Tag Archives: mood tracking

We’re All Mad Here

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I was reading an article that included the phrase “Mad Pride” about how mental illness has been perceived by society (mostly the US/Canada/UK) over time. It made me stop and think hard about how much my life has changed. I am in the closet now in a way I was not in California. There were times in my younger years where I would keep some things under wraps (I was militant about limiting sex life conversations with some groups of people) but mostly I didn’t hide any aspect of myself to such a degree that anyone and everyone couldn’t find out if they tried even a tiny bit. 

There is a big difference between “I don’t share personal stories about my sex/romantic life with students or homeschooling parents but I write about it explicitly on my public blog” and “I took my writing private so that someone would need at least a basic understanding of the internet archive in order to find out anything about me, I stopped writing about myself publicly on any topic that might be controversial and I no longer bring up or mention most things about my past and I am actively evasive with every person who does not have connections to my former life.”

It’s different. I am feeling more comfortable in the community. I feel like I probably do not have to remain quite this guarded permanently but I feel intense gratitude towards myself that I allowed myself this runway of time to have a place in the community where I am already seen as stable and competent and fairly well educated, especially in topics that are not well understood already here. I am starting to have that boost to the ego experience of having people say, “Oh Krissy I wanted to ask you about something. I don’t understand why ____?” When that something is often related to an aspect of interpersonal communication. I’m also getting more requests than I can take when it comes to organising level responsibility for different community groups or associations. And folks are asking me how I have taught my kids (thing). That’s definitely one of my sweet spots for feeling like I am not an imposter who should shut the fuck up.

It’s not that I think everyone should do what I do… that would go poorly. What I really appreciate is when people are interested in the process of how I figured out what was right for me because understanding that process is the bit that can help other people. They will have a different right answer in the end, but maybe seeing how I made decisions that align with my values will help them crystallise what their own values are so they can feel confident in their own choice. I like talking about parenting philosophy, not parenting choices. Because we are going to make different choices and that’s absolutely great. It’s mandatory. It’s as it should be for there to be the delightful variety of folks that this world needs. But the philosophy behind parenting is a place where you can discuss motivation and intentions and you can learn from each other without getting into a pissing match about technique. 

Technique is hard because it’s a minefield of traps for not understanding your own privilege when you frame what you do. Noah says that society has as much justice as it can afford. It’s complicated because often a family has as much justice as they can afford. And from family to family that is such a complicated and loaded concept that oh goodness just no. Can’t.

Anyway. The article. It goes through who is allowed to be mentally ill in public now. Who benefits from hashtag campaigns and public awareness movements around mental illness? It’s a short article but provocative in a way I agree with. I am so deeply aware of the privilege I enjoy at this point in my life. 

But this privilege comes with costs too. Costs I could not have imagined when I was on the far side of that particular privilege slider. 

I’ve been watching a lot more sci-fi/fantasy shows and movies recently. I am particularly drawn to things that are depicting ways that people live with an understanding of there being completely opposing truths/narrative/existanses existing all at the same time. 

So, I like to talk about money. If you have been here for a while you have seen the arc of that from poverty to (I think) fairly substantial wealth. When you are new to a community you only really exist from the moment they meet you. Your past is invisible and unknowable. Ok fine with google they could look me up but they don’t. I write all over the fucking internet. I have one handle I use on every site and I am so trackable it is definitely what a security expert would frown upon and give me a lecture for. I am consistent in part because that is my absolute only talisman against being called a fraud. My story is too whack-job. But I gots receipts, bitch.

I have suppressed so much of that over the past few years. I have been so very silent. It is taking a toll. 

The pendulum is going back and forth on so many different dynamics in my life. In one way I feel like my kids just got out of a big disequilibrium period (or at least some combination of them) and I am slamming my way into one with full force and fury. There are a whole bunch of things that are not working and I need them to change. 

I say over and over that disequilibrium is a necessary feeling for everyone because without it you probably won’t grow. You will get complacent and comfortable and you won’t want to face the terror and uncertainty and pain that comes with change. I have to get angry to have the force to demand change. I have to feel like I will wreck big things if the change doesn’t happen.

I am doing a med change. Amitriptyline and Lisdexamfetamine are not working for me anymore. There are enough negative symptoms with using them that I just cannot. Sex just hasn’t been happening. I’m not happy. I’ve been intermittently explosively raging for quite a while and it’s just not ok. I don’t like me. I need Patience, and I don’t mean the drink made with a whole lot of bourbon.

It feels silly to say this but I want to drink less. (It’s silly to say because Noah and I both have recently put in MASSIVE orders of alcohol.) I got variety. I got stuff that I want to invite other people over and say “I have x and y for you to taste test.” I want a social gambit, I don’t plan to consume much of it myself. I is making friends. 

I have a teeny tiny bit of regret about buying this house because it is huge and has been really rough to repair but I can’t tell you all about it because a Shorty has just informed me that there are gingerbread pieces waiting to be made into a house and I am all out of time.

Repentance and Grace

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We often have to sit down and talk about the fact that we knew therapists were not available here like they were in California so we have to help each other. We talk about the problems with that because a therapist is 100% on your side and a family member has their own agenda. I try hard to consciously and deliberately say out loud when I am saying something that is more from a therapy point of view (this might fuck me over but you need to think about it anyway) and when I am speaking as a parent and a member of the family unit (this will sound like I am not on your side… well… I am in as much as I am part of a system and systems work to preserve themselves).

This morning was such a morning. Puberty is terrible and it destroys your centre of gravity. It changes how you think about yourself, how you perceive other people’s behavior, and how you emotionally respond to things that are upsetting. You get this whole reset and it’s rough. It being rough is in no way shape or form a negative comment on any particular person. It isn’t your fault that this is hard. You are not failing or being bad and you are definitely not crazy even though this process feels so completely out of control. It’s a nightmare and there is no amount of money that could talk me into going through it again…. and I’m a hardy soul.

We talked about how other people remembering things differently is not exactly the same thing as gaslighting. Gaslighting is deliberately and purposefully fucking with someone’s reality as a way of controlling someone. Having a brief conversation that is very important and memorable to one person and easily forgotten by the other person is not gaslighting. It’s sucky! It’s frustrating! It can be super challenging to deal with! It’s not the same thing as gaslighting.

So then we get into: when you feel betrayed/upset/let down how can you ask for a repair attempt in a way that will actually get you what you want? It’s not about “you shouldn’t feel this way” and I’m not tone policing you and saying that you don’t deserve the repair attempt unless you are perfect. I’m saying that we are all human beings. Human beings almost always feel defensive when someone blows up at them. Sometimes the issue is so important that everyone must be held to working it out even if someone was blowing up and that makes the process hard. Sometimes the issue is fairly small and you won’t get what you need unless you play the game. It sucks. It is reality.

Then we came up to the fact that every single one of us messes up and is the person who makes an agreement then fails to keep it sometimes. No one is the bad one and no one is the good one. We all have to learn how to manage each others personalities and it’s a challenging road. We all have to learn how to manifest our frustrations and our difficulties and still live up to our own internal code for who we want to be.

Then of course we did a derail into how many, perhaps most people, are told what their moral code should be. Maybe their parents instill religion as the path to righteousness, maybe someone just imposes secular beliefs but in most families most parents believe they have the right to be the Authority to their children. Noah and I came out of our childhoods believing that each individual person has to be their own Authority and parents do not have all the answers. So we push our children towards figuring out their own beliefs as hard and as often as we can. That’s why you have to figure out how to live up to your own sense of right and wrong.

