Tag Archives: parenting

The roller coaster of emotions continues

One of the most intense parts of my marriage was the way that Noah made space for me to have every feeling. I didn’t have to only have the ones he wanted. He didn’t like it when I was in a bad mood. He didn’t like it when I fell in love with people. He didn’t want me to feel sadistic. He did try to control me such that I only had the feelings he wanted, but when I went off the rails he would build a protected site around the crash zone like he was defending evidence. He didn’t have to like everything I felt. He had to protect the space for it to exist.

I looked at one of my tracking things. Ah. This is going to be an exceptionally vicious PMDD cycle. It’s kind of a terrible thing the way bodies change each other. I’ve been talking to my children about our cycles. I’m real worried one of them has endometriosis. Their aunt recently had a hysterectomy and is having to go back in for a second surgery because they couldn’t get all the endometrial cells in one go. She’s in her 20’s. It is fascinating watching how people use my DNA and Noah’s to have experiences that are hauntingly similar to me and yet dramatically different as well.

Before I had kids I usually had my period 9-10 times in a year. That’s not awesome. Folks who are inflicted with a uterus are “supposed” to have more like 12-13 in a year. I had never had sufficiently good nutrition to bleed as often as I was supposed to. In a way this was protective because the depths of my suicidality were hard to bear 10 times in a year. I’m grateful there weren’t an extra 3 cycles.

My children bleed 12-13 times a year. It’s fucking wild. I now bleed 12-13 times a year. What the absolute fuck. Most of the time it’s moderately inconvenient but my PMDD cycles have improved dramatically over the years. At this point I have a really extreme PMDD cycle 2-4 times in a year. It has gotten lighter and lighter with the birth control I’ve been on since Noah died. I no longer hemorrhage every month! It feels super good for me.

When I am this kind of depressed and low and sad and self hating Noah would take the opportunity to poke me really hard. In this state, when I’m tetchy and crotchety and oversensitive like fuck, he could get me to say true things that I won’t say the rest of the time because I’m too inhibited. I would complain about things that I usually suck up. He savored having access to my brain in this weakened state. I couldn’t defend myself by hiding all the things that bother me. They come tumbling out like a waterfall.

I barely snapped at Gentleman on Sunday. I was a hair bitchy. I immediately walked away to calm down and I came back and apologised. He let it go. There was no drama.

I have barely spoken to him since. This is not a space I can inhabit with people anymore. When I feel like this I need to avoid people.

I am always the third to bleed. There’s an order with the kids. The severity of the first person often indicates how the wind is blowing. All of us are having an extremely low month. Not one person in my house has hope in their heart right now. Instead what we have is the ability to sit together and commiserate about how awful it is to have your brain do this. We bitch loudly about how much our bodily functions are ridiculous and impossible and stupid and mean.

We talk about a lot of what is making us sad. I am leaving big pieces of my sad out. I share the things that feel appropriate. I am careful. I am moderate. I think about their needs before I speak my troubles.

I miss Noah. I miss being married to a tremendous asshole who gave me permission to be an asshole because we matched. I could say any rude thing to him and I didn’t have to apologise.

I will certainly never feel ok being a raging asshole at my carefully polite English boyfriend.

It’s definitely a day to hide and scream all the things I will never feel ok speaking to another human being again.

Enh, except for all the hours I have to do my day job. And I’m meeting friends. Parts of the schedule have to go on even if I feel like shit. It doesn’t matter how I feel; it matters what I do. I need to see friends and not be an asshole. There is no space for me to be an asshole anywhere in my life. I don’t think I will ever deliberately bring an asshole into my life again. At this point I don’t have the time and space to smash the rough edges off before bringing them around my kids. I had years to work on Noah. He was allowed to be an asshole the way I was allowed to be an asshole: in a room alone together. Not at our kids. Not at our friends. Not at people we loved. Not at coworkers.

If people in public react to me being visibly distressed I can say “I miss Noah/my husband” and they will nod and stop asking me questions and that’s neatly handled. I don’t have to tell a very big piece of the truth. I am not allowed to word vomit my pain on anyone outside of my house. That’s private. It’s not a secret (obviously) but it’s the kind of thing people don’t want to see in public. There are rules to the social contract. The rules here are far more strict than where I am from. Publicly weeping and sobbing is not acceptable. Get your shit together.

