Tag Archives: adult-only

This feels healthy.

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I think this would have been mostly our approach if we had stayed in California but it is a little bit hard to judge. Over the past few years Noah and I have increased how much we drink for a whole bunch of reasons. We both still drink a small enough quantity that a Scottish doctor will laugh themselves off their chair at the idea that we might have a problem with drinking. But we have a drink a few nights a week and rarely more than that in a night. (Ok, sometimes the drink is stiff.) The older kids ask for tastes sometimes. Middle Child asks slightly more often than Eldest Child and EC occasionally “sneaks” a little bit of something. I put sneak in quotes because she always tells us that she has done it and asks if we are upset.

That has been kind of a consistent theme with her lately. She is pushing boundaries on doing things on her own when no one is around to witness but she doesn’t push that hard or that far and she almost always feels super guilty and fesses up really quickly. Like: I put the baking chocolate/candy in a little plastic box with a 3 digit code on it. She spent weeks figuring out the code then stole some M&M’s. When I finally noticed she laughed hysterically and confessed her prank and immediately offered up more money than the candy had cost to start with. On her own she poured a tiny little bit of the Jammy Red wine and drank it. I believe her that it was a very tiny amount because I didn’t even notice the amount in the bottle change.

The other day MC asked if I would pour them a little bit of the white chocolate liquor that I like a lot. I poured about half a shot glass. They took two tiny sips and declared themselves sated and handed it back with most of it remaining in the glass. EC very much likes a particular brand of cider that I get and when I open a bottle she asks me if she can pour some of it in a cup and share. The whole bottle is 2 units of alcohol and she takes about 1/4 of a bottle. I don’t see a problem with that.

I feel like each kid probably consumes about a full unit of alcohol over a two month period. But they are adventurous and eager to find out what they like and they are developing strong opinions about brands and types of alcohol. Mostly they don’t like the vast majority of strong stuff and that makes me pretty happy. They almost always have a little bit and then say, “Ok I feel that. I’m done.”

I don’t remember seeing anything like this when I was young. When young people got their hands on alcohol they would chug it as fast as possible even when they thought it was horrible. I feel like my kids will be able to go to parties as young adults and only drink if there is something they really like and then not to excess because they are learning what it feels like in their body to just have a little.

Noah and I model fairly conservative habits around drinking. I am not sure when he was last drunk. I really struggle to remember a time when he has ever been woozy or more than a tiny bit extra goofy–but really who could tell when he is such a super dork all the time. (I read him the last couple of sentences and he says he has been drunk and I just didn’t notice because he was low-key about it. Oh, ok then.)

I got super drunk one night by myself super late. I was hanging out in a chat room and I got super silly and it was really fun. Then I went off and brushed my teeth and went to bed and it was a normal day the next night. I also got super drunk night one night when I went off to see friends on the East Coast of Scotland last summer. Like rolling around on the floor singing along with silly songs, drunk. I think that is it since I had kids. I don’t drink a lot.

I worry about this because I have friends who had terrible alcoholics for parents and I don’t want to hurt my children the way my friends were hurt. I am hoping and praying that I am threading the needle on modeling moderation and drinking because sometimes it tastes nice instead of drinking to cope with life.

So much of parenting is this terrible guessing game about “Ok, how am I fucking up my kids?” In this way I feel like we are not doing too terribly. I hope it continues to go well. Of course we are following Scottish law and Youngest Child is not entitled to taste our drinks until she hits the ripe old age of 5.

I shit you not. That’s the rule in Scotland. Children under 5 can’t have alcohol. I guess her next birthday is going to be a real banger. I’m kidding. It is pretty funny, though.

Because I am a loser without a baby book…

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Here they don’t do annual well child visits with home educating families so a lot of the normal medical records I have for the older kids won’t be duplicated with Youngest Child. I was talking to someone about car seat/booster needs so I went and checked on where she is in terms of height and weight. This blog (mostly the parts that are now private) are the only place where I have recorded most of this information so I’ll log this today.

She is 108 cm and 18.7kg tall at 4 years and not quite 2 weeks. According to my reading of the charts that means she is around the 95% for height and about 80% for weight. She is a very solid little thing who runs for most of the day so she has barely the tiniest of pudge on her–she’s muscular.

I think that means she is on track to be in between the older two as adults. Oldest Child has past me up at 13 and Middle Child is getting there fast at 11–I think MC will pass me at 12. If the percentages stay true to adulthood MC will be the tallest, then YC, then EC. I get the general impression that EC will resent this for most of their adult lives. Ha.

If my memory is serving (and I’m feeling too lazy to go look it up) MC has stayed around 97-98% for their entire childhood and EC has always been around 85-87%. YC at birth was only in the neighborhood of 75% but has shot up since.

I mean… we’ll see. I have just done such a poor job of record keeping that I feel like I should write it down when I think of it.

Series of conversation in our house

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We were talking about hierarchy and how it works in different settings. Noah and I told the kids that they are always going to have a hard time truly understanding it because they have grown up with the expectation that they can challenge/argue with authority in almost every circumstance. Then we talked about how we have prepped them in advance for the few times and places where we absolutely will not tolerate backtalk and there is the high risk that if they try to challenge authority in those settings they might get slapped as a way of shutting them up. Specifically this was in relationship to traveling through countries that are not tolerant of queer/trans/uppity pagans and this is not ever going to be a normal part of our life because we don’t do that.

Then Noah went off to work and the kids and I kept talking. I mentioned that in a lot of families the parents present a united front whether they agree or not–they keep all arguments and disagreements out of the view of the children. Eldest Child observed that our family totally doesn’t work that way because we believe that arguing is how to solve problems and find a compromise everyone can live with. I told her that the fact that she believes in her core that everyone in a relationship has to compromise and that arguing is not only ok but mandatory is exactly why Noah and I say that she doesn’t understand hierarchy. I can’t remember what Middle Child said after that but it was funny. Dangit I should have written this a couple of days ago.

I relayed the interaction to Noah later and he laughed and said that our kids are going to need to find Jewish folks to date. I said “Dude we moved to Northern Scotland.” He said, “I guess we are going to need to ship them to Israel for college.” I giggled till I just about burst something.

When I asked no one else could remember the funny thing MC said either. Dangit.

We are going to confuse people so much.

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I’m pretty sure that folks here are already aware that we use “kersquirble” to mean adding sugar and milk to tea to your personal taste.

The other night Noah and Youngest Child were at the table and she asked for a cheers. They clinked glasses and he said “Kanpai!” Then she said, “Cow pie!”

Our oldest kids observed that we are going to confuse people when they come over for the first time and we push the sugar/milk tray towards them and tell them they can kersquirble their tea then we hold up our classes and exclaim cow pie!

But I mean… in jokes are kind of our thing.

Insults in action

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Eldest child has decided that she is one of those ridiculous gamer people who call everyone (including me) “bruh”. For reasons that follow my usual extreme lack of logic this bugs the crap out of me.

Years ago she was saying/doing something where she was trying to “set someone straight” in a sassy voice and I said, “You got that right, sister.” She narrowed her eyes and and did the cat butt mouth and told me that I don’t get to call her that.

So last night when she started calling me “bruh” I said, “If you call me ‘bruh’ I’m going to start calling you ‘sister’ alllllllll the time.” She narrowed her eyes at me a little bit and carefully did not do a cat butt mouth (because I totally made fun of her for that until she stopped doing it) and then said…. “You know… I kind of love that our big name calling exchange is to refer to each other as siblings.” I skipped over and kissed her on the cheek and said “Me too.” Then she smiled and leaned her head towards me for a nuzzle.

ETA: I forgot to write down the funniest part! Middle child said “You also object to mum. Why are you so picky about names?” I said, “Because I’m not into mums. Definitely not my favorite flower.” MC said: “Yeah you aren’t into mums because you like dads!” I said, “Well I am into MILFs but that’s kind of a different thing.” MC looked puzzled but EC exploded across the room with “AHHHHH I CAN’T KNOW THIS” then she bolted across the room to glare at me as I laughed and laughed and laughed. She is feeling super smug lately about how she knows everything that can be made into a dirty joke because she is on the internet. Once in a while I am a twerp and I let her know that she isn’t the only one who can make dirty jokes. It cracks me up.

A while later I almost went up to bed without writing in the five year journal the kids just got me. Big eye roll here. Two years ago they both got 5 year journals in their stockings as a way to get them to practice handwriting just a little bit every day. This year they decided that if they have to suffer so do I. Well then! EC poked fun at me for almost forgetting then gloated about the fact that they will finish two years before me and she’ll be 16 when she finishes the book so I won’t be able to make her start a new one. I countered that oh yes I can. She said, “But I’ll be too old. You can’t tell me what to do by then.”

