Tag Archives: parenting

Home schooling vs pandemic schooling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love you. You can do this.

Compartmentalize, look for your contributions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s…. really shitty and unfair.

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

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

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

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

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

I feel like such an asshole.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no fair.

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

I don’t give a flying fuck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judgement and progress report

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Why do I have such an intense horror of being judgmental? I don’t fully understand that horror in myself. I’ve been judging intensely lately. I backed out of an online social community because of one person. Because I judge her like fuck and I can’t be part of a group that tolerates that kind of behavior. In this case she spends a lot of time being a judgy bitch and bragging about all that she does for other people… but in reality she sits in her apartment with her cats on the internet most of the time doing nothing. I don’t think I would care so much about her bullshit only she spends a tremendous amount of time talking about how much she does for her niblings, who are in a highly abusive situation in another country. Only when she has the opportunity to do something for them… she picks her holidays to Asia (and the Olympics!) and tickets to Hamilton over staying with the kids and helping them deal with nightmarishly hard problems. Now she wants lots of sympathy because Hamilton and the Olympics were cancelled and it isn’t fair that she doesn’t get to go. Oh and she wants to be told how sad it is for her that the kids call her crying because they wish she was there helping them.

I can’t say a single nice thing to her so… I’m saying nothing at all anywhere that she hangs out.

She was the last person to tell me that I am fucking up my kids. Her reasoning? Because I don’t guilt trip them enough for normal kid behavior so they are going to have terrible lives and it will be all my fault.

Every single person who has told me that I am going to fuck up my kids, wreck their lives, or retard them has been spectacularly unqualified to evaluate such a metric and the people who are qualified to evaluate children think my kids are having a charmed, fabulous life.

It’s not just that my friends tell me what I want to hear. Professionals who spend their lives evaluating children think my kids are doing well. Judgy non-professionals who don’t know what they are talking about like to tell me how shitty I’m doing. Awesome.

Is that about me or them?

The school started off telling me that my kids weren’t doing so hot academically. Then it turned out that they have shitty handwriting but they are otherwise doing well. Do they handle other children hitting them well? No, they don’t. I’m not sure that is a bad sign about them. I cannot count how many people are traumatized by the school experience. It’s not that my kids suck. It’s that schools are brutal and unhelpful about bullying.

The home education movement here in Scotland is growing by leaps and bounds. The two primary reasons people pull their kids out of school: the schools won’t help children with special needs or bullying. It’s not just my family thank you very much.

But sure, the problem is that I’m wrecking my kids by not just putting them in school and telling them to figure it out on their own.

Yesterday the kids and I walked in the woods for three hours. It was really cool. The only downside? We should be wearing fucking hiking boots, not Wellies.

Oh! Yesterday was a milestone day! The cats were outside for a long time. The cat who is very people-attached was very scared and did not stay out long. The cat who is less people-attached had a great time and was out for hours and hours. I don’t think she went farther than our garden but it was cute watching her out the window.

The kids made cupcakes on their own. They also made a pretty good ganache to go on top.

I have gained 20 lbs since arriving in Scotland. That was not the direction I intended to go with that. Hahahaha. Even with all this exercise. I am now well above my previous lifetime maximum, even while pregnant. I think maybe I could do with less sugar. Maybe it is the calories from alcohol. Who knows.

My alcohol consumption still feels high to me and it still falls well below the line where my doctor would be concerned. Perspective is a funny thing.

My kids now think 17 degrees is oppressively hot. That’s 62F. We have acclimated.

Still not sleeping well.

Today’s garden task is apparently to work on constructing the stairs up to the front garden area next to the driveway. The kids are feeling a wee bit bored of working on digging the pond. I’ve started a bunch of seeds, we’ll see how they go. I should probably take stuff from the house to the polytunnel. At this point I think the tunnel is hotter than the house. I have high hopes for my tomatoes.

I think my watch has charged enough. I am out of excuses for sitting still. Blurgh. I’m sore. I’m tired. I don’t really want to be productive. But I want these things done and if I don’t move… no one else in the house will. Sigh. I feel like I am the motor.

Shit my kids say

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“As much as you’re an asshole, at least your food is good.”

(EC even documented that MC said this in his journal. Ha.)

Things I’m proud of

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When my kids come home from a sleepover they say “The next meal has to be entirely vegetables because holy moly that was quite a night. Meat. Starch. Sugar. I need veggies really bad.” I was not able to feel that kind of thing in my body when I was a kid. My children can.

We don’t talk about food in terms of calories at all. They are about as ignorant of calories and weight control as a 21st century person is capable of being. I’ve worked really hard on that. We talk about fiber. We talk about slow burning energy and quick release energy. We talk about what you need in order to poop. We talk about how different organs in your body need different nutrients and that’s why we eat a rainbow. We talk about how sugar is an inflammatory and it makes it harder to deal with your emotions and have patience and feel good. Sugar increases pain in your body.

They can tell when they have done things to make their bodies feel icki. I taught them that. I feel really good about that.

My children can cook. They know about balancing food groups and timing things so they finish at the same time and they are getting better at cleaning as they go so they aren’t left with a huge mess at the end. They can do a bunch of work to convert recipes including multiplying and dividing fractions. It’s beautiful. We covered a whiteboard with math equations for our last cake.

Their handwriting has improved in the last couple of weeks again. I think that would have happened in school too–they are just ready.

They are taking a bunch of initiative with their learning process because they are so happy that they aren’t being controlled by an outside force anymore.

They are kids and they fuck up and they break rules and they make mistakes and when they do they are fairly good at being able to learn from the mistake and figure out what they want to do next time. I know adults who can’t do that.

They are self reflective. They actively work on growing and doing better. That doesn’t mean they never backslide–of course they do. Growth involves regression. But they try so hard. They are open to becoming something new.

I love that we are back to devouring books at a furious rate instead of barely having time to read because school takes up so much time. I love that we have time to do our chores when we aren’t tired so it doesn’t take as long and we can have more relaxation time at the end of the day.

I love that my children aren’t in a race to grow up and leave behind “baby” activities. The big kids are back to a ton of intense fantasy play and I am so glad. They have no inhibitions about what kinds of toys are “for their age”. I truly admire how fearless they are about trying art techniques. They are better than me at a wide variety of techniques and I’m super thrilled to watch them shine.