I am definitely definitely definitely not allowed to say mean but very true things.

The only person who ever wanted that from me is gone.

It is a relief that what I am left with is people who weep with me and say things like, “I’m very glad that even on my worst days I am incapable of believing ‘no one likes me’ because I have you.” There is so much I have done wrong in this life, and so many people I have hurt with mean but true things. I feel the weight of it all the time. I am so conscious of how I have failed people. I have not failed these three people. I’m doing really well.

We live in each other’s pockets in a way that is far outside the norm for most humans. When Noah was here it was so intense. Since he died the older kids have started leaving the nest more as they gain adulthood. Pretty much the main time I am not in a room with my baby is when I am smoking pot. When I get access to pills I will have an unholy number of hours a day with her. Frankly, she needs them. She needs to be around other humans and she needs a lot of assistance interacting with the world.

I knew I would have high needs children when I was 17 based on my lived experiences. I wanted to have them and meet their fucking needs so I could find out what people like that were like.

My children tell me regularly that they appreciate all that I have done for them. Well, they don’t tell me that at all until they are about 15. At 15 they start having gratitude. It’s been terrific to experience. I thought it would take till their late 20’s if we ever got to this point at all. They know that I have pretty much given up having independence for this indenture. I have given it my whole fucking soul and almost all of my time for 18 years with another 9 years 5 months and 17 days to go on my term of indenture. I am a walking, talking, world interpreting edutainment experience. I am a fucking 3 ring circus. I help my autistic weirdos understand the gulf between their life and what everyone else is experiencing.

It is hard as my kids develop their own alphabet soup collection. We walk into assessments prepared with our fucking data. We talk about all the things we do actively on a daily/weekly/monthly basis to manage our complications and symptoms. I have to admit it is tremendously fucking awesome that in every case the specialists have said, “You are already doing everything we try desperately to get people to do. You are the embodiment of best practices.” I like validation as much as the next insecure nitwit.

I am struggling with the ways my internalised ableism rubs up against the reality I live with. I want us to make tremendous ambitious plans. I have always made ambitious plans. It’s different now that Noah isn’t here to catch me when I crash and burn. When I got home from the road trip in 2015 I was in so much pain that I had lost most of my peripheral vision. I didn’t move for about a month. I let him do everything for the kids and the house and unpacking from the trip. I was completely numb from pain. I shut down entirely. I pushed way past where I should have stopped because I couldn’t let myself fail.

Do you know how cool it is that my kids make prudent choices when facing risk? They understand the difference between pushing through something being hard and doing something stupid. I think back to the choices I made at their age and I marvel. These people are going to do fine in life. They are bold and they do cool stuff. They also make conscious space in their life for the need to collapse. They create room where it’s not failure, it is accepting that they can’t do something on a given day. They can get back to stuff later. They don’t feel the same drive I feel to push through no matter how much damage they are inflicting on themselves. They talk about the recovery costs and why something isn’t worth it. They actually believe the shit I say. I’m over here saying it hoping that someday I will believe it. They have arrived. It’s wild.

Living with them is really cool. It scares me though. I don’t like receiving help from them when I’m the one doing the worst. They are kinda insistent. We are so alike. We do a lot of staying out of each other’s personal business on stuff. Privacy is a very big deal in our house. Rooms are not to be entered without permission. I don’t like going through people’s stuff. It makes me feel like shit. I do it as little as I can. My plan here is to earn a relationship with my adult children. I have to respect them as autonomous humas to get that. I have to start early and practice what I preach the whole damn way through. It’s not easy. I have as big of an ego as anyone else. There are times I want to shine/shape them around making me look good. I breathe deeply and let it go. I need to look good or not based on whether I am acting right. Not whether I can make someone else act right. Which is complicated. I don’t believe I should control how my children dress/wear their hair/enjoy appropriate media. (Of fucking course I keep the inappropriate media away from them. My kids are sheltered little bastards. They will give you long lectures on the harms of watching pornography before you have your own sex life.)

I am feeling tremendously insecure. I never feel like I have done enough. I haven’t gone far enough to push my kids into learning/proving they know/earning some award. It’s an awkward thing to carry. I offer my children the chance to opt in to proving what they know in ways that will be more seen to the outside world. They shrug and move on with doing things how they like to do it. I have to cross my fingers and pray. At some point they will want to earn more money than I want to pay them. They will figure it out. I have faith.

