Middle Child has a strong desire to do a few programs in town that require qualifications. So they looked up where to go to get the qualifications and how. We have a few workbook type things in the house that help us figure out the local expectations for these ages/grades. Specifically they will need the English qualification and so they looked up the reading list and got started with stuff from our library.

There are a lot of times while home educating that I don’t feel particularly confident or secure that I am doing the right thing. I believe that education doesn’t need to come from a school to be valid. I also believe that when a person has been free they are able to catch up on years worth of learning in a very short period of time. My kids have done it with maths. MC has a plan to get through catching up on 6 years of expectations. It helps that we are a highly literate house and most of those expectations are going to be bargain basement effort for them. They will not have to work hard to understand synonyms or antonyms. The biggest issues will be handwriting legibility and speed. We have a plan for that too.

I act on faith with teaching them. I talk to them broadly about the world and their potential place in it. We have a lot of philosophical conversations and we talk about politics and history constantly. Anytime we talk about politics it turns into a 10 layer deep discussion of all the factors leading up to whatever event. We are passionate about seeing the world through stories. It’s hard to believe that this is the right thing to do but the results I’m getting are amazing.

Trusting children is not an easy thing to do. I’m not sure how much that is my cultural experience of the world. Does anywhere trust children? Does any culture believe that children are smart and able to decide their own path? Does every culture think that children are ignorant and unable to decide? I’m not sure. I certainly have my speech down pat when I say, “The reason you have parents is because we can see further into the future about the cause and effect cycle and we are supposed to help you until you can see further on your own. Now go brush your teeth.” I am kind of obsessed with teeth brushing. My mother had lost all of her teeth by the age of 40. I’ve only lost 1 so far. My children have barely had cavities and are not on track for losing any teeth at all. This is good.

Shortie is blossoming all over the place lately. She can pedal her bike! She can go really far! She’s reading rather advanced books at a blistering speed. She’s learning a lot about history because she thinks it is fun. She’s getting much better at helping to clean up after her own messes all of a sudden. She is becoming a fun housemate. She wants to bake and sew and the price is cleaning up her messes in common areas. She says that it seems very reasonable that the requirement for making big messes is being able to clean them up.

All of a sudden she can see other perspectives and she’s willing to be respectful in ways she literally couldn’t be just a few months ago. I love watching these developmental leaps. They make my heart soar. They make me feel like we are going to be ok.

Eldest Child is less than 4 months away from being 18. This is feeling overwhelming for both of us. He keeps saying emphatically that he’s not ready and he’d like to keep our current dynamic going for longer. I told him no, I’m not going to keep being this bossy with him. Hell, I feel like I am the ghost of bossiness past with him these days. I don’t have to lecture him. He sees me and rattles off all the things I would have said to him when he was younger. He lectures his sister constantly repeating things I’ve said to him. I will never again be entitled to want to commit suicide. That’s off the table as an option permanently. Even so, I feel like if I died accidentally he would be an excellent guardian as she finishes growing up. He has internalised my voice so strongly that I believe he is going to be able to handle issues as they come up throughout life.

It’s really intense sometimes. I believed that I could create interesting people and help them get through the world without hating themselves. It was a science experiment. I had no reason to believe it would work out. It was a leap of faith. I went through the system in such a hodge podge way that it seemed reasonable to me that my kids could skip the system entirely and still come out fine. I think that’s going to be true. I already feel quite confident about where my son has landed. MC is on track to find their path. Shortie is acting like a person who is going to be able to chart her own path with glee and fervor.

I am so sad that Noah isn’t here to be gleeful with me. He had faith in my ability to do this. He signed on for a whole lifetime of supporting me in doing this. I am really sad he hasn’t been here to see our youngest find this independent spirit. I am sad he won’t see our son become a man. I am sad he doesn’t get to cheer our kid on as they find their voice and independence. He would be proud too.

