one is going to hit a big stride and progress several grades in the next year. Everyone is scared and off their game. That doesn’t mean you are doing anything wrong. If you can get through the next year without an anxiety disorder, well fucking done. Pat yourself on the back. You are a rock star.

My approach to home education has changed a lot from year to year as the needs of my children and the needs of my family have drifted. In talking to other home educating families it seems to be the norm instead of the exception.

Right now in this Time Of Our Covid 2020 my standards involve trying to get as much normality and consistency as possible while not pushing for excellence. I focus more on chores and interpersonal skills than academic skills.

We are watching more screen time than normal. But in order to get the screen time you have to: do your house chores to my satisfaction, exercise, do your academics, and eat some healthy food.

Right now I have a 2 year old, a 9-almost-10 year old, and a 12 year old. 2 year old can have the iPad if she is dressed, her hair is brushed, her teeth are brushed, and her toys are picked up. If she throws a bunch of stuff on the floor the iPad goes up on a shelf because it is now play time. She does ok with this expectation.

Middle Child has maths five days a week. Right now they are working on three curriculums: Houghton Mifflin a year below their expected grade (they asked to start with this level and they are blasting through it quickly), Life of Fred which is a home school very story based alternative approach to maths–I highly recommend it, and supplementary Khan Academy. They spend 20 minutes a day on each curriculum because that way they are making progress and not getting so bored or frustrated. I started my oldest on this type of approach when she was a bit younger than MC is now, but life got in the way. MC works on handwriting by writing letters and stories. They do science work a few days of the week. Science is pretty loosy goosy right now. Sometimes it is botany stuff (sometimes we do yard work and look at the plants and look them up on identifiers and talk about their needs and sometimes we walk in the woods), sometimes they do cooking experiments, sometimes they do anatomy puzzles, sometimes we read about space and I do little pop quizzes, sometimes we watch documentaries… I’m open to a lot of things counting. Both kids have been working on a unit project for a few months about budgeting and shopping.

Eldest child’s extra maths curriculum is a pre-algebra book. So she’s roughly two grades ahead. When she turned 9 she was a full grade behind. In three years she has completed six years of maths and she’s working through the seventh year now. There were a few traumatic months early on when she did a lot of lying to me and the punishment cycle was wicked bad. In retrospect I should have given her less trust at the time because she did a fairly normal set of pushing boundaries and I wasn’t watching closely enough. I will not repeat that error. Her writing expectations are longer and more sophisticated. Her essays resemble those of my high school sophomores and she should be going into (US) 7th grade. Whatever we do for science she has to do write ups that explain what she knew before we started, what she learned, and what she would do differently in the future. She also spends a lot of very focused time on maths and computer animation skills.

I don’t say any of this to brag. I say this as a lead in to: I do not do formal academics with kids before they are 8/9 years old. If your child is 5, 6, 7, and maybe even 8 right now… I would strongly recommend doing as much as you can to relax and not worry about the “standards”. Talk to your kids. If you can afford to buy books, buy them on a wide variety of topics and read them to your kids. If you are able to check books out from the library get at least 20 a week. If you have friends who have a good library in their house: both of you keep good records and borrow things as fast as they will let you. For kids under 8 my general guideline is 2 hours or less of computer time. I might make an exception during lock down schooling of 2 hours of mindless watching and more time if it is focused and involves thinking and doing. Outschool classes are great. I would allow 2-4 hours of Minecraft right now because it’s shocking how much that teaches.

But I sincerely believe with my whole heart that the day should start with chores and exercise. In my house I deliberately organize my kitchen so that my small children can unload the dishwasher. Setting the table for meals is a great job for little kids. Clearing the table is a great job for little kids. Depending on age and ability scooping a cat litter box or giving food to pets. Tidying up their own room. These days I insist on a basic making of the bed because our cats have potty accidents and it’s easier to use a different blanket when you find a surprise “Eww gross” present at night than to have to strip the whole bed right at bed time. I think 8/9 is a great time to start taking turns cleaning the bathroom. A 7 year old can run a vacuum or sweep. This is a good basic list of chores by age. That said: my 9 year old puts a meal on the table about twice a week and does a good job.

Last night’s dinner was 9 year old made. We had venison cooked with oranges, honey, paprika, and salt; sweet potato chips; jalapeño poppers; and salad. It was delicious.

In this time of lock down I think it would be reasonable to have a once a week big baking project that supplies all of the sweets for the family. Have the kid do half or more of the work as they are able. Doubling recipes counts as maths. I love having a white board in the kitchen because I have the kid practice writing the recipe, then do the maths to double it, then check it off as we go through to double check their steps.

Read to your kids as much as you can without going insane. Raise them around literacy and even if it comes later, it will probably come. It’s not a 100% guarantee, but it’s not uncommon for kids to wait until 8, 9, or 10 to read if they have parents who will read a lot to them. They do catch on at some point because they want to play video games or go off and be part of the world faster than their parents will help out with. Video games are a great spur to better grammar. I let my kids get on RPGs with chat rooms at 10 because they have to practice their spelling and grammar because people online are vicious. It’s awesome.

Skip worksheets. They make life hell and impart very little actual knowledge. This is a great time to start writing to pen pals. This is a great time to talk about maths in the world. There are super fun manga books with maths concepts. Bedtime Math has some good stuff.

Increase responsibility. Increase connection. Eat all of your meals together and in the morning ask what the kid wants to do today. In the evening talk about your favorite and least favorite parts of the day. Work on a journal together where you write a short paragraph and the kid illustrates it.

Don’t worry about being perfect. There is no perfect in a situation like this. You are going to be anxious and scared. So will your kid. In my opinion the best thing you can do is get through this with as much grace, love, and patience as you can. If you don’t get through everything don’t beat yourself up. The best possible outcome is having another tomorrow so you can fix your mistakes.

I love you. You can do this.

Hey, hi there, hello

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I am running again. It’s a slow process. I was getting into a good rhythm for a while there then I fell down the stairs and jacked up my foot and took two weeks off. In the last seven days I covered 25.7 miles (that includes my daily walking around the house–separating the distance is hard). Given that in the past four weeks I’ve only covered 78.9, a fair amount of that was this week with the return to running. I’m having trouble with my tech so separating out just the “runs” isn’t working that well. I’m not too worried about speed at this stage so just increasing my mileage is where I am.

