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This is harder than it used to be.

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

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

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

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

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

What am I having a hard time saying here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why date? Why not just mourn?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I need to make breakfast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It feels respectful to wait.

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

I need to stop looking for bad guys.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe someday.

Finding my way back to me

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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.

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.

Sick and tired and blessed

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I am sick. It came on in the middle of last night. This is my first time being sick without Noah around since 2015 when I was on the road trip. This is awful.

That said, I have a wonderful son who brought me a banana and toast and home made apple sauce for breakfast. He knows what to do when a great many things go sideways in life. He’s had good home training. I feel an outstanding amount of pride in him.

I am starting to move old Facebook posts over here. There’s going to be an incredibly large amount of backdated postings. I am still trying to decide if I want to move writing from the other social media site. I’m still nervous about spooking vanillas.

I am really struggling with feeling like a liar because I am not publicly and boldly admitting everything that I am doing. I am in a different place with different expectations and I am scared of how I should be adapting to this set and setting. I’m scared to not be open. I am scared to be open in the next 10 years.

I am losing my mind in a lot of ways. Life is feeling really hard in ways that make me feel like a pathetic whiner. My life is not as hard as other peoples lives and I feel enormous shame around that.

I talked to the SSA yesterday. As long as the US government holds we will be find for the next 10 years. I don’t know yet how I am going to bridge the gap between my kids aging out of support and reaching full retirement age but that’s a bridge I can burn later.

Yesterday I had dinner with a new friend. They spent a bunch of time telling me how my writing is overwhelming and they think I should find a different hobby for managing my feelings. I am really struggling with that. I don’t talk about my feelings much when I’m in a room with anyone. I know that I am too much. I know that people don’t actually want to hear it. I feel slapped really hard. I feel like I was told I don’t even deserve to talk about my feelings to myself when I’m alone in a room. That hurts really badly.

I am trying to find my way back to writing with more boldness and self assurance. It’s going to be hard. For so long I depended on Noah or the other Archivists wanting to see my writing to justify me doing it. I don’t have that crutch anymore. Now I need to believe it just by myself and I am struggling.

There are a lot of patterns I want to lay out and pick apart. I can’t though. I’m afraid. I’m afraid of judgment. I’m afraid of punishment. I’m afraid of rejection, mostly for my children. It is not my childrens’ fault that I am their mother.

I am struggling really hard with the expectation that I be fun or I shouldn’t exist.

I’m struggling with my identity and getting my needs met. I’m struggling with feeling like people like me really shouldn’t exist at all.

I’m struggling.

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.

Time to start moving forward

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Today I have an appointment with our solicitor. I need to update my will and remove all DNR language. I am no longer allowed to peacefully and easily when something comes for me. I have to fight like hell. I have to manage chronic conditions and I have to fight cancer no matter how much it hurts. I’m sad about this. I wanted my next near death to be my last. Not anymore.

This was not what I wanted. This was not the outcome I wanted. I didn’t want to have to give up on the idea of a peaceful death because Noah is gone. I am going to spend the entire rest of my life stuck because Noah is gone. It makes me feel so bad that I didn’t have this feeling while he was alive to relish it.

I can’t make my kids orphans.

Today I bug the schools to get enrollment going. I will get over to the Whole Foods collective to get stuff we are running low on. Time to catch up on my bullet journal and figure out what the cheese is happening. Not anything good I had planned. Oh well.

Feels like freedom

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When I am out on my bike I always think “I want to go home and write about how good this feels” and then I basically never find the time/space/impetus to follow through. Walking through my front door means my family needs me to transition to their needs basically instantly.

I love being on my bike as my form of transportation. I know that if we had a car the lazy default would be there and I would probably embrace there being less of a process for getting places therefore I am super glad I don’t have a car. I feel strong and free and confident and happy out on my bike. People wave and greet me. I get to be out in all the weather and feel in my body what it means that there is no bad weather only bad clothing. (I would argue that there is no safe way for me to bicycle on ice.) Hail? Meh, ok.

