Self care for mental health would be taught all the way through high school with a full year being focused on how to deal with parenting since most of the population ends up parenting. I wish there were classes that taught about different parenting styles and why they are valid. Some people make authoritarian parenting work pretty well. I can’t. That doesn’t make it invalid nor my parenting style invalid.

I wish that kids spent high school learning about how complex the body really is. Having frank discussions about how confusing sexuality is. Learning that no one is “normal” and it’s ok to be into what you are into. How do you negotiate in a way that treats the person you are negotiating with like an autonomous human being instead of a piece of meat? How do you learn how to even tell what you are into vs what you are willing to tolerate because you want to be near this person so much?

I wish that there were long frank discussions about how shitty parenting is. Kids are assholes. Kids don’t give a shit about your boundaries and needs and how in the fuck are you going to manage that? There are lots of ways to approach this topic. There are lots of methods that work in the world that wouldn’t work for me.

I wish most people had to read Montessori and Holt and Maslow and Frankl and Piaget among many others. I wish that school taught the ability to evaluate yourself. The ability to evaluate yourself is one of the most important abilities you will need in life.

I think people should evaluate if they are doing well at parenting before deciding to have more children. If you aren’t handling the kid(s) you have, don’t have more. That’s a harsh opinion.

Yeah I think that kids deserve harsh evaluation. I think every child is that important. I pick quality over quantity.

I’m NOT SAYING that all people of a certain group, whether defined by disability, race, sexual orientation, wealth, or whatever…. shouldn’t have children. I’m not saying that at all. I am not saying that the government should be empowered to evaluate if people are good enough and sterilize them.

I’m not advocating for eugenics.

I’m saying that people should evaluate themselves and decide if this shitty job is one they really want to keep doing.

I love it. I love it more than the other shitty jobs I’ve had. I don’t believe I’ll ever have a non-shitty job. I know it’s a shitty job. But it’s one I want really badly.

I don’t think you should do things that are this hard unless you really really want to and you are able to do a good job at it.

Why? Because of how many traumatized people there are in this world. That doesn’t have to be true. There could be far fewer.

Yeah. That’s harsh.

But what does it mean to do a good job at parenting? Christ I don’t know. People evaluate on different levels. How physically competent someone is. How good a child is at adapting and conforming and learning. How much money someone grows up to make. How many years of therapy are necessary to keep from going postal…

There are a lot of metrics!

The metric I am shooting for is that I hope when my children are 30 they will want to be friends with me. That’s rather a low bar in the scheme of things.

My kids aren’t universally advanced and I would probably feel uncomfortable if they are. They are uncommonly verbal… but that’s because they have more opportunity to talk than average. *shrug* My kids aren’t smarter or more physically skilled than other kids.

They just glow with knowing that they are ok and they are where they are supposed to be today on their path.

That’s like, the thing I have really been able to teach. It’s confusing to me.

Let me tell you I’m not going to be the parent to teach physical prowess. We went to the park to play catch this week. That was fucking hilarious. I think we collectively caught approximately 10% of the balls.

And who fucking cares? We laughed the whole time. We had a lot of fun. It was funny. It wasn’t like when I was a kid and people would get angry at me and shout at me that I was pathetic because I wasn’t coordinated.

It was just… relaxed.

We aren’t playing catch because our future worth depends on our baseball star status. We were playing catch because it is a way to work on hand eye coordination and fill some time not sitting on our butts. Being bad at it is ok.

I seek out so much outside opinion on my parenting because I don’t even trust myself to evaluate that I’m doing well. Surely I’m the worst parent ever. I’m such a shitty person no other truth is possible. But I am also aware that I’m not so good at perceiving positives about myself. So I ask for outside opinions.

I get negative commentary on my parenting. When it is from people close to our lives who know me and my kids… I try to understand where the criticism is coming from and incorporate the lessons from it into my parenting. I’m better at talking to my kids now than I was because friends have commented on how awful some phrasings were.

Don’t worry… I’m fucking my kids up even as I’m doing some things right. It’s god damn inevitable.

But I think my kids are going to be fucked up in ways they will figure out how to cope with. I think they are going to be moderately fucked up and only inconvenienced by their degree of fucked up instead of needing 30+ years of intensive therapy with periodic skills classes and periods of intense study to try and deal with problems.

As my daughter likes to say… Generationally we are improving… she might not fuck her kids up at all!

Or maybe our line will die out and that’s cool too.

