Tag Archives: school

Life keeps plugging along.

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Today my toddler was so cute. Saying things like “Babies need hugs because babies get angry. Babies need hugs because babies get sad. Babies need hugs because babies get frustrated. Babies need hugs because babies feel loving. I love you. *big hug*” And: “I finished my cupcake, now it is time for chocolate!” Err, no kid. That’s not happening.

Eldest Child is, in my opinion, fully matriculated from home schooling. If the school goes on lock down and she has to distance learn through them it’s not my dog. I’ve been saying consistently that I am not withdrawing her from secondary school. Once she starts this school it is six years to the finish line. Today was the first day. She was elated. She should be along home… sometime soon.

Middle Child and I worked on their room today. The walls and trim are done. The closet is not done. The ceiling is not done. I cannot buy more paint for the ceiling because the paint store does not have any of the base in stock and hasn’t been able to get a shipment in a while. I cannot finish the closet until the wonderful handyman comes in and finishes the stuff he wants to add. So I’m relieved of painting duty for a while.

We started off the day with a walk to the park. We went out when EC left for school and the youngest two played for half an hour. Then we came back and I did laundry and dishes and we all had a snack. Then we painted. Then lunch. Then more laundry and dishes.

I need to sit down with MC and work out what her next “term” of home school will look like. I need to move most of the paint out of kid bedrooms and out to the shed.

I’m waiting for the handyman to put a backsplash in the kitchen because we are rubbing all the paint off the wall with our frequent cooking. The previous owners didn’t actually paint this house. They just used primer. Cheap fuckers.

Tomorrow we will go to the park when EC goes to school again and I told the littles we could stay longer. When we get home we are going to do a bunch of garden work. A lot of the plants inside the yard need thinning and I’m allowed to rip out grass and put plants along the edge of the road. I think I see a fun way to kill two birds with one project.

I need to figure out where will be the “paint clean up” zone in the future. Once we are completely done with this project I am going to scoop up all the fucked up dirt and put it in the garbage then keep working towards creating a pond.

I am really happy that all of my ongoing projects at this point feel tiny and/or easily contained/managed. They are all either a few hours at a time or they don’t create a cascading horror show of issues while they languish waiting to be finished.

I have a hard time when it feels like I can’t see the light at the end of the over-work tunnel. When I don’t know if I will be done in a week or a month or six months. I’ve been in that place for about a year now. Everytime I think I’m to the end of the big work push something breaks or there is some stall that makes things drag out forever.

I need a reduced work load. I need more rest. I can’t sustain what I have been doing. Not anymore. I’m out of spoons. I scraped the back of the drawer. I went to my neighbor’s house and borrowed all of theirs. I’m just… done.

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.

Two pieces of good news in one day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He’s not wrong…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You have to just do it.

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

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

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

I would do anything for love, but I just won’t do that

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I feel like I am trapped in a Meatloaf song. I want to do things to be pleasing. I want to show my love. But I don’t want to do that. What is that? I don’t know. What do I want? I don’t know. I want to not feel how I feel right now.

I keep thinking I didn’t have kids because I wanted a convenient life. If I insist on my kids staying in school it means I am ok with their classmates hitting them, spitting on them, elbowing them, telling them that they are fucking morons–shits–stupid–pathetic. It means I am ok with little girls telling my little girls that when they gain weight in preparation for puberty they should really go on a diet. It means I am ok with the authorities having a bigger problem with my children standing up to bullies than with the bullying behavior. It means I believe that my children should have to put up with low level harassment a lot of the time because it doesn’t rise to the level that a teacher considers worth paying attention to so stop complaining.

“It is preparation for the real world.” Bitch, if someone did that to me in the real motherfucking world I would either punch them or press charges. I wouldn’t shut up, put my head down, and take it.

You aren’t preparing them for a healthy adult life. You are preparing them to be victims and you feel quite sanctimonious about how it needs to happen.

I’m not yanking them out immediately. I am going to start emailing the fucking head every day with a report of what bullshit happens. Then when I deregister the kids I will have a paper trail of allllllllll the shit the school doesn’t think is important enough to deal with.

If I had a full time job and I had to work I would tell my kids to start punching people. But I don’t and I don’t and I don’t really want my children to have to toughen up in that manner. I have not put this much time and effort into helping them verbalize problems instead of hitting to give it up now. Sure, they are annoying to authority figures in a school who don’t want to hear it. But fuck the fucking school authorities. Their priorities are shit.

