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I am so proud of my babies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have a lot of cautious optimism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The future is vast and terrifying

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I’m trying to figure out which parts of my future are still options. I don’t know which parts are me and which pieces were entirely created so I could live up to Noah’s expectations.

I’m still interested in the gardening. I’m not managing to get as much of it done as I would hope. That’s complicated. Gardening, much like writing, tends to need to be done in a flow state or I find it incredibly agitating and annoying. I need to get better at darting outside over and over for a little bit during the day. I’m still in the last throes of requirement to directly supervise a child ALL DAY. It’s a dramatic thing when they get old enough to run off and manage their own time for a big chunk of the day. Shortie won’t be fully out of the need for supervision for a few more years. She’s an impulsive one. We have so much in common.

I feel deeply lucky that my children are happy to be like me. They feel supported in their challenges and understood in their struggles. They feel validated and seen and appreciated. They tell me so, often We have our moments of strife but we are deeply aware of the need to repair and make reparations. Everyone in this house makes mistakes and we all cop to them immediately and fairly casually. We don’t feel bad about having flaws. We don’t feel like making mistakes is any kind of permanent statement about our value as a human. To err is human. You learn more from mistakes than you do from doing it right the first time.

I love that my babies move through the world with such confidence in themselves. They can describe their needs for assistance. They have been able to set the terms for how much sensory seeking or avoiding they needed to do. There have been wild swings over the years. Noah had been giving me steady breaks for about the last 6 years of his life. That’s when he got really hands-on with the kids. I have a lot of sensory avoiding behaviours too. I like a room alone very much. I’m a writer. It’s been going way better for me.

That’s what my future will include, but what will writing mean when I don’t have Noah around as a corroborator? I’m a lot more afraid of being called a liar without him around. I do not believe I am a reliable enough narrator. That scares me. I feel very mixed about the stories I can’t tell because I don’t own them. They involve other people who wouldn’t be able to give consent if they wanted to. Someday they can give consent but that time is a long way in the future. I find it strange that I act like I have less authority to tell my story without Noah around to give his stamp of approval. He validated my existence. He wanted me and that justified the resources it took to maintain me.

It’s wild having that structure drop out of my life. I feel this vast emptiness in my soul. If Noah doesn’t want me, then why I am I still alive? The answer is because he gave me three children. What I have told each of them separately and together is that I will fight to stay alive as long as there is at least one of them. I am not saying I need the full set in order to survive. I am committed to each of them as individuals until the absolute end of the road for me. I will work hard to take it seriously that I need to extend that road as long as possible. Even when it isn’t very fun.

Being in my body isn’t feeling fun lately. I’m building back after surgery and everything hurts. I no longer get massages almost daily. Noah has been massaging me constantly for almost 20 years and it’s just gone. I hurt a lot. It takes a really high level of exercise, and specifically cross training, for me to not hurt in a fairly overwhelming way. I have to make up for all the joint instability by building up the muscle support. Yoga, rock climbing, cycling, running, swimming, and hopefully dance on a regular basis. I want to do all those sports every week.

I have to go limp and decondition after surgery or I have big bleed outs. It’s happened a bunch. So this is a cycle I will probably have to go through a few different times. It’s scary for the kids and for me. This means that I am weighing my options for birth control very carefully. I have an appointment to talk to a GP coming up. I don’t want to ever get pregnant again. This is something that is very important to me. This is something I need to have control over. My older kids have made it very fucking clear that they are not open to having another younger sibling. I respect that. It was a group decision to have Shortie and I respect them assessing their own abilities to provide support for another baby and toddler.

My life is going to revolve around my kids in a really big way for all of my life. That’s for me. That is going to stay true. We are going to have a stable home together. A home where we all get to have space and come together if and when we want to. Over time the other two bedrooms are going to be more seriously set up for people who come over regularly.

It’s interesting watching the evolution of this house. I thought this house was going to be much more static than the house in California, which I pulled apart and rebuilt and repainted and constantly moved the furniture to change how I used every room. I lived in an Ikea ever changing set. It was pretty rad. I like how I used that house. It wasn’t a house set up I would have chosen but I made it work. I changed it a lot starting when I moved in. Basically that was never Noah’s house again. And then this house is a huge lemon. It’s been insanely expensive to repair all the long term neglect from all the previous owners. When I’m completely caught up it will be baller.

I love the bones of this house. I love what we are doing with it. I love the way we morph and grow inside of it. I love that it is a house, like Wonderland, that inspires people to dream. Noah is why I had time to paint this house. He had Shortie. I have so many feelings about how I am going to be a good enough mother to her without his support.

I have spent a lot of time this year thinking about how I don’t get to have as many projects. I won’t be doing volunteer work any year soon. Well, I can if I can bring Shortie. She’s my buddy for the next 4-5 years. It won’t be as intense as it is right now for that whole time. Which is good or I would be a husk of a human on the far side. I love my babies and I am grateful to the marrow of my bones for getting to have this experience of being alive with them. I don’t wish this life away. I’m just looking forward to when Shortie is old enough to cycle to and from classes without me, you know?

The gardening was always the thing I was doing with/for/inflicting on the kids. Noah was never part of it. In a way, I think that is good. I was looking forward to long years tinkering in the garden and listening to him play piano. Now it feels different to live in this walled garden. I feel more vulnerable and yet competitive. Like, my house and garden are going to look a lot nicer because I’m going to worry more about judgment. I was allowed to get away with more of it being part of a whole heathen family. Single mothers are judged differently.

I have a lot of new social rules to learn and I am not looking forward to any of it. I am scared and anxious and cranky. It sucks because I have so little patience for caring about anyone else’s needs. If you are not my crotch fruit I only have a few hours a week to give spread between every social interaction I have. I feel bad that I need this so strongly right now. It’s a lot of why I am not asking for more babysitting to go be social with friends. It doesn’t seem like something I have the spoons for. I’m too tired and grumpy. I don’t want to care more about everyone else’s feelings than I do my own because that means being very careful about my speech. It’s a lot of work. I have to think about what everyone else needs me to pretend isn’t going on for me.

Sometimes it is a little challenging coming up against Scottish or English reserve. In a way, they are the result of many centuries of programming in a way I can’t understand. I am the freakish end result of the most progressive loop holes and policies of the people who went ever searching for more answers until they ran out of land and had to stay in California.

