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Drifting back

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Sometimes I feel guilty while I read Tamora Pierce. Bonus Mama introduced me to this author so the association is strong. I am sad I didn’t get to stay in the lives of her children. I loved them a lot. I will never see them again and that’s hard.

Mostly though I am finding it amusing that I didn’t want to read the second book from Sandry because wealthy perfect princesses are not my speed. I also skipped the second Daja book because her students were pampered rich obnoxious people. I’m having a lot of class issues in my head, that’s for sure.

Noah’s birthday is soon. I feel like a mass of anxiety. I am not functioning well. My productivity is in the toilet. It’s hard to not beat myself up over it. I really struggle with failing as a worker bee.

Stuff with the kids is all over the place. It would have been a surprise to me if you had said that by 16/18 MC would be bigger, stronger, and more consistently capable than EC. EC’s health absolutely sucks. He has 3-4 productive days in a week and then he often crashes the other days. I don’t mean he is lazy. I mean his joints don’t work properly and he can’t stand upright. He falls down on a regular basis. He looks like a marionette because his body hangs so bizarrely. I worry a lot about him. I think he is going to struggle as an adult. I am grateful I don’t need to kick him out at 18 to make his way alone. I think it would go quite poorly.

MC is not enjoying how poorly this term is going at theatre. I think it is a good learning experience. Suffering is a lesson. They are really stepping up as the most able bodied human in the house. They now do nearly all the dishes and kitchen clean up. It has made my life so much better. They don’t do any other chores, but this is an acceptable trade in our house. We cook a lot.

YC is on my last nerve. Why did I move to a country where I’m not allowed to beat her?!?! (Because I do not believe in beating children and I’m glad the state agrees with me. BUT SHE IS SO ANNOYING. Deep breathing, Krissy.) I struggle with the period of time where kids are transitioning from being incompetent to being competent but they have not yet internalised self control. It’s rough. Now she is like 5,028% more capable of being annoying. This is when Noah and I used to do a lot of tag teaming. As someone felt frustrated or overwhelmed the other stepped in. I’m struggling with this on my own.

YC is grounded for the second time in her life. The first time she obeyed the limits and the grounding was short and sweet and didn’t drag on. This time she keeps breaking the rules. I am very clear with my kids that I don’t like grounding. It happens when I am on the verge of losing my shit and going too far from accumulated stress and frustration. This is giving me time out to calm my nervous system down. I am having a hard time because she is pushing really hard against following restrictions. I get it. Being grounded sucks. Breaking the rules and sneaking out constantly until we have to have a person on duty babysitting your door or standing next to you all day is uhm… not great. It doesn’t give me the space to calm down that I need. It escalates my vigilance requirements. I am not having a good time. If I can’t stand at the door I need to use an exercise band to hold the door closed so I can do crazy things like go to the bathroom. Or she will sneak out and get into things.

I know this is developmental. I know that to a large degree she has no self control yet. Our life is different from other peoples lives. If I don’t teach my kids lessons who will? They are not part of the normal mill of human enculturation. They have to learn that I mean it when I say no. They have to learn that there are consequences for out of boundary behaviour. We are being clear all day every day: she is grounded because she needs to learn that smearing food all over the house is unacceptable. I can’t find open cans of juice/soda in every drawer of the house. I can’t find ramen and muffins stuffed through all the baskets of toys. I can’t have sweetened condensed milk spread all over the closet and the clothes that are in there. No. Just no. That’s not an acceptable behaviour pattern and we are going on a year of it. Food stays at the table. Food stays at the table. Food stays at the table. I’m not saying you can’t sit and eat a can of sweetened condensed milk, I’m saying you can’t create four loads of laundry while destroying the wood in the closet.

I am communicating the lesson that most of the time you have a fun life with much goodness and freedom and independence. Don’t fuck it up for yourself by making problems for other people. You don’t need to be perfect but you can’t destroy property willy nilly and it’s not fair to waste that quantity of food. Over the past month she has wasted/played with/spread around close to £40 worth of food. This is way out of control. No.

So she’s been grounded since the 15th of May. It started out as 3 days of grounding. She is still grounded because she was doing things like sneaking out of her room to get a pile of books. Sometimes she went and got snacks and tried to hide them in her room. At this point I took the furniture out of her room so she has nowhere to hide anything. I’m freakin serious. You will follow the restrictions for the named time period or you can stay grounded forever and all our lives will be miserable. I do not fucking play. My older kids have been telling her, “Mom is going to win this battle of wills. You do not want to find out how long she can last.” My oldest was only grounded twice but the second one was really epic. My second kid was grounded at least four times. I can’t remember the exact number. I don’t do it a lot given how old the big kids are now but I forking mean it when I do it.

It’s harder to feel justified this time. I feel a lot more paranoid about how maybe I’m going too far. I am certainly surrounded by friends who would not parent this way. But their kids all have different lives. We are such a bizarre little pod away from humanity. I tell my children quite frankly that we come from blood lines of people who struggle with addictive behaviour and anti-social behaviour. If I address it hard and fast when they are young then they develop the sense that you should only break rules when it is really important. It has worked well with my first two kids. We are close and we have intensely respectful relationships that have not involved any kind of punishment in many years. Everyone has to try me a couple of times when they are young.

This seems healthy and normal to me. Sure, my way seems overly strict to people on first glance. That’s a funny contrast with how permissive I seem compared to the average the rest of the time. You can have a looooooooot of rope to run with but when you reach the boundary you need to stop or it’s going to hurt. (Not like I am going to smack you hurt. Like you are going to be so bored you feel like you are losing your mind for a couple of days.) I feel the need to defensively include that we have long conversations during the day about why the specific rule that is being broken is necessary and unacceptable to break. We talk a lot about how I am not saying they are bad people or undeserving of love. I am saying that behaviour is unacceptable and must stop. If you need help stopping I will help you but neither of us will have fun. It’s better for you to stop yourself. You will feel in your bones that it is better for you to stop yourself.

While grounded you still get morning snuggles and hugs and kisses and lots of positive attention during the day. This is not a stonewall of angry seething. I am more prone to being bitchy and complaining about stupid stuff. You are making me do a bunch of oppressive work to ground you. I hate this. Don’t make me do stuff I hate and we can get along just fine. I am praying we hurry up and get through this in a timely fashion. Please stop making it longer kid. Please. Please. Please. I am, of course, keeping my therapist up to date with this. They understand why I am doing this and they are glad I am setting limits in a way that is not overly punitive. She isn’t being harmed, she is having some of the good things be less available for a while. I am not making her feel like life has no value. I am showing her that when I say no I really mean it. I need her to be able to trust me. This is how I earn that trust. I don’t like the cost of being consistent. I like having kids who believe me when I say something. That means I can never bluff.

This is helping to create a different hurdle for Gentleman and I to run into. When I’m in a lot of pain and I’m grumpy and I feel frustrated with the kids leading to feeling a lot of shame for my impatience with the kids I stop being particularly good at initiating sex. I feel empty and like I lack anything interesting to offer. I certainly can’t run the fuck. I’m timid. I’m out of the executive function that makes me lead. So we went almost two weeks without sex. It’s dramatic how hard that hits my body.

I am coasting super far into burn out. I want to be more exciting but it’s not available inside my body as an option. I am not sure what I can do to recover at this point. My brain keeps shutting down in the middle of stuff I want to do. I’m so tired I can’t do my normal level of forward planning. I’m too exhausted. I can’t predict what will be true or not true by then. Sex helps when I can get a lot of it. We managed sex over the past couple of days and I am already doing better than I was over most of the last week, but I need it daily for a while and that’s not going to happen. Life and work and such. I need sex so much.

I wish I could simply send my daughter to school but they’ve already hit 2/3 of my kids here. I don’t really want to throw the third into the mix. I don’t need the school to be perfect. I need the adults to be in charge enough that my children are not beaten. I also need their safety to happen while around other children instead only when they are locked into a room alone. If they need to be locked in a room to be safe then they might as well be at home. What is the fucking point of school? I’m really frustrated by the way society lets down families. Smaller classrooms should be mandated by law. Limit of 18 children in a room for the maximum level of safety for all involved.

Oh well. Society doesn’t want to spend money on that. Better to spend the money on wars.

At least the garden is seriously coming along this year. I’m pretty excited about all the stuff we have available already. Soon the fruit starts and then we have kilos every week for months. Yay!!

I’ve added two more artichokes this year because I don’t get to eat enough of them and it makes me sad. I love artichokes. Nom nom nom. It’s been fairly warm and intermittently raining and I’m hopeful that bodes well for the year. I am weeding as much as I can, which has been a lot more than over the past two years. I’m happy about that. I also got more mulch and I will be spreading that around as much as I can. This is good. The food forest is coming. I love my garden so much.

I really need this grounding to end. It’s wearing me down. We are now at the point where we are body blocking most attempts to break the rules. Maybe we can force her into compliance long enough to get through the tenure. I hate this. It feels so awful. But when I say no I fucking mean it.

Reading

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I need to feel in control of something. I need to feel like I can accomplish a thing. So I set myself the goal of 3 books per week for the year. I’m keeping up, barely, because I’m adding in graphic novels and YA fiction along with the harder books. At any moment in time I have 3-6 books on the go.