And really, there are a lot of things I miss. I miss not wasting so many hours on “Get up. Do your chores. Eat faster. Get ready to go. Pack your bag. Go. Hurry up and unpack. Do your chores. Eat faster. Go to bed because we have to wake up early and do this all again.”

We can get a lot done home schooling. But we do it at odd hours and when we feel like it. Is it a lot of stress? Absofuckinglutely. I feel less like I need to ride the kids super hard though. They are doing more than fine compared to their peers (Except for hand writing and fuck hand writing. Ok, we will work on it…. but seriously. Fuck hand writing.) and that was what kept me up at night worrying. Yeah, I hate having to push them through work.

But I love having hours a day to read together. I love having time to sit around and draw together. I love watching the neat projects they build with all of the time they have. I love knowing that they get to play with dolls and be imaginative when kids their age in school have already given it up because they are trying so hard to be “big”.

I am making contact with the home education community. I’m finding kids their age who are into Minecraft and Scratch and art and reading. Do you know what they aren’t finding at school? Kids who play Minecraft or who use Scratch or kids who are as obsessed with art and reading as they are. At school kids call them names because they don’t play Fortnight. At school kids mock them for not having an expensive brand new phone. At school the kids make fun of them for not being on social media.

Fuck school.

A mother told me the other day that she is getting her 7 year old an iPhone 6 for Christmas because the kid is getting mocked at school for not having one. What the absolute fuck? She said that she doesn’t want to waste money on toys because her daughter is only interested in perfecting her selfies anyway. Uhhh my 9 year old is getting a doll house and the thing will be played with constantly.

Yeah. Different strokes.

We are working on some fairly big changes in our marriage. It’s complicated. I don’t want to bitch about it here. I just want to write down for myself that this is when the contract ended.

I don’t know how to properly advocate for myself without throwing tantrums. I don’t know how to feel like I am being treated how I want to be treated. I don’t fucking know how I want to be treated.

I keep thinking about that doctor who told me that I just need to focus on keeping the bus on the road. (It’s a long metaphor.) He said Noah knew what he was getting into with marrying me because I was honest about my trauma history so he doesn’t get to bitch about it being hard. I don’t agree. I think Noah gets to bitch.

But sometimes keeping the bus on the road is hard even when I don’t have a good reason to point at. Sometimes just being me is hard. I feel like a whiner. I feel annoying and high maintenance and a whole lot of other rude descriptors. I definitely definitely definitely don’t think I am worth the effort.

But I throw tantrums if the effort isn’t put in because I am a fucking bitch. Apparently I have an incredibly high sense of what I deserve.

I think I am depressed. Noah thinks he is depressed. We aren’t the sorts of depressives who stop working. We put our heads down and plough on feeling little to no joy in anything. I don’t think it is SAD. I think we have been working so hard for so long without resting that our bodies are collapsing. Our spirits are collapsing.

Both of us feel like the other isn’t doing very much for us even as we can rattle off the ridiculously long chore list that we know our partner is doing… it just… feels inadequate. We are productive, just not content or happy or satisfied. We keep waiting for a long enough break to breathe.

I now have definite confirmation that our stuff is in the UK. It’s going to sit in a warehouse till December 30th when a company will go pick it up and a few days after that they will call me to arrange delivery. Our stuff will be in transit for 19 or so weeks. The estimate was 4-12 weeks. I feel glad that I can stop worrying that our stuff is lost. That’s been really bothering me.

I want my socks. And my long johns. And my books. And and and and and. I WANT THE GOD DAMN BIKE TRAILER.

This is my third night in a row of not really sleeping until absurdly late. It’s almost 1. This isn’t helping my mental health. Tomorrow I need to take a sleeping pill.

Fork.

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.

Too many thoughts.

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I am having trouble falling asleep again. I am thinking about gardening and book shelves and how very stressful it is having our things on the boat still. By the time they arrive it will have taken over four months. I don’t have perfect recollection of what is on the boat and I am at the point where I really don’t want to buy duplicates of things because that is a waste of money so I just kind of… fuss because I don’t even know what I am waiting for but I can’t buy things to fill my needs. It feels horrible.

Deficient: (in something) not having enough of something, especially something that is essential; not good enough

Retarded: less developed mentally than is normal for a particular age

I am having a lot of feelings about both of those words. Anger. Rage. Fury. Sadness. Despondency. Anxiety. Frustration. Defensive.

There is a strong idea that home schooling harms children. That it makes them unable to develop “normally”. This idea doesn’t come from one person or one place, it comes from many places. I find it utterly infuriating and enraging to have to deal with this idea. I’m not feeling very rational about it. If it were coming from one place or one person I think I could cope. I think I could parse my feelings down into a little bucket and figure out how to talk about them. But it isn’t coming from one place it is coming from many and I feel like instead of being able to process it with any of those places I am engulfed in a tidal wave of upset and I utterly cannot engage with why this is such a motherfucking insulting concept.

