Tag Archives: adult-only

Commit, then follow through.

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I have my eye on the Loch Ness Marathon; it’s the first weekend of October. I’ve been starting to improve fitness on the treadmill during the icy spells but today was a balmy 3C so I went outside for my 3 miles. Only 15 min/mile which isn’t fast yet but I have 35 weeks to go. I can work on fast over the next few months. It’s the uphill start that is really killing me.

This time I downloaded the Hal Higdon app since I have used his training plans for years but I did it with pen/paper and this time I don’t want to spend the time organising. Also the app gives feedback on your training and recommends workouts that will help with trying to meet intermediate goals. This is a good thing. I am going to work towards actually having a race pace this time: I want 13 minute miles. I am aware that barely qualifies as “running” and I don’t give a shit. I am going for faster than “I barely made it before they closed the finish line” this time.

I like that the app asks me to rate my effort and how tired I feel afterwards. I was really pleased that I wasn’t exhausted at the end today. I have that lovely rush of adrenaline and endorphins. I feel great.

I love my body.

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Most mornings I wake up and Noah has a hand or a knee on top of me and Shortie has shoved one hand under me and the other is clinging to me so hard I can barely roll over. This is a bit of a quandary as I am both an incredibly active sleeper and I need to wake up to use the toilet long before them. Getting out of the bed is a very delicate procedure.

I love this feeling. My middle child really doesn’t like to get out of bed unless I come and kiss them awake. They will lie in bed and tell me that their alarm was the gate to waking up but they can’t open it until they get a kiss from me because the kiss is the key.

We are noticing that we can’t get all of our stuff done if we try to do it after 9am breakfast. It’s just not working. So today we are getting up earlier. I have been waking up between 6:45 and and 7:15 for the past few weeks so I said let’s do 7:30. I set an alarm to make sure I can come kiss them awake. What time did I wake up? FUCKING 4:15!! My body is a shit. But it means I spent time medicating and talking to myself. I will be in a much better frame of mind for patiently guiding along my not so little partner. This kid is coming for me in size.

We are working on increasing fitness together. We are not buying a car. We have to be able to easily and casually get around this city and it will always be difficult if we aren’t more fit than we are. We have been consistent about doing it for a bit and I think it will continue until the trip in February quite easily. I need to find a way to have it extend past then because they have to be able to easily get back and forth to town a few times a day. That should be no big deal. It’s not even a full 15 minutes if I ride fairly casually. Just biking is not getting me to where I want to be in my body. I have to run.

And so does my kid. I’m going to make a rule though: we can’t process intense family matters. This is practice for compartmentalisation. You have to be able to talk about things sometimes and not at other times. It is part of how you live in the world. It is part of how you build relationships over time with gradual increases in intimacy. If you walk around sharing every negative thought loudly with every person who walks past they don’t want to help you or be your friend they want to move away from you. That is a simple reality. You have to learn how to choose when and how you share different parts of what you are thinking. We all do. Learning that has been really hard.

This not so little one still needs a lot of support and it has to be separate from everyone else. Alright then. I don’t care that you really want to stay up late and sleep late. I can’t do that. I will be a nasty fucking cunt. I can’t. So. Hey baby. Here is your key to larkdom. Three minutes and counting till the countdown to the need for the key. I better hit post.

Running in parallel

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I don’t understand the connection between wanting to have sex and writing. I see the connection between writing and medicating way more clearly. It is fascinating feeling like I have my brain back after 3 years of not feeling connected to myself in this way. This narration feels like more of my true self than any amount of being in a room with me can reveal because I will always do my best to mislead you in person.

I know the difference between being allowed to write what I am thinking and feeling and being allowed to act out how I am feeling or what I am thinking. The world doesn’t care how I feel it cares how I act. But I care what I feel. If you want to have the ability to crawl around in my head and fuck with me then you must care. I could just write to Noah, if I were actually more afraid of the consequences I would probably do that. I am getting comfortable and I’m not sure if that is good or not.

It is weird to me that I now live in a country where well actually the police might care what kind of consensual sex I have with my spouse. There are rules here that were not part of the background noise of being a Californian. I am unlikely to change enough to really be what they wish I was. The thing is, if neither I nor my husband ever complain then nobody actually knows what we are doing to one another so it’s kind of a moot point.

Side note: IT IS NOT A MUTE POINT. NOT EVER. FUCKING FORUM PEOPLE.

I do find that I am putting the more explicit stuff over on that site because it feels a little less like courting danger. I just want to gain citizenship so I can sit over here and garden and mind my business. La la la.

But I can’t. I have literally had my blog used against me in a legal mediation already. I was not a reliable witness about the things that were happening with my roof because of the swinger parties I went to. Super charming. If that, if the threat of getting in even more trouble isn’t enough to shut me up is that pathological?

I believe with my whole heart that I am not doing anything wrong. I am enjoying my sex life with my legal spouse. Hell, I’m not even poly. I do believe I should have the right to sit over here with my pot and my husband and my kids doing our weird things. Obviously the kids are not involved in the sex weirdness. And that is the point. I have a very strict filter between which people are allowed to see what and when. I mean, my children could find my blog–they know it exists. It’s my legal damn name… I’m not being secretive. I have told my children over and over since they were small children that once they read my blog they can’t unknow the things about me that they will learn and I’m pretty sure it will freak them out. Given the questions that I will answer simply and directly my children are smart enough to know that when I say, “Are you sure you want to know that” that they probably don’t.

I will off-handedly give answers that make them want to rinse their ears out with bleach. If I suggest you don’t want to know something… I’m probably not being over cautious. I am not over cautious about generic information that might influence their lives in some way going forward. I believe in boundaries and privacy. I don’t have secrets because if I will spew them on the public internet it doesn’t count as a secret. I have things that I do not tell all people in all settings. Do you understand how much time and money I spent on therapy to learn how to compartmentalise like this? Decades. Personally I have paid many tens of thousands of dollars for therapy and the state of California has probably paid at least a quarter of a million if you count the times I was in institutions.

My children do not overlap with my sex life.

For some reason I still absolutely compulsively need to write about it. This is the exhibitionist part. I think that is something I dramatically underrated about my life in the bay. A lot of what I did in the bdsm and kink communities was massively spurred on by the fact that people were watching. From when I was 18, from the second time I went to the Power Exchange the energetic interaction with the crowd was absolutely integral to the experience of being kinky.

And yet when I went to Sydney I felt really weird about the fact that the only public play spaces were performance spaces on stage in front of a dance club. That felt different for some reason? Why didn’t it just feel like BaGG? People there referred to their play as performance. At the munch I was asked, “How long have you been performing” and I twitched.

Now it seems to me like the difference between “nae bother” and “all good” and “it’s no trouble”. They are just different colloquialisms. I mean, there are nuances of difference between play and perform but most of them are about structural differences in the locations. People moving between the two locations will mostly seamlessly move between the slight differences in behavior.

When I was younger there was this really sharp divide between sex and bdsm with a lot of my friends. My friends were people who liked public bdsm spaces (I’m including house parties) and most of them do not allow sex either through explicit rules or implicit culture. Having sex is mostly off screen. Although, how do you define sex, right?

It’s all muddy in my head right now. It’s like a dam bursting and things are coming through all at once instead of in a neat stream. I don’t think I like the lisdexamfetamine. I have not been able to access this many streams of thought at once since I have been on it. I mean, I think it is useful. If my new provider (I was switched people and I meet the new one in 2 weeks) is ok with me having a much lower dose and using it as needed then I think it would have a ton of utility. But not all day and not every day. It makes me hate sex. It makes me not want to write. It makes me feel flat emotionally and unable to orgasm. I can work like a demon but that’s not all good.

I can feel in my body how I acted when my big kids were small when I use cannabis. It literally feels like my entire body relaxes and I can access all of the lanes of the superhighway that is my brain to track being a patient mother and a creative teacher and a considerate friend and a person dedicated to fitness and a person who is drawn to eating the foods that actually best fuel physical activity instead of numbing emotional and physical pain and a filthy fucking whore.

More than one thing can be true. I have nothing to be ashamed of so why should I act like what I am doing should be a secret? There is a difference between secrets and boundaries and privacy.

I am talking in circles this morning. I can feel that spiral thing happening but I don’t have time to explore it. Breakfast will be on the table in 10 minutes because that is what Noah does. He does it because I asked him to. I owe him the respect of showing up on time.

How do you measure progress?

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“I think I am a better writer than I thought.”
“What leads you to draw this conclusion?”
“The sad story I posted has had over 1,000 hits in two days. It’s the first work I’ve posted!”
“Wait, I thought you had been posting for a long time?”
“Oh, that was back on Wattpad, this is my first AO3 post.”
“Ok, and how does this jump make you feel better about yourself?”
“Well, people on AO3 are more literate and have better grammar and spelling and in general the characters aren’t so simplistic.”
“Ah. You have gone from the middle school board to the high school board?”
“Basically, yes.”