Right now my youngest is experiencing her second grounding in this lifetime. I know that grounding isn’t a consequence other people like. I know that the way I do it feels “unfair” to other people when I describe it. I also know that we lead a life outside the norm and we have to be able to work together. I don’t stonewall or act mean through a whole grounding but there is a massive cessation of the good parts of our life. It is a reminder that every action has a consequence. The older you get the higher the penalties get. This is a small taste of how awful things could be if you seriously broke laws as an adult.

Also, mostly, the kids are aware that I ground them only when I am starting to feel so furious that I am a potential danger to them. I ground so that they are not allowed to continue pushing me when I am on my last nerve. It is a safety measure as much as it is a punishment. We talk through the whole grounding about how my body activation is hard to reduce when it gets that high. I hate feeling like this. It’s way harder without Noah here. Luckily the big kids have always been so protective of their sister that I don’t worry about crossing lines the way I did with my oldest. No one was around to mediate my fury when he went through this stage. I have regrets about that.

He says that in the long run he is glad that he understands that he is as responsible for creating positive feedback loops as everyone else is.

I don’t hit my kids. Sometimes I will take away the extra joy that I usually provide so that they can experience what it is like when they actually have a terribly boring life. It’s a deprivation vacation so they can see how good they normally have it. I can live with this. I don’t believe that anyone should be so entitled they take their good stuff for granted.

That said, it’s hard passing the time in a grounding without doing shit to extend the grounding. I know this struggle. I’m inconsistent about interaction stuff during groundings. I spend as much time in the room with the grounded kid as I physically can stand without getting more frustrated. Now, with my baby, I’m paying the older kids for babysitting shifts of sitting with her. Mostly we don’t entertain/interact but we are a presence so she doesn’t actually feel abandoned (and so she doesn’t sneak off to get into trouble).

Yesterday I restarted the Circle of Magic series by Tamora Pierce. She’s one of my very favourite authors. I sat down and pulled my baby between my legs and put the book in front of her face. She read to me until her voice gave out. Then I read to her until my voice gave out. Then she had another turn. Then she wanted us to read silently while cuddling for another chapter. She is the best reader of all of my children. There’s no way in hell EC or MC could have read like this at 8 years old. They both struggled in different ways. EC is dyslexic. MC it is less clear to me exactly what is going on but reading was a slowly progressing thing. They were both very good readers by 11, it took them more time though.

I am in the middle of a biography of Terry Pratchett. It made me smile that he had to be bribed to read until he was 11 and then he took off like a rocket. I would have really enjoyed raising that man. He sounds a lot like my children.

YC is heading in the direction of being able to read like her father. That fills my heart with joy. She is good at reading out loud and she can do voices consistently. I’m not great at that. My voices kind of wander all over. Noah was amazing. He could have been a voice actor. YC has the same verve and toleration for strain on the throat. She did wear out yesterday but she went a long time. She read close to 50 pages. If she continues to do it the way Noah did she will have his ability to go 6 hours by the time she is grown. Seeing that is such a complicated thing. Parenting is magic because in each child I see shards of myself and shards of Noah and still they are completely and totally their own separate creature.

I see how YC is terribly vulnerable at this stage but I have a lot of hope for her. I’ve also reread Your 8 Year Old recently. I feel enormous pressure to get this year right. She needs me. She needs me to be delighted by her. She needs me to love her and hold her and help her see her own value. This is the exact time for this lesson. I have to do it now. This is when I must stick the landing. This is my last run through this process. My older children glow with love. I am going to give this to my baby even though her circumstances are very different.

She is still going to have a happy childhood. I will make sure of that. Yes, she has endured tragedy and loss and it will impact all of us forever. We are still together. We are still fortunate and blessed and lucky. We still have a safe life. We still have access to joy. We are still competent and strong and deeply aware that we have a lot to give on top of needing a lot of love and support.

I hate it when a kid is grounded. It makes my life suck. Nobody wants to have to deal with grounding in this house. No one. This is awful. Nevertheless I am teacher and mother and principal and authority. There are ways of being antisocial that can’t be tolerated. You have to care about the good of the group. If you don’t then you will be outside the benefits of the group. It’s never pleasant but it is part of life. It will be true forever. If you push people far enough they won’t come back.

Of course I will always come back. Don’t worry about that. I will. Other people won’t. You need to feel in your bones that there is a base level of decent behaviour everyone is required to exhibit. There is a social contract. It doesn’t matter if you are disabled or if it is harder for you than other people. No one cares. There is a bare minimum you have to hit. I am required to be the one who teaches this lesson as I am the one who elected to educate my child outside the normal routes. Other kids learn this through social ostracism at school. Frankly, it’s more emotionally damaging in the normal route.

My kids never worry about me failing to love them later. It’s not a question. They also learn “When mom says ‘No’ she means it and you’d better take it seriously.” I feel like this is a good life lesson. No one is beaten. No one is shamed. No one is made to feel less than. They simply experience what it is like to have less fun for a while.

Mostly our life is pretty darn fun.

Even within the less fun parameters I still want my children to experience cuddling and snuggles and love and adoration. Even when I’m willing to be an asshole and punish you because the alternative is you pushing me till I break and do something much more awful I still love you more than I love anything in the world. You are the reason I wake up every morning genuinely excited to say “I am so happy to see you again.” I mean it every day. That’s why I say it every day.

And now I have a baby who loves to read the way I love to read instead of children who read sometimes but mostly prefer other mediums of learning. I keep wondering who in this series will feel the most relatable to her. Clearly I am most like Tris and I am ok with that, even with the whole plant magic thing. My emotions are like the weather. They impact other people and I have to work hard at managing to let the full range happen without damage. Everyone needs all the feelings. I need all the feelings. I need to not create damage with all of the different ways I feel intense emotions.

Speaking of which, my stomach hurts. I was sick yesterday very early in the morning once and not since. I’m not sure if this is more digestive upset or if I’m simply anxious. I’m always anxious. I have control over so little. One thing I do have control over is reading all these books. I’d better get back to it.

“Are you sure you want to ask me that?”

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I’ve had this agreement with most friends and family members in my life. When they ask me a question I give them a second chance to see if they mean it. I will answer. I will answer in so much detail that you may regret your life choices.

I like that Gentleman is around while I’m doing chores more now. We talk while I’m doing stuff. It feels a lot more like an integrated relationship. It’s like how I get to be around while he practices sometimes. I like these overlapping points in the timetable. It feels like life sharing. We are testing the waters during this courting period. We are on no particular escalator with specific end goals.

I’m amused that going back and forth between his place and mine is resulting in me keeping my space more tidy than usual. He is a tidy individual. He takes care of his things and he cleans up after messes really quickly. Sometimes I feel intimidated because I’m going to struggle to match that in this house. I could in my house in California that was 1/3 the size of this house. I am often worried I got myself in over my head. With Noah I was alright. Now the house is a lot to manage alone. Gentleman offers help and I demur each time. Ask again next year. After he has waited through the mandatory window. A long time ago my children asked that there be a year period between when I start dating someone and when that person meets the kids. They asked for that when I was still married. It’s very important to me that I earn their trust in an ongoing way so I take this request very seriously.

I have a love/hate relationship with watching time pass. I hate thinking about the fact that tomorrow Noah has been gone for eight months. I hate thinking about how long it has been since I saw my mother. I love thinking about how much time I have spent doing different things. Like, the number of hours I’ve spent with Gentleman. That’s a fun thing to muse about. We are clocking the hours needed to form attachment. We are talking about things that are hard and scary instead of ignoring them and hoping for the best. We are both earning trust. I think courting is important at the start of a relationship. I bring up as many hard things as I can. I don’t believe in a honeymoon of “hoping for the best”. I am a difficult person to mesh with. Doing so takes time and doesn’t always work.

I often wonder how often Gentleman regrets his choices when he says he truly wants an answer to a question. My answers are so weird.

Yesterday it was interesting talking about the different attitudes among California naturists. He was horrified that my children have spent time in mixed gender naked environments. I’m less worried about the naturists than I would be a member of the clergy. The naturists know they are skating on thin ice on the edge of society. They have reputations to uphold if they want to be permitted in the community. He is adamant that no right thinking person in the UK could possibly agree with my stance. It is wrong, in his view, to allow children to be around naked adults.

I contrast that with my lived experience of my children skating past body dysmorphia because they are comfortable with the full actual range of human presentation and they know that their meat sack is not what defines their importance. My kids arrived at mainstream school contemptuous of the idea they should go on a diet. How stupid. If you cut calories as a growing person you can’t build the healthy muscles and bones and brain you need. Fuck that shit. I attribute a lot of their casual approach to existing to the fact that they have seen people live thousands of ways and it is all part of the range of normal for them.

Yes, I am intrinsically unbothered by the idea that at some point my children might see you nude. As long as you don’t make it weird I don’t care that much. It’s the making it weird part that is the bad thing.

My kids negotiate boundaries better than 90% of adults. Yes, I think they know how to advocate for themselves in most different environments. We practiced. They aren’t thrown by things that bother most people. They also have meltdowns from not being able to handle things that are considered a mandatory and unavoidable part of life for other people. We avoid them. Life is ever more complex than one can nail down. There are no universal rules, none.

One of the books I just finished, The Social Distance Between Us: How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain, had some interesting bits. The author, Darren McGarvey, talked about interviewing an incredibly successful philanthropist and he noted that he struggled to be as pushy/forward as he intended to be. He was more deferential and gentle than he had intended to be. He noted his own inhibition when it comes to pushing someone of a “higher class”.