I said that sin is when you believe in a rule deeply and you break it anyway. People do that. It’s part of the human condition. You don’t have to be religious or have the rule imposed by an outside party in order to sin. All you have to do is betray yourself and everyone does that. That is where the concept of repentance comes in. You repent when you figure out that you fucked up and you need to bear the weight of that and you need to figure out how to move forward with being a better person. It’s a hard and never ending task. The older you get the more you have to repent because that’s just how life goes. No one lives up to their own rules whether they are self imposed or outside imposed. It sucks.

And that is where grace comes in. Grace is when you look at someone who has done something shitty in your direction and you decide to forgive them because you know that you also do shitty things and you believe that this was an error and not malicious. Grace is allowing people to come back from mistakes and sometimes grace involves choosing to overlook the crappy way someone expresses a problem or a solution and just accepting that their heart is in the right place even though they are still a giant turkey butt.

We are all flawed creatures who are trying to cope in a world we didn’t create and we can’t control. It’s hard. It hurts. We will all get wounded and we will all bear scars from our own mistakes and the mistakes of other people. The more grace we give ourselves and the people around us the less we will have to repent. The more love and acceptance we give to the people around us who are doing the best they can the more we will get that same gift back.

To this end I will do everything in my power to speak gently when I want to scream. I will try again when I want to quit. I will repeat myself when I want to never ask again. Because I love you and I want this with everything I am. This is my chance at a happy family. I will not always do the right thing but by golly I will keep trying.

I’m about to fucking explode, y’all.

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I am not ok and it is perseverating in my head and if I don’t set it down somewhere I am going to continue to freak out in my house with my kids and that’s not cool. So let’s start there, shall we?

My kids are acting appropriate for their varying ages. All of these stages are hard at this moment in that awesome way that sometimes cycles pop up. My oldest is a fucking teenager with a fucking rude teenager mouth. I feel like he just has to tell me I’m wrong or express exasperation at my stupidity over and over all day long. Often at times when I am not actually wrong or being stupid. I mean… when I am wrong I tolerate a fair bit of sass but it drives me insane when I’m not wrong. Middle child is not wanting to accept responsibility for some areas of forward progress and I’m struggling with that. Youngest is pushing every button and boundary like it is her job… because it is.

So that’s all fun and the background noise of every single day.

I went back and checked my logs (hi, yes I am incredibly obsessive about tracking all kinds of stupid details) and starting in June I went from sleeping 8 hours a night on average over the course of the month to sleeping 6 hours a night on average. The months since then have hovered around 7 hours a night on average. That’s pretty certainly part of why I have been doing much worse. Why did I start sleeping so much less?

Ah, fucking lockdowns are over and I feel incredibly pressured (mostly internally) to get out and Meet People and Volunteer and Be Part of the Community. Also this summer has been quite energetic with gardening tasks as I’m moving towards the permaculture/low key food forest direction. I’m super tired. Also eldest said, “Let’s go ahead and finish the lounge” and I said, “Oh uhhh ok.” I was kinda hoping to procrastinate the work long enough for the paint to go bad. Then I found out my old buddy was coming and I have some projects I said he could help me with. So I started sprinting to get stuff done before he arrived.

Reader, I fucking failed.

I’ve been very much working beyond what I should be. Oh, and late May was my first trip down to England to see A & P then in June I went back down to England to bring Noah and the kids to see A & P. That is seeming like the best decision I made all year.

Oh, and I averaged 6 hours a sleep a night the month I had fucking covid and I slept through 4 days entirely. THAT’S REALLY FUCKING BAD.

I’m not ok, y’all.

July was a sprint of work I was not physically prepared for. I have never taken time to really fully recover from covid, not really. I certainly haven’t carefully increased exercise over time to get back to the fitness I had.

August was a super sprint of work and it was exhausting. September was a lot of work sprinting plus my birthday which was absolutely fucking exhausting to the extreme and I probably made some foolish choices. I was not physically fit enough to do what I did comfortably and I have paid for it. October has been more and more work and then Noah and EC went off to Helsinki then the morning after they got home I ran off to San Francisco in a last ditch effort to say goodbye to A.

In a way there are shadows of my uncle passing. I was too late. I feel like I failed and I am upset with myself. I did get to help P with one of the thornier parts of handling A’s belongings and I am deeply grateful I could perform this service.

Being in San Francisco involved a ton of driving (ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow) and many hours of work and many different social interactions one right after another and very little sleep. I just couldn’t except for a few times when I passed out in awkward scenarios. Three people said they wanted to make plans then cancelled at the very last minute. Woo. That’s always fantastic.

My buddy is a challenge in many ways. I don’t want to say too much about that but I will say that he is very emotionally needy and he wants me to help him process and understand his entire life and that’s a fucking tall order. I am not a therapist. I feel like I am drowning in his feelings. He also can’t remember a lot of our conversations because of how much he drinks so each conversation has to be repeated a few times and that is really frustrating. I don’t begrudge him the needs but my bucket is so fucking empty.

I feel empty. I feel like I can’t take more shit being dumped on me. I feel like I want to scream and scream and scream until I have destroyed my voice from screaming. I want to sleep for several weeks in a row. I want to stop speaking to people at all and I want to go back to lockdown. I am so far into burn out I feel like a pile of ash.

I know that I am a good person to help people process grief but right now I can’t handle the flood of it. It’s not just the one buddy. I feel absolutely surrounded by loss this year. Grandmother in law, A, my buddy’s parents, other friends have lost family members, a different buddy is dealing with her kid self-harming, a somewhat surprising number of pets have passed recently and folks want to talk to me because I give them comfort. Right now it feels so hard.

Oh, yeah, and it’s been an incredibly stressful year on the money front. I think things have settled down now and while we are not fully “on track” we are in a very reasonable place and I’m no longer worried about bouncing payments. But it’s been a fucking lot.

Err, also my roof just got replaced and the scaffolding and construction fuss have been irritating and challenging because to a large degree it has meant that YC has not been able to play outside unsupervised for over a month. That’s not a great situation.

I’m not exercising enough. I stopped my yoga classes because we need to be contributing more to savings. I’m not eating well enough–I am actually not enjoying the kids cooking 4 nights a week because rarely do they put more than 1 vegetable serving in a meal and it’s not doing great things to my body. I’m sleeping for shit.

It goes on and on and on. I’m sure I’m not remembering all the fuss. My head hurts. I am tired of being tired.

Almost here

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My birthday is coming up. Going to Texas and England this year means I am not running away by myself. (Important note: the woman we went back to Texas to see has now passed away. I have no regrets over prioritising that goodbye trip over other more fun activities for this year.) Noah wants to be thoughtful and asked me what I want. I want to not want anything so I can’t feel let down. I want to have patience for the 973,383 times I will have to remind my children to do basic chores (like brushing teeth). I want to not miss my mother. I want to go back and rewrite my back story so that my impending birthday doesn’t feel like a hand grenade about to land on my head. A buddy suggested that I go camp somewhere for cheap, but I have been working too hard. I couldn’t right now. My hands are trashed.

I have an old friend staying with me. It is complicated in the way that integrating a new person with deep grief, and addiction issues, and learned helplessness will be. To be fair, every time I feel like I am going to freak out about an issue I have to address he is responsive and polite and most of my requests have been acknowledged and respected. But negotiating and setting boundaries is hard. It’s One More Thing on my emotional chore list and I’m tired.

It has been a fucktastically busy year. Busy on so many levels and my exhaustion is, once again, bone deep and completely saturating my soul. I feel numb and on fire and empty and aching. I deeply miss the comfort of tracking things that happen in my blog because I benefit from the space to process but mostly I do not feel I can anymore. I have reached a certain age where I now have to be realistic about the fact that I am not really going to make more very close friendships. Sure I can find new activity partners, but it isn’t the same thing. The people I have met in the last few years I am deeply conscious of this careful distance I keep. They are not allowed to know me. And I cannot talk about my deep relationships anymore because when I do I ruin them and it is absolutely all my fault.

