Tag Archives: gentleman

Coming back is feeling hard.

I have written a few million words over the past 6 years. I put almost all of them on Fetlife because I was feeling awkward and uncomfortable and unsafe in a variety of ways. I wanted to talk about my weird sex life and trauma in a place where I wouldn’t accidentally scare a new-to-me local person here in Scotland. Every so often I meet someone in town and they say they found my website because “they just knew I would have an internet presence.” Well. That’s not alarming or anything.

I am struggling to come back because there feels like so much that I don’t know how to explain. I have been dumping my stream of conscious over there and people here lack a lot of context. I think I just have to jump in and let there be some confusion.

Because I have more money than time or hand-spoons I have asked a friend to help me with tagging the old posts. She does all kinds of translation work and this is not far outside her wheelhouse. Also, she tends to read huge batches of my writing for free so we can talk about it and that means I don’t feel like a bad person asking her to do more reading for money. I’m not asking her to opt in to harm. She already opted in! Now I will be paying her some money and the history/context that is currently only on Fetlife will come here. Hopefully in more manageable dumps. We’ll see!

I am desperately over committed. That’s a lot of what is going on for me right now. There’s a lot to do and I am living in a house with people who all have intermittent health. Technically, I was even before Noah died. His health was more up than down but I have probably spent at least a full 52 weeks out of our 20 year relationship caring for him post-surgery/through an illness/after an injury. He was fragile, too. He was just sturdier than the rest of us. Maybe.

I’m worried about our future together. My newly hatched adult son is not handling doing his 3 hour shift at work. He’s experiencing really strong migraines. He can barely stand upright. Him feeling this bad is not unusual. I don’t think he will ever be capable of a full time job. He is unwell so much of the time. Living with him forces me to deal with my deeply ingrained ableism. I feel like he “should” do more work. I watch him literally work to capacity until he crashes and the amount he accomplishes isn’t that high. 5 hours of work out of 24 is genuinely outside his capability range for most work. He can draw more hours than that. Sometimes he can handle sitting and sewing for a little longer but if he does he will have reduced capacity the next day. He is a walking (sometimes) example of a spoonie life. His life is fairly unlikely to get much easier.

He does work at exercise–he’s fairly fit. He eats better than anyone else I’ve ever known. He wears supportive devices. He is doing everything he can to function. He wants to be a work horse. He can’t be though and I watch that hurt his feelings quite badly.

Do you know what he can do for many hours a day? Write on the internet. He regularly hits the limit of number of posts on Tumblr in a day. He is a prolific author over on AO3. His stories are read thousands of times and people tell him that his writing is deeply emotionally impactful for them.

I look at my boy and I think that in a very small, terrible way, it’s slightly good that I am no longer planning around the kind of retirement Noah wanted. We were going to spend the money. He had big plans and ideas. Instead I am going to live a small life and I am going to make sure my children are ok. I won’t spend all the money. I will pass it on so that they can be ok as disabled humans. Being disabled is very hard. Society expects disabled people to receive a lot of indignity and scorn and contempt in return for a substandard meager existence. I can’t make them super wealthy. I can make it so they have a roof to share and food to eat, basically forever. They will need to supplement for fun stuff. I feel ok about that.

In a way, this is more in alignment with who I was before I met Noah. I never aspired to the wealth we created. I never wanted/needed that for myself. I have coped with building it by thinking about it as Noah’s money. Now that everything is being put in my name I don’t get to have that buffer. I’m struggling with self identity. Poor white trash isn’t supposed to end up where I did. Oh well.

Luckily MC is fairly sturdy compared to the rest of us. They have a lot more physical stamina. I anticipate them working a job that is a very large part-time job/very small full-time job down the line. Like, maybe they will get to a 30 hour/week job. I think they have that capacity for some kind of work. They are looking into ways they can access stuff over the next couple of years now that they are older. They feel most comfortable in any environment if they know what they are expected to do; they prefer to be a worker over being an attendee. They like interacting with humans in environments where there are a few common scripts they can learn/follow. They want to be around people. I think they will do great once we find them a spot. They are currently getting around 10 consistent weekly hours with outside the house people. We have been looking for stuff for a while and the age segregation in the UK has been a major stumbling block. They are almost to the point where they are allowed to go do the things they want to do. Waiting is hard. We aren’t wasting the time.

MC has made a huge amount of academic progress this year. I’m quite pleased. They decided to finally master spelling/grammar stuff and their hand writing has improved so much. They have really struggled. Now they are writing like a fairly average teenager and I’m feeling a lot of relief. One of the more terrifying aspects of unschooling is believing that the kids will get around to needing things and they will drive their own learning. It has worked well so far but it’s scary. It’s really hard having this kind of faith in these people. The older the first two get the more I am convinced that this is the right path for people like us.

I combine faith that they will self motivate at some point with having a house full of learning materials in a wide variety of subjects and constant pushy conversations about new topics that I am wondering if they have explored yet. My kids are shoved in the direction of learning, it’s just in a chaotic “Choose Your Own Adventure” kind of way. There is a concept in unschooling called “strewing” that is basically about seeding the environment with learning materials on a wide variety of topics and at many developmental levels. Don’t surround them with stuff “for their age”. Surround them with interesting learning materials and they will play with them for fun. I don’t get it as often here in Scotland, but in California people walked into my house and said it looked like a school. Yes, like a Montessori school where children are invited to explore and learn any topic at all. That was the point.

I am starting to feel more urgent about the need to find consistent access to taking YC to more activities and classes. She needs to have a driver available. This is complicated. She needs to go take horse riding lessons. She needs to participate in the nature/woods activities the home ed groups do 1.5 hours from here. I can’t get her there. This is going to be really complicated. The thing is–it’s not just that I can’t physically do the driving. Sitting in the car for these trips is going to reduce my functionality in a big way. I will experience harm. I need to have people who have strong enough relationships to take her without me. That feels like a very big ask.

My life feels so ridiculously complex because all of the “just do x” answers don’t work out so well. I can’t send my daughter with just anyone. I need to send her with someone who is going to pay enough attention to be like a 1 to 1 aide. I need to send her with someone who knows her ways of trying to do things she ought not do. She does need that support. She’s not a bad child. She is in a stage where her competence outstretches her self control and she needs someone there to ask, “Are you sure you want to do that? What might be the outcome if you do that?” She needs to talk through how the consequences might play out a few thousand times. She’s not bad. She does learn some things kind of slowly in ways that can feel frustrating for grown ups.

Hilariously, my mother in law is sending me a book titled Original Sin because she is reading it and getting a lot out of it. After I read it she would like to have a chat with me about it. Both my family and Noah’s family all have long histories of, shall we say antisocial behaviour? We are addicts. We are explosive people who can be very violent. My family is full of sexual deviants–both the cute kinky kind (I ran into a cousin at a Leather event years ago) and the sort who should be locked in a small room to keep society safe. Noah’s extended relatives were the kind of violent racists who openly giggled about hate crimes at family functions. We don’t come from good people. My mother-in-law’s mother was an incredibly violent woman. The story I was told was that it was a strong suspicion that her husband walked into that farming equipment on purpose to get away from her. Maybe he died young in an accident and maybe he died young because he could not face going home anymore. My grandmother-in-law was a hard woman. Strangely, I managed her better than anyone else in the family. I talked to her like she was the child and I was the teacher. I explained what she was doing and why it was wrong and how she needed to do better. She was actually really nice to people when I was around. It was weird. The hospital staff asked if we could visit more because she was less violently racist to the staff when I was around.

I have a way of smacking down racists that seems to be fairly effective. They listen to me. I don’t understand why.

We are down to 4 days on the grounding and everyone is crispy fried done with this. Paying this much attention is physically depleting. So, let me clarify before I get more advice: grounding does not mean I lock her in her room 24/7. That would be over the line. She has exercise classes she attends. We have to cycle to the store to get food and other essentials (like plants–we still cycle up the big hill to the nursery). We go on walks because it is necessary for accomplishing tasks. Our life is not as sedentary any more. I love not living in California. My life is physical. Existing here requires that we move and it is so good for us.

Additionally: there is no way grounding would mean not having to do chores and that takes a fair bit of time at her enthusiasm level. She’s not in her room for very long in a day. Just when I have to do something and I can’t be within arms reach of her. Then an older sibling sits in the hallway to guard. This is not fun. Four more days. We will soldier through this for four more days. I am desperately hoping that we have all been miserable enough that she won’t keep doing the weird shit with food.

