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Some day this will change, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will move forward.

I am struggling.

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

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

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

Today is 6.5 months after Noah dying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That feels hard to admit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was worth it.

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

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

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

It’s a new month

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

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

Noah gave this to us.

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

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

The cosmic injustice of her losing him staggers me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m having a lot of feelings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is harder than it used to be.

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

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

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

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

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

What am I having a hard time saying here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why date? Why not just mourn?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I need to make breakfast.

I’m not ok.

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

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

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

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

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

No pressure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biblical fucking plagues

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My life is absurd. Sometimes I have to laugh about how ridiculous this is. I’m still physically and emotionally recovering from being raped close to a year ago. There are layers to that trauma socially and physically that will take a while to fully integrate. Noah has been gone almost six months. I had surgery nine days ago. Yesterday 4/5 people in my house tested positive for covid. (Luckily the person who was supposed to perform in a play last night was negative.) Fuck my life.

I’m so sad I missed the play. It’s not cool to go out when you know you have covid so I didn’t.

I’m still the one who has to wake up in the morning and get chores done. It doesn’t matter how I feel it matters how I act. I’m moving slowly and gingerly but stuff will get done. I thank my lucky stars all day every day for the amount of ease and grace in my life. I’m struggling but none of what I’m struggling with is going to drown me. I won’t let it. I’m a cockroach. I keep moving no matter what happens. I can’t be stopped.

I have to acknowledge that part of it is the ruthless way I pursue interactions that fill my bucket, so to speak.

I went hunting for NSA sex. Mostly I found it with a series of people who are profoundly incompatible with me on dozens of levels. Mostly I found men who were going to objectify the shit out of me and not see me as a person they should feel lucky to be in a room with. It’s dramatic to me when I can see and understand this massive difference between how much I am seen or not.

Gentleman is trying to see me. I am an alien creature and he struggles at times. He asks clarifying questions and he retains the answers. It’s really funny to me the way he has avoided all of my preferred boundaries to instead sidle closer to me day by day. He’s not being rude or exploitive. He is refusing to objectify me. He is humanising me. He insists on knowing why I have boundaries so he can honour the spirit even when not the letter.

I didn’t want to date because I didn’t want someone to have a lot of expectation of me being able to give them what they want to fulfill their life goals. I can’t show up and be the +1 for someone else because my life is really full. I have very little to offer. I am exhausted and depleted and overwhelmed basically all of the time. So he pushes for dates that fit around my schedule. He shows up and provides a lot of emotional support and he’s surprised he gets anything back at all. He lets me give what I want to give without being bitter that it isn’t suiting his perfect specifications. When I can’t do much he doesn’t treat me like a broken toy he talks to me. He doesn’t have a lot of set agenda for how we will interact or what we will do. He is flexible in ways that surprises me.

Noah cared about me and Noah twisted himself into pretzels around my needs but there was always the intense, constant pressure to change myself to be more pleasing to him. That was one of the biggest overarching elements of our marriage: I was supposed to change to suit him better. I went after that. I wanted that too. It was what Noah and I chose with our eyes wide open.

I can’t ever choose that again. I can’t ever be clay in someone’s hand to mold at will. I have to fulfill my obligations and that means I need to not change too much. I have to stay on the path I was on, for better or worse. Even if I am not still Noah’s wife I am still the mother of Noah’s babies. I owe them a duty of care and provision and I feel the urgency of need to complete this process with my entire soul.

I am both sad and delighted by the ways my relationships with my children are all deepening. Loss can easily break people apart under strain. We are growing closer together in the way we have after every difficulty since this family began. Noah and I began this as a conscious co-creation and now the kids help me carry it along because they know no other way and they don’t particularly want to stop. We have strife that we must overcome together. We have challenges and we overcome them together. When we elected to leave the US we did so knowing that therapists and other forms of support would be thin on the ground and we would need to turn inward to one another for a lot more support. We chose this life.

The other day I was in the kitchen with my son. He was working on baking a cake for some friends in the community. I was packing up a dinner portion for Gentleman. It turned out that my son needed some things from the store. I asked if it was ok to ask Gentleman to pick stuff up on the way over.

We had a long conversation about food culture and snobbery and access to diverse food. It was really good. It was good for me and it was good for him. It was important to talk really explicitly about the fact that we need to work on our scathing attitude towards people who have not had as much access to diverse foods as us. It’s totally unacceptable in this setting. We have had a privilege and it’s not ok to be cunts about other people having less access. We have to be soft and kind as we offer to share our weird food with people. They will often feel challenged by the amount of variety our family seeks out in food. We don’t eat like the British, that’s for sure. We definitely don’t eat like the poorer people on this island. We can’t be cunts about it.

This is such a weird experience for me. I have gone from being the poor person with the highly restricted food intake to the point of being the rich person who is trying to gently and softly expand the experience range of people who haven’t had as much luck as me. It’s fucking wild. I don’t know who I am through a lot of this. I feel confused and like I am trying to consolidate a self out of tiny little pieces of life experience but none of them are congruent or compatible.

I know that one of the things that is complicated about dating as a single mother is that my children should not go through the ringer being exposed to a series of people. I am wildly aware of this. Continuity, stability, and predictability are all on my mind as I figure out what it means to change pieces of my life or ways I spend my time.

It is hard not to talk to my children about dating as an experience the way I have talked to them about almost every experience I have had since they were born. I don’t have Noah as the person who can take all the overflow emotions and words anymore. I feel deeply stymied. I hope that over time I can learn to not give a shit and put more of it here. I want to stop blogging on social media. It creates a feedback loop I don’t like. People think I write to get attention. Not exactly. I feel deeply uncomfortable with the way people feel free to try to edit my thinking when they get to see pieces of it.

I am having deep discomfort with the fact that my children are going to be the primary Witnesses of my life going forward. No one else will ever stand so close to me. Given that I have doubts about ever living with a partner again they may be the longest and most enduring relationships of my entire life. They are going to know things about me dating. I am not a great liar.

My son and I talked about the fact that one thing I am getting out of dating right now is a place to put excessive “I want to take care of you” energy that I have. I don’t want to smother the shit out of my kids. We are all fairly independent creatures who like to do our own things. They need me to have other outlets in life. I am feeling weird about how intensely I am enjoying my relationship with Gentleman.

It’s highly gendered in many ways and also not. I am not looking for a provider or a protector. I am looking for a companion. I am looking for someone who both likes to give care and receive it. I’m looking for someone who can both accept me plainly as I am and help me figure out how I will adapt to make my life easier. Apparently I have a real thing for the sort of man who tells bad jokes all the time. Jokes. It is my destiny to endure a Biblical plague level of suffering thanks to bad jokes. Bad jokes in the “oh my gosh this is 5 year old humour” kind of way and not in the mean/aggressive/hateful way. Lots of fart jokes. Lots of very silly puns.

I endure a plague of bad jokes. I’m just saying.

They make me feel safe and relaxed. I love silliness. I love the way my horrified negative facial expressions makes people explode with laughter and delight. They are so happy to torment me. Good thing torment is my love language.

I need this silliness and this container for giving care because otherwise I’m not sure I’d be getting the basics done. I’m making sure food is present. I’m making sure people care for their bodies. I’m making sure the kids have some level of educational progress. That’s what I’m getting done and my “to do” list that I need to do when I am not actively care giving keeps getting longer. I don’t have the energy to do it. I don’t have the mental fortitude and I feel really ashamed of that. I can talk to myself on the internet but no I can’t go hunt up all the fucking forms for the accountant.

It is exceedingly hard to brain right now.

I miss Noah all the time. I feel bad about knowing that he would be able to help me be in a lot less pain right now. He knew a lot of tricks and I would have been feeling a lot more comfortable, even while sick, even while recovering from surgery. I feel selfish for how I miss him. I am sad about what I’m not getting. I’m sad about what I can’t give. I’m sad that this huge piece of myself feels like it vanished into thin air. Who I was because of my connection to him doesn’t exist anymore. Part of me died.

There are flickers and remnants of that person in other pieces of me and will exist in amalgamations of personality fragments going forward but the wholeness of that particular self is gone. I’m aware of it all the time. This chasm of pain and fear and loss. I really thought I was going to get to be that part of me for the rest of my life. I had a lot invested in being that self forever.

Now it is over and I stagger forward out of the wreckage. I am wounded in so many fucking ways. I feel absolutely awful physically and emotionally because of so many things. I’m NOT EVEN BRINGING UP OLD STUFF BECAUSE THERE IS BARELY ROOM IN MY BODY FOR AIR. Even though I see the old cycles and patterns and pain influencing the new layers. I can’t acknowledge the impact because I have to keep moving. It’s there. I feel it. I can’t dwell. It is too hard to acclimate at speed the things that are happening in this moment. I will have to wait until I slow down and have time to breathe. Will that time ever come? Are those moments in the past?

No. Someday I will have adult children who don’t need me and all the time in the world. I will come to a stop someday and do absolutely nothing beyond base survival for months. It will be. I am allowed to get to that point. It will be ok when I do.

I look forward to that. Maybe I can go hide on Shetland or Orkney for a year. I can spend my time not giving.

Maybe. Until then, it is past time to be starting breakfast. I should get up and get on it. I have babies to kiss and food to make. It is time to start another day.

Feeling pretty butthurt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I should try to sleep again. Sleeping is hard.

Life can’t be smooth, can it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am not better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I couldn’t not freak out after being raped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once you see it you can’t unsee it.

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

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

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

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

Naw.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Backwards and forwards

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

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

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

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

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

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

I feel like I will never belong anywhere again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have intensely positive feelings about my marriage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It scares me a lot.

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

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

I have the option to choose a soft life.