“Congratulations! That’s awesome!”

Never enough time

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I spend a lot of time feeling overwhelmed by how lucky I am. I recognize the gift that is my life. I get to decide how I want to use my time. The vast majority of humans I know get few choices about their time. Most of it is spent on earning money, the rest of their (too little) awake time is a juggling act of mandatory tasks that never get properly finished: cleaning, cooking, laundry, commuting, child care…

I never run out of tasks but I get to pick a lot of them and if I skip others… well my kids and Noah do more with every passing ear. It’s pretty rad. I hope I get to live with competent adult children roommates because they make managing this big house so much easier. They are increasingly capable of just doing a share. Even Shorty is on the road; it took me a while to figure out which chores were best for her at this stage in this house–the Fremont tasks just weren’t right. This house is set up differently.

Shorty told me that on her next birthday (turning 5) we are going to pass along the baby plates/cups/silverware/bowls because she isn’t a baby anymore. It makes me sniffle a bit. I will miss having a baby around. She is already so independent and sassy. We have been letting her do basically anything she wants to do for herself and pushing her towards independence in ways that piss her off. She would strongly prefer to still have us dress her every day; we don’t. She would prefer never to clean and set the table; we insist. It’s a delicate dance. I wonder how I am going to start teaching her that sometimes it doesn’t matter how you feel you have to get it done.

The important thing is to not teach it at home with house chores because that teaches you that rest is not important and that isn’t the goal. But sometimes you are going through airport security and you need to hold your shit together so you don’t draw scrutiny. Sometimes you have to get home even when you are tired and you want to quit. Sometimes you have to shut your mouth and not say what you think and deal with something.

Both of my older children have that in their bones. I am not sure when and how I taught it. I am already noticing that it’s a real problem that Shorty doesn’t have DisneySchool. Did you know that an annual pass to Disney*(whichever) is more effective than a paid for preschool at teaching children how to wait in line patiently so everyone gets a turn? Did you know that Disneyland (the one and only) is the most amazing place in the world for a small child to practice asking for help with meeting their needs? The entire staff is trained to do backflips if necessary to meet any possible request. It teaches an extreme amount of confidence in trying and it’s hard to get that out in the world where most people are mercurial and challenging and hard to predict. As an autistic person Disneyland is the only place on the planet where I believe that I know the price of people being nice to me. I ritualize my understanding of what I have to do to make it more likely people will be nice to me. There is only one place I trust that I know how to do enough. Shorty won’t learn any of this.

Small town life is different. We don’t live in a neighborhood of retirees (we wouldn’t by this point even if we had stayed in California–those folks were selling out and moving really quickly in the couple of years before we left) so Shorty doesn’t get to spend all day practicing conversation skills with all the bored retired people in the neighborhood. She doesn’t have a dozen substitute grandparents. They wouldn’t have been there anyway but it still feels like a way I am letting her down.

There is no such thing as enough time to do all of the things I would like to do with the amount of obligation I have to the kids. They are at such dramatically different stages. It’s interesting to me how much the older kids have shifted such that they do not have similar interests or needs. I used to be able to treat them as more of a block–maybe I was understanding them wrong? I don’t think so. At this point I cannot assume that something is appropriate for both of them it almost never is. Neither of them are adult but they feel like kids who are a lot more than two years apart. EC is squarely teenager and is hilariously low key in terms of what that manifestation means. He occasionally tries to be edgy but I’m his mom so that is a bit weird for all of us. MC is physically heading for puberty but emotionally and mentally they are going to be a late bloomer. I am glad that MC has not been an earlier bloomer because they are not going to handle being hit on by adult men very well.

In a way I feel that Noah and I have done a serious disservice to MC in getting them to stop attacking people verbally or physically. They really struggle with defending themself with folks outside the family and that feels very much my fault. It was hard when the main person MC was physically and verbally aggressive with was EC. We have stopped that. We didn’t mean to stop the ability for all people. Sometimes you have to be able to defend yourself if a stranger is going to perceive you as a woman.

I am having an interesting time trying to figure out how to talk about some things with the kids around gendered language. Until the organs in the body have been surgically altered it is important to pay attention to their health. Having an organ does not mean that you are a gender. Your experienced gender is not always the same thing as your perceived gender by other people and sometimes that matters.

I’ve watched Boys Don’t Cry; I know that my son is going to have to assess safety in environments differently than other boys and men. I have to talk to him about what dietary supplements he needs as a person with the body he has in a way that includes both his EDS and other needs. I have to figure out where and when it is a better choice to hand-make a cocktail of pills because a single multi-vitamin with the wrong word on it feels like an erasing choice. I am grateful that my son remembered his martial arts classes enough to win every fight with every person who came after him in secondary school. I feel incredibly anxious and worried about what we should do to help him maintain his fitness and strength because he may well need it.

My kid is very strongly motivated towards being cute and eye catching. They don’t get more adult attention yet because they still read as so young even though they are just about exactly my height. This trip to London may well be the first time they really catch eyes and that’s going to be a real challenge for them. I worry about how intensely they freeze when they feel intimidated. I feel like I taught this and now I need to unteach it. I am anything but a perfect parent.

I wish there were more hours in the day so I could spend more time with the kids and have more time alone because my hobbies are fun too. Ah well. Be grateful for what you have: I have freedom to choose. I am lucky in a way few people get to be lucky. Sometimes it is challenging trying to figure out how to have a well regulated body. I have to put so much thought into all of my choices. No, my body doesn’t just “do the right thing” automatically no matter what some people want me to think. Unfortunately living on bread/noodle products alone makes me sick. Damnit. That’s what my body wants. Life isn’t fair.

Life isn’t fair and no one gets what they deserve. You get what you get. It isn’t about justice because almost no one gets “justice”, not really. There is chance. There is circumstance of birth. There are a million factors at play and there is no way to get “fair” for everyone like that.

My life is so good. This level of safety and security should be the bare minimum for every human being. Governments could make this happen if they chose to view the planet as a collaborative place that is non-renewable. A safe place to live. Enough food. I can afford to heat my home. I am only called names when I ask very very very nicely. We work together as a family to divide tasks and chores and we work together to maintain the building because there is the serious possibility that my children are maintaining the building they will inherit and you want it to be in good shape so…

This is enlightened self interest, baby.

I think the roads are clear enough for us to walk outside. I am really happy about that. I think Shorty should come with MC and me this time. I am looking forward to the day. Let’s go look at plants.

Finding a new normal is hard

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Ok my morning hour and a half before breakfast now includes blogging, medicating, and walking on the treadmill. Hoo it takes some balance to do this. That’s only for days when it is too icy for us to go walk on the road, not every day. Mostly I want MC training outside. We are both noticing how it is much much much easier going really fast on a treadmill compared to outside. It’s not just about incline, we increase that on the treadmill.

I think it is kind of funny how hard it is to convince my kids that maintaining enough fitness to be able to suddenly go off on an adventure is easy compared to “Oh shit we have to start training really hard RIGHT NOW and then we will still be less fit and have less fun than we would if we didn’t slack off in between.” But then again… I haven’t been forcing time to do it on my own either. I have allowed the kids refusing to go with me to stop me. I shouldn’t have. I am sorry.

Yesterday I was super keen to get off the treadmill quickly so I did more than a mile at 6mph. That’s really fast for me. It felt so good. It’s funny in that part of what feels good about it is the way my back and side fat waddle really hard. My experience as a fat runner turned slightly less fat by running and starting up again as a fat runner is that wherever it is the most jiggly is going to reduce first. It’s not that I stop having pudge there it’s that the edge of it is what is eaten first by increased need for eating fat in exercise and then the bottom layers plump into muscle. I still look fat, but it’s less jiggly and wiggly and bouncy.

That feeling means that soon I will be able to put on my fucking shoes again without panting. I really hate panting while I’m tying my shoes because I have gotten that fat. I need more exercise than I have been getting. Riding my bike isn’t enough. I need to run. I also need the fucking yoga and I should probably be doing more strength training because I am old enough I have to worry about bone loss soon. My bones aren’t starting out fantastically strong as it is.

I have done this for the past few decades. Early in my 20’s I decided to get fit because I was on the hunt for new social groups and people to fuck and someone to marry. I started dancing a lot and I ran to get in/keep in shape for that. Early 30’s I wanted to run a marathon with my brother and then that went sideways and beautiful, wonderful Blacksheep saved my ass and proved she is better than my brother in every way. (I mean, duh?) Now I am early in my 40’s and realising that I want more than I am right now.

