Tag Archives: parenting

The downs are harder to write about now

When I was younger I think it was easier to write about the down things that happened in my life. I had little care for the feelings of others as I listed my opinion about what was happening around my life. Now I worry a lot.

I was feeling like we were hitting equilibrium. My kids didn’t agree and hoo boy it’s been a rough few days. I don’t want to list the petty squabbles for posterity. That feels unhelpful at this juncture. Not being able to put these threads down is feeling bad. It’s harder for me to sort my feelings when the threads all stay in a jumbled mass and I can’t figure out how to sort them.

I feel like I need to start insisting on a lot less computer time for those I still influence. I feel like the current round of unhappiness ticked up not long after folks were allowed a little more freedom with screens.

I have mixed feelings about the ways that parenting shows me over and over that children do not benefit from complete freedom. They need structure, support, and scaffolding to grow in particular directions. They need a leader, a guide, a facilitator. They don’t need an authoritarian leader. They don’t need to be forced down a path. They shouldn’t be allowed to follow paths that will cause harm. Learning how to tell when a mistake is going to turn into a bigger problem is hard.

I never feel wise enough. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I’m a poor example for how to do things correctly.

I miss Noah so much I feel like I am going to explode. I miss being able to hand problems to him. I miss being able to share my brain with him. I miss sharing his brain. I miss sharing problems. I miss being part of a team. I miss feeling accepted with all of my flaws fully on display. I miss feeling secure. I knew Noah loved me. I knew I was lucky to have a partner who cared so much about me. I am sad my kids don’t get to have him around loving them so much they couldn’t entertain teenage angst for long.

The world feels darker and harder and less full of hope. I feel so much less capable.

I think we are on the far side of the family meeting. I think I know what we need to do to move forward. It’s going to be a lot of work. It’s going to require me doing things I hate doing and I find enormously stressful. With luck, if I succeed, I will make my life easier. We’ll see.

I feel overwhelmed in every way. I’m in a lot of physical pain. I’m exhausted and I can’t seem to bounce back.

Oh well. Life isn’t going to wait. I’ve got stuff to do. Shortie is up. Time to make breakfast.

Bragging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I did that.

Go me.

I am so proud of my babies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have a lot of cautious optimism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The line between parentification and being part of a team

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Let’s start with the premise that I have no confidence that I have done this right. I’m guessing. I’m trying. I don’t feel like I have the right to say my methods were good yet. I definitely don’t feel like my methods or approach are fully available to everyone equally. So much of my life is shaped by access to deep privilege at this point.

Yesterday I went out sledging with Shortie. It turns out our road is now excellent for this now that the farm tractors aren’t racing up and down it prodigiously. This was great news! We had a blast. It was a truly excellent time. Then we walked to the Co-op for milk for hot cocoa. By the time we got home I had walked about 2 miles but it felt like 8. She pressured me to agree to watching one of their cartoons with the kids while we drank it.

I really struggle with cartoons as a medium. Even when I have genuine appreciation for a show (Bluey is so good.) I still struggle to focus and care about what is happening. I fall asleep. I can’t sustain attention on them. It takes oomph for me to watch one enough to satisfy them. I have frankly slept through a lot of Owl House. I couldn’t stay awake enough during Avatar to even know what the fuck was happening or who anyone was. My body literally shuts down during these kinds of “You have to watch it to be part of the group” things. I used to sleep through MST3K when my friends got together. I have dim memories of Red Dwarf. So it’s not just cartoons. My brain struggles with “You have to ingest this content in order to be one of us.” I shut down. No. I don’t want to conform.

So when I walked into the house and the dishwasher was poorly, barely filled and the counters were so full of stuff I didn’t feel like I had space to start making the hot cocoa? Oh. I had feelings. I hadn’t done breakfast clean up before I went sledging. I had an online yoga class. I had made the silly assumption the kids would do it. They didn’t. They all had feelings, too.

I could feel myself wanting to explode and get all shouty. This felt not fair. Thing is, shouting won’t help and will make everyone have a sad day. I marched (a bit more heavily than necessary but my legs were super tired and making sure I walk quietly takes effort) to tell the big kids that I could be responsible for items 1-5 on the list of tasks that were necessary before we could get to hot cocoa and cartoon watching. If they wanted us to actually have somewhere to land items 6-10 had to be done by someone other than me.

My kids responded that it sounded totally reasonable and they were very happy to pitch in to help so they could have the fun pay off. No sweat. Everything got done. No one had to do it all. I did a larger share than anyone else but that’s kind of the point, right? I’m the mother and I should do a much larger share of the work?

I struggle a lot with the line between “I am training good future housemates” and parentification. Am I expecting them to take care of me or their siblings? Well, only in small ways that I put boundaries around and then they clock out and aren’t responsible anymore? They aren’t responsible for obtaining food. They are responsible for learning how to meal plan, and prepare food, and clean a kitchen environment so that no one gets sick.

Where is it parentification and where is it teaching them how to be an adult? I don’t want them to have to figure it all out on their own when they leave home. Even more so I don’t want them expecting me to take care of them because they are incompetent if they continue to live with me. I aspire to inter-generational living. We all have the kind of genetic disabilities that mean we sometimes fall ill or injure ourselves and require a fair bit of assistance to hold on to shreds of independence.

I don’t want to be Auntie taking care of my adult children into my 70’s. Fuck no. I think I wouldn’t mind if we were all sharing the work load though. She never transitioned out of “mom does everything” and I don’t want that. I really don’t. So in my house we sit down and negotiate chores. People volunteer to do that which is least annoying to them. Anyone can ask to renegotiate at any time. No one is trapped. Everyone has the ability to say “This isn’t working for me anymore. I need to change jobs.” Cool! No problem!

The parent is the one who tracks the big picture and makes sure it is all done. The parent makes sure the supplies are brought to the house. The parent guides learning how to take over all of these processes when the parent dies. The parent should do the work as long as possible but there is a time when the parent must be replaced.

Is it so wrong to teach people how to fill these roles?

I struggle with this one a lot. I feel even more worried as I have to deal with accomplishing tasks that used to belong to Noah. I can’t physically do all of it alone. I need help. I am now literally physically smaller than two of my children. Is it evil parentification if they do things they are more physically suited to doing? I worry about this massively.

There seem to be no good paths forward. Nevertheless, I keep going.

I’m told that the obsessive self reflection at the end of the year is very American.

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Not to toot my own horn or anything, but my hindsight is amazing.