There are times when I feel this but mostly I have learned to push through it. Silicon Valley was a trip. I don’t know how I would manage someone in a UK setting where class is less about success in your career and more about who you were born. I’m going to continue to ride the wave of ignoring social hierarchy that I’ve been on most of my life. I was born to be used and abused until I die. Everything else I do is gravy. When you are born as trash you have a choice. You can comply and conform, which most humans are wired to do as instinctively as they breathe. Or you can decide that the hierarchy doesn’t apply to you and you will simply exist entirely outside of it.

I have gone with option B in this life. Noah loved that about me. I don’t conform neatly into any community or set of expectations. He also hated that about me because I couldn’t cut myself down to only what he wanted me to be. He hated that I didn’t think of myself as being better than other people. I can’t do that. Doing that is agreeing to the hierarchy and I can’t do that. I’m not better than anyone. The primary thing I do really well is not die when maybe I should.

Yeah, I’m diversely educated and I know how to do a lot of shit. Everyone else knows stuff I don’t. How can it be compared? I have no idea. I don’t really bother trying.

I play with class expectations, though. I dress up or down to fit in better. I bought a suit to wear in court and ended up not needing it. I am glad I didn’t buy an expensive one. I bought a capsule of rich bitch clothing for world travel. I hold on to the beloved, full of holes old stuff that reminds me where I come from. I make sure my big house is company ready most of the time. I want people to just drop in, and more people are doing so. I know how to do barely-there rich girl makeup and that’s it. I never mastered the art of makeup past that. I’m too lazy. Also I’m not that keen on looking in mirrors.

Which isn’t to say I ever fit in well no matter which direction I move on the slider. I don’t really fit anywhere. That’s ok. I don’t fit in well but I do know how to make a place for myself in most settings. Sort of? I’m not feeling confident lately. I’m isolated and lonely. I need to get over myself. I need to get out more. It’s hard because I’m going to run into more people who react with the same level of vehemence about my opinions being wrong as I got yesterday. He let it go and didn’t continue to press about how he now kinda considers me a low key pedo.

That is a hard thing to carry. I know in my bones what it means to grow up with a pedophile. It was my life. My children have been bubble wrapped to a shocking degree. I have literally witnessed almost their entire lives. Sometimes there were naked people around because we were in a public bathing type environment. I am fine with dying on the hill that public bathing is not inherently a sexual activity and it is not pedophilia for people to inhabit the same physical environment while nude.

But I don’t particularly want to. I understand that this is not the norm where I am right now. I don’t drive and there isn’t an appropriate place nearby. I’m not going to upend my life to seek out these opportunities going forward. Being prudish about nudity is not a morally superior attitude. That said, my house is a clothes on environment at this point. The casual attitude that Noah and many of our friends had of preferring to be naked has not crossed the pond. Here my house is a fucking fish bowl. I face a walking trail and people look in all day. If I want light from the windows I have to be fully visible to everyone who passes. We wear clothes.

I definitely feel like I have let a lot of standards slip over the past while. I notice all the places where things are needing fixed/replaced/cleaned up. In the long run my garden will be build up in height and I will have more visual privacy but it is going to take a few years. I need to learn how to do a lot of this myself because I don’t want to pay for anything I don’t have to. If I can do it then I should. I don’t have Noah breathing down my neck judging how I spend my time. Anything I could farm out so that I paid more attention to him was his preference. I have built a life here where I do so much less than I did in California. I feel like it is showing. I have fallen behind in a lot of maintenance tasks. I’m going to stay behind for at least the next ten months. I have to be realistic about the limits of my body given the shape of my life.

Until the next summer solstice. I have that long to be a mess. I don’t think I will ever have an easy time believing in the hope of the winter solstice again. I lost Noah three days later. Am I going to start losing the ability to sleep between the 21st and 25th of December because I am waiting to see who will die? That’ll suck. I hope not.

Shortie is making it very clear that one year of not celebrating is all she can handle. After that, we go back to celebrating on holidays because she needs them. I agreed that I will. She still needs to have the rest of her happy childhood after the year of sad. I don’t get to stop giving my kids a happy childhood. I still have to do that.

It’s going to be a lot harder now but we will be ok.

Yesterday was pretty great. We spent about four hours in the garden and then the kitchen. The stone fruit trees should have been pruned a month ago to prevent damage in winter storms, but it is what it is. We got it done. We also harvested 8kg of plums along with 700g of blackberries. Then we cleaned it and processed it. Blackberries became cobbler. The plums are in the fridge waiting to become jam. We will be making little gift bags of stuff we made from our harvest for holiday presents this year. That’s about as far as we are going to get with any celebration this time. Fuck. I can’t handle thinking about winter holidays.

I am overwhelmed thinking about more immediate things. I should get more organised. Maybe I’ll get work done today. Maybe.

Every day is good and bad

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I’m trying really hard not to only focus on the bad parts. I burst into tears every day, keening his name. Sometimes I can’t help but scream his name over and over. How can he be gone?

I feel like I will never be seen completely again. I will always be a tiny fraction of myself going forward. Our relationship was so much. We were wonderful together and also terrible together. We were so good for each other and also abusive at times. We were intense, broken people together and we were trying to mend one another’s cracks. I feel so sad for the ways I could not make him feel secure. At least, by the end, he believed that neither of us would ever leave. At least we got there. That is something approaching secure attachment, right?

I knew he would get mad at me sometimes and act like a petulant, resentful child. But he wouldn’t go. We finally got there. It took more than 17 years to feel that kind of safe. I got less than a year of feeling that certain, that sure, that committed.There is no fair in this life.

I’m freaked out on so many levels. My poor kids are going to have to do without a dad for the rest of their lives. They have had a father for less time than I did. Not that my dad was good. Noah was a very good father. I feel absolutely devastated for my baby. She is not going to have him around for most of her childhood and that feels so unfair. There is no fair in this life. This is too much though. He saved his petulance and his resentment for me. He gave the kids all the good parts. His good parts were so good. He was such a good daddy.

He was so good that I couldn’t keep him.

My older kids have been talking about how I am going back to being the protagonist of some horrible anime series. Horrifying things rain down on me, tragedy after tragedy and I just stumble through it all. They told me they thought that raising them was going to be my epilogue, but instead they are an intermission between the awful. I’m not happy about this.

I’m really scared of my future. How much more awful stuff am I going to have to endure? I don’t feel very strong. I have a cold. My throat hurts. I’m dizzy. I’m exhausted and I feel terrible. I miss Noah. I have decades ahead of me of crawling to the kitchen to make my own fucking soup.

It was funny, someone offered to bring me soup, medicine, or other groceries. I said, “I already made soup and it is on the stove. I got medicine the first day one of my kids was sick so I’m covered. A grocery order is being delivered in 4 hours.”

It took so many years before I would allow Noah to help me. I don’t like accepting support from anyone. I don’t like being vulnerable in front of someone. I don’t have a lot of good memories around being cared for when I am ill. I had Noah and that’s it. Otherwise I hide like a cat and only come out again when I am able to defend myself.

I don’t come out until I am able to put a socially mandated happy face on. Masking is necessary for survival. People can’t be trusted when I am weak. That is when they hurt me the most.

I am so scared.

I’m not going to have Noah between me and the world anymore. I won’t be able to hide behind him when I am weak and vulnerable. People despise weakness. They want to hurt and crush anything that looks weak or sad or pathetic. It is a really standard part of human nature. It’s not the world being mean to me. It is simply how the world works.

It’s not personal.

I am grateful for the people in this life who help me feel seen. When Noah died a friend reached out and was able to recommend a therapist for helping me get through this transition. My friend said, “I know the exact right person for you.” My therapist is a plural rodent. They are heavy on the woo while also backstopping their intense multi-modality training on psychological therapy techniques with body work training. They really are a great therapist. We spent a lot of the last session working on the ways I’m having intense body reactions to dating.

I’m having a lot of anxiety around the topic for a bunch of reasons. Two of the people I’ve met in the last month are hitting old hot buttons. I’ve been trying very hard to give them chances to prove that they aren’t just like experiences I had in the past. I think I am pushing myself to be forgiving long past the point where it is healthy for me.

I am scared of putting an inappropriate amount of emotional weight on the one person I will be left seeing. One reason I like dating several people at once is because I spread out my too muchness between them and I don’t overwhelm anyone. I like this person. I’m scared of scaring him off when I’m doing the intense emotional up and down that comes with surgery recovery. I’m going to be intensely weak and vulnerable. I am going to be scared as shit the whole time. I can’t do my favourite bonding/soothing technique: sex.

When I’m recovering from surgery I shouldn’t get my blood pressure up. That means I don’t want any sexual contact. Well, I want it but it could literally be life threatening so I don’t do it.

How am I going to trust that someone wants to hang out and talk to me without me being able to barter for their time? I’m not going to be entertaining or useful at all. That makes me feel very scared and insecure.

What are the good parts of the days lately? Time with my kids. We are all being incredibly cuddly and loving and supportive. We are making a lot of progress on weeding this spring. Some years we let it get fully away from us. I think that I will be at a stable maintenance place while I’m crawling around post-surgery. This is good.

I have barely touched the garden in the entire last calendar year. My plan was to fall into it heavily after Pride but the second half of the year went completely sideways instead.

Like the first half of this year being a bit of a blur. There have been good moments but mostly I am going to remember this time as a haze of pain. I am so sad. My happily ever after is over. I don’t know how I will ever believe that anyone loves me again.

