Category Archives: adult-only

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Reflections

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Today I took the girls to visit an old friend of mine. I haven’t seen her much since I had kids. She’s older than me and she has a grown daughter. Talking to her is different now than it used to be.

Now she actively tries to tell me not to use her as an example. I don’t know if she was simply unaware of how I tried to pattern match off of her in the past or if it seemed more harmless.

Now she adamantly tells me that I should not make similar choices to her. She is not all that happy with the far side of the parenting road and she thinks that she made a lot of wrong choices.

Given that she is a specialist who works with developmentally delayed children (wow I know a lot of them) I did my normal poke, “Several friends think I should have Calli evaluated as potentially somewhere on the spectrum or possibly a speech delay. What do you think?”

She snickered. She said, “I have a 3.5 year old client who can point and say “unh” when he wants something. She’s really not delayed.”

This was kind of weird because I realized how much I want to brush off the encouraging and/or positive comments I receive about my children. Instead I worry and worry about the outliers who tell me, “I think you should ____”.

I never know how to feel about that. I don’t spend a lot of time talking about it, but lots of strangers stop me to grab my shoulders and stare at me in a really intense way and say, “Do you know how exceptional your child is?”

It happens every few months. I uhhh don’t know how to react. This is usually after ten or so minutes talking to Shanna. Talking about that sounds like bragging but honestly it makes me uncomfortable.

It’s not like it only comes from the sweet old grandmothers. It comes from a wide variety of people in a wide variety of circumstances. They are a lot easier to brush off and not think about much. I worry about the criticisms.

I want to believe that people are seeing the real experience of my life when they see potential areas I’m fucking up and not when it’s going right. The going right must be a fluke, right? I don’t believe compliments or positive statements. Although I’m not looney–I know my oldest child is advanced in speaking. But yeah. Whatever. How’s that going to effect the price of tea in China?

When I first knew a lot of my friends as mothers they were still young-ish mothers. I knew them through the periods they talk of with regret. It’s weird to now hear that side of it because I didn’t know anything at the time. I thought they were so great. Now they tell me not so much.

I’m worried, like I am. What am I fucking up? What am I missing? What am I not catching that a competent professional would catch?

Then I went on to read a thread on a homeschool email list about the idea of seeing a speech pathologist/therapist/getting kids evaluated for autism/etc other labels. The point was made that many, most issues (like speech stuff) would naturally resolve around six but we put kids into therapy earlier than that “so they don’t get used to the stigma of being deficient”. (Not my phrasing–emphasis is mine.)

It was a long thread and I’m quoting a very small part and the person I’m quoting had many interesting ideas so I’m not trying to paint it badly. But it was one of those “howdy there, juxtaposition” moments. (I’m working my way through a book on how people reach insights. It’s fascinating how connections layer.)

Anyway. The point was I think it is kind of interesting that I’m dithering about getting Calli evaluated. I have not been able to make up my mind if I want to pursue it or not. If she has speech delay it is extremely minor and most kids resolve minor issues on their own by six. She doesn’t have a severe speech issue. That is clear. She seems to have some difficulty with some sounds, but we do exercises. I’m not sure speech therapy would have much to offer her. The pediatrician does the basic autism screening and has at every appointment. The pediatrician says Calli is fine. But I worry.

And I hesitate to put my sticky little feet near the waters of the system. Do I really want my local school system building a dossier on my kids so that they can pester me about what I’m doing and whether I’m doing it right?

I go back and forth about how I feel about working with charter schools and it comes down to, ultimately, the fact that if I got the wrong “supervising teacher” to work with I would explode with rage.

That’s not so healthy or functional, I know.

I don’t do well with people who have a small amount of arbitrary power and then are petty. It’s a super common trait though and not a situation I really want to deal with.

But I worry about the idea that I am flying blind with no one to supervise me. The trouble is finding someone I respect who would be in an appropriate position to work with me. Mostly I just ask different people who have different specialties for informal evaluations.

Yeah. I feel mixed about the “methodology” I’m following. It’s uhm. Well. It’s unschooling. I don’t have a rubric of right or wrong. I’m just… doing.

What I’m trying to do is teach me and Shanna and Calli how to be polite to people. We have very good manners together. We can go to a grown-up only house and behave exactly how we should because there are Rules and we gosh darn spend the whole car ride there going over them. There are different rules for different places

I consciously and deliberately always specify why a rule exists.

You know that obnoxious “why” phase parents bitch about? We don’t have much of that here. I explain why before they can ever stop to consider how to react to an arbitrary rule. We don’t have many arbitrary rules.

Even “no food on the carpet” is “except on party days or very rarely with something that has NO CRUMBS”.

I need my children to be able to pick up on subtle behavior clues. I need it like I need water. It is not normal or natural to be as obsessed with it as I am. That means that it is not acceptable for me to expect my children to just be able to do it.

It means I have to explicitly teach my children how to evaluate how to talk to people. It means I have to go through and explain detailed body language stuff. We work on it a lot.

It’s controlling and wacky and crazy. But I tell them a lot, “I’m teaching you what I have learned. I don’t know everything. Sometimes I’m just flat wrong. As you grow up you will have different experiences than I’ve had and you will decide that I’m very wrong about some things. That happens to the best of us. For now, try to get some idea of what I’m looking at. It will take time and practice and you are going to make some mistakes and feel embarrassed. Brush it off and try again. You have to fail a million times before you can be an expert at anything.”

I want my kids to have the self confidence that comes from being allowed to try 30 things that fail before you find something that works.

And that means I frustrate the shit out of them.

I sorta think of myself as aspiring to be a cross of Mary Poppins, Mr. Miyagi, and Professor McGonagall. But more cuddly than that list implies.

I’m very demanding and exacting and I expect that is going to suck to live with long-term. We’ll see.

I don’t like curriculum but we talk about history a lot. I believe that studying history is important because many of the mistakes that we might make were already made by other people–go see how it worked out for them and then decide if you want that kind of result. We talk about historical people and periods and events and we read biographies.

When Shanna makes a grammar error and I correct her she does actually say, “Why was that wrong?” so I guess I get some “Why” questions. Mostly she says “What does ____ mean?”

I set the framework in their heads. We talk about space and biology and evolution and chemistry and physics and botany.

We haven’t been seriously working on language stuff but our play sometimes includes bouncing between using all the words in our collective vocabulary in every language we know to name objects in a space. It’s fun. They teach me words. (I verify things on the internet…) That will only get bigger as they get older. It’s a great way of getting them to sit still and be patient. I start by pointing at something and I will say it’s name/color/some descriptive term and someone will respond with a variation or move to a new object.

Unschooling means we spend our lives learning. The kids have spontaneous jam sessions where they sit down and make up song lyrics for a half hour to an hour. I uhhh look askance from a distance as someone who has always felt excluded from the cliqueish world of playing music. Shanna really likes making music and making up lyrics to go with what she is playing. It is a lot of fun to watch. It’s not “serious learning” but I would argue that it’s also important. She’s only five. Yes, some disciplines believe you can force children to learn even younger than she is. There is also some reason to believe it is better to start at more like seven or eight when the kid will really understand the range of options.

For now I’m comfortable with dithering. Or maybe I just think eight because that is when public schools start music. Who knows.

Shanna’s learning enough right now. She really does have a lot she’s trying to do.

We play math games. I don’t start them. I would probably avoid math much more if I could. Ugh. Shanna is very focused on math to my jaundiced view. She probably sits down to spontaneously do math work every week or two. She’s not a prodigy or anything but she’s interested and she feels like she is successful at it and she knows that understanding math is important for many careers. She doesn’t have any opening for bias that might imply she might be potentially bad at math.

We spend our days moving back and forth between subjects all day long. Cooking is chemistry and math. We talk about how much food costs. We talk about why we make the choices we make with the money we spend on food. There are a lot of shoot-off topics from there. Sometimes I do sit down and draw out how something would visually look if I think it would be hard for them to imagine.

But it’s all organic. (I don’t mean the hippy dippy shit.) I mean it just kind of happens. I respond to their questions all day long. I alternate filling their heads with so much information they sometimes look like they might explode with telling them, “I don’t know how to do it. You figure it out.”

We are loud people. We want to be heard. That is the last trait I want to extinguish in my kids. Same with not punishing them for whining. *I* whine. I’m not going to forking punish my kids for doing what I model. That would make me a despicable hypocrite.

I do not punish my kids for doing things I have taught them to do. Iron clad rule.

Does everyone live with rules? This many rules. So many rules. I feel like I am drowning in all the rules, rules, rules. Be this here. Be that there. Be something else someplace else. 

I like the Biblical phrase “a house divided”.

Fall. Fall. Fall.

Only I’m not divided. I promised me I’d never do that. I would never split off my memories so that only certain parts of me existed at a time. Apparently that is one of the main ways folks like me get out of childhood. That’s what the specialists tell me.

I’m not splitting. But I’m learning how to be polite in a wide variety of different cultures and it’s hard. I think I only get to like 70% correct anywhere I try.

I always say too much. I’m too forward. I’m too loud. I’m too inappropriate (although this one has faded now that I only over-share sexually with some of Noah’s random co-workers at Christmas parties. Surely that’s uhm not as bad as I’ve ever been before. That’s been it for the last several years running.

This is big.

And yet I shouldn’t talk about it because it is indiscreet. But controlling hypersexuality doesn’t go away when you are married and monogamous and having moderately good sex with your husband. (I post about bad spells and he goes, “Ahh. An opportunity. So if I put in more effort I get more sex? H’okay then!”) We’re too tired for the earth shattering kind of sex. Some day we’ll get back there. *cross fingers*

I feel like that is the main overwhelming fact of parenthood. Exhaustion. I actually sleep pretty well these days. What, I only miss 2-7 hours in the average week lately? I’ve been sleeping pretty well. I wake up when I want to and not because I have to. That’s doing ok. But I’m still exhausted.

Yes, it’s a running day and I’m tired after eight miles. But it’s not that. I think the running makes me feel better about being this tired because I am whether I run or not. At least when I run I get to have this macho swagger for a while as I feel my rock hard thighs. Holy crap. I didn’t know my legs did that. (They stopped being rock hard when I defrosted and relaxed after the run… but they had like an hour there.. Maybe I need more mid-run stretching breaks… hm.)

