It’s hard to explain what I mean when I say that I can tell I am not doing very well. Yet I need to explain it to me so that I can change it. I feel out of control. I feel like I lack focus and power to decide who and what I want to be. When I feel like this I tend to fall hard into the helper mode, by golly I will offer to help fucking everyone then I feel like I have nothing left for myself. I will pour out all of my lifeblood into something I don’t care about and at the end of the day I feel exhausted and empty and like I did nothing that makes my life feel like it is worth living. I am not acting like I am the main fucking character. 

I’m not trying to be all narcissistic about this and act like I need to be the main character of everyone else’s story, just my own. It is actually healthy to be the main character of your own story—that’s not maladjusted thinking. Subsuming yourself into everyone around you is a problem. That’s not healthy; it’s a lack of boundaries. Boundaries aren’t rules you enforce on other people boundaries are knowing where you end and where other people begin. Boundaries are knowing what is for yourself and knowing what is for other people and making sure you put enough gas in your own gas tank so that you can keep the damn car on the road.

For example: I am genuinely fulfilled by gardening work. When I keep myself so busy I don’t have time or physical energy to do it I feel shitty. I can feel this shift as spring comes on in Inverness that was a lot more muddy in California. The kinds of work I can do outside are different over the seasons in a way I still haven’t adjusted to yet. Combining this with the fact that bike events are going to increase in frequency and time length means I need to be putting gardening on the calendar in concrete and demanding ways. It’s also competing with kid school/social stuff and that’s a whole long blog post of its own.

But that’s not the only thing. And Jesus this next bit is going to sound cunty and this is the kind of thing that makes it feel scary to write anymore. There are pieces of being married that chafe sometimes and I need to find a greater degree of peace with them. We went to a rope workshop (we meaning Noah and I… not the kids… obviously) and I want that to continue and I want us to figure out how to deal with some of our challenges in that department. It’s kind of funny that most of the time I feel like I am the complainer in my marriage and then there are times when I feel pretty fucking rude in my judgment of Noah’s complaints. It’s not an attractive trait on my part. There are times and ways that Noah really struggles with being able to explain or understand things and he launches into these long winded rants about why it’s impossible or unfair or almost malicious on other people’s faults that he can’t learn from an explanation someone else is giving. God damn in those moments I notice that he and MC have that in common so maybe MC’s complaining style isn’t entirely inherited from me. It’s dramatic to me because I really struggle with being patient with him in those moments; I feel a lot more comfortable telling MC to just knock it off. I cannot listen to the rant right now. Rope, dancing, some of the challenges around travel are all pinch points where I think God damn you are autistic. There are ways that Noah really struggles to understand why he needs to explain something in a certain way in order to solve a problem. To be fair I know that I have places where I am absolutely shit at solving problems because I get stressed out and I just can’t do a thing and sometimes those are situations that Noah is preternaturally gifted at getting into the zone and he can just solve the thing. 

It is really hard when I feel like I am in a moment where I have to solve all of the things and the thing I could do to be the best wife and mother in that moment is to stop looking for help or support. I fucked up some steps in figuring out the trip we are on right this minute. (Side note: going to Texas. On a plane right this minute but we will be on the ground when I post this. Noah’s grandmother is in her last days on earth. More about this in a bit.) I did a crappy job of task sharing for the planning and as a result we had a few problems that could have been ameliorated. I absolutely should not have expected that he understand all of the levels of preparation needed but I did. I fucked up several layers of planning because all of the covid shit is a god damn nightmare and I did not understand how hard that was going to be. I landed us in a very stressful position through ineffective planning then I turned and wanted him to fix some pieces while knowing that he is not that effective at remembering/understanding all of the pieces he has to communicate in those situations. 

I need to go back to the beginning on this. It’s rather a complicated story with layers of stupid that are absolutely completely my fault. Booking was really shitty and I couldn’t understand why to begin with. I think American Airlines was just doing a website upgrade and I happened to be trying to book last minute at the absolute worst time. It took a series of phone calls over a couple of hours to research flights and book with points. Going back and forth between different credit cards because some chunks were in one currency and other chunks were in a different currency. I did this booking on Tuesday expecting to fly on Thursday. Wednesday I took off to take YC to her class for the day and track down our car seat. That took hours because we had to ride all over town tracking down the car seat cause the dude who is borrowing it was out of town and his ex, my friend, and I had to ride up a big hill to get the key to his van then ride across town to get to where the van is parked and get the actual seat. It was a very demanding ride and she was a great sport about it but we probably did 8ish miles at the very last minute. It was tiring and I couldn’t be grumpy with her to go faster when I have a battery and she doesn’t. I did not explain to Noah before I left just how many steps we had to go through when I got home. Instead I got home and said “Ok everybody let’s go” thinking we could just go get the covid test for the flight done.