I’m pretty stupid. I am going to forget the way my friends are showing up. I am going to lose time and fall into always/never and forget that any good feelings have ever inhabited my body. Which is crazy. I have Miss Jenny and I’ve had her for 31 years. I followed her across the sea. I have the people who have showed up this year. I “know” it. I hate how hard it is to be in a room with most of them. I’m super avoidant. They are coming so far and demonstrating their love with such purity and openness and I’m still hiding to cry alone.

I used to hide away from Noah, too. I rarely let him see me cry.

I hate being sick. It makes me feel extra mopey.

Noah gave me a sense of belonging that I’ve never had with anyone else. I hate that I don’t have it with the kids but I don’t. With Noah here to watch me I knew I would be a good enough mother so I was allowed to stay. He made sure I wouldn’t be too bad. I trusted him to slam a barrier in front of me if I started to do something I shouldn’t. He wasn’t the only childish one in our marriage. Without him I am scared that I am going to be the problem; I am going to fuck up my kids so maybe it is better if I am not here. I’m not going to leave–neither through suicide nor desertion. Don’t worry about that bit. But I don’t feel like I belong. I feel like I am barely allowed to be here. Now that this isn’t Noah’s house it is harder to feel like I deserve to live here. I was allowed to be here because Noah wanted me.

For the last 18 years I have avoided suicide because Noah needed me. He needed me to love him. He needed me to accept him and support him and take care of him. He needed to be able to love me. He needed to be allowed to accept and support and take care of me. We validated each other existing. I don’t know what I am going to do without that structure. Without Noah wanting me don’t I take up too many resources to continue? I need too much medical care. I need too much support and I am out of strength to pay it all back. I can’t put decades of work in before I need help. I need help now.

I am having to ask for help and it fucking hurts. I’m not doing a great job of organising it because I feel like I am choking on it. I don’t deserve it.

I feel like I only deserved the support I got over the last 18 years because I made Noah feel so much better about being alive. I made him happy. I also made him miserable and sad. I made him angry. I made him feel safe and loved. He wanted all of the feelings and he wanted them with me. It made sense that I was way too extra because he needed all of that intensity. He needed all of me.

I am scared that the rest of my life is going to be tiny slivers and I will never feel fully alive again.

I hate that I’ve been feeling stymied and blocked about writing the story of my relationship with Noah. It’s been feeling too in medias res to consider. Now that is not a problem. It is over now. I still don’t have perspective because I can’t see me post-Noah very well. But it’s closer.

Noah, Vicki, the story of hunting before Noah, the Part 2 where I’m honest about my relationships with women the way I was too afraid to be when I got started on it years ago. So many book and stories in my brain. Will I write them or will I only whine to myself about what I “could” do?

I’m not big on talking about what I “will do”. I am big on talking about what I am doing and what I have done. Don’t inflate the future.

Noah is my past. He will always be there in my memory. He will always have given me the happiest home I have ever had. He will always be the person who gave me a family. He will always be the person who thought I was worth committing to. He gave me what he could. He gave me everything he could. He loved me so much.

I don’t think I will ever be loved like that again. He burned so intensely.

I am so upset that in the last months of his life he talked about how I was going to turn into Skye O’Malley. I wish he had not done so much foreshadowing his own death. The kids and I keep talking about it. There were so many stupid things in the last six months. He acted like he was on the way out. He acted like he knew.

I would have acted very differently if I had known. Would I have made better choices? I don’t know.

I feel like I don’t know anything. I don’t know about the past, the present, or the future. I am scared. I feel empty of hope.

This is why I go have sex. It keeps the worst of my depression at bay. The positive hormones give me a lift that lets me pretend I am full optimism, hope, and joy. Without it I feel dismal, pointless, listless, and like I should go become one with the mushrooms in the forest.

So of course I decide to cut off two sources of sex because they don’t make me feel good enough. I am too much damn trouble. I just can’t be pleased. I can’t be forgiving enough. I can’t accept whatever I get. I have to have standards. I have to act like I am living in a highly traumatised body and I need to feel safe.

Isn’t that an impossible bar? Isn’t that just saying I will never be in a room with anyone ever again?

In some ways, yes. I’m scared of what will happen over the months I can’t have sex. I think about the consequences of having to believe that someone wants my company in order to ask for time. Will I be able to do that? Will he want to? I don’t know. I don’t know anything right now. I’m so scared.

I’m going to keep moving anyway. I don’t stop. That is the reason I am a protagonist. I keep moving when I don’t want to, even when it hurts and I want to stumble and fall before the boulder chasing me. I’d like to be squished. It sounds restless. I don’t get to though, I’m the fucking protagonist. I need to do some fancy parkour jumping bullshit even when I feel too weak to stand.

It doesn’t matter how I feel. It matters what I do. Not what I “will do”. Not what I dream of doing. What I do.

There is no margin of error, there is no forgiveness, there is no one left to save me from my mistakes. I’m on my own because The Family is not going to be the whole centre of my life anymore. That’s what poly means. That is what Noah was so scared of. That my entire existence would not centre around him anymore. I would instead have one foot in the family and one foot poised to run off on adventure. He was right to be afraid. I should not be as enmeshed with the kids as he and I were with each other. It would be wrong. Bonding outside the house is going to be hard for everyone.

When the kids find people to date there is always a “bring them over” energy fairly quickly and there won’t be fore me. My people will have to go through a dramatic, massive vetting process. The people I created with Noah are not the easiest folks ever created. They don’t blend in very well. Their home will always be a safe place for them.

What I am less certain of is whether I will always be in their home. I can’t imagine moving someone into this house. I can imagine moving somewhere else. That’s a weird thought but it gives me a touch of comfort. Even if I commit to this house staying in the family because it brings comfort to the kids to have this home base I don’t have to stay here.

That makes it a lot easier to think of the indenture as the time when I am setting this space up for them. It’s a lot of why I am trying to set up the garden to be as ignorable as possible compared to how much food will grow on its own because it has a self reinforcing ecosystem around it. If I think about it as having 10 years left on the run for that situation it makes it a lot easier to set my pace. That’s a substantial amount of work, but a tractable problem.

As opposed to the problem where Noah promised me that I would never have to be alone again. The problem is I tried to believe him. He had just about convinced me. And now I am looking at a future alone again.

I am going to have to buy myself flowers and hold my own hand. Not because I want to. Not because I chose this. Not because I wanted this. I wanted Noah. I put a lot of effort into training him as a partner. He knew how to make me feel loved. He knew how to make me feel safe. He knew how to make me feel respected and seen. He knew how to make me feel like there was value and purpose in my life.

I knew how to make Noah feel valued and purposeful and valuable. I knew how to make Noah glow with feeling loved. I also knew how to cut him to his core so that he sobbed on the floor. I saw all of him: good and terrible. I responded as I saw fit. I was not always kind.

I was always who he wanted.

I don’t know that I will ever be able to believe that again. I don’t think I will ever believe that anyone will ever know me well enough to convince me that they will accept all of me. I’m going to spend the rest of my life being a lying liar who lies. I will mask so hard they will believe that what they see is all that I am. It will fill me with internal revulsion and aversive feelings.

The reason that leaving the house sounds so appealing is specifically that I can imagine really benefiting from 6 months or a year on a remote location where I don’t see or speak to a person the whole time. I would not bring the internet with me. No movies. Just notebooks, books, pens.

What would I discover about myself if I didn’t spend all day censoring around what other people don’t deserve to know about?

It is really physically painful dealing with all the thoughts and feelings I can’t express in front of the kids. Noah was my outlet, my relief valve, my safe witness. He made sure I stayed being the person I wanted to be. He understood who I wanted to be and he was absolutely relentless about kicking my ass towards that future. He was a fucking asshole about it.

Noah made me feel like a real person because he got to see all the good and the shitty and the petty and the grandiose and the mediocre and he loved all of it. He was in the room watching me have my life. He also got to hear all the backstage notes. He watched me grow up into the mother I wanted to be. The mother I started out just crossing my fingers and praying I could conjure up out of thin air despite no realistic role models at all. He watched me buckle down and be the wife I wanted to be despite it being hard for me. It was often a struggle to be what he wanted and I did the struggle. He was worth choosing.

He made me feel worth choosing. He made me feel worth choosing in sickness and in health, for better or worse. Knowing that there would be a lot more sickness than health and that my life has always been a lot more worse than better.

I feel like I need to be able to see a future where I will be able to get the problems of being me further away from my kids. I am so sorry for the ways my fucking never ending stream of tragedies is impacting them. I wish I had a better self to offer them but I don’t.

I keep interrupting this essay to writhe around on the floor sobbing and screaming. It’s a rough morning. I really miss feeling safe. I feel like I don’t know how to give it to the kids anymore because I don’t have it in me.

He was going to keep me safe, and healthy enough, and loved, and looked after and that meant I knew I had those things to give the kids. Now he is gone and I am an empty shell trying to pour sand because there is no more water.

At this point my screaming is a weird high pitched squeak because my voice is gone. Bodies are hilarious. I feel like my throat will fully seize and cease to work at all. I know that won’t happen though. I’ll go inside and wash my face and I’ll find enough function to breathe and communicate. I may whisper.

It doesn’t matter how I feel; it matters how I act. When I go inside I will hug my babies gently. I will smile because I always have a smile on a shelf for them. I have back up smiles for my smiles because I am not allowed to run out. I will say, “I am so glad to see you again.” They will always get that from me. I’m not consistent about everything but I am about this.