Matisse said I had the energy of a star being born. I don’t feel like I have that flame right now. I can feel a memory of it. I don’t know that I will ever have it to give again, though. I don’t know that I’m going to have that kind of focus and freedom. Maybe after the indenture is over.

I sold my services very specifically. I wanted to get married and have kids and homeschool them. I knew they were going to be weird and have special needs and I didn’t want them to be beaten down by the system. I take this very seriously. This is what Noah bought when he married me. We had an agreement. If he supported me for the whole of the indenture I would take care of him for the rest of our lives. The words feel like bitter ash in my mouth.

I find it fascinating that I have always only had a relationship with my mother in law. I’ve barely spoken a few sentences to my father in law. We have a nearly religious separation of gender relations. We have so much in common and it’s a funny thing that she now loves me and wants to make sure I’m taken care of for the rest of my life. She wants to make sure that her grandkids don’t have to go through the kind of single mom experience she grew up with when her father died.

She wants me to have the spoons to be nice.

I really appreciate that. I see that for the gift it is. I see what my mother in law was fighting with her marriage and her mother and I see how she got to where she is. I think she’s done really darn well with the hand life dealt her. I can see how she is trying to give me the freedom to be who I want to be in this life.

I have told my children their entire lives that I am preparing them to not need me. I am also auditioning for a role as an adult peer relationship way down the line. I am not trying to be your friend right now. I am not trying to win your approval right now. I want 30 year old you to respect me. Sometimes I have to be the brick wall, that’s the size of our life. It’s not personal baby. Everyone else hits the wall in school. I am your school.

It’s a complicated relationship dynamic for me. I am consciously and deliberately working myself out of a job. I don’t want to be the source of all support or knowledge or control when you are grown. That’s not my job anymore, bitches. I did my service. Past that you need to be responsible for yourself. Anything you want from me past that you have to negotiate case by case. I don’t owe you care taking forever. But, I am happy to share chores and live in a consciously interdependent fashion because being disabled sucks, yo.

It is interesting to negotiate this with the proto-adult. In this country he is already legally an adult in many ways. In my mind I have seven more months to actively parent my oldest child. Oh my fucking Cheese. It’s insane. How could this be happening already? Wasn’t he born five minutes ago? Oh wow. Noah, I am so sad you aren’t here to help him over the finish line. I know this would have been a really epic year for you two. I was so excited about the plans you two had for the last school year. There is no fair. There is no deserve. I’m so sad that Noah won’t get to see our son become an adult. I’m sad he doesn’t get to see where this fascinating person will go in life.

I’m sad for all of our kids. They are all missing out on so much. This is awful and it hurts and I feel like I am going to explode with grief. I wanted that future. I wanted Noah raising this babies with me all the way. It was his fucking indenture too, push comes to shove. He was waiting through it with me because he couldn’t have what he wanted from me as long as it was happening.

It feels like he worked so hard for something he didn’t get to have and that feels really unfair and sad. Having privilege is a mixed bag. He may have gone through life on easy mode (in many ways) but he still felt that black hole of loneliness in his soul. I made it easier to carry. I didn’t need him to pretend that wasn’t part of him.

Near the end he was talking about wanting to do a soul retrieval. I was deeply frustrated by the misunderstanding that he was trying to recover what he killed for me. Noah and I did a lot of really deep exploring around our core woundings. We talked a lot about our families. Noah wanted to find the parts of himself he killed to survive his childhood and his young manhood. He had the space to chase those things because he felt completely safe in our marriage. We could get mad at each other, that was fine. It didn’t mean we were going to leave. If the other got too annoying we would start making their life less comfortable until they knocked it off.

We really liked the comfortable life so mostly we got along. It was a choice. It was a decision every day. We wanted to be part of a happy family. So we made one. We made one after extensive, excruciating, meticulous negotiations and renegotiations. We have no sacred cows. Anything is on the table for discussion. People get seriously called to the carpet, in private with the family, and we talk it through. Everyone gets to be heard. We don’t stop until the message lands and actual understanding happens on each side. There are a lot of rounds of “repeat back what you understood.” Cognitive distortions are not tolerated. There is always a group of people listening who respond, “That’s totally a mischaracterization.” It’s fucking awesome.

I feel like I landed in a Brontë novel or some shit. Making it work on my pension. I’m lucky we can still afford plenty of sugar. Ha, ha, ha. It’s scary to think that every pound I spend today is a pound I am taking away from our collective future. I’m not like Noah. I can’t go write another book and make a long term low key income. I don’t sell my writing, not really.

I don’t know if I will seriously write Vicki’s book and Noah’s book or not. There will have to be a G rated version of Noah’s book for my kids to read. They deserve that. Noah lit up my soul. I don’t want them to just remember me weeping about him. It’s a great fairy tale. Sometimes happily ever after isn’t all that long.

I don’t know what I will be and that worries me. With Noah I knew that I was part of a happy family even if we were fighting. We chose each other over and over and over. I am feeling a decided lack of chosen-ness at this point. It’s appropriate given where I am in my life story. I don’t have a husband anymore. I was picked and now he is gone.

I don’t think I want to be a wife again. I have weird feelings about that. I can’t contort myself like that again. I can’t try to be one person. It was hard. I don’t think I have that to give again in this life.

I need to be a separate person. My story will always be something that is a bit mysterious and foreign. I will never make sense again. All the tropes are different here. I might as well be from another planet. It’s an adventure. And you know what I say about adventure, right? It’s not an adventure until somebody cries.

With my family there is 100% of the time crying on adventures. It makes sense for us. Having the expectation of crying removes the feeling of disappointment when it happens. We laugh instead. We see crying as a stress relief option that our body takes when our stress cups get too full. It’s not a big deal. It doesn’t take someone being horrid. It’s just part of being alive.

I love being part of this family. It’s hard to feel like it is fully a family without Noah. He said everyone revolved around me. The kids and I notice that he was a really big sun in this solar system and we are all bereft without him. I find myself wondering, “How would he be doing at this point?” I don’t know. I hate reality. I hate that I couldn’t play the game out to see who would survive better and then go back and decide that I get to quit much earlier because it changes his outcome. That’s annoying. I want to make the right choice. There is no right choice. There is only stumbling forward and praying.