I love you. You are fucked up. I could list the ways and a lot of the reasons but it would feel unfriendly. I don’t mean it in an unfriendly way though. I mean that I see you. I see you as this complex messy person and I love you very much for your flaws and for the ways you are cool. I hope you see me. I hope you see that I am a flaming fucking asshole and a really caring person. I hope you see that I am a good parent and a shitty parent and I don’t deserve to be crucified or praised.

I hope you can love me anyway. I hope you can see that there is worth and value in me even on days when I don’t see it in me.

I see it in you even on the days you don’t see it.

I don’t see this judgment as being different from love. And yeah, I guess that is harsh.

I felt less self-hating yesterday than I did the day before and I feel much more calm today. It helped that yesterday was snuggle-tastic and I had lots of fantastically good interactions with the kids.

I love the days when “school” is done with me snuggling one kid at a time reading through their stuff for the day. It’s multiple extra hours of snuggling on top of how much we normally snuggle. I had an interesting chat with my somatic therapist about regulating off the kids. The therapist agreed with my assessment that as long as I am cheerfully accepting the regulating energy that the kids are freely offering… I’m not really being a vampire. If I tried to demand that they regulate me or if I pushed for more physical contact than felt good to the kids… that would be inappropriate.

But if someone is handing you a free gift, it’s ok to say yes.

I absolutely understand that having children touch you can be a PTSD trigger. For most of my life I couldn’t bear to be touched because anyone touching me was so dysregulating. Other than bdsm or sex, of course. I had enough control under those auspices to tolerate touch. My children have forced me to learn body regulation in order to tolerate their presence.

I understand that children, especially the grabby way that babies are, can overload the adult system like whoa.

Managing babies is what I do instead of meditating. Writing is what I do instead of meditating. Both require me to learn how to be in the moment and parse the differences between my needs and your needs in this exact moment and I have to get real precise “I am doing x for you even though this is hard and it hurts me.” The gift of being present for a baby is terrible to bear. Being a mother is a shit job. I don’t glorify this crap.

But it gives me purpose. It gives me a reason to get out of bed and care about someone other than myself. Go read A Man’s Search for Meaning by Dr. Viktor Frankl.

Do you know why I don’t want a job? Because if I had a job I would have to forcefully create a lot more space in my life for me to have my unique processes outside of my family. I would need a huge amount of buffer time to transition from the boundaries I need for interacting with the world as a woman on my own and the boundaries I need in the world as a mother with children. They are incredibly different for me. I understand that I am physically capable of managing one set of behaviors most of the time without lots of screaming. I know where my failures are.

Lots of people have no choice but to be parents who work. So my white knuckling technique of getting through parenting is literally not an option because their energy has to go to other places. I get that. Don’t have more kids.

My experience of working in schools, my experience of being a fucked up person in the world tells me that no one perfectly gets their needs met but almost anything can be overcome if you have a hard core support network. My experience is that very few people genuinely have a hard core support network in modern America.

Most mothers don’t have someone to step up and fill the gap of what they can’t give. It isn’t their fault. They aren’t bad people. Life is shitty and unfair and it hurts all over. I don’t think these women are bad people for coping the way they must with a whole load of traumatic experiences. But children still need what they need if you don’t have it to offer. Don’t have *more* children if you find out with your first that you cannot bear to comfort a one year old.

I’m the fourth child. No one wanted to fucking comfort me. I was hit for crying because no one wanted to hear it.

I’m not saying, “You are a shitty parent so you should lose your children.” I don’t believe that. I think that most kids are better off with their parents even when it isn’t perfect. That bond is fucking real.

I’m saying that if you wanted to find out what motherhood is and then you found out that it is so overwhelming you can’t handle meeting the needs of your kid… don’t have more kids. Not because you are bad. Not because you shouldn’t have the kid you have. Because yet more load isn’t going to make you a better parent to the child who is here.

There are a lot of things I don’t do in this life because *I* have limits that preclude me from doing them.

One of the very few things I’m tremendously good at in this life is helping kids feel supported. I was fantastic at it as a teacher and I’m better as a mother.

Which doesn’t mean this impulse towards centering children is easy or something that everybody should be able to do. It’s about a very specific shift in thinking that most people don’t experience and that’s not bad or wrong. I absolutely understand that the way I center children in my thinking is not that common. I talk to teachers all the time. I talk to parents all the time. Not many people constantly think about the child in front of them like a social worker trying to manage what services a vulnerable person needs.

