My life is absurd. Sometimes I have to laugh about how ridiculous this is. I’m still physically and emotionally recovering from being raped close to a year ago. There are layers to that trauma socially and physically that will take a while to fully integrate. Noah has been gone almost six months. I had surgery nine days ago. Yesterday 4/5 people in my house tested positive for covid. (Luckily the person who was supposed to perform in a play last night was negative.) Fuck my life.

I’m so sad I missed the play. It’s not cool to go out when you know you have covid so I didn’t.

I’m still the one who has to wake up in the morning and get chores done. It doesn’t matter how I feel it matters how I act. I’m moving slowly and gingerly but stuff will get done. I thank my lucky stars all day every day for the amount of ease and grace in my life. I’m struggling but none of what I’m struggling with is going to drown me. I won’t let it. I’m a cockroach. I keep moving no matter what happens. I can’t be stopped.

I have to acknowledge that part of it is the ruthless way I pursue interactions that fill my bucket, so to speak.

I went hunting for NSA sex. Mostly I found it with a series of people who are profoundly incompatible with me on dozens of levels. Mostly I found men who were going to objectify the shit out of me and not see me as a person they should feel lucky to be in a room with. It’s dramatic to me when I can see and understand this massive difference between how much I am seen or not.

Gentleman is trying to see me. I am an alien creature and he struggles at times. He asks clarifying questions and he retains the answers. It’s really funny to me the way he has avoided all of my preferred boundaries to instead sidle closer to me day by day. He’s not being rude or exploitive. He is refusing to objectify me. He is humanising me. He insists on knowing why I have boundaries so he can honour the spirit even when not the letter.

I didn’t want to date because I didn’t want someone to have a lot of expectation of me being able to give them what they want to fulfill their life goals. I can’t show up and be the +1 for someone else because my life is really full. I have very little to offer. I am exhausted and depleted and overwhelmed basically all of the time. So he pushes for dates that fit around my schedule. He shows up and provides a lot of emotional support and he’s surprised he gets anything back at all. He lets me give what I want to give without being bitter that it isn’t suiting his perfect specifications. When I can’t do much he doesn’t treat me like a broken toy he talks to me. He doesn’t have a lot of set agenda for how we will interact or what we will do. He is flexible in ways that surprises me.

Noah cared about me and Noah twisted himself into pretzels around my needs but there was always the intense, constant pressure to change myself to be more pleasing to him. That was one of the biggest overarching elements of our marriage: I was supposed to change to suit him better. I went after that. I wanted that too. It was what Noah and I chose with our eyes wide open.

I can’t ever choose that again. I can’t ever be clay in someone’s hand to mold at will. I have to fulfill my obligations and that means I need to not change too much. I have to stay on the path I was on, for better or worse. Even if I am not still Noah’s wife I am still the mother of Noah’s babies. I owe them a duty of care and provision and I feel the urgency of need to complete this process with my entire soul.

I am both sad and delighted by the ways my relationships with my children are all deepening. Loss can easily break people apart under strain. We are growing closer together in the way we have after every difficulty since this family began. Noah and I began this as a conscious co-creation and now the kids help me carry it along because they know no other way and they don’t particularly want to stop. We have strife that we must overcome together. We have challenges and we overcome them together. When we elected to leave the US we did so knowing that therapists and other forms of support would be thin on the ground and we would need to turn inward to one another for a lot more support. We chose this life.

The other day I was in the kitchen with my son. He was working on baking a cake for some friends in the community. I was packing up a dinner portion for Gentleman. It turned out that my son needed some things from the store. I asked if it was ok to ask Gentleman to pick stuff up on the way over.

We had a long conversation about food culture and snobbery and access to diverse food. It was really good. It was good for me and it was good for him. It was important to talk really explicitly about the fact that we need to work on our scathing attitude towards people who have not had as much access to diverse foods as us. It’s totally unacceptable in this setting. We have had a privilege and it’s not ok to be cunts about other people having less access. We have to be soft and kind as we offer to share our weird food with people. They will often feel challenged by the amount of variety our family seeks out in food. We don’t eat like the British, that’s for sure. We definitely don’t eat like the poorer people on this island. We can’t be cunts about it.

This is such a weird experience for me. I have gone from being the poor person with the highly restricted food intake to the point of being the rich person who is trying to gently and softly expand the experience range of people who haven’t had as much luck as me. It’s fucking wild. I don’t know who I am through a lot of this. I feel confused and like I am trying to consolidate a self out of tiny little pieces of life experience but none of them are congruent or compatible.