One of the many things hindsight has taught me is that I have used therapy as support for my autistic inability to understand the social rules people expect me to be following. I’m not working on my 36th year of therapy. I was diagnosed with autism in year 32. I had a 5 year break 3 years after diagnosis because I moved countries and therapy didn’t feel super essential. I was doing ok. Then Noah died. I’m not doing as ok. I need the support. I don’t think this is exactly what therapy is supposed to be for but just like I can occasionally hammer something in with the end of a screwdriver, therapy can be what you need it to be.

This is a weird year to look back on. My goals for myself were really limited: don’t burn down the house, keep the kids alive, don’t fuck up friendships, have enough sex that life feels worth living, and do whatever I can to make sure my kids feel like they still have a fun future. I’ve done pretty well! The house is still standing and I still have all the children I started the year with. Check.

It’s an odd set of thoughts because in this next year the first child is fully a legal adult and the second enters into quasi-adulthood. I won’t have the same number of children. Scotland is kind of weird on this topic.

I fucked up a few friendships and I feel deep regret about that. One of them I feel like most of the fuck up was because two mentally ill people can’t always be support for one another; I’m sad she felt the need to leave my house and punish me by making ostentatiously false claims about me to child protection services. That sucked a lot. I am relieved that social services very rapidly identified that it was a malicious, false call. The assertion that I can’t feed my children is pretty dramatic and extreme given that food is our big thing all day every day. One friendship is not over (not by any stretch) but I needed a lot of time to sit with it. I needed to think really hard about how the relationship can look going forward. Have the relationship you can have, not the one you wish you could have. I have no shortage of love for my friend. We will figure it out. I am glad I hit pause and did not try to force myself to handle things faster. I would have fucked up. I don’t want to end this relationship even though I felt pain within it. This whole year was painful. I don’t want to act like any of my friends deserve to feel like the extent of that pain was their fault. It’s not. I was drowning and couldn’t do better.

I will be able to do better in the future. I am in less pain.

Sex has been really good this year. I had fun with the hiring and firing of lovers early on. Hunting makes me feel alive in ways very little can. Gentleman has ended up in a much bigger container than I expected. He is a much better person than I expected. My expectations were a tripping hazard in hell and then he turned out to be great. It’s been lovely discovering in layers all the ways in which he is a delight to be around. I want more time with him. It has been particularly rewarding for me to see the ways in which he embodies healthy/positive masculinity far from the encroachment of feminist speech I encountered in the US. He has healthy male friendships and they support each other emotionally. He is incredibly respectful and he reacts to boundaries like they are electric fences. They never have to be defended again. He does all this without using any feminist language around it. He’s not doing any of it because he wants to jump over hoops and prove he is a “Good Man”™️. I don’t feel manipulated; I feel like he is living his life regardless of me and I get to see small pieces of it. I feel like I hit another lottery. He makes me feel so much joy.

This year will be more balanced with time between the kids. Shortie got big things this year to help her feel like there is a fun future. Next year I’m not taking her on a big trip alone. It’s going to be back to pod-adventures in the time I have before Eldest Child is big enough to declare that he can get out of them by dint of being a full legal adult.

I am dreading the return to a more rigid schedule. We restart in 7 days. This whole year has been a dream state. Our hours have been whacked. We have drifted off in various directions and we’ve lost a lot of the structure I normally enforce. I literally couldn’t do it all. Not with how much brain fog and executive dysfunction has been ruling my life. I’m doing a lot better than I was and the estate stuff is mostly done. I’m going to have to pay a fine for it being late, but hey ho. It will be done correctly and I won’t get in trouble down the line. Getting this many stupid fucking businesses to cough up information was really hard. I have mixed feelings about my habit of keeping my eggs in a dozen different baskets. In one way: yay for monetary protection. In another way: oh my poor kids. Going through this as an executor was a nightmare. It would be easier for them if I consolidated and only had maybe three baskets. That scares me for a lot of reasons. It may be the better choice anyway. I don’t have to decide today. I have meetings coming up with people I pay exorbitant fees to and they will help me figure out my plan. Then they will execute the plan while I go back to my day job because this is their shit to do, not mine.

My life is fucking wild, yo.

I tend to go back and forth between thinking about the year aligning with the US tax year (Jan-Dec) or a school year (autumn-summer). I’m thinking about these differences because I have different goals for them. My 2026 plans straddle two school years. That’s really high in my consciousness for me this year in particular because I’m heading into my last term as my son’s teacher. That’s a super wild feeling. I set out to learn what I needed to learn to enable me to homeschool my future children when I was 17. No, I’m not a tradwife. I am an autistic weirdo who never fit into the school system. I was a good classroom teacher in that phase of my life. I feel I have been an intermittently good homeschooling parent.

There are times I’m not proud of. Times when my anxiety about failing my kids got the better of me and I went well into Tiger Mom territory. I think I stepped over the line into abusive too many times. This is a hard thing to evaluate and cope with while it is happening because of course I knew people who were doing far more extreme things. It’s hard to see where you are on the scale while it is happening. Looking back, every single time I was shaking and ranting was over the line. I didn’t know how to feel secure in those moments. I had no ability to trust the long term would work out. I was operating on faith and my faith was a shaky thing.

I have not punished my younger two kids the way I did EC and I believe that is to the good. He and I have talked about it a lot over the years. In a way I feel like part of what Noah got from being his father was seeing a child live with a mother who was working on PTSD triggers so that they would no longer be present in daily life. Noah never forgave his mother for how her untreated PTSD that made his childhood very hard. My son gets to point out how his childhood had some hard points but he spoke up for himself and demanded that things get better and they did. I did not come into parenthood a fully healed human being.

This is why having a mentally ill parent is an ACE point. My kids have had to live with me as I have struggled to get to better places over and over again. As they change and age up I have to grow through a different level of being fucked up. Part of the reason I am rereading the shitty romance novels from my childhood right now is because my life arc now overlaps and intersects with things from my mother’s story. I’m no longer living out Noah’s mother’s story. It’s really weird to wrap my brain around. Noah married someone who was frighteningly like his mother. Now I get to turn into my mother instead. This sucks because Noah’s mom’s life has gotten a lot better and she’s in a better place. I have no idea where my mother is or how her life is going. I’m not open to finding out. That scares me when I start to think of my kids. Will I maintain the good relationships with the first two because they imprinted on our happy family? Will I lose the relationship with my daughter because it will go how it did with my mother and I? That scares me a lot.