First stupid: I thought I could get a covid test at a local pharmacy for flying since I see ads for them all the time. Turns out that the pharmacy offers that service in other cities but not in our city since we are so small. I figured this out while everybody was standing in the driveway with their bikes while I frantically searched on my phone. It started fucking hailing. Insult to fucking injury. Ok, put the bikes away because in our city literally the only place that does the covid test is the airport and they don’t start doing that service until the hour after the plane I booked us on for getting to London and they were out of appointments for the day before so we couldn’t grab a taxi and head over to do it that day. In retrospect in the moment I realised what I did wrong I probably should have just called AA and told them about the problem and rebooked the whole damn thing. That’s my fuck up. Instead I figured out how to get us to London Wednesday night on a different airline very late so we could be at the airport for tests at 6am so we had a 4 hour window for the flight to the states. 

Second massive fuck up on my part: now I am questioning myself. I went through about 5 different sites trying to figure out how to get the covid testing done and at least one of them said YC couldn’t be given a test so I thought that meant she didn’t need one. Yeah I was completely and totally fucking wrong. She needed a test. I booked the other 4 of us in. If I had booked all 5 of us in then we would have totally made the original flight and it all would have been fine. The lines in Heathrow were absolutely insane because it turns out that Wednesday at about 2 they had a giant fucking software problem and they had to cancel all British Airways flights. Nightmare! We waited in lines so long that by the time we figured out the fuck up with YC we didn’t have time to get on the original flight. We were in fucking lines for 4 hours and got back up to the front about 5 fucking minutes after the time we needed for security and getting across the terminal. The terminal is huge. 

Third fuck up: I should not have sent Noah to negotiate fixing this on his own. We had two reservations and he didn’t bang hard enough on that point so the employee he found who fixed the reservation for the other four of us didn’t fix his part. Then we waited in endless lines again and didn’t figure out the fuck up until we were minutes away from missing the rebooked flight. Holy.Fucking.Shit. AA booked the original tickets (on a BA flight) so BA said they couldn’t fix the reservations or rebook us. We had to go to go over to AA. AA could fix the reservations but they couldn’t print the boarding passes. So we were expected to wait in the multi-hour lines on both sides of the terminal. Fucking awesome. It was a zoo of hysterical people because they were all trying to figure out how to fix up everything that happened the day before. God damn nightmare.

In that last few minutes Noah was actually great and he went right up to the front and insisted the problem be treated like an emergency. That’s not an easy thing for him to do and it’s important to recognise in my head how much he struggles with exactly that type of problem and he came through. The kids and I caught up just in time for me to tell them about the two reservations so they could finally get it right because his explanation wasn’t helping them understand why it wasn’t working. A fucking awesome AA employee grabbed a BA person and said “You are printing this pass. Right now.” Then she walked us through security to get there faster. Thank you Jenny! We got to the gate in time to grab a few drinks because we were all super dehydrated and get on the plane. We didn’t have time to sit down in the terminal. We were at the airport from 6am and we got on a flight at 2:40. We were in lines just about that whole time. The poor kids were really amazing. Noah was patient. I tried hard to be patient and only think my impatience. 

Out of battery.

Alright, finishing this in the hotel room while Noah and EC are sleeping and MC and YC are loudly playing with dolls.

Right around the point we got on the plane from London my watch started beeping at me that it was almost out of battery and I realised I forgot the charging cable. Damnit.

We barely made it through customs and lines in Phoenix to jump on the plane to Houston. Our bags did not follow us to Phoenix. We all sat separately on all of the flights. YC was my buddy, Noah sat alone, and MC and EC said they got through the flights without fighting at all. That’s great. YC did super well; she has no memory of previous travel and her behaviour on this trip shows me really dramatically how different her life has been. She has no habits around keeping her voice down or staying near me in crowds. She does not know how to manage her body so she doesn’t kick other people in tight quarters. She is not used to strangers and she’s really shy in a lot of circumstances. It’s fascinating not being able to tell what parts of her behaviour come from her different personality and what parts come from the different nurturance because our life is completely different. 

Got to Houston and put in a baggage claim report. Now on the computer I am not able to look up anything on the computer. This sucks. I need to call the airport and I don’t have an American sim card so I don’t have a phone for calls or data. We couldn’t pick up the rental car last night because it was closed by the time our flight landed so we took a shuttle to the hotel. I think my next step should be leaving Noah and the kids in the hotel and going back to the airport on my own to get the rental car. Noah doesn’t need to be with me because his American license is expired and he doesn’t have a UK one yet. I will be doing all the driving. Then I need to go buy a booster seat because we can’t take YC in a car without one and I don’t think the car seat is going to show up for days. We also don’t have toothbrushes or clean clothes. This is going to be fun.

Another day, another adventure. It’s probably time for me to get moving.