So I do small bits of processing with people but very little in my historical record. I do almost none publicly. I mostly stuff my feelings and feel disconnected. I do not expect or hope for any kind of improvement.

I worry that the adhd medication was effective and useful for a time and it has gotten to the point where it is causing as many problems as it helps and I am starting the process of weaning off (with medical supervision do not fucking criticise me).

I watch the incoming terrifying blend of natural, political, social, and financial disasters hitting the UK with a sense of grim apprehension. I have been waiting all my life for a moment like this. I feel horrible about the fact that a lot of people are going to suffer terribly, some are going to die, but it won’t be my family. I continue my grim plod towards being able to provide a variety of supplemental food because I think famine is coming. I am installing solar panels with a battery system. I am installing rain butts, many and as large as I can manage. A chicken coop is finally being built. Hell, I’m even building a firewood pile because I worry that there will be a cold snap before the solar panels are installed. By the end of fall I will finally have my polytunnel set up for next year’s food growth.

I am working as hard and as fast as I can.

Noah’s job has managed to go most of the way towards fixing the issues that were happening with his salary. This is good. It would be a terrible time to go do a job hunt. I think we only lost a year’s worth of progress towards retirement. I am deeply aware that the fact that he is so insulated from the current global difficulties with regards to fair pay that he is still going to be able to retire before 60 means that I will never really understand the rest of my generation. Marrying him was hitting the lottery. I did not expect this. There is no fair. There is no deserve.

Even in company I feel lonely. I know I am not meeting anyone else’s emotional needs and they are not meeting mine. I do not know what could be done to change this. What I do know is that I am not suicidal and I am financially and physically prepared for more hardship than 90% of the planet. Maybe my expectation that things are going to fucking suck is almost a good thing. I am going to persevere. I will endure. I don’t need to be happy. I need to get the fucking work done.

And right now the next task on my list is to go make Middle Child a birthday cake. They are turning 12. Puberty is arriving and it’s going to be a wild fucking ride.

Why are you so tired?

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I always feel kind of stunned by this question and I get asked it a lot. It’s weird living in a place where basically no one is familiar with my back catalogue of writing. I do not direct anyone here at all anymore and I won’t start. I no longer believe that reading my blog is a way for people to know me. It is a way that some people have learned some things about me and then they fill in the blanks with assumptions and projections and in the end I feel like maybe they know me even less than if they hadn’t read the blog at all. It’s complicated.

I don’t do all the cleaning in this house, thank goodness. But it’s a big house. What I don’t do myself I have to manage and parcel out and track. In some ways that is better and in other ways it is just as stressful and challenging. The kids alternate between calmly going along and doing what I ask and screaming at me that I am a horrible person who makes them hate their life so that’s fun. Apparently when I spend two weeks saying, “Look at the current chore list and figure out what/how you would like to renegotiate the things on that list” and they say “Oh the current system is fine and I want it to continue” so I continue to remind them to do the exact same thing they have been doing for 4+ months all of a sudden “YOU KEEP INTERRUPTING ME TO TELL ME TO DO RANDOM STUPID SHIT.” Uhm, excuse me?

I write down chores in a daily planner book. I do it months in advance according to a system that I sat down with the kids and worked out. “About how many days can/should you go between doing your laundry? How often should we clean bathrooms and who should do which one? What is fair for doing dishes? How often should we sweep and how do we want to rotate the chore?” The negotiation is long and detailed. It’s not just “Mom Made Me.” The kids talked about at what point they find using something gross and it needs to be cleaned. Professional house cleaners come in every other week and do a basic upkeep so we are not required to do all of it ourselves.

But when I say, “Hey x, y, and z have been assigned over the past three days and you haven’t done them–can you please take care of that?” I am a complete and total asshole who must be raged at. Awesome. That’s not fucking draining or anything.

I ask my kids if they want to do classes and if so what kind. They tell me they want me to hunt around for them and find classes like a, b, or c. I do that. It takes time. The classes cost money. I find what they say they want and show it to them. “Are you sure you want to do this? It is x-distance from the house and will take you at least y-time to get there? It will take z-money out of the budget so I won’t have money for this other thing.” Yes they want it. Then they get 3 days into the class and all of a sudden I am a horrible person who forces them to do stupid things they hate and it is all my fault that they don’t have any spare time because instead of actually fucking riding their bike they choose to push the bike both ways at a speed of approximately .5 miles an hour. Not draining or frustrating at all.

The older kids have locks on their doors. They usually won’t use them. Youngest child is constantly in their room stealing stuff because obviously big kid stuff is cooler and I have to spend a lot of time trying to keep large, towering people from screaming at a small child until my ears ring. It’s shitty and not cool all the way around. You getting louder doesn’t solve the problem. You locking your door solves the problem. But you won’t take responsibility for what you can do you just want to scream about how you feel violated. Cool. That’s not fucking exhausting.

The amount of hoarding and screaming and fighting in this house over food is making me hate my life and everyone I live with. So fine. We are going to buy more shitty food and I am going to stop arguing because they need to learn how to live with their bodies. When you transition out of limiting food it is always rough. (There are actually principles behind this transition and I am too tired and my hands hurt too much to explain them all. I did a fair bit of research on the topic and I am not going to justify it here. If you are legitimately curious let’s schedule a video call and I’d be happy to talk about food scarcity mindset, neurodiversity, nutrition research, and parenting choices.)

Gardening is a lot. This space is so much bigger than what I had in California and I feel like I am working myself to the bone. The kids are supposed to help and every minute of help is difficult to get and involves a big fight. I am so tired. I do most of it myself because I just don’t have it in me to fight. Sometimes I am out in the yard well past dark crying just doing it all because I cannot fight for more help.

My buddy is here and that is complicated. He has lived alone for a long time. He has never lived with a child in his life–his older siblings were much older than him and he has no memory of dealing with kids beyond hour or so visits sporadically with friends or family. There are a bunch of challenges around that. He’s here for a while. He is being *very* helpful in re-teaching me how to use power tools and helping me build some projects I want done. He is also used to working in a defined way always on a dead line to very technical specs that must be met because (reasons). My compost bins and chicken coop are not similar sorts of things. The amount and kind of project meetings he wants to bicker out every single last detail are hard. The frequency with which he wants me to stop what I am doing and focus on his questions is hard because I am keeping a lot of balls in the air and I don’t change focus that well. I can’t get back on track and half an hour of talking (it’s always “I only have a few questions and it will only take a minute” but really it’s many questions and it’s 30-45 minutes) set me back 1-3 hours because I have lost focus and flow and maybe I can’t even get back to what I was doing because now I have lost that window of time and I have another thing that has to happen Right Now. He has a lot of time to rest and chill out in between work times. I don’t.

I started typing this 45 minutes ago. Then I was interrupted to go fix a computer problem for a child (that has to forking start with a multi-hour download of updates because oh boy nothing will work when you are that far out of date) paused to brush the cat because folks noticed some fleas and the brushing needs to happen before the medication. I still haven’t finished my tea from breakfast, done the budgeting updates I’m supposed to do, or emptied the dishwasher and reloaded it from breakfast.

Why am I tired? Oh my god are you kidding? Do you actually not understand? Really?

I also need to finish taking the labels off the little jam jars so I can put the spices in them because the random bags of spices piled on an open shelf that fall down every single time you do anything cause daily frustration and frequent messes and I just can’t.

Oh, and I should paint today, do some weeding, some carpentry work, hang out the laundry that is in the washer and start another load. I also need to put the food in the fridge that arrived from the farm share box because apparently unloading the boxes means “put it all on the counter” to my kids. (One of them was cooking and me putting it all away would have meant getting in their way and they would have gotten annoyed.)