(Based on a reference to a comedian I watched a bit ago and I repeated it to the kids) I said: “Oh I’m going to be the whitest Mexican mom you’ve ever seen and if you sass me when you are 40 and married I’m still going to send you to your room. And you will go.” She furrowed her brow then gave a deep sigh and said, “Yeah. That tracks.”

What’s funny about that is I think I have only sent her to her room like once in the past two years because she was being unbearable. It’s not like that’s a big part of our relationship. With EC in particular usually all I have to do to let her know that she is over the line is to glare at her. She absolutely hates it and will crumble under the force of it. She still puts her hands up in front of her face so she “can’t see me”. Then she will loudly announce that she can’t see me and thus I have no power over her.

People ask me how often I hit my kids to get them to cooperate. Ha. My parenting is pretty much force of will, baybee. Also super long “discussions” where I explain that I am right and you are going to understand why I am insisting on (thing). For a few more years you don’t have to agree with me you have to obey. Then you’ll be an adult and we have to negotiate more.

Except for sassing me. Then you can go to your room.

If you need to hit your children to enforce your will you have already lost.

I’m allowed to be frustrated but I’m not allowed to be angry

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I wanted to get started on the bathroom stuff in June. I specifically had the thought that if there were delays: hey at least no one minds spending a lot of time outside and avoiding the house when it is a disaster. The contractor wasn’t available to start until November. He started on the 24th. He thought he would be done by the week before Christmas.

Then it turned into outsourcing a bunch of pieces because he hates doing those bits. Their schedule needs became a conflict. Getting accurate lists of everything that should be ordered… is literally impossible. And now things weren’t ordered when they should be and stuff could’t come in until January. I am so very very very frustrated.

Oh, now the contractor is very sick. Deep breaths. Can’t be angry. This is just life.

My bedroom and bathroom tile is done. Yay! That’s worth a celebration. The painting in there is far from done. Roughly half the walls in the room still need a plaster compound skim coat due to the removal of icki wallpaper. The plaster guy is just flat not returning my calls. So I ordered a handful of tools. I’ll be teaching the kids how to do the work. We aren’t supposed to walk on the floor today because grout is setting. I probably *should* stick a heater in there because that will help.

That means I can walk on grout Thursday/Friday/Saturday. On Thursday and Friday and Saturday I can also work on painting the walls that have to be painted first (specifically: the walls where shelves will be attached to the wall and the wall with the glass door, oh and I guess finishing the ceiling would be wise.) Technically I’m allowed to move furniture back in as of Friday but I think it is smart to wait till the plaster sanding is done on Saturday. Deep sigh. I am going to move a lot of the furniture back in pretty immediately. Well, I can do primer on the unfinished walls on Saturday after sanding–there doesn’t have to be a big time gap between those activities.

Then the return of furniture! Of course first is the bed. My lovely bed. My wonderful bed. My bed that means that maybe I’ll get to have sex again. le sigh I do like me a closed door. I will put as much of everything else in there as I can while leaving access to painting wall space. It will be nice to have the furniture in near where it will go because it will help me remember where I don’t need to be intense. I’m stealing one of the white boards from the kitchen so that I can have a visual reminder spot that I can’t put down/lose in my room too. White boards are awesome. But I don’t need to do a lot of fancy painting behind it.

For the bathroom I’m thinking the wall that faces the shower will have a pretty serious tree with holes for various kinds of birds and fairies to live in. I think that a branch will come over the mirrors and have a nest on it with pretty speckled eggs. There will be birds flying in the sky up on the ceiling. Maybe even fairies dancing if I can figure out the perspective. Low grass and flowers down at the bottom and in the doorway.

I’ve already painted a fair bit on the ceiling. A couple of them are highly abstract in a way that will lead to many many guesses and possibilities over the years. One is (pretty fucking clearly to me) a vulva because vulvas are AWESOME. My kid says, “Hunh… I have no idea what that is,” hahahahahahahaha. I added a heart with the word forgive dotted inside it but it’s heavily obscured and I think it will only be visible at some times in some lighting (totally my goal). There is a flower because I love flowers. There is a symbol for finding gratitude that I didn’t quite finish because my neck was very angry with me. Over the bed I intend to put a sigil for encouraging peaceful sleep and banishing nightmares. I have room for a couple of other cloud symbols but I’m not sure what yet. Hm.

The office nook will have very little available space for painting. Above the computer monitor area I am going to put the pagan three moon symbol. I might do some vines or other things growing up in the space between furniture but mostly I will just paint the walls solid green behind the furniture and call it good. And by “solid green” I mean dappled greens so that it doesn’t look like some wacko who believes in one color for each wall took over my room.

In the narrow corner above my bed next to the window I want to do a wheel of the seasons. A reminder that change is always always always coming.

I’m still not sure what I want above my bed. That space feels very important and I can’t visualize what it ought to be. The side of the room with the dressing area and the exercise equipment storage will be all Mother Goddess and Greenman energy. Lots of bright colors even though it’s supposed to be midnight in a fairy glen.

I’m having fun.

What is it about me?

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Recently someone who, about two decades ago, asked to be my Leather mom tried to friend me on facebook. I actually unfriended her about six months ago because I was weak when she came around a year or so ago when I filled out my facebook profile more and included California people. I unfriended her because when I see her posts about how terribly she misses her daughter and how the lockdown was traumatizing to her because she can’t see her baby it cuts like a knife. It jumps up and down on my old buttons about how other people deserve to be loved and I don’t. So instead of being an asshole I just unfriended her.

I uhm was not as nice this time around. Instead of ghosting her I let her know (with a fair few words) just how much she hurt me and that continuing to stand near her at this point makes me think about killing myself and I just can’t do that anymore. She responded with ethos and just how broken she is now and an attempt to gain sympathy and support from my end. I am not going to respond. Because if I did it would be something hostile about how she fucking dumped me years before her partner died so if she is broken in the aftermath of his loss I don’t fucking care anymore.

This is like my mother expecting me to start handling all of her financial needs when I was 18 and I got the accident settlement. She didn’t really raise me–a whole series of foster placements kept me fed and clothed and not homeless. But hey I owe her because she is so needy and she’s my mother. Naw. Fuck off.

Many years ago now my Leather Dad told me that he’d be happy to let my kids call him grandpa but I needed to keep in mind that he wasn’t going to do anything to help me because all of his money and support and property was going to his kids. Then a couple years after that he asked to borrow $10,000. We worked out a loan agreement and I gave it to him and he paid me back. Then he came back asking to borrow $25,000. For someone who was absolutely fucking clear that he wouldn’t help me he sure expected me to help him. I said no the second time.

I talked to a good friend about how they are the only person Sarah has lived with who Sarah doesn’t owe money because they didn’t charge Sarah rent. When Sarah broke up with me she had effectively stolen money from me; it was put in an account to buy groceries for the family. A couple weeks later she had a plane ticket to see her sister’s graduation and she needed more money for groceries. This was never really discussed because if I got angry with her then she would tell me I have Borderline Personality Disorder and she can’t deal with me because I am triggering because I am just like her mother.

They say that extreme independence is a sign of trauma and it’s not a good thing. I’m told that me being a bit on edge and not 100% trusting Noah means I shouldn’t be married to him because I am being abusive to him. Basically what that means is because I am a traumatized person I should be alone for the rest of my life–hey independence!

For reasons I don’t really understand he thinks that having this much of me is better than having none of me.

Recently I read something that I found interesting: The Unified Cutlery Theory. I feel like over the last two months I managed to turn the corner and all I have are knives. I posted a while ago about doing well and I think that was a stupid thing to do. I burst my bubble.

An affirming phone call

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I want to write this down so that in the future I can remember this feeling. I talked to a buddy in town yesterday; she works in special education in an autism class. This is sometimes complicated for her because her training is entirely in language teaching (usually foreign language to mainstream kids) but this was the job she could get around here. She has been given very little additional training/teaching so she is figuring it out as she goes and reading books on her own to help her in her job. Also worth mentioning that her daughter is Middle Child’s best friend.

We talked a lot about what I’m seeing and what I’m trying to figure out with regard to helping MC. We talked about the areas of severe academic delay (specifically: MC is effectively reading about 4 years below grade level and writing 5-6 grades below level) and the complications that occurred in the classroom when MC attempted to go two years ago. We talked about dynamics in our house around chores/getting stuff done.

She was very clear that she didn’t have a lot of specific advice but she was a sympathetic ear and she talked through her experiences working with families in her classroom. She understands why I am not super keen on pushing more in the direction of the National Autistic Society help and why I have the worries I have. I talked about Auntie who is in her 80’s and has her three adult children living with her because none of them can take care of themselves and live independently. I talked about my brother Tommy and the way he physically abused his entire family and why the tantrums/violent outbursts are so triggering for me.

