Tag Archives: adult-only

Like a monster uncurling from hibernation

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For most of the time I have had children my sex drive has been utterly wrecked. I have no way of knowing how much is purely biological (for much of history it’s been “normal” for carrying parents to have a new child approximately every four years) as I have started pulling out of the dip when my body is around 4.5 years postpartum both times. Of course I do have a smaller gap in between my oldest kids, but that wasn’t about “whoops I’m pregnant because I was just having sex I wanted”. Naw. Despite my outrageous whoring around I have only ever been pregnant when I intended. I consider myself both A) a stringent user of birth control and B) a completely lucky bitch. [I tell my kids: if you are not ready to be a parent each person participating in sex needs to have birth control in use every single time.] I mean, let’s be real that I was stupid a few times and I just got lucky. But it was a very few times out of a really lot of times of being stringent.

Anyway. Yeah. I think there is a lot of basic biology. Did you know that your body is not 100% postpartum for four years because it takes that long for all of your organs to fully get back into a non-pregnant state? Fucking wild.

There was also a really strong emotional aversion when I was newly a parent that I don’t think was just part of the biological. It took a long time to unpack all of my trauma around sex in a house with children. That was really hard for him and me and getting through it just about wrecked us. I really struggled with it being ok to be touched in any kind of romantic way if a child I was responsible for was even in earshot. I was too deep in abreaction to find any kind of enjoyment there.

So as I was saying I seem to be in an uptick, by which I mean occasionally Noah is all “Yeah….. I literally can’t more.” I feel victorious. It’s reminding me of all the reasons that Noah is my person even though we still have challenges. His cock is fucking amazing. Like, he has the Baby Bear of cocks. Just big enough to hurt when we want it to but it doesn’t have to hurt. Fits nicely in all of the places. Incredible stamina for someone who has been in an almost complete drought for about five years.

Not to mention that he knows exactly how to be mean to me. When we started dating I told him I was looking for an abusive relationship with an on/off switch. He has been really freaking careful to stay in the off position for a long time.

He knows how to dance around my trauma like he is doing a polka on the head of a pin. He trusts me as an authority on a great many topics and he is openly deferential. He also fucks me raw and calls me every filthy name and he loves seeing me cry. He doesn’t use just any filthy names. He knows exactly which parts of my historical trauma will get me off instantly and which parts will get me off the bed and into the bathroom to curl into a ball and sob.

It’s not an adventure until someone is crying!

He knows me at my core in a way no person ever has or ever will. He has spelunked into every twisted corner of my deeply depraved brain. When I no longer have small children hopping into the shower with me on the regular he will go back to carving on me. The absolute hottest sex is the kind where one or both of you is dripping blood onto one another. Taking my blood and wiping it on his cock before putting it inside me is the best fucking feeling. And the taste! chef’s kiss Perfect.

Strange that I don’t like period sex. The friction is just utterly terrible and I end up with jagged awful tearing. Thanks you piece of shit motherfucker who wrecked my cunt before I could even go to fucking primary school. May your name be forgotten.

Anyway, Noah. He has studied me like I am his PhD topic. As my memory degrades he often remembers my stories better than I do. I only believe him when I wrote it down somewhere and I can go check. It was very useful that I wrote so many things down. He has read my entire archive I think 6 times? It isn’t obvious here on Fetlife but I used to blog a lot, including about my kink adventures. My whole archive is in the millions of words. The word count massively went up as I went through college. I can write a 20 page paper (including putting together all the bibliographical information) in about 10 hours once I’ve done the research. I had some stretches where I hit over 100,000 words in my blog in a couple of weeks.

And now my hands are shit. Whoops.

What I like about writing is that it allows me to think through my priorities and go back and forth dithering about what matters.

Noah has supported just about every crazy thing I have ever done. He is the reason I have written books and painted giant murals and created hundreds of square feet of tile mosaics inch by inch. Noah has kissed me goodbye cheerfully every single time I have wanted to run off and have an adventure, whether it was for a few days or weeks or half a year. He holds down the fort and makes sure that things in the house keep going the way I prefer more or less entirely because deferring to my preferences is so automatic at this point.

I met him almost 19 years ago. He was the first person who said, “What happened to you that made you end up like this?” He is the reason I have any coherency in my internal narrative, because he is always my assumed Primary Reader.

He wants to read all of it. No matter how cruel or angry or bitter or nasty I am being. If I keep a separation between my thoughts and my behavior he is happy, and even prefers, to know all the shitty thoughts. My thoughts do not define me; my behavior does. He wants to know how many shitty thoughts I have on the way to manifesting the behavior I do. I haven’t been telling him lately for a whole lot of reasons.

There is this thing about kink. I cannot be a closed box and do this in a healthy way. I tried having an M/s relationship that did not allow for navigating around my trauma. That went pretty poorly and while he was absolutely the best/most healthy relationship of my life at that point I have some deep sadness about some of the permanent harms he caused my body.

So if I want to do this, if I want to let the monster out and fight and lose and hurt and still be ok at the end of it I have to start writing again. He has to know what I am holding on to control of by tip of my fingernails. Following my brain is like trying to binge a new Netflix series every day for a month. It’s really hard to keep all the storylines straight.

He will do it. He will draw fucking diagrams if he has to. He thinks I am worth it. I see the overwhelming magnitude of work he puts into being in a relationship with me. His online organising system is kind of terrifying and he archives everything. He manages his own neurodiversity through a rigid knee jerk response to the system he has in place. He has scripted himself. And he manages me like he manages when to go check the oil in the tank.