We are brainstorming all the different pathways she has to go eat whatever she wants in the kitchen without creating a problematic situation. For starters: keep food at the table. When you finish with food, sometimes it is good to go find other people and say, “I had half of (thing) do you want the other half?” In our house the chance of finding a yes is like 98%. If you do hit one of those 2% times, go get a container, put the food in the container, then put it in the fridge. This is not a problem. EAT THE FUCKING FOOD. THE PROBLEM IS NOT YOU EATING FOOD. The problem is acting like food is confetti and you need to sprinkle it into every container and surface of my house constantly creating 2+ hour cleaning binge requirements. I DO NOT HAVE FUCKING STRICT RULES, HERE.

We also spend literally multiple hours a day hugging/snuggling/talking in affectionate ways. Even when someone is in trouble in my house we still find ways to express love. Love is constant. Frustration comes and goes. Anger comes and goes. Hatefulness comes and goes. We are allowed to feel lots of feelings at once. We always have love.

I feel like, in many ways, this opportunity has turned into when I have had the kind of time to yammer at YC the way I used to do in the car with the big kids. I haven’t done this kind of constant lecturing YC about relationship currency and being a good citizen of the house and prosocial behaviour and creating virtuous cycles and having a genetic tendency towards addictive behaviour and learning how to manage that and how to have self control and how each stage of life is going to get more difficult. We are really in the weeds on the hard stuff of life over the past two weeks. She is hearing a lot of really deep philosophical stuff and she is blossoming with it. I think it is fucking hilarious that all of my children have thanked me at the end of long punishments. They know that it was hard for me to persevere but I needed to live up to what I said I would do. I don’t bluff. If I say a thing will be a way if you do a thing I will follow through. I don’t make threats. I make promises. There are restrictions, yes, but you have a path to redemption. The path is accepting that you don’t get to have everything you want all the time. It’s hard. It really is. Sometimes you have to be able to tell yourself “No, I don’t get to have that right now.” Maybe you will be able to have it on a later date. Maybe it will never be for you.

We all must control ourselves.

I can’t make it easy for you to learn. It is always painful. It was painful for me. It was painful for your dad. It was painful for your older siblings. Learning is hard sometimes. It’s a necessary hard part of life. I can’t make it not hard. What I can do is sit next to you while you endure it and let you lean on me and complain.

We don’t quit, we complain.

This is part of how I show my children that they can do hard things. We do them together. You don’t have to be alone until you become a teenager and then you will want to be alone and I will stop pestering you so much. I will still be available whenever you need me.

Really this whole year with YC has been such a blessing. I am so grateful Noah let me have her. I think I would actually be spinning out worse if I just had the big kids. I really feel like she is an integral piece in us having the family dynamic we have. I feel like her needing the super intense attachment stuff with me right now is good. I think that is how she will be able to thrive in the long run despite losing her dad. It’s a tragedy, make no mistake. We still have oceans of love in this house. Our boats will continue to sail.

Sometimes we will love each other while being frustrated and annoyed and irritated at each other for a while. That’s not the fun part. Luckily it never lasts too long. We revert back to our normal Addams Family vibe. It is hard without Gomez but still we persevere. We love each other and feel deep loyalty to each other because we have all earned it. We have been together through thick and thin. We have worked through lots of issues together. We have learned how to live together so that we cause each other the least harm. We did that. It was all of us together. It wasn’t any one of us.

I’m looking forward to reading the book my MIL wants me to read. I am a big fan of neuroplasticity. I think that what we are born with we can change. I think we can grow and be more. I also feel like everyone has the capacity to make good choices but it is a lot more work for some of us to figure out what they are. I genuinely believe that some of us are born needing more help to learn prosocial behaviour.

My father had bad intentions for me. He created me with malice of forethought. It’s on my mind because the hypersexuality stuff has been itching me for a while. I don’t particularly feel like I want to hunt, that is way outside my ability right now. It’s more that I’m not having enough sex. I hate this urgent feeling in my body. It feels like I am choking on it. I feel sad and useless and helpless. The thing that would change this is a lot more sex.

I have sex with my delightful boyfriend literally as often as I can schedule. The limit is logistics, not willingness. He has a truly incredible amount of responsive desire and I am enjoying our relationship very much. I don’t have more time in the day to go have sex. Well, I do between 4-7am . But we have gotten to a point where meeting that early for sex is not as much fun. I need sleep too. He needs sleep. We are old fuckers. The only solution to us being able to have more sex is for him to not have a job. This is not a thing I can afford quite yet. But frankly, if this relationship carries on I’d be happy to pay him for doing a lot of the shit I can’t do. I don’t see why I should feel bad about paying a partner when I’d otherwise have to pay a random person that I’m just meeting.

It seems entirely logical to my hypersexual brain that the most cost effective, in terms of both money and time, solution to a number of my problems would be simply paying my boyfriend a salary. I don’t want him to move in. He doesn’t want to live with a partner. He has expenses. They aren’t massive on my budget. I feel like we might be able to negotiate a way forward. I also then get to have some intense feelings like whoa about how things have shifted in my life. I’ve been a kept woman. I’m probably going to keep a man. I am going to keep him well enough for him to have his own life and interests and he doesn’t have to depend on my whims. We are negotiating the 6 month nest egg that has to be in his savings account before it can happen. I’m paying a fucking dowry.

This is so hot I can barely stand it. I don’t particularly want to hunt for random sex partners; it’s always a crap shoot. I am physically and emotionally exhausted. I feel half dead. I am getting over the top good vanilla sex I enjoy; he also shows great promise as a top. I see much joy for me in the future. The sure thing is a better bet for my needs-vanilla-sex part. Right now random sex isn’t a good risk. It’s funny to feel that in my body. I’m learning so many new feelings.

And yet, this is something we are talking about working towards. Maybe it will start happening around 3 years in. Nothing is urgent. Nothing will be done suddenly. I am making careful long term plans because I have a long future to provide for and a specific pot to do it with. I have no anticipation of much income from work, ever. Maybe I’ll surprise myself and books will sell someday. We’ll see.

Also, I am feeling kind of like dog shit because I do not have the spoons to pay the amount of attention I want to be paying to Pretty Lady. I don’t. I feel crispy fried in my brain. I am so desperately over committed at every level right now that I feel like I shouldn’t have approached her yet. I feel like I am stringing her along.

This is where breeders super suck to date. I’m in the last gasping surge of all engulfing attachment behaviour with my daughter. I am struggling to have any time to myself and I’m feeling touched out to my soul when it comes to giving behaviours. I know that Pretty Lady would like to be support at this point but I do not have the ability to train her when I am this overstretched. There is no fair here. It is what it is. I am in one of those grind periods where I have to put my head down and endure until it is over. It will end. This is not forever. This is a developmental necessity. Every single one I’ve ever been in has come to an end. I trust this one too. I like feeling that trust in myself.

After this span I am going to have a lot of controlling energy going spare and I am going to enjoy the hell out of lavishing it on Pretty Lady. This does occupy my thoughts at times in the cracks when I have no ability to write an email. Life is just not fair. She is hot and fun and incredibly eager. I am having a lot of tension in myself over needing to go slow. It feels alien to me. I am a rusher. I rush into things. I do thing fast. Every physical skills teacher I have ever worked with (dance, martial arts, sewing, what-fucking-ever) has told me, “You need to slow down, Krissy. You will keep making mistakes if you don’t slow down.” I fucking know. Yes, I make a lot of mistakes. Going slow is hard. It feels mandatory or I wouldn’t be able to sustain it.

I want to get to know her better very slowly before I do anything intense. I want to know her story and what turns her on and what bothers her. I don’t know all of those things yet and as a result I feel frozen. I won’t be able to act in this relationship until I know how to do so in a way that won’t hurt her. I am absolutely determined to be good for her. That means I can’t be selfish or short sighted. I can’t rush.

I am not communicating well with anyone. I am so overwhelmed inside my brain I feel incapable of hitting someone else’s speed for communication so best not to start anything. I keep waiting for this to feel better. There are so many reasons it feels terrifying and overwhelming and I don’t know how to shift until things drop out. I am trying to cycle through so many different tasks in my brain that my volume control sucks. My emotional responses are all over the place and out of proportion. If I don’t want to fuck up, sometimes I have to choose silence even though it creates its own issues. My email inbox is a bit of a graveyard. There are conversations I really need to have but my stomach explodes in a ball of acid when I contemplate them. I can’t risk making a rupture worse because I am intemperate. I hate feeling like this.

I need the estate stuff done. I need to get all of the financial account stuff consolidated. Even though I am paying people to do a lot of the work it turns out I still have to do a bunch of supporting work and I must attend a great many meetings before I can get their help. Getting to all these things on time is stressful for me. I’m struggling quite badly since Noah died. I had really come to rely on him getting me to my appointments. I’m kinda fucked.