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

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

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

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

Even though I feel weird, I’m going to talk about him.

1 Reply

I have been writing about this so prolifically in the walled garden that it is weird to figure out where to start but I feel like I should. Only talking about this on a password protected site feels too close to dishonesty.

I only managed 2 months of abstinence after Noah died. I’ve only had one period of abstinence that was longer that wasn’t medically necessary since I was 16. I don’t do so hot with abstinence. It ramps up all of my mood difficulties. It makes me very physically jittery and my anxiety spikes through the roof. I don’t feel ok physically if I am not having sex more often than most people consider normal. I’ve gotten very comfortable with the language of hypersexuality for myself.

I went looking on a swinger website, which seems to be the hopping place for casual sexual encounters for the local area. A pal from the munch recommended it. One fella made it to almost three months before his personal life shifted and he can’t have sex with me anymore. I wish him and his girlfriend many happy years of monogamy now that they have gotten to that level together. I have had a few people last a handful of times but I ended things with all of them for one reason or another. There is another one I’ve seen a few times and I need to officially end it. I’m not one for ghosting. I like clear openings and endings.

There is someone approaching three months. Due to a whole cascade of events he’s actually going to be the person staying with me after my surgery on the 8th. I have to stay overnight near the hospital in case of issues. For various reasons the surgery is happening a hundred miles away from where I live. A friend is staying with me for 5.5 weeks to help with the kids. Then I have arranged local people helping with the kids after that.

I have been calling this person Gentleman because he has an incredibly proper way about him. Some of it is me misreading his accent as being more posh than it is. A lot more of it is because of the knee jerk intensity he has towards a lot of behaviours I would consider improper. He’s intensely respectful. Every time I have expected him to be unpleasant or rude or cutting he has instead startled with shock and been incredibly kind and supportive instead. He probably doesn’t think of himself as a proper gentleman by the standards of his country. He is what I was brought up to think of as a gentleman.

He has achingly polite manners a lot of the time. He is deeply considerate. He accepts things about me that I’ve had to fight over all my life. Not in a “go limp with resignation” sort of way, he accepts me calmly and without fuss. It’s just true. I feel guilty every time I assume something negative and he comes back entirely positive or neutral.

I feel safe and comfortable with him. I’m scared he is going to turn and run every time I cry. I’m not always managing to be a fun toy. He doesn’t have a lot of expectations about me. I feel bad that I flinch as much as I do. It feels unfair. I am sad every time I know I am tense because Noah would have been upset.

I love Noah and I will until the day I die. It is also true that we were both intensely traumatised people. We had massive gangrenous wounds that had to be accounted for all day every day. We were together all day every day. I see all the ways he accommodated me and I see all the ways I accommodated him. I see the ways we were fairly abusive with each other at various points in our marriage. I’m not rewriting my marriage in the rear view. I saw all of this and wrote about it as it was happening. I talked about us screaming at each other. I talked about name calling when it happened. I talked about hitting when it happened.

I am not rewriting the story. I am seeing it come to a close and I am trying to assess the physical damage I will get to live with in the cells of my body because I shaped myself around Noah in ways that were not always healthy. I loved my marriage and I would have stayed forever. I thought he was worth the cost I paid. I would have been willing to pay twice what he cost me. He was good for me in so many ways. I don’t think I would be ok right now if I hadn’t had him. Noah gave me a home.

We both wrote quite a bit over the years about how we both believed that I would not have been capable of accepting anyone less abusive. I needed who and what Noah was.

If I had known how short our timeline was I may have made some different choices. If I had known what the timeline was then I made bad choices. I didn’t though. I was planning around 30 or 40 or 50 years together. I don’t think I made bad choices considering what I expected to have to carry. I would be ok with being a lot more burnt out in trade for giving Noah a better last year of his life. 2024 sucked. There were high points but mostly it was a brutal year from start to close.

I would have made different choices if I knew that was the last time I would have with Noah. I miss him so much that I feel like I will explode with pain. It’s been five months and I wouldn’t say I feel better. I am having more positive emotions. The lows are still pretty terrible and they are happening most days.

This is part of what I am scared to share with a new partner. I cry a lot. I always have, that’s been true for 40 years. I have always had a lot of reason to cry. This feels like it wants to swamp me the way Uncle Bob’s death did but I don’t have the structure in my life to support that much going off the rails. So I am not. I’m holding my shit together. I sneak off and I cry for some time almost every day. Some days are too busy and by the end of it I am jittery like I’ve just downed a six pack of Jolt. I cry to let the stress out of my body because it is better than almost every other way of coping.

I am having big feelings about the way I am crying with Gentleman. I have cried with him a number of times now. That’s not normal for me. Usually I hide. It is not safe to cry in front of people most of the time. I hate that I mostly could not let Noah touch me when I cried because I was really overwhelmed. It didn’t feel safe. There were too many times when I was hurting very badly and he hurt me more. He wanted to be my safe person. He would work at it really hard. Then something would happen and I would make him mad and he would hurt me again. He was always really upset that I couldn’t drop the flinch response. He didn’t want me to act like he hurt me.

I didn’t want him to flinch away from me either. Sometimes he did when I was angry and my tongue ran away with me.

He was the least bad bad guy I could find and we spent decades being deeply and overwhelmingly obsessed with each other. Sure, there were issues. It’s weird calling any of it abuse because so much of it was explicitly consented to. Even though he was allowed to treat me any way he saw fit he had to live with the consequences. Even if I said I would never leave and he could do anything he wanted to me that didn’t change the fact that I flinched really hard sometimes.

He was my white trash prince with all the violence and anger that indicates. He was also one of the kindest people I’ve ever known in my whole life. With every passing year his violence towards me was more calculated and surgical. He wanted to hurt me to shape me to be more pleasing to him. I was willing to follow anywhere he lead.

I don’t think I can have a relationship with a bad guy again. I’ve had a few encounters since I started dating. A few of these men have been deeply problematic. I’m not going to recount the wild stories right now. That’s not the point.

The point of this essay is I am having a very hard time accepting the way I am sinking into this relationship with Gentleman because he is so easy to be around. Instead of flinching I keep finding that instead I am softening. I usually start crying because I am trying to communicate about somewhere that I am worried about us developing a problem. Every time he hugs me and waits for me to be done and we move forward without there being a problem.

The fact that I want to trust him as much as I do makes me wary. That feels dangerous. He would like to be more helpful to me. He’s that flavour of man. I like doing homey care taker things for him and he’d like to do pieces of them for me. So far I am flinching away because it would bring about possible contact with the kids and it is too soon. I like arbitrary time lines. Why? Because they give me structure and purpose. Because the first 9 whole months of our relationship will overlap with the first year my kids have had to live without their father.

It feels respectful to wait.

It also feels compassionate to myself to allow someone to comfort me. Of course I only want to accept that from someone I’m having sex with. Duh. That’s my way. I have always bonded to people through sex. That’s been a big pattern. My kinky friends think I am demented because I consciously and deliberately went looking for vanilla sex. I was not looking for a pervert. I don’t need to have my boundaries pushed right now. I need the gap between my boundaries and my partner’s to be vast with me far in the lead. I need it.

I need to stop looking for bad guys.

I have stopped looking for bad guys. When a couple have wandered into my life I turned them around and pushed them right back out. Instead I am picking to double down on the people who make me feel safe. If I don’t feel safe I don’t come back. It’s really weird in my body.

I felt comfortable with Noah. I felt known. I felt accepted. I felt loved. I felt adored. I felt worshiped. Sometimes I felt safe; sometimes I didn’t. He never signed on to being my protector. It was explicit. We did the best we could by one another. In most ways I still feel absolutely convinced that he was better than I deserved.

I’m listening to a lot of songs that have been big parts of my personal soundtrack through this life. The Day Before You. The First Cut is the Deepest. I feel like my brain is trying to resort every part of my memory. There is now an end to the story arc with Noah. The songs that he sang to me with passion and fondness and tenderness cut like a knife. There’s a bunch of Irish songs that fucking wreck me. Shortie keeps asking me to play them. Noah had such a beautiful voice. He sang me to sleep or read me to sleep or talked me to sleep for two decades.

If I include the time we were engaged Noah and I lived together for just under 19 years. I lived with my cat Puff for longer than 19 years. There’s my kids; we’ll see how long they stay. My current cats have been in my house for 5.5 years. My mom’s longest stretch with me was 5 years; she also had a 3 year stretch. All the foster homes were crammed into the 10 years in the middle. I had a boyfriend I lived with for 3 years. I never made it longer than 2 years in Auntie’s house and my mom was there with me. The fostering without mom never lasted longer than a month.

I’m scared. I notice this all the time. I’m pretty terrified of being vulnerable. I am going to be. I’m exhausted all the dang time lately. I do need to start being more careful with my diet again but it’s not mostly that. Mostly I’m deeply burned out and depressed and I’m swimming through an ocean of grief. We are coping but I’m not at the top of my game. A lot more than usual is falling through the cracks. I can’t be more effective or efficient. I don’t have it to give. I’m seriously operating beyond capacity every day. I feel awful. I’m disabled and I’m doing my best to be two parents. I am getting mixed results shall I say.

I don’t feel like I have a choice. I’m aware of all the things I’m not getting done that other people manage. I feel like a loser pretty much every minute. I’m exhausted all the forking time. I feel like I don’t have a brain. I have started avoiding phone calls like they are electrical shocks.

I feel guilty for trying to construct a self that will move forward. I feel guilty because I feel like I am abandoning Noah. I’m not. I’m acting like the internet: I am routing around damage to keep going. I don’t get to stop. Maybe not ever. I am going to have to slow down a lot. I have less to give without Noah coping with all the awful parts of adulting. It’s funny because he thought I coped with the awful parts of adulting for him.

