Sometimes I feel guilty while I read Tamora Pierce. Bonus Mama introduced me to this author so the association is strong. I am sad I didn’t get to stay in the lives of her children. I loved them a lot. I will never see them again and that’s hard.

Mostly though I am finding it amusing that I didn’t want to read the second book from Sandry because wealthy perfect princesses are not my speed. I also skipped the second Daja book because her students were pampered rich obnoxious people. I’m having a lot of class issues in my head, that’s for sure.

Noah’s birthday is soon. I feel like a mass of anxiety. I am not functioning well. My productivity is in the toilet. It’s hard to not beat myself up over it. I really struggle with failing as a worker bee.

Stuff with the kids is all over the place. It would have been a surprise to me if you had said that by 16/18 MC would be bigger, stronger, and more consistently capable than EC. EC’s health absolutely sucks. He has 3-4 productive days in a week and then he often crashes the other days. I don’t mean he is lazy. I mean his joints don’t work properly and he can’t stand upright. He falls down on a regular basis. He looks like a marionette because his body hangs so bizarrely. I worry a lot about him. I think he is going to struggle as an adult. I am grateful I don’t need to kick him out at 18 to make his way alone. I think it would go quite poorly.

MC is not enjoying how poorly this term is going at theatre. I think it is a good learning experience. Suffering is a lesson. They are really stepping up as the most able bodied human in the house. They now do nearly all the dishes and kitchen clean up. It has made my life so much better. They don’t do any other chores, but this is an acceptable trade in our house. We cook a lot.

YC is on my last nerve. Why did I move to a country where I’m not allowed to beat her?!?! (Because I do not believe in beating children and I’m glad the state agrees with me. BUT SHE IS SO ANNOYING. Deep breathing, Krissy.) I struggle with the period of time where kids are transitioning from being incompetent to being competent but they have not yet internalised self control. It’s rough. Now she is like 5,028% more capable of being annoying. This is when Noah and I used to do a lot of tag teaming. As someone felt frustrated or overwhelmed the other stepped in. I’m struggling with this on my own.

YC is grounded for the second time in her life. The first time she obeyed the limits and the grounding was short and sweet and didn’t drag on. This time she keeps breaking the rules. I am very clear with my kids that I don’t like grounding. It happens when I am on the verge of losing my shit and going too far from accumulated stress and frustration. This is giving me time out to calm my nervous system down. I am having a hard time because she is pushing really hard against following restrictions. I get it. Being grounded sucks. Breaking the rules and sneaking out constantly until we have to have a person on duty babysitting your door or standing next to you all day is uhm… not great. It doesn’t give me the space to calm down that I need. It escalates my vigilance requirements. I am not having a good time. If I can’t stand at the door I need to use an exercise band to hold the door closed so I can do crazy things like go to the bathroom. Or she will sneak out and get into things.

I know this is developmental. I know that to a large degree she has no self control yet. Our life is different from other peoples lives. If I don’t teach my kids lessons who will? They are not part of the normal mill of human enculturation. They have to learn that I mean it when I say no. They have to learn that there are consequences for out of boundary behaviour. We are being clear all day every day: she is grounded because she needs to learn that smearing food all over the house is unacceptable. I can’t find open cans of juice/soda in every drawer of the house. I can’t find ramen and muffins stuffed through all the baskets of toys. I can’t have sweetened condensed milk spread all over the closet and the clothes that are in there. No. Just no. That’s not an acceptable behaviour pattern and we are going on a year of it. Food stays at the table. Food stays at the table. Food stays at the table. I’m not saying you can’t sit and eat a can of sweetened condensed milk, I’m saying you can’t create four loads of laundry while destroying the wood in the closet.

I am communicating the lesson that most of the time you have a fun life with much goodness and freedom and independence. Don’t fuck it up for yourself by making problems for other people. You don’t need to be perfect but you can’t destroy property willy nilly and it’s not fair to waste that quantity of food. Over the past month she has wasted/played with/spread around close to £40 worth of food. This is way out of control. No.

So she’s been grounded since the 15th of May. It started out as 3 days of grounding. She is still grounded because she was doing things like sneaking out of her room to get a pile of books. Sometimes she went and got snacks and tried to hide them in her room. At this point I took the furniture out of her room so she has nowhere to hide anything. I’m freakin serious. You will follow the restrictions for the named time period or you can stay grounded forever and all our lives will be miserable. I do not fucking play. My older kids have been telling her, “Mom is going to win this battle of wills. You do not want to find out how long she can last.” My oldest was only grounded twice but the second one was really epic. My second kid was grounded at least four times. I can’t remember the exact number. I don’t do it a lot given how old the big kids are now but I forking mean it when I do it.