This is literally exactly why I know I can’t train Pretty Lady yet, I don’t have the bandwidth. I will though. I will when I get all of the support structure set up in my life so that I can be a successful single parent. I have the means. I just don’t currently have all of the ways and methods locked down. It’s improved a lot from where I was in the first few months. I have hope. Things have shifted in many ways and that’s been good. I have more offers of help and I am saying yes. I have specifically reached out to my Hedge Witch and one of my Kids. They are both going to show up more for a while with a mind towards doing specific work. I need support and they want to give it. The kids need to feel like they are a bit more taken care of. There are grown ups in our life who want and are able to give that care. I am very lucky.

As Sobonfu told me: I will never find a community that I can join. I have to build my own. I am struggling with stepping into the fullness of what that is going to mean without Noah. I tried very hard to be a supporting character in Noah’s story. He tried very hard to be a supporting character in my story. In many ways we held that against each other. We were trying to have a story where we were both the protagonist and we were struggling. In order for me to do that I had to cut off big chunks of my personality and spend a lot of my time doing stuff I actively disliked in order to be there with him. I will now admit that I was dreading pieces of it.

Do you think there was any chance I would have had fun helping him build the Ruby con he wanted to bring to our city? Naw. I would have been dealing with the kinds of people who have looked down their noses at me for my whole life. I would have been reminded over and over and over that all of these people believed he married down.

He was so proud of me he was deeply confused why these people didn’t like me. But they didn’t. It wasn’t my imagination. It wasn’t RSD. I lived in Silicon Valley for a long time. Yes, I had friends. They weren’t the ones who were the kind of international names that Noah befriended in his industry. Amusingly, this is not even a cis het white guy problem. This is a tech people problem regardless of race or gender or background. Many of them treated me with contempt because I didn’t jump through hoops to be a good enough person in their world. It is what it is.

I am really glad he let me leave.

Honestly it is refreshing when someone random in town is angry that I am here because I am an American. Most of the time I can join them in slagging off the country and it turns out ok. Sometimes it feels scary. Do I think my kids might experience anti-immigrant/tourist violence someday? Quite possibly. I breathe a deep sigh when I think of that happening here. There will be no guns. The chance of a knife being involved is pretty freaking low given where my children spend time. They might get yelled at or called names. They might get hit with fists or feet or beer bottles. Luckily I have put all of them in martial arts from very young ages. Bitches can fight. They can and have defended themselves.

I am grateful my children are going to get to stay here. I am grateful Noah did this for them. They live in a place where when they eventually wind through the medical system to care it will be adequate. Not stellar. Not world class. Adequate. Ok. Fair enough. As long as these motherfucking terfs stop coming for transgender healthcare. That part is getting scary. It won’t affect my body but it will affect my life and I am deeply frustrated watching this country go down this road. This is the super rich trying to fuck us all up.

I am scared of the next few years. I am making friends. I am building my network. I am finding people who want to engage in mutual aid with me. I have stuff I am doing for them and they have stuff they are doing for me. I need it to be clear and negotiated, not codependent and passive aggressive. I need for both sides to feel respected and like their needs are considered.

I am entirely failing to do this through writing with people at this stage. This is happening in conversations in real life where I can see peoples faces and bodies. After so many years of having lots of my life passive aggressively thought at people this is truly novel. It feels really important to not lean on writing the way I did in the past. I am no longer in an environment where I can have that kind of expectation of all of my close friends. I simply write too much and around here folks don’t read that much.

Gentleman is a reader. But he will never write back. That’s ok. I accept him as he is. I like him very much. Pretty Lady is going to wander by sometime soon. She is both a reader and a writer. This is going to be a very different kind of adventure. I still have to go at the speed of conversations in the room. I can’t coast on expecting reading. That won’t work. I’m not sure it really worked in the past. I think I messed a lot up by expecting people to understand things from writing that I wasn’t actually able to communicate. I thought people would know what it felt like to be me if they read my writing but that’s not how it works. They know how to feel like them reading my writing and that’s very different. It took me far too long to really grok this.

I am struggling with the amount of sex I am getting to have. I literally physically need more. I am flagging all the time. This is also not a reasonable expectation for my partner. I am not owed sex. I don’t get to demand constant performance. It makes me feel ashamed when I think of pestering someone as much as I want to right now. It’s far outside what average humans want to experience in this life.

It took Noah and I a long time to build back up to having sex 10-15 times a week after having kids but it was amazing and there was every sign we were going to keep that up…. forever. We were sex addicts locked in a house together. It was fantastic. We could use that constant dopamine rush to go do other things. We were very productive.

I will never have that on tap again. instead I will have years of burning and aching and being grumpy and sad and trying to pretend that I’m not. I don’t want a live in lover. I just don’t. I feel really bad about it but I need it to be ok that I have to spend my mornings out in the studio screaming and crying because I miss Noah and my mother and even my father and my brother and my uncle and auntie and my niece and nephews and Vicki and Andrew and Michael and Wendy and Jill and all the other people I can’t have back. I need to have space in my life for this wild grief and it will keep me from being able to be there all the time for someone else. I will never be a whole person again. I have given so much of me away. The containers that I shared with all of those people still take up a lot of space inside of me. When I sit in them I can still feel the good parts of that relationship. I also feel horrible pain. It would be quite poetic if I lived to a ripe old age then died of a broken heart because I just lost too many people. That would be an ending that no one would would feel bad about.

I am scared that my end is going to hurt people because I might be messy and selfish about it. I am praying I can hold on until something happens that isn’t my fault.

I don’t begrudge my children a buddy to keep them engaging in prosocial behaviour. I literally litter my entire schedule with people who are performing that function for me. I still need it. I can’t ever have it be one person who believes that they have the right to take away the parts of me that bother them again. That was too hard.

I feel like some of being frozen when it comes to exercise is partly because I know that when I am in better physical shape I feel a lot more frisky. I am still afraid of what will happen when I want to be slutty. It lingers in my mind as a worry. I don’t tend to hunt much when I am on the heavy end of my range. I am a lot less aggressive about everything when I am chunkier. My personality gets turned down a lot. This is how I manage to be a wallflower.

I feel like I have reclaimed small pieces of me and now the next few steps are going to be much harder. It requires the kind of boldness I could only attain when I was siphoning off of Noah. He was my greatest stimulant drug.

He should be turning 50 tomorrow. He isn’t. My heart is heavy. I’m catching up to him. He never got past 48. I’m turning 45 this year. I wasn’t supposed to catch him. I wasn’t supposed to catch a lot of people. My father died at 48 too. I will pass both of them when I turn 49. That feels really heavy in my heart. Only four more years until I pass both of the patriarchs of my story. I will. That’s going to happen.

I am sad. I am horny. I am tired. But at least my garden is super banging and I like my kids and my boyfriend and my girlfriend. I have fun short and medium and long term plans. I will put my head down and get through this. It will be fine. Surely. There’s no way out but through. It’ll be what it’ll be.

I like my housemates

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It’s blowing my mind that my oldest child is 12 days away from being an adult. This feels absolutely impossible and bizarre. Yet, here we are. My second child is 3 months away from being a quasi-adult in this country. (Scotland is strange. There are many ways in which you gain admittance to a softer version of being an adult: you vote (in some elections), can join the military, can leave school, and you can get married without permission. You may not buy a plastic picnic knife or a pair of scissors.) In our house one of the things that turning 16 gets you is that I no longer micromanage school/screen stuff. I go hands off and allow them to fuck with their schedule. I figure that making mistakes with running your body between 16 and 18 is one of the lowest stakes time in ones entire life. Might as well make as many as possible.

I feel like I have spent the last 18 years training housemates not raising children. They communicate so well, both of them. When one of my children is struggling with doing one of their chores they initiate a group conversation so we can re-divide chores. It’s miraculous and glorious. I feel so much pride I want to explode. MC (Middle Child) has figured out that they are happiest if they can do their contributions to the household when no one else is around. They clean the kitchen after everyone else goes to bed. They are now choosing to opt in to getting up early enough to make breakfast. These wrap around chores will make sleep slightly more of a specific issue but they want this combination because it produces the lowest amount of distraction while working.

It is really cool living with people who know who they are and what they want. I feel really proud of them. I watch them self advocate and I struggle with not crying. It never enters into their psyche that maybe they should just shut up and suffer. Their life hasn’t gone that way. When they are suffering they speak up about it and demand change. That said, we also talk through the things that must be endured because they cannot be changed DBT style. I love Dialectic Behavioural Therapy. It really works for me. The framing of it helps me a lot. I have been super active in teaching it specifically to the kids. There are things that must be endured: challenging developmental stages, security in airports, recovery from surgery. These things can’t be changed when you want to. Most things can be changed though and having the strength to make it happen is the obstacle. My children are so strong. That feels mystifying to me as they balance the contradiction of being very strong and also disabled.

