Tag Archives: grief

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.

Backwards and forwards

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Yesterday was Noah’s birthday. He should have been 49. It will be really bad for me when I turn 49. That’s going to be savage. We spent the day cleaning the house and getting ready for my impending surgery. One day till my friend arrives to help. She wants a few days of settling in with the kids first. She is smart. Surgery is in four days. Due to the stress and vagaries of train travel I’m going the night before. I feel less resilient with Noah coming along. I think the surgery will be fine. It’s going to hurt like last time.

Unlike last time I won’t have to give a police interview 3 weeks into recovery so I’m less likely to have a sudden massive bleed out.

I’m having a hard time with my feelings. I realize that isn’t a huge shock or anything. I wish I could only remember good things about Noah. Instead my brain is going through all the memories–good and bad. Our marriage was extreme in a lot of ways I can’t nail down without feeling shame. We constructed a marriage that wouldn’t work for anyone else. Were we wrong to do so? Sometimes I can’t tell.

The part that matters to me is: I wouldn’t leave for anything. I would never have left. I would have dealt with being in pain or having to be smaller. He was worth it. He was worth everything. I loved him so much I feel I could explode. He was a very good husband for me.

I am behind on emails again. I haven’t caught up on neurotic tracking in a while. If I’m not sharing the data with Noah it feels so much less purposeful. I created data, in part so I could show Noah trends and patterns and he would decide when I had to go in and seek help for a problem. He was my designated grown up and care giver. Now I feel like I will drift in the wind because there is no one to care.

I feel so achingly lonely. I want him all the time. I miss his smile, his intense way of looking at me, how he touched me, and how made me believe I always had a place: beside him.

I feel like I will never belong anywhere again.

I am highly conscious, as I move forward as a human being who will never agree to monogamy again, that I will never feel like I belong to someone again. People will always keep a space between us for their own safety. I can’t blame them. I would too. I don’t think it safe or wise to get too close to me.

The person I am seeing keeps asking why I hard selling the benefits of being around me. Do I expect him to do the same? I don’t. I really don’t. It was one of the dominant behaviour patterns of my marriage. Noah and I both did it constantly. “See, I do x for you. It is better to have me around than to kick me out.” As if that is a healthy way to run a marriage. I am having a hard time stopping. I still feel like I am trying to beg people to not throw me away. I think part of me agrees that if I am not monogamous nothing else I do will make up for that. I am a poisoned pill.

It’s been sitting heavily in my craw that between 3 men, I have not had control over my sex life or my sexual development for about 33 years. The middle one had the least time with me, but he did a lot of the early hypnosis work that Noah built on for almost 20 years. It’s not that I lost control of my body at 10. It’s that I gained it briefly at 13. I gave it away at 19/20 (that was a muddy line). It was given back when I was 23. I regained *nothing* at 33. I did have a rebellion at 34. Now I’m getting it back permanently at 43. I pay a lot of attention to patterns. Numbers give me comfort.

As I contemplate what I need from dating, as my son likes to say, the bar is a tripping hazard in hell.

Going forward I am going to need to spend time around people who make me feel cared about. I’m going to need to spend time with people who act like I am a fascinating puzzle. I am going to need to be around people who are cautious with physical boundaries and who recoil like an electric fence when they are told no. I cannot be around people who body shame because I cannot ever be vulnerable with them. That is a sign that I am going to be attacked and I will feel deep shame. I don’t need more shame factories in my life. I really don’t.

What I need (and the reason it is worth my while to seek out) is to feel seen and appreciated.

Most people don’t make me feel like this. Very few people make me feel like this. I go through most of my life feeling intensely alienated because I can’t ask most of the people I spend the most time with to see very much about me. It creates an overwhelming deficit.

Noah used to fill that. I don’t know what to do now.

I fee sad and isolated a lot of the time. More than I deserve to, in my opinion. It will change when and if it changes. I want so much. I feel entitled to so little. Noah gave me so much. My whole life is going to be less full obsessive love after this. I will never be someone’s autistic special interest like that again. I don’t even know that I would like it again. It came with a lot of constraints. They were worth it. I miss him.

The kids are clearly well on their way to deifying him. I just nod. I don’t talk about his down sides. It’s too soon. Someday when they are bemoaning how they will never be as good as their super human father I will cackle and tell them about all the stuff they didn’t see. He was a man. He had his good parts and his bad parts. He was deeply and achingly human. He was frail in a good many ways. He was aggressive in ways he shouldn’t have been. At times he was violent. Yes, he did lose his shit. Only with me. I was his safe person, as he was mine. For people like us, part of feeling safe is being able to be all the parts we can’t use with other people. Some of those weren’t very nice.

I have intensely positive feelings about my marriage.

As I move into the next stage of my life, where I don’t have Noah to meet my needs, I have to consider other ways to meet them. It feels cold as fuck but also what else am I supposed to do? I’m not my mom to simply never date again. She had a threshold of abuse and was done forever.

I have data. I understand how low the rate of violence has been for me in terms of broader exploration. I see the fireworks of good. I can’t act like one very small part of the data set defines the whole. That’s silly. That is numerically unsupportable.

Thanks to having data I can see the positive changes in my trajectory. The kinds of people I could find at different stages of my life are very different.

I am grateful I am about to have help with the kids for a while. I need it. There are tasks I’m falling behind on because I can’t brain after this many hours on duty. I feel like my job shouldn’t be exhausting after all these years–I should be inured. I’m not. I still like my day job but I need to simplify aspects of it. I can’t be as much of a three ring circus without Noah present for support.

I am so much less capable without him papering over the cracks and finishing the last 20% of so many things. And on top of that I’m doing all the stuff he usually did entirely off-screen from me. This is hard. My brain is very overwhelmed all the time. I need to find a way to get Shortie more of a social life without me having to physically facilitate it. She needs it really badly. I’m having a hard time. The surgery recovery time is looking so brutal. Oh well.

Keep moving. Only for the first wee while it’ll be shooting for 1,000 steps a day level of “moving”. The point isn’t to keep a consistent speed the whole time. We are humans, not machines. The point is to be patient and loving and kind to myself on the far side as I struggle to regain fitness. It will be another journey. I will have to go slowly or I will hurt myself.

This process is going to be harder without Noah to fuss over me and force me to rest. He was literally looking at retiring early to be my full time carer. I’m scared. I get sick a lot. I have a compromised immune system. I don’t have a specific name for it. I just get everything and I’m down for long periods. My life doesn’t stop though. I stay sick longer because I don’t rest enough. If I don’t do too much, not enough gets done.

And now Noah won’t be here to help so there is even more work that I am responsible for. Fuck. Not all of it. His family is stepping forward to build more intense relationships to start the process of transferring intergenerational wealth. Noah turned it down throughout his life. The offer was always on the table. I’m going to say yes. I would be a fool not to. I’m going to need to pay attention to this education they are offering. I am now responsible for managing all of my money. I don’t get to wave at it and call it “Noah’s money”. I have made reasonably good choices so far. I like where I’ve gotten.

A very terrible part of me can’t help but notice that the severance payment for my first marriage is alright. Sure, the relationship was terminated but I am going to be safe forever if I manage it carefully. I can’t be profligate but I can still buy whatever groceries we want. I will never live like a tech bro again. Somehow this is karmically a place I can live with.

I have incredibly mixed feelings about the wealth transfer. I also know that I have two kids with noticeable physical disabilities and one kid where it’s too young to know. It’s connected to genetic issues in both kids. The NHS is finally starting to evaluate/track them.

I may have brought people into the world who are not well suited to the capitalist hellscape. Remains to be seen, of course. I’m not offering them a fully independent amount of help. They could have enough to live at home comfortably. I can’t promise a lot more than that. I don’t have more.

Noah doesn’t have 6 more years on his arc towards saving for retirement. There was a fair bit of input expected to get to what he wanted to hit. Oh well. Deep breath. I can turn a dime into a dollar. I will be ok. I am very good at denying Current Me things so that Future Me can have more options. I’ve been playing that game for a very long time. I can take a lot of denial in some ways and not so much in others. I will build in giving lots to other people, don’t worry. I’m still me. I am thinking really hard on the structure of that giving. I am going to have to have that firm in my head. I need guard rails and limits. I need to understand what I have to give. That’s a hard thing to figure out sometimes.

I have been told recently that I like “folky” country music. I like stories, not hard rock anthems. Guilty as charged. It’s funny. I never thought of myself as such because I had never had the slider start in that position before. Usually I’m considered not very folky. I know a handful of artists and otherwise I can’t it through it. I’m too pop.

I have been listening to a lot of old albums lately. I don’t want to watch shows. I am reading more. I like having music on. I know I should embrace silence more. I do know. I like the way I get to ride my emotions like crashing waves when I have music on while I type. It is my companion through all the highs and lows and flashes of memory.

I love the way I get to re-sort my past memories that come up. I see each circumstance differently. Noah and I ran out of arc. It is really hard to feel like I am having to go in and put a manual end on each piece of the thread. “This is over now.” I am pruning off parts of myself that grew there because I had to accommodate Noah. I have absolutely no idea what this is going to mean in the long run.

It scares me a lot.

I am going to have to be mercenary with myself about my limits going forward. I need to catch up on budget work. I need to stop allowing myself this sloppiness. I’ve been scared to look. I can’t do that anymore. I’ve been watching the overall balance and keeping an eye on that. I need to look at how things are shaking out.

Then I need to hand a number to my in laws and that’s awkward. They don’t want me to stop having all fun. They want the kids to have big lives, still.

I have the option to choose a soft life.

Globally speaking this is righteously unfair. I’m aware. I’m having feelings about that. I also don’t see any global value in grinding myself to dust. Who knows what good I will do if I have the ability to learn how to thrive instead of barely surviving in “solidarity”.

I have always done my best to pay forward the help I have received. I either have credibility or not. I am not assuring private jet lifestyles. I am making sure we won’t lose the house and we never have to worry about food.

Our life together has been a mash between what he wanted and what I wanted. Now what? What about the parts that were only there because he wanted them? I’m having a lot of feelings about that. I’m having a lot of feelings about everything right now.

This is the path. I get to traverse it, not question it. All the feelings. I’ll have all the feelings.

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.

Every day is good and bad

3 Replies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am so scared.

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

It’s not personal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was always who he wanted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love those exchanges.

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

Cue beatific smile and “I know!”

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

I am so scared.

Finding my way back to me

6 Replies

Today I was told that someone needs to be cautious about their landlord seeing a book about kink because it could be a problem for their housing. I live in a place that has very different boundaries than what I am accustomed to. I can’t imagine a landlord caring what people getting up to in privacy.

This kind of difference is a lot of why I haven’t written much in the past six years in public. I’ve been afraid of consequences. I will be judged on what I do and on what I don’t do. There is no way to thread this needle and be ok for everyone, people are going to be uncomfortable, if I am going to be true to myself.

When I think about the words of my friends that bounce around in my head like a pinball that will never make it to the bottom of the table I come back to a dramatic theme. Different people in different ways at different times have all told me that the thing that makes knowing me so impactful is the fact that in every single moment I am overwhelmingly, achingly myself. I hold to my values and my truth and I move forward as I have the right. I believe in the core of my being that I have the right to exist as much as anyone else does.

I was not brought into this world as an act of joy or love. That is not my fault. I can’t do anything about the rage, control, pain, and violence that brought me into being.

I am not that powerful.

I can’t do anything about the violence and sadness and unwantedness that permeated my young life. That time is over. That book is closed.

I can’t go back to the marriage where I was cherished and adored and worshiped either.

Do you notice this theme? There is no going back. There is only racing forward. People tell me that seeing me stride forward boldly without reservation makes them feel like they can too. I am not perfect. I am not waiting until I have the perfect body or all the information or I have fulfilled all the prerequisites.

I have all the confidence of a mediocre white man in Silicon Valley. 60% prepared is definitely good enough.

People keep asking me how I am doing. I don’t know. I’m getting things done. I don’t feel like I am doing anything well and I don’t feel like I am getting every ‘t’ crossed or every ‘i’ dotted. I am dropping balls all over the place. It’s frustrating. For many years Noah and I traded tasks based on who could get 90%+ done effectively. We had different strengths and we were an amazing team. Between the pair of us we went from people with deeply spiky profiles of success and failure to being absurd and superhuman. We compensated for and eliminated one another’s failures. We both got to be much more effective human beings.

Now I have to do all of Noah’s tasks too, not just the ones that I am basically competent on. I am responsible for the really hard and scary parts. I now have to be the one who does the tasks where I cry the whole time I am doing it. I feel like I am being bad and I can and should be punished for what I am doing, sometimes just because I am doing such an inadequate job.

I have a core of perfectionism I try hard to smother with a pillow. Good enough is good enough. Everything doesn’t have to be perfect. Life does not require perfection. Life just needs us to move forward. Me. I have to be thinking about me moving forward.