Meh. But last night’s run felt great. Until I stepped into a slick of mud and fell down a little hill. Luckily I landed in a lot of mud so it didn’t hurt. Sigh. Maybe I will have to run in the neighborhood during rain periods instead of the trail even though the trail is more fun.

Paint arrives today. I should walk around and take before pictures. I have not followed Noah’s request to avoid big projects for a year at all. I would feel really bad only a lot of the construction is not my fault and I was being a total dick when all I was allowed to do was clean and stare at the kids not doing their chores as fast as I would like. I have more hope for the second year of living here being a bit restful? Ugh. It’s not my fault that the plumbing in the whole house was fucked up. I am not good at looking at bare drywall. Hell, we still aren’t done with the basic repairs. This house has been a giant pain.

I am grateful that Eldest Child wants to go to secondary school when things open up. Homeschooling three levels is utterly exhausting. EC is very much at a higher academic level these days. Middle Child is still cruising through the elementary level work. And now I have a budding preschooler. These are very different types of curriculums and they all take full attention. I told EC that once she goes back to school she is in it until she graduates because I’m not taking her out again no matter how rough it is. You get to finish.

It’s time.

I absolutely will not force a kid to start if they don’t feel ready. It’s a principle. But by golly I am not withdrawing you again.

I think it will be good for MC to get a lot of extra academic attention. She is running into that thing where she has been smart enough to “just know the answer” for her whole life and I am starting to not accept it from her. She has to show me the work. She’s not thrilled but she’s coping. We talk a lot about why the work needs to be done, not just arriving at the answer. It’s a process. In particular her emotional growth lately has been truly astounding. She’s like a new kid. She has so much more self control than she has had in the past. When she’s frustrated she huffs a little then gets on with it. That’s massive. She hasn’t thrown a screaming fit in months. I’m having a much easier time with her and I’m grateful because everything else still feels annoyingly rough.

Emotionally I’m… mixed. On one hand I am clearly very depressed. My energy levels are low and I feel very little motivation. I have a lot of discipline. I have almost zero motivation. I’m holding it together with the kids very well all things considered. I am cranky and a bit snippy but I’m not yelling and I’m not being nasty. I have been known to be a bit hostile as I say, “Don’t make me repeat myself.”

Generally speaking running a much larger house is going ok. I am delegating so much stuff. *pat self on back*

I’m writing because when I run I compose long blog posts in my head. But today I don’t actually have the courage to write about what I was thinking. I feel vulnerable and raw and like I can’t handle backlash.

So I can write about things that don’t matter very much. I am slow and I am sad but I am working hard and I am getting through intense amounts of work. I have more work coming and I will plow through it.

Now I need to go dress a two year old.

Sleep disturbances

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s… a lot.

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

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

That sounds… awful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compartmentalize, look for your contributions

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I am not being fair. I am conflating my feelings about a lot of different people and situations and I am bordering on cruelty. I don’t mean in the “everything is all my fault because I suck” way.

When I rant ad nauseum about chosen family letting me down that is taken in very general ways and implies things about people who are not in the group I mean to be speaking about.

I have so many conflicting feelings about the Godmamas. I did not behave entirely, totally honorably there. I liked one of them and I grudgingly, barely tolerated the other. I judged their relationship in ways that were none of my business. As a result the one I didn’t like very much quite deliberately got in between me and my friend. I asked to support M after the head injury and her wife told me she would let me know when that was ok. Then when I contacted M after a while she was very upset I had left her alone. But I did behave in less than supportive ways towards their marriage and it was fair that M’s wife didn’t like me very much. She wanted me to treat her like an authority and respect her despite her having beliefs that were very counter to mine and her being a lot younger than me with very little relevant life experience or education on the topics she wanted to tell me how to manage. I was a dick about it. I don’t think I am blameless. But other than accepting direction that really didn’t work for me or pushing past boundaries that were put up I’m not sure I could have done more.

When I’m ranting about chosen family I am talking about the various people who told me that they wanted to be my mothers or fathers. There were more than a few of them. For a while I collected Daddys. My leather mom wanted me to do things for her and show up for her events and make her feel special. On holidays or in times of crisis she had real children to take care of and I was supposed to go manage my own life. Dad explicitly told me that he wanted to be in my life but I couldn’t ever expect him to do anything to help me because he has biological children to support. When he needs money he comes knocking on my door. To the tune of tens of thousands of dollars and many requests.

I’m talking about people in the poly community who told me I was family and then when I stopped fucking them they never called me again.

I’m talking about Sarah. So. So. So. So much about Sarah. My baggage around Sarah could fill several jumbo jets. I feel like an exploited resource. I feel like my help came with strings of expecting something back from her and that is fucked up of me.

I can’t even begin to parse the ways my expectations of Pam have been inappropriate. I just can’t right now.

I showed up in Scotland with so much pain. I feel full of rage and disappointment and distrust. It’s not a good head space for dealing with Jenny. She has tried to help in the ways she perceives me asking for help while not fully understanding the intricacies of what that means. She has misspoken. She has apologized.

I have not been able to accept that apology nor have I been able to be there for her. I feel like I have been a user. I have felt judged and I have done a fair bit of being vicious in my head. I have mostly contained that viciousness in my head, but not perfectly. I can be so mean.

I am upset about a lot of people and I am taking it all out on Jenny. That is horribly unfair on a lot of levels.

I can go through our history and point out times when I felt belittled by things she said. Did she intend to belittle me? Did she intend to insult me? Did she feel negatively in her head?

Didn’t matter. I felt it. I reacted as if that was her point. I am assigning her motive and intent when I have no way of knowing what is going on with her. I know that she fairly regularly puts her foot in her mouth and says things in ways she doesn’t mean. When she does this in my direction I act like it is a vicious attack and totally intentional even though I see it as a pattern in her entire life so it clearly can’t be about me.

But I make everything about me. I act like everyone is mean to me so that I can be a victim of everything and everyone.

That’s…. really shitty and unfair.

I think I project my dislike of myself onto other people and then get angry with them and act like I should cut them off for being mean to me. I want to get chances from other people but I very much act like other people don’t deserve grace or forgiveness. I am selfish and cruel to people who have done quite a bit to show love for me.

