Author Archives: Krissy Gibbs

About Krissy Gibbs

Just your average hippy white trash incest survivor stay at home mom. Is there an average for us? No? Oh well.

Fragments of parenting

My son is a fiction writer. He has more followers than I do and I think that is super cool. He writes about children experiencing violent, traumatic things. People ask him on a regular basis if he is a highly traumatised person. He says no, but his parents are both highly traumatised autistics who developed a hyperfixation on social interactions in order to survive. He says an awful lot of his characters are me with some changes; his stories are basically him trying to give me a better outcome. I have feelings about this.

We talk about our family values a lot. People are not disposable. People can fuck up in horrifying ways and still deserve a second chance. People do not deserve third or fourth chances. Doing something horrifyingly bad one time can be a mistake. Repeating it is a choice. I appall people online sometimes when I talk about rape possibly being a mistake if it happens once and once only. I believe it, though. Society has the right to protect itself from serial predators.

He says that he appreciates that I have not forbidden him from doing almost anything in his life. I will, however, talk shit about stuff he is doing and explain in great detail why I don’t like it or respect the lessons that are being taught. This is funny to me because he is quick to tell his siblings that they can’t watch some YouTube people because they are bad influences. He is very much pro-authority in ways that I find odd.

I love that my kid is finding solace in acting and poetry. They are finding a slightly different path through coping. I deeply appreciate the way they tell me that being with me is when they feel most comfortable and safe. They are my adventure buddy. They love hiking and going on bike-camping trips with me. We have a fascinating push-pull dynamic when we are under stress. We are both getting really good about going, “YOU ARE SUPER FUCKING CRANKY. PUT FOOD IN YOUR MOUTH. NOW.” I love that they are so much like me. I love that they believe their life has been really good largely because they have had parents who have been ok with them following their own path. They struggle with mutism when they are overwhelmed in public environments. They have tremendous sensory challenges. I have spent over 10 years largely structuring our home environment around their sensory needs. It heals something in me to be able to do this for them.

I think I am going to push them into going into a school program next year at the local college. They should go do a drama qualification. It would be very good for them on a variety of levels. It will be like when I did Middle College instead of finishing high school. They would love to be around people more but the high cost of being autistic is too high to pay for regular school. It’s pretty striking to me that people around here really accept getting beaten as the cost of attending school if you are autistic. Fuck that shit. Fuck off into the sun. It is different once folks are adults. They will probably be the youngest person in the program at the college but that’s ok. They thrive around adults.

My daughter has had a year. She has a couple of things she is doing that are driving me nuts. She’s weird about food. I don’t even want to explain all of it because I kind of hope I mostly forget this part. She’s in a rough phase. Phases end and should not be held against someone in a long term way. I appreciate how much she adores me. I adore her, too. We talk a lot about how I can have lots of feelings all at once. I can love her bigger than the whole sky and still think that something she is doing is super annoying and rude. More than one thing can be true. I love that all of my children, when below the age of 10, have preferred to sleep clinging to me.

I love that my babies want me and love me and like me so much. I have worked really hard at being the mom they deserve.

I am scared of the future. I am glad I have these three people to face it with. Being there for them has given me purpose and drive and motivation. I feel so incredibly lucky that we all like each other so much. It doesn’t always go that way with parents and children. I am blessed.

Well that was terrifying

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Hi. I’m not sure if you noticed but my website went down for a bit. I didn’t notice the domain expiring and there was a whole process of trying to pull this back out of the ashes. I am lucky I have smart friends who can help.

It’s 9 days till the anniversary and I am all over the map mood wise. I go between existential horror and paralysis and feeling like I have to do things or I will explode with nervous energy. I am scared I will shove everyone away in the next few weeks as I have all the feelings all at once. That’s a fear, not a fact.

It’s time for me to start moving all of my writing from Fetlife over here. I have been feeling really anxious about the massive number of emails that will be inflicted on folks but it’s time. I want all of my writing in one place and I am going to back up everything like 17 times.

I feel so many things. I am grateful for my children. They continue to be the reason I have to keep going. My son blows my mind with his emotional maturity and reason. Yesterday when I got home I was very upset and he coached his sister through giving me a couple of minutes to land before she started unloading her brain on me. I could hear his father’s word and intonation in his speech. This boy quotes me and Noah so constantly that it’s slightly odd. This is what a piece of me and a piece of Noah looks like. What an extraordinary person.

My kid reminds me a lot of Noah too. And my daughter. All of them are different shards of him living on and carrying his voice and lessons into the world. It’s maybe a weird thing but I feel like I did something with my life because I helped the world have pieces of Noah for longer. He was so tremendously good.

I asked on the Ruby forum on Reddit if people want me to keep maintaining his websites and they said yes, people still go back and reference Noah’s work. It’s really cool to know this. Noah had a large influence on the technology industry around the world and he continues to do so even after his death.

I miss him so much I feel like my chest is going to explode.

I love that my son is a prolific writer who shares our family values with many hundreds of readers.

I love that my kid is a bold and confident actor who feels capable of stepping into and out of different ways of being because they know how to compartmentalize and analyze the emotions of other people.

I love that my daughter is bold and demanding of love and attention because she has always been loved and attended to. She believes that she will always be loved and adored. Even if her father isn’t here to be one of her adoring fans she trusts that there will be many other people who love her overwhelmingly.

Noah and I did this. We made people who are intensely secure. We made people who believe that there are reasons to feel love and hope. We made people who know how to manage their anxiety and self soothe in healthy ways. We made people who feel secure asking for their needs to be met. We made people who glow with certainty of place. Even after the death of their father. That’s incredible. We did this together. Now I have to carry it forward alone.

I won’t feel alone. We are so very self-reinforcing. My son believes in the values I have taught him, that Noah taught him, that we have lived for all these years.

I had a horrible thought the other day. I have said for many years that we are like a whale pod traveling together as a family. Maybe that was a cursed thing to say. Whale pods do not include the father, they are matriarchal. I should have come up with another analogy, some other species that stays together. I don’t know what though. I just know that I have to keep going and I will bring my children with me.

I love that when I walk out my back door I can make kissing noises and many different bird species explode with sound. They are all happy I am there to bring them food.

My cat has been within arms length of me basically full time for weeks now. She is the most dog-like cat I have ever known. She would like to be with me far more than she currently gets to. It’s both a bother and a comfort. I feel guilty sometimes because when I am alone in a room I will sometimes say very rude things to her about how annoying I find her and how much I don’t want to be nice to her anymore. Then I pet her very softly and gently because it doesn’t matter how I feel; it matters how I act.

I feel like the most self absorbed person on the planet right now. I’m not but it feels like it in the universe of my brain.

Last night I cried and sobbed and freaked out as I crawled around the attic getting some Yule decorations down. I made a deal with my daughter that if she tidied up her stuff I would get the smallest tree down and some ornaments and lights for her because she needs to see festivity this year. It doesn’t matter how I feel; it matters how I act.

That said, I am not decorating the whole house. I can’t. That’s too much to ask of me. It matters a little bit how I feel. She can decorate her room. That’s enough. I’m going to wrap presents today. I didn’t want to do presents at all this year. I definitely didn’t want to be Santa this year. No child deserves to lose their father and Santa in one 12 month block. That’s just fucked up beyond all measure.

This whole year has been rough. It has also been full of moments where my friends have carried me through. I have not been alone. I have not been abandoned. I have not been unsupported.

I am going to keep creating myself. I am going to lean on my friends to believe in me when I can’t believe in myself. I am going to keep growing like Noah wanted me to. I am very relieved that this record remains. I don’t know why I care so much about the writing remaining but I do. Someday if my children want to understand me better, they will have a window into my soul.

Time to wrap presents and fluff a plastic tree.

The future is vast and terrifying

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I’m trying to figure out which parts of my future are still options. I don’t know which parts are me and which pieces were entirely created so I could live up to Noah’s expectations.

I’m still interested in the gardening. I’m not managing to get as much of it done as I would hope. That’s complicated. Gardening, much like writing, tends to need to be done in a flow state or I find it incredibly agitating and annoying. I need to get better at darting outside over and over for a little bit during the day. I’m still in the last throes of requirement to directly supervise a child ALL DAY. It’s a dramatic thing when they get old enough to run off and manage their own time for a big chunk of the day. Shortie won’t be fully out of the need for supervision for a few more years. She’s an impulsive one. We have so much in common.

I feel deeply lucky that my children are happy to be like me. They feel supported in their challenges and understood in their struggles. They feel validated and seen and appreciated. They tell me so, often We have our moments of strife but we are deeply aware of the need to repair and make reparations. Everyone in this house makes mistakes and we all cop to them immediately and fairly casually. We don’t feel bad about having flaws. We don’t feel like making mistakes is any kind of permanent statement about our value as a human. To err is human. You learn more from mistakes than you do from doing it right the first time.

I love that my babies move through the world with such confidence in themselves. They can describe their needs for assistance. They have been able to set the terms for how much sensory seeking or avoiding they needed to do. There have been wild swings over the years. Noah had been giving me steady breaks for about the last 6 years of his life. That’s when he got really hands-on with the kids. I have a lot of sensory avoiding behaviours too. I like a room alone very much. I’m a writer. It’s been going way better for me.

That’s what my future will include, but what will writing mean when I don’t have Noah around as a corroborator? I’m a lot more afraid of being called a liar without him around. I do not believe I am a reliable enough narrator. That scares me. I feel very mixed about the stories I can’t tell because I don’t own them. They involve other people who wouldn’t be able to give consent if they wanted to. Someday they can give consent but that time is a long way in the future. I find it strange that I act like I have less authority to tell my story without Noah around to give his stamp of approval. He validated my existence. He wanted me and that justified the resources it took to maintain me.

It’s wild having that structure drop out of my life. I feel this vast emptiness in my soul. If Noah doesn’t want me, then why I am I still alive? The answer is because he gave me three children. What I have told each of them separately and together is that I will fight to stay alive as long as there is at least one of them. I am not saying I need the full set in order to survive. I am committed to each of them as individuals until the absolute end of the road for me. I will work hard to take it seriously that I need to extend that road as long as possible. Even when it isn’t very fun.

Being in my body isn’t feeling fun lately. I’m building back after surgery and everything hurts. I no longer get massages almost daily. Noah has been massaging me constantly for almost 20 years and it’s just gone. I hurt a lot. It takes a really high level of exercise, and specifically cross training, for me to not hurt in a fairly overwhelming way. I have to make up for all the joint instability by building up the muscle support. Yoga, rock climbing, cycling, running, swimming, and hopefully dance on a regular basis. I want to do all those sports every week.

I have to go limp and decondition after surgery or I have big bleed outs. It’s happened a bunch. So this is a cycle I will probably have to go through a few different times. It’s scary for the kids and for me. This means that I am weighing my options for birth control very carefully. I have an appointment to talk to a GP coming up. I don’t want to ever get pregnant again. This is something that is very important to me. This is something I need to have control over. My older kids have made it very fucking clear that they are not open to having another younger sibling. I respect that. It was a group decision to have Shortie and I respect them assessing their own abilities to provide support for another baby and toddler.

My life is going to revolve around my kids in a really big way for all of my life. That’s for me. That is going to stay true. We are going to have a stable home together. A home where we all get to have space and come together if and when we want to. Over time the other two bedrooms are going to be more seriously set up for people who come over regularly.

It’s interesting watching the evolution of this house. I thought this house was going to be much more static than the house in California, which I pulled apart and rebuilt and repainted and constantly moved the furniture to change how I used every room. I lived in an Ikea ever changing set. It was pretty rad. I like how I used that house. It wasn’t a house set up I would have chosen but I made it work. I changed it a lot starting when I moved in. Basically that was never Noah’s house again. And then this house is a huge lemon. It’s been insanely expensive to repair all the long term neglect from all the previous owners. When I’m completely caught up it will be baller.

I love the bones of this house. I love what we are doing with it. I love the way we morph and grow inside of it. I love that it is a house, like Wonderland, that inspires people to dream. Noah is why I had time to paint this house. He had Shortie. I have so many feelings about how I am going to be a good enough mother to her without his support.

I have spent a lot of time this year thinking about how I don’t get to have as many projects. I won’t be doing volunteer work any year soon. Well, I can if I can bring Shortie. She’s my buddy for the next 4-5 years. It won’t be as intense as it is right now for that whole time. Which is good or I would be a husk of a human on the far side. I love my babies and I am grateful to the marrow of my bones for getting to have this experience of being alive with them. I don’t wish this life away. I’m just looking forward to when Shortie is old enough to cycle to and from classes without me, you know?

The gardening was always the thing I was doing with/for/inflicting on the kids. Noah was never part of it. In a way, I think that is good. I was looking forward to long years tinkering in the garden and listening to him play piano. Now it feels different to live in this walled garden. I feel more vulnerable and yet competitive. Like, my house and garden are going to look a lot nicer because I’m going to worry more about judgment. I was allowed to get away with more of it being part of a whole heathen family. Single mothers are judged differently.

I have a lot of new social rules to learn and I am not looking forward to any of it. I am scared and anxious and cranky. It sucks because I have so little patience for caring about anyone else’s needs. If you are not my crotch fruit I only have a few hours a week to give spread between every social interaction I have. I feel bad that I need this so strongly right now. It’s a lot of why I am not asking for more babysitting to go be social with friends. It doesn’t seem like something I have the spoons for. I’m too tired and grumpy. I don’t want to care more about everyone else’s feelings than I do my own because that means being very careful about my speech. It’s a lot of work. I have to think about what everyone else needs me to pretend isn’t going on for me.

Sometimes it is a little challenging coming up against Scottish or English reserve. In a way, they are the result of many centuries of programming in a way I can’t understand. I am the freakish end result of the most progressive loop holes and policies of the people who went ever searching for more answers until they ran out of land and had to stay in California.

Matisse said I had the energy of a star being born. I don’t feel like I have that flame right now. I can feel a memory of it. I don’t know that I will ever have it to give again, though. I don’t know that I’m going to have that kind of focus and freedom. Maybe after the indenture is over.

I sold my services very specifically. I wanted to get married and have kids and homeschool them. I knew they were going to be weird and have special needs and I didn’t want them to be beaten down by the system. I take this very seriously. This is what Noah bought when he married me. We had an agreement. If he supported me for the whole of the indenture I would take care of him for the rest of our lives. The words feel like bitter ash in my mouth.

I find it fascinating that I have always only had a relationship with my mother in law. I’ve barely spoken a few sentences to my father in law. We have a nearly religious separation of gender relations. We have so much in common and it’s a funny thing that she now loves me and wants to make sure I’m taken care of for the rest of my life. She wants to make sure that her grandkids don’t have to go through the kind of single mom experience she grew up with when her father died.

She wants me to have the spoons to be nice.