For many years now I have used Noah frankly as a tool to manage a lot of my physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs. Having him drop out of my life is devastating in a way I struggle to wrap my head around.

I’m really sad my son has to share the date of his birth with the date of his father’s death. That’s going to be painful sometimes. I will not bring it up to him. He’ll notice and it will be painful enough. He definitely doesn’t want a huge deal paid this year. No parties. No celebrations. Not this year.

It’s really hard on Shorty. That is part of why I am taking her on a trip after I recover from surgery. She needs to have more going on that give her big learning experiences. I can see how and why she is struggling to get concepts we are explaining at home because she has been so limited in environmental exposure.

I have so much to tell you all. It’s going to be hard to explain all of it in a way that makes sense quickly. I don’t have enough free time for typing. I miss you. I want to seek more integration and that means I am going to have to be more honest with you lot. I’ve been hiding in a walled garden of people who were pre-screened for wanting to talk about sex. You are just here for me and that’s a lot weirder at times.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few years writing about what sex means to me. It has been contentious and difficult over the entire past year. Noah and I were struggling on that front in a bunch of ways. We were also having the best sex of our marriage. Noah was laid off last February. The last 10 months of his life he was unemployed. We were trying to figure out how to get him more immediately to retirement because my body is so shitty I could use a full time care giver. We were having a ridiculous amount of sex. It was so good. It was bonding on a soul level. A lot of it was part of active magical and spiritual rituals. We were on fire together.

We worked really hard to build the fire inside me to a raging inferno. For those of you who are not Archivists (old friends who have been reading me since livejournal across many platforms) I need to say that I am a hypersexual. I mean it in a clinical sense and not in a “I like to have sex” way. I have been actively pursuing and chasing sex in a wide variety of inappropriate and then appropriate settings since I was 3. Sex has been an overwhelming driving force in my life in ways it isn’t for normal people. I did not have a time of virginity or ignorance. That is simply not my life path.

Instead I have provided that path for my children. I have been in active trauma therapy for approaching 35 years now. I work very hard on being a person who acts consciously and deliberately. I make choices about where boundaries should be based on an excessive amount of deliberation and waffling between various theories. I overthink my life.

I was raised by people who made incredibly bad choices. I don’t have a lot of strong role models in my head of who I want to be when I grow up. The only person I want to be is me. I see the person I want to be the same way I see the murals I paint in my homes. My homes erupt with plants and water and texture. I see that Future Me bursting out of me. She will know the right thing to do in an absurd number of circumstances and she will never be a twat about it because every new thing I learn unveils a thousand variations I will fail at. The more I know the more I understand I will never understand. I am a tiny drop in a hurricane.

For 18 years Noah was my path to controlling and living with my hypersexuality. He was my safe way to not expose my children to inappropriate behaviour. We were rigid about boundaries between our sex life and our kids.

Theoretical knowledge about sex? Heck yeah! These are some deeply educated mofos. They can deconstruct tropes. They are finding their own pathways into adult relationships in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with my path. I see the edges out of the periphery of my vision and carefully never look more closely. I am a nosy and invasive asshole, only I’m not. If I want my 30 year old children to respect me I have to nail this dynamic now.

What I am doing today is not about today. I am paying Future Me. Future Me will want to have the kind of relationship with her children where EVERYONE CAREFULLY DOESN’T LOOK. Cause no one is hiding or lying or being secretive. They just aren’t flaunting.

So I need to start figuring out what that means from myself as a single adult who is going to be polyamorous.

I am not going to fall into a serial monogamist pattern. Naw. That will be unstable and bad for my kids. People will not integrate with my life quickly.

For the love of Cheese, there will always be a locked door between me and my kids when I have sex. Preferably in a sound proof room. Hey wait, I have one of those.

I’m scared of this though. Not to hurt anyone’s feelings, but I’ve seen poly done in some ways I don’t want to emulate. I have known people who have done things in ways I thought were highly respectful all around. I’ve seen everything in between. I don’t live in the San Francisco Bay Area any more. I will not have the same kind of casual social tolerance for my antics. My neighbours here are probably already noticing. I’m having feelings about that. A lot of people use my road as a daily exercise destination. They comment on my weeding. They are going to notice and raise eyebrows about vehicles. That sits heavy in my belly.

Especially given how many of them stop to talk about how sad it is that Noah is gone. I live in a small town. This is a new thing. I am going to have to figure out how to allow them to have plausible deniability because I think they will want to have it. We already get along. If they can ignore things I think they will want to. I won’t shove it in their faces. I won’t flaunt my wanton lifestyle. I will let everyone only see what they want to see. I have spent a lot of time studying the social contract and I do ok in live tests.

I know how to be neither dominant nor submissive in a social situation. I am simply on a different hierarchy. Don’t worry about whether you are above or below me. We are parallel on different scales. No reason to raise your fur. I am not a threat and you can’t threaten me.

I’m sure I will be judged and there will absolutely be rumors. Since I am me I figure I ought to at least provide some actual facts for them to judge me based on. I like being judged accurately and I’ll take my medicine for what that earns me. I always have. I always accept the consequences for my mistakes as I try to learn.

I know the deal. I am not going to bother to talk back. I’ll take it and move on. I won’t slow down much. I have more mistakes to make. I have more learning I need to do. It doesn’t really matter that I am tired and I feel weary to the marrow of my bones. There is so much to do if I am going to create that Future Me I see in my head. She has been successfully speed running this game of life a lot longer than me and I’m desperate to catch up.

“If you don’t look back on yourself 18 months ago and say ‘Wow I really sucked‘ you aren’t trying hard enough.” I know, Noah. I’m trying. It’s hard to learn while this much of my brain is screaming in agony because how can you be gone? I am a tiny fraction of the person I was. I do not think I am better than I was 18 months ago this time, sweetheart. Please forgive me for this lapse in progress. Maybe in cooking? Mostly I have become less a spiky profile with a few low skills and a whole fucking flat line. I feel like I am barely moving in most areas.

My son said, “I thought we were your epilogue. Turns out we are your intermission” and it freaked me out.

I have never been single long in my whole life and that’s a bigger statement than it is for most humans. In 40 years if you add up all the months of not having sex I think it fills less than 3 or 4 years worth. I’m not sure. It’s around there.

I don’t know what this is going to be like here and I definitely don’t know what this will be like in this set and setting. I’m going to figure it out though. Since I got married I’ve had the privilege to fail upward. I don’t know if that halo will continue but I’m going to do my best to act like that privilege is like everything else I inherited from Noah. It is now mine. Not by birthright, no, I am not one of those good people. I am still shitty little me. But in my time and my place if I outlive my spouse I absorb all that they own. Some of the ways they address the mail are weird.

I am not finding my way back to me. Not really. I cannot go back. There is only forward. I am moving forward towards the me I want to be. I’m going to have a place in a little place. I’m going to know my neighbours and they are going to accept me as an ambassador of weird to varying degrees. Some of them will hate me. I’m sure I will be hassled in some ways but it doesn’t matter. I have the ability to cope.

That is something I have had since the very beginning, a lot of cope. I don’t always make wise or good decisions but good golly I get through.

I have an enormous pile of paperwork to get through because now I am responsible for my own taxes. I kind of want to throw up. I am a head of household with the IRS. I have never been that before.

My mother was my age when I was 11. I think perimenopause is hitting me harder at a younger age. The spotting is awful. I’m spotting for half a month at this point. “How are you doing?” people ask. I don’t usually tell them this. I’m looking forward to being a crone so much. I keep wanting to ask if there is a hormone that would make this happen faster. Then I could go off hormonal birth control. That may be part of the spotting, but it happened without the patch so I doubt it is the cause. I love being a neurotic, tracking, bitch.

If anything the patch has been doing really well at helping smooth out the PMDD symptoms. It’s not all bad to muck with hormones.

There are always two forms of birth control. This has been true since I was 12. I have been pregnant five times and they were all on purpose. If I were to fall pregnant despite heroic measures I would choose an abortion. I am too old and in ill health. I’m about to have the second of three surgeries to repair damage from my third child’s birth. I’m good. Factory is closed. I don’t want to get into a debate about birth control methods. I love you. I’m letting you know how I’m doing since I know you worry.

It’s been hard to talk to you. I tell you everything because you really are a whole cast of varying Ideal Narrators for me. I think of you so often. I love you. I’m so happy when you reach out and tell me how you are. Sometimes I don’t know how to respond. I am so deep in email fuckruptcy it is absurd. I don’t respond, but I read and then leave it there unread for months waiting to have the spoons to answer.

I have not gotten organising sorted. My brain is being a right cunt about admitting this level of vulnerability and opening myself up to hearing “no” when I ask. It makes me want to puke. I don’t like asking specific people for a specific thing. That is exactly my worst failure method. It took so many years before I could ask Noah. He had to actually watch me cry while I crawled around doing things for myself because I could not ask for help. He had to live with how awful that felt. He had to beg me to ask for help. He got increasingly anticipatory as the years went by because I don’t ask for help much.

When I do it falls into one of two modes: it is incredibly low stakes and a no or a yes is equally thrilling OR I am having an emergency and I am going to be in pain if you say no.

I’m not very good at managing that second part. My primary way has been to throw open the doors to the universe and ask for help with stuff of “anyone who can” and then some people throw their hats into the ring. It’s been bloody successful for me. My life has been good thanks to this approach.

I don’t know how it will work here. It’s ok. I don’t have to know yet. Future Me will know. I just have to get to her.

I’m feeling deeply conflicted about dating. I’m not replacing Noah. There is no way. There is no such thing. I am having fun. I am having opportunities for exploration and growth. I smile more than I would without the time. I say dating because I’m still trying to not be scandalous. I’m still scared. I smile more when I have shagging very soon on the calendar. There. I’ve said it. Practically on Facebook.

I have very mixed feelings about the way this feels more me centred around myself than I have been since I got married. I am not spending my days trying to earn someone else’s approval. I am doing what I want to do in service of my own happiness. Apparently my happiness is still bought with really bad jokes.

I can’t play the “you are not funny” game ever again. There are so many layers of me that will have to change. I never need to respond as Noah’s wife again.

I keep going, even when I’m crying and even when I’m scared, because Future Me looks like a really cool lady and I want to meet her. I can’t meet her if I stop.

Life isn’t fair

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It’s not a stretch to say that my mother in law and I didn’t get along well for the first 15 years of my marriage. At that point she decided I was staying and our relationship transformed to a large degree. She’s been very nice and accepting over the past nearly 4 years. I suspect part of that had to do with me supporting her through her mother’s end of life stuff. Her mother was a hard woman.

Since Noah died I have been talking with MIL a lot more often. When I want to feel that moment of shared pride in my spawn, she is the only person who feels available for sharing it with. I used to not send her an email a month. Now I send one or more most weeks, just sharing a picture of the kids.

She is due to go into surgery a few days after me. Her surgery is much more difficult and mandatory for survival. I’m worried. There’s nothing I can do to help. I’m talking to her more. I’m sharing more of myself and my life and my kids. Maybe it will be incentive. I don’t know though. I’m not feeling particularly able to keep people alive right now.

I’m scared to get to close to anyone because I feel like it will be my fault they die. I am so bad that I deserve to be alone and anyone who gets close to me will get lost in that mess. I’m not actually this powerful but paranoia doesn’t care about reality or logic. It feels true.

I wake up almost every morning and cry because he’s not there with me. I’ll be honest and say that the overnights I’ve had don’t have as much crying. That’s part of what I like about them. I get to have the experience of looking towards the future instead of crying about the past. I can’t change the past. Maybe I can change the future? Will I be responsible for a lot more deaths? I’m not over my brother or my dad. If I could endure more pain maybe they wouldn’t be dead. I know that Noah died from a freak accident but it feels like my fault. If he hadn’t wanted to come with me to help me feel better, he might still be alive. I don’t think that will feel easier anytime soon.

I feel so much shame. I failed to protect Noah. I feel like I don’t deserve to ever have a real relationship again. I am not good enough at looking after people. This feeling is making my day job really complicated.

My children take up the vast majority of my life and I’m not feeling like I am good enough, strong enough to take care of them. This hurts so much. I need Noah. I need him to be the backstop. I didn’t fuck up a lot but when I did he was there to prevent it from going too far. What am I going to do now? Just be perfect? I don’t think that is in the cards. I am so very far from perfect.

Yesterday was a good day though. The kids and I spent the day going through house stuff working towards a purge. We own too much. We cannot take care of it all. A lot of it has to go. We managed to do it without being super upset. We have a long way to go before our house is manageable though. Now we have 27 days till my surgery. We need to get a lot of this done so that maintaining the house is easier when I am incapacitated.

I have to make the future easier.

Mostly I am gobsmacked because my income (thanks to Social Security) is about the same as it was as a teacher before I married Noah. Time stopped for me in an uncanny way.