I think that the schedule I should keep is either run or edit seven days a week. I only predictably have till 6:30am to work. The whole rest of the day is too overwhelming with kid-need-to-communicate. I love them so much but sometimes I feel like a wrung out sponge.

When I look kind of deflated Noah says, “Well we didn’t pick the low intensity kind of parenting.”

Nope. Not so much.

If I get through this twenty year period and I end up with adult children who want to be my friends and who can go off into the world and have happy lives…

I don’t want a codependent relationship forever. I don’t want two dependents. I want to engage in loud, wild, crazy sex in the middle of my living room. You can move out some day, kiddos. I have plans.

But I hope and pray every day that they will want to be my friend. I want to hear about their lives. I want to know what happens to them. Sure, I hope that they will tell me sometimes that I am a good mom. Mostly I hope that I will look at what they do with their life and think quietly to myself “That was a good choice.” I should keep my mouth shut. It is not my job to judge who they become as adults. Not one way or another.

I don’t judge them much now. I evaluate them. But I describe everything in terms of progress and development. There is no “good” or “bad”. I’m just making sure you are doing what a three year old should be able to do.

I worry that if I decide to have her evaluated she will have a very small delay and I will be told that I “really should pay for therapy so she won’t be more delayed later” (when that is only a faint possibility).

Yeah, I over think things.

If she has a 10% or 20% delay then she is still in the range of normal. She’s just not right at the center line or above it. I don’t believe there is a chance that she is more delayed than that. And her expressive language is advanced. I think she just has to grow into her mouth.

I want to give her time. I think that is all I have to give her. I don’t want to think of her as “behind”. She’s Calli. She’s not the most advanced in every single part of human development but she is certainly not struggling to be understood.

If she starts having problems having conversations with strangers because they can’t understand her then I will take her in for an evaluation. That seems like a good bar. As long as strangers can understand her and have a pick up conversation she is doing well enough for three.

Ok. I think I can stop worrying about that now. (I can dream, can’t I? Actually I can’t because I’ve started having pot at night again. Thank you blissful slumber. Yes, my tolerance is lower.)

I feel like I am so tired I will go fall in my bowl of soup. Maybe time to start getting ready for dinner. I’m so glad it is a leftovers night.

I planned out dinners for February and March. I’m pretty good about sticking to my schedule if I make it. I’m hoping to uhm bring down my food budget a little. It’s hard given some of my food priority stuff. I do my best to buy my meat from actual farmers. I make a big exception for sausage. I’m going to hell for the sausage. I have some very strong feelings about the unsustainability of factory farmed meat. But man I know how expensive it is to be all prissy about “food ethics”. Maybe this year I should be better about tracking food spending. I wonder what I’m putting where. I could look at vendors. on Mint… Hmmm. Now I’m procrastinating. Put down the darn keyboard, Krissy.

Running is so different now.

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That first year I was running I felt like I was being hounded by demons on every step. I spent most runs sobbing and crying and spitting big gobs of mucous out of my mouth so I could breathe. It was a regular occurrence for me to fall to my knees and cry for 10 or 15 or 20 minutes and sob as hard as I could in the middle of a run. I spent a great portion of every run planning how I could kill myself with the handy materials (jump off an over pass, eat poisonous plants, deliberately step in front of a Mac truck among other ideas).

I think that happened because I was training so I could run with my brother. I know my brother hates me and blames me for a lot of things that couldn’t possibly be my fault. So training to run with him was really hard. I’m kind of glad he flaked.

Instead of having a gut wrenching awful experience I had a very hard experience with someone who loves me an awful lot. She must or she wouldn’t have flown from out of state to run an awful marathon with me. It was not convenient for her to do. She went through a lot of trouble.

And all through that difficult race (it was a very hard race for experienced marathoners–the conditions were just awful) she was there with me coaxing and playing and keeping my spirits up. She sang to me. She told me funny jokes. She would gently and lovingly coax me into a minute of running… just a minute… to speed up our pace from the crawling walk I mostly managed. I would not have been an official finisher of that race without her. It was too hard for me alone.

So now when I run I notice that my internal dialogue is different. Instead of hearing what a lazy, fat, stupid, disgusting, waste-of-time bitch I am the whole way I have Blacksheeps gentle voice instead. “You can do it! I have so much faith in you. Small steps, just move ’em quick. Just a minute of running then we can walk again. You can do it. I believe in you.”

I don’t cry when I run any more. Sometimes I’m still pokey and slow and that’s ok. I get a little more of a questioning eyebrow response back now. I don’t get told I’m fucking pathetic for going so slow. I get more of a, “Are you sure you can only move that fast?”

Right now I’m training for my training half marathon. I’m going to do another half marathon later in the year with Blacksheep. I’m doing this one with the mindset of getting into better shape so I can go closer to her pace. I know she will be patient with me no matter how fast I will go–she will not shame me. She will not degrade me or act disappointed. She will be encouraging and enthusiastic about me trying so hard because she knows how long the journey has been.

When I think about reparenting stuff this kind of thing is kind of what I mean. Blacksheep talks to me the way I talk to my kids. Like they will mistakes and get back up and try again because that is what you do.

Making mistakes does not define you. Refusing to correct your mistakes does define you. There are choices in life.

I’m looking forward to both 1/2 marathons this year. And…. I’m thinking that I might go right from the second 1/2 marathon into training for a full marathon again. I like how my body feels when I’m doing the long-distance running. I’d like more of that with tapes of Blacksheep playing in my head. I need that in my life.

It’s not like she’s with me on every run. But I can remember and draw strength from the love that is there.

I do that with cooking and Sarah. When I’m feeling scared and I can feel myself wanting to curl up in a ball and cry because I feel stupid and like I can’t I can’t I can’t. Sarah comes and whispers in my ear, “Yes you can. It’s easy. Here let’s read the recipe together.”

This is how I piece together my reparenting. I’m going to go have my glass of tea now.

Thank you so much for loving me.

euphoria and bouncing

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Last weekend was great. This week has been kinda rough. Euphoric weekends tend to mean that I have slightly less energy the week after. So I want to do more retreating. Combine this with Calli going through some extra-needy period and whoa. Yesterday I probably spent five hours throughout the day cuddling Calli. Because she needed that much contact with me. She was pretty upset that I didn’t hold her more. I’m looking forward to the arrival of a back carrier that can handle her weight. My arms are numb.

I think this week has been kind of rough because I’m trying to shove Shanna through doing actual work. She signed up to send Valentine’s to all of her friends in the home school group. Great. That doesn’t mean I’m going to sit there and do 30+ fucking Valentine’s for you (including relatives). If you want to do this, then do it. But that’s a lot of work for a five year old. I have my part to play: I will do the envelopes and I will help when something is genuinely hard, but mostly if you want to do this then you have to do it.

I wrote all of the names down on her little white board and when she finishes copying the name onto a Valentine she erases it. She’s both enjoying and loathing the process, as life goes-right? But I am not being as patient as I could/should be. I’m working on it. I did screech once on the first day when she spread everything from all the craft boxes all over the living room and then left the room to go play dress up in a different room. I don’t f’in think so. Get your behind in here and clean this up before you move on. (Err, I don’t even say “f’in” in front of my kids much. I feel mingled horror and pride about the fact that I don’t cuss in front of my kids almost at all. I will rarely swear in front of them and I do not swear at them. That’s a boundary.)

So I snuggle Calli and hope that her development is doing what it should do. I alternate encouraging, nagging, and ignoring with Shanna depending on what I’m trying to get her to do/not do.

Mostly it was a good week. I don’t feel bad about my kids having the odd clingy week. It isn’t our norm and it makes me feel good about myself and so very loved and useful. It’s great as long as it isn’t every day for a month. If it’s five or six days a month then I can show up and meet the need and we both feel good about our relationship by the end. It’s nice.

I’m struggling with money feelings. I hooked up our investment accounts with my Mint account. So now I have a more real time picture of our net worth. I almost hyperventilated. We are more than likely going to be millionaires. We will have a net worth of more than a million dollars some day. If you hit one it is a lot easier to get higher than that. We will reach that point probably in the next decade. I don’t think it will take until I am in my 50’s.

That just blows my mind. In my head I’m still a dirty little street kid inclined to steal my supper. But I’m not any more.

I have enough assets that I could pay off my mortgage, remodel my house, and pay for all of the trips I have planned in the next ten years and still have money left over. I’m not going to touch those assets but I could. The money is there. Only it’s not really there. That money is about my future. Noah’s future. Forget the kids. That money is about Noah and I not having to eat cat food when we are in our 70’s. And more than half of our net worth is the value of the house which isn’t so useful in terms of preventing the eating of cat food. So I have a long way to go before our old age is secure and provided for.

This is a very different kind of self control. I have always had unusually good self control but this is different. Many of the people who have lauded my self control didn’t realize that I had self control because I knew that I didn’t have enough money to actually cover what I wanted and I’m not a big fan of buying on credit. There is one kind of “self control” associated with being poor and not digging yourself into a hole and there is a very different kind of self control associated with growing assets.

The middle ground is rough.

I mean, oh poor me now I have money. Err, or something. That’s not quite what I mean but it was the first thing I leapt to mentally after that last statement.

This is what people are talking about when they try to say that “there is no such thing as privilege there are just different life experiences”. Things are hard at every level of socio-economic privilege–they are just hard in different ways.

But I call bullshit. This may be hard but I’d pick this hard over my old hard every day of the week and twice on Sunday. That means they aren’t really equivalent. I see the privilege. I’m grateful and grateful and grateful for it.

And I’m very hyper aware that I didn’t earn this money and I would not be able to duplicate the earning of it. I could earn more money than I do but my max salary would always be somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of Noah’s potential max salary.

That means I feel much more impetus to save some for later. If something bad happens and I have to support my family we are going to need a buffer like mad because backing off our life expectations from this income bracket would be hard. I could get used to eating cheap shitty food again but my kids would rebel. They are spoiled entitled little things. I did that on purpose. My kids believe that they should have access to a wide variety of high quality food. They get kind of bitchy when they don’t have it. Their bodies don’t feel as good. Yeah, welcome to the life of a poor person. Suck it the fuck up. You will never feel “good” again.