Side note: in the past couple of weeks it has come to my attention that pretty much all of the friends I have met here have basically no idea that I have/had siblings and they know nothing about my traumatic family background. I made a couple of comments recently in context in conversations in completely different groups and they all responded with extreme shock and complete surprise. “How have I been talking to you for this long and I had no idea any of this happened?” Well… I don’t trauma dump anymore. I don’t share my mental state by and large with newer friends here. It isn’t relevant to mention any of these things if I’m not going to talk about anxiety/depression/trauma. So I don’t. This is part of my strong feeling that I am never again going to make a close friend where I talk about the really hard stuff. I will have surface friends and basically shut the fuck up about my brain going forward. It’s not safe to talk about. I can no longer absorb the consequences of being honest.

But I do sometimes need to talk about educational stuff and I need some amount of support around that. We talked about classroom strategies that she uses and how functional/useful they are for my child. We talked about the possibility of Youngest Child going into school here and the likely outcomes of that.

It is her professional opinion after working in special ed in local schools for several years that my children really are better off at home. The resources are thin on the ground and are only available for the most extreme cases. MC has already been on a waiting list for assessment for over two years and it could be another year or more before they are seen. YC would be looking at four or more years given how the waiting list has expanded over the past two years and possibly more like six years. The resources for private assessment are many hours away and their waiting lists are closed because they will not be able to get through any additional patients any year soon and they don’t want to have a waiting list that goes beyond two years. When they do reopen their waiting lists they will have a strong preference for siblings of children already in their system. Even if/when my children managed to be assessed there are very few resources available for kids at their levels. (She knows my family and is comfortable stating that.) Autism resources are only available for kids at the most extreme/non-verbal end. AHDH resources are pretty much limited to medication or being taken out of a mainstream classroom and not taught much. Other Pervasive Non-Verbal Learning Disorders are pretty much ignored entirely.

She and I have had many a chat over the years about our classroom experiences with special needs and the differences between what is given to 504/IEP kids in the bay area and what is available here. She contrasts this with what is given in her native (other European non-English speaking country that I won’t name for a vague gesture in the name of privacy) country and she is of the opinion that my level of training is higher than any co-worker she has ever worked with. She thinks American understanding of education and specifically special education for disabled kids is head and shoulders higher than anything available in Europe. She is stunned by the sheer variety and kinds of books I have read in order to be a more appropriate teacher for my children. I had previously mostly focused on the ADHD/dyslexia/general atypical neurodevelopmental needs reading stuff in conversations with her.

We shared the perspective that there is a very careful balance with special needs/disabled children and adults between giving them the help they need and enabling/infantilizing them to the point where they fail to learn skills that would allow them to be more independent as adults. When you are in the family you lack the objectivity to see the larger arc and how your actions are impacting your family. When you are in the classroom/an outside observer you lack the ability to see all the nuances and decisions that are creating the entire situation so you are ignorant of the full reasoning behind what is happening and whether it is necessary or not. We talked about how difficult it is for parents to hold the line and insist on many of the pieces of development that work towards independence because fighting every battle all day long is exhausting.

Then I said “And I get to be the parent and the teacher and be with my children for nearly all of their waking hours! It’s great!” She kinda choked for a minute and then gushed about how amazing it is that I do what I do with my kids because she sees the results and she sees us interact and man do I keep it together.

That was so fucking validating. She hosts MC for sleepovers pretty regularly. Her daughter is an only child and she’s pretty happy to have a friend over quite a bit. Her daughter has other local friends but has an easier time with MC than with a lot of the kids from school because my buddy and I have fairly similar perspectives on manners and appropriate ways to interact. Because of the one on one social dynamic and the fact that MC is highly motivated to be liked by people outside the family MC really shines in these visits as they get to show off their pride in being able to help with household chores and how to speak with people.

It’s really fascinating seeing how my personality plus my parenting techniques interact with my childrens’ personalities and needs. MC has a very strong basic need for control and a lot of anxiety around demands being made of them. However they have been raised in a 24/7 environment where there are very specific high standards about how we talk to one another and “we are workers, not shirkers” is the family motto so they have adapted their need to not be directed in somewhat surprising ways. The PDA profile fits them to a T and I can go down the list explaining all the ways they resist/avoid work… yet they still manage to do a significant amount of work because of the desire to be a “good citizen of the household”. It’s complicated/complex.

MC has very much internalized that a lot of the ways I am strict/intense in my demands are because of my internal terror that I will fail them as a parent and they love me; this makes them spotty in how they learn and follow through on what I ask but there is this undercurrent of wanting to try. They may take 6 fucking hours to sweep the kitchen most of the time because it is not ok with them on an internal level that they are being told to sweep the kitchen but when they go to someone else’s house and they want to show off they can do it in 5 minutes and tell their little friend all the specific tricks that make it easier/faster because they get to feel like a teacher and they fucking love that.

Hunh. I just had a thought. I kind of wonder if MC is going to finally be interested in learning to write when they get to feel like they are showing YC.

It is quite a challenge to get them to practice reading out loud to me but they do love to do it with YC. When they babysit (more like “mother’s helper” because everyone else is in the house but distracted with video calls or taking a bath) they do a lot of reading/talking about learning. Very much “Having someone read to you is the best…. let me show you.” So much of my teaching approach relies on careful observation and figuring out how to turn my kids personalities to my advantage. That and one to one teaching gives a level of intimacy that simply cannot be matched in a larger classroom. That is not a slam on classroom teachers in any way. I was not as good of a teacher to anyone in particular when I had 150 students. I did my best and it wasn’t what I can give my children.

I feel so much insecurity and anxiety about whether or not what I can give is good enough. I worry so much about letting my children down. It does so much to increase my confidence when I can periodically touch base with another teacher/educator and I can go through my approach and methodology. I do have a fairly extensive education when it comes to child development and what different special needs entail. I have worked very hard on understanding theory.

Towards the end of the call I said, “Something I am very conscious of with regards to my teaching and parenting is that I literally have more will and force of personality than most people. If I believe I am doing the right thing it doesn’t really matter how hard it is or how much time it takes I will do it. It is part of how my brain acts out hyperfocus. When I feel secure that I’m doing the right thing I have just about unlimited energy. I know that if my children were in a classroom they would lose out on that for a big part of their educational support because teachers by and large don’t have that intensity for a myriad of appropriate and healthy reasons. My kids do have special needs and I knew they would before they were born and I am fully committed to doing whatever I have to do to meet them. It is just hard and scary when I feel like I am flailing and I don’t know what to do.” She said that matches what she sees and my kids are lucky to have me.

I feel a lot better after the phone call. I do cycle through novelty. I do renegotiate how things are taught and what things are taught. I do hold the line on “You have to learn a basic level of functionality in order to be an independent adult and we are going to get you there.” I do push/encourage my children through learning and growing in ways that overall result in them liking themselves the vast majority of the time. Even when my kids struggle with anxiety there are usually pretty obvious organic/social reasons that I am not directly to blame for (obviously with the exception of genetics). I am not mean to my kids. I don’t beat them down. They are pretty happy and healthy and secure. Even when they are struggling for a while it is usually in ways that are predictable and appropriate developmentally and I help them pivot towards the path they want to be on.

I am not the shitty parent I sometimes fear I am. I am not perfect because there is no such thing. I do pretty well though. I refuse to stop learning and growing and increasing my ability to meet their needs. When I fail for a while I use that as motivation to push through towards a deeper level of understanding so I can better succeed as their needs change as they grow.

Part of the modeling I want to do for my children is showing that these periods of disequilibrium mean that you keep trying and learning and growing. You don’t give up and declare yourself a failure. As long as you are alive you have the chance to keep growing. Don’t give up on yourself. If we aren’t going to meet my personal goal of having my kids basically ready for complete auto-didact learning to finish the growth necessary for adulthood by 13 that doesn’t mean you can’t hit that mark by 15 or 18. It’s ok that you need the growth curve you need instead of the growth curve I had in my head as ideal. That is not a failure. It is a miscalibration and we’ll just keep going.

Frankly the way that MC needs to reassess every few months and needs a tremendous amount of novelty in order to keep doing things… looks like how I have managed my adult life. I go through intense bursts of focus in different areas. I have to restructure chores and tasks and hobbies regularly or I burn out. You know what? I’m not a failure. I do cool stuff.

MC will too.

Maybe that’s it?