It is a fascinating thing having almost all of my attention turn to Shortie. I’ve not had this one on one experience with a learning child before. My older kids are just over two years apart. They have been a pair for a long time, even though they were always learning at different levels. They had to share activities and time. My youngest has been baggage for most of her life as she was dragged to their stuff. Now my days are focused around her in a really dramatic way. This is the amount of time/attention my oldest is grateful he never experienced. He is quite certain that he is glad he is not an only child because I would have crushed him under the weight of being my sole project child. He is probably right. Shortie won’t be crushed because I am a lot more burned out than I used to be. I don’t have as much force to give. I am tired down to the marrow of my bones. I am with her. I answer questions and interact with her a lot of the time. I am also lying still while reading a book a lot of the time.

I am being very careful not to become my mother. A lot of what I struggle to forgive my mother for revolves around the ways her extreme neglect allowed me to experience really vile things. I was lonely and isolated and she had no way to try to ameliorate that. She didn’t have any money and she didn’t know how to do it while we were shifted from room to room in city after city. I have spent my entire parenting life afraid of the knock on the door from CPS/social workers checking up on the welfare of my family. It’s kinda funny. I’m really racking up points on that front. I’ve been reported in two countries. In both cases the social worker ended telling me that they have great confidence I am doing all that can be done in a difficult circumstance and they wish me the best. Authority tends to approve of me when it shows up to spot check my work.

People who don’t like me and who judge me stay trying the system though. They are certain that their dislike of my methods is proof that I am doing awful things. The first time the bad thing was entirely outside my control and I was managing it as well as a thing can be managed. The second time it was for absolutely fictitious and malicious bullshit. Something that was demonstrably untrue as soon as you walk into the house.

There are a lot of ways that I am a failure as a human being. I have never tried to deny that. I am a really good mother. I am an excellent teacher. I am as much of a saint in the patience department as Noah ever was and maybe even more. I am masterful at coregulating people who are distressed. For these three humans I am a gifted interpreter for the world. I can see the gaps in the schema they have experienced and the schemas of the people around them. I can talk about cultural/social differences and why other people are going to start every conversation with a completely different point of view. I talk very concretely about the water we swim in with our little pod. I talk about the rules and the structures that have shaped it. I talk about how their father and I came to the set of agreements we did about how to live in our little glass bowl together.

As young adults they tell me how grateful they are that they have completely missed that most of the world is obsessed with dieting. I fucking love that my child can boldly assert in their medical appointments which symptoms started long before they were obese and adult sized; they happened when they were a skinny little fuck of a young kid. The obesity came afterwards and was caused by the symptoms. When we talk about how active we are despite our demonstrative disabilities doctors express great surprise and delight. They wish they could get other patients to do even a small fraction of all the adapting we have done.

My kids have come with me on my journey towards taking care of my body. They watched the elimination diets and nutrition work. They understand why I exercise like it is a job. We are all as active as we can be and that means sometimes we drop out of everything for six or more weeks because we are simply unwell. Sometimes it is six months. Acceptance of this variability is embedded in the walls of our family home like a placenta embeds itself in the uterus. We carry this shell that permits us to be weak and not well without being impacted by the larger world. We have our own experience of being alive. It feels intensely privileged. I also know that I was sick like this when I was poor as fuck. It’s not always been like it is now. I have not always been safe. I have always been sick.

If I had a full diagnosis list before I had children, would I have had children? I don’t know. I know that two of my children are on a path to try to have their uteruses removed ASAP. They have no interest in 40-50 years of this. They watch what my body goes through and they don’t want it. They are each having their own painful and terrible journeys that are complicated for a lot of reasons.

I’ve been chewed out for using the language “inflicted with a uterus” because it sounded “derogatory to cis women”. Obviously I took that on and complied instantly, no? Obviously the feelings of cis women on the internet need to drive my language evolution. I should definitely not direct my language at the nonbinary person and the man who both happen to be inflicted with a uterus who are under my care. I should not care about their feelings at all. I should not at all casually refer to the fact that having this organ is fucking brutal when it doesn’t function easily and well. Some cis women have dandy experiences with their uteri and that’s not my damn problem.