I want to run a marathon in less than 6 hours. I want 30 mile bike rides to not feel punishing. I want to be able to run faster and longer than my fucking kids because ha ha just because you are taller than me that doesn’t mean you are stronger or fitter. 😛

I want the strength to be basically running a small-holding through my 50’s, 60’s, and maybe even my 70’s.

The neighbor in the giant fancy house decided to stay. I reopened the negotiation for me buying the acre next to mine. I told him “Wouldn’t it be nicer if instead of yet another house being constructed that close to us between us and the 150 home housing estate that is coming up in the field on the other side we had a food forest? I would plant walnut trees cause I can’t have them on my property. I would put so so so much food and you would be welcome to come share any and all of it. I would increase the plant and animal ecosystem around here and give them a place to hide as the city is moving outward. But I can’t pay what you want me to pay for a house-plot. My spouse says my limit is £50k and I can’t pay that much just for the part with the septic system.”

It is really useful being able to blame your spouse for things.

This winter I am doing a self-study course on permaculture design. I ordered all of the course books recommended by the top permaculture education organisations. I am going to increase bio-diversity, damnit.

And let me tell you: if I had an extra acre of land I could definitely feed my family in hard times. Probably a lot more people than that.

I would build a root cellar for storing food outside in the winter for preservation. The ground will keep it stable.

Paused for breakfast. Discovered major flaw in combining treadmill and blogging. I get no count for steps. This suuuuuuucks. Now I am flapping my arm like I’m trying to take flight; I feel stupid. Fixed that. Never came back. Oh well. Time to read those books.

Time to get back on track.

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I really like it when Noah is on vacation. I will like it when Noah is retired. I know more than a few relationships that have ended after lockdowns because people found out they didn’t like each other as much as they thought. I like Noah more with every passing year. I like alone time too, and time with other people. Every single day I am reminded that I am blessed because Noah is my person. He annoys me. He tells absolutely ridiculous jokes. He squicks me on a regular basis but in a way I apparently find incredibly endearing.

No one else in the whole world wants me to be as big as Noah does. Err, Ironically I do mean that in the feeder sense as well as in the spiritual sense. We were talking about some of the ways in which he is socially deferential, to the point that folks in the local bdsm community are assuming our dynamic is very different than it is. People are complicated. Noah wants me to be complicated and he doesn’t mind that it means my needs keep changing.

I am super scattered this morning. I can’t get into a flow. I stayed up too late, mostly through inertia. I need to get into the house a little early this morning. Time for Noah to go back to work and I need to be trying harder for fewer things, more consistently. I have been really needing, and taking, a fair bit of time off but if Noah needs to be working then I need to check back in.

Get ready for the day, wake the big kids, help Shorty with the morning chore, do planners with the kids. It’s time to teach backward planning. If you need to get all of these things done, when should you do them and how are you going to remind yourself? Getting too big for me to be the one who decides and reminds. It’s your turn, darlings.

Easier to do it with a smile on my face after yesterday’s delicious date. I like my husband a whoooooole lot.

Big goals

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I feel bad sometimes when I read other people with EDS/chronic pain talk about their experiences. There are places on my body where if you came up and poked me fairly gently I would drop to my knees from how overwhelmingly it hurt. If I take even the most casual inventory of how my body feels I am always in pain. I just keep doing shit anyway. I show up feeling half dead from exhaustion and I move through sheer force of will. I feel bad because I do not believe that it is healthy that I can do this, exactly, it just hasn’t been very optional for me. I have been in pain since I was a small child and I had shit to do and I had to just get on with it. I don’t know why I feel like I am fueled by rocket fuel.

I am clearly a bad example for my little zebra. Some days he is clearly in intense pain and he gingerly forces himself to keep doing his chores. I ask him why he doesn’t rest when he is in pain. “Well you don’t.”

They do as you do, not as you say.

There are some big goals this year. My big kids asked if we could go on one-on-one fun trips this year. If I am very very very lucky these will be the only big trips of the year. I’m crossing my fingers. One is soon and one is at the end of the year. Both involve me needing to ramp up my fitness in order to manage them while having any kind of a good experience. I am happy that the trip with middle kid is first because they are not starting off with lots more fitness than I have. Phew. I get to pull them along through training work rather than running and feeling half dead and like I can’t keep up. Eldest walks like his dad–they both walk like they are a half breath away from falling into a full sprint. That’s it: they walk like they are doing a run/walk paced run. I don’t walk like that.

MC and I are heading down to London in late February. They want to shop and see some historical sites and pretty parks and maybe a museum. My expectation is that we have to be Disneyland fit in order to have a good time (expect to walk 10 miles a day). I am trying to pull them in the direction of 4mph but frankly 3mph will be plenty fine for actually doing the time in London. When I walk as slow as they prefer my hips get really stiff and I feel like crud so we do have to pick up the pace a little. Luckily they are super motivated and excited. We have drawn up a slowly progressive plan for increasing our mileage and our speed. I am gratefully referencing the book Blacksheep gave me for running training.

I am thrilled about this experience with them, specifically the training, because we are getting to talk a lot about how what we eat and how we sleep dramatically impacts our ability to manage the long walks. I am introducing tracking and talking about evaluating how we feel on different days after different kinds of choices. I’m not controlling all the choices–just requiring reflection on them. They are starting from a place where 5 miles a day is not a lot or extreme so it’s not as much of a moon shot as it seems. Realistically if I asked MC to walk 10 miles today they could; it would just take almost 5 hours. 5 miles is a 2-ish hour walk right now.

Oh hey, it’s snowing again. This year has been so intense for snow–by far the most snow of any of our years here so far. That’s funny because this is our fourth winter and the snow is getting more common and hanging out longer with every passing year. Jenny said it barely ever snowed here! (In her defense the 10 years before we arrived had fairly low historical snow falls.)

As we are training for these… of course we had a big bike wipe out yesterday and MC got a bruise on their backside they are going to be feeling for a very long time. I rubbed them down 3 different kinds of topical analgesics and said we will be doing a lot more on the treadmill until it heals because they will walk awkwardly on the ice and that’s dangerous. Also: no more bike rides unless it is over 5. That sucked.

I love this whole winter hibernation thing. I feel constitutionally suited to having things just shut down for months out of the year so I can work on stuff internally and in my house.

Have I mentioned that I stopped taking the ADHD medication and I feel like my brain is hopping around like a grasshopper on speed?

So MC and I are going to London for a long weekend in February and EC and I are going to Paris, with probable stops in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and probably some city in Germany but I’m not sure which yet. We will be gone around two weeks. Yes I know that these trips seem unfair in terms of size and balance, but EC and I are going to be spending the entire day every single day going from museum to museum (although I suspect the Louvre will be a whole day on its own). He wants to take pictures and notes on as many kinds of art as possible in that time period. To be fair: he knows a fantastic amount about art history and already knows all the periods and most of the masters and who they worked with. He is going because he can already rattle off the names of hundreds of paintings and he wants to see them in person. This is school.

You can see why the kids do not enjoy traveling together very much. After the trip to Texas last year EC vehemently announced, “Remind me never to take a family vacation with any of you people again.” That hurt my feelings. Dude! IT WASN’T A VACATION!!! It was a trip to see a dying relative in a place that our entire family finds overwhelmingly stressful and difficult. There was no way for that trip to go better than it did and realistically it went about 300% better than I expected even with luggage that didn’t arrive for five days. My mother in law was nice for the whole trip. That was outstanding and I can just express gratitude.

Nevertheless there was no part of that journey that was a vacation. Just no.

Between the trip to London and the trip to Paris I am going to be ramping up speed. I will already be in better shape for distance. I’m going to whisper it here first. I want to run the 2023 Loch Ness Marathon. It’s the 1st of October, over 6 weeks before the trip to Paris so I will be nicely recovered after the race. I’ve been working on the treadmill for a few weeks so far in addition to the outside time with MC. I am doing shorter speed work in a controlled environment because I like my knees very much and walking on ice and snow is one thing, running is another.

It’s January now! I am allowed to pull my garden planning information out and plan out my work for the year. I told myself I had to wait out December and just focus on getting through the days. Woo!

I’ve been saying since I got here give me five years before you judge my garden. This is winter number four. I suspect that this coming year’s work is the last of the bones. Of course the deck around the apartment and the balcony off the lounge are both rotting and getting close to dangerous. This house is nonstop. Now I need to leave enough travel space around the house for whoever eventually replaces our windows (many are broken and in bad shape) in the next few years and I can fill in from the edges. In my head I see Noah’s aunt’s property up in Oregon. She has a gorgeous homestead that could probably feed her year round if she didn’t think preserving food was boring and a waste of time. Ha. Instead she feeds the local wildlife. Ok.

My goal in the long run is to be able to walk out of my house and find something to eat every day of the year. Sure a lot of that will be in the polytunnel during the winter but I’m ok with that!