I am scared. I don’t know what else I will build. I feel so lost. I miss Noah so much. He gave me structure and support and justification. Now I feel like a deflated balloon. I will never soar again.

I have mixed feelings about all the birthdays I spent consciously isolated and unspeaking because I believed I was going to have to sustain myself for the rest of my life. That’s feeling much harder now. I did not think he was good at certain kinds of celebrating me and I shut him out completely for that failure. I am definitely going to be difficult about birthdays and holidays going forward. I am probably going to want to hide for the rest of my life. I don’t want to be seen. I don’t want to try to be part of anything. It doesn’t work for me. I am too jagged and broken. It’s too late.

I don’t feel like I should ever try to be happy again. It doesn’t matter how I feel. It matters what I do.

Keep moving anyway.

“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.

Some day this will change, right?

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I wake up ungodly early in the morning. I retreat to my studio. There I can scream as much as I need to. Noah ensured that I have a sound proof room so I can deal with my emotions without bothering anyone. Now I come out here and scream at the top of my lungs because I want Noah back. I scream his name over and over. My throat has been hoarse all year.

I am cleaning and consolidating things in the house. I’m getting rid of stuff in layers. I’m reorganising.

I’m scared to stay in this house. It’s expensive. I’m super sad to think of leaving because my garden is *amazing* and will keep improving with every passing year.

A couple of years ago I started talking about looking forward to my 60th birthday. I want to throw a party. Only I can’t imagine doing so without Noah. I can’t imagine much being joyful without Noah. Only he really was awful at my birthdays? I don’t know why I am so convinced that things will be worse without him? Because everything is worse without him. Sleeping, eating, breathing is worse without him. I miss him so much that I feel like I want to do anything I can to get out of being alive. I should take up every vice. Any hobby that might shorten my lifespan goes on the list.

I used to believe that it was ok for me to hit 70 because Noah would be there with me. Instead, like my brother and my father I am going to catch up to him in age and then overtake him. Noah stopped at 48. My dad stopped at 48. It feels like I am so bad that men can’t live longer than that when I am in the picture.

Thus I am dating someone who is over 50. I am skipping the danger zone.

My soul hurts. I don’t want to move forward. I don’t have a choice. I decided to have three children. My baby is only 7. I don’t get to stop. I feel like I have one foot in the grave already because I don’t want to be here. I don’t feel suicidal.

It is weird how I feel completely unentitled to ever consider suicide again. I never get to quit. I am not my father. I don’t get to choose to wuss out on the hard part. I can’t leave my kids alone. When Noah was still around it was different. It would be awful but they would still be loved and cared for. Now I have to fight to stay alive more so than ever before.

My garden is flourishing this year. It’s super freaking hot and everything is growing with manic delight. It’s over 20C on the regular and that’s pretty absurd up here. Maxed out at 28C. (That’s 82F for you Americans.) It will cross 80F fewer than 10 days out of the year. I used to have that many days of crossing 100F. This is better. Fremont was a good micro-climate for California. I am in a delightful temperate patch in Scotland. I don’t get the worst of the wind or rain or snow.

I feel overwhelmed with sadness and grief. I feel flattened. I feel like I cannot cope and move forward. It doesn’t matter how I feel. It matters what I do.

I will move forward.

It’s a new month

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I am caught up on budgeting paper work. I have booked the rescheduled birthday trip for Shortie. I am dreading it. I don’t have any desire to travel. I think it sounds like a nightmare. Disneyland Paris is full of rude people. It’s deeply unpleasant but I’m not going back to the US and Shortie feels cheated out of the Disney experience. Maybe it is good that her only option is not as fun so it won’t feel as hard to miss doing it more over the years.

I’m freaking out about money. I’m not doing this trip the way I normally would. It’s shorter and cheaper. We are also going to hop through seeing a bunch of friends in London and on the continent. Holy fuck. That’s a thing in my life now. I’m going to wander through Europe stopping in homes in 3 countries. That’s pretty darn cool. This is the normal my daughter is going to experience. She won’t have the experience of driving around the US to see my far flung friends. She will have a more global experience. Damn.

Noah gave this to us.

I feel weird about the way I am thinking about Noah and new people in the same breath. It’s a very me thing to do and all. I am struggling with how intensely I feel about defending that my marriage was good even though there are pieces of it I could never endure again because it was too hard. I mean, if I could have Noah back I would climb under that grindstone and lay flat. I can’t give that to anyone else. I miss Noah so much. I feel really overwhelmed and upset that my baby girl doesn’t get to have him for most of her childhood. She was only 6 and that is destroying my soul. She was his baby. She spent so much more time with him in the first 6 years than the other two did for their own early childhoods. He didn’t start working at home until after the road trip, I think. Maybe even not till I was pregnant? I can’t remember for sure. I think Middle Child was 7 or 8 when he started working at home. Right before Shortie came.

Shortie has been interrupting him for attention all day her entire life. She was on his chest in a carrier as a baby and under his desk lying on his feet as a toddler and on his piano within arm’s reach as small child. She was with him for a good solid 6 hours out of every day. She divided her other time between me and the big kids. In most ways, Noah was her favourite parent. I’ve been doing stuff her whole life (like painting this house and working in the garden and being on committees) and I didn’t need the clingy baby experience again. I let Noah have it this time. He really loved it.

The cosmic injustice of her losing him staggers me.

In a way I feel worst for her because the older kids, in moments of abject panic and grief, have both separately told me in hurried bursts that they are grateful that I am not the one who had to die early because that would have gone way worse. They bonded to me in a way Shortie did not and I feel really bad about that right now. For so much of my first 10 years of parenting it was me and the kids. If you add up all the trips away from Noah we spent close to 2 years of that on the road. He worked long hours with a long commute for most of that time. He didn’t spend 24 hours with us in a week.

We were paying Future Us. We were putting in that time so we could have the fun retirement that we wanted together. Would I have made different choices if I had known what I was facing? I don’t know.

He always promised I could die first. I always did have this sneaky suspicion that he was a lot more fragile than he could feel. He was very disconnected from his body. The last surgery he had was pretty fraught and the anesthesiologist (I think they spell it differently here and I should try to get better about this one) was grateful I warned her about the cascade of backup plans she was going to need.