It’s based on the life I’ve lead. It is freaky to me when I come across children who are… just ok. They don’t need more support. They are getting everything they need from their life. It absolutely happens and I’m always a bit shook. It’s wonderful! I wish I had more time to grill their parents and find out how that happened.

There was this one family I worked with as a teacher. I knew the older and younger son. Both were diagnosed with Asperger’s and the family had a one to one therapist they had been working with since the oldest son was 4. I learned so many behavioral tricks from that family. The kids taught me. The mother taught me. Heck, the therapist (who came to every academic meeting) was incredibly informative. This is the hard downside of homeschooling and being so isolated. I don’t have families like that drifting through my life to teach me tricks.

I think of parenting children kind of like I think of staying up late to work in theatre. You have to evaluate if it is something you can handle. I can’t stay up late at night for love or money. I wanted a career in theatre so bad but I’m not physically capable of doing what I wanted to do. I had to find a different path.

One and done is ok. I think it is going to become more the norm than not. Only children branch out in their communities in a way that is super important. They look for the connections and the support they need.

My not-based-on-anything-real-so-I’m-probably-wrong opinion on having siblings is that it makes it harder to go out into the world seeking what you need if you believe you should have support at home. I know that it was a real handicap for me that I had three older siblings who all “talked” about “taking care of me” when the reality was I did hard physical labor to take care of my siblings as they taunted and abused me. I don’t believe that having siblings is always a good thing.

*I* didn’t want an only child because I think with my weird ass intensity I would fuck a kid up entirely if they had just me to interact with all day as we homeschool. EC definitely benefits from having FMC around. But it doesn’t always work out. It was a crap shoot. We got lucky.

It’s kind of hard knowing that if I had one kid in my house with me… I would screw them up with my intensity and my emotional ups and downs. With multiple children in the house it is easier for the house to carry on while I drift on my little emotional eddy and I’ll catch up when I’m ready. If it was just me and a single kid trying to manage my emotional shit… I sincerely believe it would get bad.

But other people have other limits. Other people have other things to offer.

Hell, I think that the parents who refuse to comfort their one year old children will often go on to be much better at inculcating what it means to be “normal” and to try and conform to being a cog in a machine. The machine doesn’t give a shit if you cry either.

Such parenting isn’t “wrong”. But shit dude only produce one cog.

Which isn’t a fact. Which isn’t a pronouncement from on high. I’m not on high looking down on anyone.

It’s my shitty opinion that no one has to care about even a little bit.

Which is why I banned myself from the forums. Because I can keep my shitty opinion to myself and stop arguing with people who have to live in the world very differently than I am able to live in the world. My life is so overflowing with privilege I don’t have the fucking right to judge anyone at this point.

I have a stack of parenting *choices* that almost no one gets. That makes me a self righteous bastard if I judge. People are coping with what they have in front of them with what tools they have in their bag. If I say they are bad for that… well… it’s already well established that I’m a shitty person so what the hell.

I’m a shitty person and a really good parent.

We went for a walk after dinner. Of course this turned into the “neighborhood tour” as it usually does. Our neighborhood is going to audibly keen when we leave. Last night was a lot of talking to the older ladies about how they can get in on the produce trading that is happening right under their noses. “Oh we do it! Let me introduce you to _______ so that you can talk about what you have to trade…”

My neighbor said that having me around makes the neighborhood feel warmer and cozier than it did without me and she’s been here 30 years. She also said that she can tell I must be a wonderful person in general because of the way my kids glow. “That has to come from you.”

I live in this permanent state of confusion. How did I produce happy children? How did I produce children who glow with so much happiness that people comment on it about once a week? Fucking strangers come up to me in stores and comment on it. Professionals who are used to finding the cracks and flaws in seemingly “happy” families tell me that they can’t figure out what they might have to offer us because we are doing so well.

It is very hard to reconcile in my head that I’m a shitty person who should die… only I’m better at this parenting gig than anyone has a right to be.

It is mostly privilege. It is mostly that I have the luxury of time without financial strain. I don’t think I would be such a good parent under almost any other circumstances and I try to be humble about that.

i wouldn’t be having another kid if I had more need to earn money. No chance. I would have nothing left to give another kid if I were in that position. I know it like I know my name. I only have as much to give as I have because of the amount of support I get from my husband.

