It’s blowing my mind that my oldest child is 12 days away from being an adult. This feels absolutely impossible and bizarre. Yet, here we are. My second child is 3 months away from being a quasi-adult in this country. (Scotland is strange. There are many ways in which you gain admittance to a softer version of being an adult: you vote (in some elections), can join the military, can leave school, and you can get married without permission. You may not buy a plastic picnic knife or a pair of scissors.) In our house one of the things that turning 16 gets you is that I no longer micromanage school/screen stuff. I go hands off and allow them to fuck with their schedule. I figure that making mistakes with running your body between 16 and 18 is one of the lowest stakes time in ones entire life. Might as well make as many as possible.

I feel like I have spent the last 18 years training housemates not raising children. They communicate so well, both of them. When one of my children is struggling with doing one of their chores they initiate a group conversation so we can re-divide chores. It’s miraculous and glorious. I feel so much pride I want to explode. MC (Middle Child) has figured out that they are happiest if they can do their contributions to the household when no one else is around. They clean the kitchen after everyone else goes to bed. They are now choosing to opt in to getting up early enough to make breakfast. These wrap around chores will make sleep slightly more of a specific issue but they want this combination because it produces the lowest amount of distraction while working.

It is really cool living with people who know who they are and what they want. I feel really proud of them. I watch them self advocate and I struggle with not crying. It never enters into their psyche that maybe they should just shut up and suffer. Their life hasn’t gone that way. When they are suffering they speak up about it and demand change. That said, we also talk through the things that must be endured because they cannot be changed DBT style. I love Dialectic Behavioural Therapy. It really works for me. The framing of it helps me a lot. I have been super active in teaching it specifically to the kids. There are things that must be endured: challenging developmental stages, security in airports, recovery from surgery. These things can’t be changed when you want to. Most things can be changed though and having the strength to make it happen is the obstacle. My children are so strong. That feels mystifying to me as they balance the contradiction of being very strong and also disabled.

MC had an adenoidectomy last week. They are really enjoying the way they can already breathe through their nose somewhat. It’s hard because they haven’t been capable in many years. I am overjoyed with the impending running schedule. They are going to be coming out with me several days a week and that thrills me. Up to age 24 is when you build all the fast twitch muscle mass you will ever have in your life. We have 8 years left to push hard together to make them stronger and capable for the whole rest of their life. That’s fun.

EC (Eldest Child) is frankly suffering a lot more. His body is crap and he is not getting a lot of help from the NHS. To be fair, I don’t know what they would be able to do for him. He eats in supportive ways. He does supportive work for his body. He is doing everything that someone with our alphabet soup of labels can do. He’s going to have a rough road. He’s going to lose a lot of time to feeling like crap and being unable to force his body through coordination. There is no avoiding this. So he takes on chores around the house that have a bit of wiggle room and he can do them in batches on days that he feels well.

YC (You are catching on with the naming convention, yes?–Youngest Child) is not so good at these things right now mostly because she has zero self initiatory drive absent an immediate reward and that’s a complicated thing. Her motivation isn’t present and I’m struggling with being consistent enough to make demands every day. It’s a negotiation and a production every day still and I’m really tired. It’s hard to be as consistent without Noah around filling in the gaps.

I miss Noah every single day. It’s not every hour at this point, that’s progress. It’s hard accepting all the ways I have less to give now because he is not the backstop. I commit to so much less than I did. I feel like my brain is constantly overwhelmed and I’m drowning in lists of things. Yes, I write them down. I still repeat them in my head because otherwise they will never happen. I feel like barely contained chaos at all times. Noah made order out of the chaos. I feel deeply helpless without him. I’m trying to learn that the maelstrom of words is not something that I can share in the same way. I will never be able to jump topics in a conversation the way I did with him again. No one else will ever have so much context for my thoughts. He could look at my face and know why I was crying. He knew which wrinkles in my face were for which layer of grief. It is hard the degree to which I will not be known going forward.

I don’t mean that no one will get to know me. They will do their best but I have a lot more history now and way less time to talk about it. What Noah and I had took so much time. I don’t have that kind of time to give anymore. It feels like I am not able to promise that depth and intimacy and I feel really mixed about that.

I feel lots of feelings at this point because poly is going to be complicated. I’m looking forward to it and also dreading it. I think that is a fairly normal set of feelings about poly. Poly is great! Also: poly is terrible! I really like my boyfriend. He feels like a really solid human. Our explorations together continue to deepen and broaden. I don’t currently have any idea what we are building towards. I don’t know what the limits of this relationship will be, exactly, yet. I don’t anticipate living together. For sure not any time soon. I am looking forward to when YC is older and I can sleep at his more often. He has a kitty who doesn’t appreciate being abandoned so he shouldn’t sleep here too often. We both have these anchors in our own spaces and that feels really comforting to me. He has been burned by relationship changes in the past. I like that we are both coming into this relationship with our own centres of gravity. (Also, if you are from the UK please give me spelling feedback. I’m trying to adapt but this shit is hard.)

