Tag Archives: kid interactions

Permission

I keep walking near this but not quite landing on it. I need to start writing again, probably as close to daily as I can manage, because that is the process by which I sort through what needs to be done and I make firm decisions and I can start moving forward confidently. I need to actually weigh out the good and the bad. I have to talk to myself and when I am not writing I don’t actually think things through. I get distracted too easily. I don’t have the same sense of building climactic drama and escalation of hormone level as I think through all the ugh and unh and contractions of muscle groups associated with each option.

Then when I have a decision I feel ok. Often I feel great. I know what I need to do.

I am really struggling with a bunch of aspects of this. The last few years have been really challenging. There has been a lot of survival mode and we have not been living in a way that is sustainable. We’ve been sprinting. We can’t keep doing this. Not everything is going to get done. We are going to do the best that we can. It will be good enough. It won’t ever involve everything we could do if we had all of the time in the world. It will be enough.

The secret to happiness is low expectations. I need to keep pushing on physical activity with the kids because right now we are all rebuilding after a lot of indoor focus. It’s time to work on being animals that have to be able to move around in a rapid manner outdoors.

It’s time to slow down and stand still and feel what is actually happening in the place you inhabit. What does this space have going on? What kind of creatures already live here? What kind of creatures could live here? What kind of plants live here? How happy are they? What would we like to add?

I had my day segmented into blocks of time. Then life happened and most of the first block got sucked into solving problems for other people. I could have let one of the kids do it, but I got rid of a huge pile of recycling at the same time freeing up a lot of the front of the bike shed. We could really use the space.

And so I sit here trying to get my head back on straight. I have been grouchy and irritable and I don’t need to be. I’m acting like I’m in a big damn hurry and people better get moving. I’m acting like there will be a consequence if we don’t “finish” in time.

WTF? There is no finish. Not really. It’s a fucking garden. I’m about to purchase a whole extra .75 acre. I will never. Never. NEVER. Finish.

Do you know what is more important than rushing at this point? Helping the kids to feel like they have ownership of the space so they take care of it more assiduously. Getting them to have more self-created small projects they can feel pride in. Let them fail and try again and fail again. It really isn’t that big of an amount of money. They are learning.

If I want to have adult children who want to live nearby and come visit the garden…

Ok. I need to be acting and modeling very differently. I have been acting like my goals were different. I have been acting like there is a specific thing in my head and I am racing towards the finish line…

Honestly I was like 85% of the way to what I wanted to have in place for the whole garden I had in mind for my dream birthday at 60.

Now… oh shit.

Maybe I’m just playing. I’m kidding. Hey…. it was a joke… ha ha…ha? What the fuck are we going to do?!?@?#E$>@#W:ERFLJaelrdsfhvn;zskdjhnvsdklz/nv

fuck

Ok. I need to go hang out with kids in the garden for a while. We need to have some chats about intentions and the fun parts and what they would like to do more of and less of for a little while.

Ah crap. Another committee meeting. But they won’t respond to fucking email. lolsob

Insults in action

Eldest child has decided that she is one of those ridiculous gamer people who call everyone (including me) “bruh”. For reasons that follow my usual extreme lack of logic this bugs the crap out of me.

Years ago she was saying/doing something where she was trying to “set someone straight” in a sassy voice and I said, “You got that right, sister.” She narrowed her eyes and and did the cat butt mouth and told me that I don’t get to call her that.

So last night when she started calling me “bruh” I said, “If you call me ‘bruh’ I’m going to start calling you ‘sister’ alllllllll the time.” She narrowed her eyes at me a little bit and carefully did not do a cat butt mouth (because I totally made fun of her for that until she stopped doing it) and then said…. “You know… I kind of love that our big name calling exchange is to refer to each other as siblings.” I skipped over and kissed her on the cheek and said “Me too.” Then she smiled and leaned her head towards me for a nuzzle.