I love my battery assisted bike. Am I cheating? Fuck you with a two by four. Sell your fucking car before you fucking call me a cheater. It makes it possible for me to pull 60-80lbs up a fairly massive hill on a regular basis. It means that I can decide how much strain my legs can handle on a day by day or even minute by minute basis and adjust based on my own feelings of strength or weakness. When I start the day out I rarely use much assist and when I come home tired I can use a lot. It’s great. It doesn’t make me go a lot faster it just makes it a lot easier to go as fast as I want to go. I’m not a fast rider and I don’t try to be.

I think I could get the kids on board with liking bikes more if the pandemic weren’t making life hard. I don’t know that I will ever get Noah to feel ok with riding the bike and I worry a lot about the strife that will cause in the long run. (Not an invitation to debate that here, Noah.)

Things are going okay in general in the house. Two is a rough age. I have cut the oldest kids off from the screen because they were being really unpleasant. You know what happened? They fight less (they do still fight…). They play together more. They are reading more. They are doing more projects. They do more chores. In general I like living with them more. This is complicated. On one hand I feel like they need to learn how to have balance about these sorts of things on their own. On the other hand… they are still children and they need to be parented. I am very clear over and over that the screens are owned by adults and the children are allowed to use them at our discretion. It’s not like their stuff in their room. To me that feels like an important distinction but maybe I’m just being a hypocrite.

Parenting continues to be hard and demanding and draining. I don’t find myself with a lot left to give to any other aspect of myself. And with being in a lot of pain my capacity is seriously diminished right now. Ah well. I stumble through.

Maybe I can sleep now.

Moving on

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It’s time.

I moved to the bay area for the first time when I was 6. I moved in and out over the next ten years. I have lived here consistently since I was 16. Now I’m 36.

We are leaving.

It’s time to taste different air and absorb different sights. It’s time to find out what is next.

I will miss you all. Maybe I will finally be able to write about you when I have the perspective of distance. I hope I will be able to do you justice.

We are opening the house Labor Day weekend for a good bye party . If you are interested in coming, send me a message and I’ll give you my address.

We are going to be permanently gone from the bay area starting in November. Where are we going? We are going to be nomadic for a few years. My partner can work anywhere with an internet connection. We will follow him from conference to conference in various countries all over the world.

Malaysia, Japan, England, possibly Austria, India… we don’t know where all.

We want to try South America: Ecuador, Uruguay.

We want to try Central America: Costa Rica

We will hopefully spend some time in New Zealand and Australia. Definitely Scotland because my long time bestie is there.

I will keep writing and sharing about my life because I do that. If you are curious, just ask for a link.

I hope life treats you kindly and you find joy and happiness. I will miss you. I hope I will get to visit and see you again some day.

We are loosely tied here for a couple more years with medical stuff. But that will mean showing up for a few weeks here and there through the year. If you are interested in knowing when those visits happen, my blog will probably be the most reliable broadcast medium I’ll maintain.

Changing venues

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I am in a place where dealing with a lot of the abuse shit isn’t optional. It’s going to be a while before I am ready for it to be a book but I am feeling increasing urgency in that direction. I am the kind of writer who needs an audience or I don’t write. But I don’t want all the book stuff on livejournal. Mostly because I want to choose what I reveal in it because the audience is different. I’m admitting things in front of people I never would have spoken to about these things now. My lj is a weird space at this point. I know that there aren’t very many readers left but when I friends-lock something here I feel completely comfortable that this is a secure space for me. It’s a different kind of disclosure. I need to have the scary disclosure for a while. I have to say this to people who aren’t obviously safe for me because I have to learn who is actually safe and where there are more safe people.

So I don’t know how much will be new information for people who have been reading this journal for years, but it’s really intense for me. Oh man. www.soggyinmilk.blogspot.com If’n I haven’t pointed you there already.

Not as planned, but good

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Yesterday I thought we had a doctors appointment at 10 and a friend coming over for dinner at 4:30. I felt stressed about finishing all the chores I wanted to get done and I was anxious. But it turns out I wrote the date wrong on the doctors appointment (I looked at the card again and it is really hard to read) and that’s the 7th. And the friend who was coming over to dinner forgot. So I got everything done and had time to write a long blog post and a long email to my lady friend! That was way better than I hoped for.