He wasn’t sturdy like he thought of himself as being. He broke so many bones in the time I knew him and always massive, unusual, freakish breaks. I feel so fucking bad that I pushed him into fucking ice skating. I ripped him away from my babies because I wanted him to be more active. That didn’t work out well for me.

It is hard to feel ok about pushing people on diet and exercise, enh? Apparently I’m not very good at looking after a husband. I wasn’t good enough at CPR to keep him alive for the 8 minutes until the ambulance arrived. I see his face when I close my eyes. He was so blue. It is hard to let go of the feeling like too much content with me means early death. Look at my dad and my brother and now Noah.

My other rapists aren’t dropping dead though. Maybe people are not tainted by a one off fuck up. They need to hurt me a lot for a long time.

I’m having a lot of feelings.

I am feeling overwhelmed to the marrow of my bones. I am moving forward slowly and carefully. I am scared. I am sad. I am so sad I feel dizzy and winded and ephemeral. I want to move forward.

I think today is going to be a day where the best I can do is to stand still without collapsing. I think that is the short term goal. The key to happiness is low expectations.

Noah’s horror was that he would be my stability and provider and I would run off to have fun with other people and abandon him. I feel some bitter fucking irony all the Cheese damned time. I never abandoned him. I stayed with him. I was deeply devoted to him. I need him and it hurts really bad that it doesn’t matter. He is gone and that need will go unmet for the rest of my life. I need him like I still need the parents I should have had. All dead or dead to me.

I’m scared all the time. Covid has hit our house really hard this time. We are all so tired we are barely functioning. I’m glad I didn’t put the kids in school so they could be in trouble for missing school because they are sick. Life is hard. Everyone is just trying to get by.

I think, today, we should take out some compost and spread it around. It’s time to put some liquid gold on these trees. Oh it’s a foul smelling, glorious bunch. I’m excited. I’m a weirdo like that.

Farmer Krissy had a garden E-I-E-I-O.

I go nuts with choruses of that song, let me tell you. 1.5kg of fruit harvested yesterday. The kids finally see what I have been working towards. I knew it just took patience and time and a lot of fucking weeding. It’s coming.

I’m not growing enough veg. We should put more seeds out in the spots I have already been weeding. It’s that time of year.

I agree with my kids that I will have an easier time stumbling forward than Noah would have. I think he was telling the truth when he said that any amount of less from me would break him. He needed me to love him so much it made up for his mom having PTSD and not attaching securely to him when he was young. I feel like I was failing him. I gave him as much as I could but it was never enough.

Now breakfast is ready. The day must begin. I will set these ghosts down and concentrate on the food and plants and people in front of me.

Permission

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I keep walking near this but not quite landing on it. I need to start writing again, probably as close to daily as I can manage, because that is the process by which I sort through what needs to be done and I make firm decisions and I can start moving forward confidently. I need to actually weigh out the good and the bad. I have to talk to myself and when I am not writing I don’t actually think things through. I get distracted too easily. I don’t have the same sense of building climactic drama and escalation of hormone level as I think through all the ugh and unh and contractions of muscle groups associated with each option.

Then when I have a decision I feel ok. Often I feel great. I know what I need to do.

I am really struggling with a bunch of aspects of this. The last few years have been really challenging. There has been a lot of survival mode and we have not been living in a way that is sustainable. We’ve been sprinting. We can’t keep doing this. Not everything is going to get done. We are going to do the best that we can. It will be good enough. It won’t ever involve everything we could do if we had all of the time in the world. It will be enough.

The secret to happiness is low expectations. I need to keep pushing on physical activity with the kids because right now we are all rebuilding after a lot of indoor focus. It’s time to work on being animals that have to be able to move around in a rapid manner outdoors.

It’s time to slow down and stand still and feel what is actually happening in the place you inhabit. What does this space have going on? What kind of creatures already live here? What kind of creatures could live here? What kind of plants live here? How happy are they? What would we like to add?

I had my day segmented into blocks of time. Then life happened and most of the first block got sucked into solving problems for other people. I could have let one of the kids do it, but I got rid of a huge pile of recycling at the same time freeing up a lot of the front of the bike shed. We could really use the space.

And so I sit here trying to get my head back on straight. I have been grouchy and irritable and I don’t need to be. I’m acting like I’m in a big damn hurry and people better get moving. I’m acting like there will be a consequence if we don’t “finish” in time.

WTF? There is no finish. Not really. It’s a fucking garden. I’m about to purchase a whole extra .75 acre. I will never. Never. NEVER. Finish.

Do you know what is more important than rushing at this point? Helping the kids to feel like they have ownership of the space so they take care of it more assiduously. Getting them to have more self-created small projects they can feel pride in. Let them fail and try again and fail again. It really isn’t that big of an amount of money. They are learning.

If I want to have adult children who want to live nearby and come visit the garden…

Ok. I need to be acting and modeling very differently. I have been acting like my goals were different. I have been acting like there is a specific thing in my head and I am racing towards the finish line…

Honestly I was like 85% of the way to what I wanted to have in place for the whole garden I had in mind for my dream birthday at 60.

Now… oh shit.

Maybe I’m just playing. I’m kidding. Hey…. it was a joke… ha ha…ha? What the fuck are we going to do?!?@?#E$>@#W:ERFLJaelrdsfhvn;zskdjhnvsdklz/nv

fuck

Ok. I need to go hang out with kids in the garden for a while. We need to have some chats about intentions and the fun parts and what they would like to do more of and less of for a little while.

Ah crap. Another committee meeting. But they won’t respond to fucking email. lolsob

Working up to the letter

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Cross posted from FB where my MIL can see it.

I feel deeply conflicted about the type of writing I have traditionally done now that I live in a place that has far less encouragement of navel gazing and public introspection. Yet, here I am. Continuing to exist and needing to type out my feelings in order to make progress. This is how I have made all of my progress in this life.

When it comes to “stop sniveling and go work” very few people have me beat. I do a lot of manual labor and I go hard. It delights me to no end when a large man says “Oh let me take that for you; it looks heavy” then they stagger under the weight of the load I was carrying with only a little visible strain. But there is a cost. I do not have a body that is built for hard labor. What I have is a soul with a little extra energy from all the stardust so I push through long past when I should stop.