ETA: I forgot to write down the funniest part! Middle child said “You also object to mum. Why are you so picky about names?” I said, “Because I’m not into mums. Definitely not my favorite flower.” MC said: “Yeah you aren’t into mums because you like dads!” I said, “Well I am into MILFs but that’s kind of a different thing.” MC looked puzzled but EC exploded across the room with “AHHHHH I CAN’T KNOW THIS” then she bolted across the room to glare at me as I laughed and laughed and laughed. She is feeling super smug lately about how she knows everything that can be made into a dirty joke because she is on the internet. Once in a while I am a twerp and I let her know that she isn’t the only one who can make dirty jokes. It cracks me up.

A while later I almost went up to bed without writing in the five year journal the kids just got me. Big eye roll here. Two years ago they both got 5 year journals in their stockings as a way to get them to practice handwriting just a little bit every day. This year they decided that if they have to suffer so do I. Well then! EC poked fun at me for almost forgetting then gloated about the fact that they will finish two years before me and she’ll be 16 when she finishes the book so I won’t be able to make her start a new one. I countered that oh yes I can. She said, “But I’ll be too old. You can’t tell me what to do by then.”

(Based on a reference to a comedian I watched a bit ago and I repeated it to the kids) I said: “Oh I’m going to be the whitest Mexican mom you’ve ever seen and if you sass me when you are 40 and married I’m still going to send you to your room. And you will go.” She furrowed her brow then gave a deep sigh and said, “Yeah. That tracks.”

What’s funny about that is I think I have only sent her to her room like once in the past two years because she was being unbearable. It’s not like that’s a big part of our relationship. With EC in particular usually all I have to do to let her know that she is over the line is to glare at her. She absolutely hates it and will crumble under the force of it. She still puts her hands up in front of her face so she “can’t see me”. Then she will loudly announce that she can’t see me and thus I have no power over her.

People ask me how often I hit my kids to get them to cooperate. Ha. My parenting is pretty much force of will, baybee. Also super long “discussions” where I explain that I am right and you are going to understand why I am insisting on (thing). For a few more years you don’t have to agree with me you have to obey. Then you’ll be an adult and we have to negotiate more.

Except for sassing me. Then you can go to your room.

If you need to hit your children to enforce your will you have already lost.

PMDD is so awful

I am on day 42 of my cycle. I start running low on hormones around day 26/27/28. I usually start sometime between day 28 and day 35. It’s been pretty consistent since the last kid. I am… not ok this time. I can feel the complete and total lack of energy or happiness or give. My bones feel worn out and terrible. The numbness in my hands is super bad at this point. I know that a lot of that is how much I’m painting but progressively over the last week it has gotten worse and overwhelming and awful.

My whole body is hurting. I haven’t had many spells like this since I moved here. This is a California-level of pain. I feel sad and irritable and angry and disappointed in so many people and situations and results that I feel unable to cope. I am not suicidal; which is a blessing–that doesn’t darken my door much anymore. I just feel like I’d like to crawl in my bed and cry for a few days until my period starts because I am completely out of cope. In the overall scheme of things that is a relatively healthy and sane impulse and I feel proud that I am in this place now instead of where my lows took me ten years ago.

It is weird being able to list things that I miss about California and reasons that there were advantages there that I don’t have here… while completely knowing that I am overall doing better here than I ever have. Do I still have pain? Yes; particularly when I am drifting back towards California-style work habits that I know are dramatically not good for my body. Do I still have some anxiety? Yes; my anxiety here is so different. I can’t put a number on this to do like a “rate your pain” scale. Knowing that I will never run into Dan or Paul or my mother or my sister or Auntie or Anna or Brittney or or or or or means that I no longer live with hypervigilance. It’s not that I believe that nothing bad can happen to me I just fully accept that scanning the room for exits is not going to be helpful in any of the bad things that happen to me going forward. I can’t tell with a casual glance who is going to be a problem so I just… don’t.

I mean, when the dude got out of his car to yell at me and smack my hand I didn’t freeze up or start crying or react poorly until after he drove away. I stood my ground (in a suitably gun free manner) and I defended myself verbally and I took his picture. I did what I think I should do. And now I don’t scan looking for him or his car because I am pretty confident that if he ran into me in town and harrassed me again I would simply call the police and tell them we had another problematic interaction and he would get in trouble. They put a mark on his record.

