I miss the chatter.

Leave a reply

I like being able to talk to myself about what I’m doing and why. But I’m scared. On one hand I feel like I am in a more stable place than I used to be but on the other hand it feels so precarious. I might be more stable in a day-to-day way but I don’t think I feel more secure.

I still feel like I am going to hurt everyone and that my words have a lot of power and I am bad if anything I say makes people feel upset.

I feel paralyzed with fear. I don’t write much at all anywhere anymore because I am afraid of consequences, arguments, misunderstandings, different points of view that make me feel like I am doing something bad again. I don’t want to have the power to hurt people. I really, really do though.

I think/process/experience things as these concentric rings that stack on top of one another and drip down into the cracks. It’s not changing what happened but it adds layers of nuance and difference to the memories and I think/project that other people do the same thing. Only the layers we are stacking are so different that the end result is a completely different thing.

It’s like that thing where if people remember that you were part of the “good old days” they forget that at the time they didn’t like you very much and all of a sudden they want to reminisce with you and talk about the people you used to know in common. They have a picture of you in their head but the total experience of it changes over time. Even if they can remember that they didn’t like you–it’s irrelevant and almost funny now. “Why didn’t I like you? Oh, something stupid. Meh. I’m over it.” But if you stayed in daily/weekly contact with them for all this time they wouldn’t be over it.

People are funny.

Ok I am happy that Noah got a full time job again. It would have been kind of difficult and scary to slowly pay for these repairs over years. Instead I have some confidence that we are going to get to the end of this cycle of repairs and not need to do anything big until the kitchen falls apart. (It’s cheap Ikea shit. That’s not a long-term solution.)

I’ve talked about it on Facebook but not here: this house sure has been a sinkhole in terms of money. Noah’s bathroom is such a wreck and leaking water that we waited until our bank account balance hit a certain level and we started in on replacing it. As has happened more than once with this house… the scope creeps as we find out about the level of damage. Former owners (probably including the ones before the people we purchased from) really did not believe in proper maintenance or doing a job right. It looks like there have been big water leaks for years and the under flooring in the bathroom has old massively destroyed wood just kinda hanging out. It wasn’t replaced the last time someone installed a tiny cubicle shower in here. We (meaning the amazing joiner we are employing) are completely ripping everything out down to studs and the whole floor and walls have to be replaced and the water damage drips down into my room. Super fun.

So there’s going to be some pretty intensive floor/wall/ceiling work involved. Could it be patched up for cheap? Sure. That’s what folks have been doing and that’s why there are major systemic problems. We are paying to put good wood everywhere. Taking out all the wonky barely effective plumbing and upgrading it. Noah is going to double the square footage of his shower. (There was literally no reason to create a blocked off corner and a tiny shower in the bathroom… there was nothing behind the space wasting corner wall thing.)

In self defense from the flood of color he has no choice but to live with… his bathroom and office will be shades of grey. It’s going to be a slightly hilarious contrast and statement about just how much he is compromising in the rest of the house. Clearly none of this brightness is his thing. He’s a patient man.

Despite feeling overwhelming desire to paint most of the house in bright murals… I don’t know what I’m going to do in my bedroom. I don’t know that I want intense colors. What I have lived with for 1.75 years at this point is mostly white walls with one blue accent wall with birds and flowers done almost like a wallpaper design. It’s not really what I like. Noah has the same accent wall in his room and it’s even less his thing.

I want an airy, open feel with very light colors in my room. I want shelves with lots of plants on them and almost no furniture.

When I finish today I need to sit down and do some pencil work on the layout of the bedroom and bathroom. There are a lot of specifics to figure out but I really should get back to painting. I started 4 hours ago and I’ve had multiple lengthy breaks… I want to finish absolutely everything I can do with the ladder in this position and then figure out how I’m attacking the project next. I may do no other ladder work this weekend; I haven’t decided yet. Depends on where I finish and how tired I am. I have to worry about the arm spasms and the back pain a lot more when I’m working this high.

But on the upside: I’m really loving what I’m doing above the stairs. It’s turning out well. Back into the breach.

This will derail some plans

Leave a reply

Well this is going to fuck up my running schedule. I fell down the stairs today. My toe isn’t broken, just really painful. Wearing actual shoes is out of the question so I’m going to be a bit behind on miles. Such is life.

I don’t want to be having a hard time. I want to be fine. I want to not feel like I am shitty. Day 35 of this cycle. Blurgh. Just bleed already.

Menstruation

Leave a reply

Something I am noticing is that my PMDD symptoms are really bad. I’m not dealing well with that cycle. I feel like that is part of not having pot. I think pot helped smooth that out a lot. I

Do you?

Leave a reply

Based on my research, almost no one remembers the past very well. We always change and adapt the stories to suit our own perceptions/beliefs/biases. But the thing is: not many people write down their wrong beliefs and memories. I do. I could have gone back and read the journal entries from the time and perhaps come away with a more accurate/correct understanding of what happened around that party. But I didn’t. I talked about how I remembered it and I was remembering it quite differently from how someone else remembered it. I accept that my memory is corrupted by general sense of self loathing and dislike of myself and my behavior.

This is part of why I don’t write much anymore. I’m not the only one who remembers wrong. But when you put things out there and you are wrong that causes more pain than just being wrong in your head.

He doesn’t remember calling me a drug pusher. Where does that memory come from? Why do I have that in my head? Is that just my fear? Is that just how I felt about myself? Was that just what I believed?

Someone said they wouldn’t go to the party unless everyone was using. I don’t even remember who that was or why it was important. I know it wasn’t true because there was one person who was there who couldn’t use MDMA because of an allergy/terrible set of previous physical reactions. So if I said that at the time it wasn’t even accurate so why did I say it?

Why did I fuck up a connection that was more important to me in the long run than whatever I tried to protect in that moment? And why do I reflect on it later when I am only going to cause more problems and be even more wrong?