Past me deserves 9,000 gold stars for saying no to all the friends who invited us on expensive holidays or who wanted us to get a reverse mortgage so we could own a much larger house. I made financial choices that will keep me safe for the rest of my life. This is something I learned by watching my mother fail to do it. You have to pay Future You first.

Noah wanted me to play lottery tickets with him (metaphorically) to try and get rich. We did a round of Angel investing with Paul Graham’s company. I told Noah that the guys he wanted to support would not last 6 months. They were sloppy, unmotivated, and had a crappy idea but he insisted he trusted them. I was right. We lost that money. He let me handle investing the rest. I did well. Looking at the long term money freaks me out. I need a bridge over the next 20 years. 10 will be covered by Social Security. Then I get to levitate for a while. I think it’ll be ok.

I think I will save so well that it won’t be a problem. It’s time to teach my kids how to live like we won’t have money for a good long while. I know how. I’ve done it before and I can do it again. It will be good life skills. Life below your means. Scrimp. Save. Do without wherever reasonable. We have plenty of stuff for the next few years.

Time to hold my breath and see if I can turn this one year of savings into ten over the next ten years. That’s not so hard. I can do that. Just take a little off the top every month.

It’s not so hard when you have the privilege of earning enough to cover your bills plus having discretionary funds. I used to skip eating to do this and I will never be in that position again. I will never have to skimp on food again.

That’s what being rich means to me. It means I don’t have to worry how much food costs. I just buy it. It feels scandalous and cheeky.

I get overnights because Aunt Jenny is taking Shortie one night a month. The older kids ignore me in the evenings anyway. They are online talking to folks. So I go out. Of course I’m seeing more than one person. That will be true for the rest of my life. My kids aren’t going to meet people quickly. I have a horror of that dynamic.

I’m going to be shy for a while before I get around to writing about my love life with great explicitness in this space. It’s feeling scary. I’m already going full speed elsewhere. Here it feels scary in a different way. Not everyone here is a giant weirdo who would love to opt in to explicit details about my sex life.

The last few years have been a wild ride of self discovery inside my marriage, outside my marriage, and now in this post-marriage time. I have never been one to sit in stasis. I am meant to grow wildly in all directions. I am meant to explode with energy. This has been true for my whole life. This is a thing that people have commented on explicitly for my whole life. Now I need to figure out how to manage that without Noah shaping and directing my growth.

I’m pretty scared.

In the past few days my son said, “I always thought we were your epilogue. Now I see that we were your intermission.”

Whoa.

Noah’s goal and plan was for all of us to be alone in this house together as much as humanly possible forever. He liked the Pod. We all liked the Pod. We have so much acceptance and love and support inside of it. We take care of each other. We are careful with our words and gestures and physical movements and expressions of anger. We know that we will deal forever with the consequences of strife within the Pod. We have all created this bubble together and people coming into it are a big deal. We treat that like a whole family negotiation.

That’s going to be complicated going forward.

Things are going to be a lot more complicated going forward.

Things are going to be a lot simpler going forward. An awful lot of everything revolved around Noah. We stayed home as much as we did because he wanted all of us to do that. He wanted to be at home and he wanted us with him so he wanted us at home. It was striking. He genuinely wanted us around existing all the time. We validated and motivated him. His life was a shrine of us. It has been fascinating living in a family this deeply enmeshed and wrapped about each other. This was not something I had background training for. This ended up being a whole different thing than I had planned for a bunch of reasons.

Home educating continues. We are starting to get back up to speed on doing academics regularly at the table. We are always learning but sometimes we can do it in ways that produce tangible results and sometimes we just learn for the sake of learning for a while. It requires a balance to live in the world. We are drifting through our grief. We talk about it a lot. We are not bottling up our feelings. We cry together. We are all writing separately.

I wonder a lot about their futures. They have a tremendous number of skills and talents and they are broadly and diversely educated but they are not going to fit in to a world of checklists. Their lives have been constructed around their individual needs and the absolute limits of what I am capable of providing. It is fascinating, now, to look at the work I see ahead of me with my youngest. My older two are settling into their own stuff and don’t need much of any input from me. All of my plans for this stage with our daughter revolves around Noah and his needs and his limits.

Balancing a house of five autistic people with weird limits and needs is a lot of fun. It is dancing on the head of a greased pin. You will fail to perfectly accommodate everyone and that is the lesson in that moment. That’s when I get to talk about distress tolerance. That’s when I talk about how to be in control of your nervous system even when you can’t control your environment. That’s when I talk about putting on a mask for social safety. Smile. Appear pleasant and non-threatening. Be curious. Put all of your panic and stomach pain in a box and put it in a closet in the back of your mind. We’ll deal with it later.

We do, in fact, come back together to deal with it. It’s so real. Compartmentalisation is a motherfucker.

I feel a lot of guilt, sometimes, because I am training my children in how to mask. I’ve been told it is similar to ABA therapy. I do know that I am a behaviourist. I actively teach and practice DBT. This is relationship oriented therapy. It is exposure therapy in a non-clinically valid method.

The main way I train my children is to take them on long journeys through many different cultures and settings and I help them learn how to evaluate what they see. What clues exist for how to behave? What patterns do you see? Does one group of people walk a lot faster? Why do you think that might happen? How do people manage walking through crowds? What can you guess about the cultural values based on these actions? What do you think they mean?

We do some searching on the internet to see if any of our guesses were close to correct. Sometimes we pat ourselves on the back for being able to easily spot something that is a major culturally point of pride. Yes. It really is clear.

My son told me that he describes our family as being full of autistic people for whom “social interactions” is our main special interest. I hadn’t thought of it that way but he’s right. We read books and watch shows because we want to talk about the social interactions. We want more representations in our brains. And we analyse what is happening in our own lives over the dinner table. We don’t grill people whether they like it or not. We all like sharing.

“So I was having this chat with someone and I said, _____.”

We then talk it out. “Ah, did you consider the thing from the angle of someone who is (list of various demographic markers)?”

“Oh. Shit. No.”

I love my house so much. We don’t put people down much but we do question everything. We are nosy and invasive and simply present.

It’s fascinating watching the teenagers start to develop their own sense of “What happens off screen is no one else’s business.” People are only entitled to know the things about you that you choose to share when you are in a room together.

Wow. What is up with all this drivel that comes out of my fingertips then? What is up with the whole darn internet? I choose to offer the world cheat sheets. I am a deeply complex person and if I don’t write about it I will never have the ability to share all of it in another form. I would only be able to share in sound bites of sanitised nothing. I do not want that in this life.

I am not an easy person to know but I want to be known. I have always wanted to be known. Being known is what has lead to increasing levels of safety for me in this life. I am a weird motherfucker. I also work hard to give more than I take. I try to conform in the ways I must. I am trying.

I am also a person who has been let out of a cage. I loved my husband and I would have born the price of staying married but I was not made to be monogamous. It was a point of enormous strife between us even when I wasn’t doing anything with anyone. It made him feel abandoned and betrayed.

I have no idea what the future is going to bring. I am betting on more growth and more change. I won’t always like it. A lot of it is going to hurt. That’s ok. I was never promised an easy life and I do not expect to have one. I am going to have a better life than the one I was brought up to expect. I am going to have integrity and honesty that did not exist in that set and setting.

Every individual family has their own vibe. Their own levels of awareness around sex and sexuality. I am struggling with the fact that my levels in California depended on their being enough ambient sex positive, sexuality displays that I could have a lot of theoretical discussions. My sex life never had to come up. Here I am going to be the first example of poly that my daughter really groks. This alarms me. That’s a lot of pressure for figuring out what “sharing information respectfully” means. It will be fine. I’ll navigate this like everything else. We are already the weirdos for a lot of reasons. It’s not going to make that big of a difference in the long run.

It feels like a life affirming thing to do at this stage. I am trying to build deeper connections than I am going to be able to access from my local friends. Boundaries are complicated things. Life is long and I would not be surprised if Noah is not the only partner I watch die. That’s scary. I’m only 43. I might have that happen again. Life isn’t fair. I’m going to experience a lot more loss. It’s really scary. I hate going under general anesthesia. It’s really scary.

And for the first time in 18 years, Noah won’t be the person who takes care of me. He was not good in the emergency crunch moments but he was awesome at babying me during recovery. Well, he got awesome because he did not like watching me crawl around the house doing the chores he hadn’t gotten to.

This time I am doing a big purge of stuff before surgery. I need to have less work to do. I need to have the ability to not fight with my baby over stupid stuff. I need to create a “Yes” environment. It will make a lot of things less stressful for a lot of people. We’ve had too much for a while. It’s time to do it differently.

Do you own your stuff or does your stuff own you? How much do you really need? I’m thinking on this really hard. I keep wanting to say “we” as if the kids somehow share responsibility but no I have too much stuff. Because I now own everything that was Noah’s. I’m having a lot of feelings about that. But it’s really past time to start the day.

Coping 4 months in

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Hi. I’m not writing a lot here. An awful lot of how I am coping I have mixed feelings about. I’m doing that thing I used to do to access emotional energy. Some day I will feel confident enough to transfer all the writing from that other social media site, not yet. I think I need my baby to be a lot older. I can’t tell. Maybe I will impulsively do it before then. I don’t know yet.

I’m getting stuff done. Maybe enough? I don’t know. I’m exercising a ton. I ran 4 miles this morning. I’ve walked another 5. I’ve cycled over 5 miles with another trip to town ahead of me. I did a yoga class this morning. Thursdays are my ridiculous day.

The kids are coping. We carry on doing stuff and growing and trying to become part of the community. It’s a process. I notice that I get much more positive community interaction at the shopping centre near my house compared to downtown. In town people are hostile about me looking weird. In my neighbourhood everyone smiles and talks to me. That’s interesting.

Life continues. I am participating in life affirming behaviour. It’s the best I can do. The legal process of dealing with the death continues to suck. It is moving slowly and I’m fucking amused that now that it’s not waiting on me it is still going at a turtle’s pace because all the professionals are more lackadaisical about responding to email than I am.

I finally got the safe open (I lost the keys and had to get a locksmith) so I could send the paperwork to SSA. They will back pay me from December. That will be very useful.

I’m going back and forth in my head being wild self recrimination for how I’m coping and rueful knowledge that Noah would both expect this and understand and forgive me. Noah understood me and he would understand this way of surviving. I am a stunted tree and I yet reach for the light. Sometimes I really don’t know what to do about the fact that Noah has been my guiding light for so long. I don’t know if I will like the me I am without him as much. I’m worried.

Life is a struggle

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Things are good with the kids. Watching the collapse of the US government when I’ve been saying “It’s going to happen in my lifetime” means my kids are far more inclined to listen to me and take what I say seriously. Obviously I’m not an oblivious, stupid idiot. I see what is happening. So the big kids are more enthusiastic about gardening than they’ve ever been. Stuff is coming *along* this year. It’s going to be a really fun garden this time. They are going to learn even more skills for surviving the end of the global supply chain. The most important part is making friends and we are struggling on that front.

I’m seeing people at group social gatherings occasionally. I have a few folks I try to see one on one but I don’t see them every month. I’m feeling incredibly isolated. It is hurting so much that I was asked to leave the bike community. I feel like I lost my ability to make friends for exercising with. Because I couldn’t keep my stupid mouth shut. Because I have to make everything hard.

I’m the problem so I need to go away.

It’s feeling hard for me to leave my house. I get a lot of random verbal abuse in town. I *look* like I don’t belong here and people tell me so often. Sometimes with lots of swearing, but most often just through a passionate conversation with their pals about what a complete loser I am and how everyone wishes that people like me would stop coming to their city.

It’s same shit, different day for me. I’ve gotten this push back my entire life no matter where I was. I mostly try to pretend I don’t hear it and I press on with my life. I don’t have a lot of that energy going spare right now. I don’t feel comfortable or entitled to have anything or be anywhere.

People keep asking me if I have support. I don’t have a single person in the country I feel like I can talk to without heavily censoring every concept that comes out of my mouth. When I am around people I’m aware that my job is to listen, not talk. No one fucking wants to deal with me. I’m too fucking much.

I got bitched out at the leisure centre because I came in to take a shower and not use other facilities. My boiler has been broken for 5? 6? weeks now. I’m sorry that I exist so wrong.

I feel empty and worthless and not worth the effort.

I feel scared and bad. I feel desperately unwanted by the community as a whole. No, I don’t feel like I should go back to the US. At least here I don’t have to worry about someone pulling a gun on my kid when they run their fool mouth. Verbal abuse happens everywhere. The ambient level of violence is lower. It’s not like people ever acted like I belonged anywhere in the US either. I have been wrong since I was in preschool. I have been out of place and wrong. This is just the rest of the world agreeing. The problem is me.