I am living in a small town where the police get upset about that kind of thing between strangers. It is still hard to solve between neighbors… but that’s a whole different dynamic. Stranger assault is prosecuted.

I’m anxious about saying the wrong thing to people I am trying to make friends with. That isn’t gone but it is different from California. I find it intensely healthy for me to be consciously aware that people here don’t owe me anything. I haven’t been doing things for people for years with the hope that someday things would shift and they would support me when I needed it because they love me. That’s very freeing.

Even though typing this is terrifying for me I’m going to do it because this space has to be for me if it is going to work. Even things with Jenny have leveled off and found a comfortable stasis. We are not trying to live in one another’s back pockets because we are both cat-like and we like a lot of space. There are topics we kind of avoid because it feels like those aren’t the best ones for us. It’s feeling really comfortable and happy for me. I can only project and not speak like I really know how she feels but she isn’t expressing any dissatisfaction with our relationship. I feel like I pushed too hard when I moved here and we had to work out how to deal with each of us having our prickly points and it has worked out. She remains one of the people I love most in the world. I would bury bodies for her. If something catastrophic happened I would absolutely rescue her or her kids or her husband. I believe with my whole soul that she would show up for me in an emergency. I am feeling safe and comfortable that we have managed to find a nice place between us. I suspect in 5-10 years when our kids are older we will see each other a tiny bit more than we do right now but we are both people who are very comfortable in our own company and that’s not a bad thing.

I’m slowly working on other relationships in town and that’s slow going and complicated because people are like that. I like living here and I think it is going to be a good space for me in the long run. I worry a little about Noah’s place here because he is a lot more constrained than I am in terms of going out and meeting people. He’s going to need friends in the long run too and having them all be on his computer is mixed.

Kids are a pain in the butt. I’m just saying. This has been a bad week for me in terms of my emotional state and that’s no one’s fault. Also: my kids have been buttheads a few times and we’ve had words. I feel so intensely proud of myself because we had words. I didn’t shout. I didn’t scream. No one was punished or denigrated. “Hey this thing is happening and it’s not ok and we need to talk about why.”

Ok, take a deep breath and really feel that. Even when I am upset and I want to freak out because of hormones… we talk. I say, “Hey let’s explore some of the angles you aren’t seeing on your own right now.” When we are done they understand why I am asking for a change (it may or may not happen–let’s be real) but they aren’t angry with me for bringing it up. I understand more about why it’s going on from their perspective. It’s not ok to just silence people when they are inconvenient. Children aren’t problems they are *having* problems and talking about why is important.

It is so hard that my older kids are very much in a place where many of their problems are now things I cannot fix because it isn’t about me. The main upside of that is they are starting to feel in their bellies that it is true when I say the same thing about my problems. “I’m not upset about you. I’m having a problem.” I can see Little Girl struggling through what the older kids went through and she is directly acting out her stuff with her dolls and it’s interesting. I feel so much more emotionally/mentally distant from the process now than I did when the older kids were that size. I will roleplay with her with her dolls.

So yesterday morning I woke up and I felt awful and I cried some. It’s not because anyone did anything. Then Little Girl came in and joined me for a snuggle and she does this thing where she likes to dig her feet into my legs. Sometimes it is ok and sometimes my body hurts and it is super painful. I was already crying so of course she felt bad and took it on herself. Later she had a whole scene with her dolls where she was talking about them hurting her by poking her legs so she was putting them in time out because it’s not ok to be mean to her. I roleplayed one of the babies and talked about how I wasn’t trying to be mean; I was trying to be close because I love her. Is there a way I can be super close without hurting her? I am scared to go in time out right now because that means I broke a rule and I don’t want to feel like snuggling is breaking a rule. She was so kind and loving and caretaking with her baby. It was really wonderful to watch. “Oh my gosh! You are right! Snuggling is not breaking a rule. Maybe we should change where we are snuggling so that you don’t hit my legs and hurt me.”