We’ve been doing a lot of talking in my house about the difference between codependence and conscious interdependence.

We’ve been doing a lot of talking in general. All of us are struggling without Noah around to talk at for hours a day. We have spent so much time together as a family and every single day is a reminder that our future looks nothing like our past. It’s really weird when I notice somewhere that I am not being difficult or blowing up in a way I commonly would because I’m not reacting to Noah. I’m not trying to head something off before it bugs him. I’m not trying to manage my emotional range for his benefit.

I didn’t expect that losing Noah means I get to soften. I don’t have to be defensive of the things he wants me to be defensive of. I can relax and not look to him to see how I’m allowed to feel. Our rhetoric was that he was watching me. I watched him too. A lot of the way he learned to control his affect and mannerism was because he was trying to not trigger me. I did the same kind of thing but it didn’t make me softer and kinder. It made me sad and wounded. I don’t want to feel like I am healing from Noah but in some ways I clearly am.

He is very much the best relationship of my life. There were still very hard parts. I’m not sure what my future looks like but it’s not going to look like my past. I won’t be going back to the day before Noah. I am not who I was. I like being Krissy Gibbs so much more than I ever liked being Krissy Archer. I am looking forward to when I will have been Krissy Gibbs longer. 6 years and 3 months to go. I’m so sad Noah won’t be with me.

I would not have accomplished 1/4 of what I did without him. He was always able to believe in me when I couldn’t believe in myself. Including believing that if he insisted hard enough I would somehow become monogamous in my spirit. There is no way to count the hundreds of hours we spent doing hypnosis and NLP actively trying to get me to only think of Noah.

This is how I know I am not a computer. I cannot be programmed. I cannot conform no matter how much I would like to. I am different. I would like to be able to comply and make people happen but I don’t have it to give. I’m feeling really bad about that lately. “Lately”. I have always felt bad about this. At this point I suspect that most of the disappointment for my failure to be shaped like cookie dough is only in my head. Other folks are fairly cheerful about taking me as they find me.

Other people do not look at me the way Noah did. They don’t look at me and see so much potential, if only I would stop doing _______________. For years I have struggled with how much I felt like I had to be the motor for all of us. I had to push people to get up and start chores and fucking leave the house sometimes. Noah was a cave troll. His children enjoy being such as well.

I feel like my motor has come to a stop. For a while I was hunting for sex and that gave me a huge boost of energy. Now I’m too weary to muster the energy to go end things with the last one I added. I am struggling with finding the unmitigated good from the sex with Gentleman because I am so anxious about fucking everything up. It’s pretty ridiculous of me, yet also predictable. He’s really happy to spend time with me. He takes all the opportunities he gets. He would like more. I don’t need to feel anxious. It’s silly. I’m being silly. I’m the one holding the brakes and I’m doing it for really good reasons. I’m doing it to create a safe container for my children to mourn in.

Noah was such a good father. It is going to be important for me to keep my mouth shut about the ways I’m processing Noah as a mixed figure in my life. They need Saint Noah and I need to let them have him that way. I also need to acknowledge for myself that he was a human. He was a human I loved with my whole soul. I would have stayed forever. I was comfortable with the ways we hurt each other. It was home. It was the safest home I have ever had. It was the home in which we both felt the most loved we ever felt in our lives. We were broken together and I’m not sorry.

Noah took in a feral stray and turned me into a pampered and well tended pet. He made me believe I don’t deserve to suffer the maximum amount every day of my life. That counts for a lot. Maybe someday I will even forgive myself for not being monogamous. I’m not. It’s not in my nature.

Maybe someday I will have a life in which I don’t feel like being this thing is the reason that I am irredeemably bad.

Maybe someday.

Every day is good and bad

3 Replies

I’m trying really hard not to only focus on the bad parts. I burst into tears every day, keening his name. Sometimes I can’t help but scream his name over and over. How can he be gone?

I feel like I will never be seen completely again. I will always be a tiny fraction of myself going forward. Our relationship was so much. We were wonderful together and also terrible together. We were so good for each other and also abusive at times. We were intense, broken people together and we were trying to mend one another’s cracks. I feel so sad for the ways I could not make him feel secure. At least, by the end, he believed that neither of us would ever leave. At least we got there. That is something approaching secure attachment, right?

I knew he would get mad at me sometimes and act like a petulant, resentful child. But he wouldn’t go. We finally got there. It took more than 17 years to feel that kind of safe. I got less than a year of feeling that certain, that sure, that committed.There is no fair in this life.

I’m freaked out on so many levels. My poor kids are going to have to do without a dad for the rest of their lives. They have had a father for less time than I did. Not that my dad was good. Noah was a very good father. I feel absolutely devastated for my baby. She is not going to have him around for most of her childhood and that feels so unfair. There is no fair in this life. This is too much though. He saved his petulance and his resentment for me. He gave the kids all the good parts. His good parts were so good. He was such a good daddy.

He was so good that I couldn’t keep him.

My older kids have been talking about how I am going back to being the protagonist of some horrible anime series. Horrifying things rain down on me, tragedy after tragedy and I just stumble through it all. They told me they thought that raising them was going to be my epilogue, but instead they are an intermission between the awful. I’m not happy about this.

I’m really scared of my future. How much more awful stuff am I going to have to endure? I don’t feel very strong. I have a cold. My throat hurts. I’m dizzy. I’m exhausted and I feel terrible. I miss Noah. I have decades ahead of me of crawling to the kitchen to make my own fucking soup.

It was funny, someone offered to bring me soup, medicine, or other groceries. I said, “I already made soup and it is on the stove. I got medicine the first day one of my kids was sick so I’m covered. A grocery order is being delivered in 4 hours.”

It took so many years before I would allow Noah to help me. I don’t like accepting support from anyone. I don’t like being vulnerable in front of someone. I don’t have a lot of good memories around being cared for when I am ill. I had Noah and that’s it. Otherwise I hide like a cat and only come out again when I am able to defend myself.

I don’t come out until I am able to put a socially mandated happy face on. Masking is necessary for survival. People can’t be trusted when I am weak. That is when they hurt me the most.

I am so scared.

I’m not going to have Noah between me and the world anymore. I won’t be able to hide behind him when I am weak and vulnerable. People despise weakness. They want to hurt and crush anything that looks weak or sad or pathetic. It is a really standard part of human nature. It’s not the world being mean to me. It is simply how the world works.

It’s not personal.

I am grateful for the people in this life who help me feel seen. When Noah died a friend reached out and was able to recommend a therapist for helping me get through this transition. My friend said, “I know the exact right person for you.” My therapist is a plural rodent. They are heavy on the woo while also backstopping their intense multi-modality training on psychological therapy techniques with body work training. They really are a great therapist. We spent a lot of the last session working on the ways I’m having intense body reactions to dating.

I’m having a lot of anxiety around the topic for a bunch of reasons. Two of the people I’ve met in the last month are hitting old hot buttons. I’ve been trying very hard to give them chances to prove that they aren’t just like experiences I had in the past. I think I am pushing myself to be forgiving long past the point where it is healthy for me.

I am scared of putting an inappropriate amount of emotional weight on the one person I will be left seeing. One reason I like dating several people at once is because I spread out my too muchness between them and I don’t overwhelm anyone. I like this person. I’m scared of scaring him off when I’m doing the intense emotional up and down that comes with surgery recovery. I’m going to be intensely weak and vulnerable. I am going to be scared as shit the whole time. I can’t do my favourite bonding/soothing technique: sex.

When I’m recovering from surgery I shouldn’t get my blood pressure up. That means I don’t want any sexual contact. Well, I want it but it could literally be life threatening so I don’t do it.

How am I going to trust that someone wants to hang out and talk to me without me being able to barter for their time? I’m not going to be entertaining or useful at all. That makes me feel very scared and insecure.

What are the good parts of the days lately? Time with my kids. We are all being incredibly cuddly and loving and supportive. We are making a lot of progress on weeding this spring. Some years we let it get fully away from us. I think that I will be at a stable maintenance place while I’m crawling around post-surgery. This is good.

I have barely touched the garden in the entire last calendar year. My plan was to fall into it heavily after Pride but the second half of the year went completely sideways instead.

Like the first half of this year being a bit of a blur. There have been good moments but mostly I am going to remember this time as a haze of pain. I am so sad. My happily ever after is over. I don’t know how I will ever believe that anyone loves me again.

I’m pretty stupid. I am going to forget the way my friends are showing up. I am going to lose time and fall into always/never and forget that any good feelings have ever inhabited my body. Which is crazy. I have Miss Jenny and I’ve had her for 31 years. I followed her across the sea. I have the people who have showed up this year. I “know” it. I hate how hard it is to be in a room with most of them. I’m super avoidant. They are coming so far and demonstrating their love with such purity and openness and I’m still hiding to cry alone.

I used to hide away from Noah, too. I rarely let him see me cry.

I hate being sick. It makes me feel extra mopey.

Noah gave me a sense of belonging that I’ve never had with anyone else. I hate that I don’t have it with the kids but I don’t. With Noah here to watch me I knew I would be a good enough mother so I was allowed to stay. He made sure I wouldn’t be too bad. I trusted him to slam a barrier in front of me if I started to do something I shouldn’t. He wasn’t the only childish one in our marriage. Without him I am scared that I am going to be the problem; I am going to fuck up my kids so maybe it is better if I am not here. I’m not going to leave–neither through suicide nor desertion. Don’t worry about that bit. But I don’t feel like I belong. I feel like I am barely allowed to be here. Now that this isn’t Noah’s house it is harder to feel like I deserve to live here. I was allowed to be here because Noah wanted me.