I’m not allowed to do any of the things to hurt myself that would let me bleed off bits of the pain. Instead I spend a lot of time in the studio screaming until my head wants to explode. I am so scared. I don’t see a forward path that is not all consuming pain. I lost the only person who could bear my company. I lost the only person who wanted to talk to me and know me. I lost the only person who has ever lived with me for longer than 3 years. My mother never kept me for longer than 3 years at a stretch. She couldn’t bear me.

Only Noah could stand me. Someday my children will have a choice about leaving. I will understand if they go as far from me as possible. I won’t blame them at all. It will make sense to me.

I’m really sad that I’m not allowed to die. I feel like garbage. I feel like dog shit on the bottom of someone’s shoe. No, I don’t want to talk to anyone about how I’m feeling. I’m the problem and I don’t want to spread my pustulent disgustingness to anyone else.

I’m afraid that I shouldn’t try to make friends because I am nothing but a black hole of self hatred. There is nothing good in me to share.

I wish my mom had pushed harder and strangled me with the umbilical cord. I shouldn’t have been saved.

I wish I could die but I can’t. So instead I scream and cry alone in a room. Because this is the only safety I will have for the rest of my life. Other people are a risk every time. I don’t have it in me to nod and accept a lot more rejection right now. So I need to ask for nothing.

I hate my father for forcing me to be here. I hate my mother for not aborting me or strangling me at birth. I shouldn’t be here. I want to accept that it’s never getting better and just stop. I can’t though. People need me. People who weren’t given a choice.

I’m glad I get along with my kids. I sort of expect them to be my only real relationships going forward. Those incredibly curated and limited relationships in which I give and I bite my tongue off trying not to ask for anything in return.

I will never deserve to get anything from anyone again. I wish I could die.

98 days and nothing is well.

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Ok, that’s hyperbole. Things are fine. We plug along. We get chores and academics and gardening and exercise done. But I feel empty and hollow. I yearn for Noah with every cell in my body. I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel loved. I feel abandoned and scared and lonely. I’ve gotten good sleep three nights in a row and I’ve felt emotionally worse with every night. Like I was hiding this pain behind the dullness of sleep deprivation.

I’m trying to fill my bucket so I have a lot to give. Today that feels impossible. I feel scared and inadequate and sad.

No one will ever be my partner like that again. It took so long to trust him and we had to go through so much together. I don’t think I will ever let anyone in. My soul hurts.

12 weeks

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I keep thinking that I should post and then I don’t. My brain has been hard core avoiding most topics. I’m staying in one repetitive special interest forum and that’s pretty much it.

It was comforting for me to read an essay about autistic grieving and how often we do simply avoid looking/thinking about the loss for a long time because it hurts too much. I’m definitely drilling deep into historical ways of coping. All of us are drifting through days accomplishing far less than pretty much ever. We can’t hear each other. Anyone can announce something three or four times and no one catches it. It’s all of us right now. It’s super hard. We are all striving for patience and acceptance with each other. Everyone slept in super late this morning. We keep missing social stuff because we are stuck in the house waiting for repair men or deliveries.

Like the oil, which I was originally told would arrive last Friday, then they said Monday, now Wednesday. We haven’t had heat or hot water for a while. It’ll be about 2 weeks by the time they finally show up. That sucks.

An oven broke. The washing machine broke. The boiler still isn’t properly repaired and I can’t schedule until the oil arrives. There are still a bunch of other things falling apart. Like, the back door is literally falling apart.

I’m still waiting for progress from solicitors/attorneys/accountants/financial advisers. Definitely no progress in March I was told. Just wait.

We are in our first week alone out of six. It’s kind of startling how much it impacted us immediately to be alone in the house. Our daily schedule is not being kept very well. It’s pretty amazing that we were only alone for five nights in 12 weeks. Having another adult around really does make it feel more important to keep moving. We have basically crashed to a stop. We have the excuse that we are waiting on oil this week.

We all feel like we could hide in the house for a few weeks. I am resisting and I’m not sure why. I feel like if I don’t push us into going to stuff I am failing to parent correctly. Academics are happening but not as fast as usual. I am feeling lost in my brain a lot of the time. I’m going back and forth between feeling super ashamed and feeling like I am being too hard on myself.

It’s hard not to feel hard on myself. I’m being selfish and I’m doing stuff to fill my own bucket. I’m not doing the martyr thing. I feel like the primary thing I need is being alone. When I’m alone I’m not scared I am hurting people. I’m struggling with how much my brain wants to shut down when I’m in a room with other people. I can barely focus to finish tasks.

I miss Noah in a million selfish ways. I want to hug him. I loved to bury my face in his chest. He made me feel safe and loved. He made me feel important and worthy of keeping alive even though it is so much effort. I miss having someone who wanted to listen to my racing thoughts. I miss regulating off his breath and heart beat. I miss his laugh and his silly jokes. I miss feeling treasured.

I am feeling deeply reminded that I am not for everyone and that I will never be worthy of effort again. I feel crushed by this knowledge. I feel like there isn’t a lot to look forward to without Noah. I’m trying to find hope and the will to live but it feels so pointless and silly. Why bother? I’m going to be abandoned over and over again. I’m scared.

I can compartmentalise and get through a lot. I’m afraid this is going to drown me, only I can’t allow that. I have to keep going for the kids. It doesn’t matter what I want. It’s not about me.

I miss you, Noah. I don’t know how to keep walking but I’m going to try anyway. I don’t feel I have a choice.

A low key celebration

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Today my last baby turns 7. She wants clafoutis for breakfast and green soup (potato/leek) for dinner.

She is delighted that I won’t ask her to do a single chore today because it is her birthday. That’s the rule. On your birthday: no chores.

I miss Noah. I miss him in every second and it is hard to not freak out all the time. I’m actually being pretty stable. I’m keeping my shit together. I’m not yelling. I’m not being overly harsh. I’ve definitely snapped a few times and been sharp. It’s all about degrees? I am being patient. I am wrapping my babies in cotton wool while they figure out what this damage means.

I am making sure that I am not the problem.

I’m figuring out how to get my needs met and how to get support. I’m having difficult and uncomfortable conversations. They are good and important though. They are necessary. I have to learn how to talk to people other than Noah again. It’s been a lot of years of only turning inward to our pod and I can’t ask my kids for support. No parentifying in this house.

My old lawyer told me that I had to make myself happy. I can not pour from an empty bucket. I have to do stuff to make me happy. I have to make that my priority or I have nothing to give my kids. I don’t have babies anymore. I don’t have to put other peoples immediate demands above my need every minute of the day.

I will fail if I continue to try.

My limits weigh heavily on me. I’m getting more kinds of support in. I am trying to lurch towards a new normal that has elements of our old normal but with a lot more support. With Noah, we could muddle through ok with just us. I can’t alone. I am trying to find ways to ask for support but it’s hard. Asking makes me vulnerable and that scares me. I am trying to make small adjustments. It’s hard that I am making in-house adjustments and out-of-house adjustments at the same time but it is necessary. It is all necessary. Necessary doesn’t mean fun or exciting.

I’m building in places in my week where I step out to be me. Thursday mornings I am going to yoga classes then I meet some buddies for a cuppa and a blether. It’s fun. I don’t even know where I get all the pieces of language I pick up. They all feel like mine because people have spoken to me using them. They were gifted to me.

I feel Noah’s loss as a stone in my chest. It weighs me down and makes me want to cry and scream. I want to be hiding in a dark room screaming for days. I won’t. I will go take a shower. Then I’ll make a birthday girl a fancy breakfast. Then I’ll go to yoga. Then I’ll talk to my friends and I’ll smile and laugh. I hope I will feel it. I might fake the whole thing. Do the things until the things feel real. Do the things until you can accept that this is your life now. Then learn how to enjoy it.

I don’t feel ready for this.

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I feel like I stopped being an adult when I got married. I feel like I was overly parentified as a child and then I barely survived for 7 years as a quasi-adult. Then I turned over a lot of the adulting to Noah. He was our public face in a lot of ways. He did all the hard parts. I may live here forever on Leave to Remain because taking the next step is probably beyond me. He was the adult.

As I look at the future I understand that paying other people to grown up for me is expensive and I don’t have an actual income. I am not a brilliant writer who can suddenly come up with a new book that will change lives and motivate people to be kinder in a whole industry. I am a useless person. I wanted to say bitch. I’m not really a bitch anymore, though. Well, maybe with special people.

I think the list of people I will go off on can be counted on my fingers and none of them live in this country. I don’t think I have been a bitch in my Scottish time.

Who knows what glory the future might bring? I’m going to be scared. That means I will be more reactive and tense and anxious. The whole time I have lived here I have stayed home when my anxiety was high. I hide. I let Noah be the grown up. I let him do the hard things. As my disability level has increased he has done ever more. He really was taking care of me.

I took care of him, too. His body was frail. It had a lot of surgeries and illnesses. When he went down he went down hard for weeks or months. We cooked for each other. I gave him a lot of foot care because he had a weird skin condition.

At some point when we had tiny babies I mildly observed that I looked forward to the future when I would have the time to properly care for his gross feet. He scoffed at me. He laughed. He said he knew that would never happen.

I am really glad I did that for the last 8 years. I am so grateful it has been this long. I started doing it in the new bathroom in California. It was lovely. It was a way to pay attention to him when I was pregnant and sex was awful. In so many ways, our third child has been placed to the side so I can spend more time with Noah. She has never been the centre of my world. Noah has been home her whole life. My life revolved around Noah. I spend time with her. I have a good relationship with her. Noah replaced a lot of my time with her so that I could do independent things. He was more involved with this child. The one that he decided to have because I was getting too uppity. The one that meant our house there was going to be too small in the long run.

Oh this was a fantastic house for lock down. I’m just saying. For a bunch of sensory sensitive autistics lock down wasn’t all bad. Noah was around 24/7. He functioned as a working mother. He was involved in meal making and cleaning and parenting and schooling. I’ve been treating this like a period of time where I was training Noah, MC, and EC to work with me as a semi-commercial kitchen. The times we all got together and really worked we have created magic. It was wonderful. Those were amazing feasts. We love food.

Noah taught me how to eat. He did so much work to broaden and expand my diet. He inventively prepared any weird vegetable I brought into the house. If I didn’t like how it came out, he would research how to fix the problem. I just had to go back and correct verb tense over and over. Now I can’t see because of crying. It’s fine. Noah always loved that I can type without looking at the keyboard. That was his favourite form of flirting. He would make his eyes all smouldery in an ostentatious way. He was never going to let me pretend there was any amount of subtlety to his approach.

Two years ago in my journal I wrote, “The ceilidh was so very fun! I had a lovely time. Today I ran 5.5 miles, biked 5 miles, and danced for hours. I feel fit and strong and free.”

If I could turn back time I would.

Noah, I miss you so much. This is going to suck really hard. But you made sure I will never be desperately poor again. You made sure I have resources to use as I recover. You made sure I have people who love me in my house for the next few decades if not forever. We’ll see. You helped me be a parent they can respect and love. Noah I am so grateful for you. You made me feel like I am indispensable instead of trash. You made me feel valuable and smart and funny and wise.

I spend a lot of time feeling really stupid because I struggle to follow kinds of nuance or jumps in conversation. I don’t have the same context as other people. It is hard for me to understand how other people see the world. It’s a lot of why my pattern matching skills have been such a focus over my life. I’m trying to figure out how and where I can understand things that people are saying based on patterns from my life. I’m lucky that I have a whole lot of different times and periods and people to think about when it comes to understanding behaviour. I just don’t always understand the connection between what I am hearing/seeing compared to what I already know. Noah would translate for me. I was so much smarter when Noah was in the room. Frankly, he was too. He wanted the same translation from me but for different things.

I think of the ballroom dance lessons we took together. He really loved that I interrupted the instructor and gave the teacher really explicit feedback on how to talk about Noah. “No. You cannot say ‘Feel the music’ to him because he will get angry and shut down his ability to listen. Never ever say that to him.” I shielded him in his tender places too. I was happy to be the one who handled being the authority on what happened to all of the bodies in our house medically, including his. I went with him to appointments and he would look to me to answer questions. He didn’t know what was going on with him. He hadn’t been paying attention. I did though. I knew him like he was my obsessive fandom.

I feel guilty for this, but I’ve read through his old letters and emails and daily reports and conversations with friends in DMs. I’m a horrible person. I have always wanted to consume him whole. I wanted everything in his brain to be in my brain. It’s really fucking cool getting this context from other relationships. I’m seeing things I couldn’t 43 days ago because I was giving him privacy so I lacked context. Now I feel sad that I didn’t do more of this before he died. I could have been a better wife.

It is humbling seeing him describe our problem periods to other people. I am so glad he had these people in his life for support. That is wonderful. He had really good friends who strongly advocated in his defense. That makes my heart feel less pain for a moment because I see the ways he was getting what he needed even though I wasn’t giving it to him. He was being seen. I am glad. I wanted him to be seen. I didn’t want him to be all mine. I wanted to share him broadly and diversely with the world because he was so cool he could change peoples lives.