But I want my kids to feel good. So I feed them well. Because I have the privilege. I don’t believe that people who have less money love their kids any less than I do but I think there is a real difference in how a body feels after eating a diet of high quality fresh produce and grass fed meat vs. mostly ramen and canned vegetables. That’s not about the love or caring of the parents. That’s the reality of food access. I have the privilege to provide my kids with better than I had and I want to so very badly. I prioritize spending obscene amounts of money on food because I want my kids to feel good in their bodies.

Maybe it matters less than I believe but I doubt it.

It’s going to be a fine day. We have some work to do. Noah is working from home. My mother’s helper is coming later.

I need to send an email to my potential editor. I’ve been thinking hard about my next response to her. I want to say it right.

I’ve been keeping up with my running. Tomorrow is 8 miles. I’m looking forward to the half marathon in March. I need to schedule the one in Portland. Haven’t done that yet. Bleh.

I’m having trouble figuring out when I want to go up there this year. Shanna vetoed her birthday weekend (which is when a cool unschooling conference happens in Dad’s town so *I* thought it might be a great time to head up there) and I don’t know that I want to be gone for over a week around my birthday. And if I went up to Portland around my birthday Noah wouldn’t be able to go and I wouldn’t be able to get 24+ hours off from the kids. So probably not early September.

Consult more calendars. Talk to Ms. Blacksheep. Figure it out.

I’m really looking forward to my birthday this year. My layers of disappointment and frustration and difficulty around my birthday are not the fault of a single solitary person in my life right now. But I still have the feelings I have. I can’t wish them away or successfully pretend I don’t have the feelings. I have them. They are shitty. I’m looking forward to being alone and not having my disappointment land on people who have not earned any disappointment. My kids and my husband are so unbelievably nice to me that I don’t want to be upset with them even a little bit for stuff that isn’t their fault.

If I could just fucking figure out what I wanted or needed from my birthday they would jump through hoops to provide it. This difficulty isn’t really about their failure. This is existential angst. I’m looking forward to keeping it to myself this year.

 

Out of curiosity…

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Normally my writing is about whatever I have in mind on a given day. I can be organized in my thinking/writing but I rarely bother.

That said, a variety of situations keep popping up where people are like, “You should speak!” My response is, “On what topic?!”

So I come to you my loyal and intrepid blog readers. What topics do you think I could speak about? What topics do you see me bring up in a way that could be organized with some work? What would you be interested in seeing me consciously expound upon with more fixed intensity?

Inquiring minds want to know. (See, I didn’t even put a smiley here. I’ve been so disciplined about it.)

find gratitude

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1) I am loved.

2) I am appreciate.

3) Compared to what I grew up with my life is luxurious and wonderful.

4) I get to do what I want to do today.

5) I am ridiculously grateful Noah puts up with my weird hippy shit. Not all of my partners have been very nice to me about my weird conservationist shit. True love, baby.

Daily ritual stuff

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Sometimes I read on the internet about how it is beneficial to have a daily routine. My problem is there aren’t enough hours in the day for all I would “like” to do.

One thing that is becoming a set part of every day is drinking tea. I like to think of it as my morning bonding moment with the women in my life. Even though I know that men drink tea too I think of women. I think of Jenny and Paula and the other formerly Miss so-and-so friends (all of whom are now married and thus no longer Miss anything) and Patti and Sarah and I remember gleeful moments we have shared over tea.

I drink every morning and I say a prayer for all of their good health and continued strength. Whether I see them or not I think about them. I have spent most of my life believing that if I just want something bad enough it’s like magic. I can make it true.

I want these women to be happy, healthy, and fulfilled. With or without me. So I drink a cup of tea and think about them and pray for their benefit. If anyone is listening I hope my karmic experiences weight my begging. Clearly I’m owed some favors for dealing with shitty stuff.

Judith. Kerry. Debbie. Stacey. Kira. Anna. Brittney. Marina. Elora. Erin. Michelle. Andy.

I sit down and cycle through women in my head. I’m not going to get through the full list in this entry and I won’t try. I’d leave someone out and they’d feel butt hurt and that isn’t the point. The point isn’t who I think about *today* because the list changes so much over time.

Remy. Rose. Marcie. Mo. Wendy. Ali. Deborah. Lauren. Denise. Chris. Amy. Talia. Angela.

I think and think and remind myself that even if these people are mad at me, they probably haven’t stopped loving me. They may not express it in ways I see or in ways that “feel” like love to me but that doesn’t mean anything about their feelings. I can’t judge what they feel. I remind myself of that over and over.

I can’t judge what other people feel.

But I enjoy sitting down to my tea and thinking about the women who have shaped me. Some of them did so on purpose. Some of them probably never realized the degree to which I have consciously patterned off of them. Many of them probably have no idea just how much time I spend sitting around thinking about them. What choices do they make? Why do they make them? What can I learn? How would I do it differently? What would it take to make me behave the way they behave? What differences would have to come up in my life to change me?

Not because I think they are wrong and I am right. Anything but.

I tend to be able to see other people as more grown up than me in a wide variety of ways. I want to grow up. I am envious of how other people manage. I need more tricks.

So whereas there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to put my life on a routine (painting, writing, editing, playing with the kids, reading, cooking, cleaning, seeing people–all of these things combine to need a 57 hour day if you want to do all of them every day) I try to start the day thinking about the many women I know who inspire me.

I try harder because I can tap into, “How would ______ handle this problem?” How would someone who was more patient solve this? How would someone who was kinder model this? How would someone with an inherently higher level of lovability manage?

It’s like having the pictures on my walls. I have lots and lots of pictures on my walls. I tell myself that these are the people who would be sad if I killed myself. (There are guys in the pictures too. The tea ritual is about my ladies. My life is not just an all-girls event.)

I’m not very good at feeling connected to people. I’m trying to learn to feel bonds. Mostly I have spent my life thinking that I am a worthless piece of shit who could only improve the planet by no longer being a waste of resources. Changing is hard.

Shanna is making my mothers day present already because there is a Berenstein’s Bears book about the topic. A scrap book of pictures about the experience of being a mom. She picks pictures off the wall and then has me pre-screen them.

We can never get another copy of Talia’s senior picture from high school so we can’t use that one in the scrap book. I can never get another copy of the picture from my junior high school dance where my friends Iris, Jenny, Kira, Yvette, and Nikki are posing.

Anything we have taken on a digital camera–go ahead. I can have more prints made if I miss a specific one on the wall.

I am increasingly sentimental as I get older. I’m trying to believe that things continue on. It’s all part of a longer story. I’m not over yet. It has been weird to grow up and realize how much my ability to organize and my lack-of-attachment to “stuff” has been about my constant feeling that I will die soon. Or that I should die soon. It’s not nice to leave a mess for someone else so get your shit together.

I have too many books to read. I can’t die yet.

Every morning I sit down and think about the women who guide me whether they know it or not. I don’t feel like a “church” would work well for me. I’m not willing to follow dogma of any kind. My karma ran over your dogma and other such “intelligent” *cough* humor.

A wise woman told me I would have to build my own community. I really have. They are spread out. They show up sporadically–more like a rural community. But they are there.

I see them. I see them in my mind and in my heart and sometimes I get to see them in person. That has to be enough. It is all there is.

Sometimes I feel bad about the way attachment works in my brain. I wish that I could turn it on or turn it off and stop futzing with it. But I think the only way I could do that is to just turn it off. And I don’t want to. I want to be able to love and be loved. I think it matters that I have relationships with people who don’t live in my house so I can model what that looks like for my children. How do I teach them to feel loved?

Part of it is just not breaking them. Humans normally have the ability to feel loved. But it feels like more than that. Noah and I *both* struggle with attachment issues. We both have family issues and we both feel intermittently loved by our friends. (No slam on anyone in our life.) But we have similar issues. If we want to have kids who have a larger emotional range than us then we need to figure out how to facilitate that whether we join them there or not.

No pressure.

I feel fairly confused by how it works in other cultures. Attachment, that is. On one hand Buddhism talks about detachment, but I think I’m missing a lot of the point. Pam’s mother expects her to call all the damn time and that’s not very detached, you know? More research. Talk to real people instead of reading white-people versions on the internet. What the hell do white people know about Buddhism? (Not that I’m converting. But I’m interested in how they solve this problem.)

Yesterday was kind of rough. I expect the kids to get all of their stuff off the floor every other week so I can vacuum. I didn’t finish till 7:30 last night because they totally didn’t want to cooperate. I’m glad that their “uncle” showed up to help them because if I had to do it… oh man. I was running out of not-screaming-strength. *phew* This is why they need a tribe.

Sometimes someone other than mom needs to patiently show them something. Sometimes mom is about to flip out and she needs to go in a dark room alone. Yay quiet.

I feel shocked that one of my former lovers is the most consistent person in my childrens’ lives so far. He has consistently shown up for longer than anyone else at this point. He’s here to see me and see my kids. If I’m being bitchy he doesn’t talk to me much and he just spends time with the kids–which is a wonderful thing.

I don’t trust anyone. I carefully weigh and measure if people are doing as they say they will. Most people don’t. I’m so grateful he is consistent. He’s very careful to promise less than he thinks he might be able to deliver on. That’s a lot of why it works. I’ve known him for more than thirteen years. And he has been coming every week–sometimes more than once a week for over a year, I think over a year and a half at this point. He hung out with the kids more sporadically before that. (He wasn’t great at the baby phase.) But he has been in their lives pretty consistently for their entire lives. He took all of the pregnancy pictures when I was pregnant with Shanna. He showed up in the first five days of life for both kids. He wanted to imprint on them. He has continually made time and space to just show up.

I honestly didn’t expect it and that’s a lot of why I didn’t have kids with him. He asked me to co-parent and I didn’t think he had it in him to show up consistently. I was wrong about him. I think I was right that we wouldn’t be the best co-parents (I’m too much of a cunt) but I dramatically underestimated his intentions and consistency. I’m sorry I so undercut him. He’s been really great. If I had turned out to want more like the single-parent thing he would have been a good ally for that.

He’s acting like a big brother. He had a kid brother and he tells me that he’s doing what he saw done in his family when he was young. You just show up. Yeah, sometimes people are assholes–you tune them out that day.

I’m not very good at that. I’m grateful to be near it sometimes. (I am learning to tune out a lot of what he says in similar ways. We have Very Different Opinions About Life.) I want him to be allowed to live. I want to be allowed to live.