I don’t know. I picked wrong. That whole attempt blew up in my face and I regret it deeply. I believe it was a terrible mistake for a variety of reasons and in my head it is more evidence of why no one should look up to me or want to be like me. I make stupid choices. I hurt people. And I can’t fix it. And years later when I remember it with whatever twist my brain put on it I hurt people more and I am more wrong and I make yet another stupid mistake by talking about it in a way that other people can see.

I do the wrong thing over and over and over. I wish my daughter didn’t tell me that she looks up to me. When she does all I can think is that I am contemptible and stupid and wrong and I do not deserve it. It makes me feel so much worse about myself because apparently I have misrepresented myself to her so badly that she has the impression that I am good.

I am not good. I make the wrong the decisions. I hurt people. And I remember things wrong and hurt people again.

I don’t see anything worthy of respect or admiration or emulation. I don’t forgive myself for these mistakes. I just keep on making them.

I should not make new relationships. I will only hurt more people.

Find gratitude: flood edition

5 Replies

In five years this will be the kind of story we tell as a group and we will cackle. Heck, by three hours after it happened I had already started laughing in that “Holy fucking shit of course this happened this week” sort of way. Ok this is kind of a long story.

We ran out of oil last week. Apparently our tank is set just a little bit lower than the boiler so even when it looks like there is still oil… that doesn’t mean there is enough pressure to get to the house and the water and heat will go out. It took us a few days of messing about with calling plumbers and waiting for them to not show up before we called the joiner-man-of-all-work who has done all of the other work for us. Turns out he has a buddy who works on our type of boiler! He was there 15 minutes later. I’m sure he was shaking his head over how silly we are but I can live with that. Put a call into the oil company: oh whoops. It is after 5 on a Friday. They won’t hear the message till start of business on Monday. Ok. First thing Monday we get an email saying they put in a work order. It can take up to a week before oil is delivered once the work order is put in. Noah calls them and explains our situation. They put a star next to our order to hopefully put us near the top of the priority list. But it’s Wednesday and no idea when the oil will arrive.

This sucks particularly hard because our tenant is Muslim and he should be taking showers and going to Mosque every day right now. Freezing showers are not his idea of a good time. I don’t blame him. I told him not to pay rent on May 1st because this whole situation is our fault and it’s negatively impacting their life to a severe degree and just oh good grief. I feel so bad for negatively impacting their lives right now.

Tuesday was pretty good in the main. Youngest Child and I went for a carefully socially distanced play date with her two little same-age friends at the park. It was nice. Then lunch was tasty. Eldest Child asked me to go for a hike after lunch and we went up the hill into the woods. Youngest enjoyed being in the shoulder-carrier for a lot of the trip up the hill because she was tired. Freakin kids.

EC told me a lot about the characters in the new-to-her anime she is currently obsessed with. What she likes and doesn’t like about them: apparently the best character is a teacher who she says reminds her of me. Every child in the class is traumatized but very prepared for life! Hm. We talked a lot about different things that are coming up for her. We talked about how different people have different skills/talents/things to teach you and it’s ok that you drift back and forth appreciating people more and less at different stages that’s fine. She said something… I don’t remember exactly what. She has this hero worship of me thing lately and it’s frankly quite bizarre. She really wants to grow up and be like me because I am so awesome and I always know the right thing to do. I told her I worry that I haven’t let her fuck up enough. Then I said that I don’t always do the right thing. She scoffed.

I told her that a few years ago I had a birthday party and I was feeling very hemmed in by being a parent and always giving and always having to project happiness I only kind of feel and I was tired of being responsible and an adult and… so I arranged that there would be a morning birthday party that was kid friendly then an adult part afterwards that would be very adult and involve taking drugs. It didn’t start out as a party that would involve drugs but it morphed into one over a couple of weeks of planning. Her eyes got a bit wide.

I told her that in the run up to this party someone that I loved dearly sent me a letter telling me that I was an evil drug pusher and I was ruining people’s lives and I was a very bad person for doing this. I explained that he was dealing with having a child in rehab and he was questioning his own life choices and feeling like he made some bad decisions and really he was yelling at his past self and trying to have me make better/different choices than he had made so I didn’t have so many regrets.

She said she was confused because I still talk to the guy and I talk about him in glowing terms and how can I feel love for someone who was so awful to me?

There is a difference between people who run you down and want you to feel bad because that is the sort of toxic relationships they have in general and people who love you very much where sometimes they have something very painful happen and they lash out with pain. There is a difference between a toxic user and being a human being in terrible pain. It can be hard to tell them apart; it’s about large patterns over many years and typical tendencies not one time things. It’s about believing the totality of what you see from a person and not thinking an outlier is the truth.

I told her that I sat on that email for a few days trying to deal with my own hurt and when I responded I told him that I understand that he is in great pain and he is taking it out on me. I told him that I forgive him and when he is ready to talk to me again I will be waiting. It took about five years. We spoke again and he apologized and I tried to be gracious: goodness knows I have done more than my share of lashing out in pain. I love him and he has been really good to me before and since that one explosion of pain.

We all deserve grace. Human beings make mistakes, most especially when we are hurting and we feel like we have hurt other people through our ignorance or unintentional mistakes. If we want grace we have to give grace.

People are my religion. I believe in you. I believe that you can change and grow and be better. I believe I can change and grow and be better. I want to do that together. We learn the most from our biggest mistakes. We learn from the big mistakes of our friends. If we want to have connection and love we have to see and accept people for the totality of their humanity.

She clutched my hand and leaned her head on my shoulder and told me that she feels very lucky to have me as a mom. My heart soared.

Then we watched YC a little ahead of us on the trail pull down her britches in the middle of the path and pee all over her clothes. It was… hilarious. I did not give her a ride down the hill. She had to walk.

When we got to the bottom after our 5 mile hike EC and I both discussed how much we would like to have ice cream. She said she would deal with cleaning up YC while I rode my bike into town and got some of the good gelato. Noah was making dinner. Middle Child was doing online classes.

I enjoyed listening to Hamilton on the way to and from town and I cried thinking about how hard life is and relationships are so painful. I’m so impressed by the nuance given to Aaron Burr in the story. I was thinking a lot about my mom. I wish that grief could get less intense.