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It’s not a secret that I have long had struggles with my middle child. I adore them and love them and worry a lot about whether or not I am doing the right things for them. I tried to get them evaluated by Stanford before we left California and they got a 15 minute yes/no questionnaire that wasn’t at all useful for data on understanding them. I was frankly pissed off. When they enrolled in school here after a month the school asked for permission to refer them for extensive neurological testing because something is going on. We’ve now been on that waiting list for a bit over two years and every sign points to the likelihood of it being another two years before we get answers. But kiddo is rapidly running into puberty when everything is going to get exponentially harder. My window for effecting major change is closing.

Due to all of that I’ve been doing more research. I am heading in the direction of Pathological Demand Avoidance. (Sometimes referred to as Excessive Demand Avoidance because pathological has a bad reputation. I mean… the definition isn’t awful. The word seems appropriate. I get that colloquial associations can be complicated.) It’s not really diagnosed in the states, this is a UK recognized syndrome. But holy shit when you read up on it: https://www.childrenandfamilyhealthdevon.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/pathological-demand-avoidance.pdf Oh. That’s my baby. I read it and felt strong recognition. I showed it to Noah and he could illustrate each section with repetitive conversations we’ve had in the past. I read it to kiddo and they said, “Oh wow. That sounds like me.” So whether or not we ever get to an official diagnosis we are treating that like Plan A going forward at this stage.

This has some potentially wide ranging implications for the future. How we home educate needs to change pretty broadly because neither of us can handle more years of crying all the time from frustration that they just won’t fucking do as I tell them to do. We need to find new strategies for figuring out how to get stuff done together and separately. And frankly my plan had been to use our investment money till we die and have the will put everything left towards charities. That may… not really be an option if my kids are not going to be 100% able to support themselves and work. I’m still in the preliminary stage of course but I’m looking into stuff written by adults with PDA and mostly they are not independent and able to work.

(Very briefly if you don’t want to read the whole description on that web page: Pathological Demand Avoidance is very related to autism but there is no certainty whether it does or does not fall under the Autism Spectrum Disorder label. It has enough specific quirks around sociability that it seems to be related but not the same. It is a syndrome where anxiety is the dominant part of the difficulty and the stress of being told what to do is so intense one shuts down. By golly if that doesn’t describe my baby. I’ve been saying for years that when they have a list of things to do the most likely way for them to spend the day is staring at a blank wall, numb. Or huge violent tantrums. It’s a wild card sort of option.

I don’t say any of this to complain, criticize, or put them down. I am looking to understand better so I can figure out how I need to change my parenting so my child can have the maximum level of mental health and support available. If this is what is going on I want to see what needs to happen so they can thrive not so I can figure out which levers to pull to make them change. They are who they are. I accept them and love them. But I have clearly not been handling things in the best way and it’s a problem and it needs to change. We both feel bad a lot of the time and I believe with my whole heart it doesn’t need to be that way.

We are both smart. If we understand what direction we need to head in we will figure it out. One of the ways I am that I believe verifies my own autism diagnosis/autistic personality is that I need to have a set of rules/labels that tells me how to behave or I flail and I experience a fair bit of distress. If I can figure out what label is most accurate then I can do research on what works best then I can act it out. Work with what you’ve got and the whole thing goes better.

More

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Column 1, Column 2, Column 3, Column 4--
1, 2, 3, 4--
1, 2, 3, 4--
Why is there always so much more?
Pick a task, any task, keep going, there's more--
It doesn't matter if you feel like falling on the floor.

Keep going, keep going
don't stop; no slowing.

I am sore
but there's more

Column 1 is the kids and the schooling and their needs.
Column 2 is the house and the cleaning and the garden and the seeds.
Column 3 is for me the people and the art I want to see.
Column 4 is for Noah keep the marriage out of the weeds.

1
     2
          3
               4

more
more
more
more

I'm so sore
I just wanna lie on the floor
I feel like I done tore
All the life is just seeping out of my core.

Bleeding is feeding the seeding to come.
This is the time to hibernate with the sun.
It is ok to lie down and not have any fun.
It doesn't mean you are broken or deficient or just the sum
of the days when you could not get anything done.

Maybe it is not depression per se
Maybe the body is just having it's say

You have spent every drop of give for this year
It is time to lie down without any fear

You did enough.

The snow is falling and blanketing the earth
Sit down and be quiet and read books for mirth
If you take time to heal you do not diminish your worth.

If you want to do more then you must heal.
Heal your arms and your hands and your legs and your heels
your back and your neck so that you can feel
strength return with each sedentary meal.

Rest. 

No more.

Go find a book.

When the snow is falling sit and look.

That's enough for now.

Spring is coming with it's relentless push for seeds and soil feeds and paint on your sleeves.

For now: just rest.

This has been beating in my head like a drum for about two days. This period is a real humdinger.

PMDD is so awful

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I am on day 42 of my cycle. I start running low on hormones around day 26/27/28. I usually start sometime between day 28 and day 35. It’s been pretty consistent since the last kid. I am… not ok this time. I can feel the complete and total lack of energy or happiness or give. My bones feel worn out and terrible. The numbness in my hands is super bad at this point. I know that a lot of that is how much I’m painting but progressively over the last week it has gotten worse and overwhelming and awful.

My whole body is hurting. I haven’t had many spells like this since I moved here. This is a California-level of pain. I feel sad and irritable and angry and disappointed in so many people and situations and results that I feel unable to cope. I am not suicidal; which is a blessing–that doesn’t darken my door much anymore. I just feel like I’d like to crawl in my bed and cry for a few days until my period starts because I am completely out of cope. In the overall scheme of things that is a relatively healthy and sane impulse and I feel proud that I am in this place now instead of where my lows took me ten years ago.

It is weird being able to list things that I miss about California and reasons that there were advantages there that I don’t have here… while completely knowing that I am overall doing better here than I ever have. Do I still have pain? Yes; particularly when I am drifting back towards California-style work habits that I know are dramatically not good for my body. Do I still have some anxiety? Yes; my anxiety here is so different. I can’t put a number on this to do like a “rate your pain” scale. Knowing that I will never run into Dan or Paul or my mother or my sister or Auntie or Anna or Brittney or or or or or means that I no longer live with hypervigilance. It’s not that I believe that nothing bad can happen to me I just fully accept that scanning the room for exits is not going to be helpful in any of the bad things that happen to me going forward. I can’t tell with a casual glance who is going to be a problem so I just… don’t.

I mean, when the dude got out of his car to yell at me and smack my hand I didn’t freeze up or start crying or react poorly until after he drove away. I stood my ground (in a suitably gun free manner) and I defended myself verbally and I took his picture. I did what I think I should do. And now I don’t scan looking for him or his car because I am pretty confident that if he ran into me in town and harrassed me again I would simply call the police and tell them we had another problematic interaction and he would get in trouble. They put a mark on his record.

I am living in a small town where the police get upset about that kind of thing between strangers. It is still hard to solve between neighbors… but that’s a whole different dynamic. Stranger assault is prosecuted.

I’m anxious about saying the wrong thing to people I am trying to make friends with. That isn’t gone but it is different from California. I find it intensely healthy for me to be consciously aware that people here don’t owe me anything. I haven’t been doing things for people for years with the hope that someday things would shift and they would support me when I needed it because they love me. That’s very freeing.

Even though typing this is terrifying for me I’m going to do it because this space has to be for me if it is going to work. Even things with Jenny have leveled off and found a comfortable stasis. We are not trying to live in one another’s back pockets because we are both cat-like and we like a lot of space. There are topics we kind of avoid because it feels like those aren’t the best ones for us. It’s feeling really comfortable and happy for me. I can only project and not speak like I really know how she feels but she isn’t expressing any dissatisfaction with our relationship. I feel like I pushed too hard when I moved here and we had to work out how to deal with each of us having our prickly points and it has worked out. She remains one of the people I love most in the world. I would bury bodies for her. If something catastrophic happened I would absolutely rescue her or her kids or her husband. I believe with my whole soul that she would show up for me in an emergency. I am feeling safe and comfortable that we have managed to find a nice place between us. I suspect in 5-10 years when our kids are older we will see each other a tiny bit more than we do right now but we are both people who are very comfortable in our own company and that’s not a bad thing.

I’m slowly working on other relationships in town and that’s slow going and complicated because people are like that. I like living here and I think it is going to be a good space for me in the long run. I worry a little about Noah’s place here because he is a lot more constrained than I am in terms of going out and meeting people. He’s going to need friends in the long run too and having them all be on his computer is mixed.

Kids are a pain in the butt. I’m just saying. This has been a bad week for me in terms of my emotional state and that’s no one’s fault. Also: my kids have been buttheads a few times and we’ve had words. I feel so intensely proud of myself because we had words. I didn’t shout. I didn’t scream. No one was punished or denigrated. “Hey this thing is happening and it’s not ok and we need to talk about why.”