He wanted me to be a cave troll with him. He wanted me to only look at him and he would only look at me. I see how my push for poly was forcing him to come to grips with things from his past that were not about me and I am trying to forgive myself for making him go through that. It’s hollow comfort now to say “It was for his own good.” Was it? I don’t know. We never actually dated anyone. There was the rape. Otherwise we had 8 years of monogamy. He wanted it to be for the rest of our lives.

I feel really really bad about being me. I don’t know if I would have been naturally monogamous without all the rapes but my body is obnoxious. I like people. I like them more than Noah wanted me to like them. It made him sad.

If I could have made a deal with the devil: monogamy or Noah dies I would have picked monogamy. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.

If I could trade my life for his I would.

I can’t. I can’t get him back and it hurts so much. I know what loss feels like. I know I will keep moving. My life is going to be really small though. I can’t sustain a big life without Noah. I am a fraction of a person. I am not who I was. I have no idea who I will grow to be but I will never take up as much space as I did when I was Noah’s wife. I never wanted that much anyway. The trajectory of our life freaked me the fuck out. I had a hard time in Noah’s circles. I had a hard time with Noah’s friends. I felt less than them and that’s complicated. Less educated, less intelligent, less motivated, less driven, less talented, less competent, less capable, less able, less worthy of respect.

It’s why I had to get out of the Valley. It was increasingly overwhelmed with people who were newly arrived and convinced of their superiority. Part of it is my bullshit. Part of it is that tech people are quite often fucking dickheads. I don’t see that being true here–people here who do tech stuff are paid like normal people so they aren’t arrogant fucks. Well, there are arrogant people here. It’s just different. The social culture is so different I really don’t understand what is going on most of the time.

I want to follow Scottish people around and see what their lives look like from the inside because I have no feckin clue.

Today is a climbing day. That will be good. We can all use the exercise. The future is coming whether we want it to or not. We have to be ready.

I want to stay in Inverness. I am scared here, but I am not as scared as I would be in the US. Scale is a very important thing. I am grateful to be in a place with gun control laws. It’s not that there are no guns. There are guns. People shoot. I know people who own and sell guns. But they are sane. They are tracked. If they engage in any antisocial behaviour they entirely lose the right to own the guns. People who have gun licenses are tracked by their car license plate and they are stopped randomly sometimes to make sure they are following every rule to the letter. If they aren’t, bam there goes their gun license. You have to be a model citizen to have the right to own a gun.

I can live with this.

I am afraid of violence because my life has been violent. I have to admit that the amount of violence I’ve experienced here has not been nearly so bad as what happened in the States. Life is not perfect anywhere. I pick this. I pick here.

My bloodline ran West until they reached the far side of the North American continent. They started in the original colonies. 3/4 of my grandparents have ancestry that arrived in first 20 years of North American settlement by British Isles folk. My people were then in California for a while. Not the 8 generations my mother claimed. We were not people who settled and put down roots very well. The way my people jumped then jumped then jumped again speaks to them not thriving in the places they picked. I have to wonder about that.

I want to thrive. I don’t want to barely survive. I am going to struggle with my guilt around that. I definitely have a piece of me that is struggling with how disloyal I will feel as I take step towards embracing being alive. He needs me to go on for the kids. I can’t do that if I feel I must demonstrate frozen horror out of loyalty.

People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime and you don’t know which until you die. What fucking bitter words those are now. I wanted him for my whole life. We don’t get to choose. Life decides for us. I loved Noah. I will always love Noah. I owe him continuing. I have children to lead. I can’t do that if I am wallowing in my pain. I have to stuff that pain into a backpack I carry around with me. I can let it out in brief moments to gasp and sob and curl around the core of myself. Then I’ll nod and put it back in the pack and I’ll keep fucking moving. I don’t really have a choice. I have less choice now than ever before.

My survival has gone from “optimal” to “mandatory”. Now Mama wants to talk. That’s nice.

What is the point?

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I’ve been awake for a few hours. I’ve folded laundry, another load is almost done. Did dishes. Tidied up the school supply area. I’m having a hard time. It all feels so silly and stupid. What is the point of my life now? I keep the set tidy so my kids and I can be ghosts moving around on it? I have no future plans beyond “I’m not allowed to die.” I don’t hope for anything.

It’s weird when people tell me that I could have a chapter two relationship. As if Noah wasn’t chapter three of my life.

The only thing that feels vaguely like hope this morning is wanting to grow more of my food. I want to need less from outside my property. I think I have enough clothing and material that if I get into the kinds of sewing that visually interest me I may never need to buy clothes again. Lots of thread and needles though.

I really wonder if I will ever paint again. Will I finish the house? I’m not sure. I’m still feeling paranoid about being kicked out of the country. Why try harder to create something that won’t be permitted to last? Other people would move into my house and paint everything white again like I was never here.

Last night a buddy observed that she has come to believe that I have actually been cursed. It has felt true my whole life. I feel really bad about having three kids right now but I would be dead if I didn’t have them. Noah wasn’t enough. Now I find out that the kids are enough to keep me working, but my heart is dead. I know I do love them somewhere buried under the numb but I have no idea when I will feel it again. I don’t feel love right now. I feel despair and emptiness and agony. I have been in pain my whole life and it’s just getting worse not better. I thought it was getting better. Then I lost Noah. It turns out Noah was the better I’m going to have in this life.

I should be fair: I’m financially secure. He gave me that. I have three wonderful children to take care of but I’m not doing great at that. We are all safe. We are eating. We are exercising. I’m not a lot of fun though. I am absolutely sobbing through a lot of the day.

The escapism I found when I was young to avoid feeling pain like this was to go find a rando for sex. It mostly worked and wasn’t any more dangerous than my dating life. It’s not an option now. I don’t trust anyone and my body is fragile and I can’t expose my kids to risk.

Noah and I have only gone this long without sex three times: the births of our children. Physically this feels awful. It’s like if someone was used to getting up and running 5 miles in 45 minutes every day and then they manage to pull a hip fracture and they cannot even walk. I feel muscles in my body atrophying. It took years of work with a pelvic floor physical therapist to deal with my vaginismus. Right this minute I am afraid that it is going to be a massive problem again and I live at the ass end of nowhere and I won’t get support for this problem.

All of the things I once aspired to do are ash in my mouth. I am so afraid that I will never actually feel loved again. I’m afraid of what this is going to do to me. I feel like I am afraid of everything.

I just need one

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There is no doubt in my mind that if I didn’t have kids I would die today. I am so completely not interested in a future without Noah. I can’t even get my head around it. No. I don’t want it.

My kids keep telling me how much they love me. Then I think of my mother, sitting alone because all of her children hate her and have left her. I don’t feel like I deserve better. I haven’t done what she did, I did other things. I don’t feel better than her.

I feel like it is time to clear everything out of the house and spend the rest of my life wandering with a home. I don’t belong here. I don’t belong anywhere. I feel like my presence on this earth is a curse. I feel like I have been cursed. I will bring pain with me everywhere I go and I can’t stop it.

I don’t have hope for a better future. I have exhaustion and weariness and the desire to stop. Stop moving, stop breathing, stop fighting.

Instead of hope what I have is duty. I brought these people into the world. I won’t leave them. I won’t stay because there are three. I will stay as long as there is one. I just need one. I signed the contract on the debt of care I own them. I will honour it. I don’t need to feel good or happy or hope or love.

I just need duty.

I started doing this so long ago

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I’m sitting here making spreadsheets. I vastly prefer making my own in a bullet journal to typing all of it. I like having the scratch work spread around like a web of supporting numbers. It eases my thinking process.

I want to figure out how I can financially manage to stay in this house for the sake of the kids. This is the last home they shared with their father. I need to plan around this being our home. They want me to. I want to. I want us to be secure in this home base. I want that to be Plan A. I think I can do it.

I will never have tech bro money again so I need to make conservative choices. I need to cobble a little here and a little there and cut a lot there. The next three years will be the hardest as I pay off the mortgage. After that I think I can manage ok.

I remember doing this when I was very young, definitely by the time I was 12 though I’m not sure how long before that I started. I would sneak into my mother’s files and I would find the copy of the paperwork for my dog bite settlement. What am I guaranteed to get? How can I make it work on that amount of money? How can I make it to the future I want to have with only these resources? Of course I haven’t followed the plans I made when I was that young. How could I have dreamed how much larger my life would end up? I couldn’t. This is still just a starting point. My life won’t be as rigid as this table indicates.

If the US government doesn’t fall, if Social Security keeps paying out to dependents, I think I see a path forward that won’t be particularly painful but also won’t be lavish and what we have come to expect. Travel is not going to be a part of my life for the rest of the time I have young children. I won’t have extra money. I’m going to be house poor because keeping this thing in good nick is expensive. I will have to ask my inlaws for help, but not nearly as much as I feared when the thought first occurred to me. I’m basically asking them for child support until the kids are grown and then I will figure it out.

It will be around when I turn 55. That will be a whole new chapter of my life. I will shift my income sources entirely that year. I have a plan. Until then I think I can ignore all the investment stuff and let it grow. So far I have exceeded my plans, in most ways, by a great margin. At least financially.

There are so many pieces of this that are out of my hands. I am scared of the future that I don’t control. I know so little about what is coming.

I was trying to write emails to my inlaws and I was crying. Then my sweetie came over and cuddled me and sang to me.

“You don’t need to cry, you are with your family. You don’t need to cry. Cause you’re with your family and that’s never a case to cry. Don’t cry, no matter what struck you. Cause you’re always with your family. Cause you’re always with your friends. Oooooooooh ooooooooh oooooooh.” It repeated a bit more in places, but this is what Shortie sang me this morning.

I know that I am sad and that I will walk in a stilted way for the rest of my life. But she is right that I can’t spend all my time crying. I have to smile because I am with my family and they need to see that being near them makes me smile. They have to see that. They need it. They need to believe that they have that power. Even if I am lying to them. Other people won’t be. Down the line having these kinds of co-regulating and connecting skills will make a big difference for their adult lives. It isn’t their fault that I am so broken.

They are the glue that has put the shards of me back together. Noah may have done a lot of the work of helping me assemble pieces and organise the mosaic but the kids were the glue.

I have a different feeling in my chest. It’s been there for a few days. I usually feel like I have pop rocks in my chest. My anxiety is a vinegar/baking soda volcano that never ceases. Now it is different. It is a steady and insistent pulling. I must go forward. I must continue. I do not look for happiness or to be loved, I am loved. That’s sorted. Move forward. I have people to care for. I don’t feel capable of providing that care–I feel half dead. I feel like I cannot think or act at all but I look at my crossed off to do list and think that I’ve actually gotten a fair bit done. A lot more will happen in this new month.

I did not finish the paperwork. Fuck. I tried. A lot of this takes a ton of time for each turn around. Some of these emails say they will get back to me in 10-15 business days. That’s quite a lag. I did my end about as fast as I could. Now I wait. I still have some stuff to do. I also have a birthday party to get ready for. A little girl is turning 7 and that doesn’t happen every day. She needs to know she is special and loved. A lot of the paperwork will be put to the side for about a week around her birthday. She will be the whole focus.

Today is Imbolc. I want to start seeds. I have assembled all the materials. I just need to bring it inside and do it. These are hot-needing seeds. Some will hide in my dark, warm boiler room. Or the bathroom with the always-on radiator.

It’s hard to commit to the work of starting seeds right now. It sounds way too much like hope and it’s not that I have hope. It’s that I would seriously like to A) stop filling the bird feeders because avian flu is such a bad thing right now and B) have enough flowers and other edibles that I’m taking care of the local wildlife anyway C) start supplementing our diet more seriously with stuff we grow. I think it’s going to matter. I think the US going haywire and the UK leaning towards nationalist grossness means food chain stuff will be impacted.

I’m scared in so many ways on so many levels.

I’m also doing a lot of stretching. My body is unhappy about the change in activity levels. I miss running with Noah. I miss going to yoga with Noah. I miss going on bike rides with Noah. I miss everything. I miss him showing up to join me at 9:30 as a reminder to be ready for bed by 10. I loved the smile he had every night. He was excited to see me. He was delighted. It was the highlight of his day. The kids were in bed and I was all his for a while.

I miss being someone’s favourite part of the day every single day.

I want to feel alive. Instead I am frozen into inaction. I feel like I have nowhere to go and nowhere to grow. I know that is a feeling and not a fact. Someday I will grow again but it won’t be like it was. It will never be like it was. I will never have Noah pushing me, driving me, caring for me, encouraging me, supporting me. He was the scaffolding around me that allowed me to be fixed safely.