It’s working for now. See, I’m not just focused on the ladiez. I’m willing to take whoever shows up. If you are willing to love me we can find a way.

I worry about these bounces.

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We’ve had a very good weekend. I medicated so my mood was better. I worry a lot about how I fuck with medication and go up and down in mood. My shrink confirms for me that the unpredictability of mood swings are some of the most damaging parts of having a parent with mental illness. A parent who is just *depressed* is one thing. A parent who goes up and down with little apparent cause is much harder on a child.

But we’ve had one of those “just another day in paradise” weekends. I’ve gotten to spend a lot of time with Noah and the kids. When we get to just be together and we don’t have to get a lot done I am completely and totally sure that my life could not be better. This is what I’ve always wanted. I belong here. I am loved here. I am wanted here. These three people are just about as obsessed with me as I am with them. It’s a mutual admiration society.

We’ve been doing a lot more with neighbors. I am consciously not writing about those experiences despite the fact that I like record keeping. Writing about people is… mixed. Sometimes people don’t mind and are positive or neutral about me writing about them. Sometimes I upset people and I really don’t mean to. I don’t feel like it is safe to talk about people right now. It would hurt too much if my current connections blew up. I can’t absorb another big loss right now.

The biggest pull back going on in my life right now has been honestly discussed and a frame work has been put around it. I respect and support all of the reasons for the pull back so I have to just live with my feelings of terror. No one can take those away from me.

I’m scared of the future. I have so little control.

But what I know for sure is that I had a really great weekend with my family. I feel loved and wanted and supported by the three people in this house. My kids are getting big enough that sometimes they will say, “What could I do to make your day a little easier?” If I tell them a chore they go do it in order to bask in the glow of my gratitude. They do it because I ask them similar questions and do similar sorts of work for them.

I’m hoping that the fact that I usually can talk about my mood swings in advance before I snap will mitigate the damage I do.

All parents damage their children. I am told this over and over by people who are much wiser than me.

I apologize for my moodiness. I acknowledge that it isn’t their fault. If I say something in a nasty way I will apologize and try again. “I am sorry that came out really hostile and you haven’t done anything at all to provoke hostility. I’ll try again.”

Today I believe that I am doing ok. I’m never going to nominate myself for mother-of-the-year. My kids are happy, healthy, able to adapt to a wide variety of situations and people, and they are learning about as fast as I can put material in front of them.

We’re doing ok. Even if it isn’t the same path as everyone else. There isn’t actually a monolithic path any way. We are all doing our own thing.

I talked to a new-to-homeschooling mom recently. She said she was researching and she felt very unsure about which direction to head in terms of unschooling vs. curriculum. I said, “Don’t worry about picking a label. Do what works for your family and be prepared to try something different every year if you have to and let your labels come after the fact. Labels should be descriptive and not prescriptive. Don’t pick a label and then force yourself to make those choices.”

I say that even though I’m pretty married to unschooling. Not radical unschooling. Not Unschooling. We are unschoolers. I don’t believe that learning fits in a nice pre-ordered box. We learn all the time and we take our sources from sometimes unorthodox locations and I think that is more or less the right way to go through life. But I understand that sometimes you have to jump through hoops and I’ve been able to do enough of it for myself that I’m satisfied I understand the process.

I’m going to spend February editing. I hope to ship it off to a friend to edit by June. I should probably negotiate with her. Ha. She told me to my face she was interested in working with me and given that I plan to pay her I don’t think it will be a hard sell. She’s a professional and all. This time I’m picking an editor who has written and edited a lot of books and run a publishing company. I hope that I do better with the next round of editing process.

It has been a good weekend. I ordered a toddler back carrier. Shanna and I want to walk farther than Calli can manage and my arms go numb holding her. I found a spiffy one more appropriate to her very large size. I only had little baby carriers before. This has a very high back. More supportive and safe and all. It’ll be good to wear her again.

It’s interesting how regressing stuff works. Sometimes they are so clingy. And I soothe them and hold them and talk to them and then eventually they want to run away again. I’m home base.

I have wanted this feeling for my whole life.

Please love me.

It’s hard that the intensity of their love sometimes feels like it is drowning me. People are not meant to raise children alone in nuclear families. It is not right or normal for our species. Children should have a tribe. They should have a wide variety of adults they spend time with so they can find out more about the world-that-is-not-their-parents. I’m doing the best I can. I’m trying like fuck not to drive away the people who know my children.

I can’t always invite. I’m sorry. I think it is pretty ridiculous how often I cry because I miss people I could call and invite over. They would probably say yes. But I can’t invite them because they might say no and that would hurt so very badly. I can’t handle a no. So I can’t ask for a yes.

I think that is part of why I throw parties. If someone tells me no for that at least I can tell myself that they didn’t want the crowd. I can take the no. It is less of a personal rejection.

I feel so scared. How long can I manage to be good enough for my kids? Am I good enough? Who is going to even notice if I start fucking up? Will my kids be left to the mercy of me self-reporting on the internet to get intervention on their behalf? (I’m paranoid so I ask professionals and I’m told I haven’t done anything that merits a CPS call. I ask, “Are you sure? I’m not very nice.” Sometimes they snicker and then tell me about their problem cases. Ok. I’m pretty nice.)

I don’t know if I am teaching codependence or healthy interdependence. I’ve not had a lot of healthy interdependence. But I believe in it as a concept. I’m fucking trying.

Sometimes I wonder what I will be like when I grow up. I’m very much using this time as my incubation period. I’m not grown up yet. Maybe by 60? Heh.

Sometimes I think it is confusing when people talk with horror about aging as if it were a bad thing. Childhood was terrible. I want as far away from it as possible. I was 29 once. I want to move on. I want something different.

My early teens and 20’s were spent in a masochistic/self harming/promiscuous blur. I’m ready for something different.

But when I see girls like me who get up and out of all that they stop talking about their perspective. They learn to pass and I’m not trying for that. Not really. I don’t want to pass. Or I’d stop telling people that my culture of origin is poor white trash.

It’s time for dinner.

Boundaries.

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I’m doing poorly with managing other peoples boundaries lately. Well, or I worry that I am not doing well. I can never tell for sure. When people I love are in situations that I have strong opinions about I fear that I get too controlling. I am not the boss of anyone other than my kids, and that’s just temporary.

I am not the boss of any of the grown ups I know. Full stop.

But man I would kind of like to be the boss. There is some part of me that believes that if people just DID WHAT I SAID things would work out better. But the thing is, they can’t just do what I say. They aren’t me. They don’t have my beliefs, preferences, priorities, or skills. They need to do what is right and sustainable for them.

I’m not a universal standard for anything. I do not believe that people should “be like me”. I think I’m pretty broken and difficult and I think that a lot of my choices blow up in my face. Who in the hell am I to tell other people what to do?

I’m trying for the happy medium of supportive without controlling. I’m allowed to give advice when I am asked for advice and otherwise I should probably shut up and just listen. Sometimes listening is the best thing you can do for someone. Sometimes listening is the only thing you can do for someone. You have no right to do anything else. But they need to be heard. So shut up and listen.

I will try harder.

Find gratitude

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1. I am grateful that I am physically strong enough to get up and go run seven miles. That was not true for most of my life. I’m grateful for my health.

2. I am grateful that I come back from running and have three people smile and say they love me.

3. I am grateful that my wonderful husband begins preparing breakfast while I’m still out running so I don’t have to come home and do a bunch of work.

4. I am grateful that today will be spent within walking distance of my home and I won’t have to be alone.

5. I am grateful for the future I have in front of me. Despite my anxiety and worry and issues I’m going to do a lot of fun and interesting things.

Find gratitude

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1. I’m grateful that I get to spend every day of my 30’s finding out what a happy childhood looks like. I may never get to know what it feels like, but I will never know what it feels like to be a black man either and I’m not crying over that every day. (Not because I think that there is a thing in the world wrong with being a black man… I just haven’t cried about it on a daily basis. I do tend to cry when I read auto-biographies by black men. But I tend to read auto-biographies of people who have had rather shitty lives, so yeah.)

2. I am grateful that despite my dithering and worry and anxiety I have access to a medication that can make me feel better. Having the possibility of feeling good in my body is promising even if I choose to sit in feeling bad for a time for whatever reason I do.

3. I am grateful that I live in a time and a place where people like me are not stoned to death.

4. I am grateful for my patient, kind, giving husband.

5. I am grateful that (so far at least) my children seem to love me so much. I can’t be all bad because they don’t have a lot of mixed feelings about me. They love me and think I’m wonderful. They rarely get irritated with me. They don’t seem to hate me, ever.

6. I am grateful that I have the privilege to parent in the way I want to parent. I am grateful that I live when and where I do because not everyone in the world is able to make the choices I am making.

7. I am grateful for every scrap of food in my kitchen. I have had times in my life where the kitchen was bare. I am so grateful that it is not true any more.

8. I am grateful that I get to “play” with gardening instead of having to learn how to grow food or starve.

9. I am grateful that when my arms hurt I can take a break from typing and my livelihood is not in danger.

10. I am grateful that my children feel entitled to snuggle every single morning of their lives. It has been such a continual ritual that they are really demanding and pushy about it happening. If I seem unavailable they will come get me and say, “Mom. It’s time for a morning snuggle. Go to the couch.” Yes ma’am. I’m coming.

That’s why my kids are so polite with me. Because I say “yes ma’am. I’m coming.” They see it modeled. They want to be like me. I am very polite to them. I do not expect deference. I do not model top-down respect. I think that I am their temporary boss and hopefully eventually their friend. I don’t own them. I need to be nice to them if I want them to want a relationship with me when they get older.

It will be a good day. A friend said, “Hey! How about if I babysit for you on Friday night so you can have a date.” Hell yes. Thankyouthankyouthankyou.

Mostly it will be a good day because I’m fucking medicating today. I’m not up for another day of crying because I am a piece of shit for rejecting my mother. I don’t have the desire to do that today. Luckily I have a handy dandy way to ensure that I don’t have to spend my day that way.

God Bless America.

Unusual session.