I love that my children cannot imagine living more than a mile away from me. By their ages I was already planning how to get away from my family. They like me.

I like that when I want them to behave I can say, “If you feel yourself wanting to bicker or start a fight I suggest that you think “Four hours of yard work per day until mom is no longer cranky.” I hope that will help you hold it together” then they are polite and they work out their differences in a reasonable way.

I love that they feel safe enough to share the really hard stuff.

I love that this baby will say things like “Not ok a be rough! Be gentle! Don’t push!” and “No kisses a baby, just snuggles.” (she uses “a” for “to”/”for” at this point; that’s ok) I like that she is so fierce about defending herself and asserting boundaries. You just keep that right up. She apologizes when she hurts someone on accident without being prompted.

I love that my children feel free to sass me until I give them the look then they back right the fork off. There is a line of respect and I’ll let you know when you cross it. I don’t disrespect you and you don’t get to disrespect me.

I like that we still say “yes ma’am” to each other.

I like that they think really hard about the balance of ethically made/materials used/cost of items. I like that they think really hard about what it means to be in a world with a lot of other people and how can we be polite to as many people as possible?

I like that they are making their own friends here despite complications and speed bumps. It is taking time and we are learning how to be ok with that. It’s healthy.

I really like my kids.

Shades of gray

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I was in therapy for such a long time. I feel like part of what the point of a lot of it was to help me mature into the idea that not everything in life is black or white. I spent a lot of time and money trying to get to the point where I could wrap my brain around complexity and see that not everything fell into good/bad dichotomies. Occasionally I run smack into someone who still has such a view of the world and it surprises me. I feel like it was drilled into me because I was trying to get to the point of being like everyone else. But maybe not.

The only way to live a black or white life is to limit what you actually do. Once you get into the nitty gritty… people get complex. Good people do bad things. Bad people do good things. People are redeemable. People are worth effort even when they fail to be perfect.

People don’t improve or get better in a black or white dynamic; there is no reason to keep trying. There is no reason to bother trying to do better if you are forever damned by the worst thing you have done in life. It’s important to remember that people only improve or get better if they want to. You can inspire people to change; it rarely works out to force people to change. Forced change is rarely for the better. Forced change often makes people feel dead inside.

Recently I was arguing with someone on the internet about a specific of parenting (for the record, THEY WERE WRONG) and we were debating how to handle a misdeed on the part of a very young child. In her mind she has to force the child to not have that behavior. I said I am utterly incapable of forcing my children to be a way. I can inspire them to be a way. I can coax them towards having the behaviors I want them to have. I can model the behaviors I want them to have. I cannot force them to have or not have behaviors. People are not clay.

Probably the single biggest thing I have learned from parenting (and I bless the fact that I have been able to do this basically 24/7 for over 11 years now) is that if I want my children to behave a way I have to figure out how to model it. I can’t tell them to do something and expect them to do it. I really can’t expect them to be better or have more self control than me. (Which is utterly infuriating sometimes.) They have had a child’s limited set of life experiences and if I want them to have a set of perceptions I need to live in a way that shows it.

In home schooling, if your child doesn’t know something it is all your fault. It’s a lot sometimes.

My children struggle. My children have hardships in their lives even if I kind of wish that they didn’t because I have given up a lot to make the ease that they have. Life is struggle. Life is suffering. I cannot save them from that; not even with home schooling.

Something that is both exciting and terrifying is watching my children go through things that I had to go through. They are not me. They have a different set of expectations and experiences than I had but they also have half of my genetic experience and many similar tendencies. Parenting is an opportunity to give someone else what I wish I would have gotten.

Sometimes they trigger the shit out of me; I am fully back in a moment of extreme trauma and it is very difficult to react to the moment I am in. Other times they upset me or behave in a way that leads to me feeling a lot of rage. I get to decide what I do with those feelings. They frustrate me on the regular.

I get to show them what it means to be a grown up and have to deal with hard feelings. They are going to have to grow up and handle hard feelings too–how do I want them to do it? How do I want them to feel about themselves as a result of having these big feelings?

There are a bunch of things I want to write about in specifics right now but I can’t. My children are not little amoebas anymore. They are fully people and people deserve privacy even if I want to write about myself because they influence me. People don’t like to be talked about. I learned that from Sarah. Even if people tell you that they like being talked about they are lying. People lie so much. And if I decided to talk about my children because I didn’t care about their privacy it would lead to other people judging them harshly in ways that aren’t balanced or fair. People judge the shit out of each other.

People perceive others in black or white. You are good or bad. Broken or whole. Defective or normal. Inappropriate or appropriate. Shitty or excellent.

People are all of those things; it just depends on which minute of their life you look at.

Sometimes I wish I could mold people like clay. I want to give them feedback “If you did x more like y things then you would get closer to the result you want.” But help that is not wanted isn’t help it is interference. I mean, I think it is important to give feedback that a specific thing is not a good choice sometimes… but that doesn’t mean you can correct the behavior and tell someone what to do. It’s a balancing act. “It is not ok for you to _______. There are many other things you could do instead. If you want help brainstorming a list I’d be happy to help you figure out what your options are so that next time you are in a similar situation you can find a different path through it.”

Getting better is a choice. It is a choice you can make. But you have to decide for yourself. Nobody can force you. If you get to being old and you have never decided to improve or look at why your behavior causes the problems you have… well… I have some judgmental words for that. When does the cut off line start though?

If you have a shitty coping method before you are 10, that doesn’t make you an asshole, right? What about if you still have that coping method at 20? 30? 40? 50? 60? 70? 80? I believe people can always change if they choose to, but what does it take to motivate change at different stages of your life?

As a diagnosed autistic person I don’t get to be shitty and say “Well I’m autistic so you have to put up with it.” It may be harder for me to learn what I need to learn to change but I don’t have an excuse for not trying.

These are not rhetorical questions for me. I have some shitty coping methods. I’m almost 40. Am I damned because I have not fixed everything already? I have fixed a lot of my shittiness but I have not been able to get everything fixed already. Am I damned because I didn’t have a different priority list?