I can be so fucking furious I want to scratch your face off and I will still greet you in the morning.

I love those exchanges.

“I am so glad to see you again. I love you. Also, I am super fucking pissed off at you.”

Cue beatific smile and “I know!”

Their casual arrogance about being overwhelmingly loved is good for my soul. Past Me did that with Noah. We made them feel that certain, that sure, that secure. Two anxious messes did that. I’m really scared that I am not enough to carry it forward without him.

I am so scared.

Being challenged is good.

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I’m trying to convince myself so please forgive me for protesting a bit too much right now.

I don’t know how people balance all the roles they play in life. I really struggle with the constant triage of priorities. There is no way for me to have a set list of what order I handle tasks in. My life is too complex.

This week became more complicated because we found out that Noah’s surgery wasn’t just to get the weird screw thing out of his arm it turned out that he had almost completely severed his tendon. Whoops. He can’t use his dominant hand at all for weeks. He is also having a gout outbreak in his left foot and he can barely walk and he can’t stand for long at all. So he literally must be in bed for a lot of the day or in a chair with his foot elevated. The last time he didn’t rest enough the attack went on for four months.

I mean, his job is having to just deal with him going on temporary leave but he also does a fuck ton in the house. Most of it he can’t do… indefinitely. Most of the time he does a lot of covering for my disabled ass. He does a solid half of the cooking. He cleans. He helps with kid-things.

Oh, and I had already scheduled going on a trip with one of my kids through some of the biggest art galleries in Western Europe starting nine days from now. We’ll be gone two weeks. At the end of the trip Noah has to bring our 5 year old to London to meet me because we could not get a passport appointment in Edinburgh in the last 5 months of trying. Yeah. That’s gonna be a fun trip.

My sexy life is really not in my top 10 list of priorities right now. I am tracking so many lists in my brain I feel like I am about to go mad.

I’m also trying to help my friend set up a retreat. She’s had a bunch of health complications and other life frustrations so the process is going slowly and I have to keep circling back around. It is taking up a lot of room in my brain.

The garden work I need to do right now is such a long list that my hands couldn’t sustain the typing. IT’S SPRING, DAMNIT. I can fill absolutely as many hours out there as I am willing to spend. (And all of them make me SO HAPPY.) I think about it so many hours of the day that it is definitely more than a 40 hour/week gig. I have learned so much more about soil biology and now I want to spend all my time figuring out companion groupings for plants. Thinking about other things feels like a serious imposition.

I’m just starting to feel enough better after being sick twice in two weeks that I can re-start running. I haven’t done it yet though. Today has really been the first day when it might have been at all reasonable and I’ve been working since my eyes opened.

The more things I have to do the more I want to type at myself to list it all so I can try to figure out what to do first. But not just a to do list. I need to reflect all the way down on why something is more or less important.

I have been maintaining excellent self discipline about continuing to plow through books. I’m really happy about that. I’m managing about two a week and that feels like a good thing right now since I’m mostly reading books about permaculture and I need to finalise my design layout for this year like yesterday. I’m also working on a couple of other non-fiction topics that I’m happy about. And I have a couple of kink books I have never read that I picked up recently cause they sound neat.

Cause I have a lot of time to think about sex. I drift pass this space mostly so I can be happy that at least someone is out there doing the fun stuff.

In the next week I need to do some batch cooking for the time when I am gone since they are going to be on pure survival mode. I need to write down organised lists of all the stuff that needs to happen. Once I write the list I need to put them in the specific order of most important to least important and I need to just hope that the top 3 things happen without being allowed to be cranky about stuff that is missed. I need to leave everyone with a full drawer of clean pants. It’s fine if their other clothes get gross but everyone needs clean pants for the whole two weeks. Hell, I bought Noah a whole extra week worth today because he will not be up for dealing with the laundry.

Triage, triage, triage.

As much as I like to do celebration cooking I absolutely loathe day-to-day home cooking. It’s boring as shit. I feel stabby. I have to just STFU and do it. So much of it.

I also need to finish the tax paperwork he was supposed to finish because that’s due when I’m leaving anyway. Fun. Paying taxes in two countries is kinda annoying but I’m happy to be here so I’ll keep it up.

Oh yeah–do I have friends? I think I have friends. I suppose I should see people sometimes? Luckily T talks to me every week by video call so it helps me feel less isolated. Which is mixed–I might have to work a lot harder at cultivating local relationships if I couldn’t still cling like a limpet to my Californians.

New people are scary. I’m a lot. I am definitely not everyone’s cup of tea. I am neurotically particular about a great many things. I get RSD like whoa. I was a professional new kid (was a student in 33 schools preschool-grad school) so I’ve met a lot of new people. Most of them just don’t have enough bandwidth in their brain for new people. Some will throw rocks. A few will like me. And then every very very small percentage of the time… I make a friend. I am a lucky woman because I have more than two close friends. That is not promised to anyone in this life. I should not be greedy. Maybe my luck is running out. Who knows. New people are scary. But you can’t get to yes without risking no.

It is hard absorbing the opportunity cost in terms of time and energy lost through connections that are briefly explored before I move on.

Even though I don’t live out in the countryside I act like I do. I live and work on my property most of the time. We are homebodies in a way I never expected. My life has not worked like this in the past. In California there were always so many strong ties, higher ranked priorities, and the fact that getting places in a car is just less effort than riding around so we didn’t stay home much.

I was really enjoying the constant fucking we were doing a few weeks ago. Now it seems like just a dream. Ah well. I’m old enough to know that whatever is happening now will not always happen.

My first “real scene”.

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So I was 18 and I had just moved out of living with my fiancé. He and I had dated for about 2 years at that point and we were mostly engaged because his Christian relatives were against us shacking up. He wouldn’t let me experiment with shaving my cunt and he didn’t want to do anything kinky and he was 1,000% against hitting me. So I wasn’t particularly sexually satisfied in this relationship. I could time to the minute exactly what three positions he liked to go through for sex–there was no variation. Also almost zero orgasms for me. I woke up one morning and told him that if we get married we will absolutely be divorced by the time I turn 40 so we shouldn’t get married. I moved out about two weeks later.

I was renting a room from an elderly lady who rented out the room because she wanted companionship. The previous tenant was a girl my age in college who was from another country and she had no friends. I was working theatre and out every night whether I had a show or not. During the daytime when I had time to burn I started hanging out on www.match.com. It was there in a stupid truth or dare game that someone asked me what my deepest fantasy was; of course it involved being whipped till I bleed then having someone fuck me nearly unconscious while I am bleeding all over the place.

So of course this dude sends me a private message and asks me if I have ever heard of bdsm. Nope, I hadn’t. He told me to go buy the book SM101. I called every fucking book store in a 30 mile radius before one helpful employee said, “Uhhh I think you should call Leather Masters. I think they are the only place you are going to find that.” So I managed to find Leather Masters and I drove over there. I walked into that store with my eyes as wide as dinner plates and my mouth open in complete horror. I remember shivering and feeling terrified. As I was slowly walking around the store I saw a cabinet with some weird metal things in it. The employee asked if I needed help. I asked him what those metal things were.

They were fucking sounds. He had a great time explaining how to use them. I bought the book and ran out of that store about as fast as I could.

I read the book in one night, masturbating furiously. Not that the book is that exciting but more the growing awareness that there almost certainly were people who would be thrilled to beat me until I bleed and then fuck me while I cry and say no. THAT WAS THE BEST NIGHT EVER. I kept talking to the guy from match.com. He told me to go up to the Power Exchange in San Francisco. I asked why and what would happen there and he told me to go find out.

I brought my fucking sister because I was so scared. In retrospect that is hilarious and rather gross given my weird family history. If you don’t know: PE, as the locals refer to it, was a public sex space that had a dungeon in the basement and various other fun tools/equipment for sex. Folks from the scene were very welcome and encouraged in the time when I was going but I understand in the last few years it has gone hard in the swinger direction. If you didn’t have fetish/super sexy clothes on you had to wear a towel. So my sister is there going, “WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF CRAZY PLACE DID YOU BRING ME. WHY AM I HERE?!?!?!?!?! MY HUSBAND* IS GOING TO KILL ME.”

I told the guy from match.com that I wasn’t sure I was up for that. He said that maybe we should take it slow and I should drive down to his house and we could do a scene in private before I dealt with the public stuff. So I did. I drove six hours to get to his house. Because I had read SM101 of course I had a safe call and I called a friend as soon as I arrived at his house and I read off his address, car license plate number, and his drivers license number before I walked into the house. In retrospect I am proud of myself.

We went in and I figured out that he was a lot older than I thought he was, or at least he looked a lot older? Something. He was at least 30 years my senior and possibly more than 40 years. He wanted to start by giving me a bath and shaving my cunt. I went along with it with reservations.

By the time he finished that and was drying me off and trying to get me to the bed I flipped out. “Uhhhhh I gotta go.” I got dressed in lightening speed. It was very late at night so I called an old friend who lived about an hour north of him. I asked if I could crash at her house for the night. She was very confused because she was not my safe call and she had no idea why I’d be in SoCal at that point. When I told her she screamed at me for about two hours about how lucky I was that I wasn’t dead. I drove home the next day.