It also looks like the shed and motorcycle ramp will be leaving my yard this weekend. Woo!

I’ve been snapping at Noah like 345% more than I should. I kind of feel like he is the last man standing in terms of people I can take my foul temper out on. It really isn’t awesome. 🙁 On that note, I’m going to go put pants on and go to the gym. Hopefully I can run out some of this aggression. Wish me luck.

Checking in

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Thank you for the phone calls. I really appreciate my friends. I’m trying to keep a more firm line in how much I talk about my shit with Shanna standing nearby. The last couple of times I have really unloaded about what was in my head repeatedly in a day she woke up with night terrors. Today I had the one outburst at my mom on the phone outside in the yard. Then I had one ~15 crying thing immediately following. Then I was calm the whole rest of the day. And Shanna didn’t have a night terror. That, to me, means I erred on the correct side of freaking out. I did a lot in the midst of my mom actively treating me like shit, but I did it outside and away from the kids. I did a little bit in the house with the kids nearby. Then I stopped. I was probably slower than average for the rest of the day, but I kept it together.

Mostly I did this because my friend, K, was due to come over in the morning anyway because she was coming over to babysit my kids while I went to therapy. Handy. Mostly at Jenny’s suggestion (Ack! Two Jennys! My brain is overloading and I will figure out that situation later.) I asked K to drive me down to therapy and they hung out in the park right across from the office. By the way, I’ve realized I’m going to have to do some work on my feelings around unsolicited advice. If I’m going to really do the blogging thing then I’m going to have to just deal with it. Oh man. That will make me twitchy.

And I’m up in the middle of the night trying to figure out what to think and feel about this latest development. I’m trying to decide how many cycles in my brain it gets to have. It doesn’t get as many as it wants right now. I have already decided I need a break from processing this kind of stuff right now and my mother does not have the right to override my decision making process. She doesn’t get to ruin my life anymore. I am on a semi-manic upswing right now. I am trying like hell to get upward momentum started. I can’t stop to obsess about this. Today I need to just get into my head that my mother is doing this to me because she is acting out the story in her head. She is not interested in doing the hard shitty work to break the cycles she has established. That’s not my problem. I am interested in doing that hard work. I am doing that work. Part of doing that work is stopping and telling the quiet, scared little girl inside me that she can’t actually hurt me anymore. Never again will she be allowed to send us to a monster. Tyra’s childhood was ruined too, but Shanna and Calli are escaping. My brother’s kids are escaping. One of my siblings absolutely continued the cycle but I have hope for Tyra. The way forward can’t be me staying up all night obsessing and it can’t be me feeling distracted and apathetic all day with the kids. That’s not acceptable. My life is good, wonderful, and I have all the possibilities in the world. I am not yet 30 years old. My life isn’t over yet. I get to grow up and be anyone I want to be.

Ok. I think I’m going to follow a few random paths for a while as I try to figure out which direction I want to grow in. But that’s ok. I have time.

Spring

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For the previous three years since Shanna was born I have been feeling increasing levels of desire to have green in my surroundings. I miss the mountains. I miss walking outside on spring mornings and closing my eyes and hearing the mist in the trees. It was wonderful. So now I am settled in a more arid land. Clay soil and suburban lawns as far as the eye can see. Yuck. I’ve been working on amending the soil (big thanks to my cousins last year) and I’m adding plants every year. So far it seems that most plants make it and a few don’t. I always have at least a few that won’t take. I consider this the cost of doing business and move on with my life. 🙂

I need to work on creating more shade in my yard. Right now it is so directly, brutally hot that it isn’t very fun to play out there for a lot of the summer. I want there to be more greenery. I’m working on it. A friend is moving out of state (this is not going to be a net-win for me) which is very sad but she is leaving me with her extensive collection of potted plants. I could not be more thrilled.