I understand to the tips of my toes that a lot of what I self-assign is not “necessary” in the sense of it being part of the base levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy. I’m an educated bitch. Instead what I have is a tremendous sense of obligation and purpose. The work I self assign is part of self actualisation. Is it “necessary”? Well… it depends on how well your other needs are being met…

This is what having privilege means to me. I have the space in my life to care about making and creating things because I do not have to worry about having food or shelter or safety ever again. And thus it moves up the triage list. It becomes urgent. It becomes intense and drowning and necessary for being able to cope with other aspects of being alive.

The overwhelming urge to self actualise takes over the same set of energy that used to go into making sure I could earn enough money to have food–a roof wasn’t going to happen on the amount of money I was making so that didn’t even feel like an important worry. I had a car; I was blessed.

I know how crazy it sounds that this set of urges feels equally intense.

But this set of urges is what gives me the deep well of patience to stand there and say for the 8,235,108 time with a level tone and no frustration, “Ok. Let’s talk again about what restaurant manners are and why they matter.” I have a whole house full of neurodiverse kids who do not copy and blend in and conform like a similar group of neurotypical children will. If I want them to learn a thing then me doing it is not even close to enough to influence their behavior. I have to tell them what I want, when I want it, why I want it, and what will happen if I don’t get it.

I can do that because A) I care very much about doing it and B) I have an intensely separate self that is allowed to have goals and plans and things that I make that I can point at and say “See, I am not just boring and shitty and doing something that no one cares about.”

I know I am dancing on a razor’s edge with fucking up my body until it hurts like this. Howdy repetitive stress injuries, howyadoin? I know that upping my exercise substantially is always courting injury. I know that having tremendous social anxiety and not sleeping well for a week and more and continuing to work like I need the money is bad for my health.

I get that. Everyone has to figure out what they need from quality of life vs. quantity of life.

I know that a lot of the work I am doing right now is not going to “work out” in the way that someone else would care about such work lasting in the long run. I am an intensely kinesthetic person and I don’t tend to learn things well until I learn it with my whole body. I like to read and I can absorb a lot from books but I don’t *know* a topic until I have done it with my body enough times to learn the rhythm.

I never really watched a plant go through a full life cycle before I had kids. I mean, I’m sure I did a bean sprouting lesson in class but I didn’t live in a place and have a set routine where I passed by given plants over and over through their life cycle. I then worked hard at learning the California biome I lived in (there are so many others in California that I’m careful with my claim) and now I have a lot more to learn. But I don’t have as many years at the end to enjoy the fruit of my understanding so I want to compact about 15 years of learning (what I did in California) into 5 years.

This year is my fuck around and find out year. I am putting an absolute avalanche of plants into my garden. I’m exploring guild combinations. I’m thinking about ways to intermix perennials and annuals. I’m trying to figure out how I will rotate through the kinds of annuals that have to move from spot to spot.

I feel like menopause is hitting my body with fervor and reminding me that if I want to get to enjoy the Witch Garden of my dreams all the way through my crone years I’d better hurry the fork up because the time in my life where my body is devoted to the Mother phase is counting down with grains of sand that feel like boulders on my head.

I don’t have time to waste. Which is kind of funny because I have so very much time. I am incredibly fortunate. I haven’t had to be afraid of not being able to get food in about 17 years. My cells do not yet really fully understand that I will never be hungry again. And part of how this manifests in my behavior is that I *must* learn how to grow enough food that I can pass on a way to ensure that my children will never have that feeling. Sure, we teach them ways to make money too. Money is a necessary thing and all.

My family had a permanent address when I was born–they had been in that home for a long time. My mom lost the house when I was three and I did not have a second permanent address until I moved in with my spouse. I very much hope that I will never leave this house. I’m building a retirement apartment downstairs. When the tenants move and everything needs fixing I’m setting it up more fully for wheelchair access.

And I’m going to have a garden I can move around and putter at and hire someone to do the individual jobs too big for me. But I’ll spend a lot of time puttering so I won’t need *much* help.

If I don’t build it now I won’t have it then.

If I push myself too hard I will not be able to maintain it as well in the long run.

Basically, this is how I meditate. This is how I sort my thoughts so I can evaluate when to pause, when to stop, when to rest. The more I allow myself to feel electrically uncomfortable and overwhelmed and drowning in the words in my head the harder it is to compartmentalise when pushing too hard on long-term projects. Other short or medium term tasks appear (in person socialising, written communication, dealing with the water company, oh the kid wet the bed) and they feel enormous and out of proportion and impossibly hard.

Unless I take just a bit of time to set things down and look at them and see the shape of all the pieces better. It’s hard to put the puzzle together if you don’t have your glasses on because you can’t see the outlines of the shapes well enough.

This process is my glasses.

The trouble with willpower

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I am trying to plow through a lot of work. Between gardening and running there are a lot of tasks that are time sensitive and I have to execute the plan with precision in order to manage to get the end result. We have slid out of cleaning the house again. I literally can’t enforce a clean house and get a lot of other stuff done. For the past few years we have maintained a shockingly clean house and it has come at the cost of many other activities.

I will not choose a clean house over actually completing important work I care about.

The thing about running is it doesn’t just take up the time it takes to go run. It means I have to be rigid about my sleep schedule. It means I have to be careful what I eat because I need proper fuel in the tank. I can’t eat shitty or I will hurt myself. I can’t miss sleep or I will hurt myself. If I hurt myself my ability to hit my targets will slip and I won’t reach my goals.

It is not easy for me to maintain rigid consistency. I can feel the internal fight. This is where I have found it fascinating to research PDA over the past few years. I am the only person making these demands upon myself but I can feel my anxiety spiking. I am not having an easy time with the constant need to refocus and align my attention with a narrow set of goals. It feels controlling and subjugating and it makes me want to completely zone out and go on “vacation” (when I keep the kids alive but zone out and don’t get anything done for a while).

Mostly I shift back and forth in between what pulls my attention and interest most on a given day. I suspect that my obsession with keeping the house clean over the past few years has partially been because I have been in the house all the time and I didn’t have that much else that could pull my attention harder. Now, there’s a lot.