I’ve already added one hazel this year (two other sub-types of hazel are coming but they haven’t arrived yet), two grapes, and a Cherry Silverberry that I am ridiculously excited about. That on top of scores of canes in previous years, a bunch of rhubarb, strawberries, cherries (5 different kinds!)… It’s going to be absolutely amazing. In 4-ish more years I will be able to tell people what kind of produce from my yard will be in season when so they can pick their visit around what they want to eat. That makes my heart soar. I’m doing this.

I may be creaky, in pain, grouchy, and difficult but I am also lucky, hard working, ambitious, determined, and incredibly successful at reaching my goals. I am the luckiest bitch.

The class should be able to run without you

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I just thought of something. A long time ago, when I was doing an assistant teaching gig in a middle school, my mentor gave me a book about how one of the most important things you can do as a teacher is to have thoughtful systems for how things will be done throughout the class day that you follow absolutely rigidly. This is so that going through the experience is so rote that you don’t even need to tell them to do whatever the next step is after a short time–they know.

I have been doing very poorly on that lately. As I say often to my oldest when he is trying to solve a problem, you are getting stuck in the weeds instead of looking at the big picture of the forest.

I am not modeling coping skills for living in a neurotypical world as a neurodiverse person in a conscious and deliberate way. I am hiding to do all of my regulation and that is opaque to kids.

It’s kind of interesting because we do talk about other aspects of mental health. Every so often a child (ambiguity there) will start acting out in some way and we will have a chat where I remind them that we don’t have easy access to therapists here so we have to actually talk to each other and figure things out. I acknowledge that I am not their therapist and I never can be because I am not a neutral party who is entirely on their side. I have my own agendas and biases so that means I am not the same thing and I’m not as good… but I am what is here. So far these sorts of conversations have ended with someone feeling like they are a little bit more ok and that’s all I can hope for.

But I’m not showing them how I organise information in my house. I narrate it quickly on rare occasions and that just isn’t the same thing. It’s not fair. I’m not always regulated the way I should be and I have a lot more experience being taught how to regulate myself. We don’t always figure these things out intuitively.

When did I learn these skills? I was always a real sucker for a school planner. I filled those bitches out. That allowed me to information dump like I do in my blog in the most nascent of forms. I blame you, middle school. My kids haven’t really had that experience. We do use Google Calendar but it is not the same. It doesn’t force you to organise your mind every time you look at it. You have to go turn on a computer/phone and check it. Yeah with a paper planner you have to open it and look at it but that part was always the easy step for me. I compulsively had the fucker out. Every hour or two I had new shit.

I am feeling especially pent up on the swearing front. I’ve been feeling so bad about all swearing around the kids that I’m doing way less and feeling weird about it. Also: conservative people in this community will judge. So, hello anxiety.

So yeah. I need to do that. Come on Krissy, get your shit together.

We’re All Mad Here

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I was reading an article that included the phrase “Mad Pride” about how mental illness has been perceived by society (mostly the US/Canada/UK) over time. It made me stop and think hard about how much my life has changed. I am in the closet now in a way I was not in California. There were times in my younger years where I would keep some things under wraps (I was militant about limiting sex life conversations with some groups of people) but mostly I didn’t hide any aspect of myself to such a degree that anyone and everyone couldn’t find out if they tried even a tiny bit. 

There is a big difference between “I don’t share personal stories about my sex/romantic life with students or homeschooling parents but I write about it explicitly on my public blog” and “I took my writing private so that someone would need at least a basic understanding of the internet archive in order to find out anything about me, I stopped writing about myself publicly on any topic that might be controversial and I no longer bring up or mention most things about my past and I am actively evasive with every person who does not have connections to my former life.”

It’s different. I am feeling more comfortable in the community. I feel like I probably do not have to remain quite this guarded permanently but I feel intense gratitude towards myself that I allowed myself this runway of time to have a place in the community where I am already seen as stable and competent and fairly well educated, especially in topics that are not well understood already here. I am starting to have that boost to the ego experience of having people say, “Oh Krissy I wanted to ask you about something. I don’t understand why ____?” When that something is often related to an aspect of interpersonal communication. I’m also getting more requests than I can take when it comes to organising level responsibility for different community groups or associations. And folks are asking me how I have taught my kids (thing). That’s definitely one of my sweet spots for feeling like I am not an imposter who should shut the fuck up.

It’s not that I think everyone should do what I do… that would go poorly. What I really appreciate is when people are interested in the process of how I figured out what was right for me because understanding that process is the bit that can help other people. They will have a different right answer in the end, but maybe seeing how I made decisions that align with my values will help them crystallise what their own values are so they can feel confident in their own choice. I like talking about parenting philosophy, not parenting choices. Because we are going to make different choices and that’s absolutely great. It’s mandatory. It’s as it should be for there to be the delightful variety of folks that this world needs. But the philosophy behind parenting is a place where you can discuss motivation and intentions and you can learn from each other without getting into a pissing match about technique. 

Technique is hard because it’s a minefield of traps for not understanding your own privilege when you frame what you do. Noah says that society has as much justice as it can afford. It’s complicated because often a family has as much justice as they can afford. And from family to family that is such a complicated and loaded concept that oh goodness just no. Can’t.

Anyway. The article. It goes through who is allowed to be mentally ill in public now. Who benefits from hashtag campaigns and public awareness movements around mental illness? It’s a short article but provocative in a way I agree with. I am so deeply aware of the privilege I enjoy at this point in my life. 

But this privilege comes with costs too. Costs I could not have imagined when I was on the far side of that particular privilege slider. 

I’ve been watching a lot more sci-fi/fantasy shows and movies recently. I am particularly drawn to things that are depicting ways that people live with an understanding of there being completely opposing truths/narrative/existanses existing all at the same time. 

So, I like to talk about money. If you have been here for a while you have seen the arc of that from poverty to (I think) fairly substantial wealth. When you are new to a community you only really exist from the moment they meet you. Your past is invisible and unknowable. Ok fine with google they could look me up but they don’t. I write all over the fucking internet. I have one handle I use on every site and I am so trackable it is definitely what a security expert would frown upon and give me a lecture for. I am consistent in part because that is my absolute only talisman against being called a fraud. My story is too whack-job. But I gots receipts, bitch.

I have suppressed so much of that over the past few years. I have been so very silent. It is taking a toll. 

The pendulum is going back and forth on so many different dynamics in my life. In one way I feel like my kids just got out of a big disequilibrium period (or at least some combination of them) and I am slamming my way into one with full force and fury. There are a whole bunch of things that are not working and I need them to change. 

I say over and over that disequilibrium is a necessary feeling for everyone because without it you probably won’t grow. You will get complacent and comfortable and you won’t want to face the terror and uncertainty and pain that comes with change. I have to get angry to have the force to demand change. I have to feel like I will wreck big things if the change doesn’t happen.

I am doing a med change. Amitriptyline and Lisdexamfetamine are not working for me anymore. There are enough negative symptoms with using them that I just cannot. Sex just hasn’t been happening. I’m not happy. I’ve been intermittently explosively raging for quite a while and it’s just not ok. I don’t like me. I need Patience, and I don’t mean the drink made with a whole lot of bourbon.

It feels silly to say this but I want to drink less. (It’s silly to say because Noah and I both have recently put in MASSIVE orders of alcohol.) I got variety. I got stuff that I want to invite other people over and say “I have x and y for you to taste test.” I want a social gambit, I don’t plan to consume much of it myself. I is making friends. 

I have a teeny tiny bit of regret about buying this house because it is huge and has been really rough to repair but I can’t tell you all about it because a Shorty has just informed me that there are gingerbread pieces waiting to be made into a house and I am all out of time.

Repentance and Grace

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We often have to sit down and talk about the fact that we knew therapists were not available here like they were in California so we have to help each other. We talk about the problems with that because a therapist is 100% on your side and a family member has their own agenda. I try hard to consciously and deliberately say out loud when I am saying something that is more from a therapy point of view (this might fuck me over but you need to think about it anyway) and when I am speaking as a parent and a member of the family unit (this will sound like I am not on your side… well… I am in as much as I am part of a system and systems work to preserve themselves).

This morning was such a morning. Puberty is terrible and it destroys your centre of gravity. It changes how you think about yourself, how you perceive other people’s behavior, and how you emotionally respond to things that are upsetting. You get this whole reset and it’s rough. It being rough is in no way shape or form a negative comment on any particular person. It isn’t your fault that this is hard. You are not failing or being bad and you are definitely not crazy even though this process feels so completely out of control. It’s a nightmare and there is no amount of money that could talk me into going through it again…. and I’m a hardy soul.

We talked about how other people remembering things differently is not exactly the same thing as gaslighting. Gaslighting is deliberately and purposefully fucking with someone’s reality as a way of controlling someone. Having a brief conversation that is very important and memorable to one person and easily forgotten by the other person is not gaslighting. It’s sucky! It’s frustrating! It can be super challenging to deal with! It’s not the same thing as gaslighting.