We are humans having a collectively miserable experience with this organ that was inflicted upon us by fate. We didn’t choose it. There is camaraderie at many levels that are good for my soul. It’s also awkward sometimes complicated that I will probably have different conversations with my daughter. I don’t push her towards being cis anymore than I pushed her siblings towards being trans. I ask my children to confirm their identities and pronouns with me on a semi-regular basis. I want to respect status updates and I know that sometimes telling me is a little hard for a lot of complicated reasons outside of my control.

It’s kinda annoying that I am a fucking saint when it comes to accepting their various difficulties and they still sometimes go through paroxysms of terror that if they tell me a thing about them that I will suddenly reject them. It stays not happening. They have to have their feelings anyway. It’s kinda nice that the older they get the faster it is ok to slap a quick “Feelings are not facts” in their direction so they can mostly snap out of it. It’s really neat to have such a relationship with people who have been trained all their lives how to have feelings but not be controlled by them. They have all their damn feelings. They know how to walk out of rooms before the meltdown starts. They know what kinds of questions to ask to get the exact information they need. They understand themselves and how they fit into the world.

Yeah. There’s a lot of shit I have been repeating on loop in my head for days. True things. Mean things. I am not saying any of them. I’m not writing them down either. Instead I am letting myself be aware of how lucky I am that my baseline is hiding at home with these people. These people who understand that when they ask me who I am meeting and I say “I think you would be happier not knowing” they need to nod and change the subject. I offer information freely on demand. If they actually want to know something I will tell them even though sometimes knowing things can be a burden. I will tell the age appropriate version of that story.

There’s a lot I suck at. There’s a lot of areas of life where I feel like a giant failure. I will be grateful every day of my life that I got to make a family with Noah. I like our children very much. It is an honour to serve them. It is the blessing of my life that I get to raise people of my blood the way I see fit. I couldn’t make “perfect” children by the measures that other people use. My children will not validate me by graduating from top schools. They will have eclectic lives shaped by the disabilities they inherited. There was no way for them to avoid some of the poor hands they have received in this game of poker. The deck was stacked against them. It would have been awesome if Noah and I had understood our genetics better before we had kids. Instead we looked at each other and said you are shiny I wonder what the babies you make will be like? They are fucking rad and I love them so much and I am so proud.

Tomorrow my kid turns 16. One more official milestone without Noah. It is now hard that their birthday triggers the quick two week period with our wedding anniversary and my birthday. I think this is going to be a brutal run this year. It should be our 20th anniversary. We weren’t sure what we were going to do for it, yet. He was going to tattoo me for our 30th anniversary. It felt like a safe time to go so far.

I have a hard time every year with this span of time. Noah was not good at big days. It was a thing we agreed to mostly not have because he was excellent for 358 days per year. I couldn’t hold those particular failures against him. I used to go off and spend my birthday alone because I didn’t want to have to take care of anyone on that day. I also needed to move through the world in a set and a setting where of course no one said happy birthday. It’s a complicated thing.

Now I can’t go. I will go again someday. Not the now. I’m taking all of my time off from the kids to go have sex. I don’t have a very deep well to draw from in terms of child care for Shortie on a longer scale. Overnights are not small asks. It’s not worth it to me to be alone on my birthday this year. Also, my kids will be very nice to me. They will treat me how I treat them on their birthdays. They know no other way. They are excited that I won’t be gone. They haven’t spent that many of my birthdays with me because most of the ones they did involved me crying and I don’t like doing that to people. I don’t want to cry at them on my birthday. I have not had good birthdays, by and large. It is sad thinking that my birthdays are likely to improve with Noah gone. He really sucked at big days. No one else can deliver his intensity 358 days a year. They can manifest a handful of big days. It is weird sitting in my belly with how little that feels like it matters.

I would rather have shitty birthdays with Noah that great birthdays without him. What a terrible bind I have created. It doesn’t matter what I would prefer. I will get what I get. I don’t think they will all be great. I think I am going to spend my birthdays crying in my room now. I don’t think it is better.