MC had an adenoidectomy last week. They are really enjoying the way they can already breathe through their nose somewhat. It’s hard because they haven’t been capable in many years. I am overjoyed with the impending running schedule. They are going to be coming out with me several days a week and that thrills me. Up to age 24 is when you build all the fast twitch muscle mass you will ever have in your life. We have 8 years left to push hard together to make them stronger and capable for the whole rest of their life. That’s fun.

EC (Eldest Child) is frankly suffering a lot more. His body is crap and he is not getting a lot of help from the NHS. To be fair, I don’t know what they would be able to do for him. He eats in supportive ways. He does supportive work for his body. He is doing everything that someone with our alphabet soup of labels can do. He’s going to have a rough road. He’s going to lose a lot of time to feeling like crap and being unable to force his body through coordination. There is no avoiding this. So he takes on chores around the house that have a bit of wiggle room and he can do them in batches on days that he feels well.

YC (You are catching on with the naming convention, yes?–Youngest Child) is not so good at these things right now mostly because she has zero self initiatory drive absent an immediate reward and that’s a complicated thing. Her motivation isn’t present and I’m struggling with being consistent enough to make demands every day. It’s a negotiation and a production every day still and I’m really tired. It’s hard to be as consistent without Noah around filling in the gaps.

I miss Noah every single day. It’s not every hour at this point, that’s progress. It’s hard accepting all the ways I have less to give now because he is not the backstop. I commit to so much less than I did. I feel like my brain is constantly overwhelmed and I’m drowning in lists of things. Yes, I write them down. I still repeat them in my head because otherwise they will never happen. I feel like barely contained chaos at all times. Noah made order out of the chaos. I feel deeply helpless without him. I’m trying to learn that the maelstrom of words is not something that I can share in the same way. I will never be able to jump topics in a conversation the way I did with him again. No one else will ever have so much context for my thoughts. He could look at my face and know why I was crying. He knew which wrinkles in my face were for which layer of grief. It is hard the degree to which I will not be known going forward.

I don’t mean that no one will get to know me. They will do their best but I have a lot more history now and way less time to talk about it. What Noah and I had took so much time. I don’t have that kind of time to give anymore. It feels like I am not able to promise that depth and intimacy and I feel really mixed about that.

I feel lots of feelings at this point because poly is going to be complicated. I’m looking forward to it and also dreading it. I think that is a fairly normal set of feelings about poly. Poly is great! Also: poly is terrible! I really like my boyfriend. He feels like a really solid human. Our explorations together continue to deepen and broaden. I don’t currently have any idea what we are building towards. I don’t know what the limits of this relationship will be, exactly, yet. I don’t anticipate living together. For sure not any time soon. I am looking forward to when YC is older and I can sleep at his more often. He has a kitty who doesn’t appreciate being abandoned so he shouldn’t sleep here too often. We both have these anchors in our own spaces and that feels really comforting to me. He has been burned by relationship changes in the past. I like that we are both coming into this relationship with our own centres of gravity. (Also, if you are from the UK please give me spelling feedback. I’m trying to adapt but this shit is hard.)

I have started dating a nice woman I know in the queer community. It is still very early days and we can’t get together often. We’ve had two dates. We have not had sex. I feel like it’s going to take a while before I can be capable of having the kind of sex we are interested in having together. I have a lot of issues. My marriage involved a bunch of very conscious programming work that Noah did on my brain to try to change me. He wanted me to be monogamous. He wanted me to never top/dominate/hit someone ever again. He did a lot of hours of work on making it so that my body feels like it can’t access these urges I have. He wanted me to only need or want him. Now I can’t help but feel like I was right to refuse that.

I keep replaying in my head when he burst into tears saying that he was going to turn out to be only one of my great loves when I was absolutely the one big one for him. It feels like an indictment of my character.

The pain I feel right now because I couldn’t give him the single minded focus he needed so bad is part of why I feel like I should never live with someone again. My inability to have only one love hurts people and I don’t want to lead anyone on ever again.

It’s not that I spent my whole marriage cheating on Noah. I didn’t. He was always terrified of it though. He felt like I could at absolutely any moment and he never relaxed. He didn’t trust me. He didn’t believe I would keep choosing him. He was afraid that any amount of not looking at him would invalidate all of the time I spent looking at him.

He was suffocating me. I feel awful about this. I didn’t have the capacity to be satisfied from spending 20 hours a day with him. He was very stingy about how much time I was allowed to be out of the house. I didn’t want to leave. I did only want 10-12 hours a day with him. That hurt him. I couldn’t make that not hurt. For him that was overwhelmingly painful rejection. I talked about getting a crappy retail job to get out of the house and meet people and he was very upset. He could not accept me wanting to spend that much time away from the family. He would scornfully tell me that I would make so little money that it could not possibly justify being away from him. He missed the point.

I was trying as hard as I could to be ok in the small box he wanted me to live in. I wanted to be the wife he wanted. I am really sad I couldn’t be. I was going to keep beating my head against that wall forever. I’m sad that our journey together is over.

I am sad that my need to be alone and to have adventures with new people will continue to hurt people forever. I am selfish. I want myself. I want to be alone. I want to spend time in my brain. I want to form new understandings of humans and that means continuing to meet new people.

Another Kid is entering my life. I am really enjoying having intergenerational friendships with folks. I love that these young adults are drawn to me. I love getting to talk to them about what is going on in their lives. I’m trying to map them out in my brain.

I feel really lucky that these people come and seek me out. I don’t do that great in group situations at this point. I hang out on the outskirts of communities. I am not a central pillar of anything. I hide in my house and garden. These folks come to me and share their hearts and life stories. I rephrase what I hear to make sure I’m understanding properly. This process is a big deal. I don’t have to have solutions or answers to anything. What I do is properly listen and help them frame the topic. That’s enough. Having someone else understand and validate what is going on is already a big deal.

I feel like I should put more effort into friendships with folks my age but they all have kids and the schedule conflicts are impossible.

I have been spending more time with Jenny. That’s really good for my soul. Once again she is pulling me into dancing. Now we go to line dancing classes together. She has been good for me for over 30 years and I cannot overstate how grateful I am. She is such a good friend.

I am not reaching out to most Californians. I feel incapable. I feel overwhelmed. I feel like I am drowning. I am fully present in every moment and I don’t have the ability to reach backwards for all the old ties. I feel like I am barely stumbling through my days. I am so tired.

Today I have a whole bunch of time. I get to weed! This is the big thrill for me right now. Yeah, yeah, “No mow May”. I’m not mowing. I’m removing grass from growing areas. I don’t have the space for a meadow. Luckily my neighbour is letting the patch next to me run wild. I finally acknowledged to myself that I missed the window on starting seeds so I have bought some plant starts. I try not to do this. Oh well. It is what it is. Food will grow. Asparagus (not to be harvested this year of course), a variety of different Asian green vegetables, a bunch of salad green things, some peas, some brassicas. I need to chuck my potatoes in the ground today.

I won’t get everything done today that I “should”. I’m not capable of it. That’s feeling really hard. I should also try to get all the tax documents sent off to the accountant. That should have happened already. Fuck.

Also I want to read more. I want to sleep more. I need more rest. I also need to exercise more. DO EVERYTHING MORE ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

Bragging

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It’s hard that I don’t get to share these little happy moments with Noah anymore. I want to talk about how much our children delight me. We are on our way out of the disequilbrium cycle that made 2025 as rough as it was. It was going to be a rough year even if Noah was alive. Instead it was extra special challenging in a lot of ways. I started perusing a book on helping people learn resilience after trauma and the opening pages said that children who lose a caregiver often turn to theft. Ah. Yeah. That was festive. Shortie had a time last year. She hasn’t swiped anything or tried to sneak out in a while. I am holding my breath and pretending I don’t notice that things have improved. I’m afraid of it reverting. Sort of. Maybe?

I love that we have figured out a bedtime routine that works for the pair of it. We struggled through a lot of last year. Noah has been her nighttime parent for almost all of her life. In a great many ways, she lost her primary parent, not her secondary parent. I feel like Noah’s death was harder on her in a lot of ways than it was for the older kids. When Noah and I agreed to have her it was with the understanding that I was deeply burnt out and she was going to be the baby he had to do the most for. He showed up. He spent as much time with her in her 6 years as he probably spent one on one with my son in his whole life despite a 10 year lead. Noah really did a lot of time with Shortie. She played in his office while he worked. He didn’t work for a few years of her life because he was trying to figure out other stuff.

Now for bed we start a YouTube video of “boring history” and she listens to explanations about different history periods. We brush our teeth, put on jammies and cuddle. She stays awake later than me but she stays in bed listening to the story. We’ve had fewer issues with nighttime shenanigans. I think we’ve had more than a month of peace. Shhhhhhhh, don’t ruin it.