I am going through a really intense period of cross training, too. I don’t think I have ever done this much exercise as an adult and maybe never in my life. I ride my bike a lot. Running is still early days–I haven’t had longer than 5 miles yet and most of the runs are 2-3 miles. But I run straight uphill as I get started and it feels fucking brutal. It is forcing my lungs to be very sad and learn how to control my breathing with a much higher heart rate. I’m seeing improvement in my lap swimming that I do while Shorty has class. My shoulder joints are clicking less and I can make it down the lane nearly twice as fast as I could a few weeks ago. That’s pretty cool. I am really enjoying starting yoga again. I need the overall strength building quite badly. It does so much to improve the pain in my arms and my shoulders and my back.

But it’s a lot. I feel worn to the bone. It’s using up all of my self discipline. It’s making it tougher to continue reading all of the permaculture books. Mostly because I have finished the ones that are most relevant to garden-level work and now I’m struggling my way through textbooks that focus on major installations, city, or true forest level designs. I have a very low likelihood of ever needing to design the layout for a 10+ acre piece of land. It’s hard using willpower to force myself through reading something that is never going to be fully relevant. But some of the details and the philosophy can be applied and is relevant so I really should finish them. Ugh.

I would much rather continue my binge of The West Wing, thanks. I’m already 48 episodes in. (Sure, I’m mostly watching them so I can detect defects…. right….)

I have not been keeping up with budget tracking. I am keeping up with laundry.

Holy crap. In the past 24 hours my polytunnel has had a minimum of 5C and a maximum of 32.7C. That means the soil temperature is staying way over 5C. Time to plant all these boxes! (I love a new way to get data. Yay thermometer!)

And I’m super sick, again. Last week it was an intestinal bug and this week it is a head cold. Ugh. Missing all the first Saturday stuff is annoying because it means no trip to the farmers market and we miss Kidical Mass.

Gardening progress

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Yesterday was fun. I feel like I am getting closer every day to the set up I am aiming for.

Yesterday I made tomato cages out of trees cut in my garden. I put some early, hopeful seeds in the beds. I need to add hay to discourage cats. I am set for the next few weeks of starting succession plants before anything can go outside. The ones going in the house are outgrowing my floor and I should get some shelving that I can keep up temporarily then store when I don’t need them.

I am looking forward to this summer so much. Friends are coming in June, July, and August. I want to be able to feed all of them from the garden. So hurry up, Krissy! In plant timing you have to have stuff ready way in advance!

Lay out the plan then follow it.

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Today I ran 2 miles to start the day. Noah came with me even though he has been having a gout attack over the past week. So far it seems like he is doing better and he’s not in extra pain from the run and that’s fabulous. I tore open an adhesion between my butt and my thigh and it’s absolutely marvelous. It only hurt for a short time and now I can lift my leg higher and I’m thrilled. This will make it easier to get on and off my bike; it’s been a struggle to raise my leg high enough for quite a while.

I took a shower and washed my hair and did all the greasing for my body head to toe. I fixed my pocket/belt doohickey because it wasn’t done perfectly on the first go-round. That’s going to be ok.

I need to tidy up my room some, do some processing of food that is in deep storage out into the glass jars for usage. It’s important. I might even unload and reload the dishwasher because MC didn’t do it before taking off on their walk and I don’t want them staying up super late to finish dishes later.

I need to catch up on budget stuff. I’ve been not getting that done. I have a whole stack of books I want to get through. I have a lot of seeds that need to be started in the next day or two because it is *time*. This is hilarious because I am running out of floor in my bedroom and bathroom.

I have a meeting at 2 with a construction dude who is going to help with the rotting deck outside the apartment. That’s a good thing. Shorty has badminton at 4 and I have to ride her over there. If I have time I probably should go get some slate tiles before we do badminton so I can bring them home with me. I are tired. Then I eat dinner quickly and head right back out to a yoga class in town. All told I am going to be riding at least 11 miles today but it might be more. I get a little fuzzy on some of the exact distances.

It’s a good day.

I did a lot of seed planting yesterday, my bathroom floor is almost entirely covered in plants and the heat is high. I have about three more weeks of needing that room to be super warm and I am deeply ready for the temperature to go down. I think that next year I am going to try harder to figure out how to have a small enclosed space that I heat without heating that whole room. This is oppressive. Also I could really use a place to start plants where the cats don’t try to sleep on them. The cats are unhappy about their current ban from my room.

I continue to have struggles in many ways as a parent. Figuring out how to teach things, how to model healthy behavior, and how to get a kid to give a shit about something that I find important is… hard. Very hard. I am not feeling good at this. I will keep trying though.

Shorty is spending a lot of time on learn-to-read apps and she’s made a fairly shocking amount of progress. I told her she couldn’t have Roblox till she was 10 because that’s about when my older kids were able to read/write well enough to be safe on the platform. She is absolutely determined to get there sooner. We’ll see!

I am by no measure a perfect person. I will keep reaching for the light even though I am stunted.

Fuck your measurements

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I have now finished all of the “soft” entrance to permaculture books and I am on to the textbooks that are deeply impervious to dilatantes like me. No, I am not going to buy a bunch of surveying equipment. I am not making a topographical map. I already know how water flows through my garden. I don’t need a map. I do think I know where I would do well to dig a small trench down the side of the garden that I will line with rocks and mulch with hay. That will ensure that a lot more of the rain that strikes the garden will land in the tree roots near that fence instead of washing into the burn immediately. Of course there will have to be an easy drain area down just before the water would otherwise hit the bike shed as that could become severely problematic.

I am realising I really do need to paint the wall white as that will do a lot to reflect light and create a hotter microclimate. That’s hilarious because ordinarily I strongly prefer not having white walls, c’est la vie.

I need to build a permanent structure for the grapes to grow up. One of the grapes was yanked out of the ground and left on the ground, I presume by Shorty. Building a garden means having to cope with all the other uses the garden has for other people. I feel like I am going to have to get over my fear of drilling into the wall.

