+ My wonderful family helped me with half an hour of yard work yesterday and that made visible progress towards my goals.

+ Even though the baby is tiny and larval and so needy it is hurting me I love her so much that I am mostly maintaining good cheer through her demands.

+ I am better at asking for help with the baby than I have ever been. When I am feeling frazzled I ask Noah or one of the big kids to help me and everyone jumps at the chance. I am feeling productive and like my body gets to rest from the physical strain of carrying a bowling ball around 24/7.

+ Noah’s cooking lately has been awesome.

+ The Educational Specialist told us she has been lying to us and telling us we need to turn in more than we need to because most clients don’t turn in how much she asks for. We are basically done with the school year in terms of quantity of produced materials and we have five weeks to go. This feels weird. I will keep having the kids move forward, we will just be moving into 3rd/5th grade a few weeks early. We finished all of the current stuff already except for two more science experiments. And we have five weeks.

+ Noah and I discussed a timeline yesterday for making the website/clearing out the house enough to have staged pictures taken for the website. We are shooting for October. I will schedule a fancy-ass photographer to come in and do the family portraits/fun house pictures and it’ll be worth the money.

+ We got the dirt moved that I needed moved and now I can get plants for the beds this week. I am doing starts this year because holy toast I don’t have the time/energy for seeds. But I want the yard to look spectacular for staged photos trying to get someone to buy it. Those beds need lush growth in them.

+ The van is full for a trip to Goodwill and Half Price Books today. I’m aiming for a trip a week for a while.

+ I can already get rid of two book cases with what I have packed/gotten rid of. I haven’t yet. But I will soon.

+ Ze bebé is getting huge. Her 3-6 month sleepers are getting tight and I’m about to start putting her in 9 month sleepers just so that diaper changes are easier. She hasn’t moved out of the 6 month onesies or dresses yet. Just in sleepers because she’s so dang tall. She will be 9 weeks tomorrow.

+ Our sweetness is smiling more and more. I think it is funny that a lot of her smiles happen on the changing table after she has a clean butt. I think she likes the wall in spring because she spends a lot of time smiling at the butterflies.

+ On the parenting forum I’m participating in a “stop yelling at your kids” challenge and whereas I’m not perfect or on a long streak or anything I’m doing pretty well. When I take into consideration that I am: a)barely sleeping b)in contact with a needy baby for 20+ hours of the day c) in a really lot of pain d)limiting pain meds like whoa e)limiting sugar f)and trying to go through allll the shit in our house…. I’m doing pretty well! Go me.

+ We are having a fucking fabulous time researching where we are going to move. We are looking at countries all over the world. This is going to be the adventure of a lifetime. My life is so fucking insanely good I can barely wrap my head around how fucking cool this is. I get to be an international nomad. That’s going to happen. In the next year.

+ I feel intense gratitude that I am still in the bay and still receiving wonderful body work from my excellent providers. That’s serious luck. I will miss them.

+ This is a little weird, but I’m grateful that since I appear to be allergic to alcohol… Noah is having some stuff go on that means he shouldn’t drink either. It means I get to look forward to a time of solidarity in enjoying silly juices together because we can’t have grown up drinks. We have to enjoy one another without inebriation. I like that.

-I dislike how much I am nagging everyone in my house. I feel like a mega bitch all the time. But gosh my kids would like to still have their entire “job” be playing and that’s not an option any more. It was appropriate when you were 5. Neither of you are 5 now.

-I am super bummed that I threw up so I needed to cancel a social visit with a friend I haven’t seen in months. That sucks. I was looking forward to talking to her.

-I would like to sleep through a night without waking up to side lie nurse. My shoulders hurt so bad. 10 months till I can night ween. *sob*

-I’m a little mad at the Educational Specialist because she has been pushing my kids for most of the year and in the last two visits she admitted that we are the only family in compliance and she feels a little bad that she shoved *us* as hard as she did because we were fully in lock-step-demand compliance. We only needed one item per subject per grading period and my kids have turned in two or three samples per subject every meeting all year. Oh. I’m not mad because we did the work, I’m mad because we had to fight over formatting so much work for turning in. We could have fought over 1/3 of the fucking formatting and that would have made my life better.