One of these years I’ll get my hands on paving stones and I’ll start doing the hardscaping in the front yard. I kind of figure it’s ok if it takes me I while. I have a lot of springs ahead of me.

Noah humored me and spent some time out back with me this weekend. I really enjoyed that. I feel a lot of joy in being outside and I’m not sure exactly how it works for me. That sounds odd. Sometimes feeling outside is wonderful and sometimes I’m just not happy with it. I’m not sure what the conditions are specifically. I do know that early spring/late winter is my favorite. The weather is in the 60’s but the sun is shining beautifully in between much needed rain bursts. To me this feels like when God is restoring blessings upon life. It feels so peaceful out in my yard enjoying the green.

Now why the hell is everyone so damn depressed.

How you spend your days is how you spend your years

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A blogger I admire, Sara Janssens, asks about the rhythm of her readers’ days. (Disclaimer for all involved–she is very strongly Christian and would almost certainly feel uncomfortable reading some of what I write about. Nevertheless I find her engaging, inspiring, and worthy of respect.)

I feel like I am bad at creating routine. Our days are very unpredictable. The most consistent part of our life is that I do a load of laundry (most often diapers), wash dishes, and Noah makes breakfast just about every day. I think those are the only things I can depend on happening. And sometimes we even skip days with those.

We get up. Noah makes breakfast basically every day. We either go out to breakfast or I cook maybe 5 days out of a month. It makes me very happy to lie in bed nursing in the morning while listening to him and Shanna talk in the kitchen. If Calli finishes nursing quickly I go check internet-happenings while breakfast is completed. Then (depending on how late it is) I listen to Noah read Shanna a story or he runs off to work right away. Often there is fussing around him leaving because Shanna is very very Daddy-needy lately. (Ok, she’s just clingy in general.)

When he leaves I generally start a load of laundry. Most Mondays I catch up on the laundry I was bad about doing over the weekend. I also try to do the kitchen clean up at this point. I try to do project sort of things on Mondays. Although I do make plans with friends. Sometimes we rush out of the house without doing anything extra because packing up the diaper bag and food and whatever else I want to bring with us takes a while. Tuesdays we sometimes have plans with friends but more often lately we stay home because my awesome mother’s helper comes over to play with Shanna and I do big batch cooking or project stuff I can’t do by myself with the kids. Wednesdays are normally our park days. I don’t get a whole lot done other than that because we are usually out of the house for 5-6 hours. But Wednesdays are when I pick up our milk/eggs from the co-op and the Planet Organics box is dropped off. 🙂 I look forward to that. Thursdays look like Tuesdays and Fridays are more of a wild card. We often have plans with various people, though not always. Saturdays and Sundays involve a lot of house cleaning and hanging out as a family with occasional plans with people.

It’s a fairly slow life and yet I still feel overburdened. I don’t have anything big and ongoing right now, like gardening. I’m not doing any big house projects lately. I tend to feel like the biggest part of the first year is just about putting your head down and surviving. At least that is how it worked with Shanna. I don’t get out often and I barely keep on top of household matters. This time I am still cooking extensively which didn’t happen when Shanna was tiny.

I read a lot, both online and books. I read to Shanna a lot. I sing silly songs to my children. I care too much about things on the internet. I float in a bubble of barely-connected-to-the-world. The list of people I spend time with is small and select. If you do not take joy in my children I don’t have time for you. That sounds harsh but it’s just a fact. I don’t have child-free time at the moment and if someone is uninterested in my kids then they aren’t good to spend time with for now.

I try to be calm and accepting of life being whatever it is. I try to regulate my mood and enjoy this precious time with my babies. It will be over soon. I’m not as good as I want to be at having patience, but I think I am doing ok. At the least Shanna shows no signs of being traumatized by me getting frustrated with her. I hope that things will work out.

We have no set wake up, nap, or bed time. Things just kind of flow. We eat at approximate times but even that is highly flexible. I’m slightly apprehensive because Calli is showing signs of being less happy about the irregular hours. She wants to be at home, in bed, in a dark room at 6:30. She’s not real happy about being out. This is going to be challenging. Calli is already getting to the point where she is uninterested in new people. The women in my playgroup are ok–they can hold her. Almost anyone else makes her cry.