Then… I got home. From the road I could hear an annoying beeping. I prayed that it was coming from my neighbors property and not my house. No such luck. When I walked in the smoke detectors were screaming. It was hard to tell exactly what was wrong; my first guess was Noah burned something while cooking. I looked around and no such luck. There was no smoke. Instead there was water pouring through the light fixtures and smoke detector. It was splashing all over the computer table and floor and I could see it coming from the upstairs. Everyone in my house was screaming at me trying to explain what was going on. I tripped on YC as she darted back and forth screaming and adding to the general sense of disorder and she decided that the absolute worst part of the day was me stepping on her. I did not apologize. I think I screamed that everyone was in so much trouble.

I then decided that the right thing to do was turn off the master power to the whole damn house and I will deal with everything else once the deafening fucking noise was gone. I asked Noah if he had told our tenant what was going on (she was downstairs with her tiny baby listening to all this). Of course he hadn’t so I went and gave her a brief explanation so that she wasn’t concerned while ignorant. I promised I would handle it as fast as possible.

I went in my room and called the wonderful handy-man-of-all-work and said I needed him to talk me through something but I don’t need him to show up. Luckily he pretty much agreed with all of what I was proposing and we made a few jokes about how maybe it would be best to chain the 3 year old to a tree in the yard for a while.

I came out and went to the electrical panel and started doing a little bit of sifting through what could be turned back on and what needed to be left off indefinitely. This allowed me to run an extension cord from the studio to the kitchen with a dehumidifier and a space heater running. There was a lot of confusion and talking over each other and in the process I was not so kind and I told YC that she did this and I was very angry about it.

But after I stuck buckets and pots under the drips (other people thought just putting a towel under the flowing water was good enough… yeah no) and moved computers and had EC move all of the freezer foods out to the deep freeze in the shed and we had dinner and sat down to just… stare off into space that’s when I started laughing.

EC asked what kind of trouble she was in. I said the kind where I’m really mad for an hour or two then I get over it because shit happens. When you have kids… these things are going to happen. It is utterly unavoidable.

I know exactly what happened. YC turned on the shower sprayer attached to the bathtub and sent the water everywhere. She had a great time. The upstairs bathroom is not well sealed at the base of the wall meeting the floor. The water went around the edges and got down through the air space in between floors and then went looking for any hole it could find to come down. The walls and ceiling aren’t soft at all and by this morning it is dried out and fine. I know there isn’t any other leak and the paint job is fine.

This reaffirms my belief that I would like to have every bathroom in my house fully sealed into being a wet room as time and money allows. Shit happens.

Nobody is in trouble today. We had banana bread and ice cream last night. And by we I mean everyone except for the kid who ate about 4 slices of banana bread earlier in the day because holy cheese that was your dessert for the day. Noah decided that he is done messing about with trying to find contracting work that allows him to work part time. He is going back to full time work because when he works full time his income is absolutely obscene and all of the things we’d like to fix in the house could be fixed after a year or so of him working full time. If I am careful about how I do it I can probably get our savings goals to full completion in fiveish years and afford to do the remodel stuff that would give us more space to manage living here pretty much permanently no matter how many kids stay with us.

I woke up this morning and turned the breakers back on. Things are fine and other than some remaining clean up (laundry, scrubbing floors) it’s over.

My gratitude is this: I get to wake up in a safe house and fix my problems. I get to plan for the day when I will have the means in petty cash to fix all of this and every other problem that is going to erupt. I am more safe than I knew a person can be. Thank you Noah for picking the right hobby when you were 7. Thank you for asking me to marry you. Thank you for giving me this life.

When something breaks we can fix it. Almost no matter what it is. And in the long run… we will laugh about it.

Projects.

Leave a reply

I’m up to 6 hours of painting. With design, set up, and take down tack on 4 or 5 hours. I have been leaving the design time out of my tracking so far and I don’t want to. I spent over an hour of practice drawings.

I will decide whether I am doing more ceiling (over the stairwell) just to use up the colors of paint I have in smaller containers or whether I am doing walls and doors when I see how I feel on Wednesday of next week. I don’t have a lot more small containers so I’m a little worried about how I’m going to manage having a bit of every major paint color out in a small container. Maybe we need to get some more takeout… This decision also requires me finishing the ceiling above the landing on Monday. That’s a maybe, of course. I’m adding white to show the light hitting the clouds. It’s going to be fussy and fiddly and take a while. I may have to add more yellow and/or more blue.

I anticipate each door taking 4 hours. There are 4 left on the landing. I’m hoping I can do the smallish bits in between in only 6 hours. That would have the landing done in the 30 hours I guesstimated on the first day. Second day? It’s starting to blend together already. Thus I’m writing it down now.

The stairwell piece is going to be an utter nightmare. That ceiling will probably take 10-12 hours because going up and down the ladder will wear me out. The three walls are probably going to take 10-20 hours each. I already know what I want for 2 of the walls: above the downstairs hall I am going to have a rocky outcrop and a lake; the big wall that started out with the mirrors I am going to use the GIANT oak stencil I bought because I want something that is really structured to balance out how much of my stuff is freehand. I like my freehand work but I also really like having some stuff that is more strictly crafted in the middle. The stencils are fussy and difficult and I will swear a lot while I’m using it. I hope I can get that fucking stencil done in only 3 days. That’s a hope, a dream, an aspiration. The third wall above the lounge/trees? I have no idea yet. Hopefully it will come to me. I need a way to bridge the two pieces I already have in mind. Then there’s the hand rail which will probably want another 10-20 hours because I want to do a lot of detail work. Which may be a bit stupid and/or masochistic because that’s a high traffic piece of wood and it will chip. Hrm.

Then I get to downstairs!

I’m trying to pace myself and only work when I have a babysitter here so that I’m not giving up sleep so I currently have 6 hours a week to devote to this project. Thus I’m looking at this work carrying through for another 16-24 weeks. Cheers. Only half a year. No biggie. Or I could increase her hours a tiny bit and have 9 or 12 hours in a week. That would still be fairly reasonable pacing for body strain (it’s divided into 3 days) and it would let me finish the upper part of the hallway in 8-12 more weeks for a total of 10-14 weeks for this project. That’s not terrible. I could argue that it is quite sane and kind to my body with a straight face.