It’s kind of overwhelming looking at just how much work he has put into me. He has iterations of the recipes he has refined over the years based on feedback because he wants to cook for my palate. I think he even has lists of gifts he has given me for holidays with how I responded. I’m not fucking kidding when I say I am his PhD.

I may miss the hunt but Noah is my heart and my soul and the only happy family I have ever had.

Did I mention his dick is perfect? And when I tell him that I want him to turn on the abusive switch he barely hesitates. I am enjoying life a lot more recently.

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.

On brand

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A very old friend is staying with me. He was my boss from 16-19 and we stayed friends after that. He taught me everything I know about carpentry, electrical work, my theatre rigging skills (which predate my bondage rigging skills), how to paint, and he helped keep my fragile psyche together when a lot of the bigger traumas of my young life were happening. To say I love him is kind of a mild and inadequate way to describe what I feel for him.

He’s been here since July. He will probably stay until his visitor visa expires in January and then he is off to figure out what he wants to do with the next stage of his retirement life. I am providing a bridge between the first stage of retirement where he provided hospice care for his parents into the next part where he has only himself to worry about for the rest of his life and he wants to find a new place to make a community. He can’t afford to go back to California and he doesn’t like most of the rest of the US so he is hoping for somewhere in Europe. Ok.

I am autistic. If you tell me there is a plan… I’m going to be super overly literal about that and bulldoze towards it.

As a result a lot of the time since then has been working on pointing out which behaviors were appropriate in a small shitty Texas town, so you learned them as a child, and they were tolerated in other parts of the US but they will be problematic now. Small example: the first time my youngest kid (not yet primary school aged) pulled off her shirt because she spilled a drink all over herself he melodramatically gasped super loudly and put his hands over his face and exclaimed “Oh my god that is totally inappropriate.” Yeah dude… Europeans are not going to tolerate that obnoxious American/Christian weirdness about bodies. I get it. The first time I saw a kid, who was clearly starting puberty, strip buck naked at the park to play in the wading pool I blinked hard and thought to myself, “We aren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

I feel like I am also providing a low-key “Woke School” experience by pointing out the places where he expresses casual racism/sexism/learned helplessness/passive aggression/toxic masculinity/and of course the perennial favourite: lying about stupid shit because he wants to deny anything that might feel embarrassing. Basically my mantra is: “Ok Boomer, it is past time to get your shit together.”

I’ve gotta say, he has come really far in a short period of time. He is accepting criticism. He thinks about it on his own and comes back to me with refining questions. His behavior is shifting in fairly dramatic ways over time. He is trying. On one hand I have very little patience with explaining this sort of stuff to the vast majority of cis-het white men of his generation but as I told him he put a lot of deposits in the bank of Krissy & G’s relationship and he has a lot of credit to pull from. It’s a little weird feeling like I am making a man in his late 60’s into a malleable lump of clay and shaping him to work better for what he wants in his future. Clearly how he has been working has not resulted in him getting the things he wants in life (since he has not managed to achieve any of his goals in life as per his description of his life) and figuring out how to be more effective going forward.

The other night he said, “I was so grateful when you said I could come here after my parents died. I knew that you would really see me and then pick on me and be mean to me and love me and kick my ass until I was the best version of myself so that I could face what comes next. You are the most incredible friend I’ve had in my entire life.”

It kinda hit me that he essentially described my “brand”. I will look at you and see the good and the bad and think you deserve love no matter what. I will explain what you are doing that is bothering people/preventing you from finding what you want. I will absolutely, MOST DEFINITELY kick your ass if you are doing stupid shit and tell you to knock it off. I will give you a list of skills and behaviors to work on and I will not give undeserved praise… ever. If I give you a compliment you’d better savour that shit because I don’t give them often or for anything undeserved. You’ve gotta work before I praise.

There have been some rocky days since he got here but all in all I am grateful for this time. I’m helping him understand some of the ways that toxic masculinity has fucked him. I’m helping him embrace his soft-boyness and brainstorm ways he can become part of a new community by finding ways to share his many physical and emotional skills and not hide in his room hiding his sadness and pain behind his drinking.

I’m not even trying to work on his alcoholism. I understand when a rock is too big for me to push. Instead I am expressing loving support for the fact that he clearly feels he needs this coping method and his brain is trying to help him survive. Show some compassion for the fact that you have gotten this far with your shoddy, not awesome coping methods and maybe you will feel enough better about yourself over time that you will need it less and it can fade away.

You do not have to be perfect to deserve being loved. You do have to find ways to make sure your jagged edges don’t cut anyone you are trying to get close to, but that’s not the same thing as needing to be perfect.

I have to believe people deserve love even when they aren’t perfect. I am very far from perfect and I will never get closer.

Every couple of days he tells me again that he feels overwhelmed by how generous and loving I am being. That’s a little hard to hear because sometimes I feel like I am being such a bitch by pointing out the shit that sucks. If you point out the problems, that must mean you are the problem. We all have our old, shitty tapes in our heads. I mean… he did offer to pay for my pot the rest of the time he is here because I am so much easier to deal with. That was uhhhh pointed.

Even though I am prickly and difficult I do still show love. I provide food and housing and I make sure no one ever says a negative word about his drinking or smoking even though my whole household is really repulsed by cigarettes. I made him a safe, sheltered place to smoke so he can do what he needs to do. I am not a soft and gentle person but I am caring. I suppose that is what people mean when they say they aren’t nice but they are kind. I am not nice. I do not only say things you want to hear. But I will bend over backwards to provide you with safety and security and space to work through your demons. I will listen to you process all the shit in your life that is holding you back and help you figure out what you need to do to change the arc of your story going forward.

