With every passing day I settle into this new shell to a different depth. It’s hard. I am so anxious it is unreal. I feel like I don’t know how to move forward without Noah to support me. I learn more with every passing day.

For the vast majority of my time the kids are the only people I talk to. They are going to be the people I live with for the longest in life. In two years I will have lived with my son longer than I lived with his father. I never wanted to be away from Noah. This hurts so much.

I’m really sad about the ways that my daughter is manifesting her grief. Every day she talks to me about how I need to find someone to marry because she needs a dad. I can see this massive wound forming in her and it scares me so much. The hole of needing a father drove a lot of my life. It shaped my romantic relationships in dramatic ways. I am worried about her. I am not able to fill all of her needs. My attempts to form more intense relationships on her behalf are not going great. I send messages and I don’t get responses.

I feel like I am failing her. It’s a very different kind of support for the big kids and we are all more or less doing ok with taking care of each other. Shortie has a good 4 hours a day of attention-need that is above and beyond what the big kids and I can provide. It is the hole Noah filled. We can’t expand enough to plug the hole. We are all at reduced capacity.

I have been talking very frankly with the kids about how I know I am not fully meeting their emotional needs. I’m trying but I don’t have enough capacity to be the sole sustaining parent carrying both sides of the load that existed with two parents. This is hard on all sides. I really appreciate that we are all being patient with each other around our reduced capacity in most ways. Well, sorta. Seven is always a challenging age. This time I am going through a rough stage while dealing with overwhelming life trauma. It’s extra spicy.

Every morning I wake them up and I tell them that I am glad to see them again. I watch them breathe that in. Their chest expands and their faces lighten. All of them. They feel this ritual. They believe it. Noah and I did that. We made people who feel loved all the way to the marrow of their bones. They breathe it in like air.

When we have conflict or they do something they shouldn’t I remind them that I made a promise on the day they were born. I will forgive their mistakes. I hope I can in return earn their forgiveness. I talk early and often about restitution and repairing mistakes. They all tell me that I am good at letting go of things that upset me. I don’t seethe or rage in an ongoing way. I may have a sharp outburst of anger when something happens but it passes quickly. I am so glad they experience me that way.

A long time ago a therapist told me that when it comes to evaluating what kind of person someone is one should speak to the children not the coworkers or friends.

I’ve had to have some uncomfortable conversations with my son. He got the worst brunt of my anger. Sometimes it is hard for him to see his sister getting an “easier” deal than he got. He remembers when I screamed for long periods of time when I was overwhelmed. He remembers a handful of overzealous punishments as “all the time” in the way of time dilation for trauma memories. It’s about being in the always/never place. He asks bitterly why I don’t treat her the way I treated him.

Baby, no part of her life is like yours. I don’t have the emotional and physical energy I did. I don’t have the money to support the same kinds of shenanigans going forward. My son had traveled more by 3 than my daughter has by 7. That’s going to continue to be an ever widening gap because I won’t be traveling like that going forward. I can’t. He asks why she isn’t “losing her Disneyland trip” because of a stupid petty prank she pulled. Dude. This is going to be the only one of her early childhood memory. Literally one. You used to spend two weeks a year there. There was one year where you had five weeks spread between Disney World and Disneyland. You lost one long weekend trip at her age because you managed to hide a scheme you were pulling for three months.

There will never be parity between you. Do not demand that she get all the shit when she can get very little of the good. That is not justice. She is going to have less grandiose good. Yeah, a lot of her punishments are going to seem less severe. She is already dealing with an entire life that is radiating pain.

Do you really want her to remember you as a bully during this horrible time in her life? I sure as fuck don’t. I’m being patient when I don’t want to be. I’m letting her wake me up by kicking me in the fucking head every night. I did the same thing to my mother. I remember her complaints. It feels like justice.

I am a single mother. Like my mother. Like my sister. Like my brother’s ex-wife. I am the only widow. Well, auntie lost her husband in her late 70’s. She is a widow too. Somehow it seems different. I am not speaking with any of them. I just think of them and feel sad.

I think of the ways I don’t want to raise my children. I think a lot about the patterns I will not pass down. I think of exploitation and shaming and weaponised incompetence and codependency.

I choose to believe that conscious interdependence where people have the right to opt out of pieces whenever they need to is different. Maybe I am lying to myself but I doubt it. Interdependence is the norm for humanity. Ok, mostly folks aren’t allowed to choose all of their roles.

There is, quite obviously, no actual metric mothers are held to. We are unobserved by outsiders for the majority of our best and worst moments. They are private. I believe this is why my therapist said that the only people whose opinion matters are the children. So far the primary complaint my children have of me is the same one their father had: they wish they could have even more of me.

That seems less damning in a parent/child dynamic. I give a lot. I give for a lot of hours in a day. They are so great my kids wish they could have more. The older they get, the more tired they get, and the more forgiveness they have for me running out of give. They can see that I am giving at my limit.

It is weird how much the success of my days is measured in the amount of time I spend absorbing the emotional experience of other people. I take all of it that I can.

I am seeing the differences emerge. This third child is going to be the reader. She is reading almost two years ahead of either big kid. She doesn’t have Noah. I can’t replace how much he read. I literally can’t. She has been taking a lot of initiative lately. This is mixed.

It is really hard not having Noah around for family meetings. We’ve now had our second. The first for conflict mediation since he died. We have mostly been getting along shockingly well. Chore negotiation is a flat fail. None of us can keep to a schedule. We are still navigating stuff day by day. I feel weary to my soul. I can’t plan for what I will accomplish in three days let alone every week for the next month. Speaking of which, oh shit. I forgot the bins again. Time to go start the day. I’m a day late and a dollar short, as usual.