Ok, I can think of one thing that I like about the rhythm of our days a great deal. We often cuddle together during rest times and I stroke my daughters’ hair and tell them all the things about them that I love and enjoy. I tell them how wonderful and strong they are. I point out to Shanna places where she has recently developed new skills or accomplishments and talk to her about the gradual process she endured. I tell her I am proud of how strong and brave she is. I encourage her to keep trying things she currently can’t do because I am confident that she will learn how to do them. Even on the really hard days I can always find things to talk about in a positive way. I’m proud of myself for that. I’m proud that my daughter often goes to sleep with a smile on her face because she is so very sure of being loved and adored. This is my contribution to the universe.

expectations

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Periodically I get very upset with myself for not getting more done during the day. Then I stop and think about how very very little I did when Shanna was tiny. I’m doing great! 🙂 Today I ran around doing chores before Calli woke up. It was surprising that she slept till 9:30 (given that she went to bed at 6pm) so I did way more than anticipated. Whoo. I need to get my house back in shape though because the mom group is having our little Christmas party here on Saturday. Yay! I’m feeling somewhat strange about the fact that I’m not seeing my pre-kid friends much at all anymore because I made the vast majority of the effort and I’ve moved to focusing on people who return the effort. It’s… kind of an interesting feeling. But! I’m really glad I’ve had these ladies pop up to fill the void in my life. I’m really not lonely anymore.

Just because

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32 days till Christmas.
12 days till I get to introduce my beautiful daughter to the awesomeness of Disneyland. The first thing she will experience is the Candlelight Processional which is a special Christmas thing they do and I’ve never seen it.
1 day until I get a new oven! A convection oven! I will get to bake again! Even though my fucking pain in the ass stupid midwife *still* hasn’t filed insurance paperwork and paying for this right now was not in my budget. (Have I mentioned that my kid is three months old and she still can’t be fucking bothered to file the paperwork? If she doesn’t file in the next five weeks we can’t file at all. And I can’t file unless I get billing information from her with codes and everything and it is no more trouble for her to get that together for me than it is to just fucking send it in herself. Oh wait. SHE PAYS SOMEONE TO DO HER BILLING AND SHE STILL HASN’T GIVEN THEM THE INFORMATION. I am so pissed. Noah thinks that taking her to small claims court is rather ungrateful given that she literally saved my life. He has a point. But I’m still really angry that she isn’t doing her job.)

Time is just plugging right along. I should post more just to give rbus something to read. 🙂

semi-productive

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It was a good weekend. We didn’t make it up to the clothes swap in Oakland because we had appointments and awesome hang-out time down in San Jose earlier in the day. Miss C is not up for a trip to San Jose and a trip to Oakland in the same day. No way, no how. But we did do good socializing. And today felt productive. House cleaning and lots of making small progress on incremental projects. So I didn’t get much ‘completed’ today, but I got closer to being done with a bunch of different things. Uhm, if that makes sense.

Anyway! I’m thrilled about Noah’s Christmas present. But if I talk about it then it won’t be a surprise. Damnit. Avert your eyes Noah! (It has words involved. A whole bunch of them. And it’s snarky. /spoiler) I am having much fun. 🙂 You’ll like it, rbus.

Grateful

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I’ve been reconnecting with a lot of friends from high school. It’s remarkable how time has changed us (and not). The big thing that keeps coming up for me is how very lucky I am. My life is exactly where I want it to be. My life is very good. I have complete confidence that once I get passed this immersive newborn experience that I will get back to the grown up stuff that is part of me as well. I’m happy. Guess I kicked the crap out of that postpartum depression. 🙂 [Or I just had baby blues and I’m paranoid because I’ve spent so much of my life depressed. Either way it seems to be over.]

Instead of feeling fussy and bitter about “Oh god I’m turning 30” I feel like I am heading into the best decade of my life. Life is so good. 🙂