For all that Jenny’s words sometimes… definitely lack grace and can feel very hurtful her actions aren’t vicious. When I hurt myself trying to help Sarah years ago she showed up to help me. When I needed support after the suicides in my family she showed up. When I have directly asked her for help with almost anything… she showed up. She did start out judging me when she didn’t know me and over the years she has learned about alternative lifestyles and she has been supportive of my behavior. She offered to throw me a party in celebration of me hitting a three digit body count. That’s… not exactly the action of someone who thinks I am bad for doing that.

But I judge her so harshly. I assume so many negative things about her intentions and her motivations and that sucks so bad.

I can think of years of times when I have over reacted to things she has said and I have been nasty in response to feeling hurt. In the vast majority of the times I can remember being hurt by her words she has apologized.

She’s spent a lot of fucking time apologizing to me and I don’t act like that matters very much compared to my towering feelings of rage because how dare she offend me.

I feel like such an asshole.

I am not great at setting boundaries with her. That’s a fact. I have been thinking that it is kind of like sexual boundaries with Noah. I don’t set them until I explode with rage and act out in ways that hurt him very badly. I mean, I tried to set them but I wasn’t very clear and I wasn’t direct and I hurt him.

Given how much time I spent talking about wanting and needing a break from my kids it doesn’t seem like a cruel and vicious attack that Jenny pushes me to send them to school. I absolutely act like I need to martyr myself to my children and she pushes back on that idea with force. I act like I need to martyr myself to bullshit repetitive tasks that get on my nerves and she pushes me to consider that I don’t have to do that. And I get really angry with her.

Because being a martyr to my children and boring tasks is part of my core identity? Then I get mad at people who don’t affirm that view. That fucking sucks.

That was where I got to on day one of trying to process this. Now it is the start of day two. I spent yesterday arguing with people I used to respect about UBI and how to survive the pandemic and I got told how stupid and ignorant I am. I’m waking up in a bad fucking mood.

How can I be both a martyr to my children and a big fat meanie pants who expects so much work out of them that other people gasp and tell me that it borders on cruelty? (Uhhhh I have cleared my chores expectations with experts because I am a fucking coward.) Other people think it isn’t worth their time or effort to teach kids how to do things because it is easier to just do it themselves and therefore they think that how I raise my kids sounds super high effort and not worth it.

But my Middle Child (9 years old) made dinner last night. She made a green salad, fried potatoes with leeks, and venison with spring onions. Then she thought it would be good with a wine sauce so Noah talked her through how to do that.

I think the effort I put into teaching my children skills is paying off very much!

Sure, an adult stood nearby the whole time to say things like “this is when you should seasoning, what herbs and spices do you think would go well with this?” and “you need to scrape the bottom of the pan pretty hard or you will end up with a burned layer that will taste bad” and “let’s talk about how to make a sauce…”. But she did the work. We are still around for supervision and advice. My nearly 12 year old Eldest Child does not need such advice or supervision anymore. Sometimes I feel nervous and I stay in the room anyway and keep my mouth shut… but that kid is more competent at cooking than I was at 21. I didn’t have anyone around to teach me.

My kids know with surprising sensitivity the difference between a well swept floor and a crappily swept floor. They know what a good mop job looks like and they can critique the hell out of someone who does a bad job (i.e. their sibling).

They can go through whole maths curriculum books and ask the occasional question and otherwise do the work correctly 90% of the time.

They can go to foreign countries and plop down and talk to people and have interesting conversations. They are getting better and better at asking questions instead of treating themselves as a traveling monologue show. They are curious about people and they are learning how that goes.

They are currently doing a grid layout of the yard for science and looking up what plants we have so that they know what to weed in the future. They are digging a pond (sometimes with whining) because they want our yard to have one. (This was their project suggestion!)

Their unit project is coming along nicely. We are working on it fewer hours a week at this point because with the pandemic anxiety, frankly we are all super exhausted and we needed to trim our academic hours a lot and that’s ok. They have made sample meal plans–checked what that means against the jobs they gave their families, checked it against the dietary needs of the families (they really like giving the people in their families disabilities and food allergies?) and had to start over from scratch with an entirely new understanding of how calories and carbohydrates play in people’s lives. They understand what insurance is and how to use it. They have learned a lot about mortgages. They are having to talk through interpersonal dynamics around family layout in order to explain/justify how things would work in their house.

In short, they are learning what it means to be a grown up and they are doing it at fairly high speed. I am really impressed with how much they have learned in a short period of time. This project covers maths and nutrition and handwriting and typing and internet research as a skill. Hell, one kid is having to learn the layout of a town in the middle of Australia because that’s where she wanted to put her family and that means she’s learning about central Australia’s supply chain and what it means for people who live there and where the kids in the family are likely to go to college.

I feel pretty deeply offended by the idea that my way of raising someone will retard them. Do you know what is coolest about all this learning? Less and less of it is hands-on for me. I sit nearby and I answer questions and I give suggestions about where they can go to find their own answers. I critique work and explain why it isn’t the solution to the problem they were trying to solve and I tell them to start over from scratch over and over and over again.

But sure, let’s go with the idea that she just meant that my kids lack the social skills to deal with the school environment because they have been blessed with not having to deal with bullies.

I am sure that there are adults in this world who have to deal with school-yard level bullies. I have had many jobs. Noah has had many jobs. Most of the people we know work. I have not had the experience as an adult that primary-school-type-bullying is a thing that extends beyond that age group. Are there some stilted people in the world who try it? Sure, of course. But you can route around them once you leave school. That’s the important part. In all of life there is one period of time where you are locked in a room with bullies and told to not inconvenience adults with complaining about it. Why is that socialization desireable or something to tell me my children must acquire? Why is that something to bring up in nearly every conversation to say that my kids must learn it? Why? Because it is what you experienced? Because it is what you choose for your child?

I’m not teaching my kids to follow your religion why would I pick teaching my children that an artificial education environment is mandatory?

I mean… I actually support public school quite a bit. And if I had to work I would help my kids work through how to survive in that environment. It’s not that I don’t understand that sometimes it is unavoidable. I don’t think everyone has the correct personality or education to home school! I think schools must exist! I think my kids are privileged (insert vaguely negatively-judgemental word because despite making my kids rich I still have negative feelings about the rich) who get to avoid a major trauma that is inflicted on the vast majority of “normal” people.