I really appreciate that. I see that for the gift it is. I see what my mother in law was fighting with her marriage and her mother and I see how she got to where she is. I think she’s done really darn well with the hand life dealt her. I can see how she is trying to give me the freedom to be who I want to be in this life.

I have told my children their entire lives that I am preparing them to not need me. I am also auditioning for a role as an adult peer relationship way down the line. I am not trying to be your friend right now. I am not trying to win your approval right now. I want 30 year old you to respect me. Sometimes I have to be the brick wall, that’s the size of our life. It’s not personal baby. Everyone else hits the wall in school. I am your school.

It’s a complicated relationship dynamic for me. I am consciously and deliberately working myself out of a job. I don’t want to be the source of all support or knowledge or control when you are grown. That’s not my job anymore, bitches. I did my service. Past that you need to be responsible for yourself. Anything you want from me past that you have to negotiate case by case. I don’t owe you care taking forever. But, I am happy to share chores and live in a consciously interdependent fashion because being disabled sucks, yo.

It is interesting to negotiate this with the proto-adult. In this country he is already legally an adult in many ways. In my mind I have seven more months to actively parent my oldest child. Oh my fucking Cheese. It’s insane. How could this be happening already? Wasn’t he born five minutes ago? Oh wow. Noah, I am so sad you aren’t here to help him over the finish line. I know this would have been a really epic year for you two. I was so excited about the plans you two had for the last school year. There is no fair. There is no deserve. I’m so sad that Noah won’t get to see our son become an adult. I’m sad he doesn’t get to see where this fascinating person will go in life.

I’m sad for all of our kids. They are all missing out on so much. This is awful and it hurts and I feel like I am going to explode with grief. I wanted that future. I wanted Noah raising this babies with me all the way. It was his fucking indenture too, push comes to shove. He was waiting through it with me because he couldn’t have what he wanted from me as long as it was happening.

It feels like he worked so hard for something he didn’t get to have and that feels really unfair and sad. Having privilege is a mixed bag. He may have gone through life on easy mode (in many ways) but he still felt that black hole of loneliness in his soul. I made it easier to carry. I didn’t need him to pretend that wasn’t part of him.

Near the end he was talking about wanting to do a soul retrieval. I was deeply frustrated by the misunderstanding that he was trying to recover what he killed for me. Noah and I did a lot of really deep exploring around our core woundings. We talked a lot about our families. Noah wanted to find the parts of himself he killed to survive his childhood and his young manhood. He had the space to chase those things because he felt completely safe in our marriage. We could get mad at each other, that was fine. It didn’t mean we were going to leave. If the other got too annoying we would start making their life less comfortable until they knocked it off.

We really liked the comfortable life so mostly we got along. It was a choice. It was a decision every day. We wanted to be part of a happy family. So we made one. We made one after extensive, excruciating, meticulous negotiations and renegotiations. We have no sacred cows. Anything is on the table for discussion. People get seriously called to the carpet, in private with the family, and we talk it through. Everyone gets to be heard. We don’t stop until the message lands and actual understanding happens on each side. There are a lot of rounds of “repeat back what you understood.” Cognitive distortions are not tolerated. There is always a group of people listening who respond, “That’s totally a mischaracterization.” It’s fucking awesome.

I feel like I landed in a Brontë novel or some shit. Making it work on my pension. I’m lucky we can still afford plenty of sugar. Ha, ha, ha. It’s scary to think that every pound I spend today is a pound I am taking away from our collective future. I’m not like Noah. I can’t go write another book and make a long term low key income. I don’t sell my writing, not really.

I don’t know if I will seriously write Vicki’s book and Noah’s book or not. There will have to be a G rated version of Noah’s book for my kids to read. They deserve that. Noah lit up my soul. I don’t want them to just remember me weeping about him. It’s a great fairy tale. Sometimes happily ever after isn’t all that long.

I don’t know what I will be and that worries me. With Noah I knew that I was part of a happy family even if we were fighting. We chose each other over and over and over. I am feeling a decided lack of chosen-ness at this point. It’s appropriate given where I am in my life story. I don’t have a husband anymore. I was picked and now he is gone.

I don’t think I want to be a wife again. I have weird feelings about that. I can’t contort myself like that again. I can’t try to be one person. It was hard. I don’t think I have that to give again in this life.

I need to be a separate person. My story will always be something that is a bit mysterious and foreign. I will never make sense again. All the tropes are different here. I might as well be from another planet. It’s an adventure. And you know what I say about adventure, right? It’s not an adventure until somebody cries.

With my family there is 100% of the time crying on adventures. It makes sense for us. Having the expectation of crying removes the feeling of disappointment when it happens. We laugh instead. We see crying as a stress relief option that our body takes when our stress cups get too full. It’s not a big deal. It doesn’t take someone being horrid. It’s just part of being alive.

I love being part of this family. It’s hard to feel like it is fully a family without Noah. He said everyone revolved around me. The kids and I notice that he was a really big sun in this solar system and we are all bereft without him. I find myself wondering, “How would he be doing at this point?” I don’t know. I hate reality. I hate that I couldn’t play the game out to see who would survive better and then go back and decide that I get to quit much earlier because it changes his outcome. That’s annoying. I want to make the right choice. There is no right choice. There is only stumbling forward and praying.

I am scared. I don’t know what else I will build. I feel so lost. I miss Noah so much. He gave me structure and support and justification. Now I feel like a deflated balloon. I will never soar again.

I have mixed feelings about all the birthdays I spent consciously isolated and unspeaking because I believed I was going to have to sustain myself for the rest of my life. That’s feeling much harder now. I did not think he was good at certain kinds of celebrating me and I shut him out completely for that failure. I am definitely going to be difficult about birthdays and holidays going forward. I am probably going to want to hide for the rest of my life. I don’t want to be seen. I don’t want to try to be part of anything. It doesn’t work for me. I am too jagged and broken. It’s too late.

I don’t feel like I should ever try to be happy again. It doesn’t matter how I feel. It matters what I do.

Keep moving anyway.

I both feel over peopled and deeply lonely

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I’m really struggling with how much I can’t say anymore because there is no one to say it to. Noah has been the safe container I lived in for so long. I feel like no one else will ever want to know very much about me if they have to live with the consequences. I know I have long term readers, it’s the in person time where people can’t handle me.

I’m dating a nice man. He’s never going to obsessively study me. He’s never going to be dedicated to me. He’s on his own life path and we share time when it works. I am really not complaining about him. I simply notice all the things that are absent in my life. Things I will never ask him for. These are not his children. He does not share my delight that such creatures came from us. I miss having Noah to talk to when I have a concern.

Shortie is 7. It’s an age with intense disequilibrium. It’s not personal. It’s developmental. I miss having another adult around to go “Oh holy shit doing this for the third time is so hard.” August and September were rough. She’s already calming down and doing better. I handled it how I handle such challenges. She had to be someone’s buddy at all times for a while. She did not have the ability to have self control so other people had to stand there patiently having control for her. It’s not the easiest of times but it worked how I wanted it to the previous times. Now I’m just following a well worn path.

Someone went to social services and reported me for beating her. In fact, this person claimed that Eldest Child, Middle Child, and I competitively bruise her for entertainment. This was a pretty extreme claim. No ambiguity like “I think they are too rough with her.” No, we competitively bruise her. That’s a Big McFlippen Deal. Luckily the social worker was convinced that the claim was malicious within a few minutes. It helps that the other half of the claim was that I am too mentally unwell to feed my children. When she entered the house I was making chicken cordon bleu, fried potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and there was a large salad with a variety of vegetables. Food is our culture in a way that is kind of extreme. Being accused of not feeding my children hurts. It’s wildly untrue. I have so much food in my house it’s a job to manage rotating through all of it before it spoils. I’m an obsessive prepper. We usually have 2-3 months worth of food on hand and I rotate through it. She said I don’t feed my children.

I am having a hard time with the idea that I should ask for help from people. It feels like a fraught and dangerous experience.

I stopped having people come stay with us because I am not able to provide the level of service people expect. And I’m too hard to help. I don’t know how to perform failing appropriately so that I inspire someone to want to help me. It’s not fair to say any of this, because there are several people who help me in an ongoing way. Following Jenny continues to be one of the most important decisions of my life. I don’t see her all the time, we both have a lot going on. She has been tremendous help over and over again this year. I would be in a very rough spot without her. A few new friends have done a lot more than I would have expected. As usual I’m surprised by who has staying power and who does not.

I am a lot less surprised by the people who have mostly fallen off. I’m not taking it overly personally. They will be friendly when I have more spoons. I am pragmatic. If I get to the point of feeling like I can produce a lot of work for other people they will tolerate me willingly.

I feel like I have nothing to offer at this point. I feel deeply inadequate to the task of doing the work to be part of community. I feel really bad about that. I don’t think it is permanent but it is the stage I am in.

I asked for a year to be intensely selfish. It’s been a mixed bag. That’s fair. The only person who ever signed up for meeting my needs is gone. I will probably get less support after this time of grief. I have to be planning around having less support. I am really grateful for the people who are helping me get through this time. 7 is one of the very hardest ages for me, I can say as the parent of a 17 year old and a 15 year old. I handle all the later stuff way better. We are going to have another gnarly year around 11/12. After that things have been a lot easier. I work hard at being less and less of a figure to rebel against. I am here to facilitate and assist, not drive your life. I’m happy to let people make mistakes without interference.

Except for the ways that I’m not and for those moments we have the buddy system. I need buddies. I have a lady I’m paying to come in one day a week and she directs us through maintaining the house. It’s awesome. I have a friend who is body doubling with me one day a week. I have a friend who is taking Shortie out once a week to give me a break. My kids all go to classes that happen every week or two.

We are witnessed out in the community. If my children were ill fed or being beaten folks would notice. I do this on purpose. I know that we are living an unorthodox life. I feel less able to defend it without Noah to stand beside me yet I really like my older children. I feel like they are going to have very happy adulthoods and they will find ways to be part of community and relationships. It’s always hard to have faith that such an end goal is possible during the harder stages. I still have faith.

When my baby is pushing every button but still smiles in a sunny way because they know I will forgive them for being difficult. I have earned their faith in me. That is the part that matters.

I am struggling with feeling like I used Noah to get the life I wanted and then abandoned him spiritually. He had a very hard time last year discussing future poly. I feel so bad that the last year of his life was so stressful between us.

I mean, we were also closer and getting along really well. Our connection felt deep and lifelong and impossible to step away from. I felt seen and possessed and obsessed over. My brain felt full of him. Now there is so much space. I feel unobserved. I feel unworthy of being seen.

I miss feeling like the most fascinating woman in the world.

I feel onerous and difficult and bothersome and unworthy. It astounds me that my children want my company so much. We try to rest on Sundays. We do a lot every day. We need a day of doing as little as humanly possible. I like that they come in to do shifts with me. They all want individual time. There is also collective snuggling. We are still a happy pod by and large.

There is this big hole in our lives. There is so much we all want to share and the container that we used to use is gone. I feel like I am going to feel empty going forward. I will but I won’t. My children are right in their self assurance that a lot of my life will revolve around them. It’s feeling hard. I feel like very little of myself remains outside the parent container. Maybe it will someday.

I don’t want to feel afraid. Being afraid makes one hateful, small, and ungenerous.

I will never have tech bro money again. I will be fine. I will keep the house. I will be able to feed anyone I want to feed down the line. I’m not going to have the kind of personal wealth Noah wanted us to have as retired people. This is ok. It works for my self conception.

I don’t feel confident about much right now. I know that my life is going to shrink in ways that would freak Noah out. He wasn’t ok with doing more with less. He was built for growth and expansion. I will contract now and regain something more like a proper shape for me.

I bought a power washer. My driveway looks like someone else lives here. My garden is looking super tidy. I need to scrub the decking a bit more before I’m done. The apartment patio still needs to be done. We are close after 3.5 long days of work. We’ve really let the walkways get into a proper state. They were unsafe. As I do the labour to clean them and make them safe for walking I think about what being the provider means.

From now on, everything that must be done I must do. There is no one else to look to. I can delegate, but I have to initiate all of it. I’m the adult. I’m the home owner. I am the one who has to direct everything. I am the responsible party. It’s feeling like so much.

I feel sad and alone even though my life is busy and full of people. I miss Noah enveloping me with his arms and his overwhelming personality. He was so much that he made me have to keep expanding to keep up with him. Now that time is over.

Parenting

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I think it is funny when people comment on my parenting either positively or negatively when they have never met my children. I mean, someone saying “I would like to have a parent who did that” or “I would never do that to my kids” is fair enough when I’m giving a tiny slice of a moment.

My children have woken up to morning snuggles just about every day of their lives. We talk all day long. They go to steady classes and have habitual events they can count on. The fact that I have erratic feelings while they go through this life process is not something I can fix. 35 years of therapy hasn’t cured me from being a highly traumatised person. I am pretty sure nothing will ever do so.

This is a lot of why I talk about my feelings and make it clear that I am having a feeling and it isn’t the fault of anyone in the room. I am reacting to ghosts and I’m really sorry you have to be in the room while I do.

This is why having a parent with mental illness is an ACE point. Even though by any reasonable measure I am doing fantastic for someone with a history like mine I am not as consistent as an untraumatised person. Fact. More than one person has told me to my face that someone like me should not have had children and since I was stupid enough to breed my children should be removed from my care. Lots of people feel that if you have already been abused, all you deserve is abuse going forward. It’s part of prosperity gospel crap.

Thing is, my kids are from two genetic lines with PTSD and severe trauma running all over the place. They have a serious handicap when it comes to being “normal” from the get go. That is 100% my fault and I accept that blame. I knew my genetics were messed up and I chose to make children with the ego-tastic belief that maybe someone in my line could have a happy childhood and grow up ok.

This has been a scary thing for me in many ways. When I was a child I was told constantly that abused children are the most loyal. What if I don’t want to abuse my children? Does that mean they will feel no loyalty to me? It’s been a terrifying commitment to keep. I have pursued it with blind belief and access to an unholy amount of privilege.

Why do I believe my children haven’t been seriously abused? My justifications are irrelevant. I’m not saying my children have never experienced abuse in or out of my house. It has never been a consistent part of their relationship with their parents because that shit doesn’t fly.

I was annoyed yesterday. I expressed my annoyance at the person whose forgetfulness was the reason I had to walk an extra 3 miles. Cheeky little bugger grinned and said, “Well it’s a good thing that you already promised to forgive me for everything I ever do wrong. I’ve got this one in the bank.”

Yeah. My erratic behaviour is totally fucking them up. Right.

Those of you who read my writing see far more erratic shit than my kids do. My kids see me walk around crying. They don’t know what I’m thinking. They do know that I have a lot of good reasons to cry. They hold my hand and lean on me. They give me the comfort of their presence.