It’s harder to feel justified this time. I feel a lot more paranoid about how maybe I’m going too far. I am certainly surrounded by friends who would not parent this way. But their kids all have different lives. We are such a bizarre little pod away from humanity. I tell my children quite frankly that we come from blood lines of people who struggle with addictive behaviour and anti-social behaviour. If I address it hard and fast when they are young then they develop the sense that you should only break rules when it is really important. It has worked well with my first two kids. We are close and we have intensely respectful relationships that have not involved any kind of punishment in many years. Everyone has to try me a couple of times when they are young.

This seems healthy and normal to me. Sure, my way seems overly strict to people on first glance. That’s a funny contrast with how permissive I seem compared to the average the rest of the time. You can have a looooooooot of rope to run with but when you reach the boundary you need to stop or it’s going to hurt. (Not like I am going to smack you hurt. Like you are going to be so bored you feel like you are losing your mind for a couple of days.) I feel the need to defensively include that we have long conversations during the day about why the specific rule that is being broken is necessary and unacceptable to break. We talk a lot about how I am not saying they are bad people or undeserving of love. I am saying that behaviour is unacceptable and must stop. If you need help stopping I will help you but neither of us will have fun. It’s better for you to stop yourself. You will feel in your bones that it is better for you to stop yourself.

While grounded you still get morning snuggles and hugs and kisses and lots of positive attention during the day. This is not a stonewall of angry seething. I am more prone to being bitchy and complaining about stupid stuff. You are making me do a bunch of oppressive work to ground you. I hate this. Don’t make me do stuff I hate and we can get along just fine. I am praying we hurry up and get through this in a timely fashion. Please stop making it longer kid. Please. Please. Please. I am, of course, keeping my therapist up to date with this. They understand why I am doing this and they are glad I am setting limits in a way that is not overly punitive. She isn’t being harmed, she is having some of the good things be less available for a while. I am not making her feel like life has no value. I am showing her that when I say no I really mean it. I need her to be able to trust me. This is how I earn that trust. I don’t like the cost of being consistent. I like having kids who believe me when I say something. That means I can never bluff.

This is helping to create a different hurdle for Gentleman and I to run into. When I’m in a lot of pain and I’m grumpy and I feel frustrated with the kids leading to feeling a lot of shame for my impatience with the kids I stop being particularly good at initiating sex. I feel empty and like I lack anything interesting to offer. I certainly can’t run the fuck. I’m timid. I’m out of the executive function that makes me lead. So we went almost two weeks without sex. It’s dramatic how hard that hits my body.

I am coasting super far into burn out. I want to be more exciting but it’s not available inside my body as an option. I am not sure what I can do to recover at this point. My brain keeps shutting down in the middle of stuff I want to do. I’m so tired I can’t do my normal level of forward planning. I’m too exhausted. I can’t predict what will be true or not true by then. Sex helps when I can get a lot of it. We managed sex over the past couple of days and I am already doing better than I was over most of the last week, but I need it daily for a while and that’s not going to happen. Life and work and such. I need sex so much.

I wish I could simply send my daughter to school but they’ve already hit 2/3 of my kids here. I don’t really want to throw the third into the mix. I don’t need the school to be perfect. I need the adults to be in charge enough that my children are not beaten. I also need their safety to happen while around other children instead only when they are locked into a room alone. If they need to be locked in a room to be safe then they might as well be at home. What is the fucking point of school? I’m really frustrated by the way society lets down families. Smaller classrooms should be mandated by law. Limit of 18 children in a room for the maximum level of safety for all involved.

Oh well. Society doesn’t want to spend money on that. Better to spend the money on wars.

At least the garden is seriously coming along this year. I’m pretty excited about all the stuff we have available already. Soon the fruit starts and then we have kilos every week for months. Yay!!

I’ve added two more artichokes this year because I don’t get to eat enough of them and it makes me sad. I love artichokes. Nom nom nom. It’s been fairly warm and intermittently raining and I’m hopeful that bodes well for the year. I am weeding as much as I can, which has been a lot more than over the past two years. I’m happy about that. I also got more mulch and I will be spreading that around as much as I can. This is good. The food forest is coming. I love my garden so much.

I really need this grounding to end. It’s wearing me down. We are now at the point where we are body blocking most attempts to break the rules. Maybe we can force her into compliance long enough to get through the tenure. I hate this. It feels so awful. But when I say no I fucking mean it.