My son writes fiction stories about people who endure terrible trauma and how they cope afterwards. People ask him if he has had a deeply traumatic life on a regular basis. He says that he didn’t have much of any significant trauma in his life, obviously now except his father dying suddenly. He says that he grew up with people who had were highly traumatised and he translates what he has seen to new characters. It’s a little creepy at times. He is writing translations of me and Noah. I can see it in the layers of complexity he puts into different perspectives. It’s never a blatant thing but if you understand the pattern you can see it super clearly. He’s a really good writer. I think he is going to be a much better writer than I am in the long run. That’s nice.

Even when I want to feel like there is no hope and everything is dreadful and I will never be fully accepted again I have to go have breakfast with these three people every day. It’s a fairly absurd claim. We are a massive mutual admiration society. We all have our areas to shine and we hand the spotlight around as much as possible. We are a fully fleshed out comedic/dramatic ensemble cast. It is fun to live with these people. No, we will never be a reality show. Ew.

We accept each other. We also understand that boundaries are great and everyone should be private about the things that family members would be happier not knowing about each other. We’ve been specific about what sorts of things go on that list. It’s not an ambiguous set up. When they were way the fuck too young to actually have such a thought about a given person we talked about how we can let them have personal space for privacy once they are adults who date. It is baked into the assumption of our household that someday most of the adult members of the house will probably have sex. Here’s how to do it politely.

It’s time to stop typing before I get more explicit on that topic because now it’s not my business to share more about that. I can face the day now. I can go do the thing that is my big success in life. I can kiss people awake and say I am so glad to see them again. They will believe me because I will mean it with my entire soul.

Yes, I do have their consent to talk about the stuff I do talk about. We have talked about the lines on a number of occasions and we will do so again. I don’t own their stories.

I miss sharing every thought with him.

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My son shares his dating exploits with me the way I write mine online. I find this touching. I have not modeled this with him as I have been dating. I have been incredibly moderate in what I have shared for lots of good reasons. He had no notion of how many people I uhh auditioned last year. I have always treated my friend reports to his dad like this, though. He watched me do it. It’s like he is live-tweeting at me now. I get little blurbs from him through the day.

It’s funny how since Noah died EC and I both notice that he is a lot more like me than he used to think. One of the things I wanted (and got) in having a third child was to break the “teams” shit we had going before Shortie came along. For a long time Eldest Child was Noah’s Gemini and Middle Child was my Virgo. In many temperamental ways the patterns are remarkable true and consistent. Noah and EC were both oldest kids. For a long time MC was the baby like me. Noah and EC tend in the stoic direction. MC and I struggle with our explosiveness. There are distinct and dramatic patterns.

MC is discovering ways that they had a lot more in common with their dad than they knew. Puberty and social isolation are combining to teach them a lot of the overwhelming anxiety that Noah struggled with despite growing up in a stable home. MC doesn’t have the bone deep sensation of being adored. I failed there. I didn’t manage to inculcate that a second time. I mean, they know I love and adore them. They have a lot more awareness of the world rejecting them. They feel more isolated and different. They didn’t spend as many years in the welcoming bosom of my queerkin in the Bay. They lost that and then went into lock down in a new country. They have a lot more anxiety than EC does. EC had a big bounce of anxiety when he went to school. With MC it is feeling like something where they will have to settle into long term management of chronic mental health struggle in this area.

EC wants to share every thought in his head. I am still his favourite audience. I choose shouting into the void. It is the only place I have ever felt comfortable. If people opt in to reading my words here, it isn’t my fault if they have feelings. I didn’t make you come here.

I am struggling really hard. I over extended myself. I should not have reached out to Pretty Lady yet. I needed her to have far more patience than was considerate. I wanted her to invest in me in the long run. She needed me to invest in her more upfront. I can understand not finding that deal appealing when I can’t match the energy she has right now. I can’t though.

Some days I pause long enough to feel in my bones how deep my burn out is. I was intensely burned out before he died. He wasn’t looking for a job because he wanted to be able to genuinely give me long periods of rest. I wanted to stop homeschooling when we moved to Scotland. I am tired. I have some friends who spend time with Shortie so I can be off duty for a bit. They all say that when they go home they are exhausted. Most of the time they fall asleep. Hell, my cleaning lady is here for two hours and she says she goes home and can’t do anything for the rest of the day because being in my house is so overwhelming. We are just talking around her. We aren’t being intense at her.