For the last 18 years I have avoided suicide because Noah needed me. He needed me to love him. He needed me to accept him and support him and take care of him. He needed to be able to love me. He needed to be allowed to accept and support and take care of me. We validated each other existing. I don’t know what I am going to do without that structure. Without Noah wanting me don’t I take up too many resources to continue? I need too much medical care. I need too much support and I am out of strength to pay it all back. I can’t put decades of work in before I need help. I need help now.

I am having to ask for help and it fucking hurts. I’m not doing a great job of organising it because I feel like I am choking on it. I don’t deserve it.

I feel like I only deserved the support I got over the last 18 years because I made Noah feel so much better about being alive. I made him happy. I also made him miserable and sad. I made him angry. I made him feel safe and loved. He wanted all of the feelings and he wanted them with me. It made sense that I was way too extra because he needed all of that intensity. He needed all of me.

I am scared that the rest of my life is going to be tiny slivers and I will never feel fully alive again.

I hate that I’ve been feeling stymied and blocked about writing the story of my relationship with Noah. It’s been feeling too in medias res to consider. Now that is not a problem. It is over now. I still don’t have perspective because I can’t see me post-Noah very well. But it’s closer.

Noah, Vicki, the story of hunting before Noah, the Part 2 where I’m honest about my relationships with women the way I was too afraid to be when I got started on it years ago. So many book and stories in my brain. Will I write them or will I only whine to myself about what I “could” do?

I’m not big on talking about what I “will do”. I am big on talking about what I am doing and what I have done. Don’t inflate the future.

Noah is my past. He will always be there in my memory. He will always have given me the happiest home I have ever had. He will always be the person who gave me a family. He will always be the person who thought I was worth committing to. He gave me what he could. He gave me everything he could. He loved me so much.

I don’t think I will ever be loved like that again. He burned so intensely.

I am so upset that in the last months of his life he talked about how I was going to turn into Skye O’Malley. I wish he had not done so much foreshadowing his own death. The kids and I keep talking about it. There were so many stupid things in the last six months. He acted like he was on the way out. He acted like he knew.

I would have acted very differently if I had known. Would I have made better choices? I don’t know.

I feel like I don’t know anything. I don’t know about the past, the present, or the future. I am scared. I feel empty of hope.

This is why I go have sex. It keeps the worst of my depression at bay. The positive hormones give me a lift that lets me pretend I am full optimism, hope, and joy. Without it I feel dismal, pointless, listless, and like I should go become one with the mushrooms in the forest.

So of course I decide to cut off two sources of sex because they don’t make me feel good enough. I am too much damn trouble. I just can’t be pleased. I can’t be forgiving enough. I can’t accept whatever I get. I have to have standards. I have to act like I am living in a highly traumatised body and I need to feel safe.

Isn’t that an impossible bar? Isn’t that just saying I will never be in a room with anyone ever again?

In some ways, yes. I’m scared of what will happen over the months I can’t have sex. I think about the consequences of having to believe that someone wants my company in order to ask for time. Will I be able to do that? Will he want to? I don’t know. I don’t know anything right now. I’m so scared.

I’m going to keep moving anyway. I don’t stop. That is the reason I am a protagonist. I keep moving when I don’t want to, even when it hurts and I want to stumble and fall before the boulder chasing me. I’d like to be squished. It sounds restless. I don’t get to though, I’m the fucking protagonist. I need to do some fancy parkour jumping bullshit even when I feel too weak to stand.

It doesn’t matter how I feel. It matters what I do. Not what I “will do”. Not what I dream of doing. What I do.

There is no margin of error, there is no forgiveness, there is no one left to save me from my mistakes. I’m on my own because The Family is not going to be the whole centre of my life anymore. That’s what poly means. That is what Noah was so scared of. That my entire existence would not centre around him anymore. I would instead have one foot in the family and one foot poised to run off on adventure. He was right to be afraid. I should not be as enmeshed with the kids as he and I were with each other. It would be wrong. Bonding outside the house is going to be hard for everyone.

When the kids find people to date there is always a “bring them over” energy fairly quickly and there won’t be fore me. My people will have to go through a dramatic, massive vetting process. The people I created with Noah are not the easiest folks ever created. They don’t blend in very well. Their home will always be a safe place for them.

What I am less certain of is whether I will always be in their home. I can’t imagine moving someone into this house. I can imagine moving somewhere else. That’s a weird thought but it gives me a touch of comfort. Even if I commit to this house staying in the family because it brings comfort to the kids to have this home base I don’t have to stay here.

That makes it a lot easier to think of the indenture as the time when I am setting this space up for them. It’s a lot of why I am trying to set up the garden to be as ignorable as possible compared to how much food will grow on its own because it has a self reinforcing ecosystem around it. If I think about it as having 10 years left on the run for that situation it makes it a lot easier to set my pace. That’s a substantial amount of work, but a tractable problem.

As opposed to the problem where Noah promised me that I would never have to be alone again. The problem is I tried to believe him. He had just about convinced me. And now I am looking at a future alone again.

I am going to have to buy myself flowers and hold my own hand. Not because I want to. Not because I chose this. Not because I wanted this. I wanted Noah. I put a lot of effort into training him as a partner. He knew how to make me feel loved. He knew how to make me feel safe. He knew how to make me feel respected and seen. He knew how to make me feel like there was value and purpose in my life.

I knew how to make Noah feel valued and purposeful and valuable. I knew how to make Noah glow with feeling loved. I also knew how to cut him to his core so that he sobbed on the floor. I saw all of him: good and terrible. I responded as I saw fit. I was not always kind.

I was always who he wanted.

I don’t know that I will ever be able to believe that again. I don’t think I will ever believe that anyone will ever know me well enough to convince me that they will accept all of me. I’m going to spend the rest of my life being a lying liar who lies. I will mask so hard they will believe that what they see is all that I am. It will fill me with internal revulsion and aversive feelings.

The reason that leaving the house sounds so appealing is specifically that I can imagine really benefiting from 6 months or a year on a remote location where I don’t see or speak to a person the whole time. I would not bring the internet with me. No movies. Just notebooks, books, pens.

What would I discover about myself if I didn’t spend all day censoring around what other people don’t deserve to know about?

It is really physically painful dealing with all the thoughts and feelings I can’t express in front of the kids. Noah was my outlet, my relief valve, my safe witness. He made sure I stayed being the person I wanted to be. He understood who I wanted to be and he was absolutely relentless about kicking my ass towards that future. He was a fucking asshole about it.

Noah made me feel like a real person because he got to see all the good and the shitty and the petty and the grandiose and the mediocre and he loved all of it. He was in the room watching me have my life. He also got to hear all the backstage notes. He watched me grow up into the mother I wanted to be. The mother I started out just crossing my fingers and praying I could conjure up out of thin air despite no realistic role models at all. He watched me buckle down and be the wife I wanted to be despite it being hard for me. It was often a struggle to be what he wanted and I did the struggle. He was worth choosing.

He made me feel worth choosing. He made me feel worth choosing in sickness and in health, for better or worse. Knowing that there would be a lot more sickness than health and that my life has always been a lot more worse than better.

I feel like I need to be able to see a future where I will be able to get the problems of being me further away from my kids. I am so sorry for the ways my fucking never ending stream of tragedies is impacting them. I wish I had a better self to offer them but I don’t.

I keep interrupting this essay to writhe around on the floor sobbing and screaming. It’s a rough morning. I really miss feeling safe. I feel like I don’t know how to give it to the kids anymore because I don’t have it in me.

He was going to keep me safe, and healthy enough, and loved, and looked after and that meant I knew I had those things to give the kids. Now he is gone and I am an empty shell trying to pour sand because there is no more water.

At this point my screaming is a weird high pitched squeak because my voice is gone. Bodies are hilarious. I feel like my throat will fully seize and cease to work at all. I know that won’t happen though. I’ll go inside and wash my face and I’ll find enough function to breathe and communicate. I may whisper.

It doesn’t matter how I feel; it matters how I act. When I go inside I will hug my babies gently. I will smile because I always have a smile on a shelf for them. I have back up smiles for my smiles because I am not allowed to run out. I will say, “I am so glad to see you again.” They will always get that from me. I’m not consistent about everything but I am about this.

I can be so fucking furious I want to scratch your face off and I will still greet you in the morning.

I love those exchanges.

“I am so glad to see you again. I love you. Also, I am super fucking pissed off at you.”

Cue beatific smile and “I know!”

Their casual arrogance about being overwhelmingly loved is good for my soul. Past Me did that with Noah. We made them feel that certain, that sure, that secure. Two anxious messes did that. I’m really scared that I am not enough to carry it forward without him.

I am so scared.

Finding my way back to me

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Today I was told that someone needs to be cautious about their landlord seeing a book about kink because it could be a problem for their housing. I live in a place that has very different boundaries than what I am accustomed to. I can’t imagine a landlord caring what people getting up to in privacy.

This kind of difference is a lot of why I haven’t written much in the past six years in public. I’ve been afraid of consequences. I will be judged on what I do and on what I don’t do. There is no way to thread this needle and be ok for everyone, people are going to be uncomfortable, if I am going to be true to myself.

When I think about the words of my friends that bounce around in my head like a pinball that will never make it to the bottom of the table I come back to a dramatic theme. Different people in different ways at different times have all told me that the thing that makes knowing me so impactful is the fact that in every single moment I am overwhelmingly, achingly myself. I hold to my values and my truth and I move forward as I have the right. I believe in the core of my being that I have the right to exist as much as anyone else does.

I was not brought into this world as an act of joy or love. That is not my fault. I can’t do anything about the rage, control, pain, and violence that brought me into being.

I am not that powerful.

I can’t do anything about the violence and sadness and unwantedness that permeated my young life. That time is over. That book is closed.