Did I mention that all of my chronic pain is through the roof and I am just about out of Ibuprofen gel and I don’t really have time to go get more? Also I need to go across town because we are about out of a few things that I get from the co-op and that’s about 6 miles round trip. I will probably wait until next week and go when I am on my way to or from the Youngest Child’s swimming class.

I told someone that I was falling behind on responding to emails/texts/messages on various platforms and she said, “Yeah I’m a procrastinator too.” ……. Does being so busy that you rarely have time to think a full thought outside of “What task do I need to be accomplishing full speed in the next 10 minutes” count as procrastinating?

Oh, and I need to respond to text messages from Middle Child’s best friend’s dad because otherwise the kids won’t see each other before the school year starts in 10 days and the bestie has been out of the country almost all summer. Woo. Haha. Got that done. Excellent. It will be great to see her again.

And really I have to close because ALL OF THE THINGS.

Praying and sleep

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Tonight I managed to get some time with my fingers in dirt. It was after I probably should have been in bed, resting. I am told resting is important. But I have been rather a nasty bitch for a few days and I needed to get a serotonin boost somehow.

I am working on a stone spiral for herbs; I won’t really be able to plant in it this year because the growing season is short here in Inverness. As I was grunting and laughing as I dragged up rocks that I probably should not have been lifting I thought about what it means when I say that I will pray for you.

If I say that I will pray for you I mean that I will think of you when I shove my hands into the soil. As I pile rock on top of rock and I shove sticks and compost into gaps I will think your name and I will hope that this universe grants you the nutrients you need to grow. I think of the people in your life who build you up and whom you in turn support. I think of how I want the universe to build a safe and stable place for you to rest. I want you to have the right amount of support so you can present exactly the angle of yourself into life you want to project.

I think of how I want you to have space around you to spread your roots into new directions. I think of how I wish water would flow around you to bring growth and moisture and sustenance as you go through your life. I think of how I want you to have seeds of new life, whatever that means for you, come to you with the wind and the birds and the flow of the seasons. I want you to thrive.

And around then I noticed that it was just about pitch black and I should probably stop. Given when in the year we are I guessed it to be close to midnight. Cell phone said it was 11:40. I’m pretty good at time. Then I laughed and thought of something that my son said to me recently. He said, “I’m kind of embarrassed to admit this but I didn’t really think you slept until after you had our little sister. That pregnancy was the first time I really saw you sleep.”

I tried to protest that it was ridiculous. Of course I sleep. He stopped and looked at me all deadpan. Then he raised his hands to melodramatically indicate the walls and the ceilings of the room we were in that I had in fact painted in the middle of the night while everyone else slept. He said, “Really mom. You do?”

As I softly shift dirt back and forth and move rocks to create the form I want even when there is no longer light I have to admit…. no. I don’t. Not really. Maybe if I did my body would hate me less. But would I really live longer or would it just feel longer?

I know the garden I want to stand in on my 50th birthday. It is going to be fucking amazing. I am going to be able to push my toes down deep into the soil and harvest fruits and vegetables that I made flourish. There will be flowers and wee beasties and a whole damn ecosystem. It might already be cold or there might be a last gasping heat wave. Either way I am going to sit in a rocking chair and hold Noah’s hand. Maybe I will already be wrapped up in a blanket or maybe I’ll be wearing barely anything at all–global warming is even coming for the north. I’ll have some whisky.

And if I am very very lucky I will even have a smile before I fall asleep for a well deserved nap.

The monsters under the bed

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Sometimes you get cocky. You think, “Hey the monsters under my bed haven’t come out for a long time. Maybe I made friends with them and they decided to leave me alone as an act of mercy. Maybe they died of natural causes. Maybe…. one of the many chemical warfare bombs I threw under their killed them. Maybe.”

Then something happens. Maybe you knock a glass off your bedside table and it shatters on the floor. Maybe a support plank in your bed gives way and makes a loud creaking sound when you move. It might be a big sound or it might be a small sound. It really doesn’t matter. There was never much sense behind the monsters coming after you anyway. They have their own agenda.

So you step lightly off your bed expecting to walk peacefully off to the bathroom to brush your teeth.

Even when they came out often you never really learned how to hop off the bed fast enough and far enough away to get away from them. Their arms are so long. They can grab you so hard and pull you so close. Their teeth when they bite you are so sharp–so terribly razor sharp. Their teeth are a bear trap. If you move very much you are going to tear the wound and make yourself bleed out. Instantly your stomach fills with the sharp, acrid, acidic, burning poison of fear.

You are always so terribly terribly afraid that even if the bleeding doesn’t kill you first your body is going to produce so much acid that you will destroy yourself from the inside. You’ve been so close in the past. The acid burned holes in you so that you could barely eat, barely sleep, it burned through the tissues of your body making terrible pain absolutely everywhere.

You will never, ever forget that pain.

So when it starts you have to first go very very still. So still that you calm down all the way to the atoms of your body. So still that it feels like if you are not careful even this paralysis might kill you. You have to slow down enough to figure out how you are going to get help.

You can’t be casual about getting help. If you ask the wrong person they think they can toss you a screwdriver or a metal nail file and tell you to pry it open yourself.

You are stupid. If the only tool that you have to hand is one that will poorly break open the seal and probably slip sideways in the blood and cause you to damage yourself even more terribly… you will use it. You are scared and you are hurting and thinking is almost an impossible task. You are desperate. Thinking requires so much will. So that first decision, “Who can I ask for help?” is maybe the first, last, and only time you will be able to think.

You have to make sure that you carefully only ask for help from people who have the right tools in their toolbox. People who have experience with this kind of atrocity. People who will neither flinch nor minimize the severity of the wound. Probably these are people who climb out of their own beds very carefully because they are currently at a détente with the monsters under their own bed. They know deep in their bones what is at stake if they fuck up.

Make no mistake, that monster wants you dead.

If you choose very carefully and you manage to pick wisely and your dear, wonderful, important friend helps you to get the trap open that doesn’t mean you have to cling to them for all of the healing. They can pack up their tools and head back on their own journey. Someone else will probably be along soon and bandages and medicine are so much easier to get help with.

It’s getting the damn trap open that usually sinks a person. That moment is do or die. That moment decides if you will have more moments. That moment when you go quiet and you pull yourself in and you weigh carefully exactly who you can ask…

It’s everything.

You had better hope you made the right friends. You had better hope they have their toolbag with them when they happen to hear your call.

Sometimes you get lucky. You can limp away. You are reminded that you did not actually kill the monsters. The war is not over. You will have to keep fighting.

But for now you can rest. Rest and heal. Be grateful that you made the right friends. Be ready to help them with their own monsters when the need arises. Because as sure as the sun will rise those monsters are going to keep trying to kill you all.

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.

I’m allowed to be frustrated but I’m not allowed to be angry

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I wanted to get started on the bathroom stuff in June. I specifically had the thought that if there were delays: hey at least no one minds spending a lot of time outside and avoiding the house when it is a disaster. The contractor wasn’t available to start until November. He started on the 24th. He thought he would be done by the week before Christmas.

Then it turned into outsourcing a bunch of pieces because he hates doing those bits. Their schedule needs became a conflict. Getting accurate lists of everything that should be ordered… is literally impossible. And now things weren’t ordered when they should be and stuff could’t come in until January. I am so very very very frustrated.

Oh, now the contractor is very sick. Deep breaths. Can’t be angry. This is just life.

My bedroom and bathroom tile is done. Yay! That’s worth a celebration. The painting in there is far from done. Roughly half the walls in the room still need a plaster compound skim coat due to the removal of icki wallpaper. The plaster guy is just flat not returning my calls. So I ordered a handful of tools. I’ll be teaching the kids how to do the work. We aren’t supposed to walk on the floor today because grout is setting. I probably *should* stick a heater in there because that will help.