I see his face in my mind all the time. He was so beautiful to me. He wasn’t classically handsome with his snaggle teeth and his lumps and lopsidedness. But when he looked at me he beamed like a ray of sunshine. He was always so happy to see us. He was so giving and kind and wonderful.

EC says he has a weird time talking about our marriage with other people. People say it sounds very abusive. Then he gets to give a long explanation about consent and unusual preferences and how things are abusive or acceptable based on your agreements. He understands that his dad and I were doing the best we could given where we started in life and we were more and more gentle with each other with every passing year. As we could be. It’s weird that EC is going to be my most significant witness in this life. He saw me and Noah more than anyone else. He is going to be my longest term live in relationship.

He will spend more time with me than any other human and he both likes me and respects me. How the heck did that happen?

He is assigning himself long lists of reading books so he can better explain characters in his stories. He wants to understand their mindsets better so he is compiling lists of books from the canon that the characters would like. When his friends ask him casual questions about his stories he responds with a 6 page essay and illustrations.

My son existing makes me feel so much better about myself. I have incredibly strong feelings about how awesome he is and I can’t miss how alike we are. He makes me feel like I am already a better person. He writes a lot of stories about traumatised people. I can see where he steals from what he has seen of me and his dad. He is so deeply insightful it breaks my heart. He tells people who ask that he has undergone fairly little trauma in his life–he had a shockingly happy childhood. But his parents were traumatised people who did their very best and this is what he learned from living with us. It’s humbling. It’s deeply rewarding to know that a lot of adults are now asking him for advice about how to cope with their problems. He has the ability to go do a lot of things with his life. He has nothing but possibilities in front of him.

My kid existing makes me feel so much better about myself. I see the ways we are alike and I see how much better they are at loving themself than I was at their age. I see them moving through the world and coping with strife and challenges with grace and poise. They decide they want things and then they figure out how to get them. I can’t wait to watch them go far.

My daughter existing makes me feel so much better about myself. She is wild and free. She is bursting into the world with all the energy of a newly born star and I am here for this adventure. Maybe even more than the other two I see the ways we are similar. I see how she is going to have a much rougher road than my first two children. She is not going to have that exceptional experience of living with Noah and me both trying to create a Wonderland away from the world. I think she is going to find ways to really dig into life here and she’s going to make herself happy.

I have never tested my children for IQ levels or anything like that. I know that they are extremely precocious and able to learn. My son makes me feel stupid on a regular basis. The only reason he doesn’t already know that he is a lot more intelligent than I am is because he hasn’t quite caught my backlog of experience. I suspect by the time he is 30 he will start to understand that he is a lot smarter than me. It’s humbling to live with him. My kid is a very different kind of smart and honestly it’s been more difficult for me to work with. They have needed very different teaching. I’ve had to throw a lot at the wall before I caught their interest on a lot of different topics. It’s wonderful watching them get to the level of independence where they can just go do stuff and learn stuff without needing my assistance as fully. It’s taken them longer to get to the level of being an autodidact. It has been interesting to me coping with how differently all of my children are extremely high needs. My son’s dyslexia has meant that he needed verbal instruction all the fucking time all his life. It’s exhausting trying to keep up with him. My kid needs intense coregulation and body doubling and they learn things in very slow and careful ways. It’s exhausting trying to slow down to go at their pace. I have had to learn a lot of meditation to be at their speed. It’s been fucking rough. My daughter is the one who feels more at my level. Frankly she’s not great at verbal instructions. She only sorta listens. I’m wondering about auditory processing stuff with her as well. She is like me in that she taught herself to read by 7 and she is already reading at an adult reading level. Her vocabulary and comprehension are off the charts. She can understand ridiculously complex concepts that she picks up on her own and then wants to explain to me. More than with the other two I must be her audience. WHICH IS FUCKING EXHAUSTING. If you know my children you know that all of us need an audience to listen to us think and unpack our brains.