Then there’s the downstairs hallway, the lounge, and the dining room left to be painted. The only reason I’m pushing myself at this point is because the paint really is thick as mud and apparently is going to get less and less usable over time. Joy.

If I can get through the paint I may just not give a fuck about bathrooms or the laundry room or my bedroom any year soon. Please oh please let me finish up the paint before I feel the need to do any of those rooms. And the youngest kid will have to be old enough to express strong opinions before I paint her room.

Oh hey, and I was going to do a whole bunch of gardening this year. Sure… my body can handle this….

I’m sleeping! This is totally a healthy workload… right? I’m getting a pretty good step count. I’m eating SO MANY VEGETABLES. This qualifies as self care while working, right? Don’t answer that. You aren’t the boss of me.

That’s what I mean

Leave a reply

I used to ask my mom strange questions. I remember that I had a few in particular that I’d ask over and over and she’d kind of freak out. One was: “What would be the most important thing for you to keep if we become homeless and we lose our car?” That question really bothered her and I asked it over and over and over all through my youth.

My oldest asks me what I would do if she died. I don’t think she is suicidal–it’s not that sort of question.

When I’m doing work I often like to have a show I have basically memorized in the background. I haven’t ripped the DVDs yet so West Wing hasn’t been my show of choice since I left the US. Here it is Call the Midwife. There’s an episode where a one-show character is introduced. Mrs. Jenkins is an old woman who spent 30 years in a workhouse and all of her children died there. This character exists in the show to show the rich and privileged main character, Jenny Lee, what it is like for people who have really suffered in poverty. Mrs. Jenkins cries loudly “The workhouse howl” as she keens her grief when she is alone.

That episode came on last time when I was painting and my oldest was sitting close to me working on her drawing while I painted. I said, “That’s what I mean. You always ask what I would do if you died. I tell you I would go on living but I would never be ok again. That’s what I mean.”

She looked utterly shattered.

Life is painful. Sometimes there are people you cry over forever. The smallest, stupidest reference to my mother can lead to me crying. That grief is so close to the surface that if a gentle wind blows away the leaves covering it then it goes off like a bomb. Am I still alive? Of course? Am I ok? In a manner of speaking. I smile. I project happiness. But I ache every day because there is a piece of me missing. A piece that I tried so hard to replace with friendships only it never worked out.

I’m almost 40. When will I stop crying over my mother? I’ll let you know if it ever happens.It is absolutely terrifying to consider how much it would break me if I lost a child. Some days I feel like I am held together with paperclips and string. How could I replace that much loss?

I need them to out live me. So eat your fucking vegetables and get regular exercise, damnit.

Chasing happiness

4 Replies

Recently some dude I don’t really know was talking in a chatroom about how it wasn’t fair that he doesn’t get to be happy. He didn’t get to (insert hobbies/relationship structures) and that means he is doomed to be unhappy. Instead he has traveled to so many countries I can’t name them all and he’s done (long list of interesting things) but none of that counts.

Man. I feel you. I have attained most of the goals I set for myself. At this point… I don’t seek happiness. Happiness is elusive. Happiness is a myth. Happiness is an illusion. I seek connection. (Fuck you pandemic.) I seek the ability to control my brain enough that I don’t wreck relationships with being an asshole. Happiness is a bar too high to even grasp with my fingertips, let alone pull myself up and over.

Last night I dreamed about seeing an acupuncturist. I was desperate to deal with some of the pain in my body and I’m well aware that acupuncture is helpful. I went in to a clinic. It was hard to find to start with and when I got in and got in front of the clinician she told me I could have exactly one needle because she wanted to go on her lunch break and she didn’t have time to fuss with a lot of needles/help. I picked a thing in my neck/shoulder because it is causing intense headaches and limiting my movement for painting. She left it in for 10 minutes (which isn’t a long time in that sort of treatment) and then told me to hurry out. At the payment desk with the receptionist we had trouble figuring out what currency I should pay in. They kept switching back and forth between various currencies I have used and yelling at me for not having a full wallet of all of them. Why didn’t I have baht handy. Where are my pesos? What kind of stupid bitch doesn’t have her yen with her? Where the fuck were my ringgits? I left crying. Even my dreams are painful.

I’ve been looking at photographs of an autumn afternoon in Scotland. This is going to be tricky as fuck. I need to layer blue and yellow and orange and gold. If I try to do that while the colors are wet I’ll end up with green. This is going to take days of adding layer upon layer upon layer until I figure out the correct proportions. It’s not like the clouds in the dining room where I could just slap on blues and whites and greys until I liked it. And the ladder I am going to need to use to paint a lot of the high stuff in the hall is already scaring the shit out of me and I haven’t even gotten it out of the shed yet. Oh boy. This’ll be risking life and limb.

Why do I need to do this? Why is this important? Is it going to make me happy?

Does anything make me happy?

I learned how to paint from doing sets. From creating backdrops that taught you about the characters without them ever having to say a word. I miss therapy. I miss being able to explore who I am and figure out why I am feeling a way and what meaning it has in my story. Now I don’t talk about myself that much. But I can paint.

I am starting a new stage in my life where I am going to be presenting myself to a whole new bunch of people. Sobonfu told me I had to make my own community. I am trying to create the backdrop against which this is going to happen. The people who are drawn to me and want to be part of the story going forward will be influenced unconsciously by the setting I create. Life is like that. People are like that. We influence each other. We change each other. We connect with each other and become something different now that we are more than our separate pieces we are a new whole together.

It is a kind of magic.

Will it bring happiness? Fleeting moments, of course. Will it bring pain? Talk to my neck that cannot stop grinding as I move it. I need to see a chiropractor. Ugh. We only get to live one life. We only get one run at this gauntlet of opportunities. If I do not share what is in my soul because it is too hard, because there is not enough moment by moment reward then I have lost The Game. My children talk a lot about how they want to keep this house forever and go to and fro with this house as the place they are centered. They are children and all children have fuzzy grasps of the future. But some people do that. Some people have a home base and it is important forever. They could be people like that.