That means I can walk on grout Thursday/Friday/Saturday. On Thursday and Friday and Saturday I can also work on painting the walls that have to be painted first (specifically: the walls where shelves will be attached to the wall and the wall with the glass door, oh and I guess finishing the ceiling would be wise.) Technically I’m allowed to move furniture back in as of Friday but I think it is smart to wait till the plaster sanding is done on Saturday. Deep sigh. I am going to move a lot of the furniture back in pretty immediately. Well, I can do primer on the unfinished walls on Saturday after sanding–there doesn’t have to be a big time gap between those activities.

Then the return of furniture! Of course first is the bed. My lovely bed. My wonderful bed. My bed that means that maybe I’ll get to have sex again. le sigh I do like me a closed door. I will put as much of everything else in there as I can while leaving access to painting wall space. It will be nice to have the furniture in near where it will go because it will help me remember where I don’t need to be intense. I’m stealing one of the white boards from the kitchen so that I can have a visual reminder spot that I can’t put down/lose in my room too. White boards are awesome. But I don’t need to do a lot of fancy painting behind it.

For the bathroom I’m thinking the wall that faces the shower will have a pretty serious tree with holes for various kinds of birds and fairies to live in. I think that a branch will come over the mirrors and have a nest on it with pretty speckled eggs. There will be birds flying in the sky up on the ceiling. Maybe even fairies dancing if I can figure out the perspective. Low grass and flowers down at the bottom and in the doorway.

I’ve already painted a fair bit on the ceiling. A couple of them are highly abstract in a way that will lead to many many guesses and possibilities over the years. One is (pretty fucking clearly to me) a vulva because vulvas are AWESOME. My kid says, “Hunh… I have no idea what that is,” hahahahahahahaha. I added a heart with the word forgive dotted inside it but it’s heavily obscured and I think it will only be visible at some times in some lighting (totally my goal). There is a flower because I love flowers. There is a symbol for finding gratitude that I didn’t quite finish because my neck was very angry with me. Over the bed I intend to put a sigil for encouraging peaceful sleep and banishing nightmares. I have room for a couple of other cloud symbols but I’m not sure what yet. Hm.

The office nook will have very little available space for painting. Above the computer monitor area I am going to put the pagan three moon symbol. I might do some vines or other things growing up in the space between furniture but mostly I will just paint the walls solid green behind the furniture and call it good. And by “solid green” I mean dappled greens so that it doesn’t look like some wacko who believes in one color for each wall took over my room.

In the narrow corner above my bed next to the window I want to do a wheel of the seasons. A reminder that change is always always always coming.

I’m still not sure what I want above my bed. That space feels very important and I can’t visualize what it ought to be. The side of the room with the dressing area and the exercise equipment storage will be all Mother Goddess and Greenman energy. Lots of bright colors even though it’s supposed to be midnight in a fairy glen.

I’m having fun.

What is it about me?

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Recently someone who, about two decades ago, asked to be my Leather mom tried to friend me on facebook. I actually unfriended her about six months ago because I was weak when she came around a year or so ago when I filled out my facebook profile more and included California people. I unfriended her because when I see her posts about how terribly she misses her daughter and how the lockdown was traumatizing to her because she can’t see her baby it cuts like a knife. It jumps up and down on my old buttons about how other people deserve to be loved and I don’t. So instead of being an asshole I just unfriended her.

I uhm was not as nice this time around. Instead of ghosting her I let her know (with a fair few words) just how much she hurt me and that continuing to stand near her at this point makes me think about killing myself and I just can’t do that anymore. She responded with ethos and just how broken she is now and an attempt to gain sympathy and support from my end. I am not going to respond. Because if I did it would be something hostile about how she fucking dumped me years before her partner died so if she is broken in the aftermath of his loss I don’t fucking care anymore.

This is like my mother expecting me to start handling all of her financial needs when I was 18 and I got the accident settlement. She didn’t really raise me–a whole series of foster placements kept me fed and clothed and not homeless. But hey I owe her because she is so needy and she’s my mother. Naw. Fuck off.

Many years ago now my Leather Dad told me that he’d be happy to let my kids call him grandpa but I needed to keep in mind that he wasn’t going to do anything to help me because all of his money and support and property was going to his kids. Then a couple years after that he asked to borrow $10,000. We worked out a loan agreement and I gave it to him and he paid me back. Then he came back asking to borrow $25,000. For someone who was absolutely fucking clear that he wouldn’t help me he sure expected me to help him. I said no the second time.

I talked to a good friend about how they are the only person Sarah has lived with who Sarah doesn’t owe money because they didn’t charge Sarah rent. When Sarah broke up with me she had effectively stolen money from me; it was put in an account to buy groceries for the family. A couple weeks later she had a plane ticket to see her sister’s graduation and she needed more money for groceries. This was never really discussed because if I got angry with her then she would tell me I have Borderline Personality Disorder and she can’t deal with me because I am triggering because I am just like her mother.

They say that extreme independence is a sign of trauma and it’s not a good thing. I’m told that me being a bit on edge and not 100% trusting Noah means I shouldn’t be married to him because I am being abusive to him. Basically what that means is because I am a traumatized person I should be alone for the rest of my life–hey independence!

For reasons I don’t really understand he thinks that having this much of me is better than having none of me.

Recently I read something that I found interesting: The Unified Cutlery Theory. I feel like over the last two months I managed to turn the corner and all I have are knives. I posted a while ago about doing well and I think that was a stupid thing to do. I burst my bubble.

PMDD is so awful

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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.

Good thing to notice

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I’ve been going to yoga classes for a little bit now–a couple of months? Something that I notice when I’m there is that I talk to/about my body differently than I used to. I’m not sure when it changed because I don’t write this kind of thing much anymore. It’s noticeable to me because of what the instructors say. They tell you to check in with your body then pause and then tell you to get past the negative vocies.

These days when I check in with my body it’s gratitude. Thank you for being so strong. Thank you for carrying me so far. I am so proud of what you can do. Yeah, you hurt but isn’t it nice that you hurt so much less than you used to? I’m proud of us for learning how to take care of you better. I can feel the expression of love over time in my bones. I’ve worked so hard to get to where I am. I’m happy that I’ve had this kind of support and time.

I suspect that the combination of meds that I’m on at this point is helping. Amitriptyline is both for pain and it increases serotonin so it’s an antidepressant at the same time. The lisdexamfetamine feels like what I wish i could have had since I was a teenager. I genuinely believe I would have made fewer risky/bad choices if I had been on it.

I really wish I could have been properly assessed for ADHD and ASD as a teenager. It would have changed my life. I wonder if I would have accomplished as much? I wonder if I would have accomplished less? Ah well. It is what it is and all I can do is move forward.

It’s a lot better painting on this med combo. I don’t feel the urge to paint all night long “just to get through it”. I know it will make me feel like trash later and that’s not very tempting/alluring. I’ve been painting for a few weeks in a row now. My one short night of sleep (I got over 6 hours… so not a California short night) was when I was trying to clean up after painting. It took 15 hours to put things back in place and clean up the house enough for the cleaners to be able to come in and do actual cleaning instead of just walking around piles. My average for the last four weeks of sleep is about 8 and a half hours. That’s… kind of shocking for me being in a heavy work cycle. That’s just about healthy. Whoa. Balance.