I can’t go back to the marriage where I was cherished and adored and worshiped either.

Do you notice this theme? There is no going back. There is only racing forward. People tell me that seeing me stride forward boldly without reservation makes them feel like they can too. I am not perfect. I am not waiting until I have the perfect body or all the information or I have fulfilled all the prerequisites.

I have all the confidence of a mediocre white man in Silicon Valley. 60% prepared is definitely good enough.

People keep asking me how I am doing. I don’t know. I’m getting things done. I don’t feel like I am doing anything well and I don’t feel like I am getting every ‘t’ crossed or every ‘i’ dotted. I am dropping balls all over the place. It’s frustrating. For many years Noah and I traded tasks based on who could get 90%+ done effectively. We had different strengths and we were an amazing team. Between the pair of us we went from people with deeply spiky profiles of success and failure to being absurd and superhuman. We compensated for and eliminated one another’s failures. We both got to be much more effective human beings.

Now I have to do all of Noah’s tasks too, not just the ones that I am basically competent on. I am responsible for the really hard and scary parts. I now have to be the one who does the tasks where I cry the whole time I am doing it. I feel like I am being bad and I can and should be punished for what I am doing, sometimes just because I am doing such an inadequate job.

I have a core of perfectionism I try hard to smother with a pillow. Good enough is good enough. Everything doesn’t have to be perfect. Life does not require perfection. Life just needs us to move forward. Me. I have to be thinking about me moving forward.

For many years now I have used Noah frankly as a tool to manage a lot of my physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs. Having him drop out of my life is devastating in a way I struggle to wrap my head around.

I’m really sad my son has to share the date of his birth with the date of his father’s death. That’s going to be painful sometimes. I will not bring it up to him. He’ll notice and it will be painful enough. He definitely doesn’t want a huge deal paid this year. No parties. No celebrations. Not this year.

It’s really hard on Shorty. That is part of why I am taking her on a trip after I recover from surgery. She needs to have more going on that give her big learning experiences. I can see how and why she is struggling to get concepts we are explaining at home because she has been so limited in environmental exposure.

I have so much to tell you all. It’s going to be hard to explain all of it in a way that makes sense quickly. I don’t have enough free time for typing. I miss you. I want to seek more integration and that means I am going to have to be more honest with you lot. I’ve been hiding in a walled garden of people who were pre-screened for wanting to talk about sex. You are just here for me and that’s a lot weirder at times.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few years writing about what sex means to me. It has been contentious and difficult over the entire past year. Noah and I were struggling on that front in a bunch of ways. We were also having the best sex of our marriage. Noah was laid off last February. The last 10 months of his life he was unemployed. We were trying to figure out how to get him more immediately to retirement because my body is so shitty I could use a full time care giver. We were having a ridiculous amount of sex. It was so good. It was bonding on a soul level. A lot of it was part of active magical and spiritual rituals. We were on fire together.

We worked really hard to build the fire inside me to a raging inferno. For those of you who are not Archivists (old friends who have been reading me since livejournal across many platforms) I need to say that I am a hypersexual. I mean it in a clinical sense and not in a “I like to have sex” way. I have been actively pursuing and chasing sex in a wide variety of inappropriate and then appropriate settings since I was 3. Sex has been an overwhelming driving force in my life in ways it isn’t for normal people. I did not have a time of virginity or ignorance. That is simply not my life path.

Instead I have provided that path for my children. I have been in active trauma therapy for approaching 35 years now. I work very hard on being a person who acts consciously and deliberately. I make choices about where boundaries should be based on an excessive amount of deliberation and waffling between various theories. I overthink my life.

I was raised by people who made incredibly bad choices. I don’t have a lot of strong role models in my head of who I want to be when I grow up. The only person I want to be is me. I see the person I want to be the same way I see the murals I paint in my homes. My homes erupt with plants and water and texture. I see that Future Me bursting out of me. She will know the right thing to do in an absurd number of circumstances and she will never be a twat about it because every new thing I learn unveils a thousand variations I will fail at. The more I know the more I understand I will never understand. I am a tiny drop in a hurricane.

For 18 years Noah was my path to controlling and living with my hypersexuality. He was my safe way to not expose my children to inappropriate behaviour. We were rigid about boundaries between our sex life and our kids.

Theoretical knowledge about sex? Heck yeah! These are some deeply educated mofos. They can deconstruct tropes. They are finding their own pathways into adult relationships in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with my path. I see the edges out of the periphery of my vision and carefully never look more closely. I am a nosy and invasive asshole, only I’m not. If I want my 30 year old children to respect me I have to nail this dynamic now.

What I am doing today is not about today. I am paying Future Me. Future Me will want to have the kind of relationship with her children where EVERYONE CAREFULLY DOESN’T LOOK. Cause no one is hiding or lying or being secretive. They just aren’t flaunting.

So I need to start figuring out what that means from myself as a single adult who is going to be polyamorous.

I am not going to fall into a serial monogamist pattern. Naw. That will be unstable and bad for my kids. People will not integrate with my life quickly.

For the love of Cheese, there will always be a locked door between me and my kids when I have sex. Preferably in a sound proof room. Hey wait, I have one of those.

I’m scared of this though. Not to hurt anyone’s feelings, but I’ve seen poly done in some ways I don’t want to emulate. I have known people who have done things in ways I thought were highly respectful all around. I’ve seen everything in between. I don’t live in the San Francisco Bay Area any more. I will not have the same kind of casual social tolerance for my antics. My neighbours here are probably already noticing. I’m having feelings about that. A lot of people use my road as a daily exercise destination. They comment on my weeding. They are going to notice and raise eyebrows about vehicles. That sits heavy in my belly.

Especially given how many of them stop to talk about how sad it is that Noah is gone. I live in a small town. This is a new thing. I am going to have to figure out how to allow them to have plausible deniability because I think they will want to have it. We already get along. If they can ignore things I think they will want to. I won’t shove it in their faces. I won’t flaunt my wanton lifestyle. I will let everyone only see what they want to see. I have spent a lot of time studying the social contract and I do ok in live tests.

I know how to be neither dominant nor submissive in a social situation. I am simply on a different hierarchy. Don’t worry about whether you are above or below me. We are parallel on different scales. No reason to raise your fur. I am not a threat and you can’t threaten me.

I’m sure I will be judged and there will absolutely be rumors. Since I am me I figure I ought to at least provide some actual facts for them to judge me based on. I like being judged accurately and I’ll take my medicine for what that earns me. I always have. I always accept the consequences for my mistakes as I try to learn.

I know the deal. I am not going to bother to talk back. I’ll take it and move on. I won’t slow down much. I have more mistakes to make. I have more learning I need to do. It doesn’t really matter that I am tired and I feel weary to the marrow of my bones. There is so much to do if I am going to create that Future Me I see in my head. She has been successfully speed running this game of life a lot longer than me and I’m desperate to catch up.

“If you don’t look back on yourself 18 months ago and say ‘Wow I really sucked‘ you aren’t trying hard enough.” I know, Noah. I’m trying. It’s hard to learn while this much of my brain is screaming in agony because how can you be gone? I am a tiny fraction of the person I was. I do not think I am better than I was 18 months ago this time, sweetheart. Please forgive me for this lapse in progress. Maybe in cooking? Mostly I have become less a spiky profile with a few low skills and a whole fucking flat line. I feel like I am barely moving in most areas.

My son said, “I thought we were your epilogue. Turns out we are your intermission” and it freaked me out.

I have never been single long in my whole life and that’s a bigger statement than it is for most humans. In 40 years if you add up all the months of not having sex I think it fills less than 3 or 4 years worth. I’m not sure. It’s around there.

I don’t know what this is going to be like here and I definitely don’t know what this will be like in this set and setting. I’m going to figure it out though. Since I got married I’ve had the privilege to fail upward. I don’t know if that halo will continue but I’m going to do my best to act like that privilege is like everything else I inherited from Noah. It is now mine. Not by birthright, no, I am not one of those good people. I am still shitty little me. But in my time and my place if I outlive my spouse I absorb all that they own. Some of the ways they address the mail are weird.

I am not finding my way back to me. Not really. I cannot go back. There is only forward. I am moving forward towards the me I want to be. I’m going to have a place in a little place. I’m going to know my neighbours and they are going to accept me as an ambassador of weird to varying degrees. Some of them will hate me. I’m sure I will be hassled in some ways but it doesn’t matter. I have the ability to cope.

That is something I have had since the very beginning, a lot of cope. I don’t always make wise or good decisions but good golly I get through.

I have an enormous pile of paperwork to get through because now I am responsible for my own taxes. I kind of want to throw up. I am a head of household with the IRS. I have never been that before.

My mother was my age when I was 11. I think perimenopause is hitting me harder at a younger age. The spotting is awful. I’m spotting for half a month at this point. “How are you doing?” people ask. I don’t usually tell them this. I’m looking forward to being a crone so much. I keep wanting to ask if there is a hormone that would make this happen faster. Then I could go off hormonal birth control. That may be part of the spotting, but it happened without the patch so I doubt it is the cause. I love being a neurotic, tracking, bitch.

If anything the patch has been doing really well at helping smooth out the PMDD symptoms. It’s not all bad to muck with hormones.

There are always two forms of birth control. This has been true since I was 12. I have been pregnant five times and they were all on purpose. If I were to fall pregnant despite heroic measures I would choose an abortion. I am too old and in ill health. I’m about to have the second of three surgeries to repair damage from my third child’s birth. I’m good. Factory is closed. I don’t want to get into a debate about birth control methods. I love you. I’m letting you know how I’m doing since I know you worry.