My grinch heart grew three sizes.

(At this point pretty much the only rule she breaks is screaming in the house and you have to take big voices to your bedroom. This is not California and I can’t insist that all screaming has to be in the yard because of weather.)

I don’t talk about the big kids much anymore because they deserve privacy and walking the line is complex. But I do want to say that it is fascinating to me just how much they still ache for my approval. (They get a lot of it–I’m not saying this is a hollow thing.)

My Oldest Girl is pushing so hard to individuate and good golly hormones have hit her like a freight train and she has so much hostility about injustice and difficulty in the world. Saying good morning at the wrong time is fairly likely to get a stiff middle finger. I go with it. I try hard not to take almost any of it personally. We are dancing around the balancing act of “I’m still your mother so sometimes I am going to be obnoxious and I will want to give you a hug and a kiss. If you truly object in the moment you are allowed to refuse but mostly it’s a good idea to let me do it.” She is doing a lot better in terms of mental health since she stopped going to school. Things were getting really bad for a while there. We come from families that have a lot of depression and anxiety and PTSD and suicide. It would be highly unethical and neglectful for me to not act quickly when I can see my child melting down because of abuse they are receiving. She is starting to blossom again. She is returning to herself and I love seeing it. It’s going to be a process for her to find friends here and school is not going to be the solution. Her art blows my mind. She has so much talent and skill and she practices all the dang time. Her writing is fun and engaging and she is absolutely brilliant at creating pictures in your mind of what is happening to her characters. She still needs a bit more work on exposition but that’s not a terrible lacking–just something to think about and work towards a bit more. She is strong and fit and confident and willing to speak up for herself. And she’s taller than me and built like 30-something Taylor Swift and I cannot even.

My wonderful and delightful Enby is still plugging along. Puberty is happening and it’s a roller coaster. It’s interesting how the acting out is different now from when they were younger. They have so much more self control than they used to have. They still have giant feelings that are hard to manage at times but they know which direction they are growing towards/working on when it comes to expressing those feelings and they are consciously and deliberately learning skills around that. I am so impressed by the effort they put in to being self aware. They are baking and cooking and tweaking recipes and being brave and adventurous. I am sad we didn’t get a better evaluation done at Stanford before we left because they clearly have some specific learning challenge going on and I’m struggling with figuring out what it is. They really have a hard time with some aspects of education and we are trying a few different things because I don’t know what direction is the right one. They are making progress but I think they are always going to be a person who is much better with kinesthetic and active and oral learning rather than on paper learning. It’s really cool watching them learn coping skills around that. They want competence and if they have to route around an area of challenge for that… well just get on with it. They alternate between being this absolutely startlingly compassionate person and being a normal kid. I see them being on this see saw towards adulthood and it is so clearly part of the process they need to follow. They progress intensely then they regress a bit then they leap again. The more patience I show and the more scaffolding I supply the bigger each leap is and the smaller the regression. If I am impatient or difficult about the regression then it intensifies and they can’t leap again for quite a while.

It is fascinating living with these children. The Oldest doesn’t need my approval all the time–once in a while she succeeds in order to spite me. The Middle craves approval like it is heroin. They will beg, borrow, steal, to get it. They do not function well at all if I am anything other than a full throated cheerleader. Rebukes and course corrections have to be delivered with the softest of touches or they wilt and don’t recover for days… sometimes weeks. The Littlest is so small that she still needs tons of redirections towards “Oh hey it would be great if you….” “Oh golly if you do x then y will happen and that’s not good.” I suspect she is going to be more on the spitfire end as she grows. Her threenager year has been so very long.

This post brought to you by the good news that one of my buddies now works in the paint store and he is encouraged to give a friends and family discount to people and basically no one he knows buys paint. I was talking about the sorry shape of my arms right now and how I am pushing myself raising the clock before the paint dies and he told me to take a break. It won’t be nearly as expensive of an issue to fix as I fear. Ok. I will listen.