It’s not that I’m never snippy but it’s worthy of comment when it happens.

I start every day with a smile and a kiss and “I am so glad to see you again.” It’s not that we never have rough days but we all feel wanted in this family. This year someone suggested that Middle Child might feel like the black sheep of the family. My baby refuted this assertion with laughter. They feel like they have a lot in common with me and with their siblings.

They used different words but basically, they feel like a chip off the old block. They are deeply aware of how much we all have in common. We talk about it with joy and occasional “bummer, sorry you got that one.” We discuss strategies we use and we compare notes about how to refine them. We have a shared language to discuss the ways we are similar. They had a similar experience with their dad. We would collectively marvel about genetics and luck of the draw.

The thing that binds us is this deep awareness of how connected we are. I have stressed from early on, “You are only mine to care for during a short period in your life. It is my responsibility to help get you ready for being an adult. Sometimes you won’t like me. That’s ok. We get to have all the feelings here.”

I love how deeply entitled these people are to being seen. I don’t think they demand it out in the world in the way we do at home. That’s why we talk about strategies so often. You can’t talk about stuff plainly with our home vocabulary out in the world. People will get very upset. People do not consent to being observed. It’s an interesting thing to navigate.

It is sitting on me harder and harder that I have no one to share my children with. It means I’m talking to my mother in law more because it feels like she is the only person who wants to hear about them. I miss having someone who wanted to talk about them for hours and hours with me. It’s harder to know if I’m doing anything right.

It’s going to be a long 10 years.

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My baby is struggling with impulsive behaviour. This means we are back to the buddy system. It means she has to be within eye sight, and preferably within arm’s reach of me throughout the day. I have to be her self control for her because she doesn’t have it right now.

I’m not going to list the ways she is acting out. I don’t particularly want to hold on to that ranting list. Her behaviour is all within developmental/PDA norms. She’s 7. She is acting like a 7 year old who has lost her primary parent. She’s in deep distress.

It’s been weird coming to terms with the fact that Noah literally was her primary parent for most of her first 6 years. He tied her to his body while working so I could do stuff. He let her come in and play piano while he was doing stuff. She played under his desk. Even though the third baby was “for me” so I could have the family that felt complete to me, due to the age gap I told Noah he had to step up. I couldn’t do what I did with the first two kids.

Looking back I both feel like it was smart that I gave myself space to rest and put spoons in my drawer while I could and also that I was stupid. Now my baby is suffering so deeply because of Noah’s loss. I can see it in her all the time. The big kids are suffering too, but it’s different. They are both much more strongly bonded to me. Now my daughter and I don’t have a choice. We need to make our bond a lot stronger and part of how we will do this is to spend a freakish amount of time together.

I think this girl would need a 1-1 aide in a classroom setting to keep her from doing things that would disrupt the learning environment for everyone else. She is just as high needs as my son was but the kinds of destructive behaviour are slightly different. I feel so exhausted thinking about going through this again. She has the destructive behaviour of my first child and the explosiveness of my second child plus her PDA traits are turned up to 11. She is going to be a truly radical and amazing adult. I can’t fucking wait to hang out with her when she is in her late 20’s and 30’s. Getting there is going to be a bit rough.

I tell myself a lot that I am paying Future Me by doing this work. I will get to have the adult peer relationships I want if I nail their childhoods.

Part of it is realising which of the methods I used with the older kids do not work for Shortie. She has a different life. I will now admit that I probably was using ABA tactics with the older kids. I took away fun things when they couldn’t meet my demands. I can’t do this to my youngest. Her life doesn’t have the massive amount of over-weight in the “fun” department. She hasn’t spent 2 weeks a year at Disneyland. She’s not traveling around the country. She’s not been to a bunch of exciting cultural events. She didn’t grow up with parties every 6 weeks and dozens of families she had constant contact with. She has had a fairly isolated and lonely life.

This girl needs different support and different raising. For one thing, I would be doing her a massive disservice if I encouraged her into being as bold as the older ones. The older kids and I are constantly having to navigate the challenge of being as weird as we are in this town. I hope that Shortie feels more like she belongs here when she is grown. It will always be different because she didn’t grow up in school culture. I don’t know.

I’m scared.

I keep making little steps of progress towards settling Noah’s estate. It freaks me out. I wish this process was over. A week until it has been 9 months. How naive I was to think I could be done in March or April. I couldn’t bear to think about how long it would drag out. I bat things back as quick as I can then someone in the chain is on holiday and it takes a week or two to get a response. It’s challenging. It means a lot of executive functioning from me to track stuff. I’m not doing very well at that.

I’m having a lot of brain fog. My pain levels are high. I’m getting back to exercise but it is a constant struggle.

The kids really need me to be on my A game. I feel like I’m barely squeaking out a C.

I am clearly flailing with a lot of my grief. I desperately wish that I could spend a whole year only keeping my body alive and not taking care of anyone else. Oh well. Keep moving. Instead I am going to experience a grueling several years. These babies need a lot of support. They are high needs people. I brought them into this world.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, “I understand why I was hit so much.” I acted out even more impressively than my kids do. I struggle with not hitting anyone some days. I don’t do it! I didn’t do it long before I lived in a country where it is illegal. It’s not like I’m refraining because “it’s the law”. I don’t hit my kids because if you have to hit your kids to control them then you don’t have any control.

I am dreading the fuck out of this trip to Disneyland Paris. My 3rd time there. Shortie’s probable one and only Disney trip of her childhood. My last two times there weren’t great. Maybe it is going to go better now that my expectations are below the toilet and in the sewer? No one will be nice. People will be hostile. Expect it and get on with it. They use the name Disney but it has nothing to do with Disneyland in Anaheim and it’s not useful to expect that.

I wish Disneyland wasn’t such a poisoned experience for me. 9 days till we get on the sleeper train. 12 days until we enter the park. These countdowns used to feel more fun. Now I feel a creeping funk hitting my brain and I want to cry. Who am I kidding? I’ve been crying.

I wish I could stop crying.

I feel frozen

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I wish I could sleep more. I have been waking up after 6.5 hours and I can’t get back to sleep. That’s when I would go wake Noah up to put me back to sleep. But Noah is gone. Instead I wander out to the studio and scream/sob for hours. It’s so hard to think about moving forward with life but I do it anyway.

Because I am me and I’ve been single for about 10 minutes in my whole life I am dating. I was trying to find casual sex that would turn into a friendship and not much more. That isn’t going to plan. Mostly people didn’t turn into friends. One of the guys is trying but we haven’t managed a hang out yet. Another one is very friendly when I see him in town and that’s mildly awkward for me.

I feel like I am a fairly hideous person for being in a relationship at this point. I would say that Noah is rolling in his grave only he’s in a box in my room so that can’t happen. I have never been the type to sit alone and cry without moving forward. Life has to keep moving. The main way I acquire access to energy is sex. If I want to be energetic and cheerful for my kids (and I do) then I need sex. It’s not really optional for me. I feel bad about this. Noah wouldn’t be hunting at this point. He would be a lot less functional than I am. I agree with the kids that he would have gone off the rails entirely. He lived for serving me. He might be doing better with the lawyers but he would not be ok. It would be like the road trip where he shut down and didn’t see friends or do much that was fun that wasn’t centered on me. Noah didn’t want to live without me.

It’s wild going through Noah’s Dropbox. His obsession with me was pretty epic. The notes he took on our interactions over 20 years are daunting as fuck. He wrote a book on me in terms of number of words. It’s a really long book. I can go back through the layers of contracts we wrote together. I can see how Noah evaluated himself as a husband and father week by week for decades.

I keep wondering if I want to delete any of his files or if they will sit in the ether forever as a mausoleum. It’s fascinating going through and looking how he organised his brain. He has so many old files. I’ve got to say that it is shocking to me how much I was part of every thought he had. I’m going through sections that are ostensibly about jobs. In the middle of a bunch of old notes about job hunting and tech stuff there are long essays about how Noah felt about me and our marriage. I have so many years of his feelings to read whenever I want. This is just the stuff I can read in Dropbox. He has so much more on his computer. Reading it is hard.

He loved me so much.

I feel like I am drowning in sadness but that’s not fair. The kids need me to get up and be active. They need me to be effective and supportive and gentle and loving.

Throughout our whole marriage we would both get to points where what we knew/could carry wasn’t enough. Every time we would get mad and say something to the effect of, “Why is the answer always ‘Then you need to get stronger’?” We never ran out of issues and problems. We were never good enough for everything we needed to do. We always had to keep getting stronger. Life wasn’t going to get easier; we needed to be able to do more. He took that so seriously. I can see the evidence of him working hard to be better year after year. He never stopped.

Until he stopped. Now I wake up and reach for him in the night and cry because I will never touch him again.

It’s good that the man I’m dating is getting the strong impression that he has to get over comparisons between him and other people I date. I’m never going to be monogamous again. It’s simply not on offer to anyone else. It was brutally hard with Noah and I’m not going to sign on for that much feeling like a piece of shit ever again. I like sex. I like sex fairly casually with people I barely know. I’m not ok with someone being mean to me because of how much I want sex. I need to have agreements that allow for me being me in ways I was not allowed to negotiate with Noah. No more veto power.

I want to communicate about my sex life, of course. I care a lot about everyone’s physical health. I am not going to take risks that harm people I love if there is any way to avoid it. I will talk about what I am doing and when and I am open to negotiations about degrees of risks.

I broke Noah’s heart a long time ago when he saw me consider the possibility of dating after his death. I feel like I am a horrible person. I also feel like I have a lot of work to do and I don’t know a way to get enough energy other than sex. Sex keeps me motivated to stay alive in a way that nothing else does. I’m going to have sex and I don’t want to be shamed for it.

“Are you sure you want to ask me that?”

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I’ve had this agreement with most friends and family members in my life. When they ask me a question I give them a second chance to see if they mean it. I will answer. I will answer in so much detail that you may regret your life choices.

I like that Gentleman is around while I’m doing chores more now. We talk while I’m doing stuff. It feels a lot more like an integrated relationship. It’s like how I get to be around while he practices sometimes. I like these overlapping points in the timetable. It feels like life sharing. We are testing the waters during this courting period. We are on no particular escalator with specific end goals.

I’m amused that going back and forth between his place and mine is resulting in me keeping my space more tidy than usual. He is a tidy individual. He takes care of his things and he cleans up after messes really quickly. Sometimes I feel intimidated because I’m going to struggle to match that in this house. I could in my house in California that was 1/3 the size of this house. I am often worried I got myself in over my head. With Noah I was alright. Now the house is a lot to manage alone. Gentleman offers help and I demur each time. Ask again next year. After he has waited through the mandatory window. A long time ago my children asked that there be a year period between when I start dating someone and when that person meets the kids. They asked for that when I was still married. It’s very important to me that I earn their trust in an ongoing way so I take this request very seriously.

I have a love/hate relationship with watching time pass. I hate thinking about the fact that tomorrow Noah has been gone for eight months. I hate thinking about how long it has been since I saw my mother. I love thinking about how much time I have spent doing different things. Like, the number of hours I’ve spent with Gentleman. That’s a fun thing to muse about. We are clocking the hours needed to form attachment. We are talking about things that are hard and scary instead of ignoring them and hoping for the best. We are both earning trust. I think courting is important at the start of a relationship. I bring up as many hard things as I can. I don’t believe in a honeymoon of “hoping for the best”. I am a difficult person to mesh with. Doing so takes time and doesn’t always work.

I often wonder how often Gentleman regrets his choices when he says he truly wants an answer to a question. My answers are so weird.

Yesterday it was interesting talking about the different attitudes among California naturists. He was horrified that my children have spent time in mixed gender naked environments. I’m less worried about the naturists than I would be a member of the clergy. The naturists know they are skating on thin ice on the edge of society. They have reputations to uphold if they want to be permitted in the community. He is adamant that no right thinking person in the UK could possibly agree with my stance. It is wrong, in his view, to allow children to be around naked adults.

I contrast that with my lived experience of my children skating past body dysmorphia because they are comfortable with the full actual range of human presentation and they know that their meat sack is not what defines their importance. My kids arrived at mainstream school contemptuous of the idea they should go on a diet. How stupid. If you cut calories as a growing person you can’t build the healthy muscles and bones and brain you need. Fuck that shit. I attribute a lot of their casual approach to existing to the fact that they have seen people live thousands of ways and it is all part of the range of normal for them.

Yes, I am intrinsically unbothered by the idea that at some point my children might see you nude. As long as you don’t make it weird I don’t care that much. It’s the making it weird part that is the bad thing.

My kids negotiate boundaries better than 90% of adults. Yes, I think they know how to advocate for themselves in most different environments. We practiced. They aren’t thrown by things that bother most people. They also have meltdowns from not being able to handle things that are considered a mandatory and unavoidable part of life for other people. We avoid them. Life is ever more complex than one can nail down. There are no universal rules, none.

One of the books I just finished, The Social Distance Between Us: How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain, had some interesting bits. The author, Darren McGarvey, talked about interviewing an incredibly successful philanthropist and he noted that he struggled to be as pushy/forward as he intended to be. He was more deferential and gentle than he had intended to be. He noted his own inhibition when it comes to pushing someone of a “higher class”.

There are times when I feel this but mostly I have learned to push through it. Silicon Valley was a trip. I don’t know how I would manage someone in a UK setting where class is less about success in your career and more about who you were born. I’m going to continue to ride the wave of ignoring social hierarchy that I’ve been on most of my life. I was born to be used and abused until I die. Everything else I do is gravy. When you are born as trash you have a choice. You can comply and conform, which most humans are wired to do as instinctively as they breathe. Or you can decide that the hierarchy doesn’t apply to you and you will simply exist entirely outside of it.

I have gone with option B in this life. Noah loved that about me. I don’t conform neatly into any community or set of expectations. He also hated that about me because I couldn’t cut myself down to only what he wanted me to be. He hated that I didn’t think of myself as being better than other people. I can’t do that. Doing that is agreeing to the hierarchy and I can’t do that. I’m not better than anyone. The primary thing I do really well is not die when maybe I should.

Yeah, I’m diversely educated and I know how to do a lot of shit. Everyone else knows stuff I don’t. How can it be compared? I have no idea. I don’t really bother trying.

I play with class expectations, though. I dress up or down to fit in better. I bought a suit to wear in court and ended up not needing it. I am glad I didn’t buy an expensive one. I bought a capsule of rich bitch clothing for world travel. I hold on to the beloved, full of holes old stuff that reminds me where I come from. I make sure my big house is company ready most of the time. I want people to just drop in, and more people are doing so. I know how to do barely-there rich girl makeup and that’s it. I never mastered the art of makeup past that. I’m too lazy. Also I’m not that keen on looking in mirrors.