I asked my oldest if she wanted to help me paint the hallway. She said she didn’t want to. She wants to see what I create because she likes the way I paint better than how she paints. Sometimes I wonder if she limits her artistic mediums away from the ones I use because she is afraid of comparing herself to me. I’m not actually that great, my love. You will be better than me across the board by the time you are an adult and even your youthful scratchings seem pretty rad to me. She is sticking to graphite and digital arts for now. That’s fine. Your journey is your own.

She is horrified that I don’t mind her reading smut. Oh my darling. If only you understood how very very very softcore your smut is you would understand why I just grin. I am glad you don’t understand. I am glad you haven’t already been reading hardcore for years. I’m glad you understand that your sexual blossoming is still entirely future tense and you still thrill at the idea that someday you will get a real kiss.

That right there is the satisfaction of a lifetime goal. What is happiness next to the surge of power and righteousness I feel when I think I have kept them safe. That’s not a given in this life. And there is no true shame when other parents don’t attain the same goal. Life is so very hard and unfair and terrible. But I broke the cycle in my family for my children. If I had failed it wouldn’t be fully my fault because it would be the fault of the perpetrator. I have sat like a fire breathing dragon over the cache of gold that is my children. I have kept them safe.

This feeling is better than happiness.

My hands hurt and my neck hurts and my back hurts and I feel sad and I feel lonely and I feel frustrated and irritable and like I want to be nasty to everyone and everything. I really need to start bleeding already. This phase of the cycle is brutal.

What I will do is try as hard as I can to speak gently to the children and I will paint as much as I can this morning. I have a three hour window. If I waste it then I only have myself to blame.

It may not lead to happiness in this moment. That’s ok. Happiness on a moment by moment basis isn’t really the goal. I am building for future me. I am creating because I believe there will be an After Pandemic Time when things are different and I will get to build the community I want so badly to have. I will bring people here, to my lair. I will throw open the doors of my soul and hope that all of the breaking open leads to more love in the world. I will try as hard as I can to tell other people that they should do the things that they feel moved to do. They should embrace the identities that are already true for them. They should yearn and aspire and go do the things that they dream about.

We only get one shot running through this gauntlet.

Go.

I do like to do things in contrary fashion.

Leave a reply

In the fall I painted spring. Now that it is spring I am painting autumn. I like to buck trends and all that. I have started on the upstairs hall. The upstairs will be sunset and the downstairs will be early dawn–I want to keep a lot of the soft pink that is currently downstairs.

Recently I was doing a video chat with an old friend and he said, “Why do you have a besom on your wall?” Because I am a witch, naturally. I think of my art as being part of how I try to change the world. It is how I try to change people’s perceptions and emotions. I am drawn to witchcraft because I believe that people have power and they should use it. Power manifests in different people in various ways and you need to figure out what your way is. I am blessed with having many ways that I influence people and I take that seriously.

For now: it’s in a hallway. I am going to do this mural with more limits for the sake of my body. I’m trying to respect the fact that I’m growing old. I got in two hours to start with so far. This one is going to take months because I am getting ollllld. I can’t upload pictures without wordpress being bitchy so I guess I won’t post the pictures here.

The only opinions that matter

Leave a reply

I used to be incredibly insecure about my parenting. I put a lot of effort into documenting what I said and how I said it and I looked to my friends as the arbiters of whether I was good enough or not. But over time and with the demise of most of my close relationships that has shifted.

The longer I parent the more I understand that a lot of the people I chose to be my judges were people who had deep trauma based on the parenting they experienced. Like often feels comfortable with like and in my pre-parenting life I mostly attracted other people who had traumatic backgrounds like my own. We could validate one another and commiserate. It was what I needed as a childless person.

I don’t think I can point at a moment or year when I stopped wanting to know the opinions of other people when it comes to my parenting. But that switch flipped somewhere. Your opinion is your opinion and it isn’t a fact and it isn’t going to influence my behavior so you should go ahead and keep it to yourself. I have noticed this recently when I had an initial impulse to maybe write about an interaction then I felt a pause in my thinking and I instead talked to the kids.

I love having older children. I love the conversations and the intense interactions we have. I love that they feel entitled to have opinions about things that happen to them. I love that they are willing and able to negotiate for changes when they need them. I love that they reflect upon their experiences and can talk about which parts feel ok and which parts need to be adjusted. They think deeply and they express their evaluations with nuance and determination.

They feel confident and self assured when it comes to asking for change and support. I mean, sometimes they frame it as diffidence or insecurity “There is something I want to tell you but I’m afraid you’ll get upset”. To which I reply, “Enh you know that I don’t yell at you about personal stuff I yell about stupid things like chores.” “Hm. You are right. Well here it goes…” Then we have a nice chat.

I am still obnoxious about chore stuff. I go in cycles. When I am overwhelmed by life because of a multitude of factors I yell about chores not getting done on a timeline I would prefer. It is not my best trait. It is basically the last shitty pressure relief valve I have. It’s not great and it isn’t ideal. It’s not constant and it doesn’t overwhelm our life so I am not losing sleep over feeling shameful about it.

I’ve been rereading (or first time reading) books on coping with executive function difficulties. We are a house full of people who struggle. I spoke with a dear old friend recently and he commented that when his son was diagnosed with ADHD he had a “hmmm” moment because he was never diagnosed and he isn’t going to bother in his late 50’s he almost certainly could have been diagnosed if it had been as much of a thing 40-50 years ago. The ways we recognize ourselves through our children is so striking and dramatic. Having children forces you to deal with the traits that you struggle with through a whole new lens. Your children aren’t you and they don’t have your experiences but they have a mix of your traits and your partners traits. Many of us pick partners who have similar enough struggles that we can understand each other.

