Market forces

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There are few phrases that Noah can utter that make me twitch more than “market forces”. I’m not nice to him about this.

Whenever he says this, no matter what the context or conversation, I am instantly in the mindset of “Oh great the rich white man who was set up from birth to be one of the most successful people of his generation is going to lecture the white trash whore on our relative values. Great.”

I don’t think that is what Noah means when he says it. But that’s what my brain does and it makes it very difficult to hear the conversation. I know this is a me problem.

It doesn’t matter how much basic value or truth there might be in the conversation he might be bringing up. It doesn’t matter how neutrally he means it. He might be talking about something 100% removed from me or my life and I’m still… stuck.

This is going to have to move to the “work on it” list but I don’t know how to get past this twitch. I don’t know how to get past the basic fact that I view him as having just about endless value and I am worth nothing.

Anxiety.

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I invited my cousin to come visit us for Christmas. After doing so she informed me that she will be spending half the time with the relatives I don’t speak to.

Yesterday she texted me that she needs money to get an ID card because otherwise she can’t get on the plane. In like 48 hours.

She knew she didn’t have an ID card before I bought the plane ticket. She could have brought up the fact that she didn’t have an ID nor money to replace her ID then. Instead she waited until late last night.

I’ve already done a bunch of physical labor preparing for having a guest. With sending her money for the ID and buying her Christmas presents and the plane ticket… I’ve sunk about $1,000 into this visit. That I get half of because she wants to go see the relatives who hate her and do nothing but talk shit about her.

And maybe she won’t be able to get an ID in time? I can’t find indication online for how long it takes in her state. It just says, “You’ll receive your ID after paperwork has been processed.” Does that take minutes? Hours? Days? Weeks?

I feel like of course this is how it is going. How could I have expected someone in my family to behave otherwise?

This is why Noah is so fucking miraculous to me. He’s the only person who makes commitments and shows up more than 95% of the time. Everyone else… I’m shown exactly how little of a priority I am.

I spent 10 months of my personal fun money on this visit. That may end up not happening. Because she didn’t want to tell me weeks ago that she couldn’t get on a plane.

This is why I don’t ask people for time or attention. This doesn’t actually surprise me.

I feel sad. I feel like of course this is how I’m being treated. This is how important I am. I’m not.

In other news I told the kids that they need to actually do their chores without me nagging and being a bitch before they get their computers back and we’ve had more than 24 hours off the computer and miraculously… they are getting along better. We’ve had less fighting in the past 24 hours than we’ve had in while. And things were on an upswing between the kids. So that’s awesome.

We saw Star Wars yesterday as our advent activity. Noah asked for it. Given that mostly the advent calendar is about what I or the kids want…. yes Noah we can totally go see Star Wars with you. It was sweet listening to his reactions.

And this morning we laid in bed and talked for a long while. It was so lovely.

It is hard that talking to Noah feels like basking in the sun. When he doesn’t have the time or energy to spend on talking I feel like the sun has gone away and I will never be warm again.

I know I can’t pin him down and demand hours of talking every day–he’s too busy for that. But it’s hard doing without it. I feel like I wither.

I try not to be too controlling with it though.

So then I get into this space where I don’t feel like I can ask for anything because asking is controlling, right?

Such a cluster fuck.

Distress

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I was talking to someone about judging how other people parent. That’s a tricky thing. Here’s my basic position:

I don’t care what choices you make. I don’t care if you breastfeed or formula feed. I don’t care if you cosleep or if everyone is in their own room. I don’t care if you home school or public school or private school.

Are your children showing signs of distress?

That’s the only metric I care about. People need different things. There are families who are doing great with every possible set of choices. There is not One Twue Way. But if your kid is freaking the fuck out… you are doing it wrong.

Not because you should be doing it like me… my way might be totally wrong for your kid.

You need to look at the child you have when you make decisions. I came into parenting with some assumptions and some of them have proven correct (I have kids who have extreme needs with regard to attachment) and others have been proven incorrect (I thought they would be able to handle sleeping in a separate room by now… they can’t handle it).

Do what is right for your household. Not what is perceived as “right”.

consumed with frustration

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My body sucks. That doesn’t help anything. Yesterday I had a nice healthy salad for lunch. When I was trying to swallow the penultimate bite I had to spit it out into my bowl. Then race to the bathroom to throw it up with great force.

Strangely about three hours later I ate a massively heavy Chinese meal and felt fine. I needed the calorie density.

Then all night long I was up to painfully poop every two hours. I feel like my intestine are being scraped with a paint scraper.

I’m so frustrated about the video games in my house. I have a full time god damn job of listening to video games and I have fucking hated video games for about thirty years now. But I can’t get a break unless I literally abandon everyone I live with.

