Tag Archives: witch

Limbo is the worst

27 days of waking up without Noah. I haven’t managed to get the kids in school yet. Over the weekend someone sent me an email telling me where I need to get the process started, 11 days after my first email. I think the schools are in the middle of big tests? Not an easy time to integrate a high needs home educated kid.

Do you know how hard I worked for the life that is ending? I spent 10 year preparing to be a teacher before I had kids. Then I spent 16.5 years home educating/being home. I was part of a partnership and we worked together like we were made for each other. Now I am a solo parent and my need to go to school.

I’m holding on by a thin thread right now. The trial is hanging out in the back of my head making me crazy every day. I can’t “educate” on top of barely staying alive right now. My brain won’t cooperate. I can’t focus on them and be entertaining and fun and light so they remember the material. I will scream at them to hurry up and then they’ll remember nothing.

I said we need to finish this year and go through all of next school year and if it isn’t working out I’ll pull Shortie and we can figure out home education together. She will be my only one and we can be more adventurous at her speed without the older “I’m too cool to play” kids along. I’m not getting rid of home ed materials for two years. I’ll decide that in two years when I decide about the house. Exactly two years from *today* there is a note on my calendar.

Ha, the day before my cunt sister turns 58. How can such a waste of skin and cells be here and Noah is not? There is no fair in this life. Wanna know something funny? When my Uncle died the cunt came to me and asked, “Has anyone close to you ever died before?”

Like our brother and father had not both committed suicide like 10 years earlier. Like we hadn’t had a whole series of family friends die. Today I think I know what she meant. Noah’s death hurts more than every other death put together time a million. This feels so much more painful than everything that has ever happened to me. Because this, for the first fucking time, is the death of my hope. I held on to hope by my fingernails all these years. If I worked hard enough my life would get better. I worked so hard.

My life will be better than it is today, someday. I won’t be awaiting a trial. I won’t have as much to do that I hate.

My life will never be better than it was on 23 December, 2024. That was my last truly good day. I went with Noah and the two younger kids to hang with Bestie and her youngest. We rode the Santa VR ride and it was very silly and fun. It was just a day. Noah was hobbling around with crutches but so cheerful with it. He so seldom complained. When he complained I would jump like I’d been electrocuted to go figure out how I could fix something for him.

I was the complainer, not him.

I remember standing with him and watching the kids interact and play. We leaned our head together and he whispered, “We made those.” I said, “I know!” We grinned and nuzzled in for a hug while we watched.

No one will ever look at my children with overwhelming pride with me again. That feels so terrible. When Noah was alive I made a point to avoid “we” language as a parent. Rarely did I say “we think”. Now I just say, “We love you. We are so proud of you.” Now, yeah he’s a monolith of feelings that agree with mine. If you don’t think so, fuck off.

It is hard for people this cool to be children. They have too much sense of self and being controlled while a child sucks.

I am not in a good position mentally or emotionally to home educate. I may not ever be again. Over the years Noah has expanded his portfolio of parenting time to “cover” a lot of the roughly 15 hours we have awake children with high needs. He probably covered a good 6 hours a day with me completely checked out. Between volunteering for organisations in town, Vicki research, art projects, writing, and general body maintenance he insisted on me taking those hours. He wanted me to feel like I had an identity outside of us like he did in the Ruby world.

Now my time is going to be different. I will orient around the school year (that part is actually easy for me). I have never been great about getting up and out the door on time for school. I was publicly humiliated for my poor attendance in schools. I wonder why I didn’t come when every day I went I was hit.

I am not looking forward to the drumbeat of regulation. It is going to mandate that most of my odd habits and patterns be abandoned, at least for a few years. I suspect I have three years ahead of me of needing to walk Shortie. I think the year after that she would start insisting that she’s not a baby and she wants to go alone. It’s not a dangerous walk by any measure. Only one big road to cross and there’s a light.