My children are not me and they are not Noah. They do, however, function as semi-distorted mirrors that reflect back parts of ourselves that are mixed. They are highly capable. They are intense people. They struggle with figuring out how to use their time with deliberate planning so they can get through their list of tasks. They can occasionally really struggle with emotional regulation though these failure modes go in different directions for each of the kids. It’s neat watching their similarities and differences.

It’s almost like watching my personality traits and Noah’s personality traits get turned into the sweets that stuff a piñata and giving birth whacked the piñata open and now the kids are each picking up random bits. Sorry for the pieces that are overly chewy and get stuck in your teeth, kids.

I love them so much and I admire them so much. I feel such tremendous validation that they like me as much as they do. The older kids are definitely getting to the point where they crave peer friendships with great intensity but they want to come back and tell me all about it and share it in retrospect. They want my help understanding dynamics. They want me to help them process their feelings and thoughts. I feel deeply respected and admired.

It’s fucking awesome I have to say.

It is hard for them to go out and make new friendships with the pandemic. This is a rough time for them and all of their peers. But they are finding ways to reach out. They are finding bridges into the community. I’m having mixed feelings about their increased internet participation in life but I suppose it was coming. Oldest is counting the days until she can have a youtube channel of her own and she’s making videos about as fast as she can. The big kids are on Discord. I’m networking with homeschoolers in the area. I have found some families that are around MC’s age and I have found a couple of families close to YC’s age. I think things will be ok once we can get going again.

Now we wait for safety. Something that feels hilariously elusive.

Clickbait trash

1 Reply

I was foolish last night. I was procrastinating on sleep and I gave in to clickbait. Habits of highly productive people. Ugh. I have this constant internal tug of war over productivity. You might have noticed that I don’t write much anymore. There are so many reasons. One of them is that I use my hands a lot and if I want to reduce pain something has to go. Another reason is that I have largely been able to write over the last 12 years by giving up sleep.

One of the neat things about tracking lots of data about my body is I can tell you fairly conclusively that Scotland has been fucking fantastic for my sleep habits. In California I went years getting 4-7 hours of sleep. 7 hours was somewhat rare and I would pat myself on the back for doing it. When I was deep in project mode 4 hours for weeks or months was not unusual.

I’ve had 4 weeks of project mode since I arrived here: painting the dining room. Otherwise I have been getting 8-10 hours of sleep. I’m certain the Amitriptyline helps. It doesn’t make me pass out in a drugged stupor instantly anymore but it keeps me asleep longer. I like that.

I don’t need to read bullshit about how if I went back to waking up at 4 am I could be a much more productive person as if productivity is the same thing as measuring how moral I am.

Every so often I will talk to another immigrant here and they will almost inevitably complain about how hard it is to deal with the less intense work ethic of Scottish people. I always say that I am trying as hard as I can to move in that direction. I don’t want to maintain my California work ethic. I don’t think it is healthy to believe that 60 hours a week is a minimum amount of acceptable work or you deserve to be fired. I don’t think it is healthy that everyone believes you must monetize every hobby and interest you have or you are wasting your time.

I find it really interesting just how happy I am to be out of California and the US as a whole. It’s not that Scotland is perfect–there is no such thing as perfect. But I don’t worry about having to find a tactful way to play 20 questions with new parents-of-friends to find out how they handle gun safety in their house because the expectation is that people might/probably have guns. I think the US has lost the plot when it comes to gun ownership. Gun ownership in the US is not about keeping the gun owner safe. It is about letting people who own guns feel powerful and mostly they put themselves and their families at greater risk for the charade of being powerful. It’s gross. I know that I know a lot of people who own guns. As much as I love you I am glad I no longer have to navigate the emotional/anxiety minefield of ever walking through your front door again. Your desire to feel powerful makes me feel sick.

When I talk to my older kids about what they want from the future: where would they like to school, where do they think they want to live? They say that even if they don’t stay in the Highlands for the rest of their lives there is no chance they want to go back to the US. I can’t say I blame them. I mean, feelings might change. That happens.

I have been reading books on gardening in this climate about as fast as I can get them. Sure, a lot of them are more England centric and don’t perfectly answer my needs for Northern Scotland but it is teaching me more relevant information than my background education in California gardening. The UK is so hilariously on the nose about naming: Flowerdew (the jokes write themselves), Cox (a kind of apple), Titmarsh (I think of little birds in the marshes telling me the ancient lore).

An immigrant buddy told me that it takes a good 7 years to settle into a place. With the pandemic I feel like that process is frozen in time in a bizarre way. I think of 80’s tv “magic” moments where someone froze time so that someone could get something done without it impacting anyone else. I am setting up my garden. I am working on the house. I’m about to start painting again: maybe that’s why I feel the need to write something down again. I feel like I am being given this weird slice of time where I am here but I am not here. I learned how to paint by doing set design. I learned about creating a setting so that things could be perceived a way, so the characters could be perceived a way, so the plot could be advanced with as little acting effort as possible.

By the time anyone is allowed into my house and I’m actually working hard on making a social place, the backdrop will be pretty much finished. Some folks are making noise about it being fine to come visit this autumn. I have serious doubts.

I want to paint soon in large part because apparently UK paint doesn’t store the way that US paint does. I need to use it up before it isn’t good anymore. I bought too much volume. Next time I will only buy 1 liter cans. Life lesson.

I have been out in the yard a lot over the past week. The kids had an academic break and the effort I normally put into schoolwork we put into yard work. It was nice. Things are coming along. I am most of the way through making the raised mount beds. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%BCgelkultur) I have been taking it very slowly because it is a lot of shoveling and lifting and carrying. Mostly what I am doing is cleaning up all the debris all over my yard and putting it in long-term compost-in-place mounds on top of felled trees. How long they will be functional is difficult to fully determine. Opinions vary between 5 and 20 years. I will find out! It’s an experiment.