I love that in the middle of the night when I come back to the bed after needing the toilet we have a little mutual admiration society conversation before going back to sleep. “I love you.” “I love you!” “I am so glad you are here with me.” “I am so glad you are here with me.” We cuddle fiercely and it’s nice. I feel like we have had to do a lot of specific attachment work this year. It’s been a very serious thing. She has had a lot of need to come and touch me since Noah died. I am super welcoming of this behaviour. For years when I hid in the studio it wasn’t ok to interrupt. Now, she comes out and tells me her hug bucket is empty and I drop what I am doing to hug her. This feels really important. The first while after his death she was coming every few minutes even when people tried to distract her. Now it’s if I stay out here for an hour she checks in. I don’t get a full hour out here much once the day begins.

My life is a lot more work than it used to be. I’m adjusting but it’s hard. I am being very careful to not overload myself on a given day because I can’t have a meltdown. I’m doing so much better than I used to at regulating my mood. I feel more capable of doing so. I see the signs coming. I am blocking off rest time and using it instead of doing extra work in that window. I have to. I have to be calm.

I am putting aside date time for the big kids now. I realised that I was doing everyone a disservice by only treating date time with Shortie as a priority. I wasn’t modeling that everyone needs time and that was creating part of the problem. Shortie wasn’t seeing the evidence with her eyes that all the needs will be tended to. That was my failure last year. We are doing better.

Eldest Child and I were out yesterday. I love listening to him talk. I can see where he uses some of Noah’s rhetorical devices when telling stories. He is such a good storyteller. He’s currently freaking out because his latest fanfiction story has been read 10,000+ times. I’ve been telling him he was a fantastic writer for a while. I’m glad he is now finding external validation to back me up. He is so sweet and gentle and loving. He is moving forward and trying to figure out who he can be as a grown up. It’s full of frustration and starts that go nowhere. Yup. He’s trying though, and that’s what I care about.

I appreciate that when people ask him how he knows so much he says, “My parents were both teachers and they considered it their life mission to make sure I knew everything they knew plus instilling the value that learning is as essential as breathing.” This is how he sees himself and his life. That’s really nice. I like that a lot.

Middle Child READ TOM JONES. It took them less than two weeks. I am fucking thrilled. They want to earn English qualifications for getting into Drama programs. They are practicing handwriting and going over grammar lessons and spelling lessons. They are super motivated and in each week they are covering many months of school curriculum. I haven’t bothered demanding that they cover any of this. They had functional communication but they didn’t care much about developing it. When this child doesn’t care they will not learn. They have a lot in common with me. I lived in Silicon Valley for 30 years and I spent most of that time dating programmers. I can’t code at all. I refused to learn. That was not for me. My kid is so much like me that I ache for them. I see some of the ways they struggle and I grimace. Ah. Yeah, it’s going to take you a while to get past that bit. It took me till my 30’s.

My kid is the one I worry about the most for a lot of reasons. They are both the most like me and also different from me in very crucial ways. They are incredibly bright–don’t get me wrong, but they don’t have that quickness of thought that has saved me over and over in my life. Their way of thinking is a lot more methodical and reasoned than mine. I leap from connection to connection without fully understanding why the jump happened. They don’t follow a thought unless they know why. In a way, they got that from Noah, but they aren’t quick the way he was either. It is hard being the slowest processor in the house. Sometimes I can watch the frustration they feel, it is so palpable. They are jumping as fast as they can intellectually but sometimes they get really upset when people are making connections too fast for them.

It’s kind of funny. I watch Middle Child get frustrated by how “slow they think” the same way I watch Eldest Child get frustrated by how “bad they are at math” and I watch Youngest Child complain about how “they read so slowly.”

Babies. The reason you think you are slow is because you are in a Petri dish with folks who have brains that are basically on speed. You are above average. Being slower than someone who is absurdly fast is not the same thing as being “slow”.

It’s like how EC complains that he doesn’t have anyone he can learn cooking stuff from/with. Dude. You want an Asian grandparent to teach you cooking and you ignore everyone below that in competence and knowledge. Yeah, you will struggle to find people like that to learn from if you move to fucking Scotland. No shit. You will need to learn to consider the people around you peers. They do know things you don’t. Don’t be a pretentious ass.

EC thought he was bad at math till he showed up at school 5 grades ahead of his peers. MC feels slow at responding in our house but lightning fast during improv exercises with peers. YC feels slow at reading compared to me but has to bring a whole ass chapter book per day of a trip because she can blow through them at 7.

I had a funny chat with Gentleman. I told him I think it is funny that he keeps referring to himself as neurotypical. I don’t think he particularly is. He 100% shares “infodumping about my special interest is my love language.” He also has a dramatic spiky profile in his traits. Stuff where he’s really exceptionally high and areas where he massively struggles. He talks about school the same way I do. He had very similar experiences as me. Tremendously gifted in some areas does not mean gifted in all areas, thank you very much. He asked why I thought he and I had a lot in common and I laughed. I told him that the big difference is that I found a lucky lottery ticket.

He isn’t Noah and I am not going to try to put him in Noah’s place. He is a really nice friend though and I think he is going to be kind to my children. We will see. I am afraid to hope. I am afraid to trust.

I like the results I have gotten so far. Every new adult is a possible bump in the road. It’s scary to involve more people in our life but it’s necessary. We need more contact with folks.

I like that when Shortie is trying to psych herself up I can hear her telling herself, “Being brave doesn’t mean you stop feeling scared. Being brave means doing it while being scared. I am a brave girl. I am smart. I figure out hard things all the time. I can do this.”

She doesn’t rant and express self contempt or self doubt. She’s turning 8 soon. Her personality is pretty darn set for where it is going to be for her adult life. She is sunny, optimistic, hard working, focused, and intense.

My kid knows how to set up a learning/study plan for themself. They looked up the resources necessary. They didn’t need me to guide their plan. HOLY CRAP THAT IS SO NICE. They didn’t want me to look up all the texts for them. They went and grabbed the novels from the list that we own and started reading without any kind of prompting. This is literally the point of unschooling. I taught them the skills for learning and they go do it. They have some mood swings at this point but they have learned an intense array of self soothing skills. They are a funny, thoughtful, kind, inventive person. Watching them grow up has been amazing. They have come so far and I know that they will do so much more in the future.

My son still needs a lot more assistance with setting up plans and with following through. He, unlike MC, has a lot more than just autism going on. He’s also dyslexic and he has ADHD. For all that he is a walking encyclopedia he also struggles with executive functioning in ways that are rough for him at times. Thing is: he knows this and he knows how to ask for help with the parts he can’t do alone. He knows how to self advocate. He is bright, personable, hard working, sweet, assertive, and able to rest. This is a combination that bodes well for his life. He needs rest. His body suffers.

With Noah’s help I learned how to carve out time for rest. I modeled that as a priority. My kids believe that when they are unwell they need to rest.

I did that.

Go me.

Pick a side

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Yesterday I had the hilarious experience of being told (online, so does it even count?) that I am demanding that all women subject themselves to abuse because I am on the side of men. This was an interesting experience given that I was saying women use sweeping judgments because not doing so is too high in cost.

Bluesky is hard to visit these days. I know the real time documentation of the fall of the US is important. It is also deeply upsetting and there is literally nothing I can do from here.

Once upon a time people did not have political turmoil across an ocean impacting their nervous system all day. It’s not great for us as a species.

My boyfriend is going to meet my kids in 27 days. That’s feeling dramatic. The few days before we go we will be away for a weekend together with friends. I’m looking forward to this weekend and I am also feeling terror. It is a huge cliff to go over.

My sister was fond of a few sayings: “abused children are the most loyal” and “you are on my side or you are against me”. It didn’t work though. I didn’t pick her side. I was not loyal.

I love the relationships I get to have with my kids. They blow me away. They are smart, funny, and deeply thoughtful. When someone blows their top a bit much we ignore it in the moment and come back a day or two later to say, “Hey, when you need to say (thing) it works a lot better if you say (slightly softened thing).” It doesn’t matter who had the bad moment. It applies to every person in our house equally. I love the way we all feel free to correct each other.

I worry about inflicting this sense of rightness in sitting judgment on my kids. They will not bow to authority how others expect. They don’t perceive that whole “adults are in charge” thing the way they would have if they properly attended school for longer. They think they have the right to say that people can’t be rude to them. I love watching them as young people. I can’t wait to see them as adults.

I am so proud of my babies

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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.

“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.

I am struggling.

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There is so much my kids need right now and I can’t do it. I tried to arrange help but it didn’t work out. Shortie is out of her mind with boredom and I have no more to give. The big kids are really struggling with post covid recovery. We are all so tired. We are taking naps, often together, almost every day. We are all barely limping through each day. I’m feeling bad about all the ways I am not enough. My kids are used to having a second full time parent who is supportive and involved all day every day. I can’t replace that.