I’m tired of feeling helpless and incompetent. I’m tired of needing so much help that Noah going to the grocery store is him contributing to bonding time such that I feel like shit all the time because the work that goes into maintaining my physical body is so much that talking to me isn’t much of a priority.

I hate that I am never alone and I feel so lonely that it physically hurts.

I want to mutilate my body so badly that I spend a lot of time sitting very still because that is the most self control I can have. Mutilating myself is a lot of how I remind myself that no one owes me anything. I have no right to ask for more or demand more or beg for more. Just shut up.

I have asked for way more than is fair to ask for. Just shut up you stupid bitch.

I feel like I want to leave. Not divorce/move out. But be gone from when I wake up till when I go to sleep. I’m tired of my role being to bitch at people all day about the work they don’t want to do in between bursts of listening to god damn video games.

So I spend a lot of time on the forums mentally checked out because it feels more like connection than anything else I have on offer at this stage of my life. Only it really isn’t connection.

I feel so empty. And I’m never going to get anything more from this valley. Asking is so utterly pointless.

I periodically go through the communities in my head that I miss. Then I remind myself of all the rapists who are more important than me. And I stay home.

I’m really sad and I don’t know how to change this feeling.

31.5 weeks pregnant

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Last post for the morning

I’m up 10 lbs finally. I am managing this by drinking 500-700 calories a day. If I stopped drinking so many calories I would abruptly lose the weight I’ve gained. At the end of a pregnancy the placenta + fluids + baby weigh somewhere between 10 and 20 lbs. Can be up to 30 lbs depending on what you are including in pregnancy weight.

So I’m not even holding my own against the weight of the baby in my weight gain. I’m still losing weight, effectively. And I’m not in the clinically obese category so this is not doctor recommended. If I manage to gain another 10ish pounds in the next 8 weeks then I won’t have caused the baby to dramatically eat me. If I fail to gain that much… the baby is eating me.

I think it is funny that the chicken wing on me left arm is just about entirely evaporated but the chicken wing under my right arm is still freely swinging. Hilarious.

I still have jiggly apron pudge on the bottom of my distended belly.

I’m still wearing my regular size large pants if they are stretchy in the waist. I’m mostly wearing regular shirts. I just don’t neeeed maternity stuff in the main. I wear my regular dresses.

The acid reflux from water is fucking killing me.

The baby still feels traverse to me. I’ll find out in two weeks at the 34 week ultrasound. I see my OB this week for the 32 week check up.

Traverse means an attempt to spin the baby and if it fails then a mandatory c-section. I’m not scared about that.

In my previous pregnancies a c-section was the boogey man. Not this time. I feel very… at peace. I want this baby out in less than 24 hours. I don’t care how. I won’t need this uterus again after this so it doesn’t matter if you do some damage to it this time getting the kid out. And while you are at it, tie my tubes.

Physically and emotionally I can’t go through this again. I can’t do this to my family. I’m so god damn depressed and physically disabled that this isn’t an ok thing to do again. This is my limit.

I’m not exercising how I should. I’m so weary I feel like I can barely walk around the house to do basic chores. My body is having more pain because of the lack of exercise.

That’s something cool about this pregnancy. I’m FEELING the difference between good food and exercise vs not having good food and exercise. I’m not sure I’ve ever had such a dramatic physical experience of going back and forth. I can tell when I will feel bad and why. That’s kind of neat.

I have 4-5ish weeks of driving left in me. I’m stopping 3-4 weeks before my due date depending on how I feel. The driving hurts. Lightning bitches about the car posture. It’s not comfortable.

This is still an active kid but not quite as active as they were a few weeks ago. I think they are feeling a bit more cramped.

FMC is still encouraging me to try not to gender the baby. They have a good point. But it’s also hard.

I love the name we picked out. It’s kind of pretentious sounding but it is humorously pretentious in a way that honors the three women who have done the most to keep me moving through life. Who doesn’t want to be a spiritual gift of style and charm?

If I could emotionally get off the damn forums my arms would feel better. So would my neck.

Come on Krissy. Do it for your body.

Dream

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I had a dream that I was taking a class. In the class a girl turned and for some reason nastily mentioned that I was white trash. She was a stranger. I said, “Better to be white trash than a nasty bitch.” She was physically aggressive and posturing. I said, “I may be 8 months pregnant but I can still kick your ass” and we left the classroom.

It turned into a therapy session with us talking about insecurities and issues. Because that is how my life goes.

I’m kind of funny.

Boundaries. Confidentiality. Fail.

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Goodness gracious my life has a theme lately. What is privacy? Who deserves it? Under what circumstances? When are you allowed to keep secrets from people?