I know that one of the things that is complicated about dating as a single mother is that my children should not go through the ringer being exposed to a series of people. I am wildly aware of this. Continuity, stability, and predictability are all on my mind as I figure out what it means to change pieces of my life or ways I spend my time.

It is hard not to talk to my children about dating as an experience the way I have talked to them about almost every experience I have had since they were born. I don’t have Noah as the person who can take all the overflow emotions and words anymore. I feel deeply stymied. I hope that over time I can learn to not give a shit and put more of it here. I want to stop blogging on social media. It creates a feedback loop I don’t like. People think I write to get attention. Not exactly. I feel deeply uncomfortable with the way people feel free to try to edit my thinking when they get to see pieces of it.

I am having deep discomfort with the fact that my children are going to be the primary Witnesses of my life going forward. No one else will ever stand so close to me. Given that I have doubts about ever living with a partner again they may be the longest and most enduring relationships of my entire life. They are going to know things about me dating. I am not a great liar.

My son and I talked about the fact that one thing I am getting out of dating right now is a place to put excessive “I want to take care of you” energy that I have. I don’t want to smother the shit out of my kids. We are all fairly independent creatures who like to do our own things. They need me to have other outlets in life. I am feeling weird about how intensely I am enjoying my relationship with Gentleman.

It’s highly gendered in many ways and also not. I am not looking for a provider or a protector. I am looking for a companion. I am looking for someone who both likes to give care and receive it. I’m looking for someone who can both accept me plainly as I am and help me figure out how I will adapt to make my life easier. Apparently I have a real thing for the sort of man who tells bad jokes all the time. Jokes. It is my destiny to endure a Biblical plague level of suffering thanks to bad jokes. Bad jokes in the “oh my gosh this is 5 year old humour” kind of way and not in the mean/aggressive/hateful way. Lots of fart jokes. Lots of very silly puns.

I endure a plague of bad jokes. I’m just saying.

They make me feel safe and relaxed. I love silliness. I love the way my horrified negative facial expressions makes people explode with laughter and delight. They are so happy to torment me. Good thing torment is my love language.

I need this silliness and this container for giving care because otherwise I’m not sure I’d be getting the basics done. I’m making sure food is present. I’m making sure people care for their bodies. I’m making sure the kids have some level of educational progress. That’s what I’m getting done and my “to do” list that I need to do when I am not actively care giving keeps getting longer. I don’t have the energy to do it. I don’t have the mental fortitude and I feel really ashamed of that. I can talk to myself on the internet but no I can’t go hunt up all the fucking forms for the accountant.

It is exceedingly hard to brain right now.

I miss Noah all the time. I feel bad about knowing that he would be able to help me be in a lot less pain right now. He knew a lot of tricks and I would have been feeling a lot more comfortable, even while sick, even while recovering from surgery. I feel selfish for how I miss him. I am sad about what I’m not getting. I’m sad about what I can’t give. I’m sad that this huge piece of myself feels like it vanished into thin air. Who I was because of my connection to him doesn’t exist anymore. Part of me died.

There are flickers and remnants of that person in other pieces of me and will exist in amalgamations of personality fragments going forward but the wholeness of that particular self is gone. I’m aware of it all the time. This chasm of pain and fear and loss. I really thought I was going to get to be that part of me for the rest of my life. I had a lot invested in being that self forever.

Now it is over and I stagger forward out of the wreckage. I am wounded in so many fucking ways. I feel absolutely awful physically and emotionally because of so many things. I’m NOT EVEN BRINGING UP OLD STUFF BECAUSE THERE IS BARELY ROOM IN MY BODY FOR AIR. Even though I see the old cycles and patterns and pain influencing the new layers. I can’t acknowledge the impact because I have to keep moving. It’s there. I feel it. I can’t dwell. It is too hard to acclimate at speed the things that are happening in this moment. I will have to wait until I slow down and have time to breathe. Will that time ever come? Are those moments in the past?

No. Someday I will have adult children who don’t need me and all the time in the world. I will come to a stop someday and do absolutely nothing beyond base survival for months. It will be. I am allowed to get to that point. It will be ok when I do.

I look forward to that. Maybe I can go hide on Shetland or Orkney for a year. I can spend my time not giving.

Maybe. Until then, it is past time to be starting breakfast. I should get up and get on it. I have babies to kiss and food to make. It is time to start another day.