Then I went to Hot Topic and bought slutty goth clothes and I went back to PE the next weekend by myself. I ended up fucking one of the employees in the laundry room. Linc was his name. Dad (@Slydexia) yelled at me to come inside the cage because he and his friend needed bottoms. I did not enter the cage for him. Instead I played with this incredibly beautiful woman. She flogged the shit out of me and told me to come kiss her as a thank you the next day at Dore Alley. I absolutely did as she directed and had my mind completely blown by the sight of thousands of hot leathermen hurting each other, pissing on each other, fucking each other on the street in San Francisco. How in the fuck was this real life?

The week after that I went to the Santa Cruz munch and met two highly creepy weirdos. Ok, that wasn’t going to work out. (I knew more about them later. My radar was 100% fucking right.) Then I went to the Palo Alto munch that Wednesday. I was invited to a party the next Saturday. I met my Owner and most of the people who would become my Leather family in the course of that first month I was in the scene.

I grew up in that Leather family. It’s not that we always had good times and there were no difficulties. I have worked through more problems with those people than any of my vanilla friends. When one of us fuck up the others are happy to point it out. It has allowed me, no required me to get my shit together in so many different ways.

I don’t want love that is uncritical and unconditional. I am not an infant. I want people to have standards that I must meet. I want people to require that I treat them well enough. I learned it through watching other people do the same.

I feel like my life is very much the result of luck. If I had not met those people when I did there is the very real possibility I wouldn’t be alive. They modeled sobriety. They modeled making calculated risks. They modeled researching risks. They modeled how to set boundaries and hold people to them. They showed me how to be a healthy person.

Well, at least healthier than I had ever known. It’s all relative–right?

  • Turns out he wasn’t her husband because the marriage ceremony they had while he was in prison wasn’t legal. He never bothered to divorce his first wife.

Clickbait trash

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I was foolish last night. I was procrastinating on sleep and I gave in to clickbait. Habits of highly productive people. Ugh. I have this constant internal tug of war over productivity. You might have noticed that I don’t write much anymore. There are so many reasons. One of them is that I use my hands a lot and if I want to reduce pain something has to go. Another reason is that I have largely been able to write over the last 12 years by giving up sleep.

One of the neat things about tracking lots of data about my body is I can tell you fairly conclusively that Scotland has been fucking fantastic for my sleep habits. In California I went years getting 4-7 hours of sleep. 7 hours was somewhat rare and I would pat myself on the back for doing it. When I was deep in project mode 4 hours for weeks or months was not unusual.

I’ve had 4 weeks of project mode since I arrived here: painting the dining room. Otherwise I have been getting 8-10 hours of sleep. I’m certain the Amitriptyline helps. It doesn’t make me pass out in a drugged stupor instantly anymore but it keeps me asleep longer. I like that.

I don’t need to read bullshit about how if I went back to waking up at 4 am I could be a much more productive person as if productivity is the same thing as measuring how moral I am.

Every so often I will talk to another immigrant here and they will almost inevitably complain about how hard it is to deal with the less intense work ethic of Scottish people. I always say that I am trying as hard as I can to move in that direction. I don’t want to maintain my California work ethic. I don’t think it is healthy to believe that 60 hours a week is a minimum amount of acceptable work or you deserve to be fired. I don’t think it is healthy that everyone believes you must monetize every hobby and interest you have or you are wasting your time.

I find it really interesting just how happy I am to be out of California and the US as a whole. It’s not that Scotland is perfect–there is no such thing as perfect. But I don’t worry about having to find a tactful way to play 20 questions with new parents-of-friends to find out how they handle gun safety in their house because the expectation is that people might/probably have guns. I think the US has lost the plot when it comes to gun ownership. Gun ownership in the US is not about keeping the gun owner safe. It is about letting people who own guns feel powerful and mostly they put themselves and their families at greater risk for the charade of being powerful. It’s gross. I know that I know a lot of people who own guns. As much as I love you I am glad I no longer have to navigate the emotional/anxiety minefield of ever walking through your front door again. Your desire to feel powerful makes me feel sick.

When I talk to my older kids about what they want from the future: where would they like to school, where do they think they want to live? They say that even if they don’t stay in the Highlands for the rest of their lives there is no chance they want to go back to the US. I can’t say I blame them. I mean, feelings might change. That happens.

I have been reading books on gardening in this climate about as fast as I can get them. Sure, a lot of them are more England centric and don’t perfectly answer my needs for Northern Scotland but it is teaching me more relevant information than my background education in California gardening. The UK is so hilariously on the nose about naming: Flowerdew (the jokes write themselves), Cox (a kind of apple), Titmarsh (I think of little birds in the marshes telling me the ancient lore).

An immigrant buddy told me that it takes a good 7 years to settle into a place. With the pandemic I feel like that process is frozen in time in a bizarre way. I think of 80’s tv “magic” moments where someone froze time so that someone could get something done without it impacting anyone else. I am setting up my garden. I am working on the house. I’m about to start painting again: maybe that’s why I feel the need to write something down again. I feel like I am being given this weird slice of time where I am here but I am not here. I learned how to paint by doing set design. I learned about creating a setting so that things could be perceived a way, so the characters could be perceived a way, so the plot could be advanced with as little acting effort as possible.

By the time anyone is allowed into my house and I’m actually working hard on making a social place, the backdrop will be pretty much finished. Some folks are making noise about it being fine to come visit this autumn. I have serious doubts.

I want to paint soon in large part because apparently UK paint doesn’t store the way that US paint does. I need to use it up before it isn’t good anymore. I bought too much volume. Next time I will only buy 1 liter cans. Life lesson.

I have been out in the yard a lot over the past week. The kids had an academic break and the effort I normally put into schoolwork we put into yard work. It was nice. Things are coming along. I am most of the way through making the raised mount beds. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%BCgelkultur) I have been taking it very slowly because it is a lot of shoveling and lifting and carrying. Mostly what I am doing is cleaning up all the debris all over my yard and putting it in long-term compost-in-place mounds on top of felled trees. How long they will be functional is difficult to fully determine. Opinions vary between 5 and 20 years. I will find out! It’s an experiment.

I am doing quite well with my current pass at increasing fitness. In the past I have set strenuous goals and reached them (by sacrificing sleep, other healthy activities, giving up almost all other hobbies) and I’m just not in a place to do that emotionally. So I have been very gradually increasing my personal step count goals and I’m ignoring the watch’s direction for how much I “should” be doing. I am consistently reaching my personal/lower goals and I’ve managed to bump them up very slowly over many months and that’s going well. I haven’t injured myself in months and at this stage of decrepitude I am treating that as a major victory.

I don’t enjoy how much “don’t injure myself extra” is a huge sticking point at this stage of my life. But it is.

I am making forward progress on fitness. I am moving the garden along. I am homes educating my kids. I am keeping a household running (thanks Noah for doing most of the cooking). I am keeping us on a budget. I am maintaining a low and slow drip of getting to know home education folk here through online meetings and randomly meeting people out on the trail (that’s pretty darn thrilling, I’ll tell you). I’m going to be painting again in a week or so.

I don’t need to be told that if I just gave up all my rest time I could be more productive as if higher productivity level is the measure of a life. I have worked really hard on increasing how much rest I get. I take weekend time to sit in my room and do nothing as a conscious choice. Yeah I am watching shit on Netflix. I am also reading books. I am also planning for the future. I’m sketching out ideas for how to solve future problems we don’t have yet but will appear like magic over the next 10 years or so.

I don’t need to give up sleep. I don’t need to give up all recreation on the altar of “Work is all that is moral”. Fuck your clickbait in the ear with a pointy stick.

On the fourth day of med trial my body gave to me…

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I slept from 8pm to about 6am. I woke up earlier with the vague belief that I should probably get up and pee… but I didn’t bother and went back to sleep instead. That’s nearly unheard of for me.

So… last night I had some cocodamol and two glasses of wine. I have very mixed feelings about how hard my body resists sedatives but I’m fucking tired and if it takes a lot sometimes I’m going to knock myself over the head with a hammer.

I’ve had a few bursts of severe pain in my hand/arm/elbow/shoulder. I attribute that to working. Which… is a mixed bag. I don’t need pain meds tonight. My back is sore and icki but I don’t feel like I want to cry.

Today I have been alert and energetic and I’ve gotten a lot of chores done. I haven’t felt slow or impeded. I don’t feel the same sense of time distortion. I feel a little tired in the “Jesus I’m years in the hole on sleep deprivation” sense but not bad or worn out for me.

I have 15 books and 32 days to go on my reading challenge. I’m almost done with one. I may even be able to finish tonight. We’ll see….

Another day, another chance to record what’s happening

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Med responses are very important to me. I am upset that I have so few written records of my previous drug attempts. Oh, by the way my oldest heard me make a crack about having a hangover from the drug and she flipped out. She thought I was using hard street drugs because I had just run out of cope.

Serves me right for not telling my kids in advance absolutely everything I do with my body I guess?

Today was different. Less exhaustion. I woke up at 4 for a trip to the loo. I didn’t get back to sleep for close to an hour then I was up by 6:30. I took the pill at 7 last night and was asleep by 8:30.

Tonight I took the pill at 6.

Today we had already made plans to go for a walk in the woods with a family who lives about 1.5 miles away from us who are new to home education. They have a 9 year old boy and an 11 year old girl. The two of them both turned up saying that they were hoping for a kid of their gender. I said, “How would a non-binary kid who is not a boy and not a girl who likes to do things regardless of gender fit?” They had about two questions then they both went with it. For the record: that’s where middle kid is at again.