When I say a child needs way more of that than the rest of us… that should be scary. She’s a lot.

Thank you, Noah, for being so crazy intense that you looked at me and thought our kids would be amazing. Thank you for wanting to be my partner for this life. It was an amazing journey together and I am a much better person because I knew you. Our children are better people because they had so much of you. Thank you for the gift if your time and your presence. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for choosing us. You made us feel special and that helped all of us move forward with purpose and no shame. We aren’t too much. It’s ok that we are very needy people, because we have each other. We need to be in relationships and we have put a lot of effort into figuring out how to create relationships. We know how to be very deliberate.

Integration is coming. The kids will meet my boyfriend in March. That’s feeling very soon. I’m looking forward to it. I appreciate the way the kids have had time to mourn and grieve while also knowing that a change will come. Each of them has asked different questions about him. They have all expressed positive impressions of him based on the way he has treated me this year. He’s a really good guy. I am deeply relieved that every conflict he can describe coming up in his past relationships with step children are things that I wouldn’t tolerate. I don’t anticipate there being much reason for friction. I don’t see any big red flags or signs of obvious incompatibility. I’ve been looking. I’ve been trying hard not to be too steeped in NRE and the honeymoon phase. We spend a lot of time talking and I ask him a lot of questions. I’m mapping his story in my mind.

I have a lot of cautious optimism.

I have also started exercising again at a fairly blistering pace and I am feeling both sore and strong. I am dragging the kids out. I have intense internal conflict as I watch the teenagers struggle with physical disability. They are not lazy. They are not unfit. They have substantial struggles. They work as hard as they are able. I see reasons their lives are going to be challenging. I have mixed feelings about that. Would I have created people if I had known more about my genetics? I don’t know. They are going to suffer. I don’t know for sure yet about my daughter but the signs are there.

They are so fucking cool though. Like, yeah they are going to have struggles. Everyone has struggles. They aren’t going to be financially vulnerable. Provided we continue to get along the plan is to be ok living together basically permanently because we all need care giving at various points. All of us take turns being the one who can’t life. This is a lot harder for me now that Noah isn’t here because I don’t like accepting so much help from the kids.

At this point I submit to as much assistance as I do when I need to because I need them to be willing to fucking rest sometimes. They cannot become enculturated with American overwork culture. Naw. Fuck that. We got away from that. It’s poison. It’s self hating. It’s awful and not necessary.

So I don’t martyr myself. When I’m sick I’m sick. The rest of the time I am very particular about the difference in expectations between adults, quasi-adults, and children. People who are not adults do not get put into adult slots.

Shit. My son is going to be an adult in 4 months. That’s going to be wild. I still won’t treat him like he is the man of the house. He’ll be a housemate not the Daddy. It is hard being the head of household. It is very important to keep in focus. I don’t have to like it. I have to do it.

I say that to kids a lot. “I didn’t tell you to like it. I told you to do it.” It is an ongoing weird thing in my life that I am both extremely demanding and shocked that my children comply. Wow. They genuinely believe that their life will go better if they do what I ask the first time. Not the youngest, not yet. The older two do their very best because they don’t want me to have to nag them. It’s not fun for either side.

They still vote me in as project manager. We negotiate this shit. They appreciate that I have put a lot of thought into how to help them grow up. They appreciate getting to own the vast majority of their time. They appreciate getting to direct their own lives. We work very well together at a wide variety of tasks. We like a peaceful house though most of us are subject to hormonal mood shifts. All of us know how to look at the floor and avoid a confrontation when someone wakes up savage. It’s pretty funny. Some days people just can’t be talked to and that’s ok. We all understand now.

It was hilarious when the first two hit puberty and had their first week of being savage. They each turned to me at some point and said, “Holy fuck. Is this how fucking angry you feel?” I say, “Yes. They say, “HOW DID YOU NOT KILL US ALREADY?!?!?!?!?!”