There is no fair.

My Middle Child is quick to tell me how unfair it is that she has to do chores because when she went to school almost no one in her class had any chores at all and they mostly got more allowance than her and had almost no limitations on screen time when they got home!

I don’t give a flying fuck.

Everyone gets to parent how they can afford and how they see fit.

I can afford a lot of time and energy spent on my kids. Do I spend a lot of money on them compared to average? Well they have a lot of learning materials. They have gotten to travel a lot. They eat very well per my definition of eating well. Do they have a lot of toys? Not really. More toys = more shit for me to clean up and feel angry about. Do they have fancy clothes? hahahahahahahaha they are still wearing third-hand hand-me-downs from the kid down the street in Fremont along with a few cheap replacement items from when we traveled. Do they have expensive electronics? Well, we did upgrade to a nice desktop unit that is shared by the whole family when the hand-me-down 12 year old laptop stopped being able to upgrade to modern operating systems and could no longer run necessary programs. The other kid is still on one of Noah’s old work laptops from several jobs ago. They do technically have phones, one has an old phone of mine where the battery dies in less than 24 hours and the other kid has a phone that was new about five years ago. Neither kid has turned on one of these phones since we stopped traveling because we have our paper books now and they don’t need them. These phones were always about being reading devices…

So they are definitely part of the modern world but they are not tremendously spoilt in the “having stuff” department. They got mocked at school for how out of date their stuff is. I don’t give a shit. I’m from Silicon Valley. I’m not impressed with trying to keep up with the technical standards of anyone because I deeply understand how messed up that process is.

I don’t think 7 year olds should walk around with phones. I think the city we walk around in is about as safe of an environment as can exist and children need to be able to be away from the control of their parents. My kids go on walks and runs without me. They know when to be home and they bloody well make it back in time.

If the school stuff was being pushed because there was the perception that I need a break… well… there are lots of more creative ways to manage that.

Slowing down to the pace of this place and no longer having a bunch of friends I feel like I “should” be seeing has done a lot to lower my ambient anxiety. That is a break by itself. In exchange for the cats (which apparently belong to the kids and not to me) each older kid does 5 hours of babysitting a week so that I now have a reasonable amount of time kid-free. I did join hook-you-up-with-a-babysitter-sites when I moved here. Guess what I got? The privilege of paying for a matching service and a chance to send emails to lots of people who didn’t respond. Basically my entire experience of searching for childcare was duplicated directly from California. Fucking cheers.

But between the big kids helping with the toddler and Noah not having a full time job… I’m exercising independently more. I have more time to vegetate. I’m getting a lot of stuff done that makes me happy. The big kids are pretty close to where I always wanted them to be on independence for school work. When the big kids faff about and refuse to get their chores done when I ask they get to do fuck tons of extra chores until I’m not annoyed anymore and I get way more down time.

I am taking more of a break. And it didn’t require school. So pushing school as the answer to my problems does not feel like a very honest explanation.

So saying now that you never meant medically retarded you meant school dynamics would be hard and you were just trying to help me get a break… feels like gaslighting.

Breakfast is ready and the day must begin. I will come back to this. I need to figure out what the fuck I am doing with this topic in my brain. I need to fully process this so I can decide how I am moving forward. I need to separate how upset I am about this topic from how upset I am about everything else in the world and I’m totally failing by keeping it in my head.

Hanging sadness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drifting

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Hi. It’s been a while. Things here continue. Tomorrow we go back to doing school work after a period off. We have been getting chores done in the house and trying to manage setting up new routines around dealing with quarantine.

I am intensely aware that I am not one of the people who are suffering the most in this pandemic. There are people who are desperately ill and doctors who have to live with making life or death choices for patients. There are store clerks and delivery people who have to deal with the public all day long. There are people who work essential jobs in shipping, construction, and utilities.

I’m… I’m so fucking privileged it makes me sick. So few people get this safety. I feel like my entire life is an over pouring of survivors guilt. I shouldn’t have this safety if other people can’t have it.

The news stories about India are absolutely gutting me. There are so many people suffering. There is literally nothing I can do. But I wish I could. I am so small. I have so little to offer. The things I have to say and do in this life won’t impact very many people. I have done that on purpose.

Small fish in a small pond. It is more true than ever. I worked very hard at that.

I feel like there was a rush of contact with people and now I am struggling with feeling like I can’t maintain it. I feel so sad. I’m not sleeping well. I stay up absurdly late reading new articles and crying. It’s not helping.

I logged off of one of the forums that I have been on a lot for a couple of years. I deleted my access. One of the women in that forum is currently the nastiest person in my life and given that I am doing a fair bit to cut down on contact with people who speak poorly to me, about me, or about my children… that internet person needs to go from my life. I have no sunk cost fallacy going on with online forums.

I feel like things in the house and the yard happen in waves. There’s a burst of activity then the slow receding clean up from the project. I always wonder if I will hit a point where the projects feel… less disruptive? Less like an imposition to daily life?

We are resuming the unit project tomorrow. I’m looking forward to that. It’s neat seeing what the kids come up with.

I feel so small and so unimportant. And like I am insulated and protected and safe. Those things don’t even conflict. Being unimportant is a lot of why I can be insulated and safe.

Our lockdown cooking is pretty epic. I’ve been cooking mass quantities of veg so that lunches are just reheating. The garden is coming along. Everything is blooming and putting out shoots and flowers. There are a lot of different kinds of daffodils in our yard. The tulips are sprouting. I’m slightly annoyed that it isn’t raining a touch more often–I have to water the new plants! What the heck!

I just want to sleep and stop feeling sick to my stomach. Is that too much to ask?

Cross posted unit plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shopping Unit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two pieces of good news in one day

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Yesterday we went to the school for a meeting with the head and the two classroom teachers. Everyone was super kind and upbeat. They extended offers of further assistance should we desire any in the future, we discussed the return of money, and they wished us well. The kids turned in the school equipment they had and… we are officially back to home education. (I will need to start saying home ed because that is the local lingo and folks here hate the Americanism of home schooling. I suspect I could get away with a bit of it due to… being American but I’m going to try to adjust.)