I have decided that I need to start making scale drawings between now and the 1st of April (no foolin) because I am going to start putting some seeds in the ground and I need a plan. My property is laid out so that the boundary lines are pretty close to exactly a square with north on the top but my house is laid out so that I have the corners of the house almost perfectly hitting each direction. (Slightly more left as the “north” corner of the house is probably at 10:30 on a clock.) I want to refer to the sections as A/B/C/D starting with A in the NE corner and then going around the clock. The studio is in C block and it takes up a lot of space. D is the bike shed, chicken coop, and a bunch of driveway. A has a fair bit of driveway and the polytunnel. For my sake I am only plotting the parts with dirt I can grow in. I know I “should” have an overall property map, and I think I will, but I’m thinking of my layout in terms of the quadrants.

Around 2/3 of A gets good sun up until around 1pm and the other 1/3 is in total shade all the time.

Ack. Need to just hit send and give up on getting this whole thing written out in one go.

Jot down some notes then get up

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I am thinking about how I am going to make a place for bamboo without spending much money. I will start with digging a trench deep enough to put about 16″ deep rhizome barrier and I will build the raised bed around that going up about 12″ above ground. I don’t want a tall raised bed there but I think that something shorter would be risking a jump over the barrier. Bamboo is super aggressive.

I want it for a few reasons. It would provide evergreen visual privacy along a whole stretch of wall that is usually in full view of everyone who walks by; we are all a little uncomfortable about the fishbowl. Over time I will be able to harvest canes and use them (and share them with neighbors.) They provide a good source of habitat for birds who are currently being ousted by the gorse removal on our road. (Insert big sad face here). It will also deflect the north wind and trap the southern wind thus dramatically impacting the microclimate of my garden into a much warmer environment. Like, that’s pretty brilliant.

I don’t want an absolute solid wall, and thus keeping them in planters rather than letting them fill the whole area by the road with just a barrier between the road/driveways/wall. I have planted a lot of fruit trees very close to the wall so they will grow big enough to be harvested from the road (and so they are close enough to the wall to catch as much extra heat as possible.

It occurs to me that I should paint that wall white. It would dramatically increase how warm the plants got.

I should be talking to me more.

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I have a whole bunch of broken Wellie boots and broken luggage; I want put them up on the border wall between me and the road with plants inside. (Yes I know I will need to bolt them down if I don’t want them to wander.) Things I want to paint on them:

Not all who wander are lost; some are seeds floating on the wind searching for the right spot to sprout.
These boots were made for walking but then they got tired and put down roots.
With age, comes wisdom. With travel, comes understanding. With good compost, comes happy plants.
I would walk far more than 500 miles to get to Inverness, this lovely place where I get to build my nest.
I have seen 1,000 cities and this I must confess: the only one I want to call my home is Inverness.
When you have more than you need you should build a longer table, not a taller fence. Feel free to take clippings from any plants and if you see a fruit tree/bush heavy with fruit, come knock on the door. I’ll probably give you a bag.

I also want to make signs for all the plants in my garden explaining what they give and add to the soil and why I picked them for this spot. I would really like for people to be able to walk around my garden and get a mini-course on permaculture. By “people” I mean me because I am totally going to forget this shit if I don’t write it down and reread it a bunch of times. This is not a project that is going to get done this year, but eventually. In the meantime I am taking way better notes than I did in California.

It is really nice feeling like the time I spent in California in my garden was an absolutely fantastic beginner course in gardening. I had the time/money/sunshine/city water to make quite an oasis. Gardening here is very different in dramatic ways. I mean… for many months of the year I shouldn’t dig in the ground because the wee beasties are hibernating. I would take December off from gardening (and sometimes January) but really I was outside in the garden 10-11 months a year. There were different seasonal jobs; I didn’t have the same routine week to week. Here I really shouldn’t disturb the earth any more than absolutely necessary from November through May. Well, I’ll be honest and say there is some amount of tidying up I can do in November and December but it’s more clearing off the slippery leaves off the driveway and doing a compost turn. I also begin starting seeds in February.

Ok so maybe it is about the same.

Only it really isn’t! This is gardening on hard mode. I can start seeds in my bedroom and bathroom, which have to be kept shut from the rest of the house the whole time. I don’t have a single other place that could be warm/away from the cats. It’s pretty funny. If I got a thermometer in the polytunnel I could chance leaving some of the seedlings out there for the weeks of Fool’s Spring just to give them a little excitement with extra air movement but mostly I wouldn’t bother because it is too much work.

Mostly here in February and March I can read and research and plan. Planning is a Big McFlippin deal here. In California I could throw tomatoes on the ground and a plant would start growing in any month of the year as long as I watered it. Sometimes there would be a cold snap that would keep a specific plant runty, but I’d get a big tomato haul. Here I have barely been able to get tomatoes to ripen at all because I haven’t figured out how to keep them warm enough. This year I’m going to grow them in the polytunnel and see if that works better.

I can’t help but feel that I am keeping all these records because I have this horrible Cassandra-like feeling that my children are going to need to be able to look through my trials and failures so they can make sure they eat someday. Yes, reading blogs and books are an ideal way to start an education in the general sense but knowing your unique microclimate isn’t available unless you learn from someone who has stood in your garden.

I am sure my weird prepper shit is just a continuation of my same old, same old and yet this feeling is different in a way that is hard to define. I love my children, don’t get me wrong, but at this point I don’t see any sign that any of them are going to be a shooting star. They are bright people who will arrive at adulthood with a better than average emotional education and a lot of ability to learn new things and do jobs that interest them. I have a lot of worry around the ways they want to work earning them much money and in this late-stage-Capitalist-hellscape I have deep fear around them suffering in the future because I entirely failed to instill that motivator.

Somewhere along the way I discovered that my goal was to give them time. Time to figure out what brings them joy. Time to explore things and fail and try again. Time to become their own best friend. Time to do what they want during the day instead of what can earn them money. I recognise deeply that Noah pays for this time. He earns and we invest and maybe someday his children can have an easier burden. In many ways he has sacrificed his life on the altar of me and our children. He has taken the provider role very seriously and combined with all the advantages he started with like picking the right hobby at seven and a family that could pay for a very nice school.

Noah has given me time. Time to think about who I want to be. Time to figure out what I need to learn in order to become that person. I feel awed at the magnitude of gift he has given me in this life. I think often about how my entire life as it is now mostly exists because of Noah. I mean, I have friends I made on my own but I live where I live in the house I live in with the children I wanted so very much because of Noah.