-I hurt. I’m minimally typing so most of the pain is coming from being a baby toting device. She’s heavy. And side lying nursing is the god damn pits.

People from the High Desert get it when I talk about running from heat and poverty in a way other people don’t. It’s a kind of being seen.

I need to only listen to country music I carefully curate. The radio isn’t ok for me anymore because the constant drumbeat of “alcohol, alcohol, alcohol” is bothering me.

I don’t actually think I need to run from all heat. But I can’t do dry heat. It makes me want to die.

The trip to SF with the baby and MC was really fun. I had a moment of being a butthead on the train because MC told me they lost their bag of toys and I was a little snippy. Then we figured out it was in the backpack and I apologized profusely. The visit with Sarah was one of the better ones I’ve had in a while. I had less anxiety and I think it was partially that I didn’t ask her to come to Fremont.

I’ve been seriously flipping out internally over how terrible I am for wanting people to come so far to see me.

Today we did a ritual with the family therapist about trying to move on from difficult feelings. I think that was a good thing.

I’m bouncing between feeling really happy and positive and certain that things are so good and are going to keep being good…. and then I’m like ONLY I’M PART OF THIS FAMILY SO OF COURSE I WILL WRECK IT ALL.

I cleaned the refrigerator finally. It’s been on my to do list since before I got pregnant. Whoops.

I have reduced my sugar but I’m not finding it possible to eliminate it. When the baby screams I go for sugar because it keeps me from crying or flipping out. I’m using sugar like an anti-anxiety drug. Basically I am eating my feelings. But I’m still having less than the previous month. Not as much less as I wish I was having.

It’s fucking hard being nice when my nerves feel like a cheese grater is going over them. Just the screaming is that hard and she really doesn’t scream much. But the sugar helps.

I am making small but noticeable progress towards culling the house. Hey! If you get a lot of mail shipments of small boxes (maybe from Amazon…) I would be SO GRATEFUL if you would collect them and give them to me. I am deliberately putting the books in small meticulously labeled boxes so that when they are in storage someone else can go through them.

It occurred to me that before we go through and do stuff to remodel the house… we should go ahead and put it up on a website. So that someone could potentially say, “Wait! I want to buy it and do that part of the remodeling!” To make that possible earlier (and to make every part of remodeling easier) I’m in hard-core cull mode and that’s working for me. If you have seen stuff in my house and coveted it in the past… now is the time to come shopping.

I’m not kidding. If you saw something you like ask fast. I’ve already taken like 10 bags and 5 boxes to get rid of and I’m moving along quickly. But at the rate I’m culling it will take six months. Who knows how quickly the thing you like will go….

Oh!!! I’m so thrilled! I asked the school across the street if they want me to donate stuff I’ve gotten for home schooling and they were thrilled. I’m excited about it being useful and easy to donate.

Ok, enough typing

Sarah started a new job so I’m babbling at her a lot but I’m trying to not go too overboard. Pam has fallen into an activism hole and isn’t available to chat much because she’s off having a life or some shit. Jenny’s mom is visiting her so she hasn’t been free to Skype in a few weeks.

The words are bubbling up inside me. God I want to talk.

I finally made all the phone calls I needed to make to deal with medical shit for the kids. (Insurance verification stuff. Not a big deal. Just a thing to do.) I paid all the bills that have stacked up. I checked on car insurance stuff. I did useful things.

Noah’s mom wrote me a nice letter and didn’t address it to Noah. I will deign to respond. I now have a policy: when his family addresses a letter to him… I don’t answer. I’m not an invisible secretary. If they write to me I’ll write back an epic chatty letter with all the details they would like to get from him but he will never tell them. Like data about our children’s personalities. He doesn’t care enough about them to tell them.

I want my kids to show up and be accepted during the rare visits they have. That means the family in Texas needs to be aware and braced for the weirdness. I give that introduction. But only when they acknowledge me as a person.

So I got another box of adorable little dresses. I’m amazed she had any left after how many she sent when the older kids were small. But here is a whole stack of 18 month clothes. Sure. I have basically nothing in that size so far.

I will have to tell her we are moving and culling so that she doesn’t send a dozen massive boxes this Christmas. hahaha. It won’t help. She will do whatever the fuck she wants.