So then we get into: when you feel betrayed/upset/let down how can you ask for a repair attempt in a way that will actually get you what you want? It’s not about “you shouldn’t feel this way” and I’m not tone policing you and saying that you don’t deserve the repair attempt unless you are perfect. I’m saying that we are all human beings. Human beings almost always feel defensive when someone blows up at them. Sometimes the issue is so important that everyone must be held to working it out even if someone was blowing up and that makes the process hard. Sometimes the issue is fairly small and you won’t get what you need unless you play the game. It sucks. It is reality.

Then we came up to the fact that every single one of us messes up and is the person who makes an agreement then fails to keep it sometimes. No one is the bad one and no one is the good one. We all have to learn how to manage each others personalities and it’s a challenging road. We all have to learn how to manifest our frustrations and our difficulties and still live up to our own internal code for who we want to be.

Then of course we did a derail into how many, perhaps most people, are told what their moral code should be. Maybe their parents instill religion as the path to righteousness, maybe someone just imposes secular beliefs but in most families most parents believe they have the right to be the Authority to their children. Noah and I came out of our childhoods believing that each individual person has to be their own Authority and parents do not have all the answers. So we push our children towards figuring out their own beliefs as hard and as often as we can. That’s why you have to figure out how to live up to your own sense of right and wrong.

I said that sin is when you believe in a rule deeply and you break it anyway. People do that. It’s part of the human condition. You don’t have to be religious or have the rule imposed by an outside party in order to sin. All you have to do is betray yourself and everyone does that. That is where the concept of repentance comes in. You repent when you figure out that you fucked up and you need to bear the weight of that and you need to figure out how to move forward with being a better person. It’s a hard and never ending task. The older you get the more you have to repent because that’s just how life goes. No one lives up to their own rules whether they are self imposed or outside imposed. It sucks.

And that is where grace comes in. Grace is when you look at someone who has done something shitty in your direction and you decide to forgive them because you know that you also do shitty things and you believe that this was an error and not malicious. Grace is allowing people to come back from mistakes and sometimes grace involves choosing to overlook the crappy way someone expresses a problem or a solution and just accepting that their heart is in the right place even though they are still a giant turkey butt.

We are all flawed creatures who are trying to cope in a world we didn’t create and we can’t control. It’s hard. It hurts. We will all get wounded and we will all bear scars from our own mistakes and the mistakes of other people. The more grace we give ourselves and the people around us the less we will have to repent. The more love and acceptance we give to the people around us who are doing the best they can the more we will get that same gift back.

To this end I will do everything in my power to speak gently when I want to scream. I will try again when I want to quit. I will repeat myself when I want to never ask again. Because I love you and I want this with everything I am. This is my chance at a happy family. I will not always do the right thing but by golly I will keep trying.

Judgmental

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I struggle with just how bitchy I am. I hate hearing the complaints in my head. One of the loudest ones lately is my feelings about SUVs.

I now live in a town that was literally constructed to the width of pre-motorisation carriages. My road is a single track farm road. I measured it during the pandemic when we were told to stay 2m away from people and from one side of the pavement to the other it *barely* makes 2m so if you want to be a full 2m away from other pedestrians you both have to stand on the dirt on either side of the road, not on the road. Land Rovers are 1,996mm wide. So basically there is 4mm less than 2m wide for a fucking Land Rover. Not even a full fucking centimeter. Lots of people drive them up my road to the farm store on a Saturday. They have no fucking patience for me on my bike.

An accident with a pedestrian and an SUV is 25% more likely to be fatal than an accident with a pedestrian and a more appropriate sized car. Catastrophic injury is also significantly higher. If an SUV is traveling under 20mph it is fairly unlikely to kill someone in an accident. If it is going over 40mph it is pretty guaranteed to kill someone. I can ride my bike at 16-18mph through most of town. I get close-passed by SUVs (because they literally can’t give me the legal amount of space because they take up so fucking much room) every single day I ride. They are going much faster than me and they show their ire at me for existing on the road by gunning the engine hard. A minor misjudgment on their part in that case could very easily be fatal to me.

Fuck SUVs and fuck the selfish fucking pricks who buy them. If that’s you, I don’t know what to tell you.

SUVs pollute more, are less fuel efficient, and are substantially more dangerous to other road users. Sure the people inside the death-machine are “safer” than the vulnerable people they will roll over. Whoo. How fucking awesome for you selfish twats.

I absolutely understand why some people need trucks. I get that. I have never seen a demonstration of why people actually need to do their daily driving in an SUV. “I have hobbies that have big equipment”–get a fucking roof rack on a smaller vehicle. “I carpool”–how often? What percentage of the time? How much are you polluting the environment and risking the safety of every other road user for that tiny fraction of the time you drive your death-machine?

Yeah the vehicle that hit me recently was a fucking SUV. His justification for not fucking stopping? “I thought you should go through the intersection.” He couldn’t see the fucking car that was coming on the cross road so he thought I should get out of his way. FUCK SUVS. FUCK SUVS. FUCK SUVS.

Yesterday Eldest Child and I were stuck in traffic trying to get into the leisure centre. It was wall to fucking wall SUVs. We could not filter through traffic (as is recommended by cycling organisations to minimize our exposure to breathing your toxic emissions you selfish twats) because the entire fucking road was blocked from side to side. So we got to sit behind an SUV for 10 minutes trying to get into a parking lot breathing that shit. We aren’t inside a vehicle filtration system, we just get a face full of exhaust. If we leave too much room between us and the vehicle in front of us we get honked at and shouted at by someone behind us in a death-machine who is upset about a whole 2m of empty road in front of them during stopped traffic.

Fuck SUVs.

It’s getting to the point where if someone hops out of an SUV for a meet up I instantly don’t like them. I think they are a shitty, selfish person. I don’t think everyone must be on a bike. I don’t judge people feeling like they need a car. They are dead useful and not everyone can handle cycling because they don’t have the time/physical ability/whatever. I get that I will have to share the road with cars, no problem. But fucking SUVs? Naw, they should be banned. When they park on the side of the road they obliterate the bike lane.

Oh, and the close pass fuckwad who got out of his vehicle to come back and scream in my face and slap my hand when I took his photograph? SUV.

Fuck SUVs. And fuck you if you own one.

I’m about to fucking explode, y’all.

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I am not ok and it is perseverating in my head and if I don’t set it down somewhere I am going to continue to freak out in my house with my kids and that’s not cool. So let’s start there, shall we?

My kids are acting appropriate for their varying ages. All of these stages are hard at this moment in that awesome way that sometimes cycles pop up. My oldest is a fucking teenager with a fucking rude teenager mouth. I feel like he just has to tell me I’m wrong or express exasperation at my stupidity over and over all day long. Often at times when I am not actually wrong or being stupid. I mean… when I am wrong I tolerate a fair bit of sass but it drives me insane when I’m not wrong. Middle child is not wanting to accept responsibility for some areas of forward progress and I’m struggling with that. Youngest is pushing every button and boundary like it is her job… because it is.

So that’s all fun and the background noise of every single day.

I went back and checked my logs (hi, yes I am incredibly obsessive about tracking all kinds of stupid details) and starting in June I went from sleeping 8 hours a night on average over the course of the month to sleeping 6 hours a night on average. The months since then have hovered around 7 hours a night on average. That’s pretty certainly part of why I have been doing much worse. Why did I start sleeping so much less?

Ah, fucking lockdowns are over and I feel incredibly pressured (mostly internally) to get out and Meet People and Volunteer and Be Part of the Community. Also this summer has been quite energetic with gardening tasks as I’m moving towards the permaculture/low key food forest direction. I’m super tired. Also eldest said, “Let’s go ahead and finish the lounge” and I said, “Oh uhhh ok.” I was kinda hoping to procrastinate the work long enough for the paint to go bad. Then I found out my old buddy was coming and I have some projects I said he could help me with. So I started sprinting to get stuff done before he arrived.

Reader, I fucking failed.

I’ve been very much working beyond what I should be. Oh, and late May was my first trip down to England to see A & P then in June I went back down to England to bring Noah and the kids to see A & P. That is seeming like the best decision I made all year.

Oh, and I averaged 6 hours a sleep a night the month I had fucking covid and I slept through 4 days entirely. THAT’S REALLY FUCKING BAD.

I’m not ok, y’all.

July was a sprint of work I was not physically prepared for. I have never taken time to really fully recover from covid, not really. I certainly haven’t carefully increased exercise over time to get back to the fitness I had.

August was a super sprint of work and it was exhausting. September was a lot of work sprinting plus my birthday which was absolutely fucking exhausting to the extreme and I probably made some foolish choices. I was not physically fit enough to do what I did comfortably and I have paid for it. October has been more and more work and then Noah and EC went off to Helsinki then the morning after they got home I ran off to San Francisco in a last ditch effort to say goodbye to A.