The children who make me feel crazy and hostile and overwhelmed and like I just want to hide in the bathroom for a few years. I would not walk away from this life for all the money in the world. There is literally nothing I would rather be doing, even though I complain like it is my job.

Today I walked around my garden and thought about all the ways I am going to shift things around towards being a food forest and a playground. I started out with beds in the front lawn but most of it doesn’t really get enough sun anyay so I am going to move some plants, change around where the logs are and put playground stuff running through the middle. It’ll work. You’ll see. I measured with conservative edge allowances.

By playground equipment I mean a climbing structure and a slide and a separate swing. Both the swing and the climbing structure will be very amenable to hosting climbing plants for the guilds. It’s going to be fantastic. It’s kind of funny how much of this thought process is shaping up around my birthday party. My friends are going to be old as fuck. I am going to need to have a garden full of places to sit and admire the lovely plants. It will be good to have pretty flowers right at face height because a lot of them aren’t going to see that well anymore.

And some will climb up to hang on the climbing structure because of course they will. I will have swings that my adult friends can use. And they will get to walk through a forest of food to get there.

Trees take time. Building soil takes time. I only have 18 years to go. That means it is bloody important I get as much of the bones in place as possible this year. It takes time to fill in a forest. Buddy, I am already training branches.

How am I going to lay out walking paths so people don’t step on my damn plants? How am I going to create convenient congregation places around the garden where it would be lovely to linger and have a chat? Where will people be able to pick a snack in September? Oh bloody hell. It’s a lot to plan!

After a search it looks like apples are going to be my best and most obvious choice for the whole top side of the garden as it is literally lined in apple trees. Raspberries will hold down the bottom side. There will definitely be runner beans all over the place. Maybe I will have magically figured out tomato ripening. Courgettes, potatoes, and onions are not really snacking foods but I can cook with them. Ok. This will be good.

Hm. Unfortunately my birthday falls on a Tuesday the year I turn 60. Well I suppose it will be a week long house party. Oh wow, that’s an interesting thought. I wonder who I will still know.

Longevity in relationships is extremely important to me. I put up with some serious bullshit from my oldest friends. Because if somehow they have decided to have some appalling belief it is now my job to somehow embody a different point of view without sounding like a preachy asshole. It’s a tightrope some moments. I believe that most relationships involve some degree of masking and setting special boundaries for people in ways that create a lot of extra work for yourself. I don’t know how to “just be one thing” all of the time. I can’t. I know that large parts of me are not particularly acceptable in a great many settings. It was true in California and it is far more true here. I have to be mindful of what I say and where.

It is utterly exhausting. Every conversation goes through this at-speed filter of “acceptable topics” and I am glad I have expanded my range of special interests so that I can usually find a couple if I try a few different mannerisms and approaches. I assume it is kind of trippy for the people I go through four or five approaches with. If I feel waved off after the fifth I start treating them like furniture and I will probably never make eye contact again.

I need much more stringent filters here. It’s not that everyone is closed minded it is that the process for sussing people out takes a lot longer and I’m sure I’ve “gone too fast” a couple of times. Mostly I haven’t horrified anyone but I take very calculated risks with self exposure.

I acknowledge to myself that in my mind I need a triad of close friends that I talk to at least somewhat consistently and we have very few filters with one another. There is no such thing as a relationship without filters. Not for me, anyway. It has been three women for most of my life, not always the same three women. Now there is a man, well a demi-boy as he now understands himself and I can understand what he means when he says that. I can feel myself consciously and deliberately allowing myself to be filled in my “imaginary bucket” as I talk to the kids about emotional energy. I feel like a vampire sometimes. I feel ashamed sometimes. But I don’t stop and I know that none of them would like me to stop because the way we take and give to each other is mutually satisfying and not draining.

Sometimes I tell my children that when there are times that they don’t love themselves then they are welcome to borrow some of my regard for them because it is endless. That is really striking because it feels like such a lie. There are ways that I judge and think harsh thoughts and feel impatient in ways that are probably ableist and deeply unfair of me. I am by no means doing my job perfectly.

I’m not getting into that self-flagelation tonight. It’s too late to go down that road.

I just need to think about the fact that sometimes when I can’t love myself I allow myself to be carried forward by the force of the regard of other people. I don’t particularly go for “likes” but I have a deep and intense respect for the people I allow to judge me. For the vast majority of human beings on this planet, I don’t give a flying fuck how you judge me because you are not actually seeing what happens. You are not a reliable narrator. If you actually know me then you can judge me based on the interactions we have had, but not that many people have spent much time with me. There are just a few.

The people I have kept close for a decade and a half, or a quarter of a century are people who have enormous wells of experience with me and my family and they have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. They get to judge me and when I fuck up they call me to the carpet.

It’s kind of funny how these power dynamics and social dynamics work because it’s not as if this judgment comes without strife. I have simply decided that for whatever reason I am willing to accept that strife as a sign of love in that relationship. They would not bother to say this to me if they did not have deep love for me.

Except when they tell me that I am Borderline during fights.

If I am at all honest I am partially leaning on my triad because it allows me to fill my bucket enough for me to go deal with all of the other places where I am in some sort of position to feel like I need to share the resources I have in ways that benefit folks. A lot of the in-person stuff is hard because my life is not shaped like most folks. My time comes in different shapes and blocks than average in many ways and it makes it hard to get the requisite hours to become a friend at this age.

I do have a few young friends in town but with all of them the level of filters is still pretty high. I have talked about myself more with them than other people around here but I’m not random California neighbour casual yet. Oh my god it’s so different. I find myself struggling to be as reserved as is appropriate here.

Dude, just go to bed.

Finding a new normal is hard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big goals

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

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

They do as you do, not as you say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m about to fucking explode, y’all.

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

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

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

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

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

Reader, I fucking failed.

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

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

I’m not ok, y’all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Almost here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why are you so tired?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Praying and sleep

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pacing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Tag Archives: gardening

I am so proud of my babies

The future is vast and terrifying

Some day this will change, right?

It’s a new month

Permission

Working up to the letter

The trouble with willpower

Gardening progress

Lay out the plan then follow it.

Fuck your measurements

Jot down some notes then get up

I should be talking to me more.

Finding a new normal is hard

Big goals

I’m about to fucking explode, y’all.

Almost here

Why are you so tired?

Praying and sleep

Pacing