I fucked up. Or more appropriately, EC’s therapist fucked up and I was the recipient of the fuck up. We (me, Noah, and FMC’s therapist) have done a great job of teaching FMC that they don’t need to share a single word that is told in therapy if they don’t want to. Apparently we have not delivered that message with sufficient force to EC. I feel super bad. EC’s therapist asked me to check in at the end of the last appointment so we could discuss appointment regularity over the next few months.

She turned to EC a few times and said, “Is it ok for me to share with your mom what you said today?” barely paused for EC to say “Uhhhh I guess” then told me stuff EC had said. EC told me she felt like she had no choice but to say yes.

Fuck. That’s not ok. We fucked up. That’s a really big fail. Oh no.

I clarified on the way home, “So when you got silly and distracting… was that your way of trying to say no?” She said, “I do that when I’m trying to block out the conversation because I don’t like it and I don’t want to hear it.”

I said, “Baby… it would work better if you said “I’m very uncomfortable with this topic and don’t want you to talk about it. We would both stop.”

“You would?”

“Yes. We are there to support you and if what we are doing is a problem instead of support then we need to change what we are doing. You are allowed to say no or stop at any point and we have to respect it.”

“But she asked in a way that didn’t feel like I could say no.”

Oh we screwed up. The whole conversation home was about how EC is not my doll she’s my child. I don’t get to know all of her thoughts or feelings or experiences. I get to know what she chooses to share with me. I am not entitled to know more than she wants to share.

I immediately wrote her shrink an email when we got home and explained that we screwed up and we need to never do that to EC again. Next time when there is a check in about appointment regularity the conversation should go a lot more like, “EC is getting a lot out of therapy. She feels it is important to continue every two weeks.”

I don’t need to know the words she is sharing. That’s not my business.

I hope we haven’t damaged EC’s trust in her therapist with this fuck up.

I reminded both of my kids that therapists are legally obligated to break confidentiality for three reasons: sexual abuse, self harm, or harming others. Outside of that… it’s not my business if you want to spend all of your therapy talking about pickles or friends or me or books. You use your time to get support how you need support. I don’t need to know about it. It’s not my business.

I feel really bad. That’s such a big fail.

To be fair, the stuff the therapist repeated was softball stuff explaining problems I already knew existed but that doesn’t make it ok.

Then as we were coming home yesterday EC was reflecting on how some people like her more than others. She’s getting old enough that being in the same room as other kids doesn’t mean it will work out for play or feel like friendship. Sometimes she clicks with people and sometimes she doesn’t. She didn’t click yesterday and she was feeling bad about it. So on the ride home she was thinking about the people she has clicked with. Her face was crumbling in the back seat.

Me being me, I was all, “Hey wait. You are having feelings. You are thinking about something. I think you are thinking about a person… maybe more than one… and you are sad…. do you want to talk about it?”

She proceeded to tell me that I wouldn’t understand because I’ve never had to deal with losing someone who was important to me.

PEOPLE. I HAVE SUCCEEDED AT KEEPING MY WHINING OFF STAGE. THIS IS A FUCKING MIRACLE. I ALMOST FELL OUT OF MY SEAT LAUGHING.

I told her that in fact I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words about how much it hurts to lose people who are important to you so maybe I might understand a bit better than she thinks.

We talked for a while. When we got home she asked if we could cuddle on the couch and she could cry about the kids she won’t see again who liked her so much.

When she was feeling a bit better I said, “Hey. You know how you are scared that I’m going to have Lightning and never pay attention to you again? Did you notice how you can’t even have a sad facial expression for a few minutes without me pouncing on it to ask what is wrong? Do you really think I’m going to stop paying attention to you?”

She smiled in this blissed out way. She said, “I love how you love me” and she melted into me with perfect trust.

I may not own you. But I care about you. That isn’t going to stop.

I tell her that my goal is to earn a friendship with her when she’s a grown up. I don’t deserve it just by existing. She will get to decide if she enjoys my company and she wants to be my friend. She doesn’t have to take care of me, ever. She doesn’t owe me information she doesn’t want to share. She doesn’t have to tell me about herself.

It’s only if she wants to.

And I fail to earn it… that’s my problem.

Doing work is haaaaaaaard.

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I asked the kids to make sure they had all the stuff they have to turn in for this grading period done before they went to Texas. I was assured that they had it all. FMC was lying through their teeth. They had half of it.

So we’ve had a stressful week. They spent about 10 hours not really making progress on an assignment yesterday as they cried and told me how unfair and mean I am. They can do one of these assignments in 1-2 hours if they choose. They kept restarting the first two sentences and crying. Why? I don’t know.

So when we were getting close to dinner and they still weren’t halfway through the penultimate assignment and they were still derailing to tell me how awful I am… I snapped. I started screaming.