I say, “I prepared for you for more than a decade before I was able to start creating you. I literally bled and barely survived your births. I’m not going to let a mood swing fuck up my life. I don’t kill you because I understood what I was signing up for. You wouldn’t be so difficult if you weren’t so much like me.”

The two reactions so far were different. One nodded, very much like his father when hearing hard truth, and said, “Right. So this is something I have to learn how to manage. This is not going to be fun.” He stomped off to his room and I heard screaming into a pillow. The other one started screaming “THIS IS NOT FAIR” while jumping up and down and flailing before running screaming through the house.

I’ll let you guess which one is a lot more like how I reacted at that age. Ahem.

I’m fucking excited about my daughter hitting puberty. I am willing to bet she’s going to put a hole in the wall. Who wants to bet me? I’ll put money on it. I will teach her how to patch the drywall in a very soothing voice. She will use her allowance to pay for all the materials we need. And she’s repainting the wall.

This is a lot of how I’ve been able to respond in a relaxed way to most of the things my children have done that have been really over the line. “OK. I have a plan for this.”

If you expect people to periodically totally fuck up and cross lines, you must treat it as completely normal; then you can guide someone into repair work without shame. My kids don’t have huge anxiety about their meltdowns. They do sigh deeply and start figuring out how to fix whatever happened. We work to make the meltdowns less intense and less frequent. We look for triggers and create plans together for managing them earlier. We can’t prevent every one but we can make life happen at a more tolerable rate.

My kids have periods of anxiety when they are in deep disequilibrium. Outside of those windows they are intensely self assured. They believe they have tools for solving problems and they learn like their life depends on it. They learn from all kinds of environments.

I believe they will be able to adapt to anything that comes up even though that is fucking hard for autistic people. We need a lot more support and guidance and patience than other people as we learn. That’s ok. Apparently I have a whole lot of patience. And I don’t even get it from bourbon. That was one of Noah’s jokes. A dad was sharing the recipe for a drink called “Patience” as they were planning to interact with a group of kids. I forget what thing. I’m not the funny one. The second dad goes, “Whoa. That’s a lot of bourbon.” The first dad says, “That’s because you are going to need a lot of Patience.”

I know when he would recite from his list of like 15 jokes. They were very formulaic and I literally record scratched my brain to kind of glitch on hearing it again. He repeated himself a lot and I needed to cope with that. It’s like my hearing just clicked out and all I heard was tinnitus. I would catch up with whatever he went to after the joke a second or two late.

It’s really common, when we are talking at a meal, for all three of us bigger people to stop and put our heads down in unison at the table when we know there was an opening for one of Noah’s 15 jokes. It’s like he says it into all of our minds at the same instant. Sometimes it’s so real that one or more of us starts openly weeping. That’s the hole where Noah is supposed to be. We all miss him terribly. But on we go anyway.

Life is no longer the shape I wanted it to be for the period of the Indenture. We are no longer that wonderful happy family. We are touched by sorrow now in a way that’s going to be complicated. We still are ridiculously happy together. We get along best when we rotate in and out of date time together. We all trust that our needs matter within the pod and we are all going to make sure that each of us is ok.

I created the family I wanted to live in. I have walked my talk and improved with every passing year. My children are people I like and respect. My children like and respect me and look forward to private time with extreme glee. Getting to go things with me alone is a reward and a treat and a wonderful thing.

That’s kind of wild. Wow. How is this my life? People used to not like me very much. It’s still hard not to expect it all of the time.

My kids act like I have treated them like doing things alone together is a reward and a treat and a wonderful thing. They all feel seen and appreciated. They don’t think I’m overly self involved. They think I am super invested in everyone around me. I’m always scared that the way I write means I spend way too much time thinking about myself. I need it, though. It helps me process my feelings and my thoughts. I think I need it a lot more now than I did when Noah was alive. I do so little talking.