It’s been hard to talk to you. I tell you everything because you really are a whole cast of varying Ideal Narrators for me. I think of you so often. I love you. I’m so happy when you reach out and tell me how you are. Sometimes I don’t know how to respond. I am so deep in email fuckruptcy it is absurd. I don’t respond, but I read and then leave it there unread for months waiting to have the spoons to answer.

I have not gotten organising sorted. My brain is being a right cunt about admitting this level of vulnerability and opening myself up to hearing “no” when I ask. It makes me want to puke. I don’t like asking specific people for a specific thing. That is exactly my worst failure method. It took so many years before I could ask Noah. He had to actually watch me cry while I crawled around doing things for myself because I could not ask for help. He had to live with how awful that felt. He had to beg me to ask for help. He got increasingly anticipatory as the years went by because I don’t ask for help much.

When I do it falls into one of two modes: it is incredibly low stakes and a no or a yes is equally thrilling OR I am having an emergency and I am going to be in pain if you say no.

I’m not very good at managing that second part. My primary way has been to throw open the doors to the universe and ask for help with stuff of “anyone who can” and then some people throw their hats into the ring. It’s been bloody successful for me. My life has been good thanks to this approach.

I don’t know how it will work here. It’s ok. I don’t have to know yet. Future Me will know. I just have to get to her.

I’m feeling deeply conflicted about dating. I’m not replacing Noah. There is no way. There is no such thing. I am having fun. I am having opportunities for exploration and growth. I smile more than I would without the time. I say dating because I’m still trying to not be scandalous. I’m still scared. I smile more when I have shagging very soon on the calendar. There. I’ve said it. Practically on Facebook.

I have very mixed feelings about the way this feels more me centred around myself than I have been since I got married. I am not spending my days trying to earn someone else’s approval. I am doing what I want to do in service of my own happiness. Apparently my happiness is still bought with really bad jokes.

I can’t play the “you are not funny” game ever again. There are so many layers of me that will have to change. I never need to respond as Noah’s wife again.

I keep going, even when I’m crying and even when I’m scared, because Future Me looks like a really cool lady and I want to meet her. I can’t meet her if I stop.

Life isn’t fair

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It’s not a stretch to say that my mother in law and I didn’t get along well for the first 15 years of my marriage. At that point she decided I was staying and our relationship transformed to a large degree. She’s been very nice and accepting over the past nearly 4 years. I suspect part of that had to do with me supporting her through her mother’s end of life stuff. Her mother was a hard woman.

Since Noah died I have been talking with MIL a lot more often. When I want to feel that moment of shared pride in my spawn, she is the only person who feels available for sharing it with. I used to not send her an email a month. Now I send one or more most weeks, just sharing a picture of the kids.

She is due to go into surgery a few days after me. Her surgery is much more difficult and mandatory for survival. I’m worried. There’s nothing I can do to help. I’m talking to her more. I’m sharing more of myself and my life and my kids. Maybe it will be incentive. I don’t know though. I’m not feeling particularly able to keep people alive right now.

I’m scared to get to close to anyone because I feel like it will be my fault they die. I am so bad that I deserve to be alone and anyone who gets close to me will get lost in that mess. I’m not actually this powerful but paranoia doesn’t care about reality or logic. It feels true.

I wake up almost every morning and cry because he’s not there with me. I’ll be honest and say that the overnights I’ve had don’t have as much crying. That’s part of what I like about them. I get to have the experience of looking towards the future instead of crying about the past. I can’t change the past. Maybe I can change the future? Will I be responsible for a lot more deaths? I’m not over my brother or my dad. If I could endure more pain maybe they wouldn’t be dead. I know that Noah died from a freak accident but it feels like my fault. If he hadn’t wanted to come with me to help me feel better, he might still be alive. I don’t think that will feel easier anytime soon.

I feel so much shame. I failed to protect Noah. I feel like I don’t deserve to ever have a real relationship again. I am not good enough at looking after people. This feeling is making my day job really complicated.

My children take up the vast majority of my life and I’m not feeling like I am good enough, strong enough to take care of them. This hurts so much. I need Noah. I need him to be the backstop. I didn’t fuck up a lot but when I did he was there to prevent it from going too far. What am I going to do now? Just be perfect? I don’t think that is in the cards. I am so very far from perfect.

Yesterday was a good day though. The kids and I spent the day going through house stuff working towards a purge. We own too much. We cannot take care of it all. A lot of it has to go. We managed to do it without being super upset. We have a long way to go before our house is manageable though. Now we have 27 days till my surgery. We need to get a lot of this done so that maintaining the house is easier when I am incapacitated.

I have to make the future easier.

Mostly I am gobsmacked because my income (thanks to Social Security) is about the same as it was as a teacher before I married Noah. Time stopped for me in an uncanny way.

Past me deserves 9,000 gold stars for saying no to all the friends who invited us on expensive holidays or who wanted us to get a reverse mortgage so we could own a much larger house. I made financial choices that will keep me safe for the rest of my life. This is something I learned by watching my mother fail to do it. You have to pay Future You first.

Noah wanted me to play lottery tickets with him (metaphorically) to try and get rich. We did a round of Angel investing with Paul Graham’s company. I told Noah that the guys he wanted to support would not last 6 months. They were sloppy, unmotivated, and had a crappy idea but he insisted he trusted them. I was right. We lost that money. He let me handle investing the rest. I did well. Looking at the long term money freaks me out. I need a bridge over the next 20 years. 10 will be covered by Social Security. Then I get to levitate for a while. I think it’ll be ok.

I think I will save so well that it won’t be a problem. It’s time to teach my kids how to live like we won’t have money for a good long while. I know how. I’ve done it before and I can do it again. It will be good life skills. Life below your means. Scrimp. Save. Do without wherever reasonable. We have plenty of stuff for the next few years.

Time to hold my breath and see if I can turn this one year of savings into ten over the next ten years. That’s not so hard. I can do that. Just take a little off the top every month.

It’s not so hard when you have the privilege of earning enough to cover your bills plus having discretionary funds. I used to skip eating to do this and I will never be in that position again. I will never have to skimp on food again.

That’s what being rich means to me. It means I don’t have to worry how much food costs. I just buy it. It feels scandalous and cheeky.

I get overnights because Aunt Jenny is taking Shortie one night a month. The older kids ignore me in the evenings anyway. They are online talking to folks. So I go out. Of course I’m seeing more than one person. That will be true for the rest of my life. My kids aren’t going to meet people quickly. I have a horror of that dynamic.

I’m going to be shy for a while before I get around to writing about my love life with great explicitness in this space. It’s feeling scary. I’m already going full speed elsewhere. Here it feels scary in a different way. Not everyone here is a giant weirdo who would love to opt in to explicit details about my sex life.

The last few years have been a wild ride of self discovery inside my marriage, outside my marriage, and now in this post-marriage time. I have never been one to sit in stasis. I am meant to grow wildly in all directions. I am meant to explode with energy. This has been true for my whole life. This is a thing that people have commented on explicitly for my whole life. Now I need to figure out how to manage that without Noah shaping and directing my growth.

I’m pretty scared.

In the past few days my son said, “I always thought we were your epilogue. Now I see that we were your intermission.”

Whoa.

Noah’s goal and plan was for all of us to be alone in this house together as much as humanly possible forever. He liked the Pod. We all liked the Pod. We have so much acceptance and love and support inside of it. We take care of each other. We are careful with our words and gestures and physical movements and expressions of anger. We know that we will deal forever with the consequences of strife within the Pod. We have all created this bubble together and people coming into it are a big deal. We treat that like a whole family negotiation.

That’s going to be complicated going forward.

Things are going to be a lot more complicated going forward.

Things are going to be a lot simpler going forward. An awful lot of everything revolved around Noah. We stayed home as much as we did because he wanted all of us to do that. He wanted to be at home and he wanted us with him so he wanted us at home. It was striking. He genuinely wanted us around existing all the time. We validated and motivated him. His life was a shrine of us. It has been fascinating living in a family this deeply enmeshed and wrapped about each other. This was not something I had background training for. This ended up being a whole different thing than I had planned for a bunch of reasons.

Home educating continues. We are starting to get back up to speed on doing academics regularly at the table. We are always learning but sometimes we can do it in ways that produce tangible results and sometimes we just learn for the sake of learning for a while. It requires a balance to live in the world. We are drifting through our grief. We talk about it a lot. We are not bottling up our feelings. We cry together. We are all writing separately.

I wonder a lot about their futures. They have a tremendous number of skills and talents and they are broadly and diversely educated but they are not going to fit in to a world of checklists. Their lives have been constructed around their individual needs and the absolute limits of what I am capable of providing. It is fascinating, now, to look at the work I see ahead of me with my youngest. My older two are settling into their own stuff and don’t need much of any input from me. All of my plans for this stage with our daughter revolves around Noah and his needs and his limits.

Balancing a house of five autistic people with weird limits and needs is a lot of fun. It is dancing on the head of a greased pin. You will fail to perfectly accommodate everyone and that is the lesson in that moment. That’s when I get to talk about distress tolerance. That’s when I talk about how to be in control of your nervous system even when you can’t control your environment. That’s when I talk about putting on a mask for social safety. Smile. Appear pleasant and non-threatening. Be curious. Put all of your panic and stomach pain in a box and put it in a closet in the back of your mind. We’ll deal with it later.

We do, in fact, come back together to deal with it. It’s so real. Compartmentalisation is a motherfucker.

I feel a lot of guilt, sometimes, because I am training my children in how to mask. I’ve been told it is similar to ABA therapy. I do know that I am a behaviourist. I actively teach and practice DBT. This is relationship oriented therapy. It is exposure therapy in a non-clinically valid method.