In a way there are shadows of my uncle passing. I was too late. I feel like I failed and I am upset with myself. I did get to help P with one of the thornier parts of handling A’s belongings and I am deeply grateful I could perform this service.

Being in San Francisco involved a ton of driving (ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow) and many hours of work and many different social interactions one right after another and very little sleep. I just couldn’t except for a few times when I passed out in awkward scenarios. Three people said they wanted to make plans then cancelled at the very last minute. Woo. That’s always fantastic.

My buddy is a challenge in many ways. I don’t want to say too much about that but I will say that he is very emotionally needy and he wants me to help him process and understand his entire life and that’s a fucking tall order. I am not a therapist. I feel like I am drowning in his feelings. He also can’t remember a lot of our conversations because of how much he drinks so each conversation has to be repeated a few times and that is really frustrating. I don’t begrudge him the needs but my bucket is so fucking empty.

I feel empty. I feel like I can’t take more shit being dumped on me. I feel like I want to scream and scream and scream until I have destroyed my voice from screaming. I want to sleep for several weeks in a row. I want to stop speaking to people at all and I want to go back to lockdown. I am so far into burn out I feel like a pile of ash.

I know that I am a good person to help people process grief but right now I can’t handle the flood of it. It’s not just the one buddy. I feel absolutely surrounded by loss this year. Grandmother in law, A, my buddy’s parents, other friends have lost family members, a different buddy is dealing with her kid self-harming, a somewhat surprising number of pets have passed recently and folks want to talk to me because I give them comfort. Right now it feels so hard.

Oh, yeah, and it’s been an incredibly stressful year on the money front. I think things have settled down now and while we are not fully “on track” we are in a very reasonable place and I’m no longer worried about bouncing payments. But it’s been a fucking lot.

Err, also my roof just got replaced and the scaffolding and construction fuss have been irritating and challenging because to a large degree it has meant that YC has not been able to play outside unsupervised for over a month. That’s not a great situation.

I’m not exercising enough. I stopped my yoga classes because we need to be contributing more to savings. I’m not eating well enough–I am actually not enjoying the kids cooking 4 nights a week because rarely do they put more than 1 vegetable serving in a meal and it’s not doing great things to my body. I’m sleeping for shit.

It goes on and on and on. I’m sure I’m not remembering all the fuss. My head hurts. I am tired of being tired.

I just came to say: goodbye, love.

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The dawn is less bright today. You might think that is because I saw the sun come up over soggy England but, no. This is the first sunrise without Andrew in it.

I first encountered Andrew through Frenzi, a mailing list centred around a group of folks in the bay area who all share a hobby. I met a lot of brilliant, witty, argumentative, wise, and patient people through there. Of course there were a lot of dipshits too.

Andrew was the first person to flame me on the internet. To be fair I had told him that I was surprised that I was never attacked because I felt like I often expressed contrary/unpopular opinions. So he taught me what it felt like to be flamed. Ouch. I learned an important lesson: Andrew was as painfully literal as I am. If you say/imply you want something he will make it happen if he possibly can.

I think I first actually spoke to Andrew and Paula at a birthday party for a friend. I am pretty sure that was my first time ever going to a Thai restaurant and I completely fell in love with the food and the company of the people I was lucky enough to sit next to. Specifically: Paula. She was so kind and gentle. It surprised me that someone as gentle and carefully considered was suited to be married to someone as prickly as Andrew. Later I came to understand how they complemented each other.

When I first moved out of living with Tom things were scary for a while. I was not sure how I was going to pay my bills and still have money for food. Andrew told me that he would absolutely not accept me going without food and if I was that skint I needed to let him know and he would make sure I ate.

With my background of poverty and periodic starving because my mother could not afford food at all he seemed absolutely unbelievable. Why would he care?

I feel like that was one of the overarching story arcs of our relationship. I have never really understood why he cared so much about me. He frequently made offers of support and love and affection and I didn’t know how to accept them. He was also very free with his opinion and he was often insightful and hilarious. One memorable time he found out who I had started dating and he said, “Oh Krissy, dump him. He’s not smart enough for you and you are going to get so bored.” He was right on the money. He loved Noah for me.

Paula helped finish the walls in my garage in Fremont. Andrew helped paint the ceiling. It made me so happy looking at that ceiling for years knowing that Andrew helped. I could feel his (and Paula’s and Taylor’s because T did soooooo much on that project with me) love surrounding me. Co-working has always been my strongest love language.

Andrew introduced me to books and told me about movies I should watch. He was very annoyed he could never get me to juggle.

We had a big falling out around my 30th birthday. We both did things that hurt the other quite badly. One of the things that I am most grateful for in this life was the chance to try once then a second time to repair the damage from that situation.

Andrew forgave me for being selfish and stupid and cruel. That was a gift he did not owe me. I am lucky that I got to have him in my life for decades. I got to have closure on talking through a situation that hurt me deeply and he felt truly contrite and loving and apologetic. He showed me how to repair a deep wound. Not very many people have been able to manifest that complete journey with me in my life. Andrew was *special*.

I am grateful to the marrow of my bones that I went and saw him twice this year. I loved helping him drive the boat and operate the locks on the canal. He told me that I learned how to drive the boat unusually quickly–he felt confident enough to just leave me alone with it after just a couple of hours of supervision. I felt elated through and through. Like me he wasn’t the sort to hand out unwarranted compliments. I had to have a stern chat with him about why I set the boundaries with my neurodiverse children where I do and he took that on and manifestly started following my rules. I felt respected.

I feel like that is the core. That is the core of what Andrew gave me: he saw me and treated me like someone he respected deeply. I met him at a time in my life when I had not experienced very much of that.

No one is perfect. But Andrew was perfectly wonderful and I am so grateful that I got to have him for so long. Here in the end he is even leaving me an extra gift. I may not be able to say goodbye to him, but he asked me to come to the bay and as a result I will get a lot of love and support from other people who have known him and loved him for as long or longer than me.

It is very hard carrying grief alone. Being able to share grief lightens the burden and helps everyone remember that no one fully dies until everyone who knows and loves them is gone. Andrew’s spirit is going to live on for a long, long, long time.

Movement is good for you; I hear.

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I posted most of this on the book of faces. But I should start using this space more.

Neurotic tracking is neurotic.

I wasn’t great about tracking my bike miles for the first few months of 2021 so I am pretty sure my year total is lower than it actually was. Then in 2022 we went to Texas and did way more walking than usual… but I didn’t bring my watch charging cable so I didn’t track any of it and then the watch strap completely broke and took a bit to replace in late July/early August. So numbers are fudged a bit.

That said: in 2021 by Sep 1st I had taken 1,653,242 steps and ridden 883 miles. (By the end of the year 2,300,012 steps and 1,165 bike miles.) In 2022 by Sep 1st I have taken 1,438,755 steps and ridden 908 miles.

If I don’t want to be behind last year’s final totals I’d better get my butt moving. Last year I was under my goals for myself in terms of movement by a fair bit. I don’t shoot for 10,000 steps a day. Personally I try for 7,000 and I have not been hitting it. In a year that adds up to 2,555,000 steps. I missed it by 254,988 last year. That’s over a month of missing steps. Ugh.

This year I am so far waaaaay lower. This is not good. I am already 262,245 down this year. That’s super sucky not good. Ugh. My bike odometer says I have ridden 920 since I got it the week of Christmas, so there wasn’t a lot at the end of December on this bike due to all of the ice on the roads.

I feel like I am very much not close to where I want to be in terms of being able to run (I have not regained fast-twitch muscle activity *at all* since the youngest was born. Ugh.) I know I need to sit down with the training book Blacksheep gave me and make a plan.

I think that the work I get done in the garden this September is going to mean that next year I will not have any big structural jobs and I may even have time to go work in the volunteer gardens in town. I haven’t managed much this year because I’ve been drowning in house/garden work.

My birthday is coming up so of course I am going deep into that funk of “What the hell am I actually doing with my life?” Well this year my hide-from-life birthday retreat will involve a 90 mile round-trip bike ride before camping in the rain. No weekend long binge of The Witcher this year.

In order to catch up on steps I need 9,150 each day between now and the end of the year. *sigh* I don’t have any specific goals about bike miles between now and the end of the year… but I feel better when I ride more and my kids have never regained their full fitness after covid. So. Ugh. Fudge.

I watch this shit like a hawk because if I get too sedentary then I lose strength and then I injure myself then I am stuck in a chair for months and the recovery period is slow and nightmarish. I haven’t had a big injury… in a long time. I can’t remember the last one. I am dancing on the edge of overwork issues with my arms and back right now with all the gardening/painting. Oofta.