If I hadn’t worked on a lot of my shittiness I wouldn’t be where I am to complain about the shittiness that remains. Maybe I didn’t have your priority list for dealing with my flaws but I have been on a grueling path of unrelenting self improvement. That’s a literal fact. I can trace my history through massive changes in personality and behavior.

Some people like to sit back and not do much with their own life and judge the shit out of other people for failing at things. At least we tried.

Reevaluate everything

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are all just works in progress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE FUCKING VOICE OF DISSENT HAS SPOKEN.

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

Sigh.

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

Sigh.

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

Uncomfortably not-numb

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I am trying to sit still and heal. I really suck at this part. I slept well last night but I feel groggy and stupid. My back still burns and aches.

I feel frustrated with myself for not doing more research on EDS before the surgery. I have a history of complications and no one is going to track them or advocate for me; I have to do it. I told EC this morning that I am glad that she is learning these lessons before she is even a teenager because someday something is going to go wrong with her body and she will know enough to advocate for herself early and hard. EDS means difficulty in healing: our collagen is different. I already knew that I had issues with local anesthesia. This is the first time a wound has popped open like this, but I’m getting older and it’s going to be a bigger concern as time goes by.

I’ve been talking to a buddy who has EDS and a bunch of similar issues. She’s trying to help me figure out how to present this information to the doctors here. She’s upset because the surgeon told me that EDS wouldn’t have any impact on this kind of surgery. That’s not a great sign for the folks around here knowing how to handle my condition and it’s a small pool of doctors here. I am going to have to educate them all.

Festive.

But if I frame it as “There is a small pool of doctors here so these are the same people who will treat EC when she has issues” then it feels a lot more worth the hassle.

I’m tired and I hurt but I’m bored too. I want to be working on something. I want to be moving forward on something.

My last contact with the shipping company says that the next company that will touch my stuff is just waiting until they next have a delivery scheduled to come to the Highlands. It could take a while. Our stuff has sat in warehouses for more than three months. That was supposed to be the maximum amount of time for shipping it. So the transit time is within the estimated time… but people just don’t feel like doing the transit part very quickly. Still no sign of them wanting to do this soon. Fuck everything.

Oh crumbs. I just remembered that we are going back to Edinburgh on Tuesday. That’s going to be fun right now. That means I get three days of “rest” before getting to travel/walk/take care of business for 16 hours. Fun.

I put rest in scare quotes because I was alone with the baby for five hours yesterday.

Shit.

I feel like absolute shit. I’m past the point where I’m holding my right arm to my torso to prevent any muscle movement. Yay? This is all massively confounded by the fact that I feel really guilty about “Noah’s month off” turning into “Noah doing everything for Krissy for a month”. I feel so overwhelmed and guilty.

I’m in the narrow window of the month when I’m more likely to be interested in sex but hahahaha no.

I feel really bad about myself right now. I feel useless and lazy. I feel like somehow I did something wrong because I should have known that I needed to do a bunch of research before the surgery and come in with documentation of my fucking special needs. I should have known that it was too soon to take the sutures out. I…

I should have done everyone else’s job for them or it is my fault things went wrong. Because I didn’t do more than my share now Noah is getting stuck with my share and that feels really unfair.

I’m tired and sad and worn out. I’m sick of resting.

But, I emailed the professor who has been on my mind for over a month. I did a bunch of research into the education system in Scotland. I know more about what I’m going to need to learn over the next few years.

Even being idle doesn’t have to be idle.

Sidebar: I WANT MY FUCKING STUFF.

Complications

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I had the stitches out yesterday from the surgery I had on the 31st. Then the wound popped open and I had to go see another doctor to have the giant gaping wound restitched. Apparently that’s called suture dehiscence and it’s common for folks with EDS. I’ve been doing research this morning. Apparently EDS means I should have had my sutures left in for twice the normal healing time. I am going to figure out how to get a bunch of research on EDS to my medical team. I mentioned on the operating table that I have it and the surgeon said it wouldn’t matter.

My kids were understandably pretty freaked out. MC told me she had an unhappy tummy when she thinks about the wound.

I said that being afraid of the wound is like being afraid of riding your bike. I am going to die someday–that’s the end result of being alive. You are going to fall off your bike sometimes and the only thing you get if you are afraid of it is that you can’t enjoy the time you are on the seat. I am going to die some day and my body has a lot of complications that I’m trying to manage so that I can stay alive as long as possible. My body has more complications than average and that means I have to do a lot of research and I have to advocate for myself because keeping me alive isn’t the same process as it is for other people. If we waste a lot of time being afraid of my eventual death we won’t get to enjoy the time I am alive.

This research is extra important because EC has the same condition and the more I find out about myself the more I can save her from suffering through similar issues. She can advocate for herself earlier and harder.

Now I need to figure out how to get this research to my medical team. It’s entirely from highly reputable/peer researched locations. I’m not researching on blogs (Even though blogs are often pretty fucking accurate) so I hope this is taken seriously.

I need to assume this will take twice as long to heal as “normal”. I need to have the stitches stay in longer than expected and I need to say that to the doctors involved in my case. I need to be proactive because I am the only person who suffers from these fuck ups. My back hurts a lot again today. There was partially healed skin there that ripped open. It doesn’t hurt as much as it did the day of the surgery but it probably hurts as much as it did on day two or three post surgery.

I almost certainly tried to bounce back faster than I should have. I feel so much shame for “being lazy” when I don’t help and do chores around the house. But here I am with more complications post-surgery because I didn’t let my body have the time it needed. It’s like what happened after the septoplasty when I probably had three or four times as long of a recovery because I didn’t take the twice as long I should have taken.

Ugh.

I should probably sit in this chair for ten days or more this time. That’s hard for me. I must work to feel worthy. But if I don’t rest I will be less able to work in the long run. It’s complicated.

Always more

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Yesterday I was looking at the “body battery” function on my watch. I know it isn’t perfectly accurate or anything, but it measures how my heart rate is doing, compares it to how much exercise I’m getting and how my sleep I get and it sort of figures out when I need more rest and when I should probably get off my ass and exercise some more because I have extra body reserves. It was really low. I got down to 3 by the time I went to sleep. This is not a battery you are supposed to use up every day. It’s a negative thing to keep it under 20 on the regular.