Every so often I take time out of the house to try to recharge my batteries. Yesterday was such a day. I went to an event in town that lasted half the day and I wrapped around the event having date time.

Today is the one year anniversary of my most recent rape. I’m looking forward to when I don’t remember the exact date just “after Pride”.

Today is 6.5 months after Noah dying.

Today it is almost 4 months since I started dating this guy. I’m not one to move slowly. Life doesn’t slow down for me. There is always more coming and more to cope with.

I’m feeling guilty about the fact that I think I am partly dating because outside of the intimacy of sex I don’t know how to feel comfortable with people most of the time. Gentleman and I are a funny pair. He asks me if my friends are talking shit about him. I ask him how he is adapting to having to endure me touching him. My friends aren’t talking shit. He is enjoying having someone want to touch him; it’s a novelty.

I think I am as oriented around relationships as I am because I have spent my entire life playing “Pass the parcel” with allowing my interactions with someone else guide my change. I always have to be trying to change. That’s simply mandatory.

I was telling him about Jenny, how she and I have done a lot of copying each other back and forth through our whole lives to the point where people seriously think we are sisters and sometimes the same person. He jokes that I am the bigger copy cat because I moved to Scotland and found an English guy too.

Jenny had another good friend, L, and the three of us were in the same grade at school. We did a fair bit of being friends together. I was the one who dated much older people more often. Then the two of them married men who are 15 years older than us and I married the guy who was only 5 years older. Their husbands are still moving forward and mine is not. I am not working as hard to find someone closer to my age at this point. That was not as much of a protective factor as I thought it would be.

I like Gentleman. He’s not Noah. He doesn’t feel like my home. It’s hard and weird seeing the ways that it is a good thing. I needed the threat of violence and punishment in order to feel like I was at home and having that leave my life is really hard. Noah didn’t want to harm me. He didn’t want me to flinch away from him because I was afraid. Sometimes I did flinch because I was afraid. I tried not to. Nothing makes people feel compelled to hit you like flinching and wincing. I miss him so much. I can also feel the ways that stress is leaving my body because I don’t need to be afraid of displeasing him anymore.

That feels hard to admit.

I miss him. I didn’t mind the tension of being afraid of displeasing him. I wanted to be anxious about pleasing him. I wanted that to be the focus of my life. I wanted to keep soothing his wounds and worries and terror. I wanted to be the one who made him feel safe and loved and accepted. I liked being his person. Being his safe space felt like a worthy accomplishment for my life. Now what?

I keep moving. I have to make new purpose for myself.

I don’t know if I will ever feel like I have a home again. Do I feel safe here? Sitting in this room where that shit man raped me? Sitting in this room where Noah punished me the day after I had surgery because I didn’t react right to being raped? Sitting on this couch, in fact. The rape happened on the other couch.

This room is becoming mostly the place where I am having an affair with Gentleman. I am not sad about that.

I am still sad Noah got so mad at me. I am still sad that he saw my reaction as a betrayal of him. I am still sad that he wanted to manipulate my focus through pain and fear. I am still sad that I upset him and hurt him so much that he had to hurt me back. That anniversary is still two weeks away. It’s all so recent. It is so long ago. I want to go back to the day of the last party for Pride last year. Maybe if I had not wanted to make a friend this whole thing could have been averted. Maybe I wouldn’t have been raped. Maybe Noah wouldn’t be dead. I am so sad.

Even as I try to figure out what a future with Gentleman could potentially look like I know that every cell of my body misses Noah. Noah was shitty and petty and vindictive and mean, just like me. We matched. We validated each other. He gave me purpose and belonging and a place. He made me feel wanted and needed. He made me feel like I was the most important person on the face of the earth. It was a lot of pressure and it was really hard.

It was worth it.

I am not ok and I don’t know if I ever will be again. There are good parts to my life. There are things that make me happy and there are things that bring me joy and connection. I’m doing my best to reach for the light. It’s just really hard right now. I mean, I recognise the amount of luxury and privilege in my life at the moment. I have the ability to dwell and ruminate to my heart’s content. I hate being disabled and stuck idle. At least I am safe. I don’t have to worry about survival.

Even without Noah I still have the bottom layer of Maslow’s hierarchy covered. I have most of the safety level. There is this little problem of being born into my life circumstance with my body. It’s not a safe place. But mostly I’m safe. Mostly I’m almost a person. I’m still working on every level up to self actualisation. Because I can. I know how lucky I am.

I am scared but I won’t slow down. I have to keep moving.

This is harder than it used to be.

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I’m still feeling comfortable in the walled garden. I think it is partly because my range of topics is limited and that guide is comfortable. I’m having a hard time writing here. I am more afraid of the consequences, partly because I will weave all the different categories together.

I’m really deep in my feelings, partly because there is a lot I shouldn’t do yet. Today is day 22 post-surgery. Tomorrow is week 27 without Noah. Six months and a week.

I keep thinking about Travel Boyfriend. That is a man who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. I haven’t explained what happened here. Some day, not too far in the future, I will start cross-posting all the stuff I wrote while hiding in the walled garden. It will be intense. My apologies to the email receivers.

I will probably do statuses in batches else it would be truly unhinged. There are over 500 journal entries. A great many of them are 10+ minute reads. As always, read what you want to and skip what you don’t. Me writing is never a mandate that anyone needs to read it or respond to it.

I feel like I need to move the whole story here and I need to figure out more about making back ups. I suspect at some point I will want to wade in and steal chunks for books. They are coming. That’s probably going to be my post-kid career. I will have to figure out how to sell books. Ew.

What am I having a hard time saying here?

Noah and I were having a rocky phase because I needed to go back to being poly. I am not by nature a monogamous person. I have a lot of personality/self to go around. Absolutely no one wants all of me. Not even Noah. Noah thought he could command me to change and have me no longer have the parts he didn’t care for. I say “command” as if it was simple. We did close to 20 years of hypnosis play and NLP. We did thousands of hours of work. He tried very hard to change me to get rid of the parts he didn’t want.

I’m always going to fall in love with people. I have been hiding from that by staying home and not letting myself develop intense friendships since I moved here.

It takes around 400 hours of shared time to establish a friendship; it works best if this happens over a short time. It takes around 2 years to get into a secure bond in a relationship.

(I’m thinking about Gentleman, the man I am seeing.) To make the math easier I am going to assume 15 hours a week. Many weeks it has been more than that, a few it was less. We just passed 15 weeks. 225 hours. If I include the fact that there have been a few weeks with way extra because of helping me with surgery, 250 hours.

We very often have differences of opinions. We give each other funny looks, shrug, and move on. It is an easy relationship. He doesn’t irritate me much. Everyone irritates me.

I catch myself asking questions about how he interacted with the children of his ex’s. He has mostly dated single mothers and that has been a fraught experience in a few ways. Mostly in the sense of making him afraid to attach. That worries me a little.

I have to be honest that as I think about dating it is important to me that my children see me do so in a way that I would feel good about modeling. I need to only bring people around my children if they are good enough to be role models.

Why date? Why not just mourn?

I’m seeking sources of energy. My life takes a lot out of me. I can’t crumble into nothingness and go join the mushrooms in the forest. That option is not open to me. I have to move forward. That means I need to have energy. The big way I get a lot of energy is sex. I promise that I’ve tried a lot of other ways. Yeah, I need to do all the body maintenance stuff too like diet, exercise (I cross train like it is my job), time alone, and rest. I know.

I need the energy. I need it. I need to not feel like I am stumbling forward in a blind haze. If I stumble forward I am going to trip and fall and hurt myself. I need to step forward confidently, even when I am not confident.

So far Gentleman is willing to figure out what polyamory means. He has a shockingly open mind and easy going mannerisms. Part of me feels like I should test that in a meaningful way before he meets my kids. I say that because I know who I want to explore dating from my friend-group.

I actually told Noah a few years ago that I suspected that I would eventually want to date this exact woman. I want to get to know her better first, but she is deeply intriguing to me. I have worked with her on community stuff. I see her around. She always flirts, just a bit. It got slightly more obvious this weekend. Not overt. Not a demand. A very subtle offer.

I no longer want to pretend I don’t see these things. I don’t want to retreat and run away because that is what I am required to do. I want to show up, say yes, and see what happens. I’m going to court slow and steady. I might have a lot of vocabulary to teach. That’s fine. I’ve been training for that for my whole dang life.

There was excitement in casting a wide net for my first hunt. I can’t deny that. Coming out of it with someone I like as much as I like Gentleman makes such a wide net less attractive. Instead of putting that much energy into necessary failure I’d rather rest or talk to him.