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I don’t cry much during therapy. It’s just not part of the process for me, mainly. I don’t cry in front of people very well. Today I probably cried for half the session. Partially as a result of that and partially just because well duh she sent me home with a book. The Cannabis Health Index. It is an examination of all the published medical studies about cannabis. It is meticulously footnoted and researched. If you want citation, this is the book for you.

PTSD is not one of the best studied issues in the book. Only three published studies and whereas they are hopeful/positive they aren’t strongly conclusive. Fair enough.

One of the things I like about the book so far is he says that cannabis is not dangerous but it isn’t harmless. There are demographics and populations who really shouldn’t be using pot; there is harm to come from misusing any medication. But when you compare it to the tens of thousands of people who die from medical prescription issues or the combined hundreds of thousands of people who die from alcohol and tobacco… it’s not dangerous.

A lot of what he (Uwe Blesching, the author) talks about is how cannabis allows you to change your mental state so that you can begin to unravel the problems in your mind which are manifesting in your body. He’s very specific and detailed as he examines how it can often allow you to be positive and think through the things that are hurting you. Often we hurt ourselves by being unable/unwilling to change patterns in our lives. He proposes that pot is a way to build a bridge between the mind and the body.

We all have confirmation bias, right?

I’ll point out that he is pretty serious about using the lowest dose medically appropriate and being on it for the shortest period of time possible. He wants people to use it as a medication to allow them to heal and then move on.

I’ve heard from a lot of people that alcohol more or less worked that way. They “outgrew” the need they had for alcohol even though for some period of time they were dependent on it.

A lot of my problem is that I am emotionally retarded. I do not mean stupid or any similar derogatory meaning. I mean underdeveloped. I mean immature. I mean held back. I mean less advanced than is typical or expected for someone my age. Like, literally emotionally retarded and not “I’m so laaaaaaaame.” (Yes, I’m defensive and worried about being misconstrued.)

So, I’m emotionally retarded and I feel a lot of shame around that. Pot allows me to stop feeling mired in the intense self belief I have that I am inherently bad and unlovable. Pot allows me to stop feeling like I should be punished for hurting the people I have hurt in my life (my mother is one of the main people). Good golly I want to be a martyr.

Pot allows me to be patient with myself as I try to work out how to have emotional regulation so that I can on-the-spot teach it to my children. I believe that my job is to teach my children emotional self-regulation. The primary way that children learn is through modeling. With pot I can manage emotional self-regulation. I can respond more “appropriately” to different stimuli instead of going into gut-level flight or fight response.

The problem is that I feel intense guilt about spending the money on pot. That’s one of the biggest problems I have. Krissy you are rolling in money. Get the fuck over it. (Ok, I’m not “rich” by the standards of the people I know. Which freaks me out. I’ve been in more than one $10 million home.) Only I can think of a million and one things that I believe are “more worthwhile” than me being relieved of torture in my brain. I’m much more inherently comfortable with the idea that I should be suffering than just about any other possible life result for me. This is kind of a problem.

I felt immediately defensive when the author suggested that maybe I don’t actually want to get over PTSD because it feels more safe/comfortable/whatever. If I feel immediately angry and defensive… I should probably examine whether something is accurate. Because I’m like that.

Cannabis is the only medication I have ever taken that produces significant positive, measurable, real difference in my life and mood. But it’s not cheap. And I feel enormous shame and guilt about being such an expensive pet.

Noah doesn’t begrudge me. Not at all. I don’t get push back from Noah about money. So far he says he is very happy about what I do with the money he earns. He specifically praises me and expresses gratitude.

I still feel ashamed.

That euphoric-ish feeling of not hating myself pretty much only comes with being pretty stoned.

Ok. I ordered some. I’m going to make tincture. I’ve been doing ok with what I have tried of it. I’ll cross my fingers that it lasts me long enough to be cost effective. *choke*

I think it is pretty miraculous that I got to pause in the middle of writing this and spend an hour researching strains before ordering from my local delivery service. Talk about luxury. I can have my pot delivered to my house after my doctor gives me the recommendation. God Bless America.

The book stresses that one of the benefits of the medication is that it allows you to feel at peace with being where you are. If I were to paraphrase his message I would say: pot allows you to not feel guilty about the number of spoons you have and it helps you cheerfully decide how to spend them. It’s not that pot increases your spoons by that much. But feeling guilty and feeling a lot of shame over having the number of spoons you have does actively decrease your spoons further. So pot sorta seems like a way to raise spoons.

Does that make sense?

I’m not far into the actual guide. I intend to read all of it. My head is going to be bursting with things that are hard for me to recite accurately. Oh man. Apparently Multiple Sclerosis is the most focused on area of study by far. I look forward to what I will learn. So far I’m just through the introduction (all 72 forking pages of it) and the sections on Aging (the first) and PTSD. Cause, duh.

Yeah. Feelings. Nearly time for sleep.

Medication and mood.

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Now that I’ve been not stoned for a long while I’ve got to say that this sucks. A lot. I miss being stoned. I miss the feeling in my abdomen of lower stress and less pain. I miss the automatic pause in my thinking before I react to anything that happens to me. That few seconds of “Must process what I think of this before I react” was awesome. The hypervigilance means I react without even thinking about what I want to do. My startle reflex is so fast. Which means I have banged the kids around a bit in the last two weeks on accident. Like, they jump on me and my body instinctively kind of blocks it so they fall off and hit something.

I’m not saying I’m shoving them or anything. I’m not being violent. I’m just recoiling and trying to avoid getting hurt. Instead they get hurt and then yell at me because I’m SO MEAN. When I was stoned all the time I didn’t have the quick recoil so they would hurt me instead of me accidentally hurting them and then we could talk about why doing ____ wasn’t a great idea. I feel like that was probably overall a kinder trade but they are jumping on me with slightly less force after a few weeks of falling off and it hurting.

The marks on the paper on the wall are really working as far as helping me control my volume. I haven’t screamed lately. I did yell at Shanna once yesterday. But all I said was her full name and “go to your room” after I’d been asking her nicely to leave the muffins alone for like an hour. (She grabbed one off the counter when I was trying to put them in bags. After her time out she came out and said, “Mom you misunderstood. I wasn’t going to eat it. I was just going to hand it to you. I don’t think I deserved time out for that.” I said, “Did you wash your hands with soap before you grabbed food that would be shared with other people?” Her eyes went big. “Ohhhh. No. I didn’t. That was a mistake. I’m sorry.” “I don’t always yell at you just because I’m a big meanie head. We have rules for a reason.” “Ok.”)

I’ve been working hard on inculcating them with the mantra of “before we prepare food we wash our hands with soap.” I have a variety of tunes I sing the process to. “Before we can prep our food we must wash our hands wash our hands. Before we can prep our food we must wash our hands and always use soap.” That one is more or less to the tune of “The wheels on the bus.”

So if that is the only shouting in a day I feel that I could continue to improve but I’m not doing shitty. I’ve been around other mothers lately. That always resets my bar on “Oh yeah. I’m not actual much of a yeller in the scheme of things…”

I feel weird about the way I’m kind of two faced about rules. On one hand I feel like we don’t have a lot of house rules. On the other hand holy shit we have a lot of house rules. Things like washing your hands before you prepare communal food. Is that a rule or a habit I’m trying to instill? I can’t really tell how to think about these things. I spent too long in the poly community. I have a lot of anxiety and guilt around imposing “rules” on people. I’m “inappropriately controlling people by putting my rules on them.” But these are my kids! I’m supposed to create the rules!

I have a lot of rules around food. No food on the carpet. You have to wash your hands before you prepare communal food. (If you are making a pbj for yourself and no one else I don’t actually care–if you want to eat your own filth that is your business.) No licking communal food tools–that’s nasty. I’m inconsistent on table manners. On one hand my children have experienced a fair number of lectures about “proper” behavior at the table. On the other hand I tell them that there are a lot of circumstances where it doesn’t matter how gross you eat and at home the rules are a lot more relaxed than they are when you are at someone else’s house or when we are at a restaurant.

My kids have been very carefully exposed to a lot of different kind of restaurants and they understand that some restaurants they can fuck around in and on some they have to be on their absolutely best behavior. I have no fear of bringing them into expensive chi-chi restaurants. They do better than the average adult. But I coach them in advance and I talk about why it matters and I talk to them the whole time they are in the restaurant and I keep them engaged. It’s a lot easier to follow the rules when you are having fun and you want to be where you are. My kids treat going to different environments like games. “How do we act when we are someone who goes here?”

I’m tense and anxious but I haven’t been simmering with rage. That’s a great step for me. The inappropriate anger is a serious problem for me. That I’ll medicate for and not feel super guilty about. It’s not ok to take my random ambient anger out on my kids. It isn’t their fault I’m angry and I’m not going to take it out on them. In this house shit does not roll down hill. Calli has enough trouble dealing with Shanna. I’m not going to be mean to them because Calli would not handle being at the bottom of the shit hill well.

When I clean my kitchen lately I spend a lot of time crying and apologizing to my in-absentia mother. I’m sorry I hurt you so much. It’s my fault. I’m sorry I wasn’t a good daughter. I’m sorry I betrayed you. I understand that you weren’t the one who hurt me, but you did fail to protect me and I’m sorry that you have gotten the life you have gotten. I’m so sorry you went from a family where you were treated badly to a family where you were treated worse. That’s not fair. And then your reward in your old age is ungrateful children who have all abandoned you. Life is genuinely not fair. I’m so sorry.

(Today is a therapy day so I have to figure out how to talk about this.)

My frightening thoughts are not as bad as they are sometimes but with less pot they are more dominant. Probably only like a 3-4 severity.

I can’t tell if I count as “avoidance” behaviors in a lot of cases. I am avoiding people and situations I used to go to but mostly I don’t think they are appropriate for my kids and I don’t want to waste my few hours off on going to pursue people who are living lives I can’t be part of any more. I have a lot of guilt, depression, and worry. Not about tangible real stuff. My life is very (blissfully) stable right now. So depression/guilt/anxiety symptoms are probably riding in the 5-6 range as far as causing distress.

My startle reflex is through the roof. I’m tense and on edge a very high percentage of the time. I’d say up in the 7-8 range. I feel like I have to be prepared and ready to fight all the time. Luckily I’m not having outbursts of anger. *phew*

I feel like I am managing my anxiety symptoms by doing the future-tripping stuff I do. Planning for things I will do in the future gives me more of a feeling of control over my life. I can’t control what happened to me in the past. But I can make sure my future has the shape I want it to have. I need to think of the 3,592 things that could go wrong and have contingency plans for all of them and then I can feel ok for a little while.