Which isn’t to say I ever fit in well no matter which direction I move on the slider. I don’t really fit anywhere. That’s ok. I don’t fit in well but I do know how to make a place for myself in most settings. Sort of? I’m not feeling confident lately. I’m isolated and lonely. I need to get over myself. I need to get out more. It’s hard because I’m going to run into more people who react with the same level of vehemence about my opinions being wrong as I got yesterday. He let it go and didn’t continue to press about how he now kinda considers me a low key pedo.

That is a hard thing to carry. I know in my bones what it means to grow up with a pedophile. It was my life. My children have been bubble wrapped to a shocking degree. I have literally witnessed almost their entire lives. Sometimes there were naked people around because we were in a public bathing type environment. I am fine with dying on the hill that public bathing is not inherently a sexual activity and it is not pedophilia for people to inhabit the same physical environment while nude.

But I don’t particularly want to. I understand that this is not the norm where I am right now. I don’t drive and there isn’t an appropriate place nearby. I’m not going to upend my life to seek out these opportunities going forward. Being prudish about nudity is not a morally superior attitude. That said, my house is a clothes on environment at this point. The casual attitude that Noah and many of our friends had of preferring to be naked has not crossed the pond. Here my house is a fucking fish bowl. I face a walking trail and people look in all day. If I want light from the windows I have to be fully visible to everyone who passes. We wear clothes.

I definitely feel like I have let a lot of standards slip over the past while. I notice all the places where things are needing fixed/replaced/cleaned up. In the long run my garden will be build up in height and I will have more visual privacy but it is going to take a few years. I need to learn how to do a lot of this myself because I don’t want to pay for anything I don’t have to. If I can do it then I should. I don’t have Noah breathing down my neck judging how I spend my time. Anything I could farm out so that I paid more attention to him was his preference. I have built a life here where I do so much less than I did in California. I feel like it is showing. I have fallen behind in a lot of maintenance tasks. I’m going to stay behind for at least the next ten months. I have to be realistic about the limits of my body given the shape of my life.

Until the next summer solstice. I have that long to be a mess. I don’t think I will ever have an easy time believing in the hope of the winter solstice again. I lost Noah three days later. Am I going to start losing the ability to sleep between the 21st and 25th of December because I am waiting to see who will die? That’ll suck. I hope not.

Shortie is making it very clear that one year of not celebrating is all she can handle. After that, we go back to celebrating on holidays because she needs them. I agreed that I will. She still needs to have the rest of her happy childhood after the year of sad. I don’t get to stop giving my kids a happy childhood. I still have to do that.

It’s going to be a lot harder now but we will be ok.

Yesterday was pretty great. We spent about four hours in the garden and then the kitchen. The stone fruit trees should have been pruned a month ago to prevent damage in winter storms, but it is what it is. We got it done. We also harvested 8kg of plums along with 700g of blackberries. Then we cleaned it and processed it. Blackberries became cobbler. The plums are in the fridge waiting to become jam. We will be making little gift bags of stuff we made from our harvest for holiday presents this year. That’s about as far as we are going to get with any celebration this time. Fuck. I can’t handle thinking about winter holidays.

I am overwhelmed thinking about more immediate things. I should get more organised. Maybe I’ll get work done today. Maybe.

A beautiful casting

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I’m trying not to be upset with myself for how hard this year is. It’s my first year without Noah. It’s a year of realising over and over that my relationship with Noah is now a fossil. It’s going to be remembered for the impact it had but it is gone. I had the best marriage I can imagine me getting to have.

It’s really hard how much I miss him. I feel so much guilt because I had so many hours I chose solitude over time with him. I was planning around a much longer marathon. I was trying to balance my needs. I should have sprinted more while I could. Someday I will have to forgive myself for this but I’m not ready yet. It’s ok to not be ready yet.

I hear his voice in my mind all the time. I see his ghost all over the house. I think in sentences that are shaped by how he prefers to receive information. Everything about me will be different for the rest of my life. I can’t go back to the day before him. I will never be in that place ever again. I will never again be expendable.

I keep trying to think about the future but it gets hazy and confused. I feel like my soul is trying to curl around him. How can I have a future without my beautiful man? I’m really glad we knew how lucky we were. I’m grateful that I can remember us sobbing and clinging to each other because we were both so overcome by the love we were able to receive from the other. I made Noah feel love.

Noah died with words of love on his lips. Well no. His last words were “Help me.” But the hours before that were euphoric. We took the day to hide and cuddle and recoup because that was our happy place. We were together in bed. There wasn’t much we liked more than that. He spent his last few hours talking about our commitment to one another. How lucky we were. How much we both appreciated this feeling of certainty: we were loved. Us. Even though we were both shitty. I didn’t have to be perfect to be good enough for him.

I’m really sad. I’m struggling to find patience. I’m getting the basics done but it is a lot harder to be fun. I’m trying. Shortie needs it.

I feel the approach of autumn in the air. It’s cold more often. The drops are harsher. For me, this is the start of the year still. I started teaching 24 years ago while I was still in college. It was a small class, I think six students? They were all returning to college after a big break. They said I made college seem a lot less scary and they were glad for my help. I helped them see that they already know how to express themselves; they just needed help with formatting.

As a witch the new year starts in November after Samhain. Tax things think the year starts in January in one country and April for the other. (For the two I deal with. I am not speaking for all countries.)

For me I hit high gear in September. It’s time to look ahead and plan what to learn for the next year. How will these learning goals be accomplished? How will progress and knowledge be measured? I haven’t given a test or assigned a grade in 17 years. Learning in the real world works differently. I feel so much more responsibility on my shoulders. There were a lot of subjects that I waved off to Noah. Now it is only me. I feel like I have no idea what I can promise being able to handle for the next year. I suspect that the first 18 months will be a haze of survival mode.

I am barely holding on to reality beyond the doors of my house. I am so grateful I have the support to do this. I feel like I have been gifted a cocoon. I know how bad and hard things could be for me right now. I can’t imagine going through this without my in-laws. That is a weird thing. I am not doing a great job with administrative work. There is so much. I don’t know how people do this and work full time jobs while raising young children. I should probably go talk to the widows more, again. I’m struggling. I lack a rudder.

I can feel my soul yearning for Noah. My fingers reach for him in my sleep and I wake up to cry over and over.

I had a happily ever after. I held a supernova. Letting go hurts. My soul hurts so much. The chunk of my heart that he held has now crystalised into a fossil remnant. It feels like a brand. It is so painful.

Something that I wonder about a lot lately, is the light in California really as golden as I remember? I remember even the most pallid of goths from my past in terms of golden light bouncing off their skin. Some people are more shiny. Noah glowed in the most tepid of early morning light, let alone when the sun was high in the sky. In the sunset he looked like a torch of light. It is different here. The light is cool and clear. Colours jump out in very vivid ways, because the light is so clear you can see a bigger range. In California everything is vaguely sepia all the time.

The final third of my marriage was the most peaceful. I’m glad I got to have that. I don’t think it would have been possible if we had stayed in the baking sun. We wouldn’t have slowed down and spent all that time together. I’m glad I picked him. I’m glad that he picked me. My biggest complaint about my marriage is that I only got 18 years. That is not so bad as complaints go.

I intend to go have a future I feel like that about. I will make it good. I need it to be good. So I will find a way or make a way. I have to. I have babies who need me to find a way forward. I will. I will go forward. I didn’t want to do this without Noah. Oh well. No one gets everything they want.

When I think about what I got to have the weight of it settles my nervous system. Someone gave me his whole life. He took care of me to the best of his considerable ability. He learned how to take care of me with me and he provided consistency when I struggled. He was my keeper.

I am sad. I knew I was living the best days of my life. At least we knew it.

“Is it easier now?”

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Yesterday I was asked if my life has gotten easier because I don’t have to route around Noah anymore. She meant well. She is struggling with stuff in her own life and she’s not sure if an ending would be a good thing for her or not. I can understand why she asked. It doesn’t feel like a callous question.

No, my life is not easier. If anything it is so much harder that I feel like I can barely stand up under the load. I spent my marriage trying desperately to live up to Noah’s standards with him as scaffolding and support teaching me how. Now I’m left trying to keep this going and it feels like far too much for me. I was not brought up to be someone who knows how to handle most of the things I now have to do. I’m making it up as I go along and I am terribly out of my depth.

Same pal said a couple of years ago, “I can’t fathom dealing with the amounts of money you go through.” Yeah. It breaks my head too. When I married Noah I had just barely gotten to the point where I could afford a studio apartment instead of living in my car. Now I have to maintain this house. This house that my children desperately want to keep because it is the last place their father lived.

Gentleman asked me some questions recently, basically how I earn a living to support the lifestyle I have. I felt like a fraud. What do I do? It feels like not much. How did I earn this lifestyle? Well, I’m really good at sucking dick. Also, I’m great at self denial. I turned down a lot of fun for a lot of years because I was saving money. Also Noah earned an obscene amount of money. Combine my impulses towards saving with Noah’s ability to earn and here we are. 28 more months on the mortgage then I reduce what I have to spend every month. I’m paying off the roof I had to replace.

I also have doors that are no longer functional that need to be replaced. Windows that are rotting. And a sink in the upstairs bathroom that doesn’t drain at all. The cold water tap in the bath tub has completely stopped working at all. It makes my stomach curdle thinking about all the repairs and work I need to do. I know my in laws will cover it but it makes me feel really bad.

What do I do to deserve this? Nothing. I don’t deserve it. I just have it because life isn’t fair and there is no such thing as deserve. I will have this going forward because I am still not raising my children at the lifestyle level my in laws would prefer. We have not accepted their help much before Noah’s death. We were about to. He was in the process of retiring to be my full time carer because of how fast my body is crumbling.

Gentleman told me to be careful because people are going to want to use me for my money. I giggled. Like I don’t hand money to people constantly as a way of life. Only now that’s trickier. I’m keeping up with budget tracking slightly better. I run out of Social Security money approximately on the 18th of the month because of all the standing bills. Past that, the investment money fills in until the 23rd, roughly. That last week is going to have to be covered by my in laws every month.

How can I hand a lot of money away now? I don’t have enough of my own to cover the month. It’s weird having money locked in limbo that I still can’t touch thanks to probate/confirmation. (Finalising a death is probate in the US and England and it is called confirmation in Scotland. As I was told with many supporting details by my Scottish solicitor.) I have enough to cover the difference in income and need over the next two-ish years by myself once I get access to that one damn bank account again. That was the savings account where I saved for travel. If I can’t afford a trip in advance I don’t take it. Right now I’m trying to get up my nerve to tell my inlaws that I need more to cover the rest of the year. This sucks so hard.

I feel like the practical thing is selling this house and buying one in slightly better repair that costs half as much. It isn’t that hard. I’ve looked. Thing is, all of those options are ones where we will not enjoy living together in an ongoing way. We won’t have enough space to do all the stuff we normally do at home. I won’t be able to grow much of any food and I’d be in neighbourhoods where people would not appreciate me trying to let a wild jungle grow in my garden. Right now I’m far enough out from town that my quirkiness isn’t a big deal.

I don’t know that I will ever have the hand spoons to do giant murals in my house again. I suspect that if I moved I would not have the spirit to try. I feel broken. I don’t have a fantastic Wonderland to share anymore. The magic maker is gone. The person who made me feel like it was ok for me to do anything I wanted is gone.

Up-side: I could buy a house in an area where the schools would be less likely to beat my daughter and maybe she could figure out the transition to school. Would that help her feel more Scottish? There’s no guarantee though. I got beat in almost every single one of the 25 schools I went to. I’m pretty sure my daughter is going to have the same kind of big mouth I have. Uprooting our whole life so she can maybe only get beaten a little is a big gamble.

No, nothing is easier now.

I’m not that worried about someone wanting to use me for money. I will continue to pay for dinners for friends because even with things as tight as they are for me… I am still walking an easier road than many. My in laws are happy to make sure my lifestyle doesn’t slip that far because they don’t want my kids to know want. I am already seeing the ways that once I stop paying for all the costs associated with Noah’s death, my spending will decrease quite a bit. His death is costing between 2 and 3 months of run money. It’s an expensive year again.

My social security income will be stable until 2034. It covers almost half of my normal expenses for the life I had with Noah. Paying for his death has put this year up in the realm of normal expense. Solicitors, lawyers, and accountants are all more expensive than usual this year. I don’t like the idea of needing my in laws to intervene constantly for the next 20 years. I mean, at some point the will sell the ranch. Either they will decide to split it 4 ways or 8 ways. That means my household will either get 1/4 or 1/2 of the profit. That ranch is kinda ridiculous. It blows my mind that some time in the next 5 or so years that money is going to show up.

I don’t need to think about how I’m going to earn enough money to make it to 2048 when I can use age limited accounts. It’s too scary to contemplate right now. An awful lot of that time I will be able to work and so will the kids. We’ll be fine. We won’t have the same kind of life that Noah provided but we will be ok.

It’s weird knowing that. It’s not in doubt. I may have to do things I don’t love. I may not be able to assure my children as much permanent security as I would prefer but I will leave my disabled kids in a pretty damn good position. They will be safe. They won’t have lavish wealth to throw away but they can survive and be safe. They will be able to pay for their own medical care. They probably won’t have nice cars.

I’ve not been writing about this much. Eldest Child is sick all the fucking time. He’s going to have a challenging life.

I am highly conscious of the fact that I am in a bridge period. It doesn’t exactly feel like limbo this time. Limbo is painful in a different way. This feels like a much more self aware and dramatic methodical process. Sometimes crossing a bridge is hard in times of difficult weather. That is part of crossing a bridge. It may not be easy but there is a clear starting point and a clear end. I am moving from being Noah’s wife to being Noah’s widow. My aunt-in-law still writes my letters to Mrs. Noah Gibbs. She can’t spell my name at all. Yeah.

Realistically I am trying to close the gap until they sell the ranch. That is the difficult part. I should assume 5 years even though she would like to do it faster. With the collapse of the US government this could be an interesting ride. The UK government isn’t far behind. Thanks, Russia. You couldn’t be satisfied with taking Livejournal.

As Noah’s wife I felt I had the safety to be completely out about my queer, kinky antics. I’ve kept my mouth shut about most of that since I moved to Scotland. This is a more conservative community. The way I write about myself is many degrees more outlandish here than it is in the States. The political climate is such that wisdom would indicate that I should climb back in the closet. That seems silly to me. The WayBack Machine is no longer to be trusted. We can’t say that the internet is forever. The US government is trying to wipe mentions of all thinks queer and kinky.

A long time ago, when I was a young kinkster, I got to sit at the feet of intense and beautiful women who had been living as sexual outlaws for their entire lives. As I watch the governments doing their best to implode on both sides of the pond I can’t help but wonder what I have done to myself. I have never been able to be secretive in the ways they do. I am not able to hide the things I do without shame. I think sex is good for people and kink that is done with self awareness around harm reduction is a great hobby.