So I stopped painting a week before my purported end date. I have a ton of other work to do that has been sliding through the cracks. This will be in no way a bad thing. I am exhausted in a way that means I am not sleeping enough because I can’t shut my brain off to sleep. I’m craving alcohol like mad. I think at my next cycle of talking to the GP and psych nurse I will say that I think I am ready to both increase the Amitriptyline and the Lisdexamfetamine.

I am still on very low doses of both and getting closer to a normal dose would be useful at this point. My blood pressure readings are so so so much better on 30mg of Amitriptyline. I’m back in the high 120’s-low 130’s/high 70’s-low 80’s. There is still room for improvement but that’s not dangerous or scary. More Amitriptyline would possibly help with that. Losing weight would probably help with that.

These medications are breaking the stalemate of my weight plateau. I’m still eating whatever I want whenever I want. I am drinking some alcohol (in the range of 4-6 units/week because I know drinking is not recommended on these meds) but not nearly as much as I was. I am not doing tons of exercise because I have been in the house painting all the time but I am still doing the twice weekly yoga and I’m riding in the neighborhood of 20-ish miles a week and even occasionally getting in a decent length walk. I’m not sedentary but I’m not over-exercising in a way that would cause weight loss. So I really believe the drop is as a result of the medications at this point. I didn’t think to weigh myself right when I started the medications. The first data point I have in this year was in February and I was 211. In late August I was at 203. As of this week I saw 199 for the first time in a long time. I repeat: I am not dieting. What I am doing is taking medications that change my brain chemistry and increase my serotonin changes how my brain processes dopamine. That’s making my body not feel like it needs to hold on to fat in the same way. I’m not doing this because I want to lose weight; I am noting physical changes in a way that can be measured. Things like mood are harder.

The PMDD window is something that can overcome the positive effect of any medication in my experience. I am seriously dreading the peri-menopause experience of my cycles gradually lengthening. I expect the next ten years to be hard. But it’s not like any decade has been easy so get on with it. I am deeply grateful that I have gotten to the point where when I feel really low that does not increase suicidal ideation or fixation. I am grateful that I don’t struggle with the desire to mutilate my body anymore. It is complicated as fuck dealing with my children as they have times of feeling like they want to hurt themselves. I am grateful to the marrow of my bones that they know they can trust me and talk to me when they feel like that. Yes, you can always come in my bed and snuggle if you feel you are scared and you aren’t safe to be alone. Puberty is a horrible time and we’ll talk and we’ll get you through this.

If therapists were available they would be in therapy. I didn’t understand the depth of privilege we had in California around mental health. My entire life trajectory happened because therapy was plentiful and that would not have been possible in other places. All my kids have is me. That’s fucking daunting. (I mean, they have friends and we are making community connections…) We talk a lot about having thoughts and feeling impulses doesn’t mean anything bad about you. Let’s talk about the possible consequences if you follow through. I’m not saying I will punish you; I’m saying that once you cross the line into these behaviors there are people in the community who are bound by law to intervene so if they find out this is what will happen. It’s out of my hands. Let’s talk about strategies and ways of coping and figuring out what other things could be done instead. Let’s build habits around feeling distressed so that when something even worse happens you have some pre-built ruts in your brain for how to handle bad things. Let’s talk about distorted feelings and projecting and learning how to scan your central nervous system and what tools exist to help you feel grounded and like you can wait to act–this feeling does not require a response RIGHT NOW. For the record no one is actively suicidal, no one has any kind of plan, and people are not engaging in the sort of behavior that would involve mandatory removal from the house.

What is happening is that they both have had to deal with bullying and additionally people have been telling my daughter that she should kill herself. They are both just children and this has been hard for them. They have every predisposition genetically towards mental health struggles. Life was never going to be a walk in the park. There were always going to be dark times. But you can bet your fucking buttons that I am going to teach them how to light a candle in the dark. (I got some LED candles so nobody else tries to burn down my fucking house. Oh good grief.)