I am finding a bit of appetite suppression from the amfetamine. I am eating smaller portions at meals (2 tacos instead of 3, 2 pancakes instead of 4, 1 bowl of soup instead of 2) and I feel less desire to have a late night dessert. Sometimes I skip lunch because I’m not that hungry but I eat a lot more dinner to make up for it and I think I eat about the same amount of food. I am drinking waaaay less alcohol (I’m probably taking 3-6 units a week down from 10-15) mostly because the amfetamine means you feel the alcohol less so I don’t feel as much desire to consume it. It still tastes good so I have some. And some of the wine I like is multiple units/serving in the glass I use so there you go. I’m flirting around 200. I haven’t seen lower than 203 since I arrived in Scotland and I’ve usually been in the 210’s and 220’s over the past 2 years so I am losing some weight. With the amount I exercise it has felt kind of weird that I keep as much extra padding as I have been. When I was in my 20’s and 30’s this much exercise would have kept me down in the 160’s.

Something that I think I am feeling in my body is I have dramatically fewer spikes of cortisol with this med combo. I really don’t feel anxious. Over the past two years I have noticed that in Scotland I feel dramatically less anxiety than I did in California as a baseline… even with the help that cannabis provided. I don’t have as much hypervigilance here. Prior to trying this med combo I was still feeling anxiety though in that way that I think is about my body being programmed to worry about everything as the natural state of being. That feels like it is stopping now. In California I had to be careful with my cannabis usage because I couldn’t/wouldn’t take it when I had to drive so I had a lot of up and down effect in terms of my experience in my body. I think there was enough break in cortisol production that my body could process food normally and not turn it all into emergency fat rations for later tragedy.

Since moving and being off cannabis entirely (the weight gain started right when I left California–I could tell in how my clothes fit) there has been a slow but gradual ballooning effect. Exercise and eating a balanced diet wasn’t having any impact at all. Despite the comments of ignorant people… I eat a fairly ridiculously healthy diet compared to the average person in the western world. We eat very little that is processed. We cook from scratch for something like 12-15 meals a week. (A lot of the other meals are leftovers.) We eat 4-9 servings of fruit and veg a day. I have cut a lot of the dairy and meat from my diet. (My family eats more than I do but I’m trying to limit inflammation.) My weight creeping up is not about eating too much and moving too little. Yeah yeah it’s anecdata but I have lived in this body for 40 years now and I’ve seen it through a lot of cycles. Cortisol/stress/anxiety.

It’s really dramatic having medications that lower the level of cortisol in my body on a 24/7 basis. I am consistent with the meds. I haven’t skipped many doses since I started so this is a really level sort of experience.

But my blood pressure has creeped up. I’m hoping that losing some weight will have an effect on that so that I can keep the meds. I really like how my brain feels. I have also halved the amitriptyline dosage on the advice of my GP to see if I can keep the positive effects with a lower dosage. She is mildly skeptical because my former dosage was already the “grandma dose” (her words) and she wonders if my body will be able to feel anything with half that. I’m trying it for a few weeks to see. I think it is worth trying. I really don’t want to lose the lisdexamfetamine. I feel like this is doing so much.

It feels like such a blessing that when I quiet down and look inward what I see is liking myself.

Chasing happiness

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Recently some dude I don’t really know was talking in a chatroom about how it wasn’t fair that he doesn’t get to be happy. He didn’t get to (insert hobbies/relationship structures) and that means he is doomed to be unhappy. Instead he has traveled to so many countries I can’t name them all and he’s done (long list of interesting things) but none of that counts.

Man. I feel you. I have attained most of the goals I set for myself. At this point… I don’t seek happiness. Happiness is elusive. Happiness is a myth. Happiness is an illusion. I seek connection. (Fuck you pandemic.) I seek the ability to control my brain enough that I don’t wreck relationships with being an asshole. Happiness is a bar too high to even grasp with my fingertips, let alone pull myself up and over.

Last night I dreamed about seeing an acupuncturist. I was desperate to deal with some of the pain in my body and I’m well aware that acupuncture is helpful. I went in to a clinic. It was hard to find to start with and when I got in and got in front of the clinician she told me I could have exactly one needle because she wanted to go on her lunch break and she didn’t have time to fuss with a lot of needles/help. I picked a thing in my neck/shoulder because it is causing intense headaches and limiting my movement for painting. She left it in for 10 minutes (which isn’t a long time in that sort of treatment) and then told me to hurry out. At the payment desk with the receptionist we had trouble figuring out what currency I should pay in. They kept switching back and forth between various currencies I have used and yelling at me for not having a full wallet of all of them. Why didn’t I have baht handy. Where are my pesos? What kind of stupid bitch doesn’t have her yen with her? Where the fuck were my ringgits? I left crying. Even my dreams are painful.

I’ve been looking at photographs of an autumn afternoon in Scotland. This is going to be tricky as fuck. I need to layer blue and yellow and orange and gold. If I try to do that while the colors are wet I’ll end up with green. This is going to take days of adding layer upon layer upon layer until I figure out the correct proportions. It’s not like the clouds in the dining room where I could just slap on blues and whites and greys until I liked it. And the ladder I am going to need to use to paint a lot of the high stuff in the hall is already scaring the shit out of me and I haven’t even gotten it out of the shed yet. Oh boy. This’ll be risking life and limb.

Why do I need to do this? Why is this important? Is it going to make me happy?

Does anything make me happy?

I learned how to paint from doing sets. From creating backdrops that taught you about the characters without them ever having to say a word. I miss therapy. I miss being able to explore who I am and figure out why I am feeling a way and what meaning it has in my story. Now I don’t talk about myself that much. But I can paint.

I am starting a new stage in my life where I am going to be presenting myself to a whole new bunch of people. Sobonfu told me I had to make my own community. I am trying to create the backdrop against which this is going to happen. The people who are drawn to me and want to be part of the story going forward will be influenced unconsciously by the setting I create. Life is like that. People are like that. We influence each other. We change each other. We connect with each other and become something different now that we are more than our separate pieces we are a new whole together.

It is a kind of magic.

Will it bring happiness? Fleeting moments, of course. Will it bring pain? Talk to my neck that cannot stop grinding as I move it. I need to see a chiropractor. Ugh. We only get to live one life. We only get one run at this gauntlet of opportunities. If I do not share what is in my soul because it is too hard, because there is not enough moment by moment reward then I have lost The Game. My children talk a lot about how they want to keep this house forever and go to and fro with this house as the place they are centered. They are children and all children have fuzzy grasps of the future. But some people do that. Some people have a home base and it is important forever. They could be people like that.

I asked my oldest if she wanted to help me paint the hallway. She said she didn’t want to. She wants to see what I create because she likes the way I paint better than how she paints. Sometimes I wonder if she limits her artistic mediums away from the ones I use because she is afraid of comparing herself to me. I’m not actually that great, my love. You will be better than me across the board by the time you are an adult and even your youthful scratchings seem pretty rad to me. She is sticking to graphite and digital arts for now. That’s fine. Your journey is your own.

She is horrified that I don’t mind her reading smut. Oh my darling. If only you understood how very very very softcore your smut is you would understand why I just grin. I am glad you don’t understand. I am glad you haven’t already been reading hardcore for years. I’m glad you understand that your sexual blossoming is still entirely future tense and you still thrill at the idea that someday you will get a real kiss.

That right there is the satisfaction of a lifetime goal. What is happiness next to the surge of power and righteousness I feel when I think I have kept them safe. That’s not a given in this life. And there is no true shame when other parents don’t attain the same goal. Life is so very hard and unfair and terrible. But I broke the cycle in my family for my children. If I had failed it wouldn’t be fully my fault because it would be the fault of the perpetrator. I have sat like a fire breathing dragon over the cache of gold that is my children. I have kept them safe.

This feeling is better than happiness.

My hands hurt and my neck hurts and my back hurts and I feel sad and I feel lonely and I feel frustrated and irritable and like I want to be nasty to everyone and everything. I really need to start bleeding already. This phase of the cycle is brutal.

What I will do is try as hard as I can to speak gently to the children and I will paint as much as I can this morning. I have a three hour window. If I waste it then I only have myself to blame.