It is both easier and harder now. I do not have the threat of Noah standing behind me anymore. I will probably never have a significant protector again in this life. I am unlikely to ever have a relationship with someone who has more resources and force to provide than I have. I am the force in my life. I am the head of my household. I will be for the rest of my life. My children will never see anyone I date as being the boss of the family. That could not possibly happen. They didn’t think their fucking father was the boss. When someone asked us who is the boss all four of their heads pointed at me. Noah believed that he was serving me. That was what Owning me meant. It was a very complicated relationship. Before things go south with the governments I really need to cross post everything from other social media sites. I’m feeling really worried about spamming the fuck out of the email people. I’ve been prolific over the last couple of years. It’s easily several novels worth of reading. That feels rude.

Why are you people so crazy? Isn’t the real question why am I so crazy? Why do I want all of this in a consistent archive? Now it isn’t about helping Noah understand me anymore. Now it is about letting people come find me if I am the kind of person they need to find. Sobonfu told me I would have to build the community I want to inhabit. That’s a really scary thought. Matisse says that if you write about yourself you run out of things to say. I have never hit this wall. I’m 25 years in.

I am going to transfer everything. I’m having mixed feelings about what to do with Noah’s entries. I feel like I should go reread all of his long writings about life and about me. I won’t read his whole professional history of writing. That’s too vast and I won’t understand a lot of it without intense study. I’m not Alexander Hamilton’s widow. I’m Skye O’Malley. My life will not be spent memorialising him. I will cry when I think about him. He will be one of the many men I have loved. He will be the one I loved the most, my only mate. He was the father to my motherhood.

I don’t think I will ever allow anyone to take care of me or be my protector. I’m on my own now. I have to manage with small bits of help. I’m not built for celibacy. It is what it is.

No, my life is not easier now. And I’m not so flush with cash that I am worried about being taken advantage of. I am very good at saying no when I don’t feel flush. Right now I am looking at long term security over short term fun. Like I have for most of my life. Sure, I splash out sometimes but only after I’ve paid Future Me and made sure the futures of my dependents are secured. As long as I’m looking at calendar days and figuring out when I have to ask for help I am not independently secure. I need to close that gap on my own. I don’t like asking for their help. It doesn’t make me feel great. I am grateful. I am going to take it because I’m not that self hating. I’m not going to suffer for pride. Fuck it.

I’m ok saying that my life has been hard enough. I don’t need to hurry up and leave the place where I planted all these trees.

2034 is when my income will change and then it will change again in 2036. I have that long to figure out how to ride it out till 2048 when my life will get easier. Do you know what is crazy? If I am even a little bit careful I will make sure all three of my kids are ok permanently. They will have their basic income covered. It’s not enough to easily move out and be independent. That would require a full time normal job. They will have enough to collectively maintain this house and buy food and pay for utilities. If they split it, it won’t be very impressive. It may be enough to keep them unable to get benefits but not able to get by comfortably.

They are going to have to work but it won’t have to be full time. I come back over and over in my life to the idea that the dog bite was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I had a basic poverty level income to build on. It was something reliable and I needed to fill the gaps above that. It supported me living in my car. At least I could afford the car.

Thank you, Larry. I know you are mad about how I wrote about you in the book. I wasn’t trying to hurt your feelings. I’m really grateful for you. You were a complicated force in my life. Thank you for sharing your culture, your family, your home, your love, and your legal services. Thank you for teaching me about the long run.

Speaking of which, time to go make breakfast and kiss people awake. I am so glad to see you again.

Parenting is going to be the big journey

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With every passing day I settle into this new shell to a different depth. It’s hard. I am so anxious it is unreal. I feel like I don’t know how to move forward without Noah to support me. I learn more with every passing day.

For the vast majority of my time the kids are the only people I talk to. They are going to be the people I live with for the longest in life. In two years I will have lived with my son longer than I lived with his father. I never wanted to be away from Noah. This hurts so much.

I’m really sad about the ways that my daughter is manifesting her grief. Every day she talks to me about how I need to find someone to marry because she needs a dad. I can see this massive wound forming in her and it scares me so much. The hole of needing a father drove a lot of my life. It shaped my romantic relationships in dramatic ways. I am worried about her. I am not able to fill all of her needs. My attempts to form more intense relationships on her behalf are not going great. I send messages and I don’t get responses.

I feel like I am failing her. It’s a very different kind of support for the big kids and we are all more or less doing ok with taking care of each other. Shortie has a good 4 hours a day of attention-need that is above and beyond what the big kids and I can provide. It is the hole Noah filled. We can’t expand enough to plug the hole. We are all at reduced capacity.

I have been talking very frankly with the kids about how I know I am not fully meeting their emotional needs. I’m trying but I don’t have enough capacity to be the sole sustaining parent carrying both sides of the load that existed with two parents. This is hard on all sides. I really appreciate that we are all being patient with each other around our reduced capacity in most ways. Well, sorta. Seven is always a challenging age. This time I am going through a rough stage while dealing with overwhelming life trauma. It’s extra spicy.

Every morning I wake them up and I tell them that I am glad to see them again. I watch them breathe that in. Their chest expands and their faces lighten. All of them. They feel this ritual. They believe it. Noah and I did that. We made people who feel loved all the way to the marrow of their bones. They breathe it in like air.

When we have conflict or they do something they shouldn’t I remind them that I made a promise on the day they were born. I will forgive their mistakes. I hope I can in return earn their forgiveness. I talk early and often about restitution and repairing mistakes. They all tell me that I am good at letting go of things that upset me. I don’t seethe or rage in an ongoing way. I may have a sharp outburst of anger when something happens but it passes quickly. I am so glad they experience me that way.

A long time ago a therapist told me that when it comes to evaluating what kind of person someone is one should speak to the children not the coworkers or friends.

I’ve had to have some uncomfortable conversations with my son. He got the worst brunt of my anger. Sometimes it is hard for him to see his sister getting an “easier” deal than he got. He remembers when I screamed for long periods of time when I was overwhelmed. He remembers a handful of overzealous punishments as “all the time” in the way of time dilation for trauma memories. It’s about being in the always/never place. He asks bitterly why I don’t treat her the way I treated him.

Baby, no part of her life is like yours. I don’t have the emotional and physical energy I did. I don’t have the money to support the same kinds of shenanigans going forward. My son had traveled more by 3 than my daughter has by 7. That’s going to continue to be an ever widening gap because I won’t be traveling like that going forward. I can’t. He asks why she isn’t “losing her Disneyland trip” because of a stupid petty prank she pulled. Dude. This is going to be the only one of her early childhood memory. Literally one. You used to spend two weeks a year there. There was one year where you had five weeks spread between Disney World and Disneyland. You lost one long weekend trip at her age because you managed to hide a scheme you were pulling for three months.

There will never be parity between you. Do not demand that she get all the shit when she can get very little of the good. That is not justice. She is going to have less grandiose good. Yeah, a lot of her punishments are going to seem less severe. She is already dealing with an entire life that is radiating pain.

Do you really want her to remember you as a bully during this horrible time in her life? I sure as fuck don’t. I’m being patient when I don’t want to be. I’m letting her wake me up by kicking me in the fucking head every night. I did the same thing to my mother. I remember her complaints. It feels like justice.

I am a single mother. Like my mother. Like my sister. Like my brother’s ex-wife. I am the only widow. Well, auntie lost her husband in her late 70’s. She is a widow too. Somehow it seems different. I am not speaking with any of them. I just think of them and feel sad.

I think of the ways I don’t want to raise my children. I think a lot about the patterns I will not pass down. I think of exploitation and shaming and weaponised incompetence and codependency.

I choose to believe that conscious interdependence where people have the right to opt out of pieces whenever they need to is different. Maybe I am lying to myself but I doubt it. Interdependence is the norm for humanity. Ok, mostly folks aren’t allowed to choose all of their roles.

There is, quite obviously, no actual metric mothers are held to. We are unobserved by outsiders for the majority of our best and worst moments. They are private. I believe this is why my therapist said that the only people whose opinion matters are the children. So far the primary complaint my children have of me is the same one their father had: they wish they could have even more of me.

That seems less damning in a parent/child dynamic. I give a lot. I give for a lot of hours in a day. They are so great my kids wish they could have more. The older they get, the more tired they get, and the more forgiveness they have for me running out of give. They can see that I am giving at my limit.

It is weird how much the success of my days is measured in the amount of time I spend absorbing the emotional experience of other people. I take all of it that I can.

I am seeing the differences emerge. This third child is going to be the reader. She is reading almost two years ahead of either big kid. She doesn’t have Noah. I can’t replace how much he read. I literally can’t. She has been taking a lot of initiative lately. This is mixed.

It is really hard not having Noah around for family meetings. We’ve now had our second. The first for conflict mediation since he died. We have mostly been getting along shockingly well. Chore negotiation is a flat fail. None of us can keep to a schedule. We are still navigating stuff day by day. I feel weary to my soul. I can’t plan for what I will accomplish in three days let alone every week for the next month. Speaking of which, oh shit. I forgot the bins again. Time to go start the day. I’m a day late and a dollar short, as usual.

Some day this will change, right?

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I wake up ungodly early in the morning. I retreat to my studio. There I can scream as much as I need to. Noah ensured that I have a sound proof room so I can deal with my emotions without bothering anyone. Now I come out here and scream at the top of my lungs because I want Noah back. I scream his name over and over. My throat has been hoarse all year.

I am cleaning and consolidating things in the house. I’m getting rid of stuff in layers. I’m reorganising.

I’m scared to stay in this house. It’s expensive. I’m super sad to think of leaving because my garden is *amazing* and will keep improving with every passing year.

A couple of years ago I started talking about looking forward to my 60th birthday. I want to throw a party. Only I can’t imagine doing so without Noah. I can’t imagine much being joyful without Noah. Only he really was awful at my birthdays? I don’t know why I am so convinced that things will be worse without him? Because everything is worse without him. Sleeping, eating, breathing is worse without him. I miss him so much that I feel like I want to do anything I can to get out of being alive. I should take up every vice. Any hobby that might shorten my lifespan goes on the list.

I used to believe that it was ok for me to hit 70 because Noah would be there with me. Instead, like my brother and my father I am going to catch up to him in age and then overtake him. Noah stopped at 48. My dad stopped at 48. It feels like I am so bad that men can’t live longer than that when I am in the picture.

Thus I am dating someone who is over 50. I am skipping the danger zone.

My soul hurts. I don’t want to move forward. I don’t have a choice. I decided to have three children. My baby is only 7. I don’t get to stop. I feel like I have one foot in the grave already because I don’t want to be here. I don’t feel suicidal.

It is weird how I feel completely unentitled to ever consider suicide again. I never get to quit. I am not my father. I don’t get to choose to wuss out on the hard part. I can’t leave my kids alone. When Noah was still around it was different. It would be awful but they would still be loved and cared for. Now I have to fight to stay alive more so than ever before.

My garden is flourishing this year. It’s super freaking hot and everything is growing with manic delight. It’s over 20C on the regular and that’s pretty absurd up here. Maxed out at 28C. (That’s 82F for you Americans.) It will cross 80F fewer than 10 days out of the year. I used to have that many days of crossing 100F. This is better. Fremont was a good micro-climate for California. I am in a delightful temperate patch in Scotland. I don’t get the worst of the wind or rain or snow.

I feel overwhelmed with sadness and grief. I feel flattened. I feel like I cannot cope and move forward. It doesn’t matter how I feel. It matters what I do.

I will move forward.

I am struggling.

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There is so much my kids need right now and I can’t do it. I tried to arrange help but it didn’t work out. Shortie is out of her mind with boredom and I have no more to give. The big kids are really struggling with post covid recovery. We are all so tired. We are taking naps, often together, almost every day. We are all barely limping through each day. I’m feeling bad about all the ways I am not enough. My kids are used to having a second full time parent who is supportive and involved all day every day. I can’t replace that.

Every so often I take time out of the house to try to recharge my batteries. Yesterday was such a day. I went to an event in town that lasted half the day and I wrapped around the event having date time.

Today is the one year anniversary of my most recent rape. I’m looking forward to when I don’t remember the exact date just “after Pride”.

Today is 6.5 months after Noah dying.

Today it is almost 4 months since I started dating this guy. I’m not one to move slowly. Life doesn’t slow down for me. There is always more coming and more to cope with.

I’m feeling guilty about the fact that I think I am partly dating because outside of the intimacy of sex I don’t know how to feel comfortable with people most of the time. Gentleman and I are a funny pair. He asks me if my friends are talking shit about him. I ask him how he is adapting to having to endure me touching him. My friends aren’t talking shit. He is enjoying having someone want to touch him; it’s a novelty.

I think I am as oriented around relationships as I am because I have spent my entire life playing “Pass the parcel” with allowing my interactions with someone else guide my change. I always have to be trying to change. That’s simply mandatory.

I was telling him about Jenny, how she and I have done a lot of copying each other back and forth through our whole lives to the point where people seriously think we are sisters and sometimes the same person. He jokes that I am the bigger copy cat because I moved to Scotland and found an English guy too.

Jenny had another good friend, L, and the three of us were in the same grade at school. We did a fair bit of being friends together. I was the one who dated much older people more often. Then the two of them married men who are 15 years older than us and I married the guy who was only 5 years older. Their husbands are still moving forward and mine is not. I am not working as hard to find someone closer to my age at this point. That was not as much of a protective factor as I thought it would be.

I like Gentleman. He’s not Noah. He doesn’t feel like my home. It’s hard and weird seeing the ways that it is a good thing. I needed the threat of violence and punishment in order to feel like I was at home and having that leave my life is really hard. Noah didn’t want to harm me. He didn’t want me to flinch away from him because I was afraid. Sometimes I did flinch because I was afraid. I tried not to. Nothing makes people feel compelled to hit you like flinching and wincing. I miss him so much. I can also feel the ways that stress is leaving my body because I don’t need to be afraid of displeasing him anymore.

That feels hard to admit.

I miss him. I didn’t mind the tension of being afraid of displeasing him. I wanted to be anxious about pleasing him. I wanted that to be the focus of my life. I wanted to keep soothing his wounds and worries and terror. I wanted to be the one who made him feel safe and loved and accepted. I liked being his person. Being his safe space felt like a worthy accomplishment for my life. Now what?

I keep moving. I have to make new purpose for myself.

I don’t know if I will ever feel like I have a home again. Do I feel safe here? Sitting in this room where that shit man raped me? Sitting in this room where Noah punished me the day after I had surgery because I didn’t react right to being raped? Sitting on this couch, in fact. The rape happened on the other couch.

This room is becoming mostly the place where I am having an affair with Gentleman. I am not sad about that.