It is not my fault you are in this position. You are in this position because you chose to lie about being done a week ago. So since you lied to me and are proceeding to make my life miserable because of your lie… you are grounded for a week. No screen and no sugar.

And tomorrow morning you get to wake up and finish your work. If you don’t finish by the time your ES shows up… you are grounded for two weeks and that includes Christmas.

I’m not fucking around.

Do. Not. Lie. To. Me. And if you do, at least have the courtesy to not turn around and yell at me that it is unfair that you have consequences for lying. That’s not ok.

I’m not going to play this bullshit game.

So I feel meeeeeeeeeeeeeeean and like I need to be this mean. It would have been better if I could have just enforced this without screaming. But holy shit the whining and yelling at me yesterday was more than I could handle.

So in the past hour kiddo has finished the first assignment and is almost done with the second assignment. Apparently they woke up with a fire under their butt. They are no longer whining and stalling they are just concentrating and writing.

They don’t want to be grounded for Christmas. Oh good. They are still not eating cookies at the cookie exchange party. I’m a hard ass.

I tell my kids frequently that home schooling is a privilege. If you want to home school you have to be responsible for your education. I am not going to breathe down your neck and force you to comply with doing work. Do it or you can go to school and be micromanaged by a professional teacher who is BEING PAID to boss you around like that. I’m not being paid to micromanage you. I’m here to help you if you want to do the work. I’m not ok with dragging and forcing you through an education. I will not do it. Work or go to school.

Every so often we need a reminder that I’m serious. I’m not going to do this harsh babysitting/punishment thing constantly. I’ve only had to yell at my kids on two or three days this year about school and I’m unhappy about it being that much?

If I were better I wouldn’t have yelled those days. But I hit my limit sometimes.

Sigh.

EC had her shit together this time. I was impressed. She didn’t even need reminders. FMC is only seven and this is their very first time in their life being held to school standards like this on a regular basis. The fact that I’ve had three days of fuss in their first academic school year…

I need to be a little more patient. They have mostly done pretty well. And I didn’t ask EC to do this shit at this age. It actually makes sense that FMC is testing the boundaries to see what happens. What they are discovering is that I’m kind of a nasty bitch if you lie to me. I can tolerate all kinds of failures and mistakes without raising an eyebrow. I don’t expect perfection. But don’t lie to me.

And now kiddo is done. Sigh.

We’ve talked about how next time they won’t lie and say they are done because it didn’t make the work easier it made it a lot harder. And they are really sad about being grounded. So next time… they will be honest about not being done yet. I asked them if this work would have been hard if they had started a week ago with many days before the ES came. They shook their head and said it would have been really easy. They even spontaneously added, “I wouldn’t have cried at all.”

Yup.

That’s what we are shooting for. The not crying. The not stressing. The not feeling terrible about deadlines. We had time.

Lying makes everything worse. Don’t lie.

And now they are doing their 15 minutes of online reading program and they are done with academics for the day by 7am. That’s going to be a better day for them….

What does that mean?

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Tonight FMC asked me why I call them “angel”. I asked them if they know what an angel is and they said not really.

I told them that angels are spirits. Mostly they are basically good but some of them are dark. Angels bring gifts like joy and love.

I said that they brought joy and love and happiness into my life. So it’s like they are an angel sent to me.

They asked me, “Am I like a dark angel? Like a demon?”

I asked them what they think. Like I do.

They said, “I don’t know. I do the wrong thing a lot.”

I said, “That’s because there are a whole bunch of things you want to learn and you can’t learn without making mistakes. Wanting to learn doesn’t make you a demon. Trying something that turns out to be the wrong thing doesn’t make you a demon. Setting out to be cruel is different. Setting out to hurt and damage people is different. Purposefully trying to destroy people…. that’s evil.”

“I don’t do that!”

“No. You don’t. You are a kid who is trying to learn who you want to grow up to be and sometimes in that process you make choices that are not like the choices you hope you will make as a grown up… because you have to learn. The fact that you keep trying to be better… sweetheart that is about you reaching for the light. Dark angels don’t do that.”

Their face relaxed and they smiled at me. They told me that they love me.

I love you my baby.

Different perspectives.

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I tried to apologize to Cupid last night for how I handled a lot of negotiation stuff last year. He shrugged it off and told me that I was married and planning to go get pregnant. He didn’t think I had anything to apologize for.

I appreciate it that other people are less hard on me than I am on my self. But he still deserved better as my friend.

Pay attention to me.

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Everyone is gone. So I’m going to take this opportunity to pay attention to myself. I had a lovely bath last night in the dark with about 20 candles burning. I like that a lot.