I need to find a way to wrap my brain around useful words though. My kids need me to. They need me to be able to advocate for them in a way that does not include just saying “Fuck off” to authority figures. I have to find eloquent words to go through why it is utterly unacceptable to use such words and I am failing. I am fucking failing.

Because those words are a contemptuous indictment of me as much or more than my children. Because I home schooled them and if they are deficient it is my fault. That was literally the point of home schooling. There is no one to blame but me. But are they deficient or are they different in a way that would have been true no matter how they were schooled? Are they struggling more or less than they would have if they were put in school when they really didn’t want to go and it would have been a daily fight? I have no crystal ball. All I have is documentation from Stanford that the way I home schooled is the ideal learning environment.

But in Scotland all home schooling is termed interrupted learning as if home educating means that all learning was interrupted.

My kids were going to be weird no matter what. Look at their parents.

Be bitchy nice. That was the advice of the mom I talked to on the playground. Demand that the school change the words they use. My experience is that schools are abusive and the only thing you can do about it is leave. Take your football and go home. But I don’t want to yank my kids out because of one fucking cunt. I need to find words that are effective and clear and commanding.

Don’t. Insult. Children.

If you cannot talk about children without using insulting, rude language do not work with them or discuss them at all. Your nasty opinion is utterly unhelpful and can in fact be damaging.

Children can have areas where they struggle. Children can have areas where they need extra help. Children can require extra support to be successful.

THAT DOESN’T MAKE THEM FUCKING DEFICIENT YOU PIECE OF SHIT MOTHERFUCKER.

Not good enough.

Go straight to hell you presumptuous cow.

Clearly something is going on and clearly I am not going to be direct about it. BUT I’M HAVING A LOT OF GOD DAMN FEELINGS.

My children are articulate, self-aware, sensitive to the emotions of others, expressive, have incredibly large vocabularies, can figure out how to play with people across social classes, can eat at fancy restaurants around the world with perfect table manners (no matter what table manners mean for that country), and they have unreal memories for data. But yes, they have things they aren’t perfect at. So. Fucking. What.

I am so angry I could spit nails. And I have no choice but to deal with this. I have to be the adult. I have to advocate. I have to ask for meetings and use my big girl words and not swear at all. Even though I want to say a lot of incredibly rude words. Even though I want to break things.

I would much rather think about gardening.

For the record: I am only interested in discussing difficulties in communicating with professional educators if you are in fact a professional educator. I have no desire to speak to other parents about this whatsoever. There are a myriad of reasons for having this boundary. I don’t need to share them all. Or any.

I still fucking hate school.

And yet I consider going back to university. I would like to work with kids who have emotional problems. I want to research incest. I think it will require more schooling. My ass is going to be in the special needs office saying, “Hi I’m Autistic, I have ADHD, PTSD, GAD, and arthritis. I absolutely require the use of a computer; it is abusive to require me to hand write.”

Fuck hand writing. Fuck hand writing being the fucking measure of someone’s motherfucking intelligence. Why don’t you fuck yourself with a fucking chain saw.

Maybe my kids need to be allowed to type as well.

Maybe it is time to find a game that teaches touch typing.

Maybe I should just think about gardening instead. I want a subscription to the lovely gardening magazine Jenny gave me a bunch of old copies of. That thing is detailed and fantastic. Over the winter I am going to sit down and start planning all the things I can do once I’m allowed to plant. I can get started in September! There’s lots to plant in September! Given the budget we want to follow next year we are going to be doing basically everything in cash. So at the end of the month I will be able to put the money I save from the hoped for budget into a jar for gardening. That’s my gardening budget. I’m not in California anymore with a tech salary. I can only buy things as I can afford them on a fairly tight income. I am choosing to make my budget much tighter than I think we will fully maintain. Hm. That sounds not-right. I always budget as if we have far less money than we do. Because I will fuck up and go over my plans. I am aiming for a really really low figure. Much lower than I think we will manage. Because then when I go over it I am still at a reasonable level. And I am going to do this partly by limiting myself to cash. Easier to say “We have no cash in the envelope” than “I don’t want to use the credit card”.