I’m not an easy person to love. But if I love you I will absolutely kick your ass into being the very best version of yourself you can be. You will never be perfect: reaching for perfection means you don’t learn how to be ok with good enough. Good enough is fucking great. I see so much potential in you. I want you to see it too.

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.

Gathering for honoring Andrew Conway

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I would like to meet up with people in San Francisco on Saturday in the late afternoon/evening to collectively grieve and share stories about Andrew Conway. I am not sure where to meet as there is a 96% chance of rain so outside is unlikely to work (unless someone can think of a place outside with good cover?)
Does anyone know of a place that would be good to meet?

I would definitely prefer that it be a sober event as that was such an integral part of Andrew’s life at the end.

The last few years have been filled with so much loss and isolation and fear. I would really appreciate having an opportunity to connect and share our mutual love and respect for someone who was a tremendous force of life. Andrew lived more fiercely and broadly than most other people manage. He touched (not like that) many lives. It would be wonderful to get to see each other’s faces (with masks) and celebrate that we were all blessed to know him. Even when he was a twerp.

I have a public Facebook post as well. I will try to post updates here if I get more comments over there. Please feel free to share it with anyone who might want to see it. I would really appreciate suggestions for where to meet up.

Paula has said she might drop in but she is not sure she is ready to process this with a big group. She gave me her blessing to ask folks to meet up this week even though she may not be up for being present.

Bring all of your Andrew stories. I originally was thinking Golden Gate Park so folks could juggle and crack whips but of course this has to be the weekend San Francisco gets weather.

Share widely! Giving away porn (San Francisco, maybe Scotland)

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Hey folks, it might be easier to share a post.

A very dear member of the San Francisco community has passed away. I was asked to take care of dispersing books and toys. I am working on a Google Sheet with a list of the books.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vDqzyDpkkNp8jLGcTpRL-hi3ztTLKSRxesC-kyAK18M/edit?usp=sharing

I got started yesterday but I am far from done. Yesterday I processed books as fast as I could and snapped photographs of spines of more. I have added what I could get from the photographs this morning. I will be going back today to fill in the information I couldn’t get from the pictures. I will take more pictures and try to get all of the book data entered by Thursday night.

I will try to make time to meet up with people on Friday, Saturday, and early Sunday. I fly out on Sunday evening. Any books that haven’t been picked up in San Francisco or claimed by Scots for me to bring home will be taken to Half Price Books early on Sunday.

Act fast! I will not be able to deliver books all over the place. We will have to meet in/near San Francisco as I am racing the clock and I don’t have much time for driving all over.

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.

The ties that bind

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This “community” we have as perverts is wide and shallow and yet so deep. The friends we make here are the witnesses to our lives. We see each other through loves and losses. We feed each other and we laugh. We show up for births and parties and holidays and deaths.

If you hang around very long you start seeing the old timers from your youth retiring or moving into care homes or hospitals and eventually they just go back through the process of becoming part of everything again. The spark that animated the very specific soul flickers then goes out.

I watch folks fuss at the problem of how to make swimming in this shark infested sea safe. I don’t think safety exists here.

I think there is transcendence and beauty and honor and horror here. I am here for it. I am here for as much of it as I can get.

I make friends with younger folks while knowing that I am writing the story of what they will remember when my own flame flickers out.

For now I just hurry so I can bloody my fingers rubbing the skin of one of my favorite sharks before he sinks forever. His wisdom will stay in the world. His love and generosity have already kept countless other souls from giving up. He kept me from giving up. He made sure I could eat and get to work and school. He gave me so much.

This blood in the water is really the least he deserves.

I will keep swimming. I will remember what he taught me. I will pass on anything I can. Sharks aren’t hoarders, they take what they need to live and they pass on the rest.

But I must keep swimming. I am a shark and swimming is how we stay alive.

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.

Monsters Under the Bed

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I wrote this and put it in other places but I think some friends here could use seeing it.

Sometimes you get cocky. You think, “Hey the monsters under my bed haven’t come out for a long time. Maybe I made friends with them and they decided to leave me alone as an act of mercy. Maybe they died of natural causes. Maybe…. one of the many chemical warfare bombs I threw under their killed them. Maybe.”

Then something happens. Maybe you knock a glass off your bedside table and it shatters on the floor. Maybe a support plank in your bed gives way and makes a loud creaking sound when you move. It might be a big sound or it might be a small sound. It really doesn’t matter. There was never much sense behind the monsters coming after you anyway. They have their own agenda.

So you step lightly off your bed expecting to walk peacefully off to the bathroom to brush your teeth.

Even when they came out often you never really learned how to hop off the bed fast enough and far enough away to get away from them. Their arms are so long. They can grab you so hard and pull you so close. Their teeth when they bite you are so sharp–so terribly razor sharp. Their teeth are a bear trap. If you move very much you are going to tear the wound and make yourself bleed out. Instantly your stomach fills with the sharp, acrid, acidic, burning poison of fear.

You are always so terribly terribly afraid that even if the bleeding doesn’t kill you first your body is going to produce so much acid that you will destroy yourself from the inside. You’ve been so close in the past. The acid burned holes in you so that you could barely eat, barely sleep, it burned through the tissues of your body making terrible pain absolutely everywhere.

You will never, ever forget that pain.

So when it starts you have to first go very very still. So still that you calm down all the way to the atoms of your body. So still that it feels like if you are not careful even this paralysis might kill you. You have to slow down enough to figure out how you are going to get help.

You can’t be casual about getting help. If you ask the wrong person they think they can toss you a screwdriver or a metal nail file and tell you to pry it open yourself.

You are stupid. If the only tool that you have to hand is one that will poorly break open the seal and probably slip sideways in the blood and cause you to damage yourself even more terribly… you will use it. You are scared and you are hurting and thinking is almost an impossible task. You are desperate. Thinking requires so much will. So that first decision, “Who can I ask for help?” is maybe the first, last, and only time you will be able to think.