Today I scheduled all my appointments to be done in time to go to the tea shop by myself. I think I have done a good job about not whining about being sad that the baby shower just didn’t happen. But I was disappointed and for some reason missing the tea shop was a big chunk of that so I’m just going by myself. And this way I don’t need to feel overwhelmed with shame that I’m asking Sarah to foot the bill so my friends can have a tea party with me. I wasn’t sad about missing out on presents–whatever. I wanted the attention. So I’m going to go pay it to myself.

Tomorrow I’m going to go to the second Saturday party I love so much. I will socialize and be a voyeur. It’ll probably be healthy for me to have a follow up conversation with Cupid after all this time.

Sunday I’m going to have a conversation. I probably won’t report on it. But there will be feelings involved.

I’m watching a lot of Netflix. I slept in the meditation room because I really didn’t want to be in the big bed alone. I slept ok but not great. Better than expected, to be fair.

Now I need to get off my ass and figure out breakfast then go take the gestational diabetes test. Then a massage. Then a tea party.

It’ll be a good day.

When I get home I get to sort paperwork. This has been on my To Do list for about 9 months. Sigh.

Goodbye love

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Noah and the kids are off on an adventure. This is the first time Noah has ever taken the kids on a trip by himself.

I have complete confidence that they will do well and they will have a good trip.

It’s nice being married to a person I trust to be competent and successful at the tasks he takes on.

I’m having interesting thoughts about the future of moving with Noah and seeing him outside this bubble. I suspect it will become more important that I never say a snotty or demeaning thing about him because outside of this bubble… he doesn’t need to be taken down a peg or two. In this valley his head is a bit swelled. He won’t be valued in the same way in other places.

That’s important for me to think about. Because he has actually earned most of the adulation he gets in the valley and I’m a snot for being rude to him.

Thoughts.

Babble babble

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I’m about to talk to Jenny and I don’t want to spend the whole time being a self absorbed twat waffle so I’ll talk about myself here first and then hopefully I’ll be a better listener. It takes coaxing and patience to get her to take her full share of talking time and if I’m feeling self obsessed that’s hard.

God I’m having such a hard time listening lately. I feel overwhelmed by the intensity of being inside my body and my brain. I feel like I can’t bear it by myself. And I know that isn’t ok. I know that wanting other people to carry around pieces of me for me because I can’t bear the load isn’t right. It’s codependent or inappropriate or needy or something bad.

Being inside of me all day every day is so hard. And I feel like I understand why that is challenging for people to be around.

I share the best parts of me with my kids. The very best I have to offer this life in terms of patience and giving and love. And they wear me all the way the fuck out. I sometimes feel like I get to the end of the day and there is no room left inside me for good feelings for myself. I gave everything good I had away and all I’m left with is the bad.

And I have this super strong internalized sense that sharing the bad parts with other people makes me horrible. I am a monster. I’ve had therapists tell me that I’m far too damaged to ever talk about my life in front of people–it is abusive.

Therapists are authority figures. It’s complicated and dangerous.

I am abusive if I share the parts of me that are the hardest to carry all by myself.

I mean… I get that there have to be boundaries around it. My kids don’t know what has happened to me. They know that sometimes I cry because a long time ago bad things happened and my body stored bad feelings.

Am I really never allowed to talk to consenting adults without abusing them? Shit lady I don’t want to know what you think of me beating my friends until they bleed. I make them ask me nicely first…

And so I’m left in this situation where if I talk about the things that are hardest for me to carry alone I am an abusive bully. I am only supposed to talk about things that are appropriate for other people. Whatever that may be.

So instead I drop it into the void. Where if you read it is your own fucking fault motherfucker. I’m not allowed to get out of my head. You don’t have to be here.

I mean, you are welcome.

But if you choose to be here I am not abusing you by existing and talking about myself.

There have to be some fucking boundaries in this world that work in my favor.

Struggling for moderation.

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This morning my feelings are big again. Not screaming big. I want to cry again. I’m having trouble with keeping my emotions where they “should” be.

A few days ago Noah commented to me that everything in our family is centered around me. There are ways that I can perceive this where I kind of nod and say, “Yeah that’s true” and I’m also struggling with how score keeping I am in my head around, “Well I do A and B and C and D and E and F and G and H and none of that is for me…”

I am struggling with this word “everything” because if everything centered around me I would have had Thanksgiving at home. Instead of getting into a situation where I got to spend my day entertaining a friend’s mother. She is a nice lady. I’m not saying that talking to her is the end of the world. But I said before the event that I didn’t really want to spend my Thanksgiving that way. And that’s what happened.

I feel really guilty that I’m kind of relieved that the RPG was cancelled for this month (I’m very sorry for the reason it was cancelled–one of the hosts having a parent die is really sad) because it means I get to go to one holiday party with people who feel like they might be my friends. Otherwise I just wasn’t going to have a holiday party at all this year that wasn’t about me sitting in a corner trying to look blank instead of pissed off or crying.