I’m struggling with how guilty I feel for advocating for myself. Noah is officially working part time for a couple more weeks (the fourth trimester is coming to an end… yay!) but I’m struggling with how ashamed I feel of asking him for help. I do stuff for myself when I shouldn’t and don’t have to and then I feel awful and angry. It’s not wise or useful or helpful or anything good.

I am using a lower dosage of medication than I would prefer for pain and sleep reasons. I’m not sleeping well because of nursing (although this kid is so easy I’m not really bitching… just noticing that it’s true). I’m in a lot of pain from holding the baby (as expected). I’m really struggling with trying to cut sugar.

I want to cry because I just want more fucking sugar. There’s so much I can’t have. Privacy going pee. A walk without my back hurting from holding a baby. Less pain in my body. Sleep. Not having sugar at the same time is feeling like horrible torture. I’m such a god damn baby.

There is no fair. I’m allowing myself tea with sugar. I have already had other sugar this month. The amount I’m cutting back to isn’t zero. I need to shut the fuck up.

But it hurts.

I god damn hate being an adult. Fuck this shit.

There is a piece of me that is afraid that if I cut the sugar more I’ll drop weight like whoa and I don’t want to.

Body mass and weight are fascinating. I’m in the mid 160’s right now (which is at the low end of the middle of my weight fluctuations… I go from 145-205 with most of my time being spent in the 160’s-180’s) but my belly is still distended and I’m wearing pants I usually wear in the 190’s. My shirts are fitting weird because I have no extra fat in my back/shoulders. I look very much like I have the kind of body where I could lose 20 lbs and all of a sudden look skinny and fit. It’s weird. Usually I feel like I look more like a chunky person but smaller? This isn’t that.

Bodies. Weird.

Ok. Time to go pick up MC from camp. Don’t wanna move from the couch but life doesn’t really give a shit what I want. Move it, wench.

Do you know what would make being patient easier? A whole lot of drugs. Do you know what I am going to have? A very small amount of drugs.

That’s not exactly, fully what I want here. Life doesn’t give a shit. I’m nursing a dang baby. Minimal drugs, bitch. Just enough to keep me shitting and eating and not cracking all my teeth. Not enough to feel cheerful.

Frankly there aren’t enough studies about the impact. I do minimize what I put in my baby as much as possible.

I just can’t use zero or I will melt down.

This phase is challenging but so important. I love so many parts of having a nursing infant. I will never again be this wonderful, this able to solve needs just with my body, this needed.

I didn’t think I would get this third chance and I appreciate it so much because I didn’t truly have hope I would meet this child. I’ve been through the baby gauntlet and come out the far side with big kids. I know how short and magical this time is.

But nursing fucking sucks. It’s also wonderful. More than one thing can be true.

I love this stage and it is hard. Ambiguity. Strong opposing feelings. That’s life.

I rewatched Orange is the New Black with an eye towards watching Susan more carefully. (Crazy Eyes) Watching the way she freaks out… that feels so true. I am not quite at the level of that character (I have a high IQ and she is developmentally six years old) but as I was flipping out at my friend on Sunday I kept getting flashes of Susan. My friend wanted me to calm down because I was reacting really big to an interaction that felt small to her. In my head I was seeing Susan screaming “I did a bad thing” and hitting herself in the head.

Shit. I totally do that.

I mean, my tantrums are slightly more nuanced and I’m better at hiding them… but that’s a huge chunk of what is different. I’m better at hiding my crazy and that’s a lot of what makes me be perceived better. If I was put in a setting like prison I don’t think I would do well. I would be seen as being as crazy as she is.

That scares me.

I am not better. As I watch all the stories of why these women are in prison… my fuck ups mostly haven’t been smaller (except the folks who committed murder or major fraud…) and I just didn’t get caught. I have muled drugs. If I had been caught on one of the times I was bringing all the drugs to a party? Phew.

I’ve done other shit I’m not going to list now.

For the record… I haven’t done much in the last few years that I could get in trouble for. I won’t model it in front of my kids and I don’t get a lot of space from them.

I understand why my sister did drugs in front of me. There was no one to watch me while she was supposed to be “responsible” and that was as responsible as she was capable of being.

I grit my teeth more and swallow pills or eat bits of medicated candy at meal times but I don’t spend my time hot boxing the house with my kids around. Learn better, do better. My kids are exposed to a medical explanation of drugs and they are not around smoking. They don’t need the medication and that would expose them.