I am still sad Noah got so mad at me. I am still sad that he saw my reaction as a betrayal of him. I am still sad that he wanted to manipulate my focus through pain and fear. I am still sad that I upset him and hurt him so much that he had to hurt me back. That anniversary is still two weeks away. It’s all so recent. It is so long ago. I want to go back to the day of the last party for Pride last year. Maybe if I had not wanted to make a friend this whole thing could have been averted. Maybe I wouldn’t have been raped. Maybe Noah wouldn’t be dead. I am so sad.

Even as I try to figure out what a future with Gentleman could potentially look like I know that every cell of my body misses Noah. Noah was shitty and petty and vindictive and mean, just like me. We matched. We validated each other. He gave me purpose and belonging and a place. He made me feel wanted and needed. He made me feel like I was the most important person on the face of the earth. It was a lot of pressure and it was really hard.

It was worth it.

I am not ok and I don’t know if I ever will be again. There are good parts to my life. There are things that make me happy and there are things that bring me joy and connection. I’m doing my best to reach for the light. It’s just really hard right now. I mean, I recognise the amount of luxury and privilege in my life at the moment. I have the ability to dwell and ruminate to my heart’s content. I hate being disabled and stuck idle. At least I am safe. I don’t have to worry about survival.

Even without Noah I still have the bottom layer of Maslow’s hierarchy covered. I have most of the safety level. There is this little problem of being born into my life circumstance with my body. It’s not a safe place. But mostly I’m safe. Mostly I’m almost a person. I’m still working on every level up to self actualisation. Because I can. I know how lucky I am.

I am scared but I won’t slow down. I have to keep moving.

It’s a new month

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I am caught up on budgeting paper work. I have booked the rescheduled birthday trip for Shortie. I am dreading it. I don’t have any desire to travel. I think it sounds like a nightmare. Disneyland Paris is full of rude people. It’s deeply unpleasant but I’m not going back to the US and Shortie feels cheated out of the Disney experience. Maybe it is good that her only option is not as fun so it won’t feel as hard to miss doing it more over the years.

I’m freaking out about money. I’m not doing this trip the way I normally would. It’s shorter and cheaper. We are also going to hop through seeing a bunch of friends in London and on the continent. Holy fuck. That’s a thing in my life now. I’m going to wander through Europe stopping in homes in 3 countries. That’s pretty darn cool. This is the normal my daughter is going to experience. She won’t have the experience of driving around the US to see my far flung friends. She will have a more global experience. Damn.

Noah gave this to us.

I feel weird about the way I am thinking about Noah and new people in the same breath. It’s a very me thing to do and all. I am struggling with how intensely I feel about defending that my marriage was good even though there are pieces of it I could never endure again because it was too hard. I mean, if I could have Noah back I would climb under that grindstone and lay flat. I can’t give that to anyone else. I miss Noah so much. I feel really overwhelmed and upset that my baby girl doesn’t get to have him for most of her childhood. She was only 6 and that is destroying my soul. She was his baby. She spent so much more time with him in the first 6 years than the other two did for their own early childhoods. He didn’t start working at home until after the road trip, I think. Maybe even not till I was pregnant? I can’t remember for sure. I think Middle Child was 7 or 8 when he started working at home. Right before Shortie came.

Shortie has been interrupting him for attention all day her entire life. She was on his chest in a carrier as a baby and under his desk lying on his feet as a toddler and on his piano within arm’s reach as small child. She was with him for a good solid 6 hours out of every day. She divided her other time between me and the big kids. In most ways, Noah was her favourite parent. I’ve been doing stuff her whole life (like painting this house and working in the garden and being on committees) and I didn’t need the clingy baby experience again. I let Noah have it this time. He really loved it.

The cosmic injustice of her losing him staggers me.

In a way I feel worst for her because the older kids, in moments of abject panic and grief, have both separately told me in hurried bursts that they are grateful that I am not the one who had to die early because that would have gone way worse. They bonded to me in a way Shortie did not and I feel really bad about that right now. For so much of my first 10 years of parenting it was me and the kids. If you add up all the trips away from Noah we spent close to 2 years of that on the road. He worked long hours with a long commute for most of that time. He didn’t spend 24 hours with us in a week.

We were paying Future Us. We were putting in that time so we could have the fun retirement that we wanted together. Would I have made different choices if I had known what I was facing? I don’t know.

He always promised I could die first. I always did have this sneaky suspicion that he was a lot more fragile than he could feel. He was very disconnected from his body. The last surgery he had was pretty fraught and the anesthesiologist (I think they spell it differently here and I should try to get better about this one) was grateful I warned her about the cascade of backup plans she was going to need.

He wasn’t sturdy like he thought of himself as being. He broke so many bones in the time I knew him and always massive, unusual, freakish breaks. I feel so fucking bad that I pushed him into fucking ice skating. I ripped him away from my babies because I wanted him to be more active. That didn’t work out well for me.

It is hard to feel ok about pushing people on diet and exercise, enh? Apparently I’m not very good at looking after a husband. I wasn’t good enough at CPR to keep him alive for the 8 minutes until the ambulance arrived. I see his face when I close my eyes. He was so blue. It is hard to let go of the feeling like too much content with me means early death. Look at my dad and my brother and now Noah.

My other rapists aren’t dropping dead though. Maybe people are not tainted by a one off fuck up. They need to hurt me a lot for a long time.

I’m having a lot of feelings.

I am feeling overwhelmed to the marrow of my bones. I am moving forward slowly and carefully. I am scared. I am sad. I am so sad I feel dizzy and winded and ephemeral. I want to move forward.

I think today is going to be a day where the best I can do is to stand still without collapsing. I think that is the short term goal. The key to happiness is low expectations.

Noah’s horror was that he would be my stability and provider and I would run off to have fun with other people and abandon him. I feel some bitter fucking irony all the Cheese damned time. I never abandoned him. I stayed with him. I was deeply devoted to him. I need him and it hurts really bad that it doesn’t matter. He is gone and that need will go unmet for the rest of my life. I need him like I still need the parents I should have had. All dead or dead to me.

I’m scared all the time. Covid has hit our house really hard this time. We are all so tired we are barely functioning. I’m glad I didn’t put the kids in school so they could be in trouble for missing school because they are sick. Life is hard. Everyone is just trying to get by.

I think, today, we should take out some compost and spread it around. It’s time to put some liquid gold on these trees. Oh it’s a foul smelling, glorious bunch. I’m excited. I’m a weirdo like that.

Farmer Krissy had a garden E-I-E-I-O.

I go nuts with choruses of that song, let me tell you. 1.5kg of fruit harvested yesterday. The kids finally see what I have been working towards. I knew it just took patience and time and a lot of fucking weeding. It’s coming.

I’m not growing enough veg. We should put more seeds out in the spots I have already been weeding. It’s that time of year.

I agree with my kids that I will have an easier time stumbling forward than Noah would have. I think he was telling the truth when he said that any amount of less from me would break him. He needed me to love him so much it made up for his mom having PTSD and not attaching securely to him when he was young. I feel like I was failing him. I gave him as much as I could but it was never enough.

Now breakfast is ready. The day must begin. I will set these ghosts down and concentrate on the food and plants and people in front of me.

This is harder than it used to be.

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I’m still feeling comfortable in the walled garden. I think it is partly because my range of topics is limited and that guide is comfortable. I’m having a hard time writing here. I am more afraid of the consequences, partly because I will weave all the different categories together.

I’m really deep in my feelings, partly because there is a lot I shouldn’t do yet. Today is day 22 post-surgery. Tomorrow is week 27 without Noah. Six months and a week.

I keep thinking about Travel Boyfriend. That is a man who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. I haven’t explained what happened here. Some day, not too far in the future, I will start cross-posting all the stuff I wrote while hiding in the walled garden. It will be intense. My apologies to the email receivers.

I will probably do statuses in batches else it would be truly unhinged. There are over 500 journal entries. A great many of them are 10+ minute reads. As always, read what you want to and skip what you don’t. Me writing is never a mandate that anyone needs to read it or respond to it.

I feel like I need to move the whole story here and I need to figure out more about making back ups. I suspect at some point I will want to wade in and steal chunks for books. They are coming. That’s probably going to be my post-kid career. I will have to figure out how to sell books. Ew.

What am I having a hard time saying here?

Noah and I were having a rocky phase because I needed to go back to being poly. I am not by nature a monogamous person. I have a lot of personality/self to go around. Absolutely no one wants all of me. Not even Noah. Noah thought he could command me to change and have me no longer have the parts he didn’t care for. I say “command” as if it was simple. We did close to 20 years of hypnosis play and NLP. We did thousands of hours of work. He tried very hard to change me to get rid of the parts he didn’t want.

I’m always going to fall in love with people. I have been hiding from that by staying home and not letting myself develop intense friendships since I moved here.

It takes around 400 hours of shared time to establish a friendship; it works best if this happens over a short time. It takes around 2 years to get into a secure bond in a relationship.

(I’m thinking about Gentleman, the man I am seeing.) To make the math easier I am going to assume 15 hours a week. Many weeks it has been more than that, a few it was less. We just passed 15 weeks. 225 hours. If I include the fact that there have been a few weeks with way extra because of helping me with surgery, 250 hours.

We very often have differences of opinions. We give each other funny looks, shrug, and move on. It is an easy relationship. He doesn’t irritate me much. Everyone irritates me.

I catch myself asking questions about how he interacted with the children of his ex’s. He has mostly dated single mothers and that has been a fraught experience in a few ways. Mostly in the sense of making him afraid to attach. That worries me a little.

I have to be honest that as I think about dating it is important to me that my children see me do so in a way that I would feel good about modeling. I need to only bring people around my children if they are good enough to be role models.

Why date? Why not just mourn?

I’m seeking sources of energy. My life takes a lot out of me. I can’t crumble into nothingness and go join the mushrooms in the forest. That option is not open to me. I have to move forward. That means I need to have energy. The big way I get a lot of energy is sex. I promise that I’ve tried a lot of other ways. Yeah, I need to do all the body maintenance stuff too like diet, exercise (I cross train like it is my job), time alone, and rest. I know.

I need the energy. I need it. I need to not feel like I am stumbling forward in a blind haze. If I stumble forward I am going to trip and fall and hurt myself. I need to step forward confidently, even when I am not confident.

So far Gentleman is willing to figure out what polyamory means. He has a shockingly open mind and easy going mannerisms. Part of me feels like I should test that in a meaningful way before he meets my kids. I say that because I know who I want to explore dating from my friend-group.

I actually told Noah a few years ago that I suspected that I would eventually want to date this exact woman. I want to get to know her better first, but she is deeply intriguing to me. I have worked with her on community stuff. I see her around. She always flirts, just a bit. It got slightly more obvious this weekend. Not overt. Not a demand. A very subtle offer.

I no longer want to pretend I don’t see these things. I don’t want to retreat and run away because that is what I am required to do. I want to show up, say yes, and see what happens. I’m going to court slow and steady. I might have a lot of vocabulary to teach. That’s fine. I’ve been training for that for my whole dang life.

There was excitement in casting a wide net for my first hunt. I can’t deny that. Coming out of it with someone I like as much as I like Gentleman makes such a wide net less attractive. Instead of putting that much energy into necessary failure I’d rather rest or talk to him.

That doesn’t mean I want to hop into monogamy and start shaping my life around him. I specifically don’t want that. I don’t want him trying to fill Noah’s shoes. That’s a really bad set up for all concerned.

I am the head of my household and that is going to stay true. I want to have good friends who are good role models for my kids. There will be a diverse array of role models because I want my kids to see that I really do believe that it takes all kinds. I’m not going out with a shopping list of “types”. That’s not my point at all.

I feel a spark with lots of people, historically. I have not allowed myself to feel this much since I moved here. I think I’m going to allow myself to flirt. I will see what happens. I don’t think I’m going to do frequent drift net fishing. And when I do, it will come with writing requirements.

Do you know part of what is hot about this woman? She’s written a lot down. I can go find out what it looks like in her brain. I like that a lot. I’m in for such a glorious ride. It’s going to be more awkward to navigate flirting because I don’t do that in front of my kids.

In order to keep it from being obvious who I am fucking I’m going to have to start spending time with a lot more people. That’s going to be fascinating to manage. It means that for all of the people I date, there will need to be a non-flirty friendship core. We will have to have a comfortable mode that involves no amount of sexual tension. I’m going to go back to acting like I did when the older kids were young. Very prudish in front of the children. No hand holding, no kissing, no longing looks. Nada. What I have been doing since I moved here.

I am going to have to grow more comfortable with that kind of dichotomy. I need to have a public face that has no sexuality involved at all. That’s going to be a change. The last 8-ish years, Noah and I were a lot more flirty and grabby and we did kiss. It felt like a reasonable thing? We always landed in no more festive than PG-13 territory.

Now that is a harder thing. My children will not see a revolving door of bodies through my bed. I was really fucked up by watching my sister cycle through terrible men. She only felt seen by people who would punch her when she was antagonistic and mean enough.

I want better patterns and trends than that. I see a woman way out in front of me. The Future Me that I’m going to be some day. That woman is one who makes Vicki proud. Noah will be proud of me too. I don’t think my parents would be proud of me. It’s ok, I have a very proud Dad in my life.

There are a lot of patterns and events in my past that I know to look for. I have seen people be poly in a lot of crappy ways. Also, good ways.

It is time to get started on the day. I want to feel less ashamed. I think that means I should be doing my talking to myself the way I used to. People who shame me for it are not good people for me to bond to. That’s ok. There are millions of reasons for people to not be compatible with me. Billions, probably. That’s ok.

I don’t need thousands of people. I don’t even need significant relationships with hundreds of people. I need dozens. This is lucky because I already have a good two or three dozen depending on how you evaluate. I need a few more because I need them to be local. I don’t need to date all of them. But I need a vibrant community.

Sobonfu told me I would never fit in anywhere–I need to build my own community. I don’t think I am going to do that in the walled garden. It means being vulnerable. I am not a fiction writer. I write because I am creating myself. I write because letting people know who I am, to as deep a degree as they choose to opt-in to, is a way of letting them know me that doesn’t involve me having to open my big fat mouth. I worry a lot about getting into one of those modes where I blurt out way more than I mean to because I am so desperate to feel connected. Writing is a way to cope with that. Writing means that I am able to be more present for just listening.

It is a way to siphon off pieces of myself so that I don’t have a bursting pressure to share them with the person in the room. I am really struggling with not having Noah to talk to about everything. It makes me wonder if there will ever again be someone who gets to see behind the curtain. It certainly isn’t the people in this house. They don’t want to read my writing. We are all very clear about that. Maybe when I die.

I’m sad and I’m scared. I’m going to like people. I’m going to spend time with them. I will always be aware of the full ocean of self I am keeping away from them with a dam I am constantly repairing. Noah didn’t like all of me and I learned ways to manage that. I will do that with more people. I will do more compartmentalising and less self-editing. I can leave parts of me out of a container. I won’t ever try to eliminate them again. I’m going to need to find ways to walk forward ethically.