Anyway, I was… more calm than usual? I felt like my brain was slower and on the sluggish side. It was a less pleasant experience than pot but not completely dissimilar? I didn’t have any of the uplift I get from pot but I got a little bit of the “pause” between having a thought and reacting.

My feet are going to sleep ridiculously quickly. If I kneel down to put stuff in a drawer it doesn’t take 2 minutes. Usually I can kneel for 10-15 minutes before my feet fall asleep.

My back has been hurting quite badly all day. Of course I have walked 6.5 miles after it hurt when I woke up. Cause yeah. I carried the littlest home for the final mile because she was utterly wasted.

I’m still having some nerve pain in my arms if I tweak them up to use them in an unusual position. (Putting the baby in the back carrier was a bit festive.) I feel a lot of tightness and general arm unhappiness. I have fairly deliberately not typed much today trying to rest. (Really the last couple of days.)

I have very much wanted to not add more medication to this in the first few days. So I’m not taking anything for the back pain or headache. I want to have a really solid idea of what is coming from the Amitriptyline. Normally I would definitely be medicating for those at this point because it hurts.

I’m having massive time dilation. I can check and see this is the end of the second day. It feels like a lot more than that. I labeled the pill packet with the exact date I am supposed to take each pill because I am worried about taking too much or skipping a day and not noticing.

I am utterly out of patience with the kids but I think that was happening before the meds. Right now it is hard to remember.

In unrelated news: I have 17 books to read in 34 days. Time for some graphic novels (Neil Gaiman’s American Gods 1 & 1). In another day I can finish The Cooking Gene, and I need to sit the kids down and finish Odd Girl Out. That will leave me with 14 books to go. Eep. Maybe my goal was a tad ambitious for this year…

No stockings

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The boat sucks. Transparent International sucks. Putting our stuff in storage for months sucks. Our stuff supposedly arrived nine days ago but the company on this end hasn’t contacted me. Either customs is taking absurdly long (it generally takes 48 hours) or it didn’t arrive for the second time. Or the company who is delivering it just… doesn’t feel like working effectively and quickly. Who knows.

A whole bunch of the stocking stuffers are on that damn boat too. Well… I guess some of them can wait for Easter? Others will just be given late. We will still have magic. Frankly… the kids will get plenty.

The trip to Edinburgh went fine. We did our paperwork. Now some bits have to be mailed off. I think that will happen tomorrow. Every day a bit more gets done, we take a few more steps towards being fully settled. I’m told that once our stuff arrives we will be offered compensation for how terribly over-estimate this has gone. If it takes till after Christmas (looking likely) it will be more than 18 weeks, on an 8-12 week estimate. Awesome.

I’m starting to feel scared they lost our stuff and just don’t want to admit it yet.

I’m trying to find joy though. Today a tree surgeon came and took out some non-natives and we now have a giant pile of stumps and tree chunks and wood chips. We will have a lot of fun with that. I am really looking forward to setting up a proper mud kitchen out there with rough materials instead of something store bought. That makes me feel… really happy. That speaks to my values.

It’s weird figuring out what things are part of your values. I want my kids to be happier playing with a pile of logs than sitting and watching a screen and I teach them that this is the way to be by going out and doing it with them. I want my kids to turn to me when they have emotional distress instead of eating their feelings or hurting themselves or finding awful romantic partners and so far… they do. They talk about the things that upset them and they try to find ways to solve their problems that are fairly constructive for little kids.

I want my children to be doers, not people who sit around being entertained as a lifestyle. I model that. I live that. And so far… they are running into slight troubles at school because they are not people who sit and wait for life to happen. They get up and do things. Will this make them suitable for every job? No. But it will help them find the right one for them someday.

A long time ago I was drawn to people who were very certain of their own “rightness”. I was like a moth to a flame. I wanted to be near people who felt confident and sure of their own path. I became that kind of person and it makes some of my old connections trickier. I am absolutely certain that those paths do not work for me. Is there anything wrong with them? No. We all get to be however works for us. I’m just grateful that (so far) my children have very complementary personalities to my own.

When I go check on Youngest Child lately, she is more and more often in the lounge sprawled out reading a book. She’s going to fit right in. She talks up a storm. She demands to go outside and play. I like her so much. Sure it’s going to take her a few weeks to wean off of demanding the iPad every single time she opens her eyes… that’s a hazard of travel. We can’t bring books with us in large quantities. E-readers are not the same in the eyes of a toddler. I am buying books. Not tons. Well… a fairly surprising amount considering we have been here three months. I think if I include Christmas presents I have bought 6-10 books for each person in the house already. Once the boat arrives that won’t feel as important. We already have books… we just don’t have our books and the pain is becoming unbearable. We are readers and our books have been in storage for a year. We have all used e-books… it’s not the same. It doesn’t fill the same need in our souls.

I found the local used book store and I’m already making friends with the proprietor. I think we will get to know each other quite well.

The guy who did our tree removal asked about getting our families together for dinner. He wants me to hurry up and make more friends locally. I think he sounds delightful. He spent several decades riding his bike around foreign countries. We will have lots to talk about.

I have a whole bunch of tendrils out into the community. The beginnings of beginnings… but I’m not following through very much yet. I talk to people when they touch my life incidentally but I’m not following up with more close contact. I’m still so tired. I still feel so overwhelmed. I don’t know how long it will take me to feel like I have anything to give a real relationship but I’m not there. I still go to sleep and wake up feeling so weary I want to fall over. I still feel like my days are completely packed with chores… I don’t know when this will change. I don’t know if or when this will ease and until it does I should not lead anyone on with the belief that I have something to give.

My bucket is empty.

I haven’t had 24 hours of down time in over two years. I know that is pretty par for the course for parents… but not many parents do continual travel and interact with their kids 24/7 the way I do. Shorter breaks don’t feel very refreshing because my level of over work is so extreme.

If I get four whole hours off in a week… it feels like a drop of rain in the ocean. I don’t notice it. I don’t settle or relax. I have not yet figured out how to recharge, not really. I just keep pushing through.

I am reading the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence that is the basis for all of their education theory. It’s really quite refreshing and more in line with my overall belief system and educational theory than I would have expected. I really hope I can help MC pop a wheelie and get over the hurdle of school feeling just that teensiest bit too hard (fucking handwriting) so that she can go back to full time school next year. This is about the best school is going to get.

I’m going to make “lines” with sticks and then we are going to shape letters with wood chips and talk about why the proportions are the way they are. Why do you space things this much. Why do you need the arches and the curves in these places. Why do you need these kinds of gaps between words to be readable.

Kinaesthetic education, yo.

Because when we are all done we can use a broom and sweep up the results and then try again. It’s perfect. I’m actually really excited about this.

I have so much confidence in my children that it sometimes feels unreal to me that anyone can feel this way about anyone else.

The other day I was wandering somewhere with EC and we saw some of these abstract statues of a mother curled around a child. She said that when we get the house more properly settled she wants to find something like that for us to have in the house because that is how she thinks of me. My heart exploded. I had so many feelings at once. I wanted to create children who felt tenderly held. I wanted to create relationships where my children felt adored and respected and appreciated… I did it and I will keep doing it. I said, “Ok. We can do that.”

I kind of love that my baby will say her name all day long “_____ hat. ______ bear. ______ shirt.” but when a stranger asks her what her name is… she smiles at them and refuses to answer. It feels like she only wants to share her identity with us. I know that isn’t it. I know this is just a normal developmental stage… but it feels really lovely anyway. This baby feels really lovely in general.

On the train home last night a guy was sitting at the table next to ours. For the first hour or so he kept his airbuds in and I worried about disturbing him. Then we ended up in line at the snack stand together and he started talking to me. He told me that he has rarely ever seen three children as well behaved as mine. Yes sir, I’ll take your random approval… Our train was over an hour delayed and we just talked and played and read and drew and had a good time together without being fussy. Even though we arrived home more than two hours past our bed time. My kids are tough cookies. They rarely whine and when they do it is generally a sign that something pretty serious is wrong. I trust them.

That’s part of why I am going to listen to MC and flexi school for the rest of the year. She is good at telling me where she needs to be and what she needs to have happen for a given period of time. She has sure changed a lot over the course of her life. She has tried out some pretty intense things… but she tells me when she needs me to shift and that’s the best I can ask for.

We will figure out this journey together.

This is where I want to be. I am with the people I want to be with. Sure, there are bumps and inconveniences… that’s because life is an adventure. And sometimes adventures make you cry.

Third time, done.

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50,129. I wrote for 90 minutes today and now I need to stop before my wrists explode into flames.

I’m sure I will add more in the future. But I’m walking away from the higher word count goal for right now. There’s a lot more I want to flesh out in some of these chapters but I am declaring NaNo done for the year and I’m going to take another break.

Maybe it will be another multi-year break like the second break. Blurgh.

Pieces of dysfunction.

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Mostly I keep my crazy ranting on my blog. I figure the few people who want to know my wackiness follow me over there and writing on a more public site is… I don’t know… forcing my insanity down peoples throats. But the thing is, the stuff I have to work on changing next is stuff that is rooted in my sexuality. That’s a journey that has been highly shaped by folks who hang out here. So once in a while my insanity will leak out a bit here.

I’ve worked pretty hard on changing my perception of myself over the years. I no longer believe I am worthless. I have substituted the belief that I am an incredibly effective tool. I know how to do a lot of different kinds of work and when I show up to do work… I get a lot done. I have developed quite a bit of pride in how effectively I can get work done over a broad swath of types of work. I’m not a one trick pony.