The way that I move through my life decisively reacting to things that happen is the result of a fuck tonne of dithering in advance. I whine at myself and go back and forth on issues. I question why I believe I should act in various ways. I plot how to handle things in advance because otherwise I might do something that is not consistent with my overall values. I’m just as selfish and stupid as the next person. The only reason I have any wisdom at all is because I’ve fucked around and found out.

Now I don’t have Noah to save my bacon when it comes to giving our kids the kind of stable and secure environment I want them to grow up in. Being a single mom is a lot harder. Like, holy shit.

If I thought I was exhausted and deep in burn out before I lost my coparent? Yikes. I’m a lot more exhausted than I used to be. Or am I? I am doing a lot less. I don’t volunteer anymore. I have dropped out of almost every community event I participated in. I still go to munches and that’s about it. Almost all of the babysitting I pay for is put into the relationship with Gentleman. I have no regrets. I’m enjoying talking to him. He is an excellent storyteller. He makes me happy. He makes no demands upon me. He is very happy to see me when he can. We have had no reason to have strife. We do talk about some day hard stuff, but he’s not that eager to get into the long term theoretical way I plan. That’s going to be a big transition for me. It’s another way I am going to have to not look for Noah replacements. I need to be alone in my brain.

This is where the solo poly thing is coming up for me. I am going to not seek out another engulfing relationship. I loved my marriage. It was a one shot deal. I rode it to the end. I don’t want that again. I am always going to be managing a lot of stuff off stage. That means I need time to be off stage.

I had an excellent therapy session yesterday. I like working with them because they often interrupt and push me into somatic work when I am explaining stuff I am struggling. Last week, they had an off week. They needed to put themself into the session a bit. There were a couple of times where they were encouraging me strongly in directions that felt like appeasement. They were clearly having big feelings about it. They wish I was a more interactive client. They want to have more midweek check ins and exchanging of silly gifs. I’m not your girl for that. I need very clear time boundaries around therapy. I have issues around that. I’ve got stories for days about therapists and bad time management. And then it gets into my mommy issues because that woman can’t be on time to save her life.

So they sent me an apology after the session. I responded very minimally that I was totally fine and looking forward to seeing them next time.

This week I told them a little bit about Traci, a therapist I worked with for 5 years who OD’ed about 3 weeks after I ended our therapy relationship. I ended the relationship because I was pregnant and she was spinning out. I needed to transition into the care of someone who had more ability to support me through the next stage of my life and Traci was seriously going off the rails and needed reciprocal care I couldn’t offer. She was bringing her problems into my therapy. She really needed support and I didn’t give her any. I have a really intense amount of guilt for that. Yes, I know that I behaved in the appropriate clinician sliding off the rails way according to the guide books. But she was a person who put a lot into me and I didn’t do what I could to pay her back. I’m really upset about that.

Thus I told my plural rodent therapist that when they are having a bad day I am going to be patient with that. They do a lot for me by being able to be there for me when I am freaking out. They are learning a lot of really tough background things. I am a challenging patient history to learn. If they have days when they need me to hear what they are struggling with, maybe that’s where I am in therapy now and it’s not a bad thing.

Maybe the trade is slightly less about the money and a lot more like being friends who have cool tricks and insights to share. I’m not upset about this, not really. It means that I have to have times when I can pull my shit in during that hour a little and that’s complicated. Every relationship has costs. Usually in therapy the cost is financial and you get support in exchange.

Am I even trying to have a therapist or a coach-y friend who is exceptionally woo and down with how weird I am?

I am conscious over and over that I will never feel like I have company in my brain again. It feels hard.

It feels very hard that my children are going to know the most about me for the whole of my life and there’s going to be a lot that is always carefully off screen. I have lost the constant witness.

I liked that Noah and I spent 12-18 hours out of 24 together pretty much since we moved to Scotland. He gave me his brain and I gave him mine. We shared them. I think it is funny that I think of it like we were sharing a compiler. I have never used one but I’ve heard a lot about them. I think it is funny that I never got into tech but it permeates my brain.