Future tripping isn’t just about travel planning. Garden planning. Meal planning. Setting up schedules for when I will pay what bills or deciding when I should transfer money for x event.

I am ridiculously proud that Shanna’s 529 is already 1/4 funded. She’s only five and her college fund is 1/4 of the way to where I want it to be. Because it is invested (and investments grow all by themselves like magic) I may be close to done contributing in her name. This year I will be contributing a lowly $1200 towards Shanna’s fund and Calli is getting more like $5000. Gotta get the ball rolling. Calli has nothing so far. I try to justify this to myself as “Well, we will be done with the mortgage for like ten years before Calli goes to college. If I don’t save enough in advance we should probably be able to pay it as she goes.” *cross fingers*

Sometimes I feel weird about the avoidance symptoms of PTSD. I can’t tell if my behavior is avoidance or if I’m just continuing the patterns begun in my childhood. We did stuff for short periods of time then we moved. These patterns were set by my mother, who almost certainly has PTSD. I only spend time with people for fairly brief periods of time then I don’t know them any more. Or if I do know people it becomes distant. Most of the people who have been big parts of my support network over the past 15 years are people I sorta still know in a distant way. But being close with people is hard. I’m bad at it. At this point it feels like I am just bad.

I don’t know how to behave in a way that makes other people feel comfortable. So I deserve to be alone. Many of my relationships have historically depended on me chasing people and I can’t any more. So they are mostly over.

I treasure the people who invite themselves over. I feel slightly more confidence that they actually like me. I don’t feel very likable. I feel like a nasty, stupid bitch.

Sometimes I wonder if I will get past the child-rearing intensity and just withdraw entirely from the world. I go out as much as I do because I have to provide my children with community. When I am no longer home schooling and hanging out with the home schooling people will I stay home and just not see anyone? I’ve read 16 books so far this January. When I no longer have children will it be a solid 23 books so far?

I don’t know.

I’m not going to be clingy with my adult children. I will encourage them to go or stay as it suits them. And when they go I will do my crying in private. It will not be their problem. I am not their problem. But I don’t know what I will do.

I’m scared.

One day at a time.

Gardening

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I spent a while yesterday planning out gardening stuff for this year. This year I will spend under $100 on seeds and that’s all I get for plants. Given that I will be growing food the $100 will come out of the food budget and I hope I can work it off. *cross fingers* I’m only going to grow stuff we consistently eat. Carrots/celery/broccoli/cabbage, etc. The things I’m at the farmers market buying every weekend. I’m not growing tomatoes this year. I got some impressive tomato bugs next year and you have to cycle the soil in order to not get big infestations.

I cancelled the farm share box. It’s really annoying that you have to call in and do so. You can do any other amendment of what you want online but you have to talk to someone for like twenty minutes and say over and over “No actually I don’t want to switch to another box. I would have done that online if that was what I wanted. I want to *cancel* and I don’t really appreciate being grilled in the process.” Grr. I get why they do it. “But you don’t have to get produce you don’t like in your box!” “But when I say no to a long list of in-season produce I end up with a box that is 2/3 lettuce because y’all think that is what I should have to suck it up and eat if I don’t want the overall variety. I don’t need to pay $50 a box for a box that is mostly fucking lettuce.” He then tried to tell me I could log in to the website every week and tell them what to put in my box.

Dude, I’m at the farmers market every weekend anyway and it’s cheaper there. No fucking thank you.

I’m not in a good spot for cooking whatever shows up with good cheer. Sometimes I am but I’m not in that cycle right now. Right now I want predictability and control of my food.

I’ve been out weeding and shaping the garden with tools. Moving on towards planting time again. I’m having some feeeeeeeeelings about the fact that I probably can’t justify buying much in the way of non-food plants in the next seven years. This is my sad face. Ah well. Good thing I have many more decades of living here in which to improve the garden. Some day I will be past the mortgage and the round-the-world trip. Then I will have more “spare money”. Until then it’s all spoken for and then some.

But my garden grows. And it’s pretty. And I’m very happy about it.

Running.

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I’m training for the Oakland half marathon in March. I have not been super good about being consistent about what I’m doing when. Yesterday I went out for a four mile run. I was very proud of myself because I consciously went kind of slow for the first mile. It took me ~ 13:48 to do the first mile. By the end of the fourth mile my overall average was down to 12:46?8? Can’t remember the last digit.

That means I picked up a lot of speed over the last three miles. Usually my first mile is by far my fastest and I slow down from there. I hardly ever ‘warm up’. I felt pretty proud of myself. And I stopped and arranged a play date with the neighbor kids Shanna has been asking about. *pat self on back*

Long term I would like to maintain the general fitness level where I can run five miles in an hour or three miles in thirty minutes. I would like to be doing ten mile runs on Saturday mornings just as a matter of course. Ideally long term I will develop the habit of having a Tues/Thurs/Sat/Sun schedule of doing 5/3/10/3 miles. (The Sunday one is a walk to the farmers market and not a run.) I think that is more or less my goal.

I dreamed.

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I used to have these long, vivid dreams every night. Then I became a stoner and they went away. Now that I’m not really stoned any more they are back.

I have always had a consistent theme about having to find my way through big, complicated, multi-story buildings. This time in the dream I started out having to get from this small town garage to a nearby big city. I don’t know where or why. I was alone. A nice older man offered me a ride. I didn’t have much of a choice so I said thank you.

We drove down the freeway and I could see this sprawling huge monstrosity of a building in the distance. I said, “Whoa. I can’t imagine wanting to live that close to that many people.”

He kind of glared at me and said, “I live in the hive.”

We didn’t talk for the rest of the ride. In the next “day” of the dream I was once again stranded at the garage for no obvious reason I could discern. Someone else told him to give me a ride again and it wasn’t so gracious the second time.

After that I found out that my good friend K had ended up living in the hive. So I had to go see her/it. I had a hard time finding my way in. In the process of trying to find her apartment (neither of us were married with children in this dream) I discovered that the hive was hosting a conference.

I suppose it was an “unconference” which I have heard about but I’ve never attended one. It was an anarchist/revolution sort of meeting. I kind of wandered near the edge of it but I’m not real comfortable at conferences even when I know that technically I am invited and part of the target demographic.

I ended up in the apartment of a woman who had three little kids. I had the vague sense that there was something missing that we couldn’t talk about our mutual experience of being parents. She lectured me a lot and was really pretty out there. She had her kids building all kinds of complex equipment and she talked about how stupid people were for not putting their children to work.

Then I found the old man’s apartment. I tried to be friendly and get to know him but he abruptly turned away from me and went to bed while I was still in his apartment. I let myself out. Then I tried to get out of the building. I wanted to go up this long slanted hallway but my male companion (kind of vaguely Noah like, but not Noah) said that we had to take the stairs.

A female resident of the hive pushed past us to go up the stairs first. After about five steps I could see why. My male companion and I were ridiculously slow because they weren’t normal stairs. Each step rise was about 40″ so after a few steps we had to rest. We got to nearly the top of the stairs and the woman was sitting there to put her shoes on. She yelled and cussed at us for stepping around her. She said we were disgusting pieces of shit for not waiting our fucking turn.

Okay then. We stepped past her anyway and got into a parking garage. Then we discovered that we couldn’t get back into the stairwell because it locked and we didn’t know how to get out of the garage.

Then I woke up and had to go to the bathroom.

I’d like to return to not dreaming now, thanks.

Working out details for travel.

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My good friend points out that her mom has an RV. This is true, but an RV probably gets somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 the gas mileage of my van and I bitch about the van a lot in terms of paying for gas. So far it looks like the trip will be in the neighborhood of 10,800 miles +/- at least 500 miles. (The absolute minimum will be 10,300 to go between the major cities I’m hitting.) If I assume an average of $3.40 for gas (it is lower and higher in different places) and 22 mpg in the van (that’s averaging freeway and city) that means I’ll be paying somewhere between $1600 and $1700. I think I should *assume* I need at least $2000 for gas and budget $2500 just so I don’t get fucked by spending more time in places where gas is closer to $4.00. I worry a lot about doubling or tripling that.

And if I have an RV then I have to find *RV appropriate parking* every day. And I can’t drive it up and down the streets of say, Chicago looking around because I will hit something because my depth perception isn’t the best ever in the history of ever. (It’s important to know yourself.) You know how most people describe themselves as better than average drivers? Not me! I’ve banged up a lot of cars. I’m not cocky about my driving or parking ability any more. I used to be. Then I grew more self aware.

So an RV sounds like a great option but I’m afraid I would break it or something nearby and I worry about going from RV camp site to RV camp site with very little ability to do anything else. I sure as fuck won’t be pulling a car. I do not want that responsibility.

Know your limits.

But I’ve been thinking more about the van. By the time we do the cross-country trip Shanna will be 7. I’m pretty sure that even though I have a high back booster seat with a five point harness that goes to like 120 lbs she would be capable of sitting in a low back booster with just a seatbelt. Is it “as safe”? No. It’s not. It is more of a risk. But if I have one 5 year old in a high back booster with harness and one 7 year old in a low back booster I can put both of them on the very back bench seat when we drive and take the car seats out and stow them on the passenger seat when we are parked.

I could find a double futon mattress on the internet for under $200. I could roll the mattress up and store it where the second row seats go while we drive. (The second row seats would obviously be staying home with Noah.) That way the girls and I could handle sleeping in the van every night. I’ve tried it with just camp mattresses and blankets as cushion and it’s rough because there are a lot of big pointy metal bits that are used for holding the seats in. Very uncomfortable on the back. With a mattress I think it would be fine.

I’m beginning to think I may need to build myself a cookbox though because I can’t find what I’m thinking of in my head. I would want something light enough for me to move it around easily. Most of what I can find premade would wear me out just moving it back and forth several times a day.

I’m thinking really hard about how I’m going to manage spoons on the trip. I will need to be cheerful and willing to do a fuckton of work every day or we will hemorrhage money. That means I need to figure out how to get the work down to under two hours a day on top of driving four hours. Six hours of concentration and labor is about my limit before I start getting snappy about interruptions and things that set me back a whopping five minutes. Yes, I’m that big of an asshole.

