Shortie was not grounded for 4 days. Only 4 days. Then she took a packet of ramen noodles and a couple of packets of instant oatmeal and decorated the lounge. Sigh. I was talking to her about this today and she said that she feels like she got grounded on purpose. Even though it sucks to be limited in what she is allowed to do, I stay within a meter of her the whole dang day. She wants that kind of contact with me so much that being grounded is better than not being grounded.

You know what? I can work with that. If she is aware that this acting out is a cry for attention then I can handle that. I’m proud of her. That’s intense emotional work for an 8 year old.

Our life is hard because she used to spend 4-6 hours a day intensely interacting with Noah and now the other three of us are having trouble with increasing our hours. I have her in activities! Don’t tell me to add more fucking activities, ok? I am ferrying her around to as much stuff as my crappy crippled body can manage. I have no ability to do more. Would it be better for her to go to school? It would be if A) the kids wouldn’t beat her and if B) the school didn’t punish her for getting beaten and reporting it. We’ve tried school here with the older kids. I don’t need to put my last kid through that delightful formative experience.

Instead she has asked to be stapled to my butt going forward. She doesn’t want to be grounded but she doesn’t completely want to be not-grounded either. She wants more attention and connection and being in the same room even when that is slightly annoying. Ok. I will find a way to manage this even though it is hard.

I am reflecting a lot on the ways in which my most recent attempt to onboard a new person failed. I assume that a huge part of the failure is on me. What can I control next time to make things go better? I can’t control everything.

It is going to be hard for people that I genuinely need to have 12 months of building a relationship with you before you get to integrate with my life. I know that other people want that stuff to happen faster and I really don’t give a shit. If you aren’t willing to invest a year into getting to know me one on one then I don’t think you have the patience or ability to integrate with my life. Dealing with my actual children is far more difficult than dealing with a courting period. I promise. My children are not easy people to build a relationship with but we are likely to remain closer than average as time goes on. My 18 year old is not in a hurry to move out. He likes our life. He wants to keep doing this with us. He had about two weeks when he was 14 where he tearfully talked about “Maybe I will move out when I am 16 since YOU DON’T LIKE ME ANYWAY.” Noah and I spent a lot of time very submissively talking about how much we liked him and we didn’t want him to go and that passed quickly. Otherwise he is as convinced at 18 as he was at 8 that he is probably going to live with me forever, or at worst move out in his 30’s. My 15 year old kid is somewhat interested in pursuing jobs that travel and using our house as a home base to come back to. They want to explore but they don’t want to go.

Dating me means understanding how polysaturated I am from the beginning. My children occupy a huge piece of my heart and mind. They are my vocational focus for this life. They are my reason for staying alive. Having a happy family is the single thing I care about most in this life. Noah and I both sacrificed a lot to build this. And we are very happy together. My kids think I’m amazing. I think my kids are amazing. We are all very defensive of each other. We understand that we are all intense, challenging humans and not everyone is going to respond well to us. None of us are willing to listen to people badmouth the folk in our family. If you try you quickly get an icy reception. My son hates a few people in town for talking about how domineering I am. I think my earnestness can easily sound domineering and I can’t appeal to everyone. It’s not a big deal to me. He is fucking furious that they stated those opinions out loud. It’s fine to have them, but sharing them at a group social event went over his line. Ok.

We are a unit. We are a pod. We come as a package deal in a way I have never experienced as a person dating. I think it must be intimidating as hell to try to find a place in our tight knit little crew. You have to come in with curiosity, an open heart, and very few demands. You can’t date me if you are not exceedingly patient. I am difficult and my kids are difficult and combined we are orders of magnitude more difficult than someone else would be.

When I was young I believed people who instantly told me they loved me and would be there for me “forever”. I now know that when people say that in the first few weeks it is wise to carefully not invest too much in the dynamic because it probably isn’t going to last. Anyone who instantly professes how much they will do for me is going to have expectations I can’t meet. This happens over and over and over again. They aren’t in love with me. They are in love with an uncomplicated, undemanding, totally unrelated to me projection they have made up.

I think my kids show a really extreme amount of maturity and wisdom when they say “Spend a year figuring out the relationship, then you can begin integration.”

Yes, I prefer talking into the void over sending anyone emails. Even though I don’t get comments. I wonder if you know how scathing you sounded when you asked me why I prefer this. I prefer this because then I don’t have to wonder if someone is going to respond in a positive way or a negative way. I don’t have to carefully anticipate what kind of topics this person can handle. I don’t have to try and proactively deal with insecurity. I am kind of brutal and harsh while I talk to myself. I try not to soften the edges much. I feel how I feel and I don’t need to apologise for it.

I will not consent to having a relationship where someone expects me to write a bunch of messages to them. I don’t want to. It hurts my hands. I don’t get as much out of it as you do. It drains me. It makes me feel like I can’t handle doing the things I’m supposed to be doing with my time.

Two years ago Noah and I were talking about poly. We were doing so because I was infatuated with a guy I’ve known since I was a teenager. We had a holiday together. On the other social media site I called him Travel Boyfriend. We never kissed or had sex but it was emotionally intense. Right before Noah died I decided it wasn’t a good thing to pursue and I ended the courtship.