I keep reading people describe other women as “good mothers” and I want to know what they are being judged on?

I’m not sure I’m a good mother. I’m doing my best and somedays that’s pretty good and other days it isn’t. I don’t know about anyone else. What is a good mother? I don’t understand. I don’t know what all these darned kids need.

My back hurts.

I would dearly love to up my medication dosage right now because this lower dose shit is eating me alive.

Things I am freaking out about: stuff. How to store it, how to dispose of it, how to get people to do the parts that I think they want to do but I’m communicating poorly so it is a mixed bag.

I’m not freaking out because of you. I’m freaking out because I need to start getting rid of stuff and if I wait 6 months to start I am going to be very sorry because then I will need to move quickly and that will be so much harder. We are going to end up with a small storage unit worth of stuff (mostly books) and suitcases. Everything else will have to go and if I try to do it quickly it will hurt my body.

So I’m starting now. I’m giving things back to people who loaned me stuff (which I’m communicating poorly about and then I feel like I’m about to flip out because I’m doing such a bad job of advocating for myself) and I’m trying to get rid of stuff. One of my buddies would like to sell stuff for me because it represents possibly many hundreds of dollars but she wants to do so on her schedule with me storing stuff until she feels like picking it up.

That is not a bad thing for her to want but if my goal is getting it out of my house and her goal is to make as much money off of selling things slowly while storing things at my house…

I’m not doing well at advocating for myself and I feel like a horrible bitch.

And then when I do get to Goodwill the employee yelled at me that I have to sort all of the stuff I donate.

Fuck. Everything.

Getting rid of stuff is so stressful.

And my kids are kids. I’m tired of fighting over food. Like, seriously fucking tired of arguing and fighting over every god damn meal. Lately things are awful. This comes in waves. The kids want to be micromanaging control freaks about every bite and none of them should be healthy. I’m done. I’m at the point where I am going to start flipping out so I need to set the boundaries early and hard. It’s not ok for me to scream at them. So I am going to start sending them in the back yard every single time they argue about food. We have regular negotiations where everyone gets an equal vote. Everyone gets to ask for meals at meal planning time. Everyone gets to say that X or Y vegetable is a hard limit and they will not eat it ever and have that respected. No one is forced to eat fucking eggplant or onions or mushrooms or… the list is god damn long. Our “acceptable” list of vegetables is fairly tightly proscribed. We only make foods that are on the tolerable list. So having to get into a fight about every god damn meal is feeling just unfair to the extreme. I’m sick of it. It is so god damn rude.

It’s like how my kids are feeling the need to interrupt their classes and argue with the teachers to the point where they are disrupting anyone getting to learn. Everything has to be about them every second of every day.

Dude. I am totally a more respectful student than this so it’s not just that they are acting like me. This is bullshit. They are hella rude. I need to get this shit in line. This is not ok.

I need more medication. And my children need more friends and time away from each other but we are struggling to make that work. I could put them in school but it wouldn’t give them friends or emotional benefits beyond time away from each other. I think it would create a lot of problems.

It’s 8:10 and the kids will be in camp all day and I am just about to explode with impatience. I want them away from me. And right this minute I’m feeling hella sad that the entire day will be spent under the baby. I love the baby. I’m feeling touched out and overwhelmed and I want a little space to be in my body and in my brain without someone complaining at me or hurting me.

I hate breastfeeding.

Just another day in paradise.

There are parts of caring for a baby that are hard, even when the baby is easy for a baby. There are nights of disrupted sleep even if the baby sleeps pretty well. There is fussing and discontent because sometimes it takes mama a few minutes to figure out that the current problem is what position I’m holding her in. Baby screams are designed to climb inside your ear drums like shards of glass. Do not ignore me say the frantic screams that can erupt in a minute when the baby realizes OH MY GOD MY DIAPER IS WET. THIS IS NOT OK. FIX IT.

But I’ve been through this rodeo. I remember crying because I needed time off from EC. Now I’m still thrilled to get time off from EC but don’t you touch my baby. She will only need me for a little while.

The load on my brain and body feel different. I have been all the way through this and come out the far side with functional, interesting big kids. I don’t feel impatient with my baby this time because in my body I know that this dependency period is so short. Then they pull away and want to do it alone.