It’s part of why I don’t feel comfortable asking other people for support. I get more than I deserve from my husband so for me to ask for support from anyone else is bad. There are a lot of people in this world who need and deserve that help so much more than me. I’m a fucking bitch. My life is already cozier than I deserve. Of course I should find ways to increase my share of suffering in this world.

There is no real way for me to pay back all the support that kept me alive. Not functional or healthy…. alive. I don’t deserve any more.

I paid back the therapy. I paid them. That’s a fair trade.

Communities kept me alive when my mother couldn’t. When my mother couldn’t comfort me when my immediate family members were killing themselves I went to my Jenny. I understand that mothers can’t always comfort their children and their children need to find that support in the world.

I also understand how hard that is. How painful the search is for people who will accept you. It’s rough.

I spend so much time wishing I hadn’t been born because then my existence wouldn’t require the support I’ve gotten and people could have “been there” for someone who was more deserving than I will ever be.

But if I had never been born my children wouldn’t be in the world. I may be a miserable son of a bitch, but my children… aren’t. My children are pretty much the only reason I am capable of looking at myself and seeing that I am fucking overwhelmingly filled with love.

I want to love people so badly. I want to be support for people so badly. I want to be worthy of being loved and supported. But I’m tremendously fucking limited in how I can offer that support. I’m really bad at being able to perceive adults the way I perceive children. I am impatient and intolerant of their needs in a way that I basically never am with children. It’s not nice and it’s not appropriate and I’m not defending it. It’s a shitty thing I do. It is a sharp block in my brain.

I have a slightly easier time with adults I knew as children so they get a halo effect. But it’s still hard.

I’m trying to work through what it means to be a good parent and a shitty person. Because I’m absolutely convinced that I am both. I’m honestly kind of hoping that as my children grow up I will have an easier time perceiving adults as people. These kids are going to be the first people I have known from infancy to adulthood. I didn’t know my siblings or cousins or niblings well enough to track them from youth to adulthood.

I was always off somewhere in a foster home because no one wanted to take care of me.

I think so much about what is owed for care that was grudgingly, barely given.

But it was given. I’m not dead. It’s kind of like mothers not wanting to comfort their kids but wanting them to exist in the world for… some… reason…

I can’t perceive this objectively because my mother never wanted me and it permeated my whole fucking life. I can only view this topic from the point of view of a baby who isn’t wanted. I know after 9 years of parenting I’m supposed to have way more compassion for how hard it is to mother…

I’m still the baby no one wanted.

I’m still the baby who was told to shut up or they will give me something to cry about. The pain I felt about knowing that everyone in that house wished I had died at birth… that had absolutely no merit or need for comfort.

I know I’m supposed to identify more with the parent who has anxiety or PTSD or depression. But I can’t. In my brain I’m still fully present with the hysterical need for a mother to comfort me. I will break my body in service to meeting my children’s needs because there will not be another child in this world who feels that way because of me.

This is something I can give if I have nothing else of value to give in this life. My children will never feel like they don’t deserve comfort because of me. I can promise them very little else in life. I promise this.

I really wish I could stop crying about this some year.

I can’t fix the pain I feel. Lord knows I’ve tried. But I can choose to not inflict it. That’s all I’ve got.

I really really really and truly do not believe that the way I parent is the one true way. I’ve seen people get equally as good or better results without having to be a neurotic freak. I envy them. But this is the only path I perceive as being available to me that will allow me to escape abusing my kids like fuck.

Isn’t that what we are all trying to do? Avoid abusing the kids like fuck?

I don’t. I was talking to my shrink yesterday about when I intervene in peoples lives and the consequences that come from doing so. They asked me how do I know that I am right, how do I decide when to intervene? Well… I never know for sure that I’m right. No one does.

I go by a combination of intellectual knowledge and gut feeling. I wait for patterns of children freaking out before I get all up in someone’s face. I don’t get bossy about children I only know for a few weeks. I don’t know them well enough to know what they need and I’m super aware of that. But when I hang out with folks for half a year or many years… I get to know the kids. I watch behavior patterns.

I’m like your friendly neighborhood weirdo watching your kids for signs of distress. Hi.

I watch for consistent distress. That’s when I get pushy. How do I know I’m right? I think that certainty is a lie people tell themselves. I do a fantastic amount of research, I look for patterns, then I pray.

I’m right a lot of the time though.

I need to get off the forums. Forums are largely gatherings of mean girls. I learn some interesting things and mostly I watch a bunch of fucking bullies. And holy criminey the advice is often terrible.