That doesn’t mean I want to hop into monogamy and start shaping my life around him. I specifically don’t want that. I don’t want him trying to fill Noah’s shoes. That’s a really bad set up for all concerned.

I am the head of my household and that is going to stay true. I want to have good friends who are good role models for my kids. There will be a diverse array of role models because I want my kids to see that I really do believe that it takes all kinds. I’m not going out with a shopping list of “types”. That’s not my point at all.

I feel a spark with lots of people, historically. I have not allowed myself to feel this much since I moved here. I think I’m going to allow myself to flirt. I will see what happens. I don’t think I’m going to do frequent drift net fishing. And when I do, it will come with writing requirements.

Do you know part of what is hot about this woman? She’s written a lot down. I can go find out what it looks like in her brain. I like that a lot. I’m in for such a glorious ride. It’s going to be more awkward to navigate flirting because I don’t do that in front of my kids.

In order to keep it from being obvious who I am fucking I’m going to have to start spending time with a lot more people. That’s going to be fascinating to manage. It means that for all of the people I date, there will need to be a non-flirty friendship core. We will have to have a comfortable mode that involves no amount of sexual tension. I’m going to go back to acting like I did when the older kids were young. Very prudish in front of the children. No hand holding, no kissing, no longing looks. Nada. What I have been doing since I moved here.

I am going to have to grow more comfortable with that kind of dichotomy. I need to have a public face that has no sexuality involved at all. That’s going to be a change. The last 8-ish years, Noah and I were a lot more flirty and grabby and we did kiss. It felt like a reasonable thing? We always landed in no more festive than PG-13 territory.

Now that is a harder thing. My children will not see a revolving door of bodies through my bed. I was really fucked up by watching my sister cycle through terrible men. She only felt seen by people who would punch her when she was antagonistic and mean enough.

I want better patterns and trends than that. I see a woman way out in front of me. The Future Me that I’m going to be some day. That woman is one who makes Vicki proud. Noah will be proud of me too. I don’t think my parents would be proud of me. It’s ok, I have a very proud Dad in my life.

There are a lot of patterns and events in my past that I know to look for. I have seen people be poly in a lot of crappy ways. Also, good ways.

It is time to get started on the day. I want to feel less ashamed. I think that means I should be doing my talking to myself the way I used to. People who shame me for it are not good people for me to bond to. That’s ok. There are millions of reasons for people to not be compatible with me. Billions, probably. That’s ok.

I don’t need thousands of people. I don’t even need significant relationships with hundreds of people. I need dozens. This is lucky because I already have a good two or three dozen depending on how you evaluate. I need a few more because I need them to be local. I don’t need to date all of them. But I need a vibrant community.

Sobonfu told me I would never fit in anywhere–I need to build my own community. I don’t think I am going to do that in the walled garden. It means being vulnerable. I am not a fiction writer. I write because I am creating myself. I write because letting people know who I am, to as deep a degree as they choose to opt-in to, is a way of letting them know me that doesn’t involve me having to open my big fat mouth. I worry a lot about getting into one of those modes where I blurt out way more than I mean to because I am so desperate to feel connected. Writing is a way to cope with that. Writing means that I am able to be more present for just listening.

It is a way to siphon off pieces of myself so that I don’t have a bursting pressure to share them with the person in the room. I am really struggling with not having Noah to talk to about everything. It makes me wonder if there will ever again be someone who gets to see behind the curtain. It certainly isn’t the people in this house. They don’t want to read my writing. We are all very clear about that. Maybe when I die.

I’m sad and I’m scared. I’m going to like people. I’m going to spend time with them. I will always be aware of the full ocean of self I am keeping away from them with a dam I am constantly repairing. Noah didn’t like all of me and I learned ways to manage that. I will do that with more people. I will do more compartmentalising and less self-editing. I can leave parts of me out of a container. I won’t ever try to eliminate them again. I’m going to need to find ways to walk forward ethically.

I’m going to need to talk to myself. Fuck.

I need to make breakfast.

Even though I feel weird, I’m going to talk about him.

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I have been writing about this so prolifically in the walled garden that it is weird to figure out where to start but I feel like I should. Only talking about this on a password protected site feels too close to dishonesty.

I only managed 2 months of abstinence after Noah died. I’ve only had one period of abstinence that was longer that wasn’t medically necessary since I was 16. I don’t do so hot with abstinence. It ramps up all of my mood difficulties. It makes me very physically jittery and my anxiety spikes through the roof. I don’t feel ok physically if I am not having sex more often than most people consider normal. I’ve gotten very comfortable with the language of hypersexuality for myself.

I went looking on a swinger website, which seems to be the hopping place for casual sexual encounters for the local area. A pal from the munch recommended it. One fella made it to almost three months before his personal life shifted and he can’t have sex with me anymore. I wish him and his girlfriend many happy years of monogamy now that they have gotten to that level together. I have had a few people last a handful of times but I ended things with all of them for one reason or another. There is another one I’ve seen a few times and I need to officially end it. I’m not one for ghosting. I like clear openings and endings.

There is someone approaching three months. Due to a whole cascade of events he’s actually going to be the person staying with me after my surgery on the 8th. I have to stay overnight near the hospital in case of issues. For various reasons the surgery is happening a hundred miles away from where I live. A friend is staying with me for 5.5 weeks to help with the kids. Then I have arranged local people helping with the kids after that.

I have been calling this person Gentleman because he has an incredibly proper way about him. Some of it is me misreading his accent as being more posh than it is. A lot more of it is because of the knee jerk intensity he has towards a lot of behaviours I would consider improper. He’s intensely respectful. Every time I have expected him to be unpleasant or rude or cutting he has instead startled with shock and been incredibly kind and supportive instead. He probably doesn’t think of himself as a proper gentleman by the standards of his country. He is what I was brought up to think of as a gentleman.

He has achingly polite manners a lot of the time. He is deeply considerate. He accepts things about me that I’ve had to fight over all my life. Not in a “go limp with resignation” sort of way, he accepts me calmly and without fuss. It’s just true. I feel guilty every time I assume something negative and he comes back entirely positive or neutral.

I feel safe and comfortable with him. I’m scared he is going to turn and run every time I cry. I’m not always managing to be a fun toy. He doesn’t have a lot of expectations about me. I feel bad that I flinch as much as I do. It feels unfair. I am sad every time I know I am tense because Noah would have been upset.

I love Noah and I will until the day I die. It is also true that we were both intensely traumatised people. We had massive gangrenous wounds that had to be accounted for all day every day. We were together all day every day. I see all the ways he accommodated me and I see all the ways I accommodated him. I see the ways we were fairly abusive with each other at various points in our marriage. I’m not rewriting my marriage in the rear view. I saw all of this and wrote about it as it was happening. I talked about us screaming at each other. I talked about name calling when it happened. I talked about hitting when it happened.

I am not rewriting the story. I am seeing it come to a close and I am trying to assess the physical damage I will get to live with in the cells of my body because I shaped myself around Noah in ways that were not always healthy. I loved my marriage and I would have stayed forever. I thought he was worth the cost I paid. I would have been willing to pay twice what he cost me. He was good for me in so many ways. I don’t think I would be ok right now if I hadn’t had him. Noah gave me a home.

We both wrote quite a bit over the years about how we both believed that I would not have been capable of accepting anyone less abusive. I needed who and what Noah was.

If I had known how short our timeline was I may have made some different choices. If I had known what the timeline was then I made bad choices. I didn’t though. I was planning around 30 or 40 or 50 years together. I don’t think I made bad choices considering what I expected to have to carry. I would be ok with being a lot more burnt out in trade for giving Noah a better last year of his life. 2024 sucked. There were high points but mostly it was a brutal year from start to close.

I would have made different choices if I knew that was the last time I would have with Noah. I miss him so much that I feel like I will explode with pain. It’s been five months and I wouldn’t say I feel better. I am having more positive emotions. The lows are still pretty terrible and they are happening most days.

This is part of what I am scared to share with a new partner. I cry a lot. I always have, that’s been true for 40 years. I have always had a lot of reason to cry. This feels like it wants to swamp me the way Uncle Bob’s death did but I don’t have the structure in my life to support that much going off the rails. So I am not. I’m holding my shit together. I sneak off and I cry for some time almost every day. Some days are too busy and by the end of it I am jittery like I’ve just downed a six pack of Jolt. I cry to let the stress out of my body because it is better than almost every other way of coping.

I am having big feelings about the way I am crying with Gentleman. I have cried with him a number of times now. That’s not normal for me. Usually I hide. It is not safe to cry in front of people most of the time. I hate that I mostly could not let Noah touch me when I cried because I was really overwhelmed. It didn’t feel safe. There were too many times when I was hurting very badly and he hurt me more. He wanted to be my safe person. He would work at it really hard. Then something would happen and I would make him mad and he would hurt me again. He was always really upset that I couldn’t drop the flinch response. He didn’t want me to act like he hurt me.