She will only think I am everything for a few months. I can be patient for that long. It means I get to snuggle her sweetness. I’ve been calling all of my kids my/your/her/their sweetness as in almost a stand in for “highness”. It keeps me from calling them “your heiny” which sometimes I am inclined to do because I am a turkey butt.

She’s not the most robust nurser ever. She doesn’t suck very hard and then my nipple falls out of her mouth and a pool of milk spills. It’s not spit up, she just didn’t swallow fast enough/hard enough. But the double chin tells me that she’s getting enough in her. She just prefers to stimulate my let down and then just let it spray. This is wise; my older children would suck hard after my let down and then get mad because they choked with the intensity. My boobs are energetic about how they deliver milk. HI. YOU WANT MILK. HERE HAVE ALLLLLLLLL THE MILK WITH GREAT FORCE.

It’s funny to me. But I spend a lot of time staring at walls so I need whatever levity I can get.

Height wise, baby is about out of 3 month clothes. She has plenty of chub space left, but the toes are getting tight and that makes it hard to dress a baby. Luckily some kind friends are going to come get my we-are-done-with-it pile this weekend. R will pick up the stuff she lent me that I don’t need to keep and Y is picking up stuff we are culling so she can sell it on the internet. She has time, energy, and the extreme need for money so she’s happy to do it. I’m happy I don’t have to get all this stuff to a donation center this month. Yay. It also means she can pick through my stuff to see if anything is useful in her new apartment. Shopping in your friend’s house for free is the best shopping.

I am not hosting an Easter party this year. I just can’t. I’m tired and not up for the amount of stress I put on myself for it. I spend 30-50 hours getting ready for the Easter party every year. I do a lot of yard work over months prepping for it. I do a massive deep clean of the house so I can have other people’s children come over and dig through the nooks and crannies of my house. I don’t want all the germs around my newborn.

I am going to hide eggs, of course, but my kids are going to spend a freakin week finding eggs.

The kids asked if we could put the house on the market next year after Easter so we can have one last big party because wouldn’t it be sweet for YC to get a real Easter egg hunt in this house…

We’ll see but it’s not a bad time line.

And I’m totally out of time.

Today was long. I have absolutely no memory of when I woke up, which is weird. Usually I notice that time and it imprints on my memory. Time is a big deal to me.

I’ve always been obsessed with time and clocks. I play a variety of little games with myself about manipulating the numbers and the lines in analog clocks. I play the adding/subtracting/multiplying/dividing games with face clocks too. I’m really into thinking about how to get everything to 10.

Anyway.

Today we woke up and went out to breakfast. It was a weird ass day. We ate out twice. After breakfast we came home to grab a few odds and ends and nurse the baby then we drove to San Jose. We went to the consignment event I said we weren’t going to visit this spring. Oh well. I found the stuff I wanted and the big kids filled in their summer wardrobes. We were down to 1-3 tank tops or shorts for each kid. Even though we do laundry a lot the summer is a little annoying with one tank top and three shorts.

I also found a swing for $35 to replace the one my friend gave me… which was broken. To be fair the one from my friend is like ten years old. These things are not manufactured that well to start with.

Then we went out to lunch. Lots of veggies were had.

We came home for a brief respite. The kids and I weren’t home for two hours. Then we got to go to chess class. Then the kids had belt testing in martial arts. We got home almost 12 hours after we initially left this morning.

The baby was great.

I would say that if you added up every minute of her screaming/crying there were about 10 more minutes of upset than we would get in the same time period at home. It just… went fine. She’s a trouper. (And now I’m second guessing that spelling of that word, Noah… even though I’m not wrong.)

This is a baby to inspire frequent breeding.

“Have a baby…. ” she says, “then you can experience the bliss of soothing a tiny helpless human with baths and car rides and being put down while you do things….”

IT’S A FUCKING LIE. NOT EVERY KID IS LIKE THIS. DON’T DO IT. KIDS ARE USUALLY HARD AS FUCK. THIS KID IS A GOD DAMN MIRACLE.

I mean, she’s still a lot of work. But she’s so sweet about it…

There are moments when I seriously think that karma is a real thing and I paid so hard when I was young that I earned having my life get better and better starting at 25. The last 11 years of my life have been surreal.