I feel like a whiny piece of shit because I did get to talk to friends this weekend. I shouldn’t feel so lonely.

I know Noah didn’t mean “everything” in a hyperbole dramatic sort of way. And a really fucking lot of our whole life really does revolve around me. That’s a fact. That’s not hyperbole in the slightest. I have more limits than most of the people in my family and that does impact everything we do from driving to how long we stay places. It’s not a mean thing to point out.

But I’m feeling petty and small and bad because it also feels like it erases how much of our life is not about me.

Do you know how many hours a week I spend listening to conversations about video games? I really struggle with the idea that “everything” in our life revolves around me. If it were up to me do you know how many hours a week I would have to hear about video games? Less than one. But instead it’s probably upwards of thirty hours a week. I’m not fucking kidding.

And I’m not sure if what I’m whining about is really what is bothering me. But I’m not sure I know/can talk about what is actually bothering me.

A friend brought us something yesterday that is for Noah to go have an experience. The friend was shocked that I would let Noah go do that without me. I had a thought similar to how I perceived comments about the road trip, “You act like we ask each other permission….” There’s a thing Noah wants to do. Why would he ask me if it was ok? He consulted me about timing because disappearing on the family is a thing we negotiate in terms of when but not if. Not rather we can or not. We don’t do that.

But I think that the persons reaction fed into my wonkiness about “everything is about me”. We all have our separate stuff. We are all centered at times. We are all fawned over and we all get to add things into the calendar. I’m scared shitless I’m going to do this balance badly and hurt my kids because I am a narcissistic piece of crap.

I resent the fact that the kids can do academic work for hours and it doesn’t “count” for the school unless they do it in a particular workbook format. And yet I also feel malicious glee that my children are experiencing externally imposed bullshit formatting for the first time. And they can’t say it is my fault.

It was pointed out to me that I should probably start thinking about packing a hospital bag. Oh. Yeah. I uhhh have never done that before. Or maybe I did? I don’t remember. Ha. It certainly wasn’t something I took seriously. Me and my hubris. I’m looking at online lists. I have no idea how this birth will go. I wish I didn’t feel so scared and empty and incapable.

I feel scared I crossed some lines with a friend yesterday. They want to be a parent and they were asking me about some of my judgey opinions about parenting and I may have run off at the mouth more than I should have. I did include a disclaimer about “I know I sound completely convinced that my opinions are right and all other opinions are wrong but I know that I’m wrong about a lot of things. I just don’t know which things. I sound certain of my perception for my reality… but I do understand that other people don’t live in my reality so what is true for them may be different.”

I was asked how many hours a parent must spend with a child in order to be a good parent. I said I don’t think it’s about how many hours a parent spends. I know impoverished families where both parents work multiple jobs and the kids don’t see them a lot. Those kids know they are loved. Those kids know their parents are out earning a living in order to make them be ok and safe. I know rich families where the parents don’t see the kids a lot and the kids know that their parents would rather hang out with friends having fun than see them.

It’s not about the hours spent. It’s about the priorities demonstrated.

I feel like if I have an overarching guiding principle to my parenting it is a mix of attachment theory, harm reduction methodology, behaviorism, and unschooling/child led learning.

I believe there is no one right way to parent. Every child needs something different.

Every parent has different things to offer. This is good.

But your kids see how you set your priorities. They see how you spend your time and money and energy.

They learn what you do.

Families don’t have to look a certain way to be “good”. But… I do judge a lot of what I see. Because I am a judgmental asshole.

Fuck.

Now I need to take off my nice warm pajamas (that are warmer than any two layers of other clothes) and get dressed to take the kids in for flu shots. Yes we are late in the season. Normally I am not a huge fan of the flu shot. We get it some years. Mostly we don’t. But I’m having a newborn in February.

Flu shots for everyone! Yay! I’m making Noah go in for a general check up too since it has been years.

Control freak bitch.

Super cool birthday party

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I find incredible joy in how often I have to refill the hand soap dispensers in my house. I’m a fascist control freak so my kids know they can’t play with the soap willy-nilly… which means they wash up a lot. Victory!

This is very relevant because yesterday we went to a waste water treatment plan. As in the place where they process all the poop. WASH ALL THE HANDS.

A kid we knew from the home school group we used to hang with was turning five. (He’s in one of the few families that still come over to hang out…) He asked his family for a poop party. Because his family is awesome… they delivered. They had it all. First we went on a tour of the treatment facility so we could learn all about poop. It’s a neat process. They talked about how there are multiple stages of decontamination and removing particles and removing other objects and essentially baking the poop to kill the dangerous bacteria and how is the water purified enough to go back to the bay and…. they usually do school tours. They said they had NEVER been asked to host a birthday party before. Ha.