I am doing quite well with my current pass at increasing fitness. In the past I have set strenuous goals and reached them (by sacrificing sleep, other healthy activities, giving up almost all other hobbies) and I’m just not in a place to do that emotionally. So I have been very gradually increasing my personal step count goals and I’m ignoring the watch’s direction for how much I “should” be doing. I am consistently reaching my personal/lower goals and I’ve managed to bump them up very slowly over many months and that’s going well. I haven’t injured myself in months and at this stage of decrepitude I am treating that as a major victory.

I don’t enjoy how much “don’t injure myself extra” is a huge sticking point at this stage of my life. But it is.

I am making forward progress on fitness. I am moving the garden along. I am homes educating my kids. I am keeping a household running (thanks Noah for doing most of the cooking). I am keeping us on a budget. I am maintaining a low and slow drip of getting to know home education folk here through online meetings and randomly meeting people out on the trail (that’s pretty darn thrilling, I’ll tell you). I’m going to be painting again in a week or so.

I don’t need to be told that if I just gave up all my rest time I could be more productive as if higher productivity level is the measure of a life. I have worked really hard on increasing how much rest I get. I take weekend time to sit in my room and do nothing as a conscious choice. Yeah I am watching shit on Netflix. I am also reading books. I am also planning for the future. I’m sketching out ideas for how to solve future problems we don’t have yet but will appear like magic over the next 10 years or so.

I don’t need to give up sleep. I don’t need to give up all recreation on the altar of “Work is all that is moral”. Fuck your clickbait in the ear with a pointy stick.

Too many thoughts

Leave a reply

Things I am thinking about instead of sleeping, a not-all-inclusive-list:

  • Ways to make the house more insulated and easier to heat.
  • Ways to add more self-sustaining energy sources to the house so that I don’t have to depend on oil for heat.
  • Ways to make a greenhouse on one corner of my house as a multi-story add on (possibly a pipe dream).
  • Reasons I probably shouldn’t ever do expensive remodeling of the house.
  • Drawings I wish I was doing.
  • Painting I might do starting in a few weeks.
  • How to be more consistent in my habits.
  • How to add more permaculture to my yard in a way that uses companion planting to enrich the soil as I go.
  • Trying not to feel mad at myself for not working on sewing yet.
  • I want to cut my hair mostly because I am feeling a distinct lack of control over fucking everything in my life and it’s feeling like One More Thing in a way that is currently bothering me.
  • Why is it so hard to get back into the habit of doing PT?
  • Why the fuck didn’t the editor I hired help me be less fucking repetitive in that damn book?
  • Cheezits this book is god damn depressing and I don’t know how other people managed to get through it.
  • I need to get the bones of this speech together.
  • I have a lot of veggies to cook. Oof. Food is so never ending. I’m tired of having to eat.
  • Hamilton is way better than I thought would be. I’m always so late to the party

A hysterectomy sounds better all the time.

Leave a reply

My mood is really awful for about 1/3 of the month. It turns on/off like a light switch. When I hit the day my period is actually going to arrive I suddenly have a nose full of snot, I feel like I am about to throw up, and I have vicious diarrhea. I feel like someone is stabbing me in the back with an ice pick. Bending over to pull a clean cup out of the dishwasher is stabbingly painful.

I’ll feel better in a few days. But right now I’m at the peak of bad mood plus bad body and it is a fucking nightmare. I am fairly likely to have ten more years of cycles. With 1/3 of the month being (some of it literally) a shit show.

Bodies are the worst.

Leave a reply

When you put a vine in the ground you have to be patient. In the first year the plant will sleep and look like nothing is happening. In reality under the ground tiny little roots will be slowly exploring and looking at how they can make this place their home. In the second year the plant will creep a little bit above ground and see if this place is really going to be safe. In the third year the plant explodes and puts out tremendous growth in all directions because yes, this is my home and I will show that I live here.

We are into our second year of living here. In the first year I put a little bit of effort into putting out tendrils of growth. I went to a few events and I met a few people and I tried to see what direction it would be wise to put energy. But between health and lock down mostly… I slept.

I am now more than three months into the second year. I am slowly creeping along. I am trying to strengthen and deepen the tiny tendrils of roots I put out here. I am cultivating just a few connections. I am sending my taproot as deep into the ground as I can. I am feeding people. I am contributing to my community. I am planting trees. I am branching out in as many ways as I can… slowly. Just tiny little indications of growth that will come without overwhelming the shallow roots I have at this point.

Depending on the state of the pandemic I may get an extra year of creeping growth. To be fair, it’s not an utterly fixed rule of that plants only need two years to get established. Poor weather or soil quality can alter any expectation. I know it will be ok in the end.

At the beginning of my third year here I will turn 40. The first decade of my life was pretty traumatic and unpleasant. In many ways the second decade of my life was more of the same or worse. My third decade was when I turned the tide and I decided how my life would be and I was no longer just a shell being tossed in the tide. I built a rudder and I steered. My fourth decade has been pretty incredible. I like who I am. I like the skills I have developed. I like the strength and capacity and knowledge I have built.

Wisdom comes from experience. Experience comes from making mistakes. I have made so very many mistakes.

In many ways this last year has been one of the most turning-inward years of my life. I am not depending on friends as much as I have in the past. I do not have a therapist for support. I barely write because I have learned that the consequences of having my feelings out in public are too great to bear. What I have now I cannot risk losing and if that means I must be silent then that is the price I will pay.

Which does not mean that my feelings are more muted or less extreme. I am not sure that I suppress them so much as I have learned how to transmute them into other things. I think this was maybe the goal of therapy all along. I have a lot of compassion for myself in my big feelings. I have the ability to sit quietly and wait for my internal storms to pass without inflicting them on everyone else around me. That does not mean that the storms are smaller–it means that the hand I have on the rudder is made of steel and it cannot be moved by casual breezes. I think it would take a hurricane to knock me off my path these days.

Which does not mean I have no bad days. I just don’t document them with the same rigidity.

I’m sure part of that is about what it means to assimilate and be an immigrant. I don’t feel as safe documenting the ways I suck.

I started this first thing in the morning and now the kids are well into the swing of bed time. We had a sharp negotiation over when kids could get up. I started at 10 am. Middle Child started at 4 am. We settled on 7. Seems fair.

Today was a day of Much Cooking. Breakfast was leftovers because we needed the containers back. Then I made two kinds of soup for lunch. One with chicken broth, celeriac root, cabbage, carrot, celery, tomato, bell pepper, herbs and another with veg broth, cauliflower, celery, carrot, flour, butter, SUPER GOOD cheese, milk, herbs. The vegetarian one was better.

Dinner was a turkey, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, carrots, corn, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, parsnips, and we finished with a cookie. It was good. We have a lot of leftovers.

Right now I am in the kitchen babysitting the turkey carcass so the cats don’t help themselves. The necessary food containers are in the dishwasher. Bless the 1 hour cycle. When the dishwasher finishes then I need to shove stuff in it for another 1 hour cycle (it’ll be full again, don’t worry). Then I get to make the overnight French toast.

Guilt

Leave a reply

Holiday baking is finished. We have: two kinds of buttermilk banana bread (one has butterscotch chips and the other is chocolate/cherry/walnut), apple pie, vanilla doodle cookies (regular snickerdoodles have cinnamon, these are dipped in vanilla powder/sugar), my mom’s sugar cookies, and chocolate chip cookie with pecans.

Our fridge is so packed it is hard to get anything into or out of it. Obviously the solution is to ride my bike around town and drop off packages on peoples doorsteps. It’s not any more dangerous or invasive than the grocery delivery folk. I’ll stand far back from the door.

I might just bring a flask of hot chocolate with me so I can talk from a very great distance for a few minutes with people. I’m really struggling with loneliness. There have been 56 new cases in my entire very large council region over the past 7 days. I will never go more than 3.1 miles from my house. I am struggling with feeling like I am no better than everyone else who is breaking lockdown rules. But I’m stretching the rules.

Heart racing

Leave a reply

Here’s an Amitriptyline symptom I should note: I’m having noticeable elevated heart rate. My watch buzzes when my heart rate is too high compared to my level of movement. It’s going off almost all day right now. I’m elevated above 120 bpm for hours a day even if I’m barely moving around. That seems kind of problematic. Hm.

Because of the watch I can give specific data about my heart rate compared to exercise over a very long time period. I normally rarely hit 120 unless I’m doing prolonged fairly intense exercise. Now I hit that sitting in a chair over and over all day.

My watch is buzzing enough that the people I live with are noticing and commenting on hearing it. That seems… possibly not good.

Christmas planning

1 Reply

For a lot of years now I’ve been trying to move towards less gifting. There’s so much emotional baggage around the entire topic of giving shit for Christmas. Almost no one outside our house is getting “stuff” from us this year. My little adopted nieces and Jenny and Noah is doing stuff for his family. We will give baked treats to our youngling friends in town but I’m not worrying about giving stuff to neighbors we have barely spoken to this year.

My big kids asked for a few items to finish their rooms from Santa. Eldest Child wants a box that can lock to keep stuff away from the little siblings and some fake foliage to finish her woods-motif bedroom. Middle Child wants a small table and a tea pot (haven’t found the tea pot yet–gulp) for playing tea party in their room. Other than that they are getting a few books and their stockings are barely half full. Additional presents are a floaty/light weight hippy dress for EC because even in Inverness she is often overheated and she has outgrown most of her clothes and MC got a beautiful hand made wrap in colors that they will love to go with their dressing up fancy obsession.

Last year I got everyone themed night clothes and they asked if we could please do that again so both big kids picked out a style they liked from Etsy. This was not a family tradition before moving here. I am amused that the kids have decided that this is going to be a tradition moving forward. Given that Noah is not usually one for wearing pajamas it may be a little weird for him to have to come along on this one.

Youngest Child is getting a gnome village from Santa and little gnomes in her stocking with some bath toys and hair clips. A couple of books as the only things to unwrap at this point.

It’s seeming a bit hilarious that I’m getting the biggest Santa present because I asked to upgrade the shoe racks as my gift. When we moved in I got a really irritating cheap £20 shoe rack as good enough to last until I knew what I wanted. Now I know what I actually want and Noah ordered it. They are fairly large because with 5 people and actual seasons we have way more shoes than we have ever collectively had before. So my present is a house thing for all of us.

I have a few things for Noah but not a lot and that’s all I can say about that because he reads this. I feel a little guilty about not doing more for him and yet he’s been telling me for years not to get him much. I don’t think he asked for a single thing this year. He doesn’t need any clothing items at all.

We didn’t do the mass Christmas card thing this year. I’m exhausted and sending a card to the US costs £1.70 a pop. We used to send about 100 cards. That adds up, yo.

I’m having a hard time shaking the programming from my youth that giving so little means I don’t love people very much. But we don’t need very much at this point and there isn’t a lot anyone wants. EC genuinely doesn’t want much. She likes having a room that is easy to tidy and she feels like she is mostly past the toys-stage and she’s not a makeup person and she doesn’t use fancy bath stuff and she doesn’t want or need a lot more clothing or shoes. We have all the art supplies we need for quite some time. MC is the sort who would always appreciate more but they have enough toys to keep them busy and they have a bursting wardrobe. They would appreciate being given more things but I can’t think of much they would actually use. YC doesn’t need much more stuff. They have enough to keep my house a constant tripping hazard already. I already rotate baskets of toys in and out of sight because if everything is out it is too overwhelming and just a mess. They would not be impressed by gifts of clothing even though they are the ones who are changing size the most quickly.

I am glad I didn’t get Christmas stuff out super early like I kind of wanted to. YC is breaking a lot of things and that’s feeling stressful. I don’t think things will be up long after Christmas this year. It will be nice to get back to having a lot of empty space in the house. I think I will like Christmas stuff being out more in about three years.

We’ve all been low key sick for the last week and we are all very low energy. It’s a cold, not Covid. Sore throat, barely runny nose, weak ass cough. Mostly just tired. But this year that means absolutely no going to school so EC has been home. After the last few years of starting to shove me away hard for budding independence reasons she has been real cuddly and that’s nice. I get in good snuggles with all three kids a lot these days.

Just plugging along.