You have to make sure that you carefully only ask for help from people who have the right tools in their toolbox. People who have experience with this kind of atrocity. People who will neither flinch nor minimize the severity of the wound. Probably these are people who climb out of their own beds very carefully because they are currently at a détente with the monsters under their own bed. They know deep in their bones what is at stake if they fuck up.

Make no mistake, that monster wants you dead.

If you choose very carefully and you manage to pick wisely and your dear, wonderful, important friend helps you to get the trap open that doesn’t mean you have to cling to them for all of the healing. They can pack up their tools and head back on their own journey. Someone else will probably be along soon and bandages and medicine are so much easier to get help with.

It’s getting the damn trap open that usually sinks a person. That moment is do or die. That moment decides if you will have more moments. That moment when you go quiet and you pull yourself in and you weigh carefully exactly who you can ask…

It’s everything.

You had better hope you made the right friends. You had better hope they have their toolbag with them when they happen to hear your call.

Sometimes you get lucky. You can limp away. You are reminded that you did not actually kill the monsters. The war is not over. You will have to keep fighting.

But for now you can rest. Rest and heal. Be grateful that you made the right friends. Be ready to help them with their own monsters when the need arises. Because as sure as the sun will rise those monsters are going to keep trying to kill you all.

The monsters under the bed

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Sometimes you get cocky. You think, “Hey the monsters under my bed haven’t come out for a long time. Maybe I made friends with them and they decided to leave me alone as an act of mercy. Maybe they died of natural causes. Maybe…. one of the many chemical warfare bombs I threw under their killed them. Maybe.”

Then something happens. Maybe you knock a glass off your bedside table and it shatters on the floor. Maybe a support plank in your bed gives way and makes a loud creaking sound when you move. It might be a big sound or it might be a small sound. It really doesn’t matter. There was never much sense behind the monsters coming after you anyway. They have their own agenda.

So you step lightly off your bed expecting to walk peacefully off to the bathroom to brush your teeth.

Even when they came out often you never really learned how to hop off the bed fast enough and far enough away to get away from them. Their arms are so long. They can grab you so hard and pull you so close. Their teeth when they bite you are so sharp–so terribly razor sharp. Their teeth are a bear trap. If you move very much you are going to tear the wound and make yourself bleed out. Instantly your stomach fills with the sharp, acrid, acidic, burning poison of fear.

You are always so terribly terribly afraid that even if the bleeding doesn’t kill you first your body is going to produce so much acid that you will destroy yourself from the inside. You’ve been so close in the past. The acid burned holes in you so that you could barely eat, barely sleep, it burned through the tissues of your body making terrible pain absolutely everywhere.

You will never, ever forget that pain.

So when it starts you have to first go very very still. So still that you calm down all the way to the atoms of your body. So still that it feels like if you are not careful even this paralysis might kill you. You have to slow down enough to figure out how you are going to get help.

You can’t be casual about getting help. If you ask the wrong person they think they can toss you a screwdriver or a metal nail file and tell you to pry it open yourself.

You are stupid. If the only tool that you have to hand is one that will poorly break open the seal and probably slip sideways in the blood and cause you to damage yourself even more terribly… you will use it. You are scared and you are hurting and thinking is almost an impossible task. You are desperate. Thinking requires so much will. So that first decision, “Who can I ask for help?” is maybe the first, last, and only time you will be able to think.

You have to make sure that you carefully only ask for help from people who have the right tools in their toolbox. People who have experience with this kind of atrocity. People who will neither flinch nor minimize the severity of the wound. Probably these are people who climb out of their own beds very carefully because they are currently at a détente with the monsters under their own bed. They know deep in their bones what is at stake if they fuck up.

Make no mistake, that monster wants you dead.

If you choose very carefully and you manage to pick wisely and your dear, wonderful, important friend helps you to get the trap open that doesn’t mean you have to cling to them for all of the healing. They can pack up their tools and head back on their own journey. Someone else will probably be along soon and bandages and medicine are so much easier to get help with.

It’s getting the damn trap open that usually sinks a person. That moment is do or die. That moment decides if you will have more moments. That moment when you go quiet and you pull yourself in and you weigh carefully exactly who you can ask…

It’s everything.

You had better hope you made the right friends. You had better hope they have their toolbag with them when they happen to hear your call.

Sometimes you get lucky. You can limp away. You are reminded that you did not actually kill the monsters. The war is not over. You will have to keep fighting.

But for now you can rest. Rest and heal. Be grateful that you made the right friends. Be ready to help them with their own monsters when the need arises. Because as sure as the sun will rise those monsters are going to keep trying to kill you all.

There is always a cost

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I am so worn out and I am trying to both rest and catch up and it strikes me that they are diametrically opposed. My growing zone has an annual last frost date somewhere between the last 4 days of April and the first 5 days of May. There was snow on the ground last week. Because of the world-wide problems with insect die off it is widely considered wise to wait until the average temperature is 10C or above. This is slightly hilarious to me because only July and August have night time averages above 10C… the average is 11C. Does that mean we shouldn’t ever disturb gardens here? It’s a thought to ponder. (Waiting until the temperature rises is because bugs hibernate when it is cold and if you go out and tidy up your garden you may well kill off a generation of wee beasties unintentionally.)