I will not be able to get into hyperfocus and do one huge project at a time. I am going to have to carefully slice up my day. I think I should spend 2-4 hours a day exercising. That sounds like a lot, but walking Shortie to school will take ~1 hr/day. Cycling to and from town to run other errands will fill close to 45 minutes. A 2 hour minimum is not a lot more than existing for me. I need to get back to taking several yoga classes a week. I should rock climb a couple of times a week–I need the strength in my shoulders desperately. I should start taking weight training seriously. I should cycle on longer routes sometimes just for training–my buddy who lives on the Black Isle can’t drive right now so I need to get over to see her. It’s really easy for a visit to a friend who is mildly out of town to require 3 hours of exercise. Also, gardening.

I am going to be a body in motion. I can’t keep sitting still near Noah. There is no Noah to stay with. There is no Noah to chase me up the hill saying I’d better move faster because he wants athletic sex, thank you. He was working out a lot and he was getting so fit. I loved our life so much. I loved him so much. He was the source of all the joy and good luck and happiness in my life. It all came through him. Yes, I love my kids–but he gave them to me.

I’m starting to get low key upset that everyone but me is having visions/dreams/think they hear him auditory hallucinations. I’m not seeing him. My only dream was trying to dig an enormous tick out of my thigh with just my fingernails. It was not a fun dream.

I am scared that something is coming that I’m going to have to deal with and I would not have been able to get the job done if I was happy. It is only because I am a miserable, lonely motherfucker that I will be able to be of real value. I’m afraid that is going to become my conditional state for entry to the social contract. I don’t like being the “There but for the grace of God go I” person. I hate being inspiration porn. Sometimes people have said things like, “I was really upset about X happening but then I thought of your life and I didn’t feel ok being upset anymore.” Don’t fucking do that. Don’t do that to me and don’t do that to you. We each have our own scale. They aren’t transferable. You bear shit I can’t.

Right now from where I’m sitting, there is the high probability I will keep the house. My kids want to be able to come and go. I want the garden. If the kids are gone I will invite lots of guests over. I’ll do things. I’ll make things. I will be part of a community and it will be lovely.

I will always feel unseen and lonely in my soul. My Perfect Witness to my life has died. Now it all feels like grains of sand running out a hole in the side of a timer. Never again will this unit mark time along with everyone else. Minutes, and later hours and days will vanish and not really exist.

This is my new pain level 10. This is worse than being picked up by your pectoral muscles before being shaken like a dog shakes his toys.

Dad is leaving today and I will miss him terribly. He has been a wonderful companion and helper during this first stage. He is a fantastic Grandpa. He is a completely stress-free house guest. I continue to treasure this friendship. We became friends in 2000. I’m really glad that I have been able to keep him in my life.

Pam’s giant mountain of a man is going home tomorrow. He’s really nice. It’s been incredibly heart warming seeing the two of them be so gloriously in love. Pam is here for another 11 days. I really freaking hope we can get school sorted in that time. I’m also hoping to be done talking to governments, legal people, and financial people. Set it up, knock it down.

I am not going to carry a bunch of work from cleaning up my old job as Noah’s wife forward into my new life. I need to finish and move on. I need to find a rhythm I can keep like a drumbeat.

I need to be the mother I needed to have when my life went sideways and there was a tremendous amount of overwhelming change and pain happening in my life.

Do you know what I watched Noah learn how to do? Take a deep breathe, channel his inner chaos and power into a think he could squeeze smaller with his fingers, then he pushed it down into the center mass of his power to rejoin all of its friends to be recalled later. He wasn’t “stuffing his feelings” he was controlling when it was useful to use them. He was choosing who to share them with. He was choosing when to share them.

That’s a lot of how he managed to have such great mentor energy with every fucking person in the Ruby community. He had a lot to give and he was humble about offering it. I am going to have to take on a lot of Noah’s steadying role. It’s going to be hard. I am used to being allowed to be impulsive to a noticeable degree because I made him be the adult. (He was impulsive in his ways, too. I did adult, too.)

I just don’t know what my safe place to let them out will look like yet. It feels like an endless pool of pain and I am kicking as hard as I can but I can’t keep my face fully above the water line.

Time to go kiss people awake.

So this is what is going on with me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am not fucking interested in disabling my children.

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

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

Cheezits mother trucker.

So I’m sorta categorising my community efforts as:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not about you, David.