It may not lead to happiness in this moment. That’s ok. Happiness on a moment by moment basis isn’t really the goal. I am building for future me. I am creating because I believe there will be an After Pandemic Time when things are different and I will get to build the community I want so badly to have. I will bring people here, to my lair. I will throw open the doors of my soul and hope that all of the breaking open leads to more love in the world. I will try as hard as I can to tell other people that they should do the things that they feel moved to do. They should embrace the identities that are already true for them. They should yearn and aspire and go do the things that they dream about.

We only get one shot running through this gauntlet.

Go.

Scraping the bottom of the spoon drawer

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Well fuck everything. The last two ish weeks have been absolutely horrid. I mean, there’s all the things (*wave arms in the direction of the whole world*) and then my body is being a real nightmare. My PMDD symptoms this month have been utterly unreal. My pain levels have been sky high. My mood is in the toilet. (Or rather in the scalpel drawer–not that I did anything. But I thought about it. Hell I don’t even own a scalpel at this point.)

And then when I did start my period my mood got worse and the pain got worse and I passed some clumps that were the size of golf balls and that’s just not fucking ok.

I’m watching two very different communities go through growing pains. I’m learning a lot about myself as I watch them process. I’m thinking about Sobonfu. I will never find a community; I have to make it. What are my values?

I’m more than a little bit of a dick. So my line can’t be that people can’t be dicks. I can be a bully so that can’t be the line either. Ah shit.

I try so hard to lift people up but right this minute all I can see are my failures.

Coming full circle

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I will never forget when I said to a therapist that I felt like I didn’t have high self esteem and she burst out laughing and said I had the highest self esteem of any client she has ever seen.

Oh.

I come at it sideways. I doubt myself. I question my decisions and my beliefs. I do not believe I am always right. I do not believe I always come to the correct decisions on the first try. I think I need to keep trying and keep growing and keep changing because being correct is never a fixed position.

But you know what? I really fucking like me. I really like who I am. I think I reach a lot of correct decisions. I think I am an ethical person. I think I have worked really hard at becoming a person I could respect.

Two things can be true. I can be open to the idea that I am wrong and I need to change/grow while also believing that I am really fucking cool. I can believe that I make a lot of correct decisions while also knowing that I still fuck up.

As my beloved Jenny said in the birthday book (paraphrased) I look at myself and see how far I have to go and she looks at me and sees how far I have come. Those can both be true.

I feel like I have had several days lately where I have felt extreme doubt about my moral compass and about my coping skills. I moved to a new country and the rules are different. But I did what I do and I went and talked to a lot of different people about the mixed feelings I am having and what I heard consistently over and over and over from a variety of different sources was: don’t change everything about you because you are really great. Figure out what you want to add on to who you already are.

That is so much more attainable than “You are wrong and you have to change everything.” I don’t hold back. I will tell you how I really feel. Even if that isn’t the British way. I have always loved having friends who were immigrants because they challenged me to look at myself and my life through new eyes. Maybe I can be that here. I will change a little to adapt. And other people will change a little to accept me and we will meet in the middle.

Do you know what I have no doubt about in any way shape or form? I will make friends and I will build a community.

It’s what I do.

I like that about me.

All communities pick a side. No community is neutral. No space is safe for everyone. I am very clear about who I will pick. I am very clear about who I want to make safe space for.

I know who I am. And today that feels very good.

It’s a lot

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In lieu of proper emails to the people who have expressed concern, here’s a blog entry.

I’m not doing so hot. It’s a whole bunch of things. This PMDD cycle is ridiculously brutal. I’m on day fucking 35 and I wish I would just god damn bleed already. I think I would be doing poorly even if everything else was going well. But everything else is not going well.

The pandemic is not hitting my area hard at all–there haven’t been new cases in a while and we’ve gone a few days without a death in the whole country. There will be a few more deaths as this trickles to an end, but Scotland as a whole has managed this pretty darn well. I am terrified of when tourism opens up again. That’s going to fuck us. But I also recognize that an awful lot of the industry exists around supporting tourism so it’s a double edged sword.

All the stuff in the US. I feel ashamed for not being there to participate. I feel grateful that I am not part of it. I feel fear for all of the people on the ground doing the work. I feel scared for the future. I am watching the revolution on tv because I was a coward and I got out.

Things in my house. Stuff with Noah is at a weird/hard point. We are having some troubles. I don’t know how to fix them and I don’t know what the way forward looks like and I’m really scared. I am really really scared. I feel so hurt. I feel wounded. I feel sad.

My oldest child is truly into puberty now. Woo! In the process of trying to celebrate her having a big milestone (in a way we have been discussing for three god damn years) she told me that I am the most embarrassing thing ever and there was a whole lot of “you are gross” face and body language. I’m totally butt hurt. I know it is normal. I know it is to be expected. I know I shouldn’t let it get to me. But I’ve already been crying for a few days so that was just not something I could shrug off in that moment.

Middle child is… she’s having a hard time with everyone taking care of their own needs right now. She is angry and being difficult because she still wants to be catered to like a little kid and no one has that to give her right now. We are all tired and doing stuff to deal with our own shit. I’m trying to talk her through how to meet her own needs a bit more and it’s just hard. So she’s getting in trouble a lot because bad attention is better than no attention.

Youngest child is an adorable little shit head. She has taken to yelling at us all because she wants to be top dog. YOU. WILL. NOT. SAY. THAT. TO. ME. (When we say something like, please don’t kick me.) She’s starting to get more consequences and she’s learning that when mama says something it fucking stays true. If you get into the fridge and steal multiple pieces of fruit and take one bite and leave them to rot, no you don’t get a slice of cake when the rest of us do. We don’t do that with food in this house. If you take the fruit you eat it before you move on. Sorrynotsorry.

Well, I’m writing behind this password because Jenny promised me that I could write what I needed to write and I didn’t need to password protect it–she would choose not to read it. Then she read it and yelled at me. So awesome. Jenny is trying to rewrite history. “I’ve said one wrong thing.” Oh fuck that. You started out our relationship 26 years ago calling me a stupid slut. There have been incidents like this for over two decades. You don’t get to say that calling my kids retarded was saying one wrong thing. She also clarified that she didn’t spank her daughter for a panic attack she spanked her because she was being defiant and screaming in Jenny’s face. Hello? You have rewarded her for bad behavior and defiance all her life and now all of a sudden it is not ok to the level you have to hit her for it? Yeah I don’t find that more excusable.

I don’t want to end the relationship. But I don’t know how close I want to be either.

I am not doing well at responding to anyone’s emails. I feel trapped inside my head. I feel unable to reach out because I feel wrong and bad and stupid and unwanted all over the place.

There was drama in some online forums. A couple pieces in a couple of places. In one of the womens-support groups there was this one woman who was really fucking antagonistic and when I got sick of being bullied I left. The one person from the group who has remained my friend then wanted me to spend weeks helping her process her feelings about being bullied by the one problematic woman. I’m like, this is not good for me. So she left the group too. Some of the other members came to her and asked about forming a new group without the problematic woman and I feel rejected, unworthy of defense, and really unimportant. I feel fucking bad. I provided a lot of emotional support to those people for over a year and me being chased off was fine but once it is this other gal all of a sudden the bully is a problem. I feel like shit.

I’ve been chatting with some of the bay area kinky folk. Some dude was making “jokes” that weren’t funny about covid at at ime when one of the members had a mom who was doing quite poorly and she was terrified. A few of us called him out for not being funny and told him he should apologize. He then proceeded to go on this extensive tirade about how pointless it is to apologize to mentally ill fuck ups. He said that the request for an apology was tantamount to him being falsely accused of rape. WTF? Now one of my friends is his new submissive. I’m like, “well. That’s fucking awesome.” I’m trying to just set boundaries with her about how I don’t want to hear about him and it’s only so successful. I may end up having to stop talking to her and that will be sad.