I’m going to need to talk to myself. Fuck.

I need to make breakfast.

I’m not ok.

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Widows keep telling me that I shouldn’t expect too much from myself in the first year. This year is a brutal nightmare. The governments of two countries expect a lot from me this year. My kids expect a lot from me. The trouble is, I’m running out of give. For reasons I am not going to get into the person who came for surgery support isn’t working out. She is leaving. I’m feeling pretty terrified. I had surgery 11 days ago. I have 10 weeks of recovery in front of me before I am supposed to resume anything like a normal schedule.

I’m grateful for the help she was able to provide. Now I need to keep rolling along.

I miss Noah so much it feels like I am going to die from my heart exploding. He spent a lot of years learning what he had to do to get me to rest. What specific subset of chores has to happen so that I can go to bed and relax? He knew. He could scan a room and see what would bother me and what I can ignore. I miss my love. I miss my husband. I miss being special and important. I miss having someone worry about my pain and discomfort. I miss having someone to talk to for as many hours a day as I wanted to talk.

There are things I’m struggling with that I can’t write about. Our family culture is not an easy one to join. We talk about things in ways that are, sometimes, deeply alienating and uncomfortable for people who are not part of it. I always regret this mismatch but I also have no desire to change. I do not want to give up this part of my culture and I can feel an insistent wall of decisiveness between me and anyone who tells me not to keep this part. It happens at times. They mean well; I see that. This came after many years of hard work. I’m keeping it.

I’m feeling incredibly insecure. It seems kinda reasonable right now. I am not going to try to guilt trip myself out of this. Being disabled and having three kids is fun load to carry. I should feel insecure. I have to figure out how to carry forward on my own. It doesn’t help that this is a Biblical plague year for me. I am hoping less will go wrong in the months to come. I have fun travel and adventures stacked from August to October. One reason I need to be careful about recovery is I have incentive to not drag things out. If I want anything to go well later then I need to nail this pacing on the first try. No setbacks.

No pressure.

I had a good hard cry with my son yesterday. I don’t feel good about leaning on him for support. He said, “We waited until I was basically an adult and I am offering you are not demanding it. This doesn’t count as parentification.”

Thing is, I’m in a hard spot. I either get help from the kids or I hurt myself in a way that might hurt them in the long run. I am not handling the level of helpless I am very well. This feels demeaning and degrading. This was hard enough with Noah around to pet me and tell me that I was a good, brave girl. I’m feeling neither good nor brave this time.

It’s interesting going through the process of getting to know someone new right now. I am an insecure nitwit, that’s for fucking sure. I was asked if anything about a body horrifies/bothers/something me. My brain is barely operational right now. I’m having to rewrite half of my sentences due to complete incoherence. I am dropping words and I’m having to route around gaps. It’s weird being in my brain today. It’s not a good place.

Anyway, he asked me if bodies bother me. I responded with a list of all the horrifying body situations I’ve been through. He said I am basically a nurse.

I have a knee jerk response to that. No, I’m not that cool. What I am is someone who grew up poor in the US. We have to develop a wide range of skills and no one is coming to take care of us when we get most ouchies. I come from a family of people prone to getting in major accidents. There’s not much about a body that can upset me. People have bodies. Bodies need care. I care about people. No, bodies aren’t an issue for me.

I don’t have as early a response to body odor as many do. If anything I smell hard working mammal and enjoy it. I’m not upset by farting though I may make jokes sometimes. I don’t care if someone shaves or lets hair grow.

I am talking around an issue I’m not explaining. I’m alluding to an insecurity and I’m not stating it. I’m doing a lot of that kind of thing right now. I’m talking around the hole in my brain where Noah belongs. He is supposed to cut through my meandering and simplify my problems and issues so they feel more tractable and fungible.

I want promises I can’t have and wouldn’t believe. I want certainty and my life is completely lacking in it. Instead what I have is bone deep terror of the future. I have a track record of people not being able to handle me very long. I won’t be kicked out of my home when this happens anymore. That’s an improvement. I am going to have to start levitating and not having needs though. I can’t need anyone.

I have to hold everyone in an open hand, ready to release them when they need to go.

I did actually feel pretty secure for a while there. I believed Noah wouldn’t leave me. Such hubris. I mean, he didn’t leave on purpose. He is still gone. I allowed myself to believe I would have a future in which I was cared for. More the fool, me.

I know people love me. That’s not something I doubt.

I feel like dog shit. I should try to sleep a bit more. I hurt so much in my body and in my soul and in my mind. Then I need to get up and make breakfast. It doesn’t matter how I feel. It matters what I do. I have babies to feed. Get on with it.

I’m not ok and it doesn’t matter. I have work to do. I have people who depend on me. I am not the most scheduled person. I get enough done.

I got through the big scary email from the accountant yesterday. I didn’t get almost any other admin work done because I ran out of time to work. I have a very limited number of spoons every day right now. Triage is hard. I hate being vulnerable and weak and needy. I am incompetent. It hurts my soul to be this. Oh fucking well. That doesn’t matter. It’s simply accurate.

I need to hide like a cat while I heal. Asking for support is such a fraught thing. Instead of support maybe nothing beyond food happens for months. Maybe that’s good enough. If I’m not selfish I will hurt myself more. This is feeling absolutely impossible to resolve in a way that has me getting more adult work done any month soon.

I’m not ok. It really doesn’t matter. I don’t get to stop.

Biblical fucking plagues

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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.

Feeling pretty butthurt

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I love the phrase butthurt. It brings me joy. I, however, do not love it when my actual butt hurts. Which it does. Ow. Given that once upon a time I documented gross levels of details about my poop here I feel like this is not a TMI level of disclosure in this space. It hurts having hemorrhoids cut off.

My kids are the light of my life. They are who I have to look to as I move forward. I’m getting awesome help from friends in taking care of them (I feel very lucky). I keep wondering how I am going to be able to pay forward this help in the future. Luckily more stuff will keep on happening whether I like it or not.

I am doing both a good job on resting and also feeling like I could stand to do a bit more. So there is that. I’m trying. I have not had the brain to go through email in over a week. This is suboptimal because I have stuff that needs done. I have tax paperwork to manage and legal stuff and travel stuff that needs sorted. Thinking coherently is beyond me.

I miss Noah all day and all night long. I reach for him over and over. I burst into tears several times a day every day. This is terribly painful.

I’m finding dating complicated as a widow. I don’t have the ‘my ex sucks’ attitude that most people have. I don’t have the life experience that there is no point to giving your all to a relationship. I don’t have the view that I should refrain from commitment because no one will stay. I mean, he didn’t stay but he didn’t want to leave. I have a different kind of terror. Mine is rooted in the weakness of the flesh.

As a hypersexual person I’ve had nightmares about someone dying during sex for most of my life. Noah and I weren’t having sex but we were lying together intimately. I was mostly asleep cuddled on his chest. I am freaked out by cuddling. I want comfort but I’m also afraid of more death. I’m afraid of being close to another person and failing to save their life. This haunts me wildly.

I go back and forth between being upset with myself for dating someone semi-seriously so soon and hoping that Noah wouldn’t be upset with me. I hadn’t intended to find someone as nice as I have.

Phew. Is it time to be more honest with y’all? It’s a scary thought. I’ve been pretty closeted since I moved here. I’ve met 13 men this year. I didn’t sleep with all of them. Most of them have been fine but not partners I will keep. That was what I expected. I expected the quickly coming and going and not being compatible with folks. I expected to be told that I am too much trouble and no one will bother for me. Instead he is pretty nice about the ways I’m weird and he listens and asks questions and remembers the answers. Sometimes he is confused about why I am telling him things.

Because I am a difficult person to be with. You have to accept an unusual amount of unpredictability and wildness. Because if I don’t tell you early on I feel like a liar and a deceiver and someone who should be abandoned when you find out the truth.

I should try to sleep again. Sleeping is hard.

Life can’t be smooth, can it?

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The kind friend who is supposed to come help through surgery recovery is currently stuck outside a big city approximately 170 miles away. Her car had trouble. Cars are like this.

I feel overwhelmed and scared right now. I don’t want to close doors. I don’t want to eliminate the chance of potential down the road but that means I will close a lot of doors by not deciding. There is no way to win this game. Today I am going to catch up on laundry and cleaning the kitchen and tidying the garden. That and getting Shortie to martial arts. My body is very sore and tired. I feel worn down. I’ve been trying to sleep. I’m going to bed at a reasonable hour. Unless I take drugs I wake up ungodly early. (The drugs come from my doctor.)

I miss Noah so much I feel like I will explode. I am scared of being alone. I am scared to be with anyone else. I am scared of asking my kids for help. I am scared of not being useful enough. I am scared I will over spend and wreck my childrens’ future. I am scared I will not do enough and our family will fail. I don’t know what that even means at this point but I’m scared of it.

I am scared I am not enough while also being entirely too much.

I wish I could spend a month or three not interacting with any humans at all.

I hate that I need help. I hate that I have to ask my friend to do a long and difficult and now even more expensive journey to help me.

I wish I had made life choices such that I could go lay down the mushrooms and be done. I didn’t though. I have to stay. I have to stay no matter how hard it is. I have to stay no matter how weak I am. I have to stay no matter how sad I feel for the rest of my life. My feelings don’t matter. My actions do.

So yes, I am absolutely using a lover as an antidepressant. Fuck buddies were a mixed bag. They always are. That’s the thing about sex with strangers, it’s like Forest says: it’s a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get.

What I will say in this medium at this moment is: I have made much safer choices than I did in the past. I am proud of myself. That feels pathetic. I shouldn’t have to beg and plead with myself for scraps of credit. I set the bar so low yet clearing it is so hard.

I have so much to do and I don’t know how much time I have. That is one of the hardest things about losing Noah suddenly. I always thought I would go first. Now I don’t know how to get everything done to make my kids safe in time. I don’t have him as a backstop. He was supposed to be there to paper over the cracks of what I missed. Now my children only have me.

That feels unfair in so many many ways. They deserve better than me. They deserved Noah.

It’s funny. I’m coming to grips with some of the ways Noah’s behaviour sucked because I need to avoid those patterns in the future. I still think he was a less shitty person than me. He did not have as much to make up for. Yes, he fucked up. Yes, he did abusive things.

I am not better.

I am a shitty, petty, awful person. I mean, my kids don’t think so. Whatever. They don’t see what is inside me. I’m pretty awful.

Noah said it didn’t matter what I thought, only what i did. But now without him I don’t know how to evaluate what I’m doing. I’m stuck in my head going round and round with my thoughts. I feel like I am going to go a lot crazier without Noah to talk to. So much of me feels like it is being forced into a weird impossible silo. I feel like it is much harder to know what is real and what isn’t.

I feel guilty for the way I am using my lover as an antidepressant. Oxytocin is my favourite drug.

I am finding it fascinating that I do not experience the same kinds of chemical surges I did when I was younger. They are different. I no longer believe that “falling in love” is a chemical reaction that happens quickly or not at all. I believe that love is a choice. Love is the act of choosing a person over and over even when it isn’t easy.

I am not having a hard time ending things with fuck buddies in the first two months. When they make me feel icky, when I realise that choosing to spend time with them means I am opting in to a set of behaviours that I have a problem with I bail really quickly. I am explicitly and consciously staying the heck away from friends. I choose to keep my friends despite them having behaviours that bug me. It’s about distance and proximity. I can handle different sized containers for relationships based on whether or not I’m having sex with someone. It changes the calculus.

Gentleman doesn’t fuck me. He makes love to me and I can feel the difference. Being with him is a balm right now. Not a lot is helping me feel better. Time with him does. He makes me smile and feel soft. He will not play “What Is Wrong With Krissy?” I confess that part of the reason I will be scared of integrating him more into my life will be the fear of falling off that pedestal. For now he hasn’t started complaining about me. It’s the honeymoon. We are in a bubble away from our lives. It’s an affair, not a relationship.

It’s a really nice affair. Like, super nice. One of the best of my life. I have mixed feelings about that.

I am having big feelings wondering how much this is a dramatic improvement because I am now willing to allow someone to be nice to me. I have run from it with great speed for most of my life. Noah was the nicest treatment I could tolerate for the longest time.

I haven’t written that much about the rape last summer in vanilla land. Part of that is because I flipped out and being super public about that is mixed. Part of it is how Noah reacted.

I needed to regain power. I didn’t think about it in a logical or wise way. It’s funny that I’m still hesitating. Soon I will be ready to cross post everything. I don’t like having secrets. If you have secrets people can shame you by implying they will expose you.

When I was raped I flipped hard into fawn mode. I basically had an affair with the rapist. I talked to him a lot in text. I went and saw him in town. I gave him a blow job in an inappropriate place. Well, he’d been telling me all about how he didn’t see a point in getting blow jobs because he never came that way. I took that as a personal challenge in my insane way.

Noah learned all this the day I had surgery. The next day when we got home he hurt me fairly badly. He waited until he could be in a soundproof room with me. If you are vanilla that sounds like abuse. It’s funny because, that’s not the part that felt abusive to me. I gave consent long ago allowing him to correct my behaviour or attitude in any way he saw fit. He owned me and I felt I owed him whatever it took to pay him back for being willing to own me.

I was sorry I couldn’t act the way he wanted me to. I was sad he had to punish me.

I couldn’t not freak out after being raped.

I have been talking about my promiscuity with him because it feels grossly unfair not to. I don’t know yet how to properly explain that part of what I mean when I say I can’t be monogamous is there are times when I will react sexually in ways a monogamous person wouldn’t.

There are things in me that are broken. I don’t have a normal person’s reaction to pain or trauma. If I did I would have died a long time ago. I can fall in love with shitty people and find ways to justify continuing to serve them. Sometimes this is something I am only dimly aware of it happening as it occurs.

I don’t want to be punished for being what my father made me any more. I no longer believe that can be beaten out of me.

It is very hard to figure out how to talk about this with normal people. I am not chasing down sadists. I’m not looking for problematic encounters. I am trying to make safer choices. It is complicated figuring out how to be fair about warning off someone who is not fucked up and abusive. No, I’m not going to hit you. No, given how you respond to boundaries I can’t imagine screaming at you.

Noah had to hurt me sexually over many years, while I asked for change, before I got to that point.

I didn’t have the right to say no. My no didn’t matter. It was irrelevant. I could say it all I wanted and he would listen if and when he felt like. He resented the times he did follow them. He held them up like shiny toys “See, I let you have this boundary.”

I opted in and I would have stayed forever. I absolutely believe I would have stayed no matter what he did to me. He was trying as hard as he could to make me not my father’s daughter. He wanted to morph that piece into only serving him.