Noah gave me the only safety I ever had. The only stability. The only consistency. Now I have to be the only source of that for the kids. It scares me so much I feel like I can’t breathe. It’s funny. I was running one of my freak out worries past EC and he said “The last problem we will ever have is making friends. We show up and work. We listen to people. We show up and give support when people need help. We will be fine in this life.”

I like the self identity my kids have.

I need to stop running my worries past him. This is not cool.

There are a lot that I don’t want to write on the internet. And now it is time to sleep.

Patterns and cycles

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Folks keep asking how the kids are doing.

Shorty asked me if something was wrong with her because she isn’t as sad as the rest of us. I said, of course not, she is simply young enough that “forever” doesn’t mean anything to her yet. She hasn’t yet understood in her body what this loss means, but eventually she will and she will have waves of sadness for her whole life. It doesn’t mean anything about her that she is not fully understanding that when she’s about to turn 7. Her brain can’t see that far yet and it’s not supposed to. This is normal. Mostly she is being extra cuddly and loving with everyone. Frankly, it looks a little bit like fawning behaviour to me. She had a tremendous loss and now she’s trying to lock down/ensure that she doesn’t have anyone else leave her life.

Luckily she’s my daughter through and through so I’m not worried about the fawning stuff becoming her whole life approach. She is absolutely still as prickly as a cactus, as she should be.

Middle Child is quiet and withdrawn a bit more than usual. I’m trying to have cuddle time with them, but they are having a hard time with physical contact. They want it enough to grab and demand it from people who are resisting but they also can’t handle being touched a lot of the time. Again, it’s fascinating watching pieces of my behaviour set pop up in the kids. MC is the least verbal of my kids (hilariously still far above average) and the most introverted. We are crying together and talking a lot and sometimes we can get the oxytocin flowing enough to feel a little bit better together.

Eldest Child is, as usual, waffling between trying to over-function and feeling like absolute crap. So far his health issues track the most like mine. Like, I get why the NHS has trouble with someone like me who shows up late in life with a lot of medical trauma and little written record. It’s interesting watching them react in real time to his symptoms. His body acts like mine did at his age. Only I ate less nutritious food so most of my symptoms were worse. He’s wearing a heart rate monitor because the doctors are noticing how dramatic his symptoms are.

Oh, this is what happens when you go through life at a normal pace getting observed as things develop. It is different.

EC is trying to step up more than usual and I keep telling him to knock it off. He is a kid who needs to be taken care of for a while because he goes through the worst trauma of his life. I am deeply aware that, of my children, he is the one who idolises me the most and who *wants* to emulate me the most. So I am being careful to model rest. I am being careful to model that I don’t have to be perfectly strong in every moment to be strong enough overall.

He’s just barely starting to draw again, I’m glad he is finding his way back to the things that are his comfort. It’s been hard watching him for most of the last month as he sat in a daze unable to focus.

We are all manifesting physical symptoms of grief (and we caught a bug) and we are all off our feed. We are all working hard on trying to reduce our quantities when we cook. Noah ate almost as much as the rest of us put together sometimes. He had an enormous appetite. It’s a miracle he didn’t weigh 400lbs. He did a lot more exercise than was probably obvious (because I forced him to) and his brain really did burn through calories at an accelerated rate.

MC and I have dropped weight. I weigh less than I did when I graduated from high school. Good thing I wasn’t skinny then. I’m continuing to watch my body hollow out as I add in more exercise without eating as much as usual. I’m eating all I can. I can usually manage two small meals. My apron is receding. (That awesome flap of belly skin that you have left after losing a lot of weight.) It feels like my body is erasing the evidence of carrying Noah’s babies and that feels really weird and hard. I think I have genuinely stayed a lot fatter over the last 18 years because my body knew Noah wanted me to. He liked how I looked. Now it’s like I don’t need it anymore.

I had two really helpful calls yesterday, one with my Scottish solicitor and I figured out how I can get almost all the rest of the fussy UK paperwork off of my plate. It leaves me with only the disability paperwork and that’s quite enough, thanks. The second was with my brother in law. That call warmed my heart in so many ways.

First, it was really lovely just to get to look at the shape of his face. He looks like Noah and that made me less sad. He was warm and gentle and humorous with the sad. It was a balm to speak with him and share thoughts and feelings. I think we will talk again.

I really am grateful that I have gotten to be part of the Gibbs family. It hasn’t always been an easy connection–we didn’t all get along right away. We have found ways to relate and respect and speak with each other. I get the very strong impression that all of us have put a fair bit of effort into trying to be understanding and kind. I think the proof is in the pudding. They are not abandoning me without Noah being around.

Here’s a “funny” story. When I first met Noah, before I had told him much about my life, he told me that he came from an extremely abusive background. I asked questions like: was he hit often? Called names? Sexually assaulted? Were his parents drug addicts or alcoholics? Were the police frequently involved? The answer to every question was no. I scratched my head and asked him to give examples.

He lived with traumatised people. That’s an ACE point. (www.acestoohigh.com)

I have often mused that Noah did the best he could to marry the woman who most reminded him of his mother. I can see the reasons behind why my mother and his mother had the struggles they had as parents. I read a lot of books and did decades of therapy to get to where I am now. Those women did not have the benefit of such resources.

I continue to be staggered by my growing awareness of what a privilege it was to be a highly traumatised child/young person in California in the 1990’s-2010’s. I did not understand how special that experience was. I did not know how lucky I was. I would have died anywhere else because they would have said I didn’t deserve as much help as I needed. California said, “Ok kid if you need an ocean of support, here’s your wave.”

California paid a lot of money for my brain. Holy fucking shit do I have a lot of compassion for my mother and my mother in law for what they went through and the complete lack of support they received when they were young.

It was nice talking to Noah more over the years about his family history. It was *amazing* that we got to visit his grandmother near the end of her life so I could ask her for lots of stories about her life. My children and I listened. This is their history. This is how their family grew. My grandmother in law was a hard woman. She was a survivor to the bone and she was not gentle about how she did that.

My kids have been talking a lot about what they are carrying forward from the people they have lost. Admittedly, they did not have as close of a relationship with their uncle as we all would have liked so that loss is more abstract for them. I can see my children specifically creating their own place in the stories from their families.

We are survivors. We get through very difficult things even if our bodies are crumbling and in terrible pain while we do them. We are people who reach for healing even when it feels hard because we have seen the results of what happens when people do not. We know in our bones the ruptures and losses that divide us from feeling loved.

I was really glad that I got to visit my grandmother in law at the end and ask her to tell me about the pain from her childhood. I understand why she was so hard. I understand how hard she felt compelled to run to get away from the people who had hurt her so much. I understand why she isolated herself from adult support then demanded it from her children, often so she could go help other people’s children.

I think of my grandmother bringing in foster children and neglecting my mother because my mother’s needs weren’t as important as the needs of those other children who had suffered more. I think of my own experience moving 50 times as a child through more than 30 foster homes.

How are my children doing? Shockingly well all things considered. I am grateful that the requirement for school no longer exists. I don’t have to force them to conform to a huge number of demands. We get to calm the fuck down and be slow and easy for months. Enough exercise to keep our bodies from degrading. Enough outside time and social contact so we don’t get super depressed. A lot of rest time.

My kids like to grin and say that if you measure by how things are going from generation to generation they might not even mess their kids up at all because I’ve only done a tiny bit of damage. This amuses me. I don’t think they should be evaluating how much damage I’ve caused yet. Time will tell. They are still in it with no perspective.

Having a parent who has mental illness is an ACE point. I knew it going in. I knew it deep in my bones. I knew that my tendency towards erratic behaviour was the single most dangerous trait I bring to the table as a parent. Noah became my stability and the person who told me no for a lot of my harebrained idiocy. He kept me from over-working myself to the point of being a bitch. He didn’t want me turning into his grandmother.

How are my kids doing? They are living with the realities of their brains and bodies and what that means for absorbing trauma.

My kids keep saying things like, “He always did seem too good to be real.” But he was, he was real. I wish so many things. I wish he had been able to reclaim the part of his soul he killed off in boyhood. I wish he had been able to see his family the way I did but that’s not fair. Of course he can’t have my perspective, he didn’t have my life.

His family look like people to me. People are annoying sometimes. Meh, but they are trying hard to be good and as the years pass everyone has grown as people and they are more kind. It is hard sometimes that everyone has their own “What I got was too much” metric. This is why folks hate the Oppression Olympics. No one else wants to be held to my perspective. They need to have their own.

It continues to bear down on me like a heavy weight that I cannot turn to my mother ever again in this life. She really did cross the too much line. It’s not all her fault and that sucks but she never stopped doing things that were really damaging. My in-laws have. It has been weird navigating that with Noah.

I loved talking to my brother in law because he reminds me so much of Noah. I loved his laugh and the way he described things. He’s a really great story teller. It runs in their family. So many good things run in their family. I don’t fully understand why Noah had the feelings he did. I genuinely don’t. I wasn’t there when he was small. I don’t understand his story.

Living the way we do all together like a pile of sleepy dogs I am deeply aware of how much Noah and my kids do not have my understanding of how life works. When I feel annoyed for a bit for feeling taken for granted I try to have a giggle. I created this sense of entitlement. That’s kinda awesome.

Look at how far our families have come. We made children who have echoes of trauma but until now, not a lot of their own. They feel allowed to stumble through life until they fully come back to life. We are being fairly gentle with each other. I’m not being perfect. It was noted that I have regressed. It’s true. Part of that is I am back to the full time body load of parenting I had back when this behaviour was previously observed. For most of the time since then Noah has been a more active parent.

I am doing my utmost to try to surrender to the understanding that I am practically back on baby duty because that amount of co-regulation and oxytocin building is most of why Shorty is doing as well as she is. Her bucket is being filled constantly. It’s hard on my nervous system though. I need the exercise. I don’t really know how to regulate off the kids. I have never allowed myself to. I have always done that from Noah. This is so hard.

I have millions of words in my head but if Noah can’t read them, what is even the point? I wrote before I met Noah. I wrote from when I was small. Hell, I went to graduate school for writing before I met him. I am not a writer because Noah declared me to be one.

I do believe that I have only created the art I have created because Noah encouraged and coaxed me into doing it. I never felt justified in doing it for myself. I learned how to do it because I was bored at home with the kids. They watched me go through trial and error and adapting and having to start again. They watched my mistakes and watched me shrug and say “Such is life” and move on.

That feels almost how they are trying to handle this death. Of course this terrible thing happened. Life is full of wonder and beauty and death and suffering. The good is so good partly because of the contrast with how painful life is. I keep telling myself that it is ok that I don’t have hope yet. I have duty. Duty will keep me moving forward. I will have hope again. It’s not fair to pretend or to act like I feel something I don’t. That would fuck up my kids. There are layers to it, but I need to be some level of open. They need to see it for them to feel permission to have the same openness. It’s not always my turn to be open; I STFU and listen quite a lot. That’s, in fact, most of the relationship.

I am very clear that I am here to be the witness to their lives, they are not here to be bit players in my drama. I got to witness the last almost 21 years of Noah’s life. I am really sad I didn’t get more time. I’m glad I was there in the ways that Noah wanted me to be even though it soured my early relationship with my in-laws. I set some harsh boundaries early on because he asked me to. He wanted them set but he didn’t feel capable of doing it himself.

It was really nice hearing my brother in law talk about how for the last 15 years his relationship with Noah has been good in ways it hadn’t been before. Both sides grew up. Both sides made their peace with the hand they were dealt in life in different ways but they appreciated their similarities and common traits. I think things would have continued to improve. Noah really was finding his way to deal with his inner alienation.

I did something I shouldn’t have done. Noah always told me that something was only a sin if you weren’t willing to admit it. I went and read one of Noah’s chat logs with one of his friends. I knew this was the person he had most leaned on for his side support for marriage challenges. That was an experience. I’ve also gone through years of daily reports of what he did to be a good or shitty person that day. Should I have done this? This is like collecting the letters of the dead for study.

All of his criticisms and complaints were fair and valid. I have no rancor for the way his friend was defensive of him. It’s lovely to see. I’m glad he had a #TeamKrissyShouldBeNicerToYou. That’s excellent. I agree. I should have been. I was as nice as I could be as much as I could be and I know that is never really enough. Not when you are walking around with the kind of attachment trauma Noah had. Eventually I believe I will forgive myself for not being able to subsume into him enough to fully fill that ache he had.

I think he would have talked to people less and he would have grown less if I had tried harder. Would that have actually been better? I’m really glad other people got to benefit from him existing. I’m glad I wasn’t selfish and small about him. I’m glad that I pushed him so hard to fully execute his plans. Don’t start shit and quit. He really loved being held to account.

As much as he parented me I parented him. It was a really interesting dynamic. We talked about a lot of the specific ways we needed this support form each other. It was conscious, deliberate, and highly considered.