I don’t know why emails feel harder.

House stuff continues……..s…..l…..o…..w…..l….y….. which means I can’t just be done. I am in this constant state of waiting for the next step and it feels awful. This house will be great when everything works. And I just want to cry.

Sleep is not going well. I do get a fair bit sometimes but mostly I don’t get enough sleep and I feel poorly. I’ve had more than a few days lately where I got almost nothing done because I feel so awful. I’m depressed and I’m definitely getting the full-body malaise.

That said, I have been completing my miles. If I feed the kids, get my miles in… that’s enough to count for a day right now. I’m only up to 16 miles/week right now. I’m adding 1 or 2 miles every other week (mostly 1 but there are a couple of jumps) until September of 2021. My birthday week next year will be my peak week: 54 miles in a week. Then I start ramping down again (hopefully for a marathon the first weekend of October, we’ll see) the week of the marathon I only do 35 miles. It’s more in a day than I did during training, but the hope is that my body will be so accustomed to just going and going that it will be fine. Knock on wood for no injuries. I am a little worried about how often I will need to use the treadmill over the winter because it just isn’t the same as running outside, but it’s a lot better than injuring myself on ice or not running.

I am 10lbs below the peak weight I hit a bit ago. I have done pretty well about cutting sugar from my tea (only had one teaspoon one time) and I’ve not 100% eliminated alcohol (it’s not a great coping method and I get that but I don’t *have* a great one) but I’ve gone from drinking 5-6 days a week to having some 3 times in the past two weeks. I am also running out of stuff and I think I will be good about not buying more for a while. I mean, I have a whole bottle of whiskey sitting there I haven’t touched yet so I won’t be out out for a while.

We have some tenants and they are super sweet. I found them through the mosque. A bit ago my heart was moved to reach out to the mosque and tell them that if one of their members ends up in a tough spot because of job-loss in the pandemic and they need emergency housing, I have an empty apartment. The kind doctor who talked to me at first said he didn’t know of anyone at the moment but he’d keep me in mind. Almost a month later I got a call. They are a really sweet couple, she’s pregnant and her cooking is mind bendingly good. They are not paying rent yet (that’s the whole out of work + being an immigrant means you can’t get government support thing) but they are giving us stuff they make and offering help around the yard and being super gracious. The long-term goal is they will pay rent once jobs happen again. I am willing to extend some faith here. These are rough times all over the place. We are having really fun conversations and they love playing with youngest child when she’s outside. The young lady moved here just over three months ago and basically doesn’t know anyone. We are talking as best we can with her emerging English and my bad Hindi which is close enough to Urdu that we can communicate some.

Seriously, just having those smells wafting through my house from her cooking is worth the price of admission. Oh golly. It smells like home.

The yard has come along quite a bit and I feel like I am ready for the growing season. I still have a long way to go before I figure out all of what I need to do and what I need to prune and when. It’s a process. The yard is feeling overgrown and more jungle-like and I love it.

I mean, I’ve been feeling pretty crappy. But instead of feeling suicidal I have self mutilation ideation. It’s still not great (and I’m not doing it) but after so many years of “I should die” being my first impulse it is in fact an improvement. I’m sad. I feel bad about myself. But I have work to do and I need to wait for this wave of sadness to pass so I can get back to it.

Why am I not over it.

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I don’t like how long it takes me to deal with my feelings. I want to be done already. I want to know how I will feel in the long run. I am impatient.

But today I am managing three children. I made smoothies to use up the fruit before more arrives in the box today. I made lemon bars (part of using up stuff from the fruit drawer). I have done a bunch of cleaning. I’ve done a load of laundry (with some assistance from kids). I’ve done a bunch of cleaning dishes. I’ve had to have several conversations about the next stages of fixing house stuff.

Turns out the plumber we hired to fix the leak in MC’s bathroom didn’t bother to use any silicone sealant around the shower. So effectively he charged us a bunch of money to set a new shower frame inside the existing shower frame (he didn’t feel like tearing out the old one) then he just kind of left it like that. It leaked like a sieve. Our options are to A) rip out the new shower, old shower, and build an entirely new one from scratch B) be like the old owners of this house and just use it as a closet or C) rip the entire thing out and give up on having a shower in that bedroom.

That shower also was added well after the original house and the plumbing for it all goes waaaaaaaay around the house to come up the outside wall so it is basically impossible to keep it warm for any length of time. If we want it to be an effective warm shower we would have to add an electric boost and the shower is already so tight that I don’t think I could take a shower in there and wash my hair without knocking the door open with my elbow. That would cost a bunch of extra money. It would take up a bunch of space in the shower.

Fuck it, rip the bitch out and all three kids can share the one main upstairs bathroom.

Bonus: Middle Child will no longer have a bedroom that is effectively much smaller than her siblings.

One of the dudes is going to do all of the sanding of the bookshelves today. I am going to start the oil process myself because they are showing up intermittently and paying their hourly wage is adding up pretty fast. We are starting to have anxiety about how much fixing this house is costing. I think it will take me somewhere under 24 hours of labor (not including the time it takes to let the oil dry in between coats) to do all of the shelves I can reasonably reach for myself. That’s a fair bit of cash to save.

I am indefinitely putting off the idea of painting the house in fun ways because I can’t justify spending the money if it means Noah might have to get a job this year. I need to give him a full and complete runway to launch his products and that means I can’t be selfish.

Talking to people through forums is resulting in me feeling overwhelming rage a lot of the time. Almost every piece of major social progress in human history has been deemed impossible right up until the minute that it happens. We have the ability to make peoples lives easier. We choose not to. As a species we prefer to have a majority of people suffer so a few people can be fantastically wealthy. It’s immoral. I need to not be part of any online discussions for a while because I am rapidly growing to despise people I have loved for years.

I am once again in that mode where I feel like I have to move everything I own back and forth and back and forth and back and forth because every fucking area of the house is broken and I can’t put anything in a permanent home.

Did I mention that the kitchen tap broke for a second time? And the bathroom tap?

Fuck everything.

I am so overwhelmed. I don’t know how to process my feelings about people and how I need to be treated in order to be in a healthy relationship.

I don’t think I know what a healthy relationship even means right now.

And I have three minutes until the next stage of work begins.

I have a lot to get done today. How in the hell do I find time to break down all of my feelings so that I can turn around and be support to other fucking people. Because that’s what it feels like is expected. How dare I have distanced myself such that I’m not providing support.

Dad sent me a video. “I haven’t heard from you in a while.” Dude, I think this is the second, maybe third time you have initiated contact in our more than two decade long relationship. I don’t have the spoons to reach out and console you right now. Even though that is our norm.

I feel so much rage.

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.

I should probably take a break.

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I have moved my center of social media activity to different places and I think it is stupid. I’m getting really frustrated with a few people and situations. That means I should stop going there because I want to go off on people.

I am in a very mixed place with people at the moment in general. I’m talking to a few neighbors through texts or emails and long distance folks are emailing. I’m trying to be chipper and upbeat. In my head I am failing. I am cranky and irritable and frustrated and I want to scream.

I was pretty sick last week so we were in isolation before the lock down. Everything is on hold indefinitely. I feel like I need to hurry but I’m not sure towards what.

Over 17,000 dead. Almost 400,000 confirmed cases. Some folks are focusing on the country by country numbers. I can’t. This is global. It’s in 192 countries. The death rate is 4.39%. It’s slowly climbing. If we are very lucky we will see a turn in the tide in a month or so, but who knows.

Who knows. I should stop talking to people so much. I’m feeling so much frustration with people.

Lots of people walking past my house. That’s bothering me. I know people are allowed to go exercise but it’s… it feels weird.

This is going to be a very rough spring.