I didn’t want him to flinch away from me either. Sometimes he did when I was angry and my tongue ran away with me.

He was the least bad bad guy I could find and we spent decades being deeply and overwhelmingly obsessed with each other. Sure, there were issues. It’s weird calling any of it abuse because so much of it was explicitly consented to. Even though he was allowed to treat me any way he saw fit he had to live with the consequences. Even if I said I would never leave and he could do anything he wanted to me that didn’t change the fact that I flinched really hard sometimes.

He was my white trash prince with all the violence and anger that indicates. He was also one of the kindest people I’ve ever known in my whole life. With every passing year his violence towards me was more calculated and surgical. He wanted to hurt me to shape me to be more pleasing to him. I was willing to follow anywhere he lead.

I don’t think I can have a relationship with a bad guy again. I’ve had a few encounters since I started dating. A few of these men have been deeply problematic. I’m not going to recount the wild stories right now. That’s not the point.

The point of this essay is I am having a very hard time accepting the way I am sinking into this relationship with Gentleman because he is so easy to be around. Instead of flinching I keep finding that instead I am softening. I usually start crying because I am trying to communicate about somewhere that I am worried about us developing a problem. Every time he hugs me and waits for me to be done and we move forward without there being a problem.

The fact that I want to trust him as much as I do makes me wary. That feels dangerous. He would like to be more helpful to me. He’s that flavour of man. I like doing homey care taker things for him and he’d like to do pieces of them for me. So far I am flinching away because it would bring about possible contact with the kids and it is too soon. I like arbitrary time lines. Why? Because they give me structure and purpose. Because the first 9 whole months of our relationship will overlap with the first year my kids have had to live without their father.

It feels respectful to wait.

It also feels compassionate to myself to allow someone to comfort me. Of course I only want to accept that from someone I’m having sex with. Duh. That’s my way. I have always bonded to people through sex. That’s been a big pattern. My kinky friends think I am demented because I consciously and deliberately went looking for vanilla sex. I was not looking for a pervert. I don’t need to have my boundaries pushed right now. I need the gap between my boundaries and my partner’s to be vast with me far in the lead. I need it.

I need to stop looking for bad guys.

I have stopped looking for bad guys. When a couple have wandered into my life I turned them around and pushed them right back out. Instead I am picking to double down on the people who make me feel safe. If I don’t feel safe I don’t come back. It’s really weird in my body.

I felt comfortable with Noah. I felt known. I felt accepted. I felt loved. I felt adored. I felt worshiped. Sometimes I felt safe; sometimes I didn’t. He never signed on to being my protector. It was explicit. We did the best we could by one another. In most ways I still feel absolutely convinced that he was better than I deserved.

I’m listening to a lot of songs that have been big parts of my personal soundtrack through this life. The Day Before You. The First Cut is the Deepest. I feel like my brain is trying to resort every part of my memory. There is now an end to the story arc with Noah. The songs that he sang to me with passion and fondness and tenderness cut like a knife. There’s a bunch of Irish songs that fucking wreck me. Shortie keeps asking me to play them. Noah had such a beautiful voice. He sang me to sleep or read me to sleep or talked me to sleep for two decades.

If I include the time we were engaged Noah and I lived together for just under 19 years. I lived with my cat Puff for longer than 19 years. There’s my kids; we’ll see how long they stay. My current cats have been in my house for 5.5 years. My mom’s longest stretch with me was 5 years; she also had a 3 year stretch. All the foster homes were crammed into the 10 years in the middle. I had a boyfriend I lived with for 3 years. I never made it longer than 2 years in Auntie’s house and my mom was there with me. The fostering without mom never lasted longer than a month.

I’m scared. I notice this all the time. I’m pretty terrified of being vulnerable. I am going to be. I’m exhausted all the dang time lately. I do need to start being more careful with my diet again but it’s not mostly that. Mostly I’m deeply burned out and depressed and I’m swimming through an ocean of grief. We are coping but I’m not at the top of my game. A lot more than usual is falling through the cracks. I can’t be more effective or efficient. I don’t have it to give. I’m seriously operating beyond capacity every day. I feel awful. I’m disabled and I’m doing my best to be two parents. I am getting mixed results shall I say.

I don’t feel like I have a choice. I’m aware of all the things I’m not getting done that other people manage. I feel like a loser pretty much every minute. I’m exhausted all the forking time. I feel like I don’t have a brain. I have started avoiding phone calls like they are electrical shocks.

I feel guilty for trying to construct a self that will move forward. I feel guilty because I feel like I am abandoning Noah. I’m not. I’m acting like the internet: I am routing around damage to keep going. I don’t get to stop. Maybe not ever. I am going to have to slow down a lot. I have less to give without Noah coping with all the awful parts of adulting. It’s funny because he thought I coped with the awful parts of adulting for him.

We’ve been doing a lot of talking in my house about the difference between codependence and conscious interdependence.

We’ve been doing a lot of talking in general. All of us are struggling without Noah around to talk at for hours a day. We have spent so much time together as a family and every single day is a reminder that our future looks nothing like our past. It’s really weird when I notice somewhere that I am not being difficult or blowing up in a way I commonly would because I’m not reacting to Noah. I’m not trying to head something off before it bugs him. I’m not trying to manage my emotional range for his benefit.

I didn’t expect that losing Noah means I get to soften. I don’t have to be defensive of the things he wants me to be defensive of. I can relax and not look to him to see how I’m allowed to feel. Our rhetoric was that he was watching me. I watched him too. A lot of the way he learned to control his affect and mannerism was because he was trying to not trigger me. I did the same kind of thing but it didn’t make me softer and kinder. It made me sad and wounded. I don’t want to feel like I am healing from Noah but in some ways I clearly am.

He is very much the best relationship of my life. There were still very hard parts. I’m not sure what my future looks like but it’s not going to look like my past. I won’t be going back to the day before Noah. I am not who I was. I like being Krissy Gibbs so much more than I ever liked being Krissy Archer. I am looking forward to when I will have been Krissy Gibbs longer. 6 years and 3 months to go. I’m so sad Noah won’t be with me.

I would not have accomplished 1/4 of what I did without him. He was always able to believe in me when I couldn’t believe in myself. Including believing that if he insisted hard enough I would somehow become monogamous in my spirit. There is no way to count the hundreds of hours we spent doing hypnosis and NLP actively trying to get me to only think of Noah.

This is how I know I am not a computer. I cannot be programmed. I cannot conform no matter how much I would like to. I am different. I would like to be able to comply and make people happen but I don’t have it to give. I’m feeling really bad about that lately. “Lately”. I have always felt bad about this. At this point I suspect that most of the disappointment for my failure to be shaped like cookie dough is only in my head. Other folks are fairly cheerful about taking me as they find me.

Other people do not look at me the way Noah did. They don’t look at me and see so much potential, if only I would stop doing _______________. For years I have struggled with how much I felt like I had to be the motor for all of us. I had to push people to get up and start chores and fucking leave the house sometimes. Noah was a cave troll. His children enjoy being such as well.

I feel like my motor has come to a stop. For a while I was hunting for sex and that gave me a huge boost of energy. Now I’m too weary to muster the energy to go end things with the last one I added. I am struggling with finding the unmitigated good from the sex with Gentleman because I am so anxious about fucking everything up. It’s pretty ridiculous of me, yet also predictable. He’s really happy to spend time with me. He takes all the opportunities he gets. He would like more. I don’t need to feel anxious. It’s silly. I’m being silly. I’m the one holding the brakes and I’m doing it for really good reasons. I’m doing it to create a safe container for my children to mourn in.

Noah was such a good father. It is going to be important for me to keep my mouth shut about the ways I’m processing Noah as a mixed figure in my life. They need Saint Noah and I need to let them have him that way. I also need to acknowledge for myself that he was a human. He was a human I loved with my whole soul. I would have stayed forever. I was comfortable with the ways we hurt each other. It was home. It was the safest home I have ever had. It was the home in which we both felt the most loved we ever felt in our lives. We were broken together and I’m not sorry.

Noah took in a feral stray and turned me into a pampered and well tended pet. He made me believe I don’t deserve to suffer the maximum amount every day of my life. That counts for a lot. Maybe someday I will even forgive myself for not being monogamous. I’m not. It’s not in my nature.

Maybe someday I will have a life in which I don’t feel like being this thing is the reason that I am irredeemably bad.

Maybe someday.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Tag Archives: gentleman

Coming back is feeling hard.

I like my housemates

Bragging

Pick a side

I am so proud of my babies

I am struggling.

This is harder than it used to be.

Even though I feel weird, I’m going to talk about him.