I can’t make the same mistakes with my baby that I made with my oldest because the safety net isn’t present. Having Noah in the house to be an alternative source of affection meant that our kids felt and knew they were overwhelmingly loved every minute of every day even when a parent was upset with them. I no longer have that on offer and it breaks my heart.

I don’t feel like I am going to be able to push a full schedule yet. It takes a lot of push in my house of AuDHD barely contained chaos. We get a lot done. We also don’t lead lives that align all that well with “normal” lives. That feels a lot harder to defend when I don’t have Noah in the house as the wage earner proving that keeping an abnormal schedule is no big deal. People can do that for their whole lives and still be part of society. Now I have to do it with my own chutzpah and I feel decidedly lacking.

I feel really scared and I hate that. I don’t want to feel really scared right now. I want to feel calm and like I know how to do my job. I started preparing for this job 27 years ago. Surely I deserve to feel confident now. In less than a year I have my first homeschool graduate. In a way it is unfair though, he is the literal poster child for why unschooling is a fabulous concept that can be magically successful for self-motivated people. He had to go to school to learn that people believed his dyslexia +ADHD+autism means that he was supposed to be stupid. He was never told that at home. It was never part of the conversation. He had to learn tricks and ways to work around his issues, but his brilliance was absolutely never in question. It took two years after I dragged him back out of school to unlearn the awful beliefs he picked up in two years at school. Fuck school.

I definitely believe all the way to my bones that I am the best educational opportunity on offer for my children. This has been my great passionate vocation for my life and every single person who is qualified to judge me has been impressed by my knowledge and impact. I should be able to get over my anxiety about failing my children. There is literally no chance I can do a worse job with them than sticking them in school would do and that’s the standard offer. I’m fine. Really.

The anxiety is still very hard. The anxiety is what stands between me giving a mediocre performance and me being my absolute best Mary Poppins self. Sometimes people tell me not to worry and not to track how many hours we spend on various aspects of life like social life vs academics vs house chores.

My dude, you don’t understand that the tracking is how I allow myself to worry less. I never get to “don’t worry”. I don’t think that is on offer for my brain in this lifetime. It’s ok. The tracking lets me put down like 80% of it so I can use the bandwidth for other things. It’s useful.

I think about life in terms of hours spent. I’m watching the clock right now and feeling the last bit of joy that I get to keep writing right now. Starting in 7 days my time will be up by now. We have completely fallen off of the habit of doing family morning walks. It’s bad for us. We need to restart this way to begin our days. It’s important for so many reasons. We live 1/4 of the way up a really big hill. Going to the top of it every morning is the absolute most important thing we can do to ensure that we will be together for many, many years. Our hearts need it. Our circadian rhythm needs it. Our intestines need it. Our spirits need it. It’s time to get back to it. I love all of us enough to insist that we need to do this. Sure, exercise killed your father. Whatever. We still have to exercise.

This is a hard thing to carry. I feel like my bullying is a lot of why he died and I’m really struggling with that. I absolutely am a bully when it comes to exercise. There are reasons my kids can usually sprint up hills. I chase them up the hill over and over and over again. The faster you go the less I can talk and that means I’ll do less bugging you to go faster. It’s a really great self reinforcing cycle. The person who runs the fastest spends the least time listening to me push. They all get mad when I get high into marathon training and I can keep talking while they are panting and wanting to die.

I don’t know that I will ever do another marathon. At the start of the year I felt like I couldn’t possibly. Now I feel like it would take years because the amount of training time away from my daughter is hard to cover. Maybe I could make her cycle it with me. That’s a thought. I’m definitely mean enough to insist on her learning to cycle that far. We are bike people. It is our form of transport. If you can’t go out and do a lot of it you can’t go out and have a day and have enough energy for all the things. We have to treat cycling training like a mandatory part of life.

I have degenerative physical issues. I hold them back with a wall of exercise and good diet. Will I ever get better? No. Will I ever stop hurting? No. Will I maintain independence as long as possible? You bet your fucking buttons I will. I build muscular strength to make up for the weakness of my joints. It is the only productive solution I know of. I often have to wear braces or supports. I’m never fast. I’m never “fit” meaning skinny and well toned. But I am able to drag my meat sack through days of getting shit done. That is what I care about.

I have said repeatedly that I expect it to take 18 months for me to get back to something more like my normal speed. That means I am assuming the whole first half of 2026 is not going to be a banger year. It is my last term as my son’s teacher. I don’t want to go out with a whimper but I also can’t push hard enough that my anxiety spikes and I act like a bitch. It’s a hard balancing act on my own. I will have to bring enough joy into my life that I can stay stable. That’s hard. I have never been the best at stability. I have always lurched from highs to lows.

I find myself using a lot of the specific somatic techniques to regulate my nervous system. I am catching my anxiety spikes and solving them on my own. This can be very awkward for people in public so I try not to do it when out of the house. You can see the inherent problem there, right? Going out is when I feel the most anxiety while also feeling the least ability to self soothe. People really look at the weirdo rocking and tapping on themself while humming a really high tone for a long time.

I fucking love that I go to therapy to learn ways to be autistic more purposefully. Worth every £90 session. They help me strategise how and when to exit upcoming social situations so I can calm down. Do I need to fully leave? Can I just step out for a few minutes? It’s an adventure. I’m definitely the one crying.

It’s easy and natural to do around my kids though.

It’s making me think long and hard about what I perceive as “the social contract” and NT behaviours that I am required to mimic in public. I believe the social contract is largely not something that can be negotiated because it is about interacting with strangers and they can never be expected to give one grace. Will some of them ultimately be friends who will give lots of grace? Absolutely. You don’t test that right off the bat. You follow the social contract.

I was very delighted to spend Christmas day with a family of other ND people who struggle with masking enough to look normal. I felt so very comfortable. When someone else had a tic I could feel my body relax. I’m allowed to be here. My soul needs this feeling. I need other weirdos. It’s really important for me on a physiological level. I need the co-regulation. We all exist and we all should exist and it is ok that we have the needs we have.

How do I carry this forward being the only parent? Noah cast a big shadow and a lot of the reason we all felt so comfortable being weird together was because he was very weird and could make being intensely off-putting somehow charming. He was a marvel to behold. I do not have his ability to make things charming. I’m a lot more of a 2×4 to the head. The pressure of trying to be all the things has been giving me literal migraines. My body is overwhelmed and sad. More exercise is the answer, right? If it isn’t then I’m fucked because I don’t have a lot more on offer.