Yesterday was a high heart rate, stress the fuck out sort of day. I don’t think it had to be and I don’t really know how to calm down. I opened the box of Christmas card (I’m never using Minted again because they ship the cards straight to you instead of to all the fucking addresses we entered) and learned I had to put return addresses on every envelope and stuff the fuckers. Just what I want to see when I really need to get those bitches in the mail. Surprise! Fussy work! Noah helped and it got done in a bit under two hours. Our address is a pain to write that many times.

I walked over to the Tesco and mailed off the Christmas cards, a letter to the grandparents from MC, the birth certificates we neglected to bring to the Consulate, and the notarized documents for selling our DVC property. Even with extra fast shipping and tracking on a lot of it… postage was a whopping £40. I sent all the US cards to a buddy and she’s opening the box and taking it to the post office to have them all stamped and sent out. If we had sent them all individually from here it would have been in the neighborhood of £140 all told. We are getting a deal. Thank you, kind friend.

I’m having some big feelings about freakin Christmas presents. A whole bunch of presents were in the boat stuff that is… I don’t know where. I am starting to feel really paranoid that they lost everything and just haven’t told us yet. I haven’t heard a word from the UK company in 11 days and that’s a bad sign. The last time I was told a UK shipping company would be contacting us for delivery it turned out the company was given our contact information in error and our stuff wasn’t on the god damn boat it was supposed to be on. This is incredibly distressing and I don’t know how to get my heart rate to stop skyrocketing every time I think about it.

Noah’s Santa present arrived broken in November. I’m glad I ordered the blasted thing as early as I did. The replacement is sitting in customs in town and has been for 3 days. I don’t know why since it already spent several days in customs in a different part of the country. My stomach hurts.

The parent of a kid who has been whacking on MC came to the school yesterday to intimidate/threaten my children (EC had told the boy to stop hurting MC or she would tattle… she didn’t threaten to hit him or anything) and that’s causing some rage and panic. The school needs to handle this mother-fucking today or I am going to cause a massive stink. I don’t give a flying fuck that it is the last day until after Christmas holidays. I’m not giving the school a lot of leeway here. I will go to the Council first and if it can’t be resolved to my satisfaction then I’m withdrawing my children. Fuck school. Other parents do not get to harass my children.

No wonder my heart rate is sky high.

My body feels like I am gearing up for a big fight and I hate it. I feel sick.

Oh, and YC is sick. Life is awesome.

No stockings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My bucket is empty.

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

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

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

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

Kinaesthetic education, yo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We will figure out this journey together.

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

Ugh, dreaming is terrible

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I woke up rather early from an awful dream where I moved to Canada to marry this horrible man I went on two dates with from the dance community. There is zero chance I would do this. Even dreaming about the possibility makes me sick to my stomach. His second wife, the mother of his child, is one of my least favorite people on the planet and I don’t want to ever be in a room with either of them again because how they parent is so repugnant to me. So dreaming that I would be marrying into that shit show… blurgh. Stupid brain. I hate you stupid brain. Why do you even consider such gross options in life? I miss pot and the lack of dreaming it facilitated. I’m a complete moron in my dreams.

Middle Child is having nightmares about school. There’s a boy in her class who tried to knock her down the stairs. On the first week of her being in school she watched him drag younger children around by their hood. Eldest Child says she’s afraid of this kid too because he’s pretty violent.

I told the Head that my children were having bullying problems. She asked me for names. I said I could not give the names but she should ask my children. My children went to school and asked to speak to her. She acted confused why they would think she would make time to speak to them. I’m not happy about that part of how things are going. In my next round of emails I will mention it again. She needs to talk to them about the bullying they are experiencing.

She wants my children to stay in school but she doesn’t want to have to put in effort to find out who is giving them problems. I mean, I know I wrote positive things about the fact that they seem like a better group to work with than other teachers I have known… but it is still school. School is shit and I understand why MC is feeling over it after two months.

EC is feeling pretty annoyed because her class’ performance for the Christmas show involves the kids having to sing very loudly over a recorded song with a loud singer. Most of the kids in her class won’t sing at all because they are not interested in performing. She started off being angry with the kids because their lack of intensity leaves her feeling like she must sing twice as loud to make up for them and she is damaging her throat. She’s been doing some name calling of the kids and insulting their work ethics. I told her that she has not had seven years of being beaten down and constantly forced to do bullshit for school that she doesn’t want to do so she doesn’t understand their position. None of them opted in to this activity and they don’t want to be there. Why are you calling them names because they are engaging in the only form of protest available to them?

I asked her if it would be appropriate for me to call her names when she doesn’t feel like doing all the chores my greedy little heart might like to assign her. Her eyes went wide. Then she said, “Ok well it totally sucks that the teacher picked a song where we have to sing really loudly to drown out the singer–that’s not fair.” I agreed that the teacher made a rude choice. That’s totally fair to criticize. But criticizing people for not going along on an activity they don’t want to do? Meh. I can’t get on board.

It is utterly striking to me what a rule follower EC is. She wants to conform to the demands of authority left, right, and center and she thinks it is shameful when others don’t want to do it. But she’s also starting to notice that authority in school is not at all like the authority she grew up with. In school the authorities set rules based on their convenience or on arbitrary standards and the teachers really don’t care if the rules are appropriate in a given context. Such as: all children must carry a coat out to the playground for breaks and lunch because it is Scotland and it could rain. It frequently doesn’t rain and the children overheat in jackets so the kids leave the jackets sitting around and then they get lost and the children are in trouble. EC has been complaining about constantly feeling overheated and uncomfortable and she can’t understand why the staff wants her to feel that way.

Because the staff doesn’t care about your personal comfort. The staff cares about enforcing “the rule”.

Whether it is raining or not you have to have a jacket on.

Apparently the staff is giving her lip for showing up in shorts and short sleeved polo shirts because it isn’t “weather appropriate” but she is constantly overheated. They don’t think this is possible for someone who is from California because it is colder here. Dude. She lived in her underpants in California because she was always uncomfortably warm. I promise you that she can overheat here. She doesn’t understand why the school doesn’t care that they are making her miserable.

Welcome to school. You wanted to find out what it was like.