Gardening is not going to be a big part of the budget. I am probably going to become that lady who asks if I can take clippings. I only get to buy plants/hard scaping stuff once I have saved up enough money. I’m not planning to travel any time soon. Well, we have to go to Edinburgh for official stuff. But the whole trip is going to be in the neighborhood of £300. Lodging and train are costing £140 and I plan to bring snacks/meals for the train. We aren’t staying long. We aren’t going to fancy restaurants nor Do All The Things. We will get passports taken care of and notarize the sale papers for DVC. Then we will come home.

We will only be awake and available for entertainment for like 9 hours total in the city anyway.

I’m tired. I don’t want to hang out. I really don’t.

I’m tired so why the fuck can’t I sleep? Because I have to be bitchy nice with officials and the idea makes my stomach hurt. I feel sick.

Gardening. Gardening is fun to think about. Book shelves will be paid for out of DVC profits. After the book shelves are paid for the rest goes into investments.

Paint will have to be saved up for.

It occurs to me that I don’t want to get rid of all the cardboard boxes. I want them for gardening and painting. Hm. For gardening: it will be a great way to kill a bunch of the lawn so I can plant more interesting things there. For painting: tarps ain’t free and if I can put cardboard several layers deep over the carpet I don’t need tarps. Hmmmm. Ok. I convinced myself.

Before I kill lawn I need to see where things come up in the spring. I hear there are bulbs out there. I will have to mark the lawn somehow to protect the bulbs when I rip out grass. I’ll figure that out.

We’ve gone out and done some winter pruning as a family. It was really fun. I love how much my kids love working with me. I love watching them take pride in their growing abilities. They are quite competent at a wide array of skills.

NOT GOOD ENOUGH MY AUNT FANNY.

Fuck petty educators.

Gardening. Book shelves. Stop ranting in your head, Krissy. It won’t help.

I am scared I won’t be able to help.

I feel bad about myself.

I feel like I must be a shitty teacher. Only I know I am not. Only I feel like I am. All home schoolers have experienced “interrupted learning”. I want to puke. I am so fucking mad.

Dogma. Fuck your fucking dogma.

Just keep swimming.

Draw a picture or some shit.

About my niece…

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I had her come over for a bit yesterday to chat. There were some shudder inducing moments for me. She didn’t even know how she did in the classes because she never bothered to check. REALLY?! She had to ask me to define words a few times (the most memorable being dilettante). And she expressed extreme surprise that you don’t need a Business degree in order to open a small business doing event planning. *smack forehead* Essentially I talked her out of college for now. She’s really not ready. I told her that after some time has passed and she is actually interested in buckling down and doing the work she can try again but I’m not paying for her to fuck around. She seems oddly relieved.

It was overall a positive conversation. She really needs some life experience before she will see any value in college. I’m the only adult in her life with a college degree, of course she doesn’t really see much value in school. (Although I was smart enough to be in the position where I had *no* adults in my life who had been to college and recognize it as the problem…) So she’s going to go do her thing. I’m… I’m hoping that she does something with her life that is better than what my sister has done but I’m not holding my breath at this juncture. It could go either way. (Yes, I get to judge the fuck out of my sister.)

Families kinda suck. How hard is it going to be to ensure my kids don’t end up like my family?

Paying for college

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This is f-locked in case someone in my family is paying attention. I doubt it, but there is a slight possibility. So we are paying for my niece to go to college. This is something that I have always said I was happy to do for my niece and nephew to help them get the fuck out of the shitty life our family has. My nephew wanted to do this intensive program on learning how to install solar panels… sure! I’ll pay for that! That would be a great career! After doing alright in the program he decided he didn’t want to do it as a career. His skin is too sensitive to be outside that much. . . . Maybe you could have thought about this a bit earlier sensitive boy? (Oh, he works at Shoreline every summer as a parking attendant because it is ‘cool’. At least he has done it for two years in a row. So much for the sensitive skin.)

Now my niece is taking classes at the local JC. Though she wants to transfer because the one she is going to has “too many Asians”. I’m not entirely sure what that means as a criticism, but ok. She gave me her login information to the webportal program the school uses so I can pay her fees. She thinks I am not able to check her grades. I’m not sure why she is stupid enough to think that, but ok. Last term she withdrew from the PE class she insisted that she wanted to take (I told her it was a bad idea) and she got a C in the Intro to Business class (she wants to be a Business major) and a D in the basic level accounting class. So her GPA is a 1.5. No one is perfect, I get that. But uhm… a free ride to college is not exactly a god given right.