Tasks I need to perform:

  • install bike pulleys
  • install trailer pulleys
  • build a better compost unit (my pallets are all rotting and sagging)
  • sift my compost pile and distribute the lovely material around my garden
  • get some fertilizer on my hydrangeas and all the food plants
  • finish taking apart the old shed for boards
  • build the potting benches for my poly tunnel and the raised beds I want to have in there
  • weed, always weeding around the fence borders because the ground elder is fierce
  • get more wood chips and cover more grass with it because by golly in about 4 years I will have subdued it enough to make a serious start on alternative ground covering plants
  • get more seeds because I only had like 5 packets of veg seeds left, and they were mostly gone in any case, and I need to get cracking on starting this year’s plants
  • figure out storage for the mountain of costumes I brought home from Texas
  • respond to cafe owner about holding meet ups for the youth group
  • schedule a walking munch and the 101 workshops
  • clean my dang bathroom
  • tidy up my room because right now it is a royal mess
  • restart the subscription orders from the grocery service
  • do a bit more pushing with the mum bike group to get some activities scheduled
  • figure out when the group camping trip is happening and get myself organized for that
  • install the trailer hitch on the new bike so that I can have towing capacity when I have extra passengers
  • get YC more time out on the balance bike because she has nearly outgrown it and I don’t really want to buy a bigger one I want her to progress to pedals, dangit
  • schedule with a freakin roofer
  • schedule with a plumber for the apartment bathroom (the sink is leaking)
  • schedule getting the retaining walls repaired around the property because it is past time
  • I really should be reading books because, dude
  • don’t forget the damn skin care routine
  • oh yeah I should eventually have sex with my husband
  • all of my kids could do with some one on one time because they are all feeling super needy and emotional
  • I really need to organize group bicycle skill training for my family because my instructions are not adequate to help all of them know what they need to know
  • I need to organize specific training in bike maintenance because this is causing a lot of fighting and fussing and it is driving me insane
  • I should submit data to the national database about when my fucking fruit trees are in flower because tracking this stuff is important
  • the XR people would really appreciate it if I took on more duties, as would the allotment people
  • oh yeah, I also need to schedule some physics experiments because my kids really don’t understand some basic elements that would make cycling go better
  • I need to sit on my kids more industriously about working on their school work because that is literally one of my main jobs
  • I haven’t touched up the sloppy paint areas in my room I was going to come back to
  • I want to move the white board from the kitchen into my bedroom so I can use it to track forking lists like this
  • I also want to change a bunch of how I store things in the kitchen/dining room/laundry room because the current set up is inefficient, sloppy, and difficult to keep tidy
  • I should also be more industrious about exercising and eating vegetables and going to fucking sleep at a reasonable time

Yeah. Fuck me. I still have almost constant headaches and neck aches from the concussion. The sensitivity to light is really bothering me but I have to push through it anyway. I am still feeling stupid and like I am not retaining new information. I feel unmotivated and weary and frustrated at basically every moment of every day.

Visiting Noah’s family was intense. I feel like I understand the dynamics a bit better. I have much stronger opinions about what I would guess for various folks’ diagnostic labels but I try not to say those out loud too much because I am not an expert and I am not seeing any of these people in any kind of professional capacity so it’s a dick thing for me to call out. However, it helps me decide how I should respond in terms of my own behavior and as long as it is my opinion and judgment and it exists in my head and I’m not trying to influence other people I think it is ok. It’s funny to me how much I can now go, “Oh yeah. I’m trying to place a rules system around this topic because that helps me understand it.” I don’t want to make other people agree with me or change… heck I don’t plan to see any of those people again for 3-5 years. I will barely communicate with them through rare letters.

I believe it is important for me to think about things in this way because I have to think in a long term way if I am going to manage the historical trauma my children have inherited. I happen to be a big believer in the epigenetic nature of trauma. The things that happened to their parents impact them. The things that happened to their grandparents impact them. The things that happened to their great grandparents impact them. That said, neuroplasticity and resilience count for so very much. And let’s not discount the benefit of various levels of privilege.

I don’t need to try hard to control other people. I need to know what I need to think about when it comes to my own behavior and what I am modeling for my children. That’s what I am doing here.

I mean, I can worry about the gardening and the social life and the academics and the house maintenance… but what I am actually fucking doing here is figuring out how to raise people who can come from a fairly intense amount of ancestral trauma and thrive. Their mental health, their resilience, their ability to grow and change and find a better path is what I am fucking doing with my life.

I lose sight of that. I get mired in the weeds (literal and figurative) because it is easier to put my head down and just do whatever is in front of me. When I do that I invite inconsistency and acting out unconscious patterns. I invite the repetition of behaviors that have already damaged their bodies through their inherited genetics and what the fuck am I doing; I know better. I don’t need to shove them through survival. I don’t need to create lists of tasks so long that no lifetime can contain them all and then convince my children that they are inadequate if they aren’t working their bodies into dust.

Life is not about grinding yourself in a mortar and pestle. It’s just not. There are costs to those behaviors and attitudes: impatience, lack of understanding, lack of dignity, unkindness, addictive behaviors, unhealthy bodies and minds.

Noah’s grandmother survived, but the costs her children paid were so severe that they cannot bear her presence. There is duty there, some of them still serve that duty, but there is no love. Her grandchildren can barely tolerate her. Her great grandchildren are split on despising her or on not knowing her. She accomplished fairly impressive things. What was the cost? She lies on a bed alone in a room day after day. Most of the people who have ever known her have no interest in her company. Was what she accomplished worth the cost?

Noah’s mother mostly has good relationships with her children. Noah fleeing the nest as early as he did and with such intensity seems to have made a lasting impression. She worked on her behavior. She came to therapy late in life but she did get there. That’s something. Is she perfect or healed or a person I would want to spend much time with? Oh goodness no. But the difference between how she acts now and how she acted when I met her over 15 years ago is dramatic. Not different enough for me to leave my children alone with her, even though she did ask politely.