Thank you, Noah.

I am grateful that you have been willing to essentially train a feral animal. I am not who I was when we got married. There are parts that are better and parts that are harder but absolutely none of who I am today would be possible without the safety, support, and love you have given to me.

And the kids. You gave me three specific reasons I never get to quit on you. You made it so you have a permanent manipulation button on me. “It would be better for the kids if you…”

You are a genius.

I’m getting over my internal whine about oh my god I signed on for 30 god damn years of active parenting and moving into a feeling of gratitude. This spacing is really wonderful so far for a variety of reasons. I’m really glad we didn’t get pregnant right away. Our big kids are at the perfect developmental stage for accepting a sibling and six months ago I think it would have been shitty. They were both in hard disequilibrium periods and right now they are both riding high on equilibrium, self assurance, and mastery. They are both feeling good in their bodies and lives.

I mean, there is still that deep pocket of shame. There is still that base line of emotional volatility… but it’s doing so much better. There will always be seasons that are easier or harder and we lucked into having the baby be born during an easy season. This timing is wonderful.

I think MC in particular would not have coped with a sibling before this. Being a middle child isn’t easy. There is all the fuss and complication of always striving to feel “as good as” the older sibling and all the pressure of being an older sibling and not being permitted to “be the baby” forever. I think MC would have done poorly at pretty much any point in the past. They needed seven years of being the baby before they were ready to move on and let someone else be the baby.

MC is really latching on to “Sibby”. In my family of origin Sissy is the name for the oldest sister in the family. So we have Sissy and Sibby and both of them really wish I was more supportive of them being little mommies. I believe with all my heart that while it is good for older siblings to be capable of helping and for them to do some of it… they aren’t parents. They are not going to be given power or authority over their younger sibling(s). Just no. There are lots of life circumstances where I might have no choice and I am not judging folks who have to.

It is important to understand how and where your personal choices and preferences are about the intersection of needs, abilities, resources, and desires of the people involved.

I understand why people have to leave an oldest in charge. I just want to do everything I can to avoid doing that. If I have to then… everyone’s principles can change in case of need. That’s life.

In four more years when YC is around four and MC is around twelve and YC is around fourteen…. I can imagine paying the older children to babysit so I can drag Noah to a munch with me so we can make friends in a new place.

But it won’t be frequent and when my kids babysit… I will need to pay them. Given all the schtuff in my life… that’s just part of the deal.

I don’t know why I kept the Sissy thing when I hate my Sissy so much.

Because I love her and I want to look up to her and Auntie was such a good Sissy to my mom. Auntie is always there for my mom. Sure she’s codependent as shit. I’m pushing EC to not put up with being disrespected and working on teaching her patterns of abuse and what to put your foot down about.

Can you be a good Sissy and not be an enabler?

I tell my children, “You only stay in a relationship with someone if they treat you decently and that includes your family members. If you don’t like how I, or your dad, or your (whoever) treat you then you don’t have to continue knowing us as an adult. It will be up to you. Hopefully we will act right and you will want to have relationships with us… but you never owe us. Only share what you freely want to share.”

I owe them because I selfishly chose to bring them into the world. I made them just because I wanted to know them. Because the other seven billion fucking people didn’t love me enough and that was never going to change.

It’s interesting perceiving how much I have changed because of the simple reality of having relationships that are intensely physical and completely non sexual. I am pretty sure that the longest I ever lived with my mother was a six year span from when I was 12-18. My mother and I did not have an intensely physical relationship. She would hug me at times but mostly she didn’t like to be touched; I get it.

I have wonderful friends. We don’t see each other much. Mostly we don’t touch that much when we do see each other unless we are having some kind of sex. Because…

Yeah. Because.

Because that’s what I do. Only I can’t anymore. I have to be something different.

I feel sometimes like I was born when EC was. Sometimes I wonder if part of the reason I went through a really horrible long period when sex was pretty traumatic most of the time was because I did a lot of abreacting and trying to identify with EC’s life to learn how to feel safety in my body and it kept being interrupted by physically painful and damaging sex.

I started really coming out of it eight years later.

I started coming out of it on my own at a time when women in my family have often gone into puberty in generations past.