They are kids. They are all so different. I like all of them. I am annoyed by all of them. I admire all of them. I enjoy spending time with all of them. I don’t know what their future will bring but I sure hope that I get to be an enthusiastic cheerleader as they go do all the things they will do. I tell them that when they don’t believe in themselves they can borrow some of my faith in them. I will never ever run out.

Find gratitude: flood edition

In five years this will be the kind of story we tell as a group and we will cackle. Heck, by three hours after it happened I had already started laughing in that “Holy fucking shit of course this happened this week” sort of way. Ok this is kind of a long story.

We ran out of oil last week. Apparently our tank is set just a little bit lower than the boiler so even when it looks like there is still oil… that doesn’t mean there is enough pressure to get to the house and the water and heat will go out. It took us a few days of messing about with calling plumbers and waiting for them to not show up before we called the joiner-man-of-all-work who has done all of the other work for us. Turns out he has a buddy who works on our type of boiler! He was there 15 minutes later. I’m sure he was shaking his head over how silly we are but I can live with that. Put a call into the oil company: oh whoops. It is after 5 on a Friday. They won’t hear the message till start of business on Monday. Ok. First thing Monday we get an email saying they put in a work order. It can take up to a week before oil is delivered once the work order is put in. Noah calls them and explains our situation. They put a star next to our order to hopefully put us near the top of the priority list. But it’s Wednesday and no idea when the oil will arrive.

This sucks particularly hard because our tenant is Muslim and he should be taking showers and going to Mosque every day right now. Freezing showers are not his idea of a good time. I don’t blame him. I told him not to pay rent on May 1st because this whole situation is our fault and it’s negatively impacting their life to a severe degree and just oh good grief. I feel so bad for negatively impacting their lives right now.

Tuesday was pretty good in the main. Youngest Child and I went for a carefully socially distanced play date with her two little same-age friends at the park. It was nice. Then lunch was tasty. Eldest Child asked me to go for a hike after lunch and we went up the hill into the woods. Youngest enjoyed being in the shoulder-carrier for a lot of the trip up the hill because she was tired. Freakin kids.

EC told me a lot about the characters in the new-to-her anime she is currently obsessed with. What she likes and doesn’t like about them: apparently the best character is a teacher who she says reminds her of me. Every child in the class is traumatized but very prepared for life! Hm. We talked a lot about different things that are coming up for her. We talked about how different people have different skills/talents/things to teach you and it’s ok that you drift back and forth appreciating people more and less at different stages that’s fine. She said something… I don’t remember exactly what. She has this hero worship of me thing lately and it’s frankly quite bizarre. She really wants to grow up and be like me because I am so awesome and I always know the right thing to do. I told her I worry that I haven’t let her fuck up enough. Then I said that I don’t always do the right thing. She scoffed.

I told her that a few years ago I had a birthday party and I was feeling very hemmed in by being a parent and always giving and always having to project happiness I only kind of feel and I was tired of being responsible and an adult and… so I arranged that there would be a morning birthday party that was kid friendly then an adult part afterwards that would be very adult and involve taking drugs. It didn’t start out as a party that would involve drugs but it morphed into one over a couple of weeks of planning. Her eyes got a bit wide.

I told her that in the run up to this party someone that I loved dearly sent me a letter telling me that I was an evil drug pusher and I was ruining people’s lives and I was a very bad person for doing this. I explained that he was dealing with having a child in rehab and he was questioning his own life choices and feeling like he made some bad decisions and really he was yelling at his past self and trying to have me make better/different choices than he had made so I didn’t have so many regrets.

She said she was confused because I still talk to the guy and I talk about him in glowing terms and how can I feel love for someone who was so awful to me?

There is a difference between people who run you down and want you to feel bad because that is the sort of toxic relationships they have in general and people who love you very much where sometimes they have something very painful happen and they lash out with pain. There is a difference between a toxic user and being a human being in terrible pain. It can be hard to tell them apart; it’s about large patterns over many years and typical tendencies not one time things. It’s about believing the totality of what you see from a person and not thinking an outlier is the truth.