Also, we finally got an email scheduling our delivery. Sometime next Wednesday. Six more days until our stuff arrives. When it arrives it will have taken five months and a day from door to door. 22 weeks and a day. The estimate was 4-12 weeks. This is going to get the 1-starriest of 1 star reviews. And we need to open all the boxes quickly to check for damage. Woo. I have been told that I should expect a lot of mold damage. Fudge and suckerfish and whiiiiiiiiine. That will be super fun. And that means poor Noah is going to need to do most of the work for checking because I sincerely doubt I will be up for doing any of the lifting.

My wound had noticeable bleeding when we were in Edinburgh. That was 15 days out from the original surgery and 5 days out from the second stitching. That’s not so good. On the upside, I don’t know of a reason I have to leave the house until I have a doctors appointment on the 31st of this month. I am going to decline offers of suture removal before that. That’s a dermatologist appointment. The wound is very uncomfortable to the point that I would still say it hurts. The other upside is we might actually get the money for selling DVC soon. It’s a bit over a full year of run money so that sounds nice.

Wait, I do know a reason I have to leave the house. In the next two days I need to go pick up my library card. I signed up before the original surgery and I thought I would be better by now. It’s not a long walk away.

I’m really excited. I feel like I have my kids back. We already have the schedule agreed to and written on the white board in the kitchen. The kids know that chores and academics need to be done by noon if they want to game with the local home ed kids in the afternoons (they were invited to a Minecraft realm and they’ve been really enjoying that). On days they don’t get their stuff done they will probably spend the afternoons playing or reading books. I’m sure we will have some slack days in the semi-collapse post school rigor.

We have exchanged contact information with a number of parents from the school and I hope several of those friendships continue. One family in particular I am quite certain it will, others are TBD. We have tentative plans for a weekend hangout at the park with one of the girls from MCs class.

We won’t be able to jump into the home ed community until my back heals so I’m sort of extra motivated to sit in a chair so I can heal faster. I think this is going to be fun. And soon I have my stuff! This is great! SIX MORE DAYS

Reevaluate everything

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I don’t really know what I’m doing as a parent. I read things, lots of things. There are so many opposing opinions on literally everything. So I try shit out and then I talk to my kids about how it is going. In the long run their opinion of my parenting is the only metric I care about.

I asked them last night if they think getting paid for chores is motivating them or taking away motivation. EC eloquently said, “Well, on weeks when I don’t need any money I don’t see any reason to do chores.” So that’s not super helpful. I asked if they think paying for their own stuff is helping them feel like they are more responsible with how they use up products. They said that part is working well.

We also renegotiated their pay for babysitting because that’s different from sweeping and tidying. They did some practice on how to state how they have increased their responsibility (closer to babysitting rather than just being a good playmate who distracts YC while I have to do all the ‘work’ stuff) but they still aren’t ready to be fully independent about it. We talked about what adults/older teens get paid and what sorts of qualifications those people have that my kids lack. I did this same sort of process with their former babysitter. How do you negotiate for pay increases, how do you talk about your increasing level of responsibility?

It was interesting listening to how they have no real interest in renegotiating what they get paid for chores because that has an opposite effect on their motivation to do the work, but babysitting is different. If I were to guess about why these things are different (I don’t know for a fact I can only use conjecture) chores are things they are doing in preparation for being an adult and it’s part of being a citizen of the household. Babysitting is different from just playing with their sister and being part of a family. It’s exhausting in a different way and they are doing this training partially so that when they get older they know how to advertise their services to other people. Neither of them anticipate a career in janitorial services, those are skills they are learning for themselves.

That’s my guess. But I could be wrong.

So we are going back to a flat allowance for most chores with the exception of babysitting. The first five hours/week of babysitting is payment for their cats since they don’t want me to feel like I own the cats. They get paid over that threshold. So technically their pay can still be variable, but frankly most weeks I doubt they will do more babysitting time than the basic hours.

It means that each big kid will do a couple of hours on a weekend day with their sister and then an hour most week days. I will get to rest more.

I’ve tried creating this with adults for pay. I signed back up with Care.com and the like here in Scotland. I have ads. I’m looking for support! I’ve sent messages! No bites. I’m not sure what it is about how I advertise that makes people have so little interest in working with us. Ah well.

I might get to actually date my husband again one of these years. Woo.

MC’s “babysitting” is still at the level where I have to be available to provide food and nappy changing services but she’s getting really good at playing with YC for a while if I have chores I want to do. I think EC is at the point where Noah and I could disappear down to the apartment for a few hours. I still wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving them alone in the house as a regular thing.

EC did take care of things when my wound popped open. Getting a taxi for 5 is… hit or miss. Sometimes they send an adequate vehicle and sometimes we have to send back a smaller car and wait for a bigger one. So she stayed here for two hours with YC while I got stitched up. I am grateful that we now have that level of assistance, but I don’t really think EC feels ready to take on that level of babysitting on a regular basis.

Babysitting usually means Noah and I get to be in our bedrooms with the door shut for a little while. So we have half an ear out for stuff we need to mediate, but we get to do something without toddler “help” for an hour or so. It’s a work in progress.

We are all just works in progress.

I do these kinds of negotiations with my kids partially to model for them that relationships are not static. You try something and if it isn’t working you can change it. Just because you agree to try something that doesn’t mean you are stuck doing it forever. You are allowed to grow and change. You really should change over time. And it’s hard to figure out what should change when things aren’t working; sometimes you need to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

We are talking a lot about what we want from home schooling going forward. I’m doing more research because that’s my place of comfort. I’m looking into what the exams are like in secondary school. When do they happen, what do they mean? How do we prepare for them in a home schooling environment?

Well, me screaming about them not working hard enough… that needs to not be part of it. MC is just to the age where I started sitting on EC really hard to force her to “catch up” in a few subjects. Turns out I didn’t make her catch up to grade level I made her get way above grade level but I did it at the cost of both of us being miserable for a long time. I need to learn from that mistake.

Why is it that people who beat the “handwriting is important” drum think they are being the voice of dissent and advocating for The Most Important Life Skill? You aren’t the voice of dissent. You are literally parroting The Man and being as fucking basic as possible.