My family wanted me to perceive myself as stupid but all of the GATE testing when I was a kid and grown ups going “Holy crap this kid is SMART” means that their attempts to make me think I was stupid just kind of failed. I’m brilliant and I’m comfortable with acknowledging that. The rate at which I read complicated non-fiction books helps me not ever succumb to the belief that I might be stupid. But I have to keep working consciously on expanding what I know or I would start chanting this at myself. I view smart as something that has to be constantly worked on or it doesn’t count.

I could go through a long list of specifically triggering things I’ve worked on, but the problem that keeps coming up and I just can’t fucking deal with it in a rational way… is what I was born to be.

Let me explain. My father raped my mother when she knew she was fertile and she didn’t want to have more kids. He wanted to make another kid to rape. He was already raping the children they had. Like a true pedophile, gender wasn’t that important to my father.

So from when I was a tiny baby the story I was told about my existence is that I was made so that men would have more holes to use and how I felt about that really didn’t matter.

This is the problem I keep coming back to. This is the core belief I have not been able to shake or move or change in years of trying. This is what I am here for. It doesn’t really matter if it feels good to me or if I like it or if I want it. That’s why I am here. It is literally why I was made.

I don’t know how to alter these wires in my brain so that I stop giving a shit what my father’s intentions were and start feeling like I get to define what I am here for.

This piece is just sticky as hell and I have not figured out how to change it. This is what brings me to my knees over and over sobbing and feeling like I need to die to get away from the terrible burden of being responsible for taking more and more and more pain inside my body.

Even when my partners (my husband most of all) have tried to figure out how to fuck me without hurting me we always run up against this strong limitation that I can’t really talk in the moment about sex hurting my cunt. I dissociate away from that so fast I am literally physically incapable of talking when it happens. Even though I’ve done decades of work on trying to fix this.

I’ve fixed a lot of pieces of this. But this spot still persists and I have not yet figured out how to rewire this in my brain.

I can write about it when it’s not happening. I can barely speak out loud about this topic without melting down into tears or screaming swear words like FUCK YOU FOR HURTING ME. Which is not all that productive.

I continue to be impressed with my husband’s persistence in wanting to help me deal with my laundry list of problems.

I sabotage efforts to make sex not hurt me. Because I have this internal motivation that I have to be providing a lot of sex, even if it is damaging me and I have to initiate even when I’m in pain and….

I know I create a lot of this problem with my utter unwillingness to act like pain in my cunt is worthy of acknowledgment in the moment. There were a few times when I was very young when I mentioned that it hurt to partners and the response was a solid wall of “So?” and I just completely lost the ability.

The kinds of 25 year olds who like to fuck 12 year olds really don’t care.

This internal belief, that fucking is literally why I exist, is why I push so hard for sex with so many people. I have an internal programming that dictates that I must ask for sex. Because this is why I exist. To give this experience to people who want it.

This has gotten more complicated as my partner has gone through a shift from actively wanting polyamory when we met to very actively wanting mainly monogamy with very rare occasions of group sex.

Fitting into the expectations that are currently held for me takes a lot of work. I’ve adapted as best I can. It’s not always easy. But the good I get from being part of this family is so breathtaking. I get to belong somewhere. People care when I’m crying. People care about me in this house. I am important to them. It’s worth a lot of pain and suffering to try and deal with more layers of my mental illness to try and stay here for more of this.

Recently I went through a multiple month period where I genuinely didn’t want to die. That is the longest I can remember feeling like that in my entire life. I have always wanted to die. That has been the drumbeat chasing me through life for just about 30 years now. “I should die because this hurts too fucking much.” I want more of the not-wanting-to-die feeling. And I have to change this belief to get there.

This is tricky because I partially married my husband because he has the highest sex drive of anyone I ever seriously dated. He’s been the only one who wanted to keep up with what I wanted to initiate.

But a lot of what I initiate hurts me. And then there are waves of consequences.

This is so unfair.

It is desperately unfair to my husband and frankly it isn’t fucking fair to me either. It is fucking shitty being in my head and in my body. It isn’t anyone’s fault at this point that it sucks so much to be inside of me… but it’s a fact.

One of my buddies idly mused that I get a lot of self esteem from my interactions with my children.

Children are the only people I know how to interact with without feeling like I am failing in not offering sex. That’s the only time I feel like it is completely appropriate for me to not be offering sex. It’s safe in a way nothing and no adult ever is.

I don’t ask everyone for sex all the time for a variety of reasons (I’m pretty sure you don’t want to be asked, I’m pretty sure my husband would flip out, etc) but I have had to grow up and work on my boundaries to get to this point. It took a fair bit of maturing before I understood that my father was lying and not everyone wanted that from me.

Thanks to all the folks who have skillfully and tactfully turned me down over the years. I’m glad you didn’t follow that up with refusing to know me because I was so rude/tactless/gross/insert word of choice.

I’ve tried to grow up as fast as I have been able. I’m a lot closer to my goal of “grown upness” than I actually believed I would make it to… but I’m not there yet. I’m hoping I manage around the time my 9 year old makes it to adulthood.

What am I here for?

That’s this huge existential question, right? I’m super partial to the work of Viktor Frankl, a psychotherapist who went through the Holocaust. He wrote the book Man’s Search For Meaning. His general hypothesis is that folks can survive any horror in life if they have something they believe in and it doesn’t matter what it is. It could be “I want to see my wife/husband again”. That kind of belief is enough. If you believe that your love for someone else is your reason for continuing to be alive then you can make it enough to see you through anything.

I can’t control why I was made. I can’t control the intentions behind my makers.

But why do I stay alive?

Maybe that needs to be the focus of the next stage of work. I can’t change what I was made for or whether I did my best to live up to that for the first few decades of my life.

But why now?

I feel really guilty that a lot of why I’m staying alive at this point is a science experiment. Will I be a good enough mother that my children will want to know me when they are adults? Am I capable of treating them in a way that will cause them to want to know me?

I feel guilty about this because I feel like I “should” pick something that is more oriented towards my husband and… that’s different. It’s really complicated that I already feel like I have failed at being a good wife and I feel like there is no walking back from that. He’s not leaving because I’m better than nothing but I will never make it to good. I can’t hang my hat on that in this life.

Ok, so “I am bad” and “I am a monster” are strongly tied in with what is causing me these eternal problems.

It is hard because my husband is having a hard time with how much the shift into being a mother has derailed a lot of the hypersexuality and a lot of my strong need to be hit so much. I’m boring now.

I feel like I am bad for even trying to work towards a future where my cunt will hurt less because that will mean I am not meeting his expectations for how often he wants to get laid.

And the cycle continues.

forward

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I'm almost done editing the book.  I will need to write some kind of forward because it's not nice to let people head into a story like this without some kind of fore-warning.

I'm curious if a couple of people would like to see an advance copy before it is perfect so you can give me feedback on what it made you think about, how I can direct people in the most useful ways, and any other feedback you would be willing to give me because I am scared shitless of this just appearing in the Amazon marketplace in two weeks.

Two weeks.  Holy shit.

Who in the hell okay’ed this project?!

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We have a little board book called First Rhymes. Most of the rhymes are the old favorites everyone knows (Little Bo Peep, Little Jack Horner, etc.) but there is one that uhm… who decided that this was a good idea (for a book published in 2005)?

I Love Little Pussy

I love little pussy,
Her coat is so warm,
And if I don’t hur her
She’ll do me no harm.

*cough* Totally innocent, I’m sure.

Question and Purging

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As for the question I asked yesterday–I didn’t ask because Noah and I are having trouble negotiating. We are both very happy with how we work things out. The only friction at all is because I have an insane work ethic and I would cheerfully have both of us work 24/7. He does all that I reasonably expect from him and more. 🙂 And I checked this morning–he thinks I do plenty. I asked because this is a frequent theme on some of the boards I read and I was sort of curious how people I actually know feel about it.

I’m starting to feel the urge to get rid of a bunch of stuff. This may or may not have anything to do with the fact that I am moving everything out of the garage and trying to figure out how to fit it all in the shed. 🙂 Part of it is honestly that now that I am done with the comp exam I would kind of like to get rid of the books I had to read but I never actually liked. Why am I storing all of those? Am I trying to brag about how well read I am? Yeah… I think I’m kind of done with that. I don’t need them anymore so they are going to go away. (Before you say anything Rebecca, trying to sell them online would add a lot of hassle to my life that would not be proportional to the time I would have to spend on the project.)

And in looking at how much kid stuff we have I reached the conclusion that I really really don’t want any presents for Shanna for her birthday. She’s turning one. She won’t feel slighted and we have way too much stuff for her already. I should probably send email to the family. If people really feel like they just have to spend money on her I will ask them to give money towards her college fund. 🙂

book talk

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Many thoughts and feelings all jumbled up. I wonder how much of it is connected to the really complex and unsettled book I am reading. Midnight’s Children is utterly fascinating. I often have trouble getting into magical realism books at first and then I feel changed by the experience of reading them. I see more complexity in life and relationships. It’s really interesting.

some of them don’t suck.

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So far I liked The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The English Patient; Midnight’s Children and Kim are both really interesting so far. Pretty much everything else has been obnoxious. I’m happy about four good ones. 🙂

I have eight books left that are not in progress. I have four weeks and four days left. Oof. Best get to hurrying!