True and not true. Just looking at patterns. They don’t mean anything.

Abort. Abort. Delete Paragraph.

Anyway. I should go to bed. I’m starting to hit the wall. I was overstimulated like I had been sucking down… I don’t know what. Caffeine doesn’t keep me awake very well. Nothing keeps me awake when I’m tired except intense emotion. I can stay awake. But it takes something ridiculous like a new baby or a term paper I didn’t write until 24 hours before it was due.

Not that I was ever such a slacker. All the way through grad school.

But I don’t stay up well for parties or social events.

Why did I used to go to so damn many parties?

Ahhhh…. so I could meet my wonderful friends. But once I find them I can go home and contact them in my preferred mediums.

It works. Mostly. I do have some neat friends. I find them all over.

I am struggling with talking myself into holding the baby while I brush my teeth. Whine. It’s wonderful. It’s a great job. Holding the baby (or being on my side while I face the baby and nurse in bed) for approximately 22 hours a day gets… ouchie. And I’m not seeing my normal body workers because no I don’t leave my baby for an hour or two because this is my thing. I spend the fourth trimester with my babies.

Sure I dragged this one out of the house all day. But she was in the car for about two and a half hours in chunks spread over twelve hours. The. Entire. Rest. Of. The. Day. Is. On. Me. 

Noah hasn’t had her for an hour out of the last 24.

And I give him dates by himself. Two of us on a self abnegation spree goes poorly. Someone has to be getting some damn needs met.

Ok, I’m getting most of my needs met. Just not alone time or body care. There is more of that in my future. I can be patient.

In the past I made poor decisions because I pursued self-care stuff at the expense of my children. I won’t do that again. If it hurts sometimes… well… I didn’t have kids because I wanted a convenient life. I wanted purpose and connection. I wanted to have someone whose opinion I care about.

I am selfish and small and not everyone else in the world was enough without them.

I needed to have there be more people who think of the holidays and me and “home”. Noah feels like that and it’s great.

When I was born I was told I would get three older siblings. Instead I was raised mostly as an only child and I had occasional visiting abusers.

Now I get to have one kid on one side of me and another kid on the other side of me and another kid on top of me. Noah leans on some part of me or another.

They want me here so much.

This is what safe feels like.

Sometimes I feel pretty squeamish about the fact that I am not sure how much I want to “be” a good person and how much I want to pretend I am a good person so I can model it for my children. I want them to have the option of being good people or effective monsters if they choose.

That’s an interesting thought process. I don’t want to decide for them how they end up. I want to give them the opportunity.

I honestly feel like “being good” was not an option for me when I was young if I wanted to survive. If I had striven harder for being good I would have cooperated more. I would have fought less. And I’d be dead.

So I don’t want to force my children into the model of always doing as they are told. I want them to know how to choose. I want them to have a strong sense of their own internal compass for right and wrong and I want them to do their best to do right according to their own metrics.

Shit like giving money to homeless people. That isn’t something that I feel “Everyone Must Do To Be Good.” That’s not how it occurs in my brain at all. *I* was homeless for years and people helped me. People helped *me* not die. *I* owe paying that help forward. I have extra. My life is freakishly blessed. If *I* don’t hand $5 to anyone who asks me then I am betraying the child I once was.

That’s not about a universal sense of right or wrong or being good or being bad. It is about me playing the other part of the role I used to play. Because I can. Because in this life if you receive it is also good to give.

But different people receive different things. Not everyone is morally or spiritually obligated to have the same role as me.

How does goodness fit into that?

I do actually perceive myself as a generous person. I do perceive myself as a kind person.

But goodness is just a bridge too far.

I ain’t nice, but I strive for kindness all the time. Kindness is not always nice. Kindness is sometimes brutal. Kindness is telling my best friend she needs to change because this outfit sucks on her instead of saying something nice about it being an interesting pattern.

On a completely different note… my body has gone through some kind of intense reset lately. I cannot remember when I last had diarrhea. I’ve had solid stool for weeks. Even postpartum it never got liquid again. It was soft and easy to produce… but not diarrhea. I am pretty sure this is the longest period in my life when I have had solid stools. Apparently we are doing a fantastic job of nailing my nutritional needs plus lowering my stress levels. I’m really impressed. I didn’t know my body was capable of doing this well.