Ok, take a deep breath and really feel that. Even when I am upset and I want to freak out because of hormones… we talk. I say, “Hey let’s explore some of the angles you aren’t seeing on your own right now.” When we are done they understand why I am asking for a change (it may or may not happen–let’s be real) but they aren’t angry with me for bringing it up. I understand more about why it’s going on from their perspective. It’s not ok to just silence people when they are inconvenient. Children aren’t problems they are *having* problems and talking about why is important.

It is so hard that my older kids are very much in a place where many of their problems are now things I cannot fix because it isn’t about me. The main upside of that is they are starting to feel in their bellies that it is true when I say the same thing about my problems. “I’m not upset about you. I’m having a problem.” I can see Little Girl struggling through what the older kids went through and she is directly acting out her stuff with her dolls and it’s interesting. I feel so much more emotionally/mentally distant from the process now than I did when the older kids were that size. I will roleplay with her with her dolls.

So yesterday morning I woke up and I felt awful and I cried some. It’s not because anyone did anything. Then Little Girl came in and joined me for a snuggle and she does this thing where she likes to dig her feet into my legs. Sometimes it is ok and sometimes my body hurts and it is super painful. I was already crying so of course she felt bad and took it on herself. Later she had a whole scene with her dolls where she was talking about them hurting her by poking her legs so she was putting them in time out because it’s not ok to be mean to her. I roleplayed one of the babies and talked about how I wasn’t trying to be mean; I was trying to be close because I love her. Is there a way I can be super close without hurting her? I am scared to go in time out right now because that means I broke a rule and I don’t want to feel like snuggling is breaking a rule. She was so kind and loving and caretaking with her baby. It was really wonderful to watch. “Oh my gosh! You are right! Snuggling is not breaking a rule. Maybe we should change where we are snuggling so that you don’t hit my legs and hurt me.”

My grinch heart grew three sizes.

(At this point pretty much the only rule she breaks is screaming in the house and you have to take big voices to your bedroom. This is not California and I can’t insist that all screaming has to be in the yard because of weather.)

I don’t talk about the big kids much anymore because they deserve privacy and walking the line is complex. But I do want to say that it is fascinating to me just how much they still ache for my approval. (They get a lot of it–I’m not saying this is a hollow thing.)

My Oldest Girl is pushing so hard to individuate and good golly hormones have hit her like a freight train and she has so much hostility about injustice and difficulty in the world. Saying good morning at the wrong time is fairly likely to get a stiff middle finger. I go with it. I try hard not to take almost any of it personally. We are dancing around the balancing act of “I’m still your mother so sometimes I am going to be obnoxious and I will want to give you a hug and a kiss. If you truly object in the moment you are allowed to refuse but mostly it’s a good idea to let me do it.” She is doing a lot better in terms of mental health since she stopped going to school. Things were getting really bad for a while there. We come from families that have a lot of depression and anxiety and PTSD and suicide. It would be highly unethical and neglectful for me to not act quickly when I can see my child melting down because of abuse they are receiving. She is starting to blossom again. She is returning to herself and I love seeing it. It’s going to be a process for her to find friends here and school is not going to be the solution. Her art blows my mind. She has so much talent and skill and she practices all the dang time. Her writing is fun and engaging and she is absolutely brilliant at creating pictures in your mind of what is happening to her characters. She still needs a bit more work on exposition but that’s not a terrible lacking–just something to think about and work towards a bit more. She is strong and fit and confident and willing to speak up for herself. And she’s taller than me and built like 30-something Taylor Swift and I cannot even.

My wonderful and delightful Enby is still plugging along. Puberty is happening and it’s a roller coaster. It’s interesting how the acting out is different now from when they were younger. They have so much more self control than they used to have. They still have giant feelings that are hard to manage at times but they know which direction they are growing towards/working on when it comes to expressing those feelings and they are consciously and deliberately learning skills around that. I am so impressed by the effort they put in to being self aware. They are baking and cooking and tweaking recipes and being brave and adventurous. I am sad we didn’t get a better evaluation done at Stanford before we left because they clearly have some specific learning challenge going on and I’m struggling with figuring out what it is. They really have a hard time with some aspects of education and we are trying a few different things because I don’t know what direction is the right one. They are making progress but I think they are always going to be a person who is much better with kinesthetic and active and oral learning rather than on paper learning. It’s really cool watching them learn coping skills around that. They want competence and if they have to route around an area of challenge for that… well just get on with it. They alternate between being this absolutely startlingly compassionate person and being a normal kid. I see them being on this see saw towards adulthood and it is so clearly part of the process they need to follow. They progress intensely then they regress a bit then they leap again. The more patience I show and the more scaffolding I supply the bigger each leap is and the smaller the regression. If I am impatient or difficult about the regression then it intensifies and they can’t leap again for quite a while.

It is fascinating living with these children. The Oldest doesn’t need my approval all the time–once in a while she succeeds in order to spite me. The Middle craves approval like it is heroin. They will beg, borrow, steal, to get it. They do not function well at all if I am anything other than a full throated cheerleader. Rebukes and course corrections have to be delivered with the softest of touches or they wilt and don’t recover for days… sometimes weeks. The Littlest is so small that she still needs tons of redirections towards “Oh hey it would be great if you….” “Oh golly if you do x then y will happen and that’s not good.” I suspect she is going to be more on the spitfire end as she grows. Her threenager year has been so very long.

This post brought to you by the good news that one of my buddies now works in the paint store and he is encouraged to give a friends and family discount to people and basically no one he knows buys paint. I was talking about the sorry shape of my arms right now and how I am pushing myself raising the clock before the paint dies and he told me to take a break. It won’t be nearly as expensive of an issue to fix as I fear. Ok. I will listen.

So I stopped painting a week before my purported end date. I have a ton of other work to do that has been sliding through the cracks. This will be in no way a bad thing. I am exhausted in a way that means I am not sleeping enough because I can’t shut my brain off to sleep. I’m craving alcohol like mad. I think at my next cycle of talking to the GP and psych nurse I will say that I think I am ready to both increase the Amitriptyline and the Lisdexamfetamine.

I am still on very low doses of both and getting closer to a normal dose would be useful at this point. My blood pressure readings are so so so much better on 30mg of Amitriptyline. I’m back in the high 120’s-low 130’s/high 70’s-low 80’s. There is still room for improvement but that’s not dangerous or scary. More Amitriptyline would possibly help with that. Losing weight would probably help with that.

These medications are breaking the stalemate of my weight plateau. I’m still eating whatever I want whenever I want. I am drinking some alcohol (in the range of 4-6 units/week because I know drinking is not recommended on these meds) but not nearly as much as I was. I am not doing tons of exercise because I have been in the house painting all the time but I am still doing the twice weekly yoga and I’m riding in the neighborhood of 20-ish miles a week and even occasionally getting in a decent length walk. I’m not sedentary but I’m not over-exercising in a way that would cause weight loss. So I really believe the drop is as a result of the medications at this point. I didn’t think to weigh myself right when I started the medications. The first data point I have in this year was in February and I was 211. In late August I was at 203. As of this week I saw 199 for the first time in a long time. I repeat: I am not dieting. What I am doing is taking medications that change my brain chemistry and increase my serotonin changes how my brain processes dopamine. That’s making my body not feel like it needs to hold on to fat in the same way. I’m not doing this because I want to lose weight; I am noting physical changes in a way that can be measured. Things like mood are harder.

The PMDD window is something that can overcome the positive effect of any medication in my experience. I am seriously dreading the peri-menopause experience of my cycles gradually lengthening. I expect the next ten years to be hard. But it’s not like any decade has been easy so get on with it. I am deeply grateful that I have gotten to the point where when I feel really low that does not increase suicidal ideation or fixation. I am grateful that I don’t struggle with the desire to mutilate my body anymore. It is complicated as fuck dealing with my children as they have times of feeling like they want to hurt themselves. I am grateful to the marrow of my bones that they know they can trust me and talk to me when they feel like that. Yes, you can always come in my bed and snuggle if you feel you are scared and you aren’t safe to be alone. Puberty is a horrible time and we’ll talk and we’ll get you through this.

If therapists were available they would be in therapy. I didn’t understand the depth of privilege we had in California around mental health. My entire life trajectory happened because therapy was plentiful and that would not have been possible in other places. All my kids have is me. That’s fucking daunting. (I mean, they have friends and we are making community connections…) We talk a lot about having thoughts and feeling impulses doesn’t mean anything bad about you. Let’s talk about the possible consequences if you follow through. I’m not saying I will punish you; I’m saying that once you cross the line into these behaviors there are people in the community who are bound by law to intervene so if they find out this is what will happen. It’s out of my hands. Let’s talk about strategies and ways of coping and figuring out what other things could be done instead. Let’s build habits around feeling distressed so that when something even worse happens you have some pre-built ruts in your brain for how to handle bad things. Let’s talk about distorted feelings and projecting and learning how to scan your central nervous system and what tools exist to help you feel grounded and like you can wait to act–this feeling does not require a response RIGHT NOW. For the record no one is actively suicidal, no one has any kind of plan, and people are not engaging in the sort of behavior that would involve mandatory removal from the house.