I have started dating a nice woman I know in the queer community. It is still very early days and we can’t get together often. We’ve had two dates. We have not had sex. I feel like it’s going to take a while before I can be capable of having the kind of sex we are interested in having together. I have a lot of issues. My marriage involved a bunch of very conscious programming work that Noah did on my brain to try to change me. He wanted me to be monogamous. He wanted me to never top/dominate/hit someone ever again. He did a lot of hours of work on making it so that my body feels like it can’t access these urges I have. He wanted me to only need or want him. Now I can’t help but feel like I was right to refuse that.

I keep replaying in my head when he burst into tears saying that he was going to turn out to be only one of my great loves when I was absolutely the one big one for him. It feels like an indictment of my character.

The pain I feel right now because I couldn’t give him the single minded focus he needed so bad is part of why I feel like I should never live with someone again. My inability to have only one love hurts people and I don’t want to lead anyone on ever again.

It’s not that I spent my whole marriage cheating on Noah. I didn’t. He was always terrified of it though. He felt like I could at absolutely any moment and he never relaxed. He didn’t trust me. He didn’t believe I would keep choosing him. He was afraid that any amount of not looking at him would invalidate all of the time I spent looking at him.

He was suffocating me. I feel awful about this. I didn’t have the capacity to be satisfied from spending 20 hours a day with him. He was very stingy about how much time I was allowed to be out of the house. I didn’t want to leave. I did only want 10-12 hours a day with him. That hurt him. I couldn’t make that not hurt. For him that was overwhelmingly painful rejection. I talked about getting a crappy retail job to get out of the house and meet people and he was very upset. He could not accept me wanting to spend that much time away from the family. He would scornfully tell me that I would make so little money that it could not possibly justify being away from him. He missed the point.

I was trying as hard as I could to be ok in the small box he wanted me to live in. I wanted to be the wife he wanted. I am really sad I couldn’t be. I was going to keep beating my head against that wall forever. I’m sad that our journey together is over.

I am sad that my need to be alone and to have adventures with new people will continue to hurt people forever. I am selfish. I want myself. I want to be alone. I want to spend time in my brain. I want to form new understandings of humans and that means continuing to meet new people.

Another Kid is entering my life. I am really enjoying having intergenerational friendships with folks. I love that these young adults are drawn to me. I love getting to talk to them about what is going on in their lives. I’m trying to map them out in my brain.

I feel really lucky that these people come and seek me out. I don’t do that great in group situations at this point. I hang out on the outskirts of communities. I am not a central pillar of anything. I hide in my house and garden. These folks come to me and share their hearts and life stories. I rephrase what I hear to make sure I’m understanding properly. This process is a big deal. I don’t have to have solutions or answers to anything. What I do is properly listen and help them frame the topic. That’s enough. Having someone else understand and validate what is going on is already a big deal.

I feel like I should put more effort into friendships with folks my age but they all have kids and the schedule conflicts are impossible.

I have been spending more time with Jenny. That’s really good for my soul. Once again she is pulling me into dancing. Now we go to line dancing classes together. She has been good for me for over 30 years and I cannot overstate how grateful I am. She is such a good friend.

I am not reaching out to most Californians. I feel incapable. I feel overwhelmed. I feel like I am drowning. I am fully present in every moment and I don’t have the ability to reach backwards for all the old ties. I feel like I am barely stumbling through my days. I am so tired.

Today I have a whole bunch of time. I get to weed! This is the big thrill for me right now. Yeah, yeah, “No mow May”. I’m not mowing. I’m removing grass from growing areas. I don’t have the space for a meadow. Luckily my neighbour is letting the patch next to me run wild. I finally acknowledged to myself that I missed the window on starting seeds so I have bought some plant starts. I try not to do this. Oh well. It is what it is. Food will grow. Asparagus (not to be harvested this year of course), a variety of different Asian green vegetables, a bunch of salad green things, some peas, some brassicas. I need to chuck my potatoes in the ground today.

I won’t get everything done today that I “should”. I’m not capable of it. That’s feeling really hard. I should also try to get all the tax documents sent off to the accountant. That should have happened already. Fuck.

Also I want to read more. I want to sleep more. I need more rest. I also need to exercise more. DO EVERYTHING MORE ALL AT THE SAME TIME.