There are eight more school days for my kids in before Christmas break due to our trip to the Consulate. I put the chances of MC going to part-time school in January at about 80%. Do I want to do it? Not particularly. But I did not force EC to go to school when she wasn’t ready and I don’t feel ok about forcing MC to go. I am more than capable of teaching the subjects she is struggling with and the teacher is literally unable to provide the one on one attention I can provide. Of course the teacher thinks that MC would learn much better by being in a group of peers and normalizing off of other students. I don’t agree. I find that dynamic pretty fucked up.

The teacher did not look like she appreciated it when I said, “As someone who has been a public school classroom teacher the thing I appreciated the most about home educating is the lack of wasted time for transitions. In a class room you are lucky to get ten productive minutes out of each hour because getting all of the children to focus at once is practically a miracle. With home educating that whole hour can be productive and that’s why I don’t start academics until many years later and we blast through many years of progress in a short period of time with far less effort.” School is invested in believing that it must take many years to force large groups through a given set of knowledge. It literally doesn’t have to be that way. It is how school does it. But it is not a necessary part of the learning process.

Home educating (I’m trying to adapt my language because the local crowd is hostile to the “Americanism” of saying home school) is much more concise and effective than school. I can understand school feeling insecure about that. But I don’t care about your feelings any more than you care about my children’s feelings. And thus the world goes round.

I do not exist to provide you with little people to affirm your feelings about yourself. I am here to support my children.

I will have to ask for a formal explanation of the layout expectations so that I can help kiddo figure out how to do it. We’ve been talking about presentation differences for years. It is utterly hilarious to me the way the teachers here are super smug about their layout being standardized in primary schools so every child must be held to it. As if I haven’t already had to learn APA and MLA and a variety of other standards for different earlier schools. This standard isn’t somehow more magically wonderful and correct. It is just what you prefer. Whatever.

Do I want to keep home educating? No. I don’t. I’m exhausted and I’d like to be selfish and have more time for myself. But if it is what my child needs I am going to do it. This is her decision, not mine. And I’m about 80% sure at this moment that she is going to pick home educating because she learned that school sucks.

Yup. I hated school. Your father hated school. School is a miserable experience. I don’t blame you for wanting to opt out now that you have had a taste. The more I think about it the more I feel a little sick about the school trying to say that she should have to spend six more months there before I let her decide. It feels like “We haven’t had enough time to break her spirit and convince her that she’s not allowed to opt-out of abuse. Please keep letting us work on it.” The assertion that you must learn to conform to an arbitrary, abusive environment or you will never be able to have a job is so repugnant and repulsive. I don’t believe that.

My shitty hand writing has never prevented me from getting a job I applied for, no matter what the schools like to tell me. I mean, I didn’t apply for being a college professor… so I guess the timed handwriting aspect of the final exam for my masters did limit my potential… but I absolutely loathed being an adjunct instructor. I hated teaching college students. So was there really a loss of life potential there? I don’t think so.

My hand writing kept me teaching the kids I wanted to teach. Was that really a limitation? I don’t honestly believe my hand writing is going to keep me from future work I want to do. So how about if you fuck right off with your nasty attitude about how hand writing is the measure of intelligence.

“It is clear that MC should be in the highest reading group based on comprehension but her hand writing isn’t good enough so I won’t allow her to be in it.”

And you wonder why she is bored, acting out, and doesn’t want to be in school. Hm. It’s a fucking mystery. You think I should work with you to convince her that she has no option other than comply with your demands or be punished by being forced to work below her intellectual potential. She has to jump through an arbitrary hoop before she is allowed to learn anything interesting.

Or she could stay home.

Yeah. That’s school for you. MC wants to set project goals and work towards them. She knows that she is currently in the grade where EC got to work on a music video (to learn programming) and a big comic (with lots of supportive research because the comic was about California history), she did a couple of big fun real-life based maths projects, there were countless hours spent on art history as a passion project, and we went through three different fun science curriculums. EC spent this year working on learning more like how college classes are run. MC is being told she has to read baby books that are boring as shit because she doesn’t write well enough to learn anything interesting.

I FUCKING WONDER WHY SHE WANTS TO LEAVE SCHOOL.

Home educating is both a real education and fun. School has fun elements too–I can’t provide all of the group access that school can and they have resources I don’t have… but it comes in a whole package with kids who want to knock you down the stairs. It comes packaged with people spitting on you. It comes with constant name calling because you dare to be proud of being intelligent and bookish. Nerd is a constant refrain. And these kids don’t mean it as a compliment. They are trying to be derisive. Luckily my children have not been in school their entire lives so they respond with confusion, “Of course I am a nerd. Why wouldn’t I be? Nerds grow up to be rich and have good lives?” The other kids are not getting the power they would like to have from this exchange.

I am happy to the core of my being that my children are not building their sense of self-identity on the other children at school. Kids suck. Kids are assholes. Kids want to keep each other at low levels so that no one will be expected to work that hard. Fuck the expectations of kids. Keep reaching. Keep growing. Keep having high standards for yourself. You will be ok in the long run.

Sometimes people make comments about how if I have an abrasive personality I won’t have friends so I should conform more. Hahahahahahahahaha. I am abrasive as fuck. I have absolutely all the contact with friends I can possibly handle and sometimes too much. Our first overseas visitor is here and it’s going super well. It’s absolutely perfect that she can have space in the apartment to herself when she wants it and she can opt-in to conversation and food and companionship when she wants it. I’m really glad she is spending so much time sleeping. She desperately needs it. When she wants to come out our topics are ranging from education to philosophy to psychology to remodeling projects to books to cooking/food to animal training to parenting to cultural mores to group dynamics to stress management to nutrition to exercise to limiting our children having access to time wasting entertainment. I’m utterly thrilled.

But sure. If I don’t learn how to be more conformist and people pleasing I won’t have friends. Right. That has sure been demonstrated over my lifetime. Not. Yeah my 98 person Christmas card list is evidence that my behavior is totally off-putting to all people. Why don’t I get my shit together so maybe someone will like me.

Dude I need to be more abrasive so that I cull the damn list of people in my life because I’m overwhelmed trying to pay attention to so many people. Shut up.