I have stopped looking at the long run. I no longer weigh and measure how I behave based on the relationships I want to have with my 30 and 40 year old children. I am sloppy. I am messy. I am inconsistent. I am pursuing short term goals at long term cost. That is stupid. I am not modeling what I think should be modeled. I am not showing how to make better choices with a joyful heart. I am dragging myself through a series of tasks and I am short tempered and impatient. I don’t think I am being vicious but that should not be the bar. Frankly I am not happy with how I have behaved for a while. I’m distracted. I’m snippy. I am not performing the behaviors I believe are necessary because I am wearing myself to the bone on things that matter so much less.

This is not what I want my children to remember. Do I think they need to have some challenges and some difficulties in life in order to build resiliency? Of course. That doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to be outward focused. I want to be focused in on the people I made commitments to.

Krissy, you know who you are supposed to be. Go fucking act like it. Or you will pay the cost.

Put Yourself In The Story

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It’s hard to explain what I mean when I say that I can tell I am not doing very well. Yet I need to explain it to me so that I can change it. I feel out of control. I feel like I lack focus and power to decide who and what I want to be. When I feel like this I tend to fall hard into the helper mode, by golly I will offer to help fucking everyone then I feel like I have nothing left for myself. I will pour out all of my lifeblood into something I don’t care about and at the end of the day I feel exhausted and empty and like I did nothing that makes my life feel like it is worth living. I am not acting like I am the main fucking character. 

I’m not trying to be all narcissistic about this and act like I need to be the main character of everyone else’s story, just my own. It is actually healthy to be the main character of your own story—that’s not maladjusted thinking. Subsuming yourself into everyone around you is a problem. That’s not healthy; it’s a lack of boundaries. Boundaries aren’t rules you enforce on other people boundaries are knowing where you end and where other people begin. Boundaries are knowing what is for yourself and knowing what is for other people and making sure you put enough gas in your own gas tank so that you can keep the damn car on the road.

For example: I am genuinely fulfilled by gardening work. When I keep myself so busy I don’t have time or physical energy to do it I feel shitty. I can feel this shift as spring comes on in Inverness that was a lot more muddy in California. The kinds of work I can do outside are different over the seasons in a way I still haven’t adjusted to yet. Combining this with the fact that bike events are going to increase in frequency and time length means I need to be putting gardening on the calendar in concrete and demanding ways. It’s also competing with kid school/social stuff and that’s a whole long blog post of its own.

But that’s not the only thing. And Jesus this next bit is going to sound cunty and this is the kind of thing that makes it feel scary to write anymore. There are pieces of being married that chafe sometimes and I need to find a greater degree of peace with them. We went to a rope workshop (we meaning Noah and I… not the kids… obviously) and I want that to continue and I want us to figure out how to deal with some of our challenges in that department. It’s kind of funny that most of the time I feel like I am the complainer in my marriage and then there are times when I feel pretty fucking rude in my judgment of Noah’s complaints. It’s not an attractive trait on my part. There are times and ways that Noah really struggles with being able to explain or understand things and he launches into these long winded rants about why it’s impossible or unfair or almost malicious on other people’s faults that he can’t learn from an explanation someone else is giving. God damn in those moments I notice that he and MC have that in common so maybe MC’s complaining style isn’t entirely inherited from me. It’s dramatic to me because I really struggle with being patient with him in those moments; I feel a lot more comfortable telling MC to just knock it off. I cannot listen to the rant right now. Rope, dancing, some of the challenges around travel are all pinch points where I think God damn you are autistic. There are ways that Noah really struggles to understand why he needs to explain something in a certain way in order to solve a problem. To be fair I know that I have places where I am absolutely shit at solving problems because I get stressed out and I just can’t do a thing and sometimes those are situations that Noah is preternaturally gifted at getting into the zone and he can just solve the thing. 

It is really hard when I feel like I am in a moment where I have to solve all of the things and the thing I could do to be the best wife and mother in that moment is to stop looking for help or support. I fucked up some steps in figuring out the trip we are on right this minute. (Side note: going to Texas. On a plane right this minute but we will be on the ground when I post this. Noah’s grandmother is in her last days on earth. More about this in a bit.) I did a crappy job of task sharing for the planning and as a result we had a few problems that could have been ameliorated. I absolutely should not have expected that he understand all of the levels of preparation needed but I did. I fucked up several layers of planning because all of the covid shit is a god damn nightmare and I did not understand how hard that was going to be. I landed us in a very stressful position through ineffective planning then I turned and wanted him to fix some pieces while knowing that he is not that effective at remembering/understanding all of the pieces he has to communicate in those situations. 

I need to go back to the beginning on this. It’s rather a complicated story with layers of stupid that are absolutely completely my fault. Booking was really shitty and I couldn’t understand why to begin with. I think American Airlines was just doing a website upgrade and I happened to be trying to book last minute at the absolute worst time. It took a series of phone calls over a couple of hours to research flights and book with points. Going back and forth between different credit cards because some chunks were in one currency and other chunks were in a different currency. I did this booking on Tuesday expecting to fly on Thursday. Wednesday I took off to take YC to her class for the day and track down our car seat. That took hours because we had to ride all over town tracking down the car seat cause the dude who is borrowing it was out of town and his ex, my friend, and I had to ride up a big hill to get the key to his van then ride across town to get to where the van is parked and get the actual seat. It was a very demanding ride and she was a great sport about it but we probably did 8ish miles at the very last minute. It was tiring and I couldn’t be grumpy with her to go faster when I have a battery and she doesn’t. I did not explain to Noah before I left just how many steps we had to go through when I got home. Instead I got home and said “Ok everybody let’s go” thinking we could just go get the covid test for the flight done.