When I was younger I did a lot to seek out people who would play parental roles in my life. I needed a lot of guidance and mentorship. It is fascinating feeling in my body that I am not open to such a thing again. It is the same thing as when I had my third child I had this huge no fucking way am I going through that shit again. My first labour was 49 hours. My second was 9 days and I had a hemorrhage and nearly died. Neither of those made me feel done. I still felt called to have another child.

Humans are narrative seeking creatures. The timing and placement of our third child was a truly magnificent layered cluster of “it was foretold”.

For many years I patterned off my oldest child; as he went through ages I would have flashbacks and abreactions and struggle with the difference between what he experienced and what I experienced. It was viscerally difficult on a daily basis. My oldest is almost as old as I was when my father died.

I can’t pattern off of him anymore. He’s going in directions I never did and I can’t follow or lead. Middle child I also can’t pattern after because they are at that stage where they must push me away with both arms. It’s developmental. So here I am going through trauma mostly focusing on my youngest.

Her story is not like mine, but she is going to have a hole in her life. My job is to model how to fill that hole without being compulsive, self-destructive, or desperate. My job is also to keep the lessons from her father active in our life. His influence really will live on. We all want very much to honour him.

I truly never expected to spend a lot of my life valorizing a dead father. That was not on my FML BINGO card. He’s really worth it though. Time to catch my second wave of sleep.

I don’t understand how I keep finding out I’m optimistic

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I thought I could get the paperwork done this week on my end. Cue hysterical laughter track. It’s going to take a lot longer and be a lot more complicated. I feel really overwhelmed and scared and like I don’t know how I am going to get through this. Noah dying is going to be more expensive than I thought. We weren’t as close to set up as we thought. This is going to suck.

It will end. But it won’t be done in January. I will hope for February seeing the completion, because goodness this is painful and awful to do. Also: most bank accounts are frozen and that scares me. It won’t stay true forever. It’s normal. I have run money for a while. It’s just terrifying because it’s one more thing that feels out of my control.

Gosh if that isn’t thew whole theme of my life recently: I’m not in control.

I’m really struggling.

I feel like I reach for him dozens of times a day to remember over and over again that I never get to feel good like that again. I am not destined to be loved all of my days. I’m not good enough.

Well, that’s not fair. My kids are definitely going to love me for the rest of my life, as are my friends. My friendships have a habit of being tumultuous. Noah was my rock, my stability, my emotional security relationship. I don’t expect to ever trust anyone enough to have a secure attachment again. I need to go through my life with the clear and present knowledge that I am not allowed to need someone to be ok. Never again because they all go. I will always be left. Or I will leave, cause hey my mom is alive.

People keep asking if my family is coming to help. My friends are the closest thing I have to family. Friends who I, mostly, don’t talk to all that often because our lives are very separate. I grew away from everyone. I did what Noah wanted. I tried to learn how to only cling to him. I’m having a lot of mixed feelings about every choice I’ve made over the past 20 years. I wish I had picked Noah every time. I wish I had learned to cling more tightly earlier so he wouldn’t have had to spend so many years feeling insecure and sad.

I don’t know how to embrace my future. Luckily I have a good 11 years before I need to think about it.

I don’t like me that much

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I’ve been a serious asshole to one particular person since Noah died. This is a woman I have had a contentious relationship with for going on 22 years. Us interacting like oil and water isn’t new but I am less restrained this time than I ever have been in the past. In the past I always knew that my Bestie and my husband carried a torch of affection for this woman and that stilled the worst of my tongue.

Not carrying grudges and being willing to forgive people is a really strong cornerstone of my sense of self identity. Savagely reading this woman for filth across several different platforms is not a thing that a nice person would do. I am not always a nice person. Especially when a particular person keeps trying me decade after decade.

I feel bad that I went off publicly but I also don’t. The person I used to vent my spleen to so that I could be civilised is gone and she fucking tried me 3 days after he died. I get my ass handed to me on the regular. When I fuck around I find out. Other people get to sometimes as well.

I don’t owe everyone nice every day no matter how hard they poke me with sticks.

I think I actually got “Be nice as long as you can and then be effective” from Noah. It’s fine for me to want to be nice. It’s great if I can get things to work out that way. Yay! Everyone wins!

I work hard to not be a raging cunt. I really do. I walk away from most fights, hell I run. Sometimes I am a bit of a cunt.

Noah and I spent a lot of time talking over the years about whether or not I should have backed out to give more space for other people, particularly some of the women who are whining about how I stole him. One of those conversations in particular, not that long ago, involved him curling his body around mine and sobbing about how desolate he would feel to lose time with me for other people. He would feel empty and sad and lost.

When I think about the ways our varying attachment traumas wrapped around one another, I know what he meant. I am going to feel that overwhelming sucking black hole for the rest of my life. I am going to spend time with other people and I am going to smile politely and accept the scraps that they have to share. I am always going to know what it means to be filled with an absolute tsunami of want and need and love and understanding. Only now the tide had receded and will never come again.

It’s really weird. I am around the age I should have been when my father died, if my life had anything like a natural course. Instead he died when I was 17. Noah and I had a weird co-raising-each-other relationship for 18 years. He raised me, I guess. I feel cursed.

I feel horribly sad about the future I am going to have. I am going to be a horrible person for all time because I am going to compare and that’s not fair. Noah was not an average person and I have no right in any way to think about him when I am dealing with anyone else on any level. It is unkind for all involved. I feel really bad that I am like this. I will always understand the magnitude of what I lost. Noah was special.

Noah gave me unconditional love. He is the only person who has ever done so. In a much more limited fashion, he gave that feeling to other people too. He was bizarrely messianic. He made people feel loved and important and the person he wanted to spend all of his time feeling loved by was me.

I feel incredibly ashamed of having ever done anything other than adore him. I feel like I displayed a shameful amount of self absorption. I feel sad. I don’t even actually feel a massive amount of self loathing. I feel like I should, but I don’t. I’m tired.

I’m sad. I have to keep walking and it doesn’t matter if I am good or if I made the right decisions or if I would do it all again the same way. I have to keep moving. I don’t have to like it.

I do have to not loathe myself. I have to act like Noah picked a good person to marry and to be the mother of his children. I need to be the person I want my kids to grow up with. That’s a complicated thing.

I knew who that was when I had Noah. What do I do now? Pam is leaving soon, as she should because she needs to get on with her life. More people are coming, but they won’t have the answers either. No one does. This is a riddle I have to solve all by myself. Who am I going to grow up to be? I don’t know yet. I never wanted to meet myself post-Noah. Definitely not at 43. Oh it sucks so hard. I feel some fucking self pity right now and I think it is ok that I do.

Happily Ever After is over and I’m left as a shitty, petty, stupid bitch who is still slap fighting with someone from over 20 years ago. I fucking suck.

So I blocked her. I never block people. It’s a policy. This time I broke it. I genuinely want her to go have a good life. Away from me and I’ll never look again. I need to move forward.

I need to stop having my nose rubbed in how much I never deserved him in the first place. It doesn’t matter at all if I deserved him. He wanted me. I wanted him. I kept him until his body gave out. I gave everything I could.

This hurts in waves of nausea and warmth and cold and rage and emptiness and gasping sobs. It doesn’t hurt in the way that never knowing what being loved hurts though. There are rests between the waves where I remember what it was like to be loved like that. Times when I remember that even if my whole life is in the rear view, I was loved. I was absolutely loved and adored and someone’s best girl.

There is the very real chance that I am going to spend most of the rest of my life alone once my kids are adults. I can’t imagine I will get easier to put up with. I will have friends, but my life is going to be small. I will always be conscious of the mask I have to wear.

I will never be known like that again. I will have a future, possibly, with someone. What I will never really share is my past. It is over. My past is a closed book. Sure, some people might visit once in a while to remind me that once upon a time I earned their love.

It’s different though. We have grown in different directions. We shared only bits in the past.

I’m really sad. I liked being loved the way that Noah loved me. It is very hard knowing that I will spend the rest of my life feeling sad and missing him. He was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Good thing he gave me the second and third and fourth best things to happen to me.

I didn’t get everything for the whole of my life. I haven’t had a lot of good years. Most of the good ones were with Noah. I am glad I got to see what a happy family looks like. I get to carry on creating one even though I don’t feel very happy.

I will again someday. It will always have this shadow though. I wish Noah was holding me. I want Noah. I want Noah and it is hard to want anything else when I can never have him again.

I don’t know where this will go

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I don’t know how to get started today. I don’t have a plan or a bunch of sentences I have been rehearsing in my head so I don’t forget them. I’m just sitting here listening to Taylor Swift sing about how she’s alone and always has been. Something bloomed from writing in her room.

I feel almost like I conjured Noah from thin air. I wrote about someone like him. He transformed himself over and over for me over the years. He would accept any feedback seriously and try to become what I needed. He was a fucking unicorn, who happened to be obsessed with The Last Unicorn. Oh gosh I am becoming more like Molly Grue. Noah loved her so deeply. He didn’t cry over much, but sometimes this book could make him cry.

Mostly the only times I saw Noah cry were when he was showing me how afraid he was of losing me. The first time I did not treat it as the gift it was. I was younger and stupid and cruel. I didn’t know what I was seeing. It took a while. When it happened again I was not cruel. I held my love and told him that the idea of losing him hurt me just as much. I didn’t want to lose him.

Oh. I just found the scream. I guess I needed to go to the studio. That’s fantastic to know. That was such a big scream it necessitated a bathroom break. That’s some good screaming. But I’m not coming back in the same headspace.

I still have the same Taylor Swift song because I like a focus I can bounce off of. I have felt alone for most of my life. I also know I was passed hand to hand by people who loved me. Many of them gave me poison with the love but the love was there.

I’ve been reading “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents”. I feel like I’ve got my shit shockingly together by the metrics of this book–yeah I see my failure modes. I see my parents. I see Noah’s pattern with his patterns. I’m having interesting conversations with his mom about his dad.

Noah had a very different impression of his father than everyone else. He left at 17 and it took years before he understood on return visits that he simply knew a lot more. He imprinted on the child view “My parent is Godlike” and it was a very hard fall for him.

I see it coming with my son. I’ve been warning him for years that it is coming and he shouldn’t get upset when it comes to pass. It’s natural. It’s inevitable and I feel fucking proud that he is going to pass me. I don’t want to slow him down in any way. Out fucking run me, kid. Go. Go. Go.

I don’t think I’ve been as alone as I thought. I have this amazing web of people in my life. I wasn’t always alone. I wasn’t always getting the intensity of connection I needed in order to feel fully accepted but exactly one person has sustained that at great cost. I need to accept the lesser kinds of love and just be grateful for what I get. Noah treated me like a priceless work of art.

The trouble is, I mostly wanted to be that because he was looking at me and I didn’t want to shame him. I didn’t want to bring him down to my level. I tried as hard as I could to climb up to him.

I don’t know if I will ever give a flying fuck what anyone thinks of me ever again. I will put on the correct uniform for the kind of role I have to play to get whatever I need done. Then I will come home and take it off.

I wonder how small of a fraction of me people will see going forward. Without Noah, most of me is useless, extraneous, and a waste of energy and resources.

My old lawyer (who did not and can not give me legal advice due to retirement) told me that I need to learn how to love myself enough to make up for him. She said that was the most important thing she learned after a painful separation. Her situation is quite different but the thinking is sound.

I am not on my own. Not only do I have one semi-dependent/semi-independent kid, I have two fully dependent kids. I have access to family resources that will guarantee my security. I won’t be lavishly wealthy but I will be safe, forever.

I’m not on my own. I pick people up as I go through life. I integrate them into the patterns I build of lives and experiences and time spent. I don’t, in general, tend to spend most of my time alone. I have created a life where that has to be stolen from the wee hours of the morning while other people sleep. When I’m really depressed I withdraw a lot. That’s getting ever less acceptable without major supports in place.

I am going to say yes to the people who are offering help. I am going to believe people when they make an offer. I am not in a position where people do it because they have to. They want to.

I have to say yes even though that is scary. Even though not everyone will turn out to be nice. Even though sometimes I will be disappointed. I have to accept that it’s ok for me to have needs right now. I’m not doing something wrong.

I’m fitting into society in the only way that is available. I never was going to be normal.

I am feeling enormous gratitude that my children don’t have to go into school. I’ve been very afraid of that. I was going to fake my good cheer and be upbeat about it. I am glad I don’t have to. This will be hard, but hard in a way that will cause us to dig deeper in the specific places we were already sending down roots. This is better for us. We can engage at our own level instead of trying to fit into a mold. We are not plastic. We are bespoke.

The thing that hit me like a freight train last week was, “My baby will not know what it means to grow up free.” Well, bollocks to that. My oldest is free in his soul in a way I have rarely encountered in a human being. He has some dings and scars from his brief time in school but by and large he has already matured enough to understand it for what it was. He is like his dad. He is willing to go sparkle and be fun just by existing and people respond to that. The right people. He’s building his community in his ways and I’m thrilled.