He was doing so from a place of basic misunderstanding. He thought he could make me monogamous. He thought he could make me into someone who reacted to sexual trauma by withdrawing and taking space.

No. I run into the fire. Over and over. I run all the way to the far side of it. I see what damage I can correct after the fire ends.

Even though the Scottish government finds me to not be a credible witness due to the muddiness of the case I feel good. I got a lot of other people to come forward. He’s in jail and going to stay there. I’ll tell you plain that part of the reason some of them agreed to step forward was because I was able to show them my receipts so they could see the pattern for themselves.

Once you see it you can’t unsee it.

When people feel alone they usually can’t start moving at all. I start moving when I need to find my compatriots. I don’t curl up into myself. I branch out. I put feelers into different communities and locations. I explode into building tiny itty bitty root tendrils. I need data and examples before I can make any of that happen.

Wanting me to curl into myself is saying that I should stop looking for the patterns. I never wanted that. I don’t want to be raped again. That’s not my point. When something shitty happens to me I don’t want it to be the focus of my life. I need to have the experience on as much of a speed run as possible because I don’t have time to do the slow motion thing that most lives see. I don’t have the patience for that. I’ll get bored and wander off without getting enough data. Then I won’t find the pattern.

I like that I explode briefly with each trauma into frenetic community building. I want that aspect of myself. It’s not always pretty though.

After going to the pub with Gentleman I can confirm that I 100% would never hunt in such an environment. It’s not for me. It’s disorienting and people are incoherent and ugly drunk. There’s nothing appealing about hunting for sex under those circumstances. Either I am there with a group of people and I am only going to pay attention to them or I am there alone and that makes me fucking rape bait.

Naw.

I am not courting trouble. Only I am. I had specifically not wanted to have only one partner because feelings and escalators and stuff.

I am going to disappoint someone who expects and wants monogamy. It is hard not to feel like I am bad. I don’t know for sure how I will react to other traumas in life. I wouldn’t put money on me being out of them.

It’s really hard to leave the house a lot of the time. But I do it. In my eye catching bullshit so people get used to seeing me. One way or another they will know I’m around and probably have some kind of opinion. It is harder to be alone in a room with a man.

I need the antidepressant. I feel guilty when I have someone want to make love to me without knowing what kind of crazy they are sticking their dick in.

It feels deeply unfair to let someone fall in love with me before I puncture their bubble about what kind of person I am. I can’t let people project all over me. I will behave erratically. It will be a bad experience. I will hurt them. It feels like if I don’t come with a long list of awful disclaimers it is wildly unfair.

If what you are looking for is loyalty I am a very broken toy. It will not look how you want it to look. Am I loyal? Very. I don’t always demonstrate it in the ways people need me to. They need loyalty to mean a set of behaviours I can’t live up to. I am scared of what this is going to mean for my future. Will I continue to feel willing to take risks on longer relationships even though they mean so much more insecurity?

Fuck buddies eventually fade out from my life for the most part. I don’t know what will happen with lovers going forward. Luckily I have a long time before I need to decide.

I’m having a lot of body memories collide this morning. My friend have difficulty getting here is ratcheting up my anxiety. I’m not upset with her, of course. She even had the car checked before beginning the trip. Stuff happens. It’s just that everything feels higher stakes now. Every hiccup feels more “oh crap should I be arranging backup?” It is hard to trust that things will fall into place in the ways I need them to.

They probably will. Realistically this is a very surmountable problem.

My body is shaking though. I hate living with layers of memories and feeling like my body doesn’t know where it is in time. I have to shake it off. I have a lot to get done today. I need to function and I need to smile, even though I don’t get to take my antidepressant. He says he is going to observe medical protocol to the letter. This makes me want to weep. Also it makes me feel secure. It makes me feel a lot of things I don’t know how to express.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. I feel like maybe I should be a giant cunt and make him want to leave. That would be the adult and mature thing to do, right? Kidding not kidding. Only I don’t want to.

When he is around most of what I want to do is sit in his lap and kiss him in between talking. I don’t really know a lot of reason to be mean to him. I’d have to stretch really hard.

His biggest flaw to date is that he isn’t big on soup. I’m not sure we can be friends. I really like being his lover though.

It’s time for the day to begin. I have sourdough starter to use up. I’ll start there.

Backwards and forwards

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Yesterday was Noah’s birthday. He should have been 49. It will be really bad for me when I turn 49. That’s going to be savage. We spent the day cleaning the house and getting ready for my impending surgery. One day till my friend arrives to help. She wants a few days of settling in with the kids first. She is smart. Surgery is in four days. Due to the stress and vagaries of train travel I’m going the night before. I feel less resilient with Noah coming along. I think the surgery will be fine. It’s going to hurt like last time.

Unlike last time I won’t have to give a police interview 3 weeks into recovery so I’m less likely to have a sudden massive bleed out.

I’m having a hard time with my feelings. I realize that isn’t a huge shock or anything. I wish I could only remember good things about Noah. Instead my brain is going through all the memories–good and bad. Our marriage was extreme in a lot of ways I can’t nail down without feeling shame. We constructed a marriage that wouldn’t work for anyone else. Were we wrong to do so? Sometimes I can’t tell.

The part that matters to me is: I wouldn’t leave for anything. I would never have left. I would have dealt with being in pain or having to be smaller. He was worth it. He was worth everything. I loved him so much I feel I could explode. He was a very good husband for me.

I am behind on emails again. I haven’t caught up on neurotic tracking in a while. If I’m not sharing the data with Noah it feels so much less purposeful. I created data, in part so I could show Noah trends and patterns and he would decide when I had to go in and seek help for a problem. He was my designated grown up and care giver. Now I feel like I will drift in the wind because there is no one to care.

I feel so achingly lonely. I want him all the time. I miss his smile, his intense way of looking at me, how he touched me, and how made me believe I always had a place: beside him.

I feel like I will never belong anywhere again.

I am highly conscious, as I move forward as a human being who will never agree to monogamy again, that I will never feel like I belong to someone again. People will always keep a space between us for their own safety. I can’t blame them. I would too. I don’t think it safe or wise to get too close to me.

The person I am seeing keeps asking why I hard selling the benefits of being around me. Do I expect him to do the same? I don’t. I really don’t. It was one of the dominant behaviour patterns of my marriage. Noah and I both did it constantly. “See, I do x for you. It is better to have me around than to kick me out.” As if that is a healthy way to run a marriage. I am having a hard time stopping. I still feel like I am trying to beg people to not throw me away. I think part of me agrees that if I am not monogamous nothing else I do will make up for that. I am a poisoned pill.

It’s been sitting heavily in my craw that between 3 men, I have not had control over my sex life or my sexual development for about 33 years. The middle one had the least time with me, but he did a lot of the early hypnosis work that Noah built on for almost 20 years. It’s not that I lost control of my body at 10. It’s that I gained it briefly at 13. I gave it away at 19/20 (that was a muddy line). It was given back when I was 23. I regained *nothing* at 33. I did have a rebellion at 34. Now I’m getting it back permanently at 43. I pay a lot of attention to patterns. Numbers give me comfort.

As I contemplate what I need from dating, as my son likes to say, the bar is a tripping hazard in hell.

Going forward I am going to need to spend time around people who make me feel cared about. I’m going to need to spend time with people who act like I am a fascinating puzzle. I am going to need to be around people who are cautious with physical boundaries and who recoil like an electric fence when they are told no. I cannot be around people who body shame because I cannot ever be vulnerable with them. That is a sign that I am going to be attacked and I will feel deep shame. I don’t need more shame factories in my life. I really don’t.

What I need (and the reason it is worth my while to seek out) is to feel seen and appreciated.

Most people don’t make me feel like this. Very few people make me feel like this. I go through most of my life feeling intensely alienated because I can’t ask most of the people I spend the most time with to see very much about me. It creates an overwhelming deficit.

Noah used to fill that. I don’t know what to do now.

I fee sad and isolated a lot of the time. More than I deserve to, in my opinion. It will change when and if it changes. I want so much. I feel entitled to so little. Noah gave me so much. My whole life is going to be less full obsessive love after this. I will never be someone’s autistic special interest like that again. I don’t even know that I would like it again. It came with a lot of constraints. They were worth it. I miss him.

The kids are clearly well on their way to deifying him. I just nod. I don’t talk about his down sides. It’s too soon. Someday when they are bemoaning how they will never be as good as their super human father I will cackle and tell them about all the stuff they didn’t see. He was a man. He had his good parts and his bad parts. He was deeply and achingly human. He was frail in a good many ways. He was aggressive in ways he shouldn’t have been. At times he was violent. Yes, he did lose his shit. Only with me. I was his safe person, as he was mine. For people like us, part of feeling safe is being able to be all the parts we can’t use with other people. Some of those weren’t very nice.

I have intensely positive feelings about my marriage.

As I move into the next stage of my life, where I don’t have Noah to meet my needs, I have to consider other ways to meet them. It feels cold as fuck but also what else am I supposed to do? I’m not my mom to simply never date again. She had a threshold of abuse and was done forever.

I have data. I understand how low the rate of violence has been for me in terms of broader exploration. I see the fireworks of good. I can’t act like one very small part of the data set defines the whole. That’s silly. That is numerically unsupportable.

Thanks to having data I can see the positive changes in my trajectory. The kinds of people I could find at different stages of my life are very different.

I am grateful I am about to have help with the kids for a while. I need it. There are tasks I’m falling behind on because I can’t brain after this many hours on duty. I feel like my job shouldn’t be exhausting after all these years–I should be inured. I’m not. I still like my day job but I need to simplify aspects of it. I can’t be as much of a three ring circus without Noah present for support.

I am so much less capable without him papering over the cracks and finishing the last 20% of so many things. And on top of that I’m doing all the stuff he usually did entirely off-screen from me. This is hard. My brain is very overwhelmed all the time. I need to find a way to get Shortie more of a social life without me having to physically facilitate it. She needs it really badly. I’m having a hard time. The surgery recovery time is looking so brutal. Oh well.

Keep moving. Only for the first wee while it’ll be shooting for 1,000 steps a day level of “moving”. The point isn’t to keep a consistent speed the whole time. We are humans, not machines. The point is to be patient and loving and kind to myself on the far side as I struggle to regain fitness. It will be another journey. I will have to go slowly or I will hurt myself.

This process is going to be harder without Noah to fuss over me and force me to rest. He was literally looking at retiring early to be my full time carer. I’m scared. I get sick a lot. I have a compromised immune system. I don’t have a specific name for it. I just get everything and I’m down for long periods. My life doesn’t stop though. I stay sick longer because I don’t rest enough. If I don’t do too much, not enough gets done.

And now Noah won’t be here to help so there is even more work that I am responsible for. Fuck. Not all of it. His family is stepping forward to build more intense relationships to start the process of transferring intergenerational wealth. Noah turned it down throughout his life. The offer was always on the table. I’m going to say yes. I would be a fool not to. I’m going to need to pay attention to this education they are offering. I am now responsible for managing all of my money. I don’t get to wave at it and call it “Noah’s money”. I have made reasonably good choices so far. I like where I’ve gotten.

A very terrible part of me can’t help but notice that the severance payment for my first marriage is alright. Sure, the relationship was terminated but I am going to be safe forever if I manage it carefully. I can’t be profligate but I can still buy whatever groceries we want. I will never live like a tech bro again. Somehow this is karmically a place I can live with.

I have incredibly mixed feelings about the wealth transfer. I also know that I have two kids with noticeable physical disabilities and one kid where it’s too young to know. It’s connected to genetic issues in both kids. The NHS is finally starting to evaluate/track them.

I may have brought people into the world who are not well suited to the capitalist hellscape. Remains to be seen, of course. I’m not offering them a fully independent amount of help. They could have enough to live at home comfortably. I can’t promise a lot more than that. I don’t have more.

Noah doesn’t have 6 more years on his arc towards saving for retirement. There was a fair bit of input expected to get to what he wanted to hit. Oh well. Deep breath. I can turn a dime into a dollar. I will be ok. I am very good at denying Current Me things so that Future Me can have more options. I’ve been playing that game for a very long time. I can take a lot of denial in some ways and not so much in others. I will build in giving lots to other people, don’t worry. I’m still me. I am thinking really hard on the structure of that giving. I am going to have to have that firm in my head. I need guard rails and limits. I need to understand what I have to give. That’s a hard thing to figure out sometimes.

I have been told recently that I like “folky” country music. I like stories, not hard rock anthems. Guilty as charged. It’s funny. I never thought of myself as such because I had never had the slider start in that position before. Usually I’m considered not very folky. I know a handful of artists and otherwise I can’t it through it. I’m too pop.

I have been listening to a lot of old albums lately. I don’t want to watch shows. I am reading more. I like having music on. I know I should embrace silence more. I do know. I like the way I get to ride my emotions like crashing waves when I have music on while I type. It is my companion through all the highs and lows and flashes of memory.

I love the way I get to re-sort my past memories that come up. I see each circumstance differently. Noah and I ran out of arc. It is really hard to feel like I am having to go in and put a manual end on each piece of the thread. “This is over now.” I am pruning off parts of myself that grew there because I had to accommodate Noah. I have absolutely no idea what this is going to mean in the long run.

It scares me a lot.

I am going to have to be mercenary with myself about my limits going forward. I need to catch up on budget work. I need to stop allowing myself this sloppiness. I’ve been scared to look. I can’t do that anymore. I’ve been watching the overall balance and keeping an eye on that. I need to look at how things are shaking out.

Then I need to hand a number to my in laws and that’s awkward. They don’t want me to stop having all fun. They want the kids to have big lives, still.

I have the option to choose a soft life.

Globally speaking this is righteously unfair. I’m aware. I’m having feelings about that. I also don’t see any global value in grinding myself to dust. Who knows what good I will do if I have the ability to learn how to thrive instead of barely surviving in “solidarity”.

I have always done my best to pay forward the help I have received. I either have credibility or not. I am not assuring private jet lifestyles. I am making sure we won’t lose the house and we never have to worry about food.

Our life together has been a mash between what he wanted and what I wanted. Now what? What about the parts that were only there because he wanted them? I’m having a lot of feelings about that. I’m having a lot of feelings about everything right now.

This is the path. I get to traverse it, not question it. All the feelings. I’ll have all the feelings.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Author Archives: Krissy Gibbs

About Krissy Gibbs

Fragments of parenting

Well that was terrifying

The future is vast and terrifying

I both feel over peopled and deeply lonely

Parenting

It’s going to be a long 10 years.

I feel frozen

A beautiful casting

“Is it easier now?”

Parenting is going to be the big journey

Some day this will change, right?

I am struggling.

It’s a new month

This is harder than it used to be.

I’m not ok.

Biblical fucking plagues

Feeling pretty butthurt

Life can’t be smooth, can it?

Backwards and forwards