First stupid: I thought I could get a covid test at a local pharmacy for flying since I see ads for them all the time. Turns out that the pharmacy offers that service in other cities but not in our city since we are so small. I figured this out while everybody was standing in the driveway with their bikes while I frantically searched on my phone. It started fucking hailing. Insult to fucking injury. Ok, put the bikes away because in our city literally the only place that does the covid test is the airport and they don’t start doing that service until the hour after the plane I booked us on for getting to London and they were out of appointments for the day before so we couldn’t grab a taxi and head over to do it that day. In retrospect in the moment I realised what I did wrong I probably should have just called AA and told them about the problem and rebooked the whole damn thing. That’s my fuck up. Instead I figured out how to get us to London Wednesday night on a different airline very late so we could be at the airport for tests at 6am so we had a 4 hour window for the flight to the states. 

Second massive fuck up on my part: now I am questioning myself. I went through about 5 different sites trying to figure out how to get the covid testing done and at least one of them said YC couldn’t be given a test so I thought that meant she didn’t need one. Yeah I was completely and totally fucking wrong. She needed a test. I booked the other 4 of us in. If I had booked all 5 of us in then we would have totally made the original flight and it all would have been fine. The lines in Heathrow were absolutely insane because it turns out that Wednesday at about 2 they had a giant fucking software problem and they had to cancel all British Airways flights. Nightmare! We waited in lines so long that by the time we figured out the fuck up with YC we didn’t have time to get on the original flight. We were in fucking lines for 4 hours and got back up to the front about 5 fucking minutes after the time we needed for security and getting across the terminal. The terminal is huge. 

Third fuck up: I should not have sent Noah to negotiate fixing this on his own. We had two reservations and he didn’t bang hard enough on that point so the employee he found who fixed the reservation for the other four of us didn’t fix his part. Then we waited in endless lines again and didn’t figure out the fuck up until we were minutes away from missing the rebooked flight. Holy.Fucking.Shit. AA booked the original tickets (on a BA flight) so BA said they couldn’t fix the reservations or rebook us. We had to go to go over to AA. AA could fix the reservations but they couldn’t print the boarding passes. So we were expected to wait in the multi-hour lines on both sides of the terminal. Fucking awesome. It was a zoo of hysterical people because they were all trying to figure out how to fix up everything that happened the day before. God damn nightmare.

In that last few minutes Noah was actually great and he went right up to the front and insisted the problem be treated like an emergency. That’s not an easy thing for him to do and it’s important to recognise in my head how much he struggles with exactly that type of problem and he came through. The kids and I caught up just in time for me to tell them about the two reservations so they could finally get it right because his explanation wasn’t helping them understand why it wasn’t working. A fucking awesome AA employee grabbed a BA person and said “You are printing this pass. Right now.” Then she walked us through security to get there faster. Thank you Jenny! We got to the gate in time to grab a few drinks because we were all super dehydrated and get on the plane. We didn’t have time to sit down in the terminal. We were at the airport from 6am and we got on a flight at 2:40. We were in lines just about that whole time. The poor kids were really amazing. Noah was patient. I tried hard to be patient and only think my impatience. 

Out of battery.

Alright, finishing this in the hotel room while Noah and EC are sleeping and MC and YC are loudly playing with dolls.

Right around the point we got on the plane from London my watch started beeping at me that it was almost out of battery and I realised I forgot the charging cable. Damnit.

We barely made it through customs and lines in Phoenix to jump on the plane to Houston. Our bags did not follow us to Phoenix. We all sat separately on all of the flights. YC was my buddy, Noah sat alone, and MC and EC said they got through the flights without fighting at all. That’s great. YC did super well; she has no memory of previous travel and her behaviour on this trip shows me really dramatically how different her life has been. She has no habits around keeping her voice down or staying near me in crowds. She does not know how to manage her body so she doesn’t kick other people in tight quarters. She is not used to strangers and she’s really shy in a lot of circumstances. It’s fascinating not being able to tell what parts of her behaviour come from her different personality and what parts come from the different nurturance because our life is completely different. 

Got to Houston and put in a baggage claim report. Now on the computer I am not able to look up anything on the computer. This sucks. I need to call the airport and I don’t have an American sim card so I don’t have a phone for calls or data. We couldn’t pick up the rental car last night because it was closed by the time our flight landed so we took a shuttle to the hotel. I think my next step should be leaving Noah and the kids in the hotel and going back to the airport on my own to get the rental car. Noah doesn’t need to be with me because his American license is expired and he doesn’t have a UK one yet. I will be doing all the driving. Then I need to go buy a booster seat because we can’t take YC in a car without one and I don’t think the car seat is going to show up for days. We also don’t have toothbrushes or clean clothes. This is going to be fun.

Another day, another adventure. It’s probably time for me to get moving.

Pacing

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I am sure there are many people who would not appreciate me saying this: but I miss lock down. I didn’t have to worry about balancing the various needs of my family members with various outside the home activities and people while also figuring out when to get chores done. I slept more and more consistently. Lately my sleep is shit again.

One of the problems with the age spread of my children is that the shape of providing “structure” for each of them is different. Youngest Child is still small enough that she should mainly be around kids through classes and they all want to start mid-morning and last for around an hour before popping the kids out on the other side expecting snacks and a trip to the park. Most parents of children in similar ages are either nearly in nursery or already in nursery and they are specifically training the kids around having the habit of being out of the house 5 days a week for most of the day so the children manage the transition to primary school.