I am too tired to hunt. My relationship with Gentleman is going to be delightful and sweet and soft. I worry about the black hole I have of need for stimulation and connection. I am going to try spending more time with non-sexual friends. I’m not committing to monogamy. I’m just tired. I need joy. I need a lot of it. I need buckets of it.

I miss Noah. I have to keep moving anyway. It’s not time for me to stop. He promised I could die first. I’m really sad that I have to live with that broken promise. Oh well. Today I go get my new glasses. Hopefully that will help with the headaches. If not, time to see the GP.

The day must begin. There are foreheads to kiss. I need to tell them that I am so glad to see them again. Rituals are important. They bind you to who you are.

Happy Solstice

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The stockings are filled. Santa presents are arranged. The small batch of gifts is under the tiniest tree. (We have 3 for a long list of reasons I’m not going to explain. This is the child sized one.)

I am breathing deeply. I miss Noah. I miss Noah like my soul is on fire and I cannot breathe without him. Yet on I move. I continue to breathe. I continue to do things and feel things and talk to people and smile. I will cuddle my babies today. I will try again on cinnamon rolls. Today I will play games and be silly. It will be fun.

On we go. Always forward. Time to turn the oven on for baking the bread.

Fragments of parenting

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My son is a fiction writer. He has more followers than I do and I think that is super cool. He writes about children experiencing violent, traumatic things. People ask him on a regular basis if he is a highly traumatised person. He says no, but his parents are both highly traumatised autistics who developed a hyperfixation on social interactions in order to survive. He says an awful lot of his characters are me with some changes; his stories are basically him trying to give me a better outcome. I have feelings about this.

We talk about our family values a lot. People are not disposable. People can fuck up in horrifying ways and still deserve a second chance. People do not deserve third or fourth chances. Doing something horrifyingly bad one time can be a mistake. Repeating it is a choice. I appall people online sometimes when I talk about rape possibly being a mistake if it happens once and once only. I believe it, though. Society has the right to protect itself from serial predators.

He says that he appreciates that I have not forbidden him from doing almost anything in his life. I will, however, talk shit about stuff he is doing and explain in great detail why I don’t like it or respect the lessons that are being taught. This is funny to me because he is quick to tell his siblings that they can’t watch some YouTube people because they are bad influences. He is very much pro-authority in ways that I find odd.

I love that my kid is finding solace in acting and poetry. They are finding a slightly different path through coping. I deeply appreciate the way they tell me that being with me is when they feel most comfortable and safe. They are my adventure buddy. They love hiking and going on bike-camping trips with me. We have a fascinating push-pull dynamic when we are under stress. We are both getting really good about going, “YOU ARE SUPER FUCKING CRANKY. PUT FOOD IN YOUR MOUTH. NOW.” I love that they are so much like me. I love that they believe their life has been really good largely because they have had parents who have been ok with them following their own path. They struggle with mutism when they are overwhelmed in public environments. They have tremendous sensory challenges. I have spent over 10 years largely structuring our home environment around their sensory needs. It heals something in me to be able to do this for them.

I think I am going to push them into going into a school program next year at the local college. They should go do a drama qualification. It would be very good for them on a variety of levels. It will be like when I did Middle College instead of finishing high school. They would love to be around people more but the high cost of being autistic is too high to pay for regular school. It’s pretty striking to me that people around here really accept getting beaten as the cost of attending school if you are autistic. Fuck that shit. Fuck off into the sun. It is different once folks are adults. They will probably be the youngest person in the program at the college but that’s ok. They thrive around adults.

My daughter has had a year. She has a couple of things she is doing that are driving me nuts. She’s weird about food. I don’t even want to explain all of it because I kind of hope I mostly forget this part. She’s in a rough phase. Phases end and should not be held against someone in a long term way. I appreciate how much she adores me. I adore her, too. We talk a lot about how I can have lots of feelings all at once. I can love her bigger than the whole sky and still think that something she is doing is super annoying and rude. More than one thing can be true. I love that all of my children, when below the age of 10, have preferred to sleep clinging to me.

I love that my babies want me and love me and like me so much. I have worked really hard at being the mom they deserve.

I am scared of the future. I am glad I have these three people to face it with. Being there for them has given me purpose and drive and motivation. I feel so incredibly lucky that we all like each other so much. It doesn’t always go that way with parents and children. I am blessed.

Well that was terrifying

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Hi. I’m not sure if you noticed but my website went down for a bit. I didn’t notice the domain expiring and there was a whole process of trying to pull this back out of the ashes. I am lucky I have smart friends who can help.

It’s 9 days till the anniversary and I am all over the map mood wise. I go between existential horror and paralysis and feeling like I have to do things or I will explode with nervous energy. I am scared I will shove everyone away in the next few weeks as I have all the feelings all at once. That’s a fear, not a fact.

It’s time for me to start moving all of my writing from Fetlife over here. I have been feeling really anxious about the massive number of emails that will be inflicted on folks but it’s time. I want all of my writing in one place and I am going to back up everything like 17 times.

I feel so many things. I am grateful for my children. They continue to be the reason I have to keep going. My son blows my mind with his emotional maturity and reason. Yesterday when I got home I was very upset and he coached his sister through giving me a couple of minutes to land before she started unloading her brain on me. I could hear his father’s word and intonation in his speech. This boy quotes me and Noah so constantly that it’s slightly odd. This is what a piece of me and a piece of Noah looks like. What an extraordinary person.

My kid reminds me a lot of Noah too. And my daughter. All of them are different shards of him living on and carrying his voice and lessons into the world. It’s maybe a weird thing but I feel like I did something with my life because I helped the world have pieces of Noah for longer. He was so tremendously good.

I asked on the Ruby forum on Reddit if people want me to keep maintaining his websites and they said yes, people still go back and reference Noah’s work. It’s really cool to know this. Noah had a large influence on the technology industry around the world and he continues to do so even after his death.

I miss him so much I feel like my chest is going to explode.

I love that my son is a prolific writer who shares our family values with many hundreds of readers.

I love that my kid is a bold and confident actor who feels capable of stepping into and out of different ways of being because they know how to compartmentalize and analyze the emotions of other people.

I love that my daughter is bold and demanding of love and attention because she has always been loved and attended to. She believes that she will always be loved and adored. Even if her father isn’t here to be one of her adoring fans she trusts that there will be many other people who love her overwhelmingly.