The main way I train my children is to take them on long journeys through many different cultures and settings and I help them learn how to evaluate what they see. What clues exist for how to behave? What patterns do you see? Does one group of people walk a lot faster? Why do you think that might happen? How do people manage walking through crowds? What can you guess about the cultural values based on these actions? What do you think they mean?

We do some searching on the internet to see if any of our guesses were close to correct. Sometimes we pat ourselves on the back for being able to easily spot something that is a major culturally point of pride. Yes. It really is clear.

My son told me that he describes our family as being full of autistic people for whom “social interactions” is our main special interest. I hadn’t thought of it that way but he’s right. We read books and watch shows because we want to talk about the social interactions. We want more representations in our brains. And we analyse what is happening in our own lives over the dinner table. We don’t grill people whether they like it or not. We all like sharing.

“So I was having this chat with someone and I said, _____.”

We then talk it out. “Ah, did you consider the thing from the angle of someone who is (list of various demographic markers)?”

“Oh. Shit. No.”

I love my house so much. We don’t put people down much but we do question everything. We are nosy and invasive and simply present.

It’s fascinating watching the teenagers start to develop their own sense of “What happens off screen is no one else’s business.” People are only entitled to know the things about you that you choose to share when you are in a room together.

Wow. What is up with all this drivel that comes out of my fingertips then? What is up with the whole darn internet? I choose to offer the world cheat sheets. I am a deeply complex person and if I don’t write about it I will never have the ability to share all of it in another form. I would only be able to share in sound bites of sanitised nothing. I do not want that in this life.

I am not an easy person to know but I want to be known. I have always wanted to be known. Being known is what has lead to increasing levels of safety for me in this life. I am a weird motherfucker. I also work hard to give more than I take. I try to conform in the ways I must. I am trying.

I am also a person who has been let out of a cage. I loved my husband and I would have born the price of staying married but I was not made to be monogamous. It was a point of enormous strife between us even when I wasn’t doing anything with anyone. It made him feel abandoned and betrayed.

I have no idea what the future is going to bring. I am betting on more growth and more change. I won’t always like it. A lot of it is going to hurt. That’s ok. I was never promised an easy life and I do not expect to have one. I am going to have a better life than the one I was brought up to expect. I am going to have integrity and honesty that did not exist in that set and setting.

Every individual family has their own vibe. Their own levels of awareness around sex and sexuality. I am struggling with the fact that my levels in California depended on their being enough ambient sex positive, sexuality displays that I could have a lot of theoretical discussions. My sex life never had to come up. Here I am going to be the first example of poly that my daughter really groks. This alarms me. That’s a lot of pressure for figuring out what “sharing information respectfully” means. It will be fine. I’ll navigate this like everything else. We are already the weirdos for a lot of reasons. It’s not going to make that big of a difference in the long run.

It feels like a life affirming thing to do at this stage. I am trying to build deeper connections than I am going to be able to access from my local friends. Boundaries are complicated things. Life is long and I would not be surprised if Noah is not the only partner I watch die. That’s scary. I’m only 43. I might have that happen again. Life isn’t fair. I’m going to experience a lot more loss. It’s really scary. I hate going under general anesthesia. It’s really scary.

And for the first time in 18 years, Noah won’t be the person who takes care of me. He was not good in the emergency crunch moments but he was awesome at babying me during recovery. Well, he got awesome because he did not like watching me crawl around the house doing the chores he hadn’t gotten to.

This time I am doing a big purge of stuff before surgery. I need to have less work to do. I need to have the ability to not fight with my baby over stupid stuff. I need to create a “Yes” environment. It will make a lot of things less stressful for a lot of people. We’ve had too much for a while. It’s time to do it differently.

Do you own your stuff or does your stuff own you? How much do you really need? I’m thinking on this really hard. I keep wanting to say “we” as if the kids somehow share responsibility but no I have too much stuff. Because I now own everything that was Noah’s. I’m having a lot of feelings about that. But it’s really past time to start the day.

Time to come out.

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It hasn’t been five months yet. I’m dating. I’ve been writing about my hypersexuality for a long time. For the past few years I’ve been doing so in a hidden way. I have been giving in to the idea that I should be ashamed and hide what I’m doing. That’s poisonous.

I’m seeing people. I have needs. I’m meeting them. I’m doing so with a crazy quilt of experiences and situations. I’m being careful about not taking much time away from the kids. There is less babysitting happening now than before Noah died so I am not pushing my luck real hard.

I have rules. If someone is in my house to help with the kids they are strictly off limits. I won’t let anyone I shag meet my kids for at least a year; not until I am certain it will turn into a real relationship. There are a long list of reasons that someone will never meet my kids. If I don’t think someone has compatible values it is simply a non-starter. I understand that most of the people I meet are not going to have extensive background information on the many ways my children and I are weird. I will have to be patient as I explain all of our quirks. That is why it will be a very slow process.

I need to be careful. I don’t know how the future is going to happen. It’s scary to think about. I am going to try to navigate a path forward that is respectful to all concerned. I won’t walk a road that resembles the one that other people follow. It needs to be ok. I can’t live like other people. I haven’t had the training.

Coping 4 months in

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Hi. I’m not writing a lot here. An awful lot of how I am coping I have mixed feelings about. I’m doing that thing I used to do to access emotional energy. Some day I will feel confident enough to transfer all the writing from that other social media site, not yet. I think I need my baby to be a lot older. I can’t tell. Maybe I will impulsively do it before then. I don’t know yet.

I’m getting stuff done. Maybe enough? I don’t know. I’m exercising a ton. I ran 4 miles this morning. I’ve walked another 5. I’ve cycled over 5 miles with another trip to town ahead of me. I did a yoga class this morning. Thursdays are my ridiculous day.

The kids are coping. We carry on doing stuff and growing and trying to become part of the community. It’s a process. I notice that I get much more positive community interaction at the shopping centre near my house compared to downtown. In town people are hostile about me looking weird. In my neighbourhood everyone smiles and talks to me. That’s interesting.

Life continues. I am participating in life affirming behaviour. It’s the best I can do. The legal process of dealing with the death continues to suck. It is moving slowly and I’m fucking amused that now that it’s not waiting on me it is still going at a turtle’s pace because all the professionals are more lackadaisical about responding to email than I am.

I finally got the safe open (I lost the keys and had to get a locksmith) so I could send the paperwork to SSA. They will back pay me from December. That will be very useful.

I’m going back and forth in my head being wild self recrimination for how I’m coping and rueful knowledge that Noah would both expect this and understand and forgive me. Noah understood me and he would understand this way of surviving. I am a stunted tree and I yet reach for the light. Sometimes I really don’t know what to do about the fact that Noah has been my guiding light for so long. I don’t know if I will like the me I am without him as much. I’m worried.

Life is a struggle

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Things are good with the kids. Watching the collapse of the US government when I’ve been saying “It’s going to happen in my lifetime” means my kids are far more inclined to listen to me and take what I say seriously. Obviously I’m not an oblivious, stupid idiot. I see what is happening. So the big kids are more enthusiastic about gardening than they’ve ever been. Stuff is coming *along* this year. It’s going to be a really fun garden this time. They are going to learn even more skills for surviving the end of the global supply chain. The most important part is making friends and we are struggling on that front.

I’m seeing people at group social gatherings occasionally. I have a few folks I try to see one on one but I don’t see them every month. I’m feeling incredibly isolated. It is hurting so much that I was asked to leave the bike community. I feel like I lost my ability to make friends for exercising with. Because I couldn’t keep my stupid mouth shut. Because I have to make everything hard.

I’m the problem so I need to go away.

It’s feeling hard for me to leave my house. I get a lot of random verbal abuse in town. I *look* like I don’t belong here and people tell me so often. Sometimes with lots of swearing, but most often just through a passionate conversation with their pals about what a complete loser I am and how everyone wishes that people like me would stop coming to their city.

It’s same shit, different day for me. I’ve gotten this push back my entire life no matter where I was. I mostly try to pretend I don’t hear it and I press on with my life. I don’t have a lot of that energy going spare right now. I don’t feel comfortable or entitled to have anything or be anywhere.

People keep asking me if I have support. I don’t have a single person in the country I feel like I can talk to without heavily censoring every concept that comes out of my mouth. When I am around people I’m aware that my job is to listen, not talk. No one fucking wants to deal with me. I’m too fucking much.

I got bitched out at the leisure centre because I came in to take a shower and not use other facilities. My boiler has been broken for 5? 6? weeks now. I’m sorry that I exist so wrong.

I feel empty and worthless and not worth the effort.

I feel scared and bad. I feel desperately unwanted by the community as a whole. No, I don’t feel like I should go back to the US. At least here I don’t have to worry about someone pulling a gun on my kid when they run their fool mouth. Verbal abuse happens everywhere. The ambient level of violence is lower. It’s not like people ever acted like I belonged anywhere in the US either. I have been wrong since I was in preschool. I have been out of place and wrong. This is just the rest of the world agreeing. The problem is me.

I’m not allowed to do any of the things to hurt myself that would let me bleed off bits of the pain. Instead I spend a lot of time in the studio screaming until my head wants to explode. I am so scared. I don’t see a forward path that is not all consuming pain. I lost the only person who could bear my company. I lost the only person who wanted to talk to me and know me. I lost the only person who has ever lived with me for longer than 3 years. My mother never kept me for longer than 3 years at a stretch. She couldn’t bear me.

Only Noah could stand me. Someday my children will have a choice about leaving. I will understand if they go as far from me as possible. I won’t blame them at all. It will make sense to me.

I’m really sad that I’m not allowed to die. I feel like garbage. I feel like dog shit on the bottom of someone’s shoe. No, I don’t want to talk to anyone about how I’m feeling. I’m the problem and I don’t want to spread my pustulent disgustingness to anyone else.