With Travel Boyfriend, Pretty Lady, and Good Trouble (a random pick up from a swinger website), all of them were pushy about meeting my kids. They wanted to integrate faster than I was comfortable with. In all three cases pushiness about the kids was a big factor in why I ultimately broke it off. If you can’t respect that my kids asked for a year I don’t trust you to ever treat my kids with respect. I don’t believe you care about them as humans. You are thinking of them as pieces to move around the board to suit your whims. Every single one of them was pushy because “they wanted to help me”. It doesn’t help me to make me feel anxious and like people aren’t respecting boundaries. That’s a hindrance to good mental health. That isn’t help; that is interference.

My son made the comment that he doesn’t care how many people I go have relationships with, he cares that only people who have both staying power and respect get to come into our house.

Personally I think I need to make it much more clear way faster that if people want to read about me, the Archive exists. I will not be typing my history to people in emails. No. I don’t want to. I find it distressing. I will talk about stuff in a room with you but I won’t write it down for you in an email. I find that specific framing of inflicting my writing on an individual to be highly distressing. Part of how I make peace with writing things down is people have to opt in to reading it. Emailing people isn’t the same opt in experience.

It doesn’t have to be rational. It doesn’t have to be what would make other people comfortable. I’m not existing the way I have for over a quarter of a century because of you. I am like this because it works for me. If it doesn’t work for you that is completely ok. I won’t hate you because we aren’t compatible. I am not compatible with nearly everyone. I am compatible with very rare souls.

I am having a bit of a hard time here. I know a lot of people. I feel emotionally connected to 6, maybe 7 adults in this town if you squint and include EC in that total. That’s a low rate of connection vs how many I know for me. In the past I was used to feeling emotionally close to a much higher number of people. I can tell that I feel deeply bothered by my inability to spend the kind of time with people that would lead to such closeness.

I wanted it with Pretty Lady but I wanted to wait and develop it in the room and that made her feel abandoned and ignored. I feel so flat most of the time. I’m really struggling with the amount of cheer and patience my day job requires. I don’t have good cheer most of the time when I’m alone in a room. I just have apathy and ennui and burn out. Writing emails when I feel like this is fucking exhausting. It makes me feel like I’d rather carve on my legs with scalpel for entertainment.

That’s not a standard way for humans to feel. I’m the aberration. This being true about me is going to make me hard to date. I don’t have to want to make people feel bad to effectively do it.

I need to have relationships build in the room. I can’t have these long torrid email things these days. I genuinely can’t. I want to build stable interactions. I want to choose people over and over because being in a room with them is better than being in a room alone. The thing is, I really like being in a room alone. I am fucking awesome.

I want to date people. I want to have serious, long-term, interesting relationships with lots of room for growth. I’m willing to wait and be picky and see who comes along. I’m not in a rush. If someone is in a rush they are not for me. I’m not offended by that or upset. It is what it is. We all have to be free to go our own speed. I move at a glacial pace. I have to. I have a lot going on. I can’t inflict sudden drastic change on my life. Nothing is stable enough for that.

I keep feeling surprised that Gentleman keeps hanging on. I keep expecting him to get sick of my bullshit and stop coming over. Instead he leans in a little more. He waited 12 fucking months to meet my kids. He had to go through the process. No one else is going to be so fucking special they get to leap from the process. If you want to believe that you deserve better than to go through our process then you won’t fit with my family. Sorry.

My life has been full of people coming and going. It has hurt my kids. They have learned how to protect themselves from my endless searching for new connections. They know that most people flame out in the first year. Hell, most people flame out in the first three months. I have stats. Sometimes people make it to several years of friendship before things go south. I’ve had a few long term intense friendships end with fireworks. I try not to do that anymore. It hasn’t happened in a long time. I’m a lot more cautious about not stress testing relationships anymore. I keep my messy bits more private. Now that I don’t have Noah to talk to about any of it I don’t know that I will ever talk to anyone about my harshest pieces. I don’t think it will ever feel appropriate. I don’t think I will ever feel safe enough.

If you feel entitled to know stuff about me, you can read the Archive. Otherwise I’ll say what I say in the room and no you don’t get to be pissy about expecting me to write you emails. I can’t be doing that. I am not able. If you think you are more inconvenienced than I am by the ways I am disabled let me fucking set you straight.

I am grateful that Gentleman spent the night last night. I managed to get almost 10 hours of sleep. That’s a miracle. I’ve been struggling with insufficient sleep for weeks.

I feel deeply inadequate and unworthy of love today. Which is funny because I went to the park for a birthday party of a little person in our community. Many of the folks there like me just fine. We aren’t close friends but we are community and that’s great. We’ve been doing stuff together for years now. I behaved. I was good. I did what I was supposed to do. I interacted how I was supposed to.

I did it while feeling like I barely know these people and I’m scared of all the things I can’t/shouldn’t say to them. I did it while feeling physically weary to the point I needed to sit down almost the whole time I was there. I did it while feeling exhausted by the knowledge that I choose actively to live in this place as an alien invader and that’s complicated.

I got cursed out by some guy on the way home. He wishes all the fuckers like me would leave and not come back. I don’t look like a local. They can tell at a distance. Fair enough. In a field of gorse I sprout up like a redwood tree. I take up wayyy too much energetic space. This is true.

It is weird feeling exhausted by the strain of trying to integrate more fully into this life in town. I need to do more with my kids around people here and it sounds so terribly exhausting. People are so loud and pushy and difficult. Being out is hard and draining. It’s supposed to be “good for me” but it leaves me feeling wrecked.

I wish I felt less like an invasive species that no one ever wanted to have planted here.