What is happening is that they both have had to deal with bullying and additionally people have been telling my daughter that she should kill herself. They are both just children and this has been hard for them. They have every predisposition genetically towards mental health struggles. Life was never going to be a walk in the park. There were always going to be dark times. But you can bet your fucking buttons that I am going to teach them how to light a candle in the dark. (I got some LED candles so nobody else tries to burn down my fucking house. Oh good grief.)

They are kids. They are all so different. I like all of them. I am annoyed by all of them. I admire all of them. I enjoy spending time with all of them. I don’t know what their future will bring but I sure hope that I get to be an enthusiastic cheerleader as they go do all the things they will do. I tell them that when they don’t believe in themselves they can borrow some of my faith in them. I will never ever run out.

More medication changes/observations.

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The last time I posted was 2 days after I lowered the Amitriptyline as an experiment. I am talking to my doctor/psych nurse about all of these changes before I do them. It’s kind of weird having a medical team that I call up and say “Hey I want to try x. I will report back on how it goes.” They respond with, “Cool. Let me know how it goes.” I am not used to American doctors being so chill about someone playing with their medication dosages. In emoji terms: 🤯

I had almost three weeks of being on the first step of Amitriptyline dosage. Very quickly I noticed: my mood getting lower (a lot more intrusive obnoxious thoughts during yoga–amusingly), sleep became really hard (the last three weeks I averaged 7.5 hours of sleep when I’ve been otherwise averaging over 8 hours a night for the past few years), I started craving alcohol a lot (back up to probably 8-10 units a week after only 2-4 units/week for the previous month or so), I was more interested in late night snacking, I had several very late night painting sessions because going to sleep just didn’t feel important, I needed more Lorazepam to sleep, my general pain levels were sky high, and I was using more Co-codamol. Oh hey and my blood pressure went from being usually in the 120’s-130’s/80’s to being mostly in the 140’s-150’s/mid-high 90’s.

That’s some forking data. (I mean… sorta anecdata but I have spreadsheets where I’ve been documenting this day by day…) It’s not like I’m trying to apply this population wide or anything.

I talked to my psych nurse two days ago and told her I do not think this is a good time to increase the Lisdexamfetamine because I need my blood pressure under control first; then I talked to my GP yesterday and told her that I think the next step is increasing the Amitriptyline for a month and seeing what happens. They both think my suggestions are dandy and that’s plan A. We will all check in next month and see how things are going.

After another month on the Lisdexamfetamine I am 3.2 pounds lower. That is a very gentle and sustainable amount of weight loss compared to the roughly 10 pounds I lost in the first month. I mean… I’m still 40-ish pounds away from where I feel like my body feels the best in terms of strength and not being limited by chub in the way. I don’t love having to shove a roll of fat out of the way to get into a certain position. I don’t love that it is hard to bend over and tie my damn shoes. But this is way better than the 60-ish pounds I was above that weight for a while.

I have been putting painting progress pictures up on Facebook because that interface is easier for dumping photos. I kind of hope I will get around to putting together pictures on a webpage here sometime soon. It’ll just take a lot more focus and time than I have right now. Erf.

Good thing to notice

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I’ve been going to yoga classes for a little bit now–a couple of months? Something that I notice when I’m there is that I talk to/about my body differently than I used to. I’m not sure when it changed because I don’t write this kind of thing much anymore. It’s noticeable to me because of what the instructors say. They tell you to check in with your body then pause and then tell you to get past the negative vocies.

These days when I check in with my body it’s gratitude. Thank you for being so strong. Thank you for carrying me so far. I am so proud of what you can do. Yeah, you hurt but isn’t it nice that you hurt so much less than you used to? I’m proud of us for learning how to take care of you better. I can feel the expression of love over time in my bones. I’ve worked so hard to get to where I am. I’m happy that I’ve had this kind of support and time.

I suspect that the combination of meds that I’m on at this point is helping. Amitriptyline is both for pain and it increases serotonin so it’s an antidepressant at the same time. The lisdexamfetamine feels like what I wish i could have had since I was a teenager. I genuinely believe I would have made fewer risky/bad choices if I had been on it.

I really wish I could have been properly assessed for ADHD and ASD as a teenager. It would have changed my life. I wonder if I would have accomplished as much? I wonder if I would have accomplished less? Ah well. It is what it is and all I can do is move forward.

It’s a lot better painting on this med combo. I don’t feel the urge to paint all night long “just to get through it”. I know it will make me feel like trash later and that’s not very tempting/alluring. I’ve been painting for a few weeks in a row now. My one short night of sleep (I got over 6 hours… so not a California short night) was when I was trying to clean up after painting. It took 15 hours to put things back in place and clean up the house enough for the cleaners to be able to come in and do actual cleaning instead of just walking around piles. My average for the last four weeks of sleep is about 8 and a half hours. That’s… kind of shocking for me being in a heavy work cycle. That’s just about healthy. Whoa. Balance.

I am finding a bit of appetite suppression from the amfetamine. I am eating smaller portions at meals (2 tacos instead of 3, 2 pancakes instead of 4, 1 bowl of soup instead of 2) and I feel less desire to have a late night dessert. Sometimes I skip lunch because I’m not that hungry but I eat a lot more dinner to make up for it and I think I eat about the same amount of food. I am drinking waaaay less alcohol (I’m probably taking 3-6 units a week down from 10-15) mostly because the amfetamine means you feel the alcohol less so I don’t feel as much desire to consume it. It still tastes good so I have some. And some of the wine I like is multiple units/serving in the glass I use so there you go. I’m flirting around 200. I haven’t seen lower than 203 since I arrived in Scotland and I’ve usually been in the 210’s and 220’s over the past 2 years so I am losing some weight. With the amount I exercise it has felt kind of weird that I keep as much extra padding as I have been. When I was in my 20’s and 30’s this much exercise would have kept me down in the 160’s.

Something that I think I am feeling in my body is I have dramatically fewer spikes of cortisol with this med combo. I really don’t feel anxious. Over the past two years I have noticed that in Scotland I feel dramatically less anxiety than I did in California as a baseline… even with the help that cannabis provided. I don’t have as much hypervigilance here. Prior to trying this med combo I was still feeling anxiety though in that way that I think is about my body being programmed to worry about everything as the natural state of being. That feels like it is stopping now. In California I had to be careful with my cannabis usage because I couldn’t/wouldn’t take it when I had to drive so I had a lot of up and down effect in terms of my experience in my body. I think there was enough break in cortisol production that my body could process food normally and not turn it all into emergency fat rations for later tragedy.

Since moving and being off cannabis entirely (the weight gain started right when I left California–I could tell in how my clothes fit) there has been a slow but gradual ballooning effect. Exercise and eating a balanced diet wasn’t having any impact at all. Despite the comments of ignorant people… I eat a fairly ridiculously healthy diet compared to the average person in the western world. We eat very little that is processed. We cook from scratch for something like 12-15 meals a week. (A lot of the other meals are leftovers.) We eat 4-9 servings of fruit and veg a day. I have cut a lot of the dairy and meat from my diet. (My family eats more than I do but I’m trying to limit inflammation.) My weight creeping up is not about eating too much and moving too little. Yeah yeah it’s anecdata but I have lived in this body for 40 years now and I’ve seen it through a lot of cycles. Cortisol/stress/anxiety.

It’s really dramatic having medications that lower the level of cortisol in my body on a 24/7 basis. I am consistent with the meds. I haven’t skipped many doses since I started so this is a really level sort of experience.

But my blood pressure has creeped up. I’m hoping that losing some weight will have an effect on that so that I can keep the meds. I really like how my brain feels. I have also halved the amitriptyline dosage on the advice of my GP to see if I can keep the positive effects with a lower dosage. She is mildly skeptical because my former dosage was already the “grandma dose” (her words) and she wonders if my body will be able to feel anything with half that. I’m trying it for a few weeks to see. I think it is worth trying. I really don’t want to lose the lisdexamfetamine. I feel like this is doing so much.

It feels like such a blessing that when I quiet down and look inward what I see is liking myself.