Ok. Now that I have reflected it’s time to get off my butt. Daylight is no longer endless and apparently I have a lot of miles to cover. It doesn’t help my sense of impending doom that my birthday is coming. Stupid birthday. I hate you. It’s not that I mind getting older. It’s just that it is usually such a very terrible day. I feel bad that I can’t be present with my kids on my birthdays. But I can’t. That’s just the reality. No sense in denying a thing that is just true. Thanks, mom, for this gift that just keeps on giving. I mean… I know it isn’t her fault at this point. She hasn’t ruined a birthday in over 20 years. But there is a broken piece there. I have tried to fix it and failed. I am putting all of my try into other places; I have none left for something as stupid as my birthday.

Alright. Time to work.

Almost here

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My birthday is coming up. Going to Texas and England this year means I am not running away by myself. (Important note: the woman we went back to Texas to see has now passed away. I have no regrets over prioritising that goodbye trip over other more fun activities for this year.) Noah wants to be thoughtful and asked me what I want. I want to not want anything so I can’t feel let down. I want to have patience for the 973,383 times I will have to remind my children to do basic chores (like brushing teeth). I want to not miss my mother. I want to go back and rewrite my back story so that my impending birthday doesn’t feel like a hand grenade about to land on my head. A buddy suggested that I go camp somewhere for cheap, but I have been working too hard. I couldn’t right now. My hands are trashed.

I have an old friend staying with me. It is complicated in the way that integrating a new person with deep grief, and addiction issues, and learned helplessness will be. To be fair, every time I feel like I am going to freak out about an issue I have to address he is responsive and polite and most of my requests have been acknowledged and respected. But negotiating and setting boundaries is hard. It’s One More Thing on my emotional chore list and I’m tired.

It has been a fucktastically busy year. Busy on so many levels and my exhaustion is, once again, bone deep and completely saturating my soul. I feel numb and on fire and empty and aching. I deeply miss the comfort of tracking things that happen in my blog because I benefit from the space to process but mostly I do not feel I can anymore. I have reached a certain age where I now have to be realistic about the fact that I am not really going to make more very close friendships. Sure I can find new activity partners, but it isn’t the same thing. The people I have met in the last few years I am deeply conscious of this careful distance I keep. They are not allowed to know me. And I cannot talk about my deep relationships anymore because when I do I ruin them and it is absolutely all my fault.

So I do small bits of processing with people but very little in my historical record. I do almost none publicly. I mostly stuff my feelings and feel disconnected. I do not expect or hope for any kind of improvement.

I worry that the adhd medication was effective and useful for a time and it has gotten to the point where it is causing as many problems as it helps and I am starting the process of weaning off (with medical supervision do not fucking criticise me).

I watch the incoming terrifying blend of natural, political, social, and financial disasters hitting the UK with a sense of grim apprehension. I have been waiting all my life for a moment like this. I feel horrible about the fact that a lot of people are going to suffer terribly, some are going to die, but it won’t be my family. I continue my grim plod towards being able to provide a variety of supplemental food because I think famine is coming. I am installing solar panels with a battery system. I am installing rain butts, many and as large as I can manage. A chicken coop is finally being built. Hell, I’m even building a firewood pile because I worry that there will be a cold snap before the solar panels are installed. By the end of fall I will finally have my polytunnel set up for next year’s food growth.

I am working as hard and as fast as I can.

Noah’s job has managed to go most of the way towards fixing the issues that were happening with his salary. This is good. It would be a terrible time to go do a job hunt. I think we only lost a year’s worth of progress towards retirement. I am deeply aware that the fact that he is so insulated from the current global difficulties with regards to fair pay that he is still going to be able to retire before 60 means that I will never really understand the rest of my generation. Marrying him was hitting the lottery. I did not expect this. There is no fair. There is no deserve.

Even in company I feel lonely. I know I am not meeting anyone else’s emotional needs and they are not meeting mine. I do not know what could be done to change this. What I do know is that I am not suicidal and I am financially and physically prepared for more hardship than 90% of the planet. Maybe my expectation that things are going to fucking suck is almost a good thing. I am going to persevere. I will endure. I don’t need to be happy. I need to get the fucking work done.

And right now the next task on my list is to go make Middle Child a birthday cake. They are turning 12. Puberty is arriving and it’s going to be a wild fucking ride.

Why are you so tired?

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I always feel kind of stunned by this question and I get asked it a lot. It’s weird living in a place where basically no one is familiar with my back catalogue of writing. I do not direct anyone here at all anymore and I won’t start. I no longer believe that reading my blog is a way for people to know me. It is a way that some people have learned some things about me and then they fill in the blanks with assumptions and projections and in the end I feel like maybe they know me even less than if they hadn’t read the blog at all. It’s complicated.

I don’t do all the cleaning in this house, thank goodness. But it’s a big house. What I don’t do myself I have to manage and parcel out and track. In some ways that is better and in other ways it is just as stressful and challenging. The kids alternate between calmly going along and doing what I ask and screaming at me that I am a horrible person who makes them hate their life so that’s fun. Apparently when I spend two weeks saying, “Look at the current chore list and figure out what/how you would like to renegotiate the things on that list” and they say “Oh the current system is fine and I want it to continue” so I continue to remind them to do the exact same thing they have been doing for 4+ months all of a sudden “YOU KEEP INTERRUPTING ME TO TELL ME TO DO RANDOM STUPID SHIT.” Uhm, excuse me?

I write down chores in a daily planner book. I do it months in advance according to a system that I sat down with the kids and worked out. “About how many days can/should you go between doing your laundry? How often should we clean bathrooms and who should do which one? What is fair for doing dishes? How often should we sweep and how do we want to rotate the chore?” The negotiation is long and detailed. It’s not just “Mom Made Me.” The kids talked about at what point they find using something gross and it needs to be cleaned. Professional house cleaners come in every other week and do a basic upkeep so we are not required to do all of it ourselves.

But when I say, “Hey x, y, and z have been assigned over the past three days and you haven’t done them–can you please take care of that?” I am a complete and total asshole who must be raged at. Awesome. That’s not fucking draining or anything.

I ask my kids if they want to do classes and if so what kind. They tell me they want me to hunt around for them and find classes like a, b, or c. I do that. It takes time. The classes cost money. I find what they say they want and show it to them. “Are you sure you want to do this? It is x-distance from the house and will take you at least y-time to get there? It will take z-money out of the budget so I won’t have money for this other thing.” Yes they want it. Then they get 3 days into the class and all of a sudden I am a horrible person who forces them to do stupid things they hate and it is all my fault that they don’t have any spare time because instead of actually fucking riding their bike they choose to push the bike both ways at a speed of approximately .5 miles an hour. Not draining or frustrating at all.

The older kids have locks on their doors. They usually won’t use them. Youngest child is constantly in their room stealing stuff because obviously big kid stuff is cooler and I have to spend a lot of time trying to keep large, towering people from screaming at a small child until my ears ring. It’s shitty and not cool all the way around. You getting louder doesn’t solve the problem. You locking your door solves the problem. But you won’t take responsibility for what you can do you just want to scream about how you feel violated. Cool. That’s not fucking exhausting.

The amount of hoarding and screaming and fighting in this house over food is making me hate my life and everyone I live with. So fine. We are going to buy more shitty food and I am going to stop arguing because they need to learn how to live with their bodies. When you transition out of limiting food it is always rough. (There are actually principles behind this transition and I am too tired and my hands hurt too much to explain them all. I did a fair bit of research on the topic and I am not going to justify it here. If you are legitimately curious let’s schedule a video call and I’d be happy to talk about food scarcity mindset, neurodiversity, nutrition research, and parenting choices.)

Gardening is a lot. This space is so much bigger than what I had in California and I feel like I am working myself to the bone. The kids are supposed to help and every minute of help is difficult to get and involves a big fight. I am so tired. I do most of it myself because I just don’t have it in me to fight. Sometimes I am out in the yard well past dark crying just doing it all because I cannot fight for more help.

My buddy is here and that is complicated. He has lived alone for a long time. He has never lived with a child in his life–his older siblings were much older than him and he has no memory of dealing with kids beyond hour or so visits sporadically with friends or family. There are a bunch of challenges around that. He’s here for a while. He is being *very* helpful in re-teaching me how to use power tools and helping me build some projects I want done. He is also used to working in a defined way always on a dead line to very technical specs that must be met because (reasons). My compost bins and chicken coop are not similar sorts of things. The amount and kind of project meetings he wants to bicker out every single last detail are hard. The frequency with which he wants me to stop what I am doing and focus on his questions is hard because I am keeping a lot of balls in the air and I don’t change focus that well. I can’t get back on track and half an hour of talking (it’s always “I only have a few questions and it will only take a minute” but really it’s many questions and it’s 30-45 minutes) set me back 1-3 hours because I have lost focus and flow and maybe I can’t even get back to what I was doing because now I have lost that window of time and I have another thing that has to happen Right Now. He has a lot of time to rest and chill out in between work times. I don’t.