It’s exciting to me.

My sleep is all over the place. Meaning I’m not sleeping very well or very deeply. I’m absolutely terrified that I am going to be responsible for killing my baby. I don’t think that is going to happen but the terror is there. So I don’t sleep well because I check her over and over and over all night long. We do follow safe sleep practices. I’m not medicating at night. I’m not doing risky stuff with my baby. But SIDS is an absolutely terrifying boogeyman. Sometimes you do everything right and your baby still dies. So I don’t sleep much in the hopes that if her breathing pauses for some reason of immaturity I will be there to poke her back into action.

I’ll sleep when she’s more sturdy.

I am so so so grateful I don’t have to drive or have a job right now.

My hat is off to the mamas who have to go back to work already. You are strong, powerful, and loving. Your kid is lucky to have your protection in every form you give it. You are teaching your kids stuff I am not teaching mine and your kids are lucky.

I do wish my country viewed the long term mental health of everyone who breeds as important and provided longer maternity/paternity leave. A low stress time period of adapting to being a parent would be better for everyone.

One lady in my online due date club had to go back to work nine days postpartum. She’s the bread winner for her family and her job won’t let her take more time off. She has cried a lot about how sad she is to leave her baby, but it is necessary for the survival of her family. I believe it is wrong that our country does this to people but I don’t have even 1 oz of judgment for her. She’s surviving and coping in an unfair situation.

Mamas usually (not always) do their best. It is really sad when circumstances control the fact that their best is probably not what is truly best for their family. I don’t blame the mothers. I blame our fucked up culture.

When your choice is between feeding and housing your family or bonding with your new infant… that’s not a choice. That’s evil.

*We* choose to allow that to be the way our culture works. We elect politicians who keep it true.

Someone Noah grew up with has a baby just a couple of months older than our new one. Their baby was diagnosed with liver cancer.

There is no fair. There is no amount of paranoia that can actually keep my children safe. It’s luck of the draw and life is so unfair there are no words to adequately express how unfair it all is. I mourn for their family and pray that such a fate does not strike my children. Because nothing I do or don’t do will actually influence that kind of health. It’ll happen or it won’t.

Being a parent is terrifying.

In this exact moment I feel like I have passed some sort of… I don’t know a line in the sand. Some level of development. I’ve reached some sort of change.

I know that I will again feel like I want to die at some point. But in this moment I feel like there is so much need for my presence that I hope I will never again feel like I “should” die because in this moment I am capable of seeing how untrue that will be for the rest of my life. From here on out my death is going to absolutely devastate several people. There is no chance that my death is a positive thing ever again.

When I die it will cause more pain than it will relieve. I don’t believe that has been true for most of my life. It would have been a selfish act, always, but I don’t think it would have hurt people the way it would now. And for most of my life I have been in so much more pain than I am now. My physical pain comes and goes and sometimes spikes much higher than it was when I was a child but the physical pain has never really been the problem. The emotional pain is what I have struggled to bear.

I don’t know why this daughter feels like such a tipping point to me. She is not more important, valued, or loved than her sister or sibling.

But there are four fucking people who would absolutely never be ok again if I killed myself.

I am not really ok after my father and brother killed themselves. It doesn’t hurt like it would hurt my kids… I had different relationships. But if I still feel the amount of pain I feel in relation to their deaths I can barely imagine what it would do to my kids. It would scar their souls until they died.

I can see that so clearly. My oldest daughter has been clingy and loving and so wonderful lately. She’s having big feelings about the transition to having another baby and she is needing a lot of snuggling and chats about life and change. She’s not trying to regress. She is trying to affirm her own importance in my heart.

My children continue to feel glad that when we go out and it’s chilly, I will still give them my warm layers so that I can shiver and they can feel better. Even though I told you to bring something or I’d let you suffer for your own silliness. I never really do though. If I have warmth to share I will give it. Because you are my externalized beating heart and I want you to be ok. I will be ok enough with what I have left. I have survived so much worse. But you feeling uncomfortable is enough for me to try and fix it. Because you are my love. How could I look at you and make a choice to let you feel uncomfortable when it is so easy for me to fix?

You are my everything. My reason for living and striving and trying.

I need you. I love you.

And now my family has brought me back donuts. Time to go!