Getting old is fun

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I had an appointment with my psychiatric nurse this morning. We agree that I don’t need to adjust the lisdexamfetamine because it is going very well. She is, however, quite worried about my continual high blood pressure. She is also a bit concerned about how much weight I have lost in the last month (around 15 lbs) but not *overly* concerned because I have reduced how much alcohol I am drinking, I am snacking less right at bed, and I did ride almost 300 miles last month. I am going to be monitor my weight and my blood pressure daily for a while. She wants me to send her a text message once a month letting her know how the trends are going.

I am also going to be speaking to my GP about lowering my dosage of amitriptyline or possibly switching meds entirely to see if something else can provide some relief without the blood pressure spike.

I finally feel like I am getting a handle around some pieces of how the NHS functions. That’s good. I’m feeling cheerful about life just at the moment. I’m back to painting. After lunch I am going to go do a few hours of working on the ceiling in the lounge. I never have finished the hall but I need to finish up the bits that require the extremely tall ladders because I need to give them back. I suspect I will be painting through a lot of the winter. Christmas decorations may come out a bit on the late side this year and get put away early because I don’t know how much painting I can do with them out.

Middle kid has been an absolute dear and is letting me store paint in their closet because they don’t use that shelf anyway and keeping the paint away from the extreme temperature cycling will help it last a bit longer. It also makes it easier for me to get it out and put it away reducing how much time I need for support work instead of painting.

Today feels like a very good day.

Opportunities and expenses

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Oof. I need to start this off by saying: I am so grateful to be in the position I am in. I am very much in the luckiest top I don’t know what % of my age cohort.

Owning a house is a lot. By the time we finish the current set of bathroom remodels (water dripping down through walls and the wood was not replaced in the last 2 or 3 times things were “fixed” because previous plumbers were asshats) we will have replaced 5 showers and we will only have 2. That sucks!!!!!! But this time (because the current guy is so much more competent) we are going the distance and fixing everything else and getting two whole new bathrooms out of the deal. I’m excited and sad to be paying for them. I was going to limp along for a few more years but if I have to do this much work again… I’m coming out of it with a damn heated floor.

I am also coming out of it with a gorgeous bathroom and a slightly different shaped bedroom and I’m going to put heated flooring in my bedroom and ditch the radiator on the wall. This is exciting to me. It will also as a side benefit reduce the rate of mold growing on stuff I store under my bed. Extra score!

But I didn’t really want to pay for this kind of house remodeling stuff this year. It seems like a lot of dang money. I somehow suspect we are not going to get around to fixing the upstairs carpet for another year or two because… money.

“Where is all the money going?”, you ask. Well… our next door neighbor has decided to change up some things in his life and he offered to let us by the adjoining empty plot of land. We dickered over it because oh my god not having debt has been so nice. We had to choose between liquidating some investments and paying cash or getting a mortgage. Mortgage finance rates in the UK are below 1% and people here complain that they are too high. heh. We decided that having a mortgage also gives us the opportunity to build UK credit and that’s something we care about a lot so…

Damnit. I have debt again. But that means I am going to be scrimping and saving as much as possible. You are only allowed to pay 10% extra in a given year so I can’t massively overpay in the exact same manner I did in California but you only lock in a rate every 2 or 3 or 5 years (I’m going with 5 years so we don’t have to pay the £1500 fee for getting the mortgage as often) and at that point you can dump as much as you want into paying off the mortgage. That sounds terrific. If I want to pay it off in 10 years or less I will need to be dumping in the neighborhood of £25,000 a year into this. That’s going to make a big difference in our spending over the next few years and the house remodeling stuff is not helping my stomach hurting over how I will get everything done.

I mean. I’m a lucky asshole and I have more security and financial ability to swing stuff than other people. But I will go back to being as conservative as I possibly can in a bunch of areas. That’s not strictly speaking my favorite.

(The loan is for more than we need just for the property. It’s complicated and I can’t disclose the full details around why the loan is for so much.) If we were just financing the property I would only need to find around £15,000/year. oof.

This is leaving the stock option part of Noah’s income alone as investment stuff every year because we need to be growing the investment portfolio towards retirement. He’s really scared of that cliff that tech workers have where they just… don’t get jobs when they are older. He feels like he for sure has 10 more solid work years left in his industry and he can’t promise 15 more years at this salary level. That seems incredibly fair so I feel like we need to get all the house fixing/mortgage stuff paid off in 10 years. I mean… houses will need more in the future no matter what. We will always have to save for that and have money sitting around waiting for the next disaster. I am hoping that it will all be ok. I mean… I’m a lucky bitch and I have more chance of it being ok than I could have ever dreamed when I was young.

But golly I hate owing anyone anything.

Lisdexamphetamine

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I should put this here and not facebook for long-term tracking reasons.

I’m a little over 3 weeks into the trial of lisdexamphetamine now.


I would say the main thing that is helping is that I am less willing to attempt multi-tasking to the point of frustration meaning I am blowing up less. I feel less anxious about all the things I “should” be doing at any given point. I have a long to-do list but I always have a long to-do list because I have a chronic need to believe that working is how I earn my right to breathe.
I think I can say with confidence that this is the best-for-me psychiatric medication I have ever tried. I can see how this would have helped me when I was younger and I have really intense feelings around the fact that no one was ever willing to look for a reason other than “trauma” to explain my behaviors as a child.


How different would my life have been if I had been diagnosed with ADHD and ASD as a child? The signs were there but I never stayed in a school long enough for them to see patterns. They just knew I acted inappropriately and assumed it was all because of the family issues.
Can’t change the past. I can can only move forward. I suspect this is going to be a medication I am on for as long as cannabis isn’t legal here. It is the closest to what cannabis gives me of anything I have ever experienced. I love being able to do one thing at a time without my brain constantly jumping between 6 different tracks. This is pretty rad.


I am going to sleep later than I was before starting this trial but I am getting the same number of hours of sleep so I think that’s not so bad?


Also: I have lost 10 lbs in 3 weeks after this weight not budging for the entire time I have been in Scotland. I am eating as much as I feel like I want to eat. (Interestingly I crave snacks more at night when I take amitriptyline earlier than usual…) I think the weight loss is because there are fewer cortisol spikes with the lower anxiety level. Ok… also probably because I am drinking less alcohol because I can’t “feel” it with this medication so it seems kind of silly to have it.

Sentimentality

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I do something bone numbingly stupid. I hold on to every card, letter, thank you note, holiday letter… all of them. They are in a box. It’s not a small box. I appear to have lost some of the ones from very early in my life (unless they are somehow buried at the bottom of the box I think of as “Noah’s stuff). Well… and I burned my dad’s suicide note.

This is a stupid thing to do. It’s stupid for a whole bunch of reasons but chiefly because scanning through these things causes me pain. I fucked up so many relationships. I hurt people. I made choices that horrify or embarass me. I lost people that I didn’t want to lose due to my selfishness and my unkindness and my anger.

And I keep this box to remind me that if you fuck up there are consequences. If I run my mouth or think too highly of my opinion… there are consequences. If I put myself out there and let people know what I really think it may result in the severing of ties I don’t want to sever. Better to shut my fucking mouth and bite my tongue and pretend everything is fine even when it isn’t.

It’s the price.

What is a witch?

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Recently a little girl told me that all witches are ugly and old and have green skin. Hm. I’ve been thinking a lot about what being pagan means to me lately. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to manifest in this life. I believe that magic is focusing your intention and your will on making something real. I don’t think it has to be about repeating prescribed words or chants that someone else made up. I honestly don’t see much point in following someone else’s path, even as I read books that other people write about their paths.

I think the painting is part of it for me. I often think of it in terms of creating the background setting as if I was creating a theatre set. All the world’s a stage and all the people are but players. (I don’t believe in a binary of genders so the original quote doesn’t seem so fitting.) I am shaping how people see me. I am shaping who people perceive me to be. It matters to me. I put as much effort into this as someone else would put into a spell. I want to draw the right people to me.

Sobonfu told me to make my own community as I will never belong in one that other people have made. I need a place to invite that community. I need a space where people will feel the force of my will and feel influenced without me even having to say anything. If I have to say something then I have missed a window. I have missed an opportunity.

I don’t know how many opportunities I have left in this life. Everytime you miss a window you change the course of your future. You change what opportunities will fall into your lap in the future. There are limits to what any person can accomplish. I know that I will hit limits. I just don’t want to miss opportunities that might be well within my limits.

It feels like it matters so much.

It’s the waning crescent moon. The end of the cycle. Time to let things go, but what? It’s almost time to think about new beginnings again. Oh golly. I don’t know what to let go of nor what to start. So much happening. So many balls in the air. How can I narrow my focus to be more effective? Right now I am spread in so many different directions that I hardly know what to change nor how I will manage.

I know that tomorrow will involve maths, breakfast and a visit with friends, then painting. Friday is a park date with homeschoolers then more painting. My arm is only a little sore. My hand isn’t even numb. Surely that means I am ready for more work. I really want this part of the hallway done.