I started typing this 45 minutes ago. Then I was interrupted to go fix a computer problem for a child (that has to forking start with a multi-hour download of updates because oh boy nothing will work when you are that far out of date) paused to brush the cat because folks noticed some fleas and the brushing needs to happen before the medication. I still haven’t finished my tea from breakfast, done the budgeting updates I’m supposed to do, or emptied the dishwasher and reloaded it from breakfast.

Why am I tired? Oh my god are you kidding? Do you actually not understand? Really?

I also need to finish taking the labels off the little jam jars so I can put the spices in them because the random bags of spices piled on an open shelf that fall down every single time you do anything cause daily frustration and frequent messes and I just can’t.

Oh, and I should paint today, do some weeding, some carpentry work, hang out the laundry that is in the washer and start another load. I also need to put the food in the fridge that arrived from the farm share box because apparently unloading the boxes means “put it all on the counter” to my kids. (One of them was cooking and me putting it all away would have meant getting in their way and they would have gotten annoyed.)

Did I mention that all of my chronic pain is through the roof and I am just about out of Ibuprofen gel and I don’t really have time to go get more? Also I need to go across town because we are about out of a few things that I get from the co-op and that’s about 6 miles round trip. I will probably wait until next week and go when I am on my way to or from the Youngest Child’s swimming class.

I told someone that I was falling behind on responding to emails/texts/messages on various platforms and she said, “Yeah I’m a procrastinator too.” ……. Does being so busy that you rarely have time to think a full thought outside of “What task do I need to be accomplishing full speed in the next 10 minutes” count as procrastinating?

Oh, and I need to respond to text messages from Middle Child’s best friend’s dad because otherwise the kids won’t see each other before the school year starts in 10 days and the bestie has been out of the country almost all summer. Woo. Haha. Got that done. Excellent. It will be great to see her again.

And really I have to close because ALL OF THE THINGS.

Praying and sleep

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Tonight I managed to get some time with my fingers in dirt. It was after I probably should have been in bed, resting. I am told resting is important. But I have been rather a nasty bitch for a few days and I needed to get a serotonin boost somehow.

I am working on a stone spiral for herbs; I won’t really be able to plant in it this year because the growing season is short here in Inverness. As I was grunting and laughing as I dragged up rocks that I probably should not have been lifting I thought about what it means when I say that I will pray for you.

If I say that I will pray for you I mean that I will think of you when I shove my hands into the soil. As I pile rock on top of rock and I shove sticks and compost into gaps I will think your name and I will hope that this universe grants you the nutrients you need to grow. I think of the people in your life who build you up and whom you in turn support. I think of how I want the universe to build a safe and stable place for you to rest. I want you to have the right amount of support so you can present exactly the angle of yourself into life you want to project.

I think of how I want you to have space around you to spread your roots into new directions. I think of how I wish water would flow around you to bring growth and moisture and sustenance as you go through your life. I think of how I want you to have seeds of new life, whatever that means for you, come to you with the wind and the birds and the flow of the seasons. I want you to thrive.

And around then I noticed that it was just about pitch black and I should probably stop. Given when in the year we are I guessed it to be close to midnight. Cell phone said it was 11:40. I’m pretty good at time. Then I laughed and thought of something that my son said to me recently. He said, “I’m kind of embarrassed to admit this but I didn’t really think you slept until after you had our little sister. That pregnancy was the first time I really saw you sleep.”

I tried to protest that it was ridiculous. Of course I sleep. He stopped and looked at me all deadpan. Then he raised his hands to melodramatically indicate the walls and the ceilings of the room we were in that I had in fact painted in the middle of the night while everyone else slept. He said, “Really mom. You do?”

As I softly shift dirt back and forth and move rocks to create the form I want even when there is no longer light I have to admit…. no. I don’t. Not really. Maybe if I did my body would hate me less. But would I really live longer or would it just feel longer?

I know the garden I want to stand in on my 50th birthday. It is going to be fucking amazing. I am going to be able to push my toes down deep into the soil and harvest fruits and vegetables that I made flourish. There will be flowers and wee beasties and a whole damn ecosystem. It might already be cold or there might be a last gasping heat wave. Either way I am going to sit in a rocking chair and hold Noah’s hand. Maybe I will already be wrapped up in a blanket or maybe I’ll be wearing barely anything at all–global warming is even coming for the north. I’ll have some whisky.

And if I am very very lucky I will even have a smile before I fall asleep for a well deserved nap.

Riding the covid wave

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I like documentation. Documentation is awesome.

On Monday the 20th at about 1:00am our first notice of a problem was middle child waking up to vomit all over the sofa bed and floor of the hotel we were in. Cleaning that up sucked because the hotel didn’t really have cleaning supplies available. Suck.

Because of the railway strikes I already knew that if we waited until the 21st to go home… we couldn’t get home from Edinburgh on the train because of strikes. In retrospect, since we took the bus anyway, we maybe should have done that? I don’t know. I also knew that our hotel was booked for right after us and no other rooms were available anywhere nearby to allow us to wait out illness/strikes.

So we cleaned up and went back to sleep. Later on Monday the 20th we got up and packed up and took a bus to Birmingham (strikes had already cancelled all trains leaving Stratford-upon-Avon). Then we boarded what was supposed to be the first of three trains home. The second train was so delayed we missed the third train. I scrambled and found a bus route home. While we were on the bus Scotrail announced that they were adding one last train to Inverness. Damnit. MC woke up long enough to make transfers and otherwise slept through the ride home.

We arrived home at about 11:45pm on Monday the 20th.

Middle child spent Tuesday the 21st in their room on quarantine after a positive covid test, mostly asleep.

Wednesday the 22nd Youngest child developed a high fever and intense exhaustion and body pain and went to bed. We decided there wasn’t a point in putting MC in quarantine if YC was sick too because she is too little. I got some chores done in a big hurry because I could see that this wasn’t going to go well. I already felt cruddy, but a walking wounded kind of cruddy. In between chores I would end up snuggling YC back to sleep every time she woke up crying. Noah and EC both felt cruddy but not incapacitated. MC was awake for more of the day and happy about lots of computer time.

Thursday YC could not handle having me get out of bed because everytime I moved she cried. She was miserable. I didn’t feel good but I didn’t feel heinously bad. I was pretty happy about the rest even though I was super upset to miss an event I was supposed to freakin host. Whine.

Friday was my day to be flat out in bed mostly asleep. The chest congestion was still minimal. I hurt everywhere and couldn’t stay awake long enough to follow most of the bad movies I had on for company. YC was up and playing and complaining that no one wanted to entertain her. MC was feeling a little better but far from perfect. EC was feeling crummy but not a lot worse. Noah was still feeling cruddy but only a little worse. Noah and EC still test negative at this point.

Saturday I was awake slightly more but the pain was worse and the congestion was starting. Lots more coughing. Very full and disgusting hanky. YC was able to get up and move about but very grumpy and whiny and miserable. Noah felt worse but still able to do stuff. MC and EC both complained about not feeling well but managed to do what they felt like doing. I was barely able to stand and walk to the the toilet. I took a covid test just so I could double check. Yup, positive. YC hates the test so we are just calling her positive.

Today is Sunday the 26th. I can stand and walk more than yesterday but not for long without intense dizziness. I need to lean over the counter and rest if I am up for more than 2-3 minutes or get a chair. I am hacking up half a lung in disgusting productive coughs. It is less prolific as I am awake/closer to sitting for more time. It took a while of hacking to be able to breathe this morning. Today will definitely be a bed day. EC and MC both say they don’t feel good but they are in playing video games. YC is in bed with me because she doesn’t want to be up. Noah says he feels worse than the previous days but he hasn’t come to bed yet.

Being sick with a fitness tracking watch is fascinating. I can watch my resting heart rate climb (over 90 when usually it is in the mid 70’s). It does its best to monitor my oxygen saturation. It is monitoring its opinion of my “stress” rate (higher than it has been through the entire time I have owned the watch). Yesterday it claimed that my stress was skyhigh and it spent the whole day begging me to rest. I was flat out in bed barely moving enough to use the toilet or eat. My “average” for the previous year was a stress level of 37 and yesterday it was up at 81. Hm. My pulse oxygen readings are also lower than normal but probably not low enough to call a doctor yet. Low enough that I am monitoring it.

I knew the chronic bronchitis would be a problem if I caught covid. I’m coughing more than the rest of the house combined. Damnit. Not that I wish they were sicker. I don’t.

This was a very bad week to lose my glasses. I have a super bad headache. Ugh. Typing this was hard. Time for a nap.