My body is not happy with me. I am not doing enough cross training. The kids have been grumpy with each other. This means I am not asking for babysitting much. These periods are rough. Disequilibrium comes for us all. Mostly my children get along ridiculously well. Sometimes people are cranky. This too, shall pass.

Instead of being at lots of yoga classes and running I have been gardening a lot more. Things are really coming along. I’m going to get a lot more food this year and that’ pretty exciting for me. It’s definitely time to be picking greens every single day. This is good because I’ve been having an unpleasant IBS flare. The kids have been opting into cooking instead of other chores. They haven’t been wanting to bother with making vegetables a part of meals. I’ve been eating a lot of starch and cheese with occasional fatty meat. My body hurts. This is not sustainable for me. I’m feeling incredibly ill from it. I miss Noah.

This time is not forever. At some point I will have less overwhelming need to be present in the house. Then I will be able to go back to running on a schedule. Really, I should be doing it in the wee hours of the morning since I’m not sleeping anyway. It’s too bright (yes I have blackout curtains) and too warm (it’s 11C/51F at night). I am ridiculous. Maybe. Or maybe it is my body trying to shift with this season. During the winter time I sleep a lot more. I have actual data on this for almost the whole time I’ve lived here. I sleep around 6 hours a night in the summer and 9 hours a night in the winter.

I’m struggling with task initiation. I’m being hella productive in a revenge procrastination kind of way. I have so many things to do in every day that I wake up behind even though I have more hours a day to do stuff. This is highly annoying. Noah isn’t here to prompt me towards doing the “correct” task. I really hate being the designated adult. I have a lot of meetings that freak me out. I have to do a lot of paperwork. Holy crap did I under-appreciate him while he was alive. He did all the previous rounds of immigration paperwork. Ugh.

My nerve pain is terrible. It feels like no one in my house is fully able bodied. Every day is a triage between who is most able to function doing more work than is strictly ideal. We are still learning. We are still interacting with humans out of the house. We are still cos-playing as functional people but the cost is really high. We do too much borrowing from the future and having to pay back our functionality with extra painful levels of non-functioning. It happens for literally all of us. A lot of it is hormonal and cyclical. Given how synced up we are that means there’s about 18 days a month when everyone is doing well at the same time. Then there is the rest of the time.

The coil has seriously helped with my PMDD and painful periods. At this point I’m spotting a little bit when I have sex and otherwise I don’t bleed. I still have times when I feel a bit sad but that feels reasonable. I’m not having the hyperbolic suicidal jags. My brain has accepted that it’s not an option and I don’t experience the frantic keening need for it.

I feel both like I deeply and desperately need to integrate more people deeply into my life and I am feeling afraid and like I need to reject any offer of anyone getting close to me. I keep feeling trapped in the loop of feeling like I “know” that I will be rejected anyway so why bother trying. I have to try because I can’t get a yes without going through a lot of no’s. It’s the process. It hurts. I don’t want to go through the process.

Viktor Frankl teaches that humans can get through horrifying trauma if they have a why that drives them. My why for a long time has been modeling how to be a healthier human for my kids. That means I don’t get to stop. It is hard giving them what I did not get. It doesn’t matter that it is hard I have to do it anyway. That means I have to work harder not that I get to quit.

I’m tired though. Ugh. Oh well. Get up. Go shower and get dressed. Today I do need babysitting. I need to move and I need to see my friends. Part of modeling being a healthy human is having relationships. I make them tend to their friendships. Friends are the waves that carry you through life. They are very important.