Noah and I did this. We made people who are intensely secure. We made people who believe that there are reasons to feel love and hope. We made people who know how to manage their anxiety and self soothe in healthy ways. We made people who feel secure asking for their needs to be met. We made people who glow with certainty of place. Even after the death of their father. That’s incredible. We did this together. Now I have to carry it forward alone.

I won’t feel alone. We are so very self-reinforcing. My son believes in the values I have taught him, that Noah taught him, that we have lived for all these years.

I had a horrible thought the other day. I have said for many years that we are like a whale pod traveling together as a family. Maybe that was a cursed thing to say. Whale pods do not include the father, they are matriarchal. I should have come up with another analogy, some other species that stays together. I don’t know what though. I just know that I have to keep going and I will bring my children with me.

I love that when I walk out my back door I can make kissing noises and many different bird species explode with sound. They are all happy I am there to bring them food.

My cat has been within arms length of me basically full time for weeks now. She is the most dog-like cat I have ever known. She would like to be with me far more than she currently gets to. It’s both a bother and a comfort. I feel guilty sometimes because when I am alone in a room I will sometimes say very rude things to her about how annoying I find her and how much I don’t want to be nice to her anymore. Then I pet her very softly and gently because it doesn’t matter how I feel; it matters how I act.

I feel like the most self absorbed person on the planet right now. I’m not but it feels like it in the universe of my brain.

Last night I cried and sobbed and freaked out as I crawled around the attic getting some Yule decorations down. I made a deal with my daughter that if she tidied up her stuff I would get the smallest tree down and some ornaments and lights for her because she needs to see festivity this year. It doesn’t matter how I feel; it matters how I act.

That said, I am not decorating the whole house. I can’t. That’s too much to ask of me. It matters a little bit how I feel. She can decorate her room. That’s enough. I’m going to wrap presents today. I didn’t want to do presents at all this year. I definitely didn’t want to be Santa this year. No child deserves to lose their father and Santa in one 12 month block. That’s just fucked up beyond all measure.

This whole year has been rough. It has also been full of moments where my friends have carried me through. I have not been alone. I have not been abandoned. I have not been unsupported.

I am going to keep creating myself. I am going to lean on my friends to believe in me when I can’t believe in myself. I am going to keep growing like Noah wanted me to. I am very relieved that this record remains. I don’t know why I care so much about the writing remaining but I do. Someday if my children want to understand me better, they will have a window into my soul.

Time to wrap presents and fluff a plastic tree.

I both feel over peopled and deeply lonely

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I’m really struggling with how much I can’t say anymore because there is no one to say it to. Noah has been the safe container I lived in for so long. I feel like no one else will ever want to know very much about me if they have to live with the consequences. I know I have long term readers, it’s the in person time where people can’t handle me.

I’m dating a nice man. He’s never going to obsessively study me. He’s never going to be dedicated to me. He’s on his own life path and we share time when it works. I am really not complaining about him. I simply notice all the things that are absent in my life. Things I will never ask him for. These are not his children. He does not share my delight that such creatures came from us. I miss having Noah to talk to when I have a concern.

Shortie is 7. It’s an age with intense disequilibrium. It’s not personal. It’s developmental. I miss having another adult around to go “Oh holy shit doing this for the third time is so hard.” August and September were rough. She’s already calming down and doing better. I handled it how I handle such challenges. She had to be someone’s buddy at all times for a while. She did not have the ability to have self control so other people had to stand there patiently having control for her. It’s not the easiest of times but it worked how I wanted it to the previous times. Now I’m just following a well worn path.

Someone went to social services and reported me for beating her. In fact, this person claimed that Eldest Child, Middle Child, and I competitively bruise her for entertainment. This was a pretty extreme claim. No ambiguity like “I think they are too rough with her.” No, we competitively bruise her. That’s a Big McFlippen Deal. Luckily the social worker was convinced that the claim was malicious within a few minutes. It helps that the other half of the claim was that I am too mentally unwell to feed my children. When she entered the house I was making chicken cordon bleu, fried potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and there was a large salad with a variety of vegetables. Food is our culture in a way that is kind of extreme. Being accused of not feeding my children hurts. It’s wildly untrue. I have so much food in my house it’s a job to manage rotating through all of it before it spoils. I’m an obsessive prepper. We usually have 2-3 months worth of food on hand and I rotate through it. She said I don’t feed my children.

I am having a hard time with the idea that I should ask for help from people. It feels like a fraught and dangerous experience.

I stopped having people come stay with us because I am not able to provide the level of service people expect. And I’m too hard to help. I don’t know how to perform failing appropriately so that I inspire someone to want to help me. It’s not fair to say any of this, because there are several people who help me in an ongoing way. Following Jenny continues to be one of the most important decisions of my life. I don’t see her all the time, we both have a lot going on. She has been tremendous help over and over again this year. I would be in a very rough spot without her. A few new friends have done a lot more than I would have expected. As usual I’m surprised by who has staying power and who does not.

I am a lot less surprised by the people who have mostly fallen off. I’m not taking it overly personally. They will be friendly when I have more spoons. I am pragmatic. If I get to the point of feeling like I can produce a lot of work for other people they will tolerate me willingly.

I feel like I have nothing to offer at this point. I feel deeply inadequate to the task of doing the work to be part of community. I feel really bad about that. I don’t think it is permanent but it is the stage I am in.

I asked for a year to be intensely selfish. It’s been a mixed bag. That’s fair. The only person who ever signed up for meeting my needs is gone. I will probably get less support after this time of grief. I have to be planning around having less support. I am really grateful for the people who are helping me get through this time. 7 is one of the very hardest ages for me, I can say as the parent of a 17 year old and a 15 year old. I handle all the later stuff way better. We are going to have another gnarly year around 11/12. After that things have been a lot easier. I work hard at being less and less of a figure to rebel against. I am here to facilitate and assist, not drive your life. I’m happy to let people make mistakes without interference.

Except for the ways that I’m not and for those moments we have the buddy system. I need buddies. I have a lady I’m paying to come in one day a week and she directs us through maintaining the house. It’s awesome. I have a friend who is body doubling with me one day a week. I have a friend who is taking Shortie out once a week to give me a break. My kids all go to classes that happen every week or two.

We are witnessed out in the community. If my children were ill fed or being beaten folks would notice. I do this on purpose. I know that we are living an unorthodox life. I feel less able to defend it without Noah to stand beside me yet I really like my older children. I feel like they are going to have very happy adulthoods and they will find ways to be part of community and relationships. It’s always hard to have faith that such an end goal is possible during the harder stages. I still have faith.