I’m afraid that I shouldn’t try to make friends because I am nothing but a black hole of self hatred. There is nothing good in me to share.

I wish my mom had pushed harder and strangled me with the umbilical cord. I shouldn’t have been saved.

I wish I could die but I can’t. So instead I scream and cry alone in a room. Because this is the only safety I will have for the rest of my life. Other people are a risk every time. I don’t have it in me to nod and accept a lot more rejection right now. So I need to ask for nothing.

I hate my father for forcing me to be here. I hate my mother for not aborting me or strangling me at birth. I shouldn’t be here. I want to accept that it’s never getting better and just stop. I can’t though. People need me. People who weren’t given a choice.

I’m glad I get along with my kids. I sort of expect them to be my only real relationships going forward. Those incredibly curated and limited relationships in which I give and I bite my tongue off trying not to ask for anything in return.

I will never deserve to get anything from anyone again. I wish I could die.

Sick and tired and blessed

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I am sick. It came on in the middle of last night. This is my first time being sick without Noah around since 2015 when I was on the road trip. This is awful.

That said, I have a wonderful son who brought me a banana and toast and home made apple sauce for breakfast. He knows what to do when a great many things go sideways in life. He’s had good home training. I feel an outstanding amount of pride in him.

I am starting to move old Facebook posts over here. There’s going to be an incredibly large amount of backdated postings. I am still trying to decide if I want to move writing from the other social media site. I’m still nervous about spooking vanillas.

I am really struggling with feeling like a liar because I am not publicly and boldly admitting everything that I am doing. I am in a different place with different expectations and I am scared of how I should be adapting to this set and setting. I’m scared to not be open. I am scared to be open in the next 10 years.

I am losing my mind in a lot of ways. Life is feeling really hard in ways that make me feel like a pathetic whiner. My life is not as hard as other peoples lives and I feel enormous shame around that.

I talked to the SSA yesterday. As long as the US government holds we will be find for the next 10 years. I don’t know yet how I am going to bridge the gap between my kids aging out of support and reaching full retirement age but that’s a bridge I can burn later.

Yesterday I had dinner with a new friend. They spent a bunch of time telling me how my writing is overwhelming and they think I should find a different hobby for managing my feelings. I am really struggling with that. I don’t talk about my feelings much when I’m in a room with anyone. I know that I am too much. I know that people don’t actually want to hear it. I feel slapped really hard. I feel like I was told I don’t even deserve to talk about my feelings to myself when I’m alone in a room. That hurts really badly.

I am trying to find my way back to writing with more boldness and self assurance. It’s going to be hard. For so long I depended on Noah or the other Archivists wanting to see my writing to justify me doing it. I don’t have that crutch anymore. Now I need to believe it just by myself and I am struggling.

There are a lot of patterns I want to lay out and pick apart. I can’t though. I’m afraid. I’m afraid of judgment. I’m afraid of punishment. I’m afraid of rejection, mostly for my children. It is not my childrens’ fault that I am their mother.

I am struggling really hard with the expectation that I be fun or I shouldn’t exist.

I’m struggling with my identity and getting my needs met. I’m struggling with feeling like people like me really shouldn’t exist at all.

I’m struggling.

98 days and nothing is well.

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Ok, that’s hyperbole. Things are fine. We plug along. We get chores and academics and gardening and exercise done. But I feel empty and hollow. I yearn for Noah with every cell in my body. I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel loved. I feel abandoned and scared and lonely. I’ve gotten good sleep three nights in a row and I’ve felt emotionally worse with every night. Like I was hiding this pain behind the dullness of sleep deprivation.

I’m trying to fill my bucket so I have a lot to give. Today that feels impossible. I feel scared and inadequate and sad.

No one will ever be my partner like that again. It took so long to trust him and we had to go through so much together. I don’t think I will ever let anyone in. My soul hurts.

12 weeks

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I keep thinking that I should post and then I don’t. My brain has been hard core avoiding most topics. I’m staying in one repetitive special interest forum and that’s pretty much it.

It was comforting for me to read an essay about autistic grieving and how often we do simply avoid looking/thinking about the loss for a long time because it hurts too much. I’m definitely drilling deep into historical ways of coping. All of us are drifting through days accomplishing far less than pretty much ever. We can’t hear each other. Anyone can announce something three or four times and no one catches it. It’s all of us right now. It’s super hard. We are all striving for patience and acceptance with each other. Everyone slept in super late this morning. We keep missing social stuff because we are stuck in the house waiting for repair men or deliveries.

Like the oil, which I was originally told would arrive last Friday, then they said Monday, now Wednesday. We haven’t had heat or hot water for a while. It’ll be about 2 weeks by the time they finally show up. That sucks.

An oven broke. The washing machine broke. The boiler still isn’t properly repaired and I can’t schedule until the oil arrives. There are still a bunch of other things falling apart. Like, the back door is literally falling apart.

I’m still waiting for progress from solicitors/attorneys/accountants/financial advisers. Definitely no progress in March I was told. Just wait.

We are in our first week alone out of six. It’s kind of startling how much it impacted us immediately to be alone in the house. Our daily schedule is not being kept very well. It’s pretty amazing that we were only alone for five nights in 12 weeks. Having another adult around really does make it feel more important to keep moving. We have basically crashed to a stop. We have the excuse that we are waiting on oil this week.

We all feel like we could hide in the house for a few weeks. I am resisting and I’m not sure why. I feel like if I don’t push us into going to stuff I am failing to parent correctly. Academics are happening but not as fast as usual. I am feeling lost in my brain a lot of the time. I’m going back and forth between feeling super ashamed and feeling like I am being too hard on myself.

It’s hard not to feel hard on myself. I’m being selfish and I’m doing stuff to fill my own bucket. I’m not doing the martyr thing. I feel like the primary thing I need is being alone. When I’m alone I’m not scared I am hurting people. I’m struggling with how much my brain wants to shut down when I’m in a room with other people. I can barely focus to finish tasks.

I miss Noah in a million selfish ways. I want to hug him. I loved to bury my face in his chest. He made me feel safe and loved. He made me feel important and worthy of keeping alive even though it is so much effort. I miss having someone who wanted to listen to my racing thoughts. I miss regulating off his breath and heart beat. I miss his laugh and his silly jokes. I miss feeling treasured.

I am feeling deeply reminded that I am not for everyone and that I will never be worthy of effort again. I feel crushed by this knowledge. I feel like there isn’t a lot to look forward to without Noah. I’m trying to find hope and the will to live but it feels so pointless and silly. Why bother? I’m going to be abandoned over and over again. I’m scared.

I can compartmentalise and get through a lot. I’m afraid this is going to drown me, only I can’t allow that. I have to keep going for the kids. It doesn’t matter what I want. It’s not about me.

I miss you, Noah. I don’t know how to keep walking but I’m going to try anyway. I don’t feel I have a choice.

A low key celebration

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Today my last baby turns 7. She wants clafoutis for breakfast and green soup (potato/leek) for dinner.

She is delighted that I won’t ask her to do a single chore today because it is her birthday. That’s the rule. On your birthday: no chores.

I miss Noah. I miss him in every second and it is hard to not freak out all the time. I’m actually being pretty stable. I’m keeping my shit together. I’m not yelling. I’m not being overly harsh. I’ve definitely snapped a few times and been sharp. It’s all about degrees? I am being patient. I am wrapping my babies in cotton wool while they figure out what this damage means.

I am making sure that I am not the problem.

I’m figuring out how to get my needs met and how to get support. I’m having difficult and uncomfortable conversations. They are good and important though. They are necessary. I have to learn how to talk to people other than Noah again. It’s been a lot of years of only turning inward to our pod and I can’t ask my kids for support. No parentifying in this house.

My old lawyer told me that I had to make myself happy. I can not pour from an empty bucket. I have to do stuff to make me happy. I have to make that my priority or I have nothing to give my kids. I don’t have babies anymore. I don’t have to put other peoples immediate demands above my need every minute of the day.

I will fail if I continue to try.

My limits weigh heavily on me. I’m getting more kinds of support in. I am trying to lurch towards a new normal that has elements of our old normal but with a lot more support. With Noah, we could muddle through ok with just us. I can’t alone. I am trying to find ways to ask for support but it’s hard. Asking makes me vulnerable and that scares me. I am trying to make small adjustments. It’s hard that I am making in-house adjustments and out-of-house adjustments at the same time but it is necessary. It is all necessary. Necessary doesn’t mean fun or exciting.

I’m building in places in my week where I step out to be me. Thursday mornings I am going to yoga classes then I meet some buddies for a cuppa and a blether. It’s fun. I don’t even know where I get all the pieces of language I pick up. They all feel like mine because people have spoken to me using them. They were gifted to me.

I feel Noah’s loss as a stone in my chest. It weighs me down and makes me want to cry and scream. I want to be hiding in a dark room screaming for days. I won’t. I will go take a shower. Then I’ll make a birthday girl a fancy breakfast. Then I’ll go to yoga. Then I’ll talk to my friends and I’ll smile and laugh. I hope I will feel it. I might fake the whole thing. Do the things until the things feel real. Do the things until you can accept that this is your life now. Then learn how to enjoy it.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: adult-only

Some day this will change, right?

I am struggling.

It’s a new month

This is harder than it used to be.

I’m not ok.

Biblical fucking plagues

Feeling pretty butthurt

Life can’t be smooth, can it?

Backwards and forwards

Even though I feel weird, I’m going to talk about him.

Every day is good and bad

Finding my way back to me

Life isn’t fair

Time to come out.

Coping 4 months in

Sick and tired and blessed

98 days and nothing is well.

12 weeks

A low key celebration