I really want all of the high stuff done so I can go back to working at reasonable heights with a step ladder. There is no way to get to the other side but to go through. I can do it. I will do it. It will feel good to be done on so many levels. All it takes to get through is doing many more hours of work.

Now that’s magic I can embrace.

Limitations

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What does it mean to live in a place? For most of my life I lived more in a general geographic area than in a place. Then I had my time in Fremont–nearly 13 years. I spent a lot of time in Fremont but I still spent a lot of time leaving Fremont. I traveled around the world while living there. I probably missed well over a year of being in the city in that time with all the trips added up. When I was there, depending on the year, I spent a lot of time driving south or north or west to spend most of my waking hours with other people. I was not content in my skin or in my place in the community.

I feel a bit like a ping pong ball here in this small town. I want to pop out and learn more about the community. I want to get to know people. I am someone who likes to know everyone and so far I know precious few. But I also want to spend an awful lot of time at home. I want to paint and garden and learn how to sew and cook and bake and take care of chickens. An awful lot of my push to go out into the community stems from feeling like I have to create a network for the kids. I don’t know how much I want it for myself. I can’t even tell because it is all mixed up.

I am afraid of looking for community for me. I know that the self I am allowed to bring with me here is a carefully edited version. I know that I have to mask my difficulties and challenges as much as possible and when I can’t mask I need to go home. I have challenges and they have to be utterly invisible. I really suck at that and things leak out. Then people feel uncomfortable and it is my fault.

I am afraid of trying to making friends. I know I have Jenny. We are figuring out how the size and shape of boundaries needs to work between us so we can maintain this relationship that is very important to both of us. I love her so much and I don’t want to wreck everything.

I feel like I always wreck everything.

Do I fear abandonment? Enh… not exactly. The funny thing is: you can do a fearsome amount of damage to a person and a relationship and they still won’t abandon you. They will keep coming around year after year because there is something they get there that they feel they need. People submit to being hurt long after they should just walk away because their fear of being alone is far greater than their sense of indignation in putting up with someone who wrecks everything.

People are weird.

I don’t fear being alone. I fear being the source of pain. I fear being the one that someone hears in their head when they feel bad about themself. The trouble with being a highly reflective mirror that shows people who they are is… reflected sunlight can burn. It can burn all the way to the bone.

I fear causing damage that cannot be fixed while creating a bond that means someone will never want to walk away from me. I don’t leave because I’m running away before you do. I leave because I know you won’t and someone has to think you don’t deserve to be treated that way.

Which is ego, right?

I always come back to Karen laughing when I said I had low self esteem. It wasn’t a chuckle or a soft laugh, no it was a full belly guffaw. “You have the highest self esteem of anyone I have ever met.” Damn. That doesn’t sound like a compliment. I do have an incredibly high sense of what I will accept from people. It’s not even that I feel like “I deserve better” so much as I am not going to put myself into a position where I am going to explode and I know what makes me explode.

I’m tired of exploding. I want a smaller life.

I wrote a letter today; my first one in a long time. This wonderful lady has written me so many letters since I moved she outpaces all other mail from everyone else. I talked about my garden because it is clearly very important to me. I am stunned by the sheer variety of plants in my yard and I have not yet catalogued them nor grown to understand them fully. (Apparently one fucker is connected to tics with Lyme disease?! Ok I don’t like the poky thorns that much anyway.)

What do I want to share of myself going forward? I am not defined by where I was nor what happened to me. I am what I do. I cultivate a garden. I work hard at reducing my impact on the earth. I try hard to be creative and possibly even inspiring. I invite people into my little world as much as I can. I have to share what I have to share.

I want to be a positive force in people’s lives. Maybe it will happen and maybe it won’t. All I can do is try. I have to work within my own limitations.

I want to be done painting by November. If I could be done with all the indoor painting by then it would be absolutely fantastic. That’s 17 weeks. If I could manage 20 hours a week on average that would give me 340 hours of work.

All I’ve got to say is thank fucking goodness I am mostly done with the evil ladder work. A little bit is still to go high up but it’ll pass quickly. I have faith. I hope that all the evil high stuff will be done in another 10 hours. I think I’m 48 hours into the hallway. That totally discounts the time I put into the kid doors during the last big round of painting. But hey. Gotta just count from somewhere.

I’m running into the limits of my body and the patience of my little Shortie. She is so damn done. But on we press.

There is no way out except for through. If I get the painting done this year then I can just… leave it be. I won’t have more of that project hanging over my head. That sounds so absolutely lovely. Then gardening and baking and cooking and sewing can become my projects. Chickens. I want to sit around and read in the yard.

And lots of fully functional bathrooms. Woo.

I miss the chatter.

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I like being able to talk to myself about what I’m doing and why. But I’m scared. On one hand I feel like I am in a more stable place than I used to be but on the other hand it feels so precarious. I might be more stable in a day-to-day way but I don’t think I feel more secure.

I still feel like I am going to hurt everyone and that my words have a lot of power and I am bad if anything I say makes people feel upset.

I feel paralyzed with fear. I don’t write much at all anywhere anymore because I am afraid of consequences, arguments, misunderstandings, different points of view that make me feel like I am doing something bad again. I don’t want to have the power to hurt people. I really, really do though.

I think/process/experience things as these concentric rings that stack on top of one another and drip down into the cracks. It’s not changing what happened but it adds layers of nuance and difference to the memories and I think/project that other people do the same thing. Only the layers we are stacking are so different that the end result is a completely different thing.

It’s like that thing where if people remember that you were part of the “good old days” they forget that at the time they didn’t like you very much and all of a sudden they want to reminisce with you and talk about the people you used to know in common. They have a picture of you in their head but the total experience of it changes over time. Even if they can remember that they didn’t like you–it’s irrelevant and almost funny now. “Why didn’t I like you? Oh, something stupid. Meh. I’m over it.” But if you stayed in daily/weekly contact with them for all this time they wouldn’t be over it.

People are funny.

Ok I am happy that Noah got a full time job again. It would have been kind of difficult and scary to slowly pay for these repairs over years. Instead I have some confidence that we are going to get to the end of this cycle of repairs and not need to do anything big until the kitchen falls apart. (It’s cheap Ikea shit. That’s not a long-term solution.)

I’ve talked about it on Facebook but not here: this house sure has been a sinkhole in terms of money. Noah’s bathroom is such a wreck and leaking water that we waited until our bank account balance hit a certain level and we started in on replacing it. As has happened more than once with this house… the scope creeps as we find out about the level of damage. Former owners (probably including the ones before the people we purchased from) really did not believe in proper maintenance or doing a job right. It looks like there have been big water leaks for years and the under flooring in the bathroom has old massively destroyed wood just kinda hanging out. It wasn’t replaced the last time someone installed a tiny cubicle shower in here. We (meaning the amazing joiner we are employing) are completely ripping everything out down to studs and the whole floor and walls have to be replaced and the water damage drips down into my room. Super fun.

So there’s going to be some pretty intensive floor/wall/ceiling work involved. Could it be patched up for cheap? Sure. That’s what folks have been doing and that’s why there are major systemic problems. We are paying to put good wood everywhere. Taking out all the wonky barely effective plumbing and upgrading it. Noah is going to double the square footage of his shower. (There was literally no reason to create a blocked off corner and a tiny shower in the bathroom… there was nothing behind the space wasting corner wall thing.)

In self defense from the flood of color he has no choice but to live with… his bathroom and office will be shades of grey. It’s going to be a slightly hilarious contrast and statement about just how much he is compromising in the rest of the house. Clearly none of this brightness is his thing. He’s a patient man.

Despite feeling overwhelming desire to paint most of the house in bright murals… I don’t know what I’m going to do in my bedroom. I don’t know that I want intense colors. What I have lived with for 1.75 years at this point is mostly white walls with one blue accent wall with birds and flowers done almost like a wallpaper design. It’s not really what I like. Noah has the same accent wall in his room and it’s even less his thing.

I want an airy, open feel with very light colors in my room. I want shelves with lots of plants on them and almost no furniture.

When I finish today I need to sit down and do some pencil work on the layout of the bedroom and bathroom. There are a lot of specifics to figure out but I really should get back to painting. I started 4 hours ago and I’ve had multiple lengthy breaks… I want to finish absolutely everything I can do with the ladder in this position and then figure out how I’m attacking the project next. I may do no other ladder work this weekend; I haven’t decided yet. Depends on where I finish and how tired I am. I have to worry about the arm spasms and the back pain a lot more when I’m working this high.

But on the upside: I’m really loving what I’m doing above the stairs. It’s turning out well. Back into the breach.