When my baby is pushing every button but still smiles in a sunny way because they know I will forgive them for being difficult. I have earned their faith in me. That is the part that matters.

I am struggling with feeling like I used Noah to get the life I wanted and then abandoned him spiritually. He had a very hard time last year discussing future poly. I feel so bad that the last year of his life was so stressful between us.

I mean, we were also closer and getting along really well. Our connection felt deep and lifelong and impossible to step away from. I felt seen and possessed and obsessed over. My brain felt full of him. Now there is so much space. I feel unobserved. I feel unworthy of being seen.

I miss feeling like the most fascinating woman in the world.

I feel onerous and difficult and bothersome and unworthy. It astounds me that my children want my company so much. We try to rest on Sundays. We do a lot every day. We need a day of doing as little as humanly possible. I like that they come in to do shifts with me. They all want individual time. There is also collective snuggling. We are still a happy pod by and large.

There is this big hole in our lives. There is so much we all want to share and the container that we used to use is gone. I feel like I am going to feel empty going forward. I will but I won’t. My children are right in their self assurance that a lot of my life will revolve around them. It’s feeling hard. I feel like very little of myself remains outside the parent container. Maybe it will someday.

I don’t want to feel afraid. Being afraid makes one hateful, small, and ungenerous.

I will never have tech bro money again. I will be fine. I will keep the house. I will be able to feed anyone I want to feed down the line. I’m not going to have the kind of personal wealth Noah wanted us to have as retired people. This is ok. It works for my self conception.

I don’t feel confident about much right now. I know that my life is going to shrink in ways that would freak Noah out. He wasn’t ok with doing more with less. He was built for growth and expansion. I will contract now and regain something more like a proper shape for me.

I bought a power washer. My driveway looks like someone else lives here. My garden is looking super tidy. I need to scrub the decking a bit more before I’m done. The apartment patio still needs to be done. We are close after 3.5 long days of work. We’ve really let the walkways get into a proper state. They were unsafe. As I do the labour to clean them and make them safe for walking I think about what being the provider means.

From now on, everything that must be done I must do. There is no one else to look to. I can delegate, but I have to initiate all of it. I’m the adult. I’m the home owner. I am the one who has to direct everything. I am the responsible party. It’s feeling like so much.

I feel sad and alone even though my life is busy and full of people. I miss Noah enveloping me with his arms and his overwhelming personality. He was so much that he made me have to keep expanding to keep up with him. Now that time is over.

Parenting

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I think it is funny when people comment on my parenting either positively or negatively when they have never met my children. I mean, someone saying “I would like to have a parent who did that” or “I would never do that to my kids” is fair enough when I’m giving a tiny slice of a moment.

My children have woken up to morning snuggles just about every day of their lives. We talk all day long. They go to steady classes and have habitual events they can count on. The fact that I have erratic feelings while they go through this life process is not something I can fix. 35 years of therapy hasn’t cured me from being a highly traumatised person. I am pretty sure nothing will ever do so.

This is a lot of why I talk about my feelings and make it clear that I am having a feeling and it isn’t the fault of anyone in the room. I am reacting to ghosts and I’m really sorry you have to be in the room while I do.

This is why having a parent with mental illness is an ACE point. Even though by any reasonable measure I am doing fantastic for someone with a history like mine I am not as consistent as an untraumatised person. Fact. More than one person has told me to my face that someone like me should not have had children and since I was stupid enough to breed my children should be removed from my care. Lots of people feel that if you have already been abused, all you deserve is abuse going forward. It’s part of prosperity gospel crap.

Thing is, my kids are from two genetic lines with PTSD and severe trauma running all over the place. They have a serious handicap when it comes to being “normal” from the get go. That is 100% my fault and I accept that blame. I knew my genetics were messed up and I chose to make children with the ego-tastic belief that maybe someone in my line could have a happy childhood and grow up ok.

This has been a scary thing for me in many ways. When I was a child I was told constantly that abused children are the most loyal. What if I don’t want to abuse my children? Does that mean they will feel no loyalty to me? It’s been a terrifying commitment to keep. I have pursued it with blind belief and access to an unholy amount of privilege.

Why do I believe my children haven’t been seriously abused? My justifications are irrelevant. I’m not saying my children have never experienced abuse in or out of my house. It has never been a consistent part of their relationship with their parents because that shit doesn’t fly.

I was annoyed yesterday. I expressed my annoyance at the person whose forgetfulness was the reason I had to walk an extra 3 miles. Cheeky little bugger grinned and said, “Well it’s a good thing that you already promised to forgive me for everything I ever do wrong. I’ve got this one in the bank.”

Yeah. My erratic behaviour is totally fucking them up. Right.

Those of you who read my writing see far more erratic shit than my kids do. My kids see me walk around crying. They don’t know what I’m thinking. They do know that I have a lot of good reasons to cry. They hold my hand and lean on me. They give me the comfort of their presence.

It’s not that I’m never snippy but it’s worthy of comment when it happens.

I start every day with a smile and a kiss and “I am so glad to see you again.” It’s not that we never have rough days but we all feel wanted in this family. This year someone suggested that Middle Child might feel like the black sheep of the family. My baby refuted this assertion with laughter. They feel like they have a lot in common with me and with their siblings.

They used different words but basically, they feel like a chip off the old block. They are deeply aware of how much we all have in common. We talk about it with joy and occasional “bummer, sorry you got that one.” We discuss strategies we use and we compare notes about how to refine them. We have a shared language to discuss the ways we are similar. They had a similar experience with their dad. We would collectively marvel about genetics and luck of the draw.

The thing that binds us is this deep awareness of how connected we are. I have stressed from early on, “You are only mine to care for during a short period in your life. It is my responsibility to help get you ready for being an adult. Sometimes you won’t like me. That’s ok. We get to have all the feelings here.”

I love how deeply entitled these people are to being seen. I don’t think they demand it out in the world in the way we do at home. That’s why we talk about strategies so often. You can’t talk about stuff plainly with our home vocabulary out in the world. People will get very upset. People do not consent to being observed. It’s an interesting thing to navigate.

It is sitting on me harder and harder that I have no one to share my children with. It means I’m talking to my mother in law more because it feels like she is the only person who wants to hear about them. I miss having someone who wanted to talk about them for hours and hours with me. It’s harder to know if I’m doing anything right.

It’s going to be a long 10 years.