I told her that I sat on that email for a few days trying to deal with my own hurt and when I responded I told him that I understand that he is in great pain and he is taking it out on me. I told him that I forgive him and when he is ready to talk to me again I will be waiting. It took about five years. We spoke again and he apologized and I tried to be gracious: goodness knows I have done more than my share of lashing out in pain. I love him and he has been really good to me before and since that one explosion of pain.

We all deserve grace. Human beings make mistakes, most especially when we are hurting and we feel like we have hurt other people through our ignorance or unintentional mistakes. If we want grace we have to give grace.

People are my religion. I believe in you. I believe that you can change and grow and be better. I believe I can change and grow and be better. I want to do that together. We learn the most from our biggest mistakes. We learn from the big mistakes of our friends. If we want to have connection and love we have to see and accept people for the totality of their humanity.

She clutched my hand and leaned her head on my shoulder and told me that she feels very lucky to have me as a mom. My heart soared.

Then we watched YC a little ahead of us on the trail pull down her britches in the middle of the path and pee all over her clothes. It was… hilarious. I did not give her a ride down the hill. She had to walk.

When we got to the bottom after our 5 mile hike EC and I both discussed how much we would like to have ice cream. She said she would deal with cleaning up YC while I rode my bike into town and got some of the good gelato. Noah was making dinner. Middle Child was doing online classes.

I enjoyed listening to Hamilton on the way to and from town and I cried thinking about how hard life is and relationships are so painful. I’m so impressed by the nuance given to Aaron Burr in the story. I was thinking a lot about my mom. I wish that grief could get less intense.

Then… I got home. From the road I could hear an annoying beeping. I prayed that it was coming from my neighbors property and not my house. No such luck. When I walked in the smoke detectors were screaming. It was hard to tell exactly what was wrong; my first guess was Noah burned something while cooking. I looked around and no such luck. There was no smoke. Instead there was water pouring through the light fixtures and smoke detector. It was splashing all over the computer table and floor and I could see it coming from the upstairs. Everyone in my house was screaming at me trying to explain what was going on. I tripped on YC as she darted back and forth screaming and adding to the general sense of disorder and she decided that the absolute worst part of the day was me stepping on her. I did not apologize. I think I screamed that everyone was in so much trouble.

I then decided that the right thing to do was turn off the master power to the whole damn house and I will deal with everything else once the deafening fucking noise was gone. I asked Noah if he had told our tenant what was going on (she was downstairs with her tiny baby listening to all this). Of course he hadn’t so I went and gave her a brief explanation so that she wasn’t concerned while ignorant. I promised I would handle it as fast as possible.

I went in my room and called the wonderful handy-man-of-all-work and said I needed him to talk me through something but I don’t need him to show up. Luckily he pretty much agreed with all of what I was proposing and we made a few jokes about how maybe it would be best to chain the 3 year old to a tree in the yard for a while.

I came out and went to the electrical panel and started doing a little bit of sifting through what could be turned back on and what needed to be left off indefinitely. This allowed me to run an extension cord from the studio to the kitchen with a dehumidifier and a space heater running. There was a lot of confusion and talking over each other and in the process I was not so kind and I told YC that she did this and I was very angry about it.

But after I stuck buckets and pots under the drips (other people thought just putting a towel under the flowing water was good enough… yeah no) and moved computers and had EC move all of the freezer foods out to the deep freeze in the shed and we had dinner and sat down to just… stare off into space that’s when I started laughing.

EC asked what kind of trouble she was in. I said the kind where I’m really mad for an hour or two then I get over it because shit happens. When you have kids… these things are going to happen. It is utterly unavoidable.

I know exactly what happened. YC turned on the shower sprayer attached to the bathtub and sent the water everywhere. She had a great time. The upstairs bathroom is not well sealed at the base of the wall meeting the floor. The water went around the edges and got down through the air space in between floors and then went looking for any hole it could find to come down. The walls and ceiling aren’t soft at all and by this morning it is dried out and fine. I know there isn’t any other leak and the paint job is fine.