After the educational and entertaining tour around the plant we used their break room for the party. After games in the courtyard. The games in the courtyard were pretty cool. They played poop the potato and pop the poop. So for poop the potato you had to start on the far side of the courtyard with a potato between your legs and you had to run/walk without dropping the potato alllllll the way to the bucket, then you needed to sit like you were on a toilet and let the potato go. That led to some pretty hilarious antics if you ask me. Pop the poop was just sitting on balloons. Less entertaining but the kids thought it was great. Who doesn’t want to explode a balloon with their butt?

The poop piñata was pretty ridiculous. As is standard for these parties I was the crowd enforcer. It was funny how the mothers I knew from the group kind of sighed and said, “We’ve missed you… it’s so hard to keep them under control for this part of the party.” Not for me! “GET BACK OR YOUR FACE WILL BE SMASHED. NO WE DON’T GET TO SWING THE BAT AGAIN UNTIL YOU GET BACK.” 

In the piñata they had poop shaped stuffies and poop shaped pencil sharpeners and poop rubber duckies and chocolate kisses with poop stickers on them and pencils with plungers on the back and… I feel like there was more I’m forgetting. It was over the top and fabulous and completely on topic and I’m super impressed.

They had poop balloons and poop streamers and a poop happy birthday sign and a poop cake.

The older sister made the poop cake. It was mostly a chocolate layer cake with really thick frosting to shape into a poop pile. But it looked disgusting and tasted delicious. Perfect.

Oh my god. They had little jello shot glasses. The jello was yellow. Inside the bottom of the cup were little chocolate jelly beans. They looked absolutely like a toilet full of pee and poop. It was horrible and yet the kids said it was really tasty. I…. I loved it. Well done y’all.

Sausage pizza of course so the meat bits looked like little poop piles. WHY NOT?!

It was fantastic. I feel like I have never been to so intense of a birthday party. That was themed. And it was fun because I got to see folks I haven’t seen since before the road trip. There was one little girl in particular who saw my kids, squealed so loud she almost shattered ear drums and then barely let FMC be 1′ away from her for the rest of the day. And this little girl has several enby’s in her life so she was super defensive of FMC’s ‘they’ pronoun with everyone at the party. That really rocked for FMC. They felt so loved and seen and important.

It was a fantastic day. I’m grateful we were invited and I’m glad we went even though the driving was kind of stressful.

I felt kind of like a self involved asshole because I kept trying to ask people questions about what is going on with them and they deflected back to “Tell me more about the pregnancy” so I spent most of the day repeating the same information about my physical health and I always worry that makes me overly self involved. But people kept asking me the same questions…. I was trying to get the topic away from me… I just failed.

I like those people and I miss hanging out with them. I don’t miss the driving and there is no way I could rejoin the group. I can’t drive that far consistently. It hurts so much. Oakland and Alameda are just too much driving for frequent socializing.

This is part of why I want to leave the bay. It’s not that there aren’t wonderful people here. But it is necessary to spend 2+ hours/day in the car driving in order to see them and I just physically can’t.

It was nice seeing people after 2.5 years though. It was funny how many of them stood there and argued with me that it couldn’t have been that long. Uhm. I got home 2 years ago from a 6 month trip and I haven’t seen you since returning. How could it be less time elapsed than that!?

This is like people who tell me I got into the bdsm community at 16. Nooo…. I’d remember that. I was an adult.

It’s been a few days since I’ve had the buzzy, panic feeling inside my brain/body. That’s good. It’s a lot easier to be patient/nice when it isn’t happening.

Minute by minute

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Right in this moment I feel physically yucky. I feel on the verge of puking. I ate a small bowl of soup for dinner and a slice of bread and I feel so full that I want to pop. For the entire rest of the day I ate a bowl of cereal, one pancake, and one piece of string cheese. I shouldn’t feel full.

My shoulders hate me for how I have been typing.

This baby is so active I feel like a live eel is going through my abdomen and whipping all my internal organs.

EC had her first chiropractic adjustment today because she landed wrong a bit ago when doing gymnastics play with her sibling. The chiropractor said that the way she is hyper-sensitive to most touch is an indication that she has nerve impingement and she probably should have been coming in for adjustments years ago. Sigh. She loved the adjustment and she walked out gasping about how much better her neck and back felt. She’s due to go back with me next week. Maybe I can prevent things from becoming entrenched problems for her?