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My baby is struggling with impulsive behaviour. This means we are back to the buddy system. It means she has to be within eye sight, and preferably within arm’s reach of me throughout the day. I have to be her self control for her because she doesn’t have it right now.

I’m not going to list the ways she is acting out. I don’t particularly want to hold on to that ranting list. Her behaviour is all within developmental/PDA norms. She’s 7. She is acting like a 7 year old who has lost her primary parent. She’s in deep distress.

It’s been weird coming to terms with the fact that Noah literally was her primary parent for most of her first 6 years. He tied her to his body while working so I could do stuff. He let her come in and play piano while he was doing stuff. She played under his desk. Even though the third baby was “for me” so I could have the family that felt complete to me, due to the age gap I told Noah he had to step up. I couldn’t do what I did with the first two kids.

Looking back I both feel like it was smart that I gave myself space to rest and put spoons in my drawer while I could and also that I was stupid. Now my baby is suffering so deeply because of Noah’s loss. I can see it in her all the time. The big kids are suffering too, but it’s different. They are both much more strongly bonded to me. Now my daughter and I don’t have a choice. We need to make our bond a lot stronger and part of how we will do this is to spend a freakish amount of time together.

I think this girl would need a 1-1 aide in a classroom setting to keep her from doing things that would disrupt the learning environment for everyone else. She is just as high needs as my son was but the kinds of destructive behaviour are slightly different. I feel so exhausted thinking about going through this again. She has the destructive behaviour of my first child and the explosiveness of my second child plus her PDA traits are turned up to 11. She is going to be a truly radical and amazing adult. I can’t fucking wait to hang out with her when she is in her late 20’s and 30’s. Getting there is going to be a bit rough.

I tell myself a lot that I am paying Future Me by doing this work. I will get to have the adult peer relationships I want if I nail their childhoods.

Part of it is realising which of the methods I used with the older kids do not work for Shortie. She has a different life. I will now admit that I probably was using ABA tactics with the older kids. I took away fun things when they couldn’t meet my demands. I can’t do this to my youngest. Her life doesn’t have the massive amount of over-weight in the “fun” department. She hasn’t spent 2 weeks a year at Disneyland. She’s not traveling around the country. She’s not been to a bunch of exciting cultural events. She didn’t grow up with parties every 6 weeks and dozens of families she had constant contact with. She has had a fairly isolated and lonely life.

This girl needs different support and different raising. For one thing, I would be doing her a massive disservice if I encouraged her into being as bold as the older ones. The older kids and I are constantly having to navigate the challenge of being as weird as we are in this town. I hope that Shortie feels more like she belongs here when she is grown. It will always be different because she didn’t grow up in school culture. I don’t know.

I’m scared.

I keep making little steps of progress towards settling Noah’s estate. It freaks me out. I wish this process was over. A week until it has been 9 months. How naive I was to think I could be done in March or April. I couldn’t bear to think about how long it would drag out. I bat things back as quick as I can then someone in the chain is on holiday and it takes a week or two to get a response. It’s challenging. It means a lot of executive functioning from me to track stuff. I’m not doing very well at that.

I’m having a lot of brain fog. My pain levels are high. I’m getting back to exercise but it is a constant struggle.

The kids really need me to be on my A game. I feel like I’m barely squeaking out a C.

I am clearly flailing with a lot of my grief. I desperately wish that I could spend a whole year only keeping my body alive and not taking care of anyone else. Oh well. Keep moving. Instead I am going to experience a grueling several years. These babies need a lot of support. They are high needs people. I brought them into this world.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, “I understand why I was hit so much.” I acted out even more impressively than my kids do. I struggle with not hitting anyone some days. I don’t do it! I didn’t do it long before I lived in a country where it is illegal. It’s not like I’m refraining because “it’s the law”. I don’t hit my kids because if you have to hit your kids to control them then you don’t have any control.

I am dreading the fuck out of this trip to Disneyland Paris. My 3rd time there. Shortie’s probable one and only Disney trip of her childhood. My last two times there weren’t great. Maybe it is going to go better now that my expectations are below the toilet and in the sewer? No one will be nice. People will be hostile. Expect it and get on with it. They use the name Disney but it has nothing to do with Disneyland in Anaheim and it’s not useful to expect that.

I wish Disneyland wasn’t such a poisoned experience for me. 9 days till we get on the sleeper train. 12 days until we enter the park. These countdowns used to feel more fun. Now I feel a creeping funk hitting my brain and I want to cry. Who am I kidding? I’ve been crying.

I wish I could stop crying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am struggling.

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

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

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

Today is 6.5 months after Noah dying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That feels hard to admit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was worth it.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

This is hard.

2 Replies

There are things I want to document but privacy and security are different things in my life now.

I have:

cancelled Noah’s cell phone contract
updated the electricity company to my information
updated the oil company with my information
sent emails to several people in the council because good golly school registration is not going well
threw myself on the mercy of several different support organisations around town
emailed new accountant to talk through pieces of the hand off
got him off my credit card accounts (two of them)
exchanged emails with the financial advisors about getting everything consolidated as much as possible and all in my name
I made a big fun breakfast for wishing Grandpa goodbye
I checked the oil tank level
I snapped a couple of times because I am really hitting overwhelm with video games

I need to get the kids in school. What we are doing isn’t healthy or sustainable and I don’t have more to give. It is simply the reality of the situation I find myself in. I’ve been trying to contact people for 14 days now. I send messages regularly and then I either get no response or get fobbed off. It’s sounding like there may well be an inability to get placements due to over crowding. That’s going to be fucking festive.

I will deal with that when we have to.

The kids are safe and being played with and interacted with by a wide variety of humans. They aren’t being neglected, but I can’t teach right now. I can’t make them do things. I have to be entirely unconditional acceptance and I have this god damn trial coming.

It’s a lot to ask of my body.

Keep moving

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Waking up for the 12th day of Noah being gone. It’s a weekend; the last weekend before I have to sign the kids up for school. Middle Child is very confident they are going to ride through the rest of secondary school because getting qualifications will simplify later life. Shortie isn’t sure about school. She is scared. I told her that we are going to try through the end of the next school year and if she has not settled, then we will discuss a return to home education. Eldest Child has plans and he is figuring out his forward facing routine. He is scared but ready to figure out his future.