I miss Noah. I will never try to replace Noah being the Oracle. I will never have his recall. I don’t think I will meet many people in the whole of my life who will be as smart as him. That’s a weird thing. Even if I do meet people that smart they will not be interested in downloading my brain. I will be irrelevant to them. It’s hard to think about. I feel a wave of pain when I go through all the topics I’m thinking about that I will never speak out loud at all. I no longer have anyone who wants to hear what I’m thinking at that level.

I need time to cope with that. I need to be able to be in a room alone. I feel like it goes best when I wake up extra early in the morning and take my alone time then. I get to fill my bucket with attention before I go work. I don’t love when these essays pour out at night because the day has been a lot. My feelings are so big. I want to talk to Noah about them.

I got to explain to my therapist that I really don’t want to be encouraged towards forgiving someone I am having a social conflict with so that we can be friends. That would require a lot of sweeping really awful things under the rug and I’m not British enough. What I need from them is support in figuring out how to crank back my rage because it’s a waste of energy that I need for other things.

I don’t want to waste time feeling rage. I want to move forward. I want to put all of my energy into the work ahead of me. Goodness knows I don’t have a lot of energy going spare.

My babies are vowing to help more with the garden this year. It’s going to be interesting to see how it goes. We will see! I like that they are starting to see the extreme value of the garden we have built together. They all really appreciate the glut of amazing fruit. Especially because I’m not buying fruit that is £10+/kg. Nope. In order to get enough of it to make a dent in our nutrition needs it is horrifyingly expensive and shipped in from very far away. We need to eat stuff from what is in season and what we can get from this country as much as possible.

We are close to having a 12 month garden. This week I’m going to start in the poly tunnel. I have a plan for how to make it more usable. I’m pretty thrilled. I am grateful that I will have help with getting rid of all the wood inside that I haven’t been able to figure out what to do with. I am cleaning up a lot of stored rubbish and it’s making things feel easier. We are donating a lot of stuff. It’s time to make space in our house for future needs. We don’t need to fill every nook and cranny.

We are changing our shape inside the house and it feels good. It feels like the right thing. A lot needs to be fixed, still, and that’s feeling super freaking intense. This is a forking expensive place to live in. It will be entirely upgraded in like 3 more years. That’s wild to think about. I will have replaced and improved stuff from the roof to the floor joists and the underpinnings. I still need more cladding. The upstairs bathroom is in dire need of ripping out and starting again because of the levels of problems. It needed replaced when we bought the damn house. The entire upstairs is going to have the flooring done all in a big go. I will pay a decorator to do the painting so that those rooms will look like someone else lives here. It’s going to be like I’m staging the damn house. It’s so intense to think about.

I have a big ass fancy house and it’s getting fancier by the year. The garden is so freaking cool and I can do things like give comfrey starts to young budding permaculture interested queerlings. This brings me big joy. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to throw a 60th birthday party without Noah. Luckily I don’t have to decide yet. I’m still working on getting the garden and house ready anyway. I figure working towards what will be here in 16 years is a good timeline when it comes to a garden and fixing a house. At that point the house will be so completely renovated that we will truly never want to leave. We will grow in and around the house.

It feels good to talk about the kids. I feel kind of gross bragging about them to anyone but Noah. It feels like I am being an asshole about other people. I’m really not trying to. My children did not fit into school. They would not have done well if they had been pushed into more compliance. It took years of recovery time for my son to stop feeling suicidal.

What we are doing is working for us. I am grateful for the privilege that allows us to do this. It is shocking dealing with what it means to be a one of those Gibbs’. Noah was not that impressed by being from that family. It’s been a wild ride for me. Way more good than bad. I’m scared of the future. I’m also really looking forward to it because I have front row tickets to see three cool people launch themselves into the world. I’m looking forward to the show.