I am going to do fine making more friends in Scotland. I am always fine at making new friends. The adults I talk to here tell me that rather than conforming to authority the expectation here is that you will just lie to any authority that questions you. I get that.

I already have a list of local people I need to follow up with for our next round of contact. But I’m tired and I haven’t wanted to get to it yet so I haven’t. It’s not a requirement that I hurry up. I plan to be here for a while. I’ll get to it. Maybe I will get distracted because it will be more important that I devote my limited energy to building connections to the home education community. We’ll see.

I’m tired and I should be asleep. But dreaming about following that annoying douchebag to another country is so obnoxious that maybe not sleeping is better. Stupid brain. ugh. He wasn’t even a good lay, what are you doing stupid brain? He’s a terrible parent. He’s whiny and self important and self aggrandizing and ugh. No. All the no. Ew. Never. Blurgh. It makes my stomach recoil in utter panic. Not for all the tea in China.

My brain is an asshole.

It’s kind of funny: having this lovely guest and having MC tell me fervently that my company is better than anyone else’s company… it reminds me that yes, my company is lovely and I would like to have more of it. Hahahaha

Ok. And now my frequent flier miles are gone because I have booked three friends coming to see us. Schweet. I’m really happy that all of our traveling has been rewarded with such a delightful outcome.

That happened.

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I had a meeting with the school, specifically with the Head and with the main classroom teacher. (It’s a complicated set up.) I feel that those two women both listened and advocated really well for their agenda. They want my kids in school. They were fairly eloquent and patient as they explained their reasoning.

They asked a lot of questions about how I homeschool and what my philosophy is for education. They asked about methodology and why I have the preferences I have. They explained their methods and what they are held to when it comes to transferring children on to secondary school in this country. It was an incredibly productive conversation. The Head was stunned when we said that the kids are almost never on video games unless they are programming them to create their own. That was not a concept she had ever really considered as an option before.

The next couple of weeks are mainly prepping for the winter concert, parties, movies, and fun stuff. We are going to ride out the end of this month in school. The Head is emailing the Council (like the district) about setting up the paperwork for part time schooling; there are already several other kids in the school doing part time so they are both familiar and comfortable with this process. I appreciated how much the Head stressed that I have the legal right to require part time schooling or home education any time I see fit. That was really awesome. I felt quite supported in that way. In the states a principal would have danced around that conversation and not explained my rights in such a straightforward manner. That was really nice. That builds trust.

We are going to have another meeting in January to decide for sure if we are going forward with part time schooling. Frankly I would prefer to have my kid in school. I am so utterly exhausted. I was shown writing samples for the entire last two months and kiddo is making big strides of progress. I’m not sure she would make much faster progress at home.

We had words about the aid who is using inappropriate words and both the Head and the classroom teacher apologized and said they would handle it. They have already spoken with her about never using that word about a child again. There is another aid who works in that classroom and she will be the one who handles my kid going forward. That’s a really good sign.

I actually really like most of the staff as professionals, I would be quite happy to work with them if I were still teaching. I like their attitudes, I like their methods, and I like the way they listen. I really hope we can figure out the growing pains and just keep kiddo in school. To be completely selfish: it would be better for me right now. I don’t know about what is best for my kid. I suspect that she fondly remembers the pair of them wearing me down and getting out of a lot of work and getting a lot of free time. If we part time schooled we would have to spend the mornings sitting at the table doing school work before she went off to school for more work. I could not use any of that time for work around the house and the baby would pretty much get left with the iPad, which I strongly dislike as a coping method. To be fair literally the only thing available to watch is Signing Time and she has picked up a huge ASL vocabulary from the iPad so it’s not all bad. It’s not like she is just watching generic shows that will make me crazy.

We will have another meeting in January and see how things go. I am starting kiddo up on Khan Academy for math in after school time (the teacher said she would stop sending homework home) because she doesn’t feel she is making the kind of progress she wants to make right now and it’s a really great extra curriculum; in my experience it is a poor primary curriculum. I always use it as a supplement anyway. I am going to start making her write every morning while she’s sitting around waiting on breakfast. I really hope this much supplementation is sufficient for her to feel like she is getting the support she needs from home on these subjects. She wants to be in the advanced groups across the board. Her teacher said that intellectually she is clearly at the top level… but her writing is so many grades below that she can’t be put in any of those tracked groups and I get it. I have said approximately 5,203, 839 times to my children “If I can’t read it I can’t grade it” and now they are hearing it at school and acting like it is news. Insert eye roll. I know that middle child is still really struggling with letter and number orientation. It’s a process. We are playing with Play Doh and we are talking about it a lot. We need to make up stories about why the letters face the ways they do to create mnemonics. That is the worst god dang word to spell.

I do want the kids to transition to needing less from me. It’s complicated. I think we are getting close to the time when I am going to request that they try ADHD medications because I am struggling with how much they want me to be their entire executive functioning process for them. I am pretty sure that EC is doing fine with the transition to school expectations. MC is… still in the gray area where it’s a struggle. I know we are more dependent on one another than average. The Head commented that she is really surprised my children like being home with me so much given the way we live (no tv, minimal screen time, lots of enforced exercise and healthy eating habits) because she doesn’t think most kids would be open to how we live. It was a somewhat funny thing to say. We really like each other. We really like all the time we get to be together.

We pay attention to our kids and talk to them for hours and hours every day. Our children feel heard, seen, and respected and they believe we make the choices we make because we are trying to shoot for longevity so we can have as much time together as we can possibly have. It’s a bit sad that the Head thinks most children would hate this.

I got pushy

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The school keeps hinting that they will call for a meeting… then not doing it. So yesterday i said I would like one and it is happening today.

I am going to ask for flexi-schooling. In the US it would be part-time schooling. There are aspects of being in school that my child will benefit from experiencing, I agree. There are aspects of being in school that are not going very well and I would like to opt-out. I have done my research and whereas it’s not common in Scotland (only about .5% of students flexi-school compared with something like 1%-2% who home educate) but there are students in our Council who do it.

Not surprisingly the overwhelming evidence is that flexi-schooling is most common among students who need extra help who cannot get it in schools.