As I hide in my room because I am banished from the kitchen I have to take a moment to feel in my heart that I got here. I have one adult child. I have a quasi-adult child in 7 more weeks. (Scotland is weird.) I have one more small one to get through puberty. This is what I set out to get. I have always felt deep shame that “find a partner” was not my #1 life goal. I talked to Noah about this. He knew he was, in large part, a means to an end. He helped me have children. That was my goal. To make people of my bloodline who were ok and who made it to adulthood with as little trauma as possible. That level is higher than I would have preferred. I have my babies. They are magnificent to me. Including in the way that gets me banished from the kitchen from 10pm-12am every night. That is when I have a choice. I can let a magical fairy clean up my kitchen in complete privacy or I can incur the wrath of the furies if I enter the kitchen.

Really, is it even a choice?

All of my children have a lot in common with me. I find it affirming that we get along well. We can all set boundaries and make demands. Oh boy is my youngest making a lot of demands. This is tricky. MC, Shortie and I are all very PDA flavoured and that makes the fact that we are all demanding motherfuckers pretty complicated. It was easier to give them both the space they need when I had Noah giving me the space I need. I don’t feel like I can find Mary Poppins anymore. I am too tired. I don’t have the ability to be practically perfect and attentive to their every need. My battery has been empty for a long time.

In my mind I carry a picture of my grandmother in law. I have always considered her as a there but for the grace of God go I sort of character. She was a brilliant woman. She was also deeply hard and selfish and unable to consider the needs of her children. She was violent and cruel and abusive. She kicked my mother in law out, literally kicked, when she got married. She said her daughter had become a whore. That’s a fascinating view to have of someone getting married as an adult while not pregnant in the 1970’s. Hardly harlot behaviour.

Like Auntie was a martyr I don’t want to be. Like my mother was a perpetual victim and childlike in her inability to care for herself. Like my sister passed on the legacy of destructive behaviour we were taught. Like my mother in law didn’t get her PTSD under control in time to save her relationship with her oldest child.

I have so many examples I want to do at least slightly better than. Not because I think I am better than any of them. I’m not. I’m equally as damaged and distraught and overwhelmed and out of cope. I am better resourced than all of them put together, though. I don’t share their justifications for needing to lose their shit. My therapist keeps trying to convince me that my life is super hard. They would like me to give myself a lot more slack. They worry a lot about my nervous system. I appreciate that. I am definitely feeling the HPA axis dysfunction lately. My body is not doing well. I’m brittle. I’m cranky in ways I don’t mean to be. Stupid shit sets me off. I don’t like being this low in reserves. I keep feeling like I just need a little rest. Then I am interrupted by one of a million things.

I need to have more capacity. The only way to increase my capacity is to do less. I can’t do more with my capacity if I am doing less. I’m kinda fucked here. I feel terribly selfish for missing Noah because he gave me rest. He did a lot of taking work away from me and sending me off to be alone. He and I were very interchangeable in the house. It was amazing. He was doing more and more with every year. I really appreciate the way that we never stopped turning towards one another. We were both doing intense stuff to bring focus back to us as a dyad all the way through the end.

I feel like I will permanently have less than 40% of the capacity I used to have. I can’t manage to finagle that level of support in time before Shortie has outgrown the really intense period. I am in this death march until she hits increased independence. My coparent is gone. He was amazing. I can’t imagine having anyone try harder to support me in raising a family. I don’t seek another coparent. That is not a fair role to ask of anyone. Noah casts a big shadow.

I can see my daughter casting about for father figures to bond with, though. I am glad that she has a few different ones. I am glad that she gets to have a bunch of men who are being loving and considerate and careful of her as she goes through this period. I’m lucky. I laid the groundwork for this in advance and friends have stepped forward when I asked. She is clearly pretty interested in having a relationship with Gentleman. I keep thinking how much Noah would approve of Gentleman. Noah was always afraid of me choosing to date people who were disrespectful of me. He was very concerned that I not subject myself to any more substandard treatment. Adoring me is step one. If they don’t, off they fuck.

Noah both did and didn’t set me up well for losing him. In many ways I am struggling because I lost my main emotional support person on top of my main physical support person on top of my coparent and exercise buddy and there is