But the exams here all handwritten. So my kids need to practice for that. I get it. Just, ugh. Don’t act like handwriting is the measure of the anything other than the ability to jump through an arbitrary stupid hoop. It is not the measure of intelligence or knowledge or wisdom.

My mother’s handwriting is exquisite. That hasn’t helped the woman get a good job, ever. My handwriting is shit and the only thing it ever cost me was a masters degree. I still got the pay raise associated with the masters degree in my career of choice. I still have never had difficulty applying for any work I’ve ever wanted to do. I didn’t want the career that a masters would enable. I wanted the knowledge so I could be better at the career I was in without having it at all.

Just… ugh. Why in the fuck do handwriting advocates think they are so… revolutionary? “I’m going to be the voice of dissent that happens to agree with every bureaucrat in existence.”

Like, really? Voice of dissent here? Come on now.

Oh… you were just trying to say that if there are disability related reasons that handwriting is a problem I should not seek out accommodations because who gives a fuck about those disabled kids. Right. How very ableist of you. One of the fucking diagnostic tools for EDS is difficulty/pain in holding a pencil. Our god damn joints don’t stay in place to hold the pencil the way it works for other bodies and we can end up with permanent fucking pain.

That’s not the “voice of dissent”. People have been telling folks with disabilities to suck it up since forever. But sure. Keep feeling superior over there. What was that you said? You don’t have a job and you need to go back for extensive training to get another one because your qualifications lapsed? I guess all that fucking handwriting you did wasn’t enough to save your ass?

Sure. Keep telling me about how handwriting is The Way, The Truth, and The Light.

I’m clearly frustrated with someone. But yes, I know my kids have to work on handwriting. Even if it wrecks ECs hands she has to do it anyway.

THE FUCKING VOICE OF DISSENT HAS SPOKEN.

“It is no sign of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” – Krishnamurti

Sigh.

If you look up recommended accommodations for children with EDS, “eliminate handwriting grade and substitute grades for content and effort” is on the list.

Sigh.

We’ll figure it out. I’m just frustrated. People are challenging.

Improving and thinking

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I made it through a day out without feeling too terrible. We had some stuff we needed to deal with and we met a home educating family at a park after errands. It went well.

Now my back is quite sore again. I was out too long and I feel really uncomfortable. I won’t die or anything, but it’s feeling like a lot.

It’s kind of funny, but I’ve seen the mama in that family in town with her kids before. I noticed her because I admired her clothes and I wondered about her being out mid-day with her kids in tow. Ha.

It made me miss my clothes that are in transit that much more. I miss feeling like I look like me. I am in borrowed/hand-me-downs or a couple of pairs of trousers I got because I needed something and that’s what I could find that felt comfortable. I don’t have clothing with me that is weather appropriate that feels like my style. This is amusing to me given how much time and effort I spent thinking about how I want to be seen in the world at the encouragement of the horse-trainer-lady. She has a whole workbook she made about figuring out how you want to be perceived in the world and taking concrete steps towards being accepted for how you see yourself. And now it’s all on the boat. I had stuff with me that worked for how I wanted to be perceived in excessively hot weather. For now, I tread water in stuff that feels kind of wrong. Almost 20 weeks of waiting now.

“It’s on the boat” has become an epithet of hostility in my house.

I both care and don’t care about how people think about me. I tried makeup. Frankly I can’t wear it in this environment; even the “water proof” shit runs and then I look stupid. But I’m a hippy. I want my long loose skirts back. I am not a straight mini-skirt person. Knee length skirts barely feel decent to me. Even when I think they are super cute they don’t feel like me. I realized last night when I went to bed in pajamas that had a little hood on it I was literally only exposing a little oval of skin on my face. I had gloves and socks on (keeps the lotion in, yo–I’m dry as fuck). I honestly like managing my appearance in such a manner. I like being covered. I like having my body be private. I have no interest in dealing with other people’s perspective on whether I shave my armpits or not. You can go fuck yourself if you care.

I like keeping most of my body private in this really intense way. And living in trousers doesn’t feel the same and that’s what I’m doing right now.

I miss the super awesome hiking boots that were too heavy to wear in the heat in Thailand. I want them back. They are on this island. They have been on this island for five days short of a month.

If I get a call on Monday for a Wednesday delivery then the absolute soonest we can get our stuff is 20 weeks. This dominates so much of my awareness. I don’t feel settled. I am always waiting.

I am waiting for my life to start. I’m thinking about the fact that a lot of our home school materials are on the forking boat. Give them back.

We can’t “officially start” home schooling until we are given council permission. This is most irritating. If I never enroll YC in nursery and if I waited until the end of this year when EC is graduating out of primary school I wouldn’t need council permission. At this crux times I’m allowed to simply not enroll my children and the council has no say. But MC having another two years in primary school means I need permission. It being mid-year matters.

It’s going to be a few weeks until they are home full time again. The boat stuff had better bloody arrive.

Meh, bookshelves won’t be built until February at the soonest and probably won’t be done until March or April. Noah’s bathroom has a leak. It’s not like we are settled into this house. Still adjusting. Still wiggling into spot.

I’m trying to not get ahead of myself on planning for the garden. I don’t even know what it looks like at the beginning of spring yet. I don’t know the light patterns yet. I don’t know where things will grow and where I want to add things. I just know I need a whole lot more wildness. I need it for my soul.

Oh! I found out that the housing development that is supposed to be placed on the field behind my house is held up because of badgers! They can’t build anything there until they find suitable rehoming spots for all the badgers and they keep finding more! THAT’S SO COOL. In light of the utter total destruction happening in Australia it’s nice that some animals somewhere in the world are being kept safe right this moment. It doesn’t help the half a billion animals killed there in the fires, but it is one set of humans doing something in one place. It’s not enough.

Enough would require about 7 billion people caring. I don’t know how to make that happen.

Our home is becoming really wonderful to me and I have mixed feelings about that. I am a Have in this world. As a result I am building a beautiful home–it’s a process. Making this home is going to take a decade or more. Ha, Noah thinks I don’t have a big project started? I’m just pacing myself. There is no fair. There is no justice. I don’t know how to feel about any of this or what I should do about any of it. I didn’t think I would be a Have. I expected to be a Have Not.

And yet when I look back… did I really? Or was my sense of self esteem so high that I made sure this would be the end result?