This reaffirms my belief that I would like to have every bathroom in my house fully sealed into being a wet room as time and money allows. Shit happens.

Nobody is in trouble today. We had banana bread and ice cream last night. And by we I mean everyone except for the kid who ate about 4 slices of banana bread earlier in the day because holy cheese that was your dessert for the day. Noah decided that he is done messing about with trying to find contracting work that allows him to work part time. He is going back to full time work because when he works full time his income is absolutely obscene and all of the things we’d like to fix in the house could be fixed after a year or so of him working full time. If I am careful about how I do it I can probably get our savings goals to full completion in fiveish years and afford to do the remodel stuff that would give us more space to manage living here pretty much permanently no matter how many kids stay with us.

I woke up this morning and turned the breakers back on. Things are fine and other than some remaining clean up (laundry, scrubbing floors) it’s over.

My gratitude is this: I get to wake up in a safe house and fix my problems. I get to plan for the day when I will have the means in petty cash to fix all of this and every other problem that is going to erupt. I am more safe than I knew a person can be. Thank you Noah for picking the right hobby when you were 7. Thank you for asking me to marry you. Thank you for giving me this life.

When something breaks we can fix it. Almost no matter what it is. And in the long run… we will laugh about it.

More parenting issues

I think it is kind of funny that most of my parenting issues involve conflict with other parents, not problems with my kids. I can’t post about them on MDC though because the women I hang out with are on it. And apparently it is actually against the User Agreement to post about issues with other members. So yeah. Y’all get to hear about it. 🙂

Disclaimers! I like the kid in question a lot. He is a wonderful little snuggle bug and I adore him. I like the mom in question a lot. She is a great match for a lot of the things I miss so much about Sarah (although dear God is she *not* Sarah… some big differences).

So one of the little darlings in our play group is ~15 months. We have been hanging out with him for almost a year. He is now getting to the walking and talking stage. …And the hitting stage. And thus the difficulty. And he’s a biter. He has both bitten and hit Shanna in the face. Repeatedly. Now, to be clear, it’s not like I think his mother should beat him or anything, but she’s not reacting. She says, “Ohhhh [first name]” and that’s it. She doesn’t walk up to him to redirect. She doesn’t talk to him about his behavior being unacceptable. She just kind of lets it slide. I kind of have a problem with this approach seeing as he might be 16 months younger than Shanna but he outweighs her. He is a *very* sturdy child. When he hits it *hurts*. I know. He’s walloped me and I was shocked by how much it hurt. And yesterday he clocked Shanna in the face while simultaneously screaming, “No no no” because he didn’t want her to move the toy they were both playing with. I think once you get to the point where you are actively saying that you don’t like someone else’s behavior you can understand the request to not hit. You may not follow it… but I think he would understand redirection. And the mama isn’t giving him any.

So I’m not sure what to do. She’s not doing the parenting here and my kid is suffering. I’m not sure what to do. I’m about 10% tempted to tell Shanna to knock his block off if his mother allows him to hit Shanna. But uhm, yeah. That’s not actually a great plan. He needs help with his behavior and in the moment I am usually caring for a sobbing Shanna and I feel like it shouldn’t exactly be my responsibility to talk to him about his hitting. However she isn’t doing it. How horribly inappropriate would it be for me to start talking to him/working with him on the hitting? I feel like since she isn’t willing to shadow him I need to start. He really needs more input than he’s getting from her about his behavior. One more time! I don’t think he’s a bad kid! He’s 15 months old and he’s got poor impulse control. I like his mom too! But she’s… not as instructive as I would prefer for the continued health of my kid, ya know?

As per the norm when asking for advice on the internet I am not explaining every single thing from the situation. Like, I suspect that part of the reason she is so laissez faire is because she had a very hard road to have him. Many years of fertility treatment and a previous abortion at 20 weeks because the baby wouldn’t have been able to survive anyway. Hard hard road to parenthood. I get that she is just grateful to have him. Complicated.