But if I observe my limits I can be patient within what I can handle. I won’t be inviting anyone to travel with us because my experience of traveling with people is I plan out my work then they want something done in a different way and I panic and turn into a less than pleasant person. Then they don’t like me any more. Best to go it alone.

I’m thinking hard about food. I think we will bring a cooler and go grocery shopping every second or third day. My kids are very happy to subsist semi-permanently on granola and yogurt and fruit parfaits and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I may have to suck it up and eat more pbj’s just for the sake of ease. At this stage Shanna is pretty proud of herself for “making lunch for the family” and she sometimes brings me a pbj I didn’t ask for just because she wants to be able to do something for me. I don’t bitch even though I am not a peanut butter fan. I am effusive in my praise of her labor. “You wanted to make me lunch! That is so kind of you. Thank you for going through all that trouble!” Who gives a shit if I don’t like peanut butter. I make them eat shit they aren’t enthusiastic about. Eat it and smile, motherfucker.

I have the sneaky suspicion that the only way I would be happy with a rote dinner would be if I made ramen or something similar every night. However I think I might be willing to “splurge” and get some of the freeze dried camping meals. Or figure out how to make the same thing at home for less money. “Add water and you have a meal with a different flavor” is worth $8-$9/dinner for me. It helps that the three of us would easily eat one packet of food and not be starving. I wonder how much Shanna will eat by then? So far all three of us eat a one person entree without additional hunger. At some point that will change.

Or we could have days where we plan to really cook and that’s a lot cheaper. I could manage lentils and such. Mmmm lentils.

Three annual passes for Disney World will be about $2200 depending on how much they raise the price next year. That sounds absolutely horrid. But we will be there for about five weeks straight. (35 days) That comes out to ~$63/day for entertainment for three people or $21/person/day. That’s not cheap by any measure. But it’s probably a once in a lifetime opportunity for my kids. And they will be 7 and 5. The perfect ages to really remember this. And I’ll take millions of pictures. I am scared I will be the asshole who doesn’t have fun.

I think that if I stick with my approach to theme parks that I use at Disneyland I will be ok. We are rarely in the park for five hours. Usually we crap out at four hours and go do something else for the rest of the day. There are four big “theme” parks and two water parks on property. A lot of the point of the trip is we will hotel hop around the resort and spend a few days going to one park then a few days going to a different park based on which activity is closest to where we are staying at that point.

I’m pretty interested in seeing most of the DVC (time share) properties because man that sounds fun. They have a lovely service where they will move your bags from hotel to hotel for you. So I will have to pack up (but I’ll be used to that) but I won’t have to schlep. I think that will be a fun trade for me.

Or I’ll hate it and talk shit about this trip forever. I am sometimes like that. Although in the rosy glow of memory I don’t remember the problems I’ve had on almost any of my trips. I mean, the worst thing I really remember about the Scotland trip was beating my head on the ground after I was awake for seven days straight because I couldn’t get the voices to stop any other way. Then I went to the store and bought sleeping pills and the trip improved immeasurably. Ok, the hotel staff in France were assholes. But I knew that anyway.

I don’t think I’ll ever travel without sleeping pills again.

The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival will cost ~ $1,000. But it will be food inclusive for a week and that will be nice. And it will pay for a lot of childcare so I can wander around have multiple hours off every day. I’m such an asshole that I think going to an event where they will take care of my kid for the cost of admission is uhm a good trade. (I will have to do volunteer hours in child care and that’ll be dandy.)

So that’s already $5,000 needed. Ouch. Then we talk about food and equipment. And spending money. I think this trip will cost at least $9,000 and potentially up to $12,000 depending on how restrained I am. Uhm, since I married this rich guy my restraint went to hell. The Scotland trip ended up being almost $5,000 over budget. I can save money at home. I’m *shit* at doing it while I travel. Unless I eat very unhealthy food and don’t move around much. Which is kind of the point of travel. You can travel much less expensively if you go to one place and then walk from that spot. I don’t do that. I go to some place then drive around and take the train and shop. Oops.

I’m thinking hard about this because if I need to have at least $12,000 saved for this trip that means I need to think about it far in advance of the trip. We would probably leave in less than 18 months (the leave date isn’t locked in stone yet). That’s not many months if I have to save that much money for this trip.

I also need to continue over paying on my mortgage. And putting money aside for the around-the-world trip. And kid college saving. And my retirement. So the farther in advance I start thinking about where the money goes the more self-discipline I will be capable of having month-by-month between now and then. Over the next 18 months I would like to save $12,000 for this trip, $11,000 for retirement (not counting the 401k that happens before I see the money), ~$6,000 for kid college fund stuff, and I would like to spend $60,000-$70,000 on my mortgage. And whatever I can shuffle off towards the around-the-world trip because I’m not quite 1/3 of the way towards paying for that. Which is pretty good given that it is still six years out. (Ok, let’s be fair. This isn’t about my self-discipline this is about Noah being freakishly good at making money. I don’t get that much credit.)

So in the next 18 months assume I want to come up with at least $90,000. That’s not including the rest of our living expenses. So $5,000 a month over and above our normal living expenses. (Ok, mortgage is usually part of our living expenses but the overpayment bit only sort of is and… you know what I mean.)

The part that makes my wame curdle is that with just a little bit of discipline that is totally doable. But I’ll have to be disciplined. And cut a bunch of expenses somehow. Oh man. Hrm. And no more big house projects until after 2020. That’s the big thing. Ok.

Stupid body.

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I suppose I shouldn’t call my body stupid just because I didn’t get pregnant this month. I have proof. And it hurts. It hurts so much it woke me out of a sound sleep in an agony of pain. Yeah, fuck you too uterus.

Today is my sister’s birthday. She is 45. I’m going to cry for a while about that.

Today is park day. I’m not looking forward to it because one of the moms has described me as whiny. I take this as my hint to not come within 20′ of her. I don’t want to go to the park. I want to stay home and cry.

I suppose the only part that matters is I’m not going for my sake any way.

Dreaming of travel.

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I don’t feel well today. My body is very uhm attached to the porcelain god. Such is life.

When I feel shitty the kids destroy the living room around me and I talk to them about travel plans. They have vetoed the idea of visiting the Disney Vacation Club resorts that are not part of a theme park during the 2015 trip. I thought it would be nice to just go to the beach. They say uhmmm not so much. So we will be at Disney World for a very long time. We will be switching hotels a lot.

As of my spreadsheet for today we will be arriving at Disney World on 9/2/15. We will bounce between seven hotels and eventually leave the area on 10/8/15. I have every expectation that I will be completely sick of Disney by the time we leave. That will be using what is left of 2014’s points, 2015’s points, and basically all of 2016’s points too. I can live with that.

I’m still playing with how far I think I can handle driving on the driving days and how long I want to set up camp in various places. I more or less run my life with the expectation that even 48 hours of my presence is often distressing and unpleasant for other people. I’m looking at maps and trying to decide about visiting various people across the country. I need to figure out my spoons for managing the kids, wrangling food, driving, and still being acceptably mild in my interpersonal interactions that I never make other people upset so that we have to move on before I am physically ready.

I feel sad that I am so hard for people. I don’t want to ruin any more friendships so I have to be very careful how I dole out time with me. I wish I was better able to just act right. I try, but I mostly just seem to keep failing.

Altogether (right now) it looks like we will be leaving California on 7/8/2015 and arriving home on 11/18/2015.

Maybe could extend or shrink if we want to cut off spending time with people on the ends. Or if I wanted to have fewer rest days and more driving days. On that schedule I would have 31 days of driving spread out. I would only drive more than 400 miles in a day 4 times. Those legs don’t have good cut-up-spots. Most days I will drive fewer than 300 miles. I would prefer to be actively driving for less than four hours in a day.

Shanna says she votes for more hiking/nature/camping and less time in cities. I’ll do my best but if we are going to go allllllll the way out to Ithaca to see a friend then I will force her to submit to a little bit of New York City. Neiner.

Incidentally, there are some people scattered throughout the country whom I already assume we will see because I have long standing “I will come see you some day” exchanges with people. (Aunt Mitty, DA, Shalyndra, my ex-internet girlfriend from MDC, some folks in North Carolina, Pittsburgh unschoolers) Those are the folks who have expressed enthusiasm and hope that I will inflict my distinguished personage upon them. *cough* If you think you are not on my list and you want to be on my list you should speak up or I will go about my life assuming people don’t want to see me. Like I do.

It’s interesting thinking about the planning stuff now. I think that if I am going to be medicated then I will need to find some way to beg/borrow/rent a vehicle that will allow us to sleep behind locked doors. That would eliminate about 90% of my paranoia about sleeping alone in a tent with two little kids while I’m stoned. If there is a locked door then there will be enough noise and movement to wake me up.

Must work on that stage of the plan. Less than 18 months to go now. That’s in actual planning stages…

Dreaming of privilege

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I miss being really stoned. I hate my dreams. I’m edgy and tense and on the verge of being really snotty.

So recently a friend was talking about food stuff. When he was a kid he was forced to sit at the table until his food was all consumed. He could sit there for hours. Sometimes, if his mom was feeling really nice, she would rewarm things. If after multiple hours of sitting there while getting yelled at didn’t get him to eat his food she would wrap it up, put it in the fridge, then serve it for breakfast.

He describes his early life of being a time when the fear of hunger haunted everyone. Sometimes grocery stores did not have enough of what you wanted so you had to eat the gross stuff.

I contrast this with my own childhood. I wasn’t told to clean my plate. Well, that’s not true. I would occasionally bop through a house that had that rule but I was never there for more than a few weeks. I don’t feel like I have lived with a “clean your plate” rule.

Instead I made my own ramen every meal. I started when I was too young to even use measuring cups. I had a particular pan and I knew the water level was supposed to get close to the screws for the handle. I usually ate out of the pan so that I didn’t have to wash two dishes.

Then I sit down to breakfast with my kids. A breakfast *I* requested because I didn’t yell at all yesterday. I wanted Brussels sprouts because I haven’t been eating enough vegetables in the past few days and I feel kind of off. The meal was rounded out with mozzarella, prosciutto, and scones. Cause I’m nice about the scone bit. Mostly, I ate the Brussels sprouts. (I wonder if I ever would have grown to like them if I hadn’t first eaten them at blacksheeps.)