I want to learn how to be a lot more things; I want to do a lot more things. I don’t want to buy a lot more things. I want to make my own pretties. And that requires one of the biggest luxuries of all… time.

I’m not a minimalist. I like drawers and shelves and cubbies with things in them. Minimalists think more will appear in the moment they have a need. I like having stock to get me through the lean times when access is harder.

My typing is tapering off because Fluffy is not ok with me doing anything other than petting her.

Skills I want to have:

  • making more kinds of ethnic foods from scratch
  • sewing the clothing I wear, I hope mostly from recycled fabrics
  • make the candles I burn
  • figure out more about growing native plants from cuttings so I can provide food for local insects as many months a year as possible
  • get better at painting
  • figure out how to make bread-making a part of my routine; it tastes better
  • build an exercise routine I can keep with kids around

In 2020 I hope to:

  • read 78 new-to-me books
  • walk at least 1500 miles
  • be consistent with tracking our finances so we have a better idea of what that will look like going forward
  • find more relaxed ways to help my kids learn; I want to be less schooly
  • have more date time with Noah
  • build a play kitchen in the yard for YC
  • organize the books in the house
  • get started on setting up an art studio
  • write at least 10 letters to friends
  • spend less time on the computer or my phone
  • try to incorporate more witchcraft into our family time

That’s a lot. That’s enough. Go to bed, Krissy. Boat stuff won’t come faster if you stay up being annoyed at the delay.

He’s not wrong…

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Yeah. We are “trying” to keep going to school for another month but our hearts aren’t in it. The kids are doing a lot of talking about what they plan to do when we start home schooling again. They each have solid plans. They are quite certain how they want to be spending their time and they are not happy with how much time school wastes.

EC is setting herself a whole bunch of art projects. She has a fairly specific list of skills she wants to master and styles she wants to practice. She would not be able to work on any of that with how many hours a day she has free while going to school.

MC is ecstatic about the keyboard and plans to spend a bunch of time playing every day along with working on computer programming and more maths. She says she will work on handwriting–it will be more fun to do when she gets to pick her topic. She is excited that she will be allowed to read at her level instead of being forced into a lower level reading group because her handwriting isn’t good enough.

I mean, I know we will run into problems again at some point. They are children and their sense of motivation runs out. We all have some executive functioning problems and that’s a serious concern. I need to transition a lot more of that management onto their shoulders; that was one big net positive of school. When EC forgot her computer she had to deal with the mess up, not me. When they forgot to pack the lunch that I made them… they had to cope without me.

They are both noticeably less stressed and upset than they have been over the past month. They asked if we could go ahead and start home schooling stuff over break; do we have to wait? Well–most of the things you want to work on for your personal benefit aren’t the things I police. Yes you can do as much of that as you want over break.

We have meet ups scheduled with home educators. The kids are enrolled in an acting/dancing/singing course that starts in January. We will get connected to the local community. We will make friends. But school isn’t going to be it. I’m sort of glad I didn’t bother getting more involved with the PTA. It would be harder to tell the school/other parents “Yeah this place sucks and we are opting out” than to just tell the Head “My children aren’t happy here and I see no point in making them miserable for the sake of ‘conforming to the system’. I believe with my whole heart that schools are trying to force children into 20th century modes of living and the 20th century is over.”

And the bullying. I’m going to document all of the bullying through January and say that I don’t see a good reason to continue subjecting my children to it when the school isn’t handling it.

I don’t send them to school to get hit. But they are getting hit. That sounds like school to me…

It really doesn’t help that the “feelings” teacher doesn’t like my kids and she thinks there is something wrong with them because they prefer adults to children. Dude, that was 100% how I felt. It is utterly normal for gifted kids.

My kids are 2E. They are more challenging than average; believe me I know. For a wide variety of reasons I am more qualified than most to accept and handle their needs.

And if you think that home schooling means they will never fit into society, apparently you don’t know very many people who have been home educated. They grow up into quite normal, wonderful people who don’t resent the idea of learning the way that a lot of other people do.

Do I want to home school again? Not really. I’m tired. But I want my children to be happy and self motivated. I want my children to not be hit. I want my children to not grow up being told that they are fucking morons or that they should go on a diet. I want my children to think that playing with dolls is more fun than worrying about their selfie game. I want my children to have an intense and deep knowledge of their surroundings. I want them to feel safe and to spend a lot of time outside. People who spend a lot of time on social media (based on statistics and studies) feel more lonely and tend to be more paranoid about what bad things can happen to them.

I’ve had a lot more negative experiences than average in this life. I’m still not afraid of being outside or doing things alone. I’m incredibly confident. I can survive and thrive even if a lot of bad things happen. I want my kids to feel like that.

I want my kids to feel like there is a big wide world made up of mostly good people and they should go out and explore it. I want them to feel like there are a lot of problems that they didn’t make but they can help solve. I want them to feel like a life where you give back feels better than a life where you complain about not being given enough. I mean, yes…. eat the rich. But we are very lucky. We are some of the luckiest people on this planet and that means we should use that luck and try to spread it around. How?

Kiddos, in this life people rarely give you responsibility in a way that matters. You take responsibility for things. You take responsibility for your own actions and fixing the mistakes of others. You take responsibility for finding ways of helping people large scale hurt the planet less.

No one will come up to you and gift wrap an opportunity to be a good person.

You have to just do it.

And maybe, if you waste less of your time in school you will come up with more ways to do that sooner. It’s not that school is all bad–it isn’t. Most parents are not in my position with regards to educate their children and I don’t mean to denigrate or mock that. School is a necessary institution for the vast majority of children.

But it isn’t necessary for my kids. I made sure of that. I worked very hard to make that true.

I don’t need to force them to be in a situation that is to my benefit and their detriment. I can do better.

No stockings

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The boat sucks. Transparent International sucks. Putting our stuff in storage for months sucks. Our stuff supposedly arrived nine days ago but the company on this end hasn’t contacted me. Either customs is taking absurdly long (it generally takes 48 hours) or it didn’t arrive for the second time. Or the company who is delivering it just… doesn’t feel like working effectively and quickly. Who knows.

A whole bunch of the stocking stuffers are on that damn boat too. Well… I guess some of them can wait for Easter? Others will just be given late. We will still have magic. Frankly… the kids will get plenty.