Middle Child has found access to several different community activities that are helping them feel confident and like people really value them being there. That’s fantastic. They have learned ways to manage their selective mutism and flooding when they are out in public in stressful situations. They do need a lot of downtime to recharge: their favourite way is very long walks. I have no complaints. It has been wonderful, and a blessing to watch them grow through some of the roughest patches of their life with a bulwark of overwhelming love and support. They are the kind of kid who wouldn’t feel loved in most families. They are hard in ways that specifically challenge parental authority. I would have been beaten for their behaviour. Wait, I was beaten for behaviour just like theirs. As they are cresting over to 14.5 they are a lot more calm and self aware. They know how to deflect and avoid explosions. They know how to take time to prepare their body for the process of dealing with humans. They have a lot of useful to understand that a sudden feeling of anger might mean that they will need to set a boundary, but they should not attack. They know how to breathe and calm down their bodies.

What the fuck else is the goal?

“Qualifications.”

I think they have the whole rest of their lives to earn qualifications and exactly one easy developmental cycle for learning the skill of being secure. It happens most easily and most successfully in childhood when it should happen. It takes a lot extra for some people to feel secure. If that need is met when they are children then they tend to not still need it as adults. People who are brushed off as children are the ones who spend the rest of their lives trying to find it through romance.

I’m having so many feelings. Probably because I finally hit skip on the playlist. Now other feelings come up. Ha. Oh man, Teenage Dream. That was a big favourite for Noah. He felt like that about me. I felt like that about him. We did run away and only looked back for funeral.

His body changed shape a fair bit last year because I was dragging him to exercise with me more. I freaking loved having so much of his time. He was getting really fit and hot and he was wearing a lot of 501 jeans because they uhh grab my attention. One of the only pinchy things I never object to. I’ll use my teeth if I have to.

There was someone in this world who could not get enough of me. There was no such thing as enough. He never wanted me to go away. He never wanted a bunch of space. Sometimes I needed it for my processing. Other than work he would have preferred to have one body part touching me around the clock. (Usually just a hand or foot.)

He loved me with the same fierce clingy need of my first child and that has struck me over and over and over. He really struggled when I was touched out at first and I couldn’t be a sex machine while dealing with a child who wanted to have their mouth on my nipple 24/7. It was really hard.

Knowing what I know about his mother and her mother and the “wisdom of the age”. I bet Noah screamed as a baby and was left in a cot. I just about lost my mind with how much my kid demanded. I paid the price because Noah and I wanted to make children like us and then love them so much, all around the clock, for the whole of their childhood then maybe they would turn into people who didn’t feel like no one could ever love them?

Instead my older two children grin and say, “I’m a niche interest and I’m good with that.”

My baby is still in the jagged years. She is going to need a lot of very bespoke care and experiences to come through this with her sense of self intact and still full of love. It’s going to be hard, mostly on me because I’m going to have to do a lot of it alone when I was really really burnt out on doing most of it. Do you know what Noah did with a solid 4 hours of every day after he got laid off? He played with Shorty. He went wherever she wanted to go with her. He was at her disposal.

I found him so fucking attractive.

Seeing that put a lot in my metaphoric bucket. I got to spend all day watching the Daddy I never got to have. It feels really unfair that I don’t get to see more of this. I had been starting to join sometimes even though a lot of the games are hard for me right now.

I still can’t believe I beat Noah at chess for the first time ever in the last month of his life. That feels really shitty and weird. I wish he had immediately demanded a rematch and smashed me. He didn’t. He grinned like his kid just one first prize in the contest. He was so proud.

There were ways he was petty. He was occasionally cruel or spiteful. With every year that passed he made sure that he only did things in ways that fit how we wanted our relationship to work. I felt really loved and seen. He wanted to help me cultivate a separate part of ourselves behind closed doors away from all the rest of our life. Most of our life was kin keeping.

I feel conflicted about whether or not I am going to treat Noah’s permanent permission as a permanent green flag to do whatever the fuck I want or if I am going to believe that the last person who had the right to say they wanted me to stay and over ride what I wanted is gone.

I am used to getting all day every day constant verbal affirmations. It’s really kind of ridiculous. That was just how we talked to each other. We were silly and upbeat. It made us happy. It made us feel connected and loved. Noah looked at me with great tenderness most of the time. He really was besotted. It never dimmed. I mean, I spent like 15 hours a week coaching him how to handle shit with his job even though I loathe coding and everything about the tech industry. I was of more merit than a rubber duck. I tracked how long something dragged on and told him when to stop wasting effort on a losing thing. I helped him figure out how to handle sticky conversations. I listened to a lot of his big talks and helped him with pieces of them.

That was how I showed my equal dedication and fervor. I don’t fucking care about coding. I cared about Noah getting to be one of the conductors on the information railroad and I’ll helped him get there. He told me that was what he wanted to do with his work life and he really did it. I am proud of him. I am as proud of him as he was of me.

I wish that we had gotten to have a lot more years of that mutual admiration society. No one gets to choose what they get. They can make choices that make it more likely. But there are always the bit where it is just a roll of the dice. We all die.

Yeah, part of my life did die. I am not Noah’s wife anymore. I am Noah’s widow. Mostly I will just be Krissy. I will just be me as a person alone. I will have people in my life because I am a big believer in community. I will have time to fill. Other people will too.

Noah took up most of my time. He wanted me to be here with him.

I carry that part of me forward. The part that was good enough to make someone like him be that fascinated for that long. I guess maybe I am something special.

He spent his life on adoring me. That’s what he wanted to do. He worked to build a secure future where he could spend decades adoring me in retirement. He had always had several monitors and his screen saver was pictures of me and the kids. We were why he was there and if he needed motivation, there we were anytime he stood still for 90 seconds.

It was weird having people stop in town when they saw us. I didn’t know who they were but they explained that they worked with Noah so of course they recognise me and they want to tell me how amazing it is to work with him. They admire him so much. Gosh, tell him they said hi.

It was a weird moment every time it happened. I moved him away from that.

He wanted this. He wanted me. I’m glad we didn’t wait. I’m grateful that he got us the permanent right to not be in the US. He set us up for being safe, then he burnt out. It is horrifying and grotesque and nauseating. I did not want this, not like this. Noah, you were my #1 priority on my list. I wanted a partner so I could have a co-parent. That was my big fucking thing.

You were always so insecure and it’s so weird. Why did you feel like you were easily replaceable? There is fucking no one else like you. Ok, there’s the deep keening. That’s it. That’s what I don’t let myself do when people are around.

White people don’t do that. So I’m told. And told. And told. If they shamefully do it at all they do it behind closed doors where no one has to hear. Get your shit together and stop acting disorganised.

Noah and I had such a weird cross section of background similarities. I will feel like an alien for the rest of my life. I will always be a weird curiosity that is never to be understood because no one will care enough to remember much. That’s the social contract. People don’t want intensity. They want casual. They want light hearted and entertaining. They want fun, not drama or suffering or grief. Don’t be a downer. Or just stay the fuck home.

I won’t create a new Wonderland here. I think that ability came from Noah. The endless wildfire growth was his special magic power. I have a lot, but I don’t think I can burn it like that anymore. Now I need to settle in and focus on what it will take for me to make my life here work for me. It will not be managed if I stay home alone.

I have always liked the quote “If you need to go fast, go alone; if you need to go far, go together.” I will need a community. I will have to make one. And I won’t have childcare so that’s going to shape a lot of it.

Time to go start the day. Editing is a thing of the past.

One month has passed.

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I feel like so much happened that it has been many months, not one. Maybe even years have passed in the last 31 days with how slowly I felt the movement of time. I am tremendously not ok and I have no anticipation of being so anytime soon. Pam worries a lot about me not feeling hope at this point.

In my relationship with Noah there was a fair bit of insecurity on both sides. We were both worried that the other wouldn’t want to stay with us. We need constant reassurance and it went in both direction. We never relaxed into feeling safe for more than a few minutes at a time. Luckily we loved giving each other that reassurance so we had good days more than not. Noah wanted me to live for him and that’s a complicated thing. There was always this balancing act. I don’t want to die because I don’t want to hurt my kids, but maybe I hurt them more by living. Maybe it would be better if I weren’t here. Noah wanted me to just stay alive for him and I certainly have so far but it was a thing that lived in the back corner of my mind: do I ever get to choose when I stop feeling pain?

Now I don’t. It isn’t a question. I must fight to live for as long as possible.

I wish the price had been smaller.

I cannot ask my children for reassurance that they really love me. It’s not ok. I say that I love them. They say it when they feel so moved. I can’t ask. It’s not ok. I am allowed to say, “May I have a hug?” That’s fine. I can’t ask them to prove to me that I have value. Not ever. That is going to be weird and hard. I am going to have to learn how to carry this giant black hole of pain without having anyone tell me that I’m great all the time. What I got from Noah during our marriage has to be what I get in this life. I can’t look for a replacement.

I am going to be my own source of reassurance and comfort and that sounds really sad and lonely. Literally, I don’t need anyone else’s approval. I am still Noah’s good girl and he gave me a permission slip. I get to be here. He bought me this house, which is not solely legally mine. He gave me three wonderful children who fill me with pride and delight every day. He got me out of the US.

It’s kind of funny. I have always told my kids that I can’t make sure bad things never happen to them, but I can be there with them while they go through it. Noah didn’t ever manage to make it so bad things never happened to me. Last year was pretty rough. I knew he would walk through fire with me if I had to go there. Now I am going to do an awful lot alone.

I am not going to be looking for an intense friendship for years. I’m going to make it clear that my plan is to continue to talk to people in Meat Life as if they didn’t know I was raped and my husband died last year. People in this town don’t owe me shit and messy displays of emotion are not done. I will keep it as low key as I can but holy fucking shit I’m going to cry a lot. I really can’t help it and I also can’t stay home until I get it under control. That would be really bad for me physically. I need to move more than that.

You store grief in your lungs. I do a fair bit of exercise. Yeah, there will be a lot of crying. I cried like a little bitch through most of yoga. He had just started coming with me to classes in November. There are so many layers of upset and shitty here. He was retiring to hang out with me.

I feel so empty. No, I don’t have any personal hope right now. Someday I will have hopes for my children but I don’t know what I will ever hope for again and that needs to be ok.

I am showing up. I am doing my duty. I am serving my indenture. I am talking to the kids about their hopes. I am talking to them about how as painful as this is–it’s an origin story and they have the vast majority of their lives to go make their life into whatever they want. I don’t have the vast majority in front of me. I have less than half of it left, in all likelihood.

One of my buddies shares my alphabet soup of genetic issues and has been sending me research. One of the tiny insignificant pieces of it is that one of the *single best things* for me to eat is: liver. Preferably lamb but beef is acceptable. Chicken isn’t ideal.

Do you want to know one of the only things my mother ever bullied and pressured me into trying? Fucking liver. “It’s good for you, Krissy. It will help you feel better. Yum, yum.”

I feel horrible for how I judge her. She did try and I was a really hard kid. I was super non-compliant and hostile and argumentative and demanding. Just like my kids. She lacked the wherewithal and resources to handle someone as challenging as me. Shit, I can understand that feeling.

I have a Valentine’s Day card in a box somewhere that I bought 18 years ago. It says something about how I turn more into my mother with every year. It’s the sort a daughter is supposed to give. I didn’t remember to give it to my mother before I divorced my family and then shit happened. I think it managed to get mailed across the sea.

I feel very temped to write in it that I have always loved her. Thank you for telling me to eat liver. Turns out you were completely correct.

I wouldn’t put a return address on the envelope or a phone number inside. It’s not an invitation to a relationship.

My grief is and always has been so very complicated. Am I ever just mourning one thing or does it bring the avalanche of mostly unresolved grief crashing down again. It’s never fully gone, it’s just in a box out of sight because it bothers other people. I sort of wonder if some day, after my indenture is over I will spend a whole year wandering around weeping for a full year because I have that many unshed tears hiding in me. I can’t let it out now. It’s not safe for me or fair to the people around me if I lose my shit right now. They need me to cope.

I feel like garbage. I feel wrecked. I feel empty and like I will never be filled again. A whole month without Noah. What a fucking nightmare. I never wanted this. I wanted to serve Noah for all of my days. I wanted more years of taking care of his gross feet. I wanted to chase him up the hill and yell “what?!” because he mumbles all the time. I wanted to properly explore Scotland with him. I wanted to adore him and bask in his brilliance. I wanted to talk him through the best ways to solve different social situations. I loved how much he respected me. I don’t think that is something I will ever feel again.

I am afraid that my ability to be an expert died with him. I required his confidence in me. I think I am going to contract in so many ways. I will never believe in myself the way he believed in me. Yes, I will be more timid.

I am so scared