I get it… but I also find that doing that in the morning mostly shoots my wad and I’m too tired to come home and do a big project of my own unless I do it after dinner and give up sleep. If I am out for the morning the mid-afternoon to dinner chunk is mostly me interacting with the older kids around their school stuff and my brain is just not currently capable of doing something for me while I talk to them. Yay ADHD medication? It feels like too tired because I can’t push my brain into doing many things at once on this medication unless I am super well rested.

If I get a good night of sleep and I start my project early in the day then I can normally handle talking to the older kids about a second thing while I work. (Most projects of this type being garden or cleaning related.) I can talk to them about their literature reading progress first thing in the morning while we continue working on removing nails from the old shed boards because we are going to repurpose the wood. But if I try to do the exact same thing starting at 1 or 2 I get confused and befuddled and irritated and angry. My brain says I can fuck all the way off.

So I’m not making forward progress on a lot of the outside projects I want to do since YC started classes and that’s feeling frustrating. The older kids have enjoyed the descent into too-much screen time that happened during my last painting project and they are absolutely loathe to give it up. They really won’t come out in the mid-afternoon and help me. I can push it in the mornings.

This pacing is not working and I feel exhausted and crappy most of the time. It doesn’t help that Noah’s work schedule is hard to figure out and manage. Working for a company that is 5 hours behind us in time zones gets to be pretty challenging.

I am almost to the end of this session of little kid classes. I am going to try and move the timing. If I can get her into classes that are more like after lunch and less like after breakfast then maybe I can get the big kids through helping me instead of getting on video games first thing then fighting to not have to get off later.

I am getting to the point where I am low key signaling distress in ways I don’t mean to and that’s a problem. Fairly random strangers keep asking me if I have any support because it sounds like I have a lot going on. It depends on what you mean by support but mostly… no. I have been shoving my mental health care needs in a box for a couple of years now. Every so often I open the box long enough to shove something else in then I quickly tape over it again. I’m not ok. I know that lots of people aren’t ok and I don’t have it bad in the scheme of things.

I’m not ok and I don’t have a way to cope with that right now. Therapy isn’t an option–I spoke with my GP recently about head injury stuff. In the course of the conversation she asked me how I was overall coping and I told her not that well. I had previously believed that I would be a lifer in therapy then I moved here and that’s not an option. She told me that she thinks I am being very kind to notice just how limited the access to therapy is here and deliberately not put myself on a waiting list. She told me that she has seen me enough times now to have a sense of me and she thinks that any of the therapists in town could be nothing other than a kind and sympathetic ear because they don’t have more training than I do after how much therapy I’ve had.

This is not the first local expert who has told me that I am the best source of support, tools, and tactics for managing my issues and those of my children in this area. Apparently I put those decades of living in the bay and having access to experts to very good use. Every so often one or the other of the older kids has something challenging happen with regard to mental health because they are people and life is complicated. When that happens I ensure that we have privacy and we get into the heavy stuff. Both kids have said, “I’m sure if I tell you about (_____) you will be upset with me.” I tell them to give me a minute so I can fix my face. Then I put on the “I will not judge you; I will be supportive and unsurprised by anything you say because it’s ok for you to be a person on your journey” face. We talk about their big feelings and the situation and why it is both normal and ok that they are struggling. We talk about the fact that it is hard that we can’t hire therapists to be there through these sorts of things going forward. We talk about what things they can imagine doing to change the situation. I ask if they want to hear about any other options I know about–sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. Boundaries, yo.

I am not your therapist. I will never be a completely neutral party. I will never be 100% on your side because I am often the person you are in the most conflict with. That is rough. But I am not going to judge all of the things you think I will judge. I am not going to be upset about even half of the things you think I will be upset about. And as you get older I will have to be less and less of who you consider when you decide how you will solve a problem. That is the way forward. I am not and I can never be your therapist but I can help you talk out some of what is bothering you. I definitely don’t have all of your answers but pretty often I do have useful questions. I have been very lucky in my life and the state of California made sure that I had access to lots of people who asked good questions.

I need to start writing even if I am afraid of consequences. I am going to be the closest thing to a therapist I have going forward. That process doesn’t work well without the blog. As my Eldest Child says: “When I write something just for me I delete it or rip it up most of the time because it never seems worth keeping. When I just go ahead and post it right away then even when it isn’t perfect I get feedback and I have to act like it was real and I have to carry on forward as if it has happened and can’t be taken back.”

Of course, she is talking about the status of her fanfic and she’s posting on Wattpad so it’s slightly different. I’ve gotta say that her comments are probably more vicious than mine ever are. I worry about the consequences of my writing because working out my feelings is not a pretty process. Sometimes I hurt people when they know what is going on inside me. If I just shut my stupid mouth and stand near them then they don’t know what an asshole I am and things carry on without too big of a problem.

Being real about all the strife inside my brain is scary. I just about always have as much pull towards people as I have push away from them. My magnetic polarity is really confused.

The thing is: I do shitty things to hurt myself when I don’t work through the stuff in my brain. I am long past the point of the kinds of self-harm that would land me in a psych ward but I am not kind to myself. I do not take good enough care. I do things that will cause long-term damage through neglect or lack of love. It’s little, cumulative things but nothing dramatic that will force other people to intervene. I am smart and I don’t want intervention so let me tell you I will stay below that fucking radar for the rest of my life. There is a lot of room under the radar line to hit a bird and have it destroy an engine.

I am not acting like I am a creature I love who needs to be taken care of. That means I can’t model what that means and that’s a problem. I am very certain that I will never again have a person I talk to all the time to help me sort out my brain. So I have to do it. I need to start doing it a lot again. Which also means I need to stop sitting in this damn chair and use the standing desk. That’s going to have to be step one, Krissy.