The trip to Edinburgh went fine. We did our paperwork. Now some bits have to be mailed off. I think that will happen tomorrow. Every day a bit more gets done, we take a few more steps towards being fully settled. I’m told that once our stuff arrives we will be offered compensation for how terribly over-estimate this has gone. If it takes till after Christmas (looking likely) it will be more than 18 weeks, on an 8-12 week estimate. Awesome.

I’m starting to feel scared they lost our stuff and just don’t want to admit it yet.

I’m trying to find joy though. Today a tree surgeon came and took out some non-natives and we now have a giant pile of stumps and tree chunks and wood chips. We will have a lot of fun with that. I am really looking forward to setting up a proper mud kitchen out there with rough materials instead of something store bought. That makes me feel… really happy. That speaks to my values.

It’s weird figuring out what things are part of your values. I want my kids to be happier playing with a pile of logs than sitting and watching a screen and I teach them that this is the way to be by going out and doing it with them. I want my kids to turn to me when they have emotional distress instead of eating their feelings or hurting themselves or finding awful romantic partners and so far… they do. They talk about the things that upset them and they try to find ways to solve their problems that are fairly constructive for little kids.

I want my children to be doers, not people who sit around being entertained as a lifestyle. I model that. I live that. And so far… they are running into slight troubles at school because they are not people who sit and wait for life to happen. They get up and do things. Will this make them suitable for every job? No. But it will help them find the right one for them someday.

A long time ago I was drawn to people who were very certain of their own “rightness”. I was like a moth to a flame. I wanted to be near people who felt confident and sure of their own path. I became that kind of person and it makes some of my old connections trickier. I am absolutely certain that those paths do not work for me. Is there anything wrong with them? No. We all get to be however works for us. I’m just grateful that (so far) my children have very complementary personalities to my own.

When I go check on Youngest Child lately, she is more and more often in the lounge sprawled out reading a book. She’s going to fit right in. She talks up a storm. She demands to go outside and play. I like her so much. Sure it’s going to take her a few weeks to wean off of demanding the iPad every single time she opens her eyes… that’s a hazard of travel. We can’t bring books with us in large quantities. E-readers are not the same in the eyes of a toddler. I am buying books. Not tons. Well… a fairly surprising amount considering we have been here three months. I think if I include Christmas presents I have bought 6-10 books for each person in the house already. Once the boat arrives that won’t feel as important. We already have books… we just don’t have our books and the pain is becoming unbearable. We are readers and our books have been in storage for a year. We have all used e-books… it’s not the same. It doesn’t fill the same need in our souls.

I found the local used book store and I’m already making friends with the proprietor. I think we will get to know each other quite well.

The guy who did our tree removal asked about getting our families together for dinner. He wants me to hurry up and make more friends locally. I think he sounds delightful. He spent several decades riding his bike around foreign countries. We will have lots to talk about.

I have a whole bunch of tendrils out into the community. The beginnings of beginnings… but I’m not following through very much yet. I talk to people when they touch my life incidentally but I’m not following up with more close contact. I’m still so tired. I still feel so overwhelmed. I don’t know how long it will take me to feel like I have anything to give a real relationship but I’m not there. I still go to sleep and wake up feeling so weary I want to fall over. I still feel like my days are completely packed with chores… I don’t know when this will change. I don’t know if or when this will ease and until it does I should not lead anyone on with the belief that I have something to give.

My bucket is empty.

I haven’t had 24 hours of down time in over two years. I know that is pretty par for the course for parents… but not many parents do continual travel and interact with their kids 24/7 the way I do. Shorter breaks don’t feel very refreshing because my level of over work is so extreme.

If I get four whole hours off in a week… it feels like a drop of rain in the ocean. I don’t notice it. I don’t settle or relax. I have not yet figured out how to recharge, not really. I just keep pushing through.

I am reading the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence that is the basis for all of their education theory. It’s really quite refreshing and more in line with my overall belief system and educational theory than I would have expected. I really hope I can help MC pop a wheelie and get over the hurdle of school feeling just that teensiest bit too hard (fucking handwriting) so that she can go back to full time school next year. This is about the best school is going to get.

I’m going to make “lines” with sticks and then we are going to shape letters with wood chips and talk about why the proportions are the way they are. Why do you space things this much. Why do you need the arches and the curves in these places. Why do you need these kinds of gaps between words to be readable.

Kinaesthetic education, yo.

Because when we are all done we can use a broom and sweep up the results and then try again. It’s perfect. I’m actually really excited about this.

I have so much confidence in my children that it sometimes feels unreal to me that anyone can feel this way about anyone else.

The other day I was wandering somewhere with EC and we saw some of these abstract statues of a mother curled around a child. She said that when we get the house more properly settled she wants to find something like that for us to have in the house because that is how she thinks of me. My heart exploded. I had so many feelings at once. I wanted to create children who felt tenderly held. I wanted to create relationships where my children felt adored and respected and appreciated… I did it and I will keep doing it. I said, “Ok. We can do that.”

I kind of love that my baby will say her name all day long “_____ hat. ______ bear. ______ shirt.” but when a stranger asks her what her name is… she smiles at them and refuses to answer. It feels like she only wants to share her identity with us. I know that isn’t it. I know this is just a normal developmental stage… but it feels really lovely anyway. This baby feels really lovely in general.

On the train home last night a guy was sitting at the table next to ours. For the first hour or so he kept his airbuds in and I worried about disturbing him. Then we ended up in line at the snack stand together and he started talking to me. He told me that he has rarely ever seen three children as well behaved as mine. Yes sir, I’ll take your random approval… Our train was over an hour delayed and we just talked and played and read and drew and had a good time together without being fussy. Even though we arrived home more than two hours past our bed time. My kids are tough cookies. They rarely whine and when they do it is generally a sign that something pretty serious is wrong. I trust them.

That’s part of why I am going to listen to MC and flexi school for the rest of the year. She is good at telling me where she needs to be and what she needs to have happen for a given period of time. She has sure changed a lot over the course of her life. She has tried out some pretty intense things… but she tells me when she needs me to shift and that’s the best I can ask for.

We will figure out this journey together.

This is where I want to be. I am with the people I want to be with. Sure, there are bumps and inconveniences… that’s because life is an adventure. And sometimes adventures make you cry.