The aid who is supposed to provide such assistance in my child’s classroom is fairly clear in her dislike of my child and frequently refers to her as deficient. I would like her to spend the morning at home working with me one on one towards developing the skills I want her to work on in the manner I have already stream lined with my oldest child. The school cannot argue that there is a problem with my methodology given that my oldest child is at the top of her grade. I did not have the crucial two year period my middle child is now entering. I’m going to take it. Fuck school.

But I do want her to go to school part-time. I think it would be best if she arrived at lunch time to do the afternoon with her peers. The morning is when her class does reading, writing, and math. Those are subjects I am more than qualified to teach and I have been wildly successful with my older child. It is not benefiting my middle child’s reading ability to be told she has to read books that are way below her level and only read 1/3 of the quantity you are capable of reading then stare at the wall while your peers catch up.

I understand that the classroom teachers would prefer if my child were less animated. I am mindful of the fact that on a global scale we will need people who are self-starters, people who are able to find their own motivation to accomplish things, and people who are generally willing to disrupt the social order and demand change. I do not want her to be less animated. But I can offer up less disruption to school time as a compromise.

Of course, I am waking up with a very sore throat. By afternoon my voice is going to be raspy, I can feel it. What optimal timing for a school meeting.

One of the few things I liked about the US school system was the ambition to have an IEP for every child. It is never going to happen for reasons of scale, expense, and lack of support but it is a beautiful ambition. I know my middle child needs a lot of one on one help. Believe me I am aware. I don’t believe this to be permanent, but at this stage she genuinely does need it. If I am getting the support of the school for part of the day I can supply it. I do need some help at this stage. I am really tired. But I can see that my child needs me to once again dig deep and just figure it out.

I’m capable. I’m willing.

It’s time to go negotiate for my child. Alright. Bitchy nice. Implacable. Decisive. Commanding. This is how it is going to be because my child needs it. She needs time to practice writing. She needs kinesthetic support for learning to spell. She needs time to seriously actually read instead of bite sized chunks of not getting much out of the experience. She can come home and get a much better environment for supporting her in gaining those skills. She is following the typical learning curve for her bloodline. I will not tolerate her being insulted in that process.

I need to calm the fuck down and organize my thoughts.

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I have been researching educational theory and child development for nearly twenty years. In that time I have come to some very firm opinions. It is never appropriate to refer to a child as deficient. Deficient is a very final word. It means not good enough. When you describe a child this way, even when you feel you are describing behavior and not the personhood of said child, you damage the child’s sense of self. I’m not even saying self esteem; the child learns that who they are is not good enough. When you tell a child that they are deficient they learn that there isn’t a lot of point in them working hard to improve because they are not good enough.

All human beings have areas where they struggle. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses and areas where they could improve if they worked hard enough. If you shame people for this natural variation it does damage that can be permanent. They can learn that there is no purpose in attempting self improvement because they are simply less than.

When you tell a child coming from a different culture that the way that they are, based on their culture, is rude you are shaming them. Shame does not motivate change nor improvement it teaches a child to shut down and feel wrong.

It is absolutely possible to work with children who come from varying backgrounds and encourage them to change in ways you feel are appropriate. The best way to do this is through emphasizing where you see them behaving or reacting in ways that are in alignment with your values and praising them. Telling them that they are rude Americans and correcting them is not actually helpful. If you must correct them saying things like, “Ah, here we really like hearing _____ instead of ______” is both more effective and more kind. You do not need to shame their culture of origin to encourage them in how to change. It is unhelpful and harmful. They cannot help being American. Telling them that being American is wrong, less than, or rude is damaging.

I home schooled my children because I spent a lot of time and energy researching best practices for educating children while knowing that very few educators actually believe it is worth the time and effort it takes to do it right. When I was a teacher I worked 70 hour weeks because I stayed late with my students who needed extra help. If they hadn’t learned something yet it was a failure on the part of the teachers not a failure on the part of the students. All of my students made substantial progress, often multiple grades in one year. It is not that hard to help students learn if you get them to feel like you care about them and you genuinely believe that it is worth your time and effort to help them.

If your mannerisms, tone, and words convince a child that you do not care about them then no matter how much you profess to “caring” a child will not learn from you. That is not a failure on the part of the child.

At this point my children believe that if they breathe wrong the teachers are going to reprimand them. Middle Child in particular thinks that the teachers actively dislike her.

This is not becoming an atmosphere in which my children are going to be able to make much learning progress. They are going to stall. I have touched base with the local home education community and I believe we would be able to get to know the community pretty well through those people. There is a lot going on.

I would prefer to have my children in school. I really would. I am tired. Educating little people takes a lot of time and energy and effort and frankly I would like to turn it over to people who are being paid to provide such a service. If my children are going to suffer because the people who are being paid to provide such a service are not able to work with my kids, then it doesn’t matter what I would prefer I will educate my children.

This is a time of great potential for my kids. They could be growing by leaps and bounds. They could be massively expanding their abilities and skills. Or they could deal with adults who want to focus on their few weaknesses and decide that those weaknesses mean they are deficient and subpar.

I am not going to allow my children to suffer because of the stereotypes, biases, bigotry, and judgments of adults. Not when it is fully legal for me to withdraw them and just see to it that they have what they need to be successful. I am not trying to raise compliant, obedient children. I am trying to raise successful adults.

The boat

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I don’t care if it is a ship instead of a boat. It was an interesting cruise. The highlight was the acupuncturist. She is hands-down the most effective acupuncturist I have ever worked with. I am pretty sure she is the most effective medical provider I have ever worked with. I’m not in pain. I have a few places where I feel a little bit stiff and a little sore, but not pain. I usually have to do fantastically heavy drugs in order to feel this good. I’m really pleased with her work. And she wasn’t expensive for what she did.

I spent a lot of the trip processing stuff with Sarah. There is a lot I have not been willing to admit to myself about how bad that relationship was for a lot of years. I am really struggling with dealing with that emotionally. She used me.

I think this is going to negatively impact my ability to trust people for a long time. I have been very willfully not seeing the problems because I didn’t want to lose her.

I am feeling a little bit nervous about this perpetual travel thing. I have not been as nice to the kids as I should have been. I am struggling. For a long time I used Sarah loving me as proof that I was worthy of love and that allowed me to feel gentle and like I had some love to give. I feel like the bottom opened up beneath me. I feel unworthy of love and like I am bad. And it makes me feel mean and vicious. I don’t like me very much. That’s never good for my behavior.