The older kids are scared I will sell the house. They are really overwhelmed by this idea. That means I need to be careful with that option. It has to be only at absolute last resort. I think I am going to need to work very hard to keep this house. I think the kids are going to need that stability for a long time to come. This was our final home with Noah. Leaving here is choosing to leave him behind. I’m not sure we will ever be ready for that. We will make the decision in two years but the kids are acting like it would be a problem if we left. I need to consider that.

I love him so much. I am going to have a rough road. Missing him is going to be a blessing and a curse for the rest of my life. I’m going to know how much I was loved and I am going to know how much I lost. Even if it isn’t my fault it is my loss to deal with. It is a loss for my children to deal with. I am going to have to push my babies forward alone with no one adding to my bucket.

I feel bad because there are so many thoughts in my head that will never be spoken again. I won’t ever believe anyone cares. It makes me feel lonely in my soul. Sure, yeah, I will talk out loud to Noah but it’s not the same. It’s going to make me feel very disconnected from life that I am only safe talking to myself alone in a room.

Tomorrow is when we were supposed to wake up to go on our holiday alone after the aborted negotiation with TB. I don’t even know if TB is in the country. I don’t care. He poisoned that well this year when he told me he didn’t need to be upset about me being raped because I wasn’t his wife. That’s disgusting and nauseating.

I really do wonder if I am going to turn into my mother and just give up sex. Either that or I will cause problems. I struggle with believing I will find a healthy medium. I’m used to having sex every day, often two or three times a day. I can feel in my body that it is not happening and my body is not pleased. I would be literally pawing at Noah by now if for some reason I hadn’t jumped him already this morning.

It is hard going back to bed after my early morning trip to the bathroom. That’s when I would get excited every single morning because I could wake Noah up for sex. He would warm me back up from the chill of the bathroom and the process would lead into melting together.

Yeah. Last night was the last night a person who snores can be in my bed. I love you with my whole soul Pam but I need to be able to go back to sleep at 1am. I can’t lay awake for hours listening to snoring and thinking about how much I am scared. It’s not healthy. I need to be able to go back to sleep.

I had someone who wanted to know about every weird gurgle and blip in my body. Someone who wanted to know every discomfort because maybe he could help. He could help in so many ways. I am overwhelmed with sadness. I want to take care of him. He was so delighted with the ways I am confident. He made me feel special. Pam and Dad are trying hard to get me to feel special.

It’s not working very well. I feel like I failed the boss level at life. I didn’t protect Noah. I hurt inside my soul. Noah, I am so sorry. Noah I am sorry for every time I didn’t do what you deserved.

The only way I can continue in his service is to give our kids a good life. That starts with the building block of sleep.

Shortie and I were talking about that last night. She was annoyed because all the grown ups are harping on her to go to sleep. She was complaining about how it is stupid because sleep doesn’t do anything anyway. I told her she was so wrong and I started explaining what sleep does for your brain and body. It’s necessary for learning, growing, and healing. She asked a lot of follow up questions. She is so clever that it is really uncanny at times.

I am scared that she is going to end up being the kid who is most like me. Middle Child is firmly in the PDA camp with me and I’m absolutely certain beyond all measure that Shortie is too. When she is asked to do something she responds with snarls and a vicious physical retaliation if you physically try to push her into something. I’m going to have to talk to the school. She always comes back and apologises for these rapid bursts of emoting. That’s not how she wants to act it is just instinctive and utterly compulsive. If you have compassion for her and deescalate without taking it as a challenge then things can smooth right out. She is not mean or vindictive or unwilling to help. She has a really strong automatic anxiety reaction to being ordered about. I can’t judge.

She has also taught herself to read at 6. My other kids did not do that. She’s far further into maths than her siblings were at her age because she finds it fun and engaging. She is more than halfway through the elementary curriculum set I have. I’m a little worried that she is going to be advanced enough to really struggle in school. Or maybe they will let her read like I did?

I’m scared on so many levels. I’m scared of so many things. I’m sad. I feel this horrifyingly swelling well of sadness and depression. I want Noah and I will never have him again. Noah was my life, my happiness, my home. This house is just a building for me. My home was him being inside of me. It was the only way I ever felt fully secure. That is gone. I never get to feel like that again. I miss him.

I will keep going though. I have to. The older kids are processing in waves what it means that their dad is gone. My baby is flailing and uncertain and having all the feelings. I can’t be mean to her about the way she is feeling. I love the bones of her. That’s a thing I’m worried about–she is losing weight and that’s not ok. She’s already extremely slender. I can’t give on the candy front because she is super compulsive but I need to massively bend on controlling her food. She is so much like me and she struggles with digestion stuff because her diet isn’t varied enough. Right now I need to give her a lot of leeway around picking stuff that can give her what she needs. Mostly I need to stock my kitchen with stuff she is welcome to have at any minute and encourage grazing. She’s not great at meals.

It was worth arguing over when it was our biggest issue. It isn’t anymore. Survival is. I’m not giving up on the process of helping her learn to eat more food but I am going to push less.

I have to go limp in a lot of ways. A lot of things I would normally correct or criticise I can’t for the next 6+ months. I am waking the kids up every day and having chats with each of them or singing a cheerful song. Everyone gets a private moment with me to start the day. We are also touching base later in the day for directed attention outside of group stuff.

I have to take care of them. I am who they get to have. I think that sucks for them and is really unfair but it’s true.

I’m struggling with my shame around having chosen to have kids when I struggle so much with mental illness. When I had Noah to cover my fuck ups it felt more justifiable. Now I have to regulate myself more than I ever have in my entire life. That’s really hard. I have to do it while struggling with the worst things that have happened to me in decades. I believe they are worth the effort and I need to put my money where my mouth is.

I know that it isn’t healthy for me to spend the rest of my life living for my children. I’m pretty sure it is healthy for the next year. Maybe that’s all I can handle thinking about right now. Maybe I am not able to think past that to what will come in the next chapter of my life. I don’t actually want another chapter. I liked the one I was in. Noah. I miss you, Noah.

But it’s over. Life isn’t fair. There is no such thing as fair. No one gets what they deserve.

For a time I had Noah. It was really wonderful.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Tag Archives: parenting

The downs are harder to write about now

Bragging

I am so proud of my babies

The line between parentification and being part of a team

I’m told that the obsessive self reflection at the end of the year is very American.

Happy Solstice

Fragments of parenting

Well that was terrifying

I both feel over peopled and deeply lonely

Parenting

It’s going to be a long 10 years.

I am struggling.

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

Life isn’t fair

I just need one

Patterns and cycles

I don’t know where this will go

This is hard.

Keep moving