When I say I “made my own ramen every meal” that is kind of misleading. I made it when we had it. Sometimes I had to walk to the store alone and steal some if I wanted to eat. We rarely lived within a mile of a store so I was walking alone when I was 5, 6, 7.

I look at my daughter and I think, “There is no fucking way in hell I would allow you to walk the 1.4 miles to Safeway alone to steal your own food.”

But my friend doesn’t believe in privilege and I beat my head against a wall trying to find a way to explain to him that I don’t care if he “gets it” I need my daughters to get it. I need for my kids to understand that not everyone has someone to take care of them. I won’t always be here to take care of you.

You have to be prepared for life. It is a privilege to have someone around who teaches you what you need to know.

My friend can cook and prepare a wide variety of vegetables even though he usually won’t eat them on principle because now he is an “adult” and he “doesn’t have to”.

But his lifestyle choices have resulted in diabetes and he isn’t treating it very well. And he refuses to change how he eats. So I’m sad but I don’t expect him to be in my life for that many more years. I’m not going to bother arguing with him about privilege. I’m going to lose that battle and turn my sights on younger people. The people who have a chance of making things substantially different.

I talk to my kids about privilege. I’m very aware of it because I’m handing them a whole train load of privilege I never had and I notice all the time.

My kids expect to be fed good, nutritious, healthy food 3-5 times a day. If you don’t present such food on demand they are incredulous. WHAT DO YOU MEAN I CAN’T HAVE A SNACK AND I HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL LUNCH?! I think my kids have more indignation over being denied a snack than I have over large scale social problems. They have a lot of indignation left to spread around.

Food security is a huge privilege. When someone grows up with always having a sufficient quantity of food but it isn’t always of high quality or good tasting it is a very specific kind of privilege.

I’m aware that I ate a lot more consistently than many children in third world countries. That is terrifying to me. Between the ages of 3 and 12 I probably only missed 3-5 meals a week. That’s not starvation hunger. Sure, I also had a lot of malnutrition because I ate *no* vegetables and very little meat, but I ate.

Privilege is not a binary scale where you have it or you don’t. Privilege is about understanding the good you have gotten from your unique set of life circumstances and knowing that other people may not have that advantage.

I ate enough that I was still able to learn. I was still able to go to stupid schools where they taught me very little and get straight A’s. That’s not true. I never had straight A’s. I always had a D in homework because I refused to do extra work at home. If I can pass your fucking tests leave me alone. Err, and I usually had a bad grade in PE. My body has hurt all the time throughout my life. I was an incredibly unfit child. Now I understand what that means.

I don’t have to care if some of my rich white male friends “believe” in privilege. Their “belief” or not is going to have no impact on my behavior or my beliefs.

It is really easy to deny the existence of privilege when you’ve had so much of it. I’ve been up and down the ladder so many times that I can’t unsee what I have seen. It stays with me.

I grew up with people for whom it was a major life goal to be able to eat out every meal because “cooking is lame”. So they eat at McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and 7-11 because that is what they can afford. They then have severe health problems (it doesn’t help that they are completely sedentary) and can’t figure out why.

At this stage of my life I believe that understanding nutrition is a privilege. It’s about education and not everyone has access to early enough education that can shape their lives. It is not *necessarily* tied to wealth because a great many poor people can tell you to eat your greens. Privilege is not *only* about wealth. Privilege is about access to education and teachers and I don’t just mean Teachers Who Are Paid.

If you had a grandmother who taught you how to cook your collard greens you have access to one kind of privilege.

If you had a grandfather who yelled at you to get off your ass and move your body around so you can be healthy you have access to one kind of privilege.

If you had an aunt who would whisper to you about sex and how to keep yourself safe then you have access to one kind of privilege.

If you had an uncle who would teach you sports then you have access to one kind of privilege.

Community, family, education all of these things are tied up together to make privilege. Have you ever noticed how of the top Ivy League schools in the country (which have the potential to be pretty homogenous) instead have extremely different sets of skills they turn out? Cal Tech, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and MIT don’t turn out identical programmers. They each have different styles and flavors. Because people are shaped by their environment and in turn they shape the environment around them.

My old technical director told me that my college had a “golden period” of about six years where there were an unusual number of students who were all passionately involved in the theatre department. We did bigger shows than usual. We had more community than usual. We had a lot of outside adventures together. We grew up together.

Where you are in the country decides a lot about what kinds of bdsm you can learn to do. You learn from the teachers who are near you. Sure, if you have boatloads of money you can travel and learn from all the big names all over the country, but most people have to just learn within their local communities. Which means that some jackasses who have no business teaching become teachers anyway. To fill the void.

Right now West Virginia is having to deal with some crazy pollution in their water. It means that some people in the United States are finally dealing with some of the insanity our country usually pushes over seas. Go do some research on what Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola do to local watersheds in their overseas plants. It’s horrifying.

Access to clean water shouldn’t be a privilege. But it is if you don’t have enough money to keep the polluters the hell out of your water.

California’s governor has declared us officially in a state of drought and he asks everyone to cut water usage by 20%. So–am I still “gross” for not flushing the toilet every single time I pee? Give me a break.

I have these conversations in my head even while I’m asleep.

What is privilege. How do you talk about it. I get that a great many people use “check your privilege” as a short hand for “shut up white man” but just because people use a worthy phrase in ways I don’t like that doesn’t mean I’m going to get rid of it. I’m not giving up feminism for the same reason. Just because some people who share my label are icki that doesn’t mean I will let them have it.

How do I teach my children to be aware of the fact that their life experiences are unusual and exceptional and they need to think hard about leveling the playing field.

Just because you are a special fucking snow flake getting lots of privilege that does not make you better than anyone else. It’s an accident. You got lucky. What can you do to make your “luck” more of a right for other people? Every child should get to be educated and safe. That isn’t happening right now.

Being able to go through your childhood without being sexually assaulted is a privilege denied to a great many children, regardless of gender.

Being able to go through your life without being the victim of violent crime is another. It’s a privilege and it god damn shouldn’t be. Transsexual women of color are the single most targeted population for violent crime. That makes me cry.

I don’t want to just move the target. I don’t want to say, “Ok, how about if we just talk people into hating the white men instead. Or the brown men. Or the white women. Or the red women or the…”

No. The violence needs to stop. How do we do that?

How do we teach people that violence isn’t the answer? How do we teach awareness of privilege without playing the Oppression Olympics?

Yes, into every life a bit of hardship has to come. If your hardship was getting beaten up in grade school maybe it’s time to stop hating everyone in the world because your life was sooooooooo hard. Yes. It was hard. I don’t deny that. Have you been beaten up in the last twenty years? No? Then can we maybe focus on getting the people out of danger who were beaten up yesterday and who are probably going to be beaten up tomorrow instead of sitting around talking about poor you?

I am not the center of every conversation I have. Sure I’m the center of most of my blog posts (that is the nature of writing and all) but I am not the most important person in almost any conversation. I understand that my life was weird and on the fringe and in many ways privileged beyond my comprehension regardless of the ways I was not privileged.

Now that they hate me I can be more frank about the fact that I probably wouldn’t have gotten my dog bite settlement if I hadn’t been white. The neighbor who defended me didn’t let his pwecious widdle baby girl hang out with the brown kids in the neighborhood.

I am more in favor of a guaranteed income as I get older. I had one. I had $14,400 to live on for the first twelve years of my adult life. It changed everything for me. It’s not a lot of money but it was enough for me to squeak by and more importantly it was GUARANTEED. I didn’t have to feel fear every month about how I would get things paid for. I didn’t have to try to work extra shifts or cry when my shifts were cut. I had my money.

I feel like that was one of the most important things that has happened to me in the whole story of my life. I’m so glad that pit bull attacked me. (I swear I didn’t antagonize the dog so I could get a settlement. It wouldn’t have entered into my mind.)

Having two parents in your home who love you and are kind to you every day is a privilege. It gives the gift of a settled nervous system. It gives you the ability to be calm. It gives you the ability to work out problems without being hurt unduly by mistakes.

Having parents who “force” you to learn to clean up after yourself is a privilege. It allows you to be more able to care for yourself as you become an adult. You won’t thrash and fail because you are unprepared. Having parents who educate you about how food works and how your body works is a privilege. Having parents who insist on you being physically strong is a privilege.

Having people look at you and say, “You are incredible. You could do just about anything you want to do. You are going to have to have to work really hard for all of it because all the worthy things are hard work” is a privilege.

Having access to toys that shape your learning is a privilege.

Having….

No, these aren’t just “differences”. These are about advantages. These are about the fact that humans don’t learn in a vacuum. Humans can learn as much and as fast as we can because we aren’t all starting from scratch with a bunch of sticks. We build on the collective knowledge of those who are around us and those who have come before us. The more access to that collective bunch of knowledge a person has the more they can do. Period. Yes, it’s a privilege.

Today should be quiet. Good. I want away from my dreams for a bit. I hate sleeping.

Thinking about stuff else-net.

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Sometimes I look at the way people “ask for help” and I think “you don’t actually want help. You want to be pissed at people for failing to help you.”

It is easier to see it when someone else is doing it in front of me. I’m pretty sure I do that sometimes.

I’m struggling with the line between “I want to help EVERYBODY” and “Well, I don’t want to help you because you annoy me.”

It’s a good thing I don’t have a lot of spoons left to hand out any way. This person is clearly more interested in being pissed off about the stuff that happened a long time ago than in doing actual healing.

Healing from trauma is messy, painful, and inconvenient. If you expect therapy to “make you feel all better” without any messy or painful bits then you can keep dreaming. And keep firing therapists. You can say that it is all the fault of all 50 of those therapists that you aren’t better.

But you know what? You are responsible for you. Not anyone else.

I’m responsible for me. If I want to be “better” I have to first define what “better” means and then I have to do every single step of walking to get there. No one can do it for me. It’s hard. It’s life. I can’t make someone else have an easy journey. I can’t make me have an early journey.

Sometimes life is just hard. And on that note I am going to stop beating my head against the wall with this person. I can’t fix him. I will never even know who he is. He can’t be a project of mine.

I have too many projects going already.