I wish people wouldn’t tell me that I am inspiring. I talked to a few people on the boat about life and stuff. There was one guy in particular who was born and raised in San Francisco. He had a lot of questions about what being homeless was like. He had a lot of questions about why I hate the rich the way I do. He could not understand why I believe that billionaires are evil. After I talked long enough, he got it. It took some talking though.

I have a sore in the middle of my forehead from the acupuncture needle. It’s kind of funny, the acupuncturist constantly smacked me in the center of the forehead. She told me she was waking up my third eye so that I could accept the blessings of the universe. It’s funny that I am walking away with a scab there. It’s like my third eye really doesn’t want to open.

San Francisco is so cold. We were warm just a few days ago. And we will be warm tomorrow. I used to think that I like the cold more than the heat. But my bones ache.

Gratitude bandwagon

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Today I am grateful for being the mom. I’m not every day so I thought I would note it today. (full disclosure: I am always grateful for my kids, but being the mom sucks rocks a lot of days.). Last night Shanna asked to sleep next to me. She doesn’t cosleep anymore so we had to maneuver a bit. Some time in the middle of the night she woke up, sat up just long enough to look for me then she threw herself across my chest to snuggle. She’s a cuddly kid in general but that instinctive “where is my mommy” in the middle of the night feels different. That is primal. I am the one she wants and needs and loves the most in the world.

Calli has been resisting napping alone. She wants to be on my lap. I haven’t been willing to give her this for most of her life but I’m doing it on vacation. Sometimes she wakes up just a little and starts to panic, then she notices that she is on me and her whole body relaxes. Oh Mommy.

This is why I had children. I wanted this. I want this so much that I ache with it. And I have it. It’s a gift. I constantly feel like I don’t deserve these amazing kids, but they think I am perfect. I am so grateful that I get to be Mommy.

Good parenting.

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I asked on MDC what makes good parents and someone turned around and asked me if I would like to have me as a parent. Yes. I really would. I would so love a mom like me. I am empathetic, strong, dependable, mostly consistent with my behavior even though my moods are unpredictable, I am fun! I like to play. I like doing all kinds of neat things and I think, “Why not?” is a great answer to questions like, “Can I cover my entire body in finger paint?” I am fiercely protective. I fight through my touch issues to be incredibly snuggly with my girls. I think that everyone needs to scream sometimes–just not in the house. I think that everyone has bad days and they do not in any way reflect your value as a person. I am loyal. I am honest. I am kind. I am considerate. Loving! So! So! Loving. I pay so much attention to my kids. As people. I like to stare at them.

So it seems that I am a great supporting character. (Like I was a good secondary.) I’m not that great at being the main character. Maybe I should just like me more. Maybe then I would do better at being the important one in my life.

Also, really thrilled about the push to recognize Shanna’s behavior as Not About Me. We’ve had a really great day and a lot of it is when she starts pushing on something I am stopping to think how it relates to her and her needs instead of mine. *That’s* good parenting. 😛 Thanks for telling me to do it, blacksheep.

I think I needed that.

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Today my therapist laughed at me. At some point we worked our way around to how to continue processing abuse stuff in a limited way in that little box over there in the corner so that there isn’t ‘leakage’ into the rest of my life. These are important things to consider when planning how to end the cycle of abuse or build a nuclear reactor plant. Just sayin’. I came around to the idea of a support group. Yes! That is what I need! A support group for mothers with mental illness or mothers who are survivors of abuse. Yes! Because then I can have people who are in the same place as me who can give me advice because I suck and I’m not figuring it all out. She almost fell out of her chair laughing. Apparently she thinks they don’t have much to teach me. We actually spent the rest of our time together talking about a workshop she has been dying to lead…and she has been trying to figure out how to talk to me about it. Because she thinks I have a lot to teach about doing this. She views my recent blip as as really… nothing to write home about when dealing with mothers who were victimized. No lines have been crossed. No one has been harmed. No actual damage has been perpetrated. Ok, my tone of voice sucks sometimes. Why am I crucifying myself? We spent a lot of time talking about victim/rescuer judge/(can’t think of the word but you catch my point). It was really neat. It was interesting having her point out on this little graph how I was moving around in my relationship with Shanna. We talked about specifics of how to step out of it and she said that really the only thing she would have suggested is what I started doing yesterday. It was very validating. She more or less gave me a check list of things to think about when considering parenting stuff and that was extremely useful. It was also nice to be reminded that as a parent it really and truly isn’t my job to ensure that my kids like me. Making them happy at all costs is really not the right road to a happy adulthood because they will be total assholes. But I digress. 🙂

I’m always going to be kind of messy (like emotionally and psychically) and weird. But that’s ok. So is everyone else if I look at them closely enough. I am not a bad person. I want to stop treating myself like I am. No matter how much I want to believe that I am a monster in the making, I’m really not. I’m not abusing my kids. I’m not hurting them. I’m loving on them and giving them lots of attention and affection and support. Why do I only see the 4 seconds I yell and decide that is the only important 4 seconds of the day? It’s really not. All the time I spend patiently showing Shanna every step of ‘how to do things right’ even when it is challenging to let her do it. For every time I say, “Man you’ve been working on that! You couldn’t do that a week ago. I wonder what you will be able to do next week.” I see her. I love her. I don’t need to buy her love. I make a vow today, I will stop acting like I have to buy my daughter’s love. That course of action will result in both of us losing.

Maybe I should read parenting books more often

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So I’m picking around Becoming The Parent You Want To Be. I’ve been kind of poking at it intermittently for years. It is interesting to have it reaffirmed that no really, it’s ok for my kid to be kind of weird and different from other people. If she’s happy, secure, and prepared for success in life there isn’t a thing wrong with being weird. Maybe I should stop listening to other peoples parenting advice.

How ironic that I want a parenting advice book to tell me to stop taking advice. Ha. I’m a moron.

You just keep going

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Tag Archives: parenting

Home schooling vs pandemic schooling

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I got pushy

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Good parenting.

I think I needed that.

Maybe I should read parenting books more often