“My kid uses me as a lovey and I hate it so how do I make them stop.” Well, if your kid is trying to comfort themselves as a baby with knowing you are present… you can convince them that you won’t actually be there for them and they are abandoned… Good luck with coming back here in a few years and saying, “I don’t understand why my kid has anxiety issues.” Because i swear to cheese these threads are back to back.

I’m not saying that attachment parenting is the only way. I’m saying that refusing attachment has consequences.

“Just make the kid cry. They’ll get over it.”

That makes me cringe. Kids sorta get over it. They shut down the desire to ask for contact.

I mean, there’s a certain level at which the relationship is a dyad and it has to work for both parties. But not wanting your kids to take comfort from you… that’s too much.

No more forums. They are depressing as shit.

If they were complaining about 6 or 7 year olds being too grabby I’d totally have advice about negotiating. These are almost always people with one year olds. That’s just sad.

If you are seriously anti snuggling a one year old STOP HAVING CHILDREN. Oh my god.

You are their entire world at one year old. Trying to convince them to not depend on you… that leaves scars. I understand that daycare is a fact of life for many families. I’m not arguing with parents needing their children to tolerate other caregivers. But if when your child is around you… it makes you angry that your kids need physical contact… that’s really sad.

Kids need hugs. It’s not optional.

Why do I speak up even when I don’t know for sure that I’m right? Because folks waited for absolute certainty with me and ended up doing nothing. That was the wrong choice.

I’m hitting that stage of pregnancy where I’m crying because I don’t have anyone to ask for help. Noah is already doing way more than he can really sustain so I can’t ask for anything else. And I don’t have anyone else I feel comfortable asking for anything.

It isn’t that I need help with anything big at this point. It’s stupid shit. I have a huge pile of stuff on my dresser. It’s not a big deal but I’m feeling very overwhelmed by the cognitive load of sorting it out. This is the kind of thing I go over to peoples houses and do for them. But I’m feeling too stupid to manage it for myself. I need to do some gardening and I just… can’t bring myself to go do it.

The second trimester is unsurprisingly harder than my first. People claim that the second trimester is easier and it might be for them but it sucks for me. I threw up once in the first trimester. I’m up to four pukes (including last night) in the second trimester. Heartburn is going insane. I’m feeling physically really bad.

It was hard having the sleep doctor yesterday lecture me extensively about how I shouldn’t be driving because it isn’t safe. Yeah, I know lady. I have had to pay to rebuild the front of my car. I’m aware. I could kill someone.

She told me to take public transit to my appointments. That would make most of my appointments take 4-5 hours. I’m already seriously struggling to get through all of the stuff I’m supposed to do with the appointments taking 2-3 hours with driving. And Uber would be fucktastically expensive because all of my appointments are 20-40 miles away. Uber says it would have been somewhere between $25-$60 for each way of yesterday’s appointment. I can’t do that 5 days a week. That’s $50-$120/day for getting me to appointments. I’m not that fucking rich.

It’s kind of funny that I feel like a worthless sack of shit who should die because I am not capable of being productive or useful right now but meeting EC’s shrink yesterday was… uhhh… different. Let’s add one more highly trained professional to the list of people telling me that my children are the most emotionally healthy, well supported children they have met and they have basically nothing to offer our family because I’m doing so great.

It’s weird living in my head.

I’m really sad that my neighbor moved to Hawaii. If she were here I would be collapsing on her couch and letting her pet me. She’d be thrilled to do so. It would make her feel good. But she followed her dream to move to Hawaii. I’m glad she is following her dream. We still text a fair bit. She’s having a hard time adjusting and I’m coaxing her through trying out ALL the churches on the island before she declares that she’s just too weird to have a faith community there. She tells me I’m a fantastic motivational speaker.

But I can’t motivate me to think I’m anything other than a selfish piece of shit who should die. I hurt so many people so much. I don’t deserve any help or good feelings from anyone because I am bad.

Except my kids. Apparently those fuckers should feel I’m doing ok by them. Professionals keep telling me so.

I don’t really think they are fuckers. That’s my pathetic attempt at levity this morning.

I don’t feel like I want to kill myself. But I do want to hurt myself a lot for being so bad.

I would really like to crawl into my magical bathtub and fill it to the brim so I can submerge myself and open my arms from wrist to elbow so I can never hurt anyone again.