Right now I’m feeling pretty fussy. If I sit her down and explain, “These D’s won’t even transfer. So I’m paying for you to *say* you are in college but this isn’t actually making any progress towards your supposed future goals.” I will be the bitch. I will be the bad person who is pressuring her. In paying for her college we are directly taking money we would be investing on Shanna and Calli’s education and using it on my niece instead. I’m not sure how willing I am to do that while my niece is much more interested in partying than in going to school. But if I cut her off I am probably cutting off my last real tie to my family. I will have proven that I am a terrible person.

I love how no matter what *I* am the bad guy.

EDIT: Noah points out that this post doesn’t convey a lot of why I am pissy. She posts constantly on facebook about partying. She will only take night classes because she is completely unwilling to get up at a reasonable hour (I mean getting up before noon, not 6 am). I would have more sympathy if I thought she was trying and just not getting it right. She skips classes to go to parties. Yeah… it’s not just that she is trying and not figuring things out.

Edited again:
I just went and looked. She hasn’t bothered to submit any financial aid paperwork whatsoever. Given that her mother hasn’t worked in the past couple of years (I’m not sure how Denise is going to increase her drug dealing enough to stay afloat once she stops getting unemployment) I bet that I shouldn’t have to pay almost anything at all for my niece’s education. But she can’t be bothered. Oh I’m getting pissier by the minute.

Thinking about schooling

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I really like a lot of the theory behind unschooling (google it if you want to know what it is) but I’m pretty opposed to radical unschooling. I’ve been having interesting conversations with Noah about this topic and the gaps in education he worries about. I have different things I worry about. I’m not sure where things will shake out for us exactly, but I’m kind of randomly curious.

What things do y’all think are necessary for one to be an educated and/or well rounded person? What do you actually think it is necessary to learn?

Stuff and such

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Shanna fell asleep on my lap. She hasn’t done this in a while. My foot is now asleep. I guess she’s gained some weight. 🙂

I discovered this morning that I am in Trouble. I wondered why the ASL class was moving so slowly given that it is a 5 unit course. Now I know. The reason we learn very little new in class is because you are supposed to spend a ridiculous amount of time in the lab learning everything by yourself. Uhm, thanks? Getting enough time in the lab is going to be a serious problem. They are open for very limited hours, 100% of which overlap with Noah’s work schedule. They seem to believe that only full time college students with no jobs or kids should be allowed to take ASL. Fuckers. (Technically it isn’t their fault. The problem is state budget cuts. But I can still feel whiny.)

I went out yesterday! I went to the fair and had a fabulous time. I ran into people from all over the country, many of whom I have not seen in 3+ years. 🙂 I didn’t even make a full circuit of the booths because I got there a bit late and the crowd was getting to me. I had a really great time though and I got a waist cincher from Dark Garden! w00t! I have the most generous of husbands. 🙂 Noah stayed home with the short one and he got to learn firsthand why I believe we need to acquire more board books. 🙂 It gets a bit old reading them over and over and over again. Before anyone suggests the library: Shanna is a book eater. She will grow out of this in time but for now it isn’t cool for us to have books for her that need to be well treated. I would feel horribly guilty about damaging library books. I feel confident that this stage can’t last too much longer. 🙂

I was thinking about it yesterday and I came to the conclusion that I am really glad I didn’t try real hard to have “my own time” when Shanna was smaller. I wasn’t ready. I felt anxious the entire time I was away from her. I didn’t enjoy myself. Now I can take off for a day and have fun and feel confident that it is ok and developmentally good for both of us. Yesterday was probably a bit longer than Shanna is thrilled about, but she didn’t spend the time having a temper tantrum so I think we did ok. I like feeling confident in my parenting choices. I’m super glad I ignored everyone who told me that I ‘had’ to get away from her early on. No, I didn’t. It would have sucked for all concerned. Now I can go do stuff and she does fine and I do fine and daddy does fine. We win!

Six things

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First: I am a good wife. I told Noah to go game because he hasn’t been able to much and he’s really stressed out and overburdened at work.

Second: I still haven’t heard about the comp exam. I took the test 25 days ago. I have been patient. Now I’m starting to freak out.

Third: I bought a nasal irrigation thingy. Hopefully this will allow me to resume my normal course of breathing.

Fourth: New diapers arrived! I am nerdy enough to find this very exciting.

Fifth: Family support today over the fact that both my sister and mother are over-the-top crazy. I appreciate the validation there.

Sixth: In other family news, looks like my sister is dealing again. But of course it would be my fault if she went to jail.

One more reason to homeschool.

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Yes, I’m aware this is an unusual case. The attitude of the school administrators is sadly not unusual: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103215199

Supreme Court To Hear School Strip-Search Case

The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments Tuesday on whether school administrators may strip-search a student based on mere suspicion that the student may possess drugs.
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