My kids did not do their academics today how they should. Nor their chores. They just… went off the rails for the day. Today was exasperating. But the kids did get their own library cards (PAM. I FINALLY DID IT.) and they had a great time hanging out with the other children at the library. The other kids asked my kids to come back tomorrow afternoon so they could do homework together. This little girl gave EC a long lecture about how if she doesn’t take her academics more seriously she is going to grow up to be stupid and never get a good job. I was impressed by just how intense this girl was. She was only in the 3rd grade and she was convinced that any slacking today means your life is ruined. Tomorrow will be a work-all-day sort of time and that’s not going to be anyone’s favorite.

I asked a beloved friend to babysit this weekend. She’s been the only person to be consistently available since our babysitter moved away. It’s always weird asking her to babysit because I feel like I’m using her. But this is a great excuse to get her to my house for a 24 hour visit because I get to hang out with her before and after. That’s a real blessing. I appreciate our chats so much. This weekend her dog gets to enjoy the nice dog bed we got for her. We want them both to feel comfortable and happy here. Her dog is getting older and the hard floor isn’t very loving for her poor bones. A nice comfy bed will be a much better option.

She is babysitting so we can go to a party for Noah’s Japanese teacher. So I’m going to the second party in a 9 day period for Noah and his friends. I need to get over thinking that Noah bends over backwards for me and I do nothing for him. That’s bullshit. I support him all over the place.

And yet at this moment I don’t feel as sad and frantic as I have for a while. I don’t have the keening feeling deep in my chest.

Oh, and I accidentally let my kid see a flash of pornography. We were opening up my blog feed reader to go back and check Aunt Jenny’s journal and double check the birthdate of her second daughter and…. it turns out that all of my recent posts were from a friend who posts a lot of porn. I will never open feedly with my children in the room again. I will go find Aunt Jenny’s blog through G+ next time. Oh god. Oh god.

I’ve already emailed their shrink, of course. (The response was remarkably supportive and awesome. I’m so grateful for this shrink.) So far FMC (when will they become just MC? Will I wait until Lightening arrives?) says that they are very uncomfortable with having seen that. They have more than once mimed getting into doggy style and commenting loudly “He was like this and she was like this and I think his penis was going in her vagina!” Yes… You are right… that is what was happening. They are very certain that they shouldn’t have seen that. I agree. Sigh. That was my fuck up. God damnit. It was like a 2 second glimpse but that was too fucking much.

I tell them that feeling uncomfortable makes sense. That’s not something they should be seeing. It isn’t appropriate for a kid. I told them that it partially feels uncomfortable because sex is a private thing and seeing someone else have sex by surprise is a boundary violation and that should feel uncomfortable. I told them that by the time they hit puberty they will be more curious about seeing stuff like that and then they will know appropriate ways to seek out times and ways to learn about sex that don’t feel like boundary violations.

They asked me why people take pictures like that and why is it on the webpage where I was going to learn about their cousin’s birthday!?!?!?!?!?!?! I explained about a blog feed reader where lots of blogs are put in one place–I have all kinds of blogs I follow and they all get dumped on one front page. I said that people take pictures like that because sex is a complicated part of adult life and people like to look at it and talk about it and figure out different things about it. I said that I have many friends who are curious about sex and many friends who teach people about healthy sex so…. yeah I have sex stuff come up on my blog reader. But I’m an adult and all the people who participate in these conversations are adults and if we sometimes see a picture of sex we won’t be shocked or upset so it’s ok for us. It’s not ok for them (FMC) and I’m very sorry I let them see something they weren’t ready to see. That was a failure.

They are taking this in.

But you know what? I feel much more confident in my belief that my child has never been inappropriately touched. They are so confused by the topic of sex. I think of how practiced and casual I was at their age. I can stop and take a moment to feel really proud of myself that I have raised children who are this damn sheltered.

I did that. That feels so good.

Olympia looks interesting…. Thanks so much for that suggestion! We’ll have to learn more. I’m thrilled by how arts focused and LGBT+ friendly they are. And at 83% white it is… more diverse than a lot of the area. Sigh.

LGBT+ friendly is going to be pretty dang important after all.

It took more than nine years of parenting before I fucked up enough for a kid to have a 2 second glimpse of porn. I maybe feel better about that than I should? I will lock this down more over the next few years. I will stop looking at porn on my normal web browser and clear the cache. My kids deserve that much effort. Autofill on my browser is… uhhh… pretty obscene at the moment. I’ll get that done this week. Even though they don’t use my computer much. Doesn’t matter. Hygiene is important.

These children show me where my boundaries are muddy. Children need boundaries of solid brick. Best get on mending those chinks.

They are worth learning anything for.

Right this moment I feel like maybe I will learn how to be good enough for them. I’m not certain–definitely not cocky. But I see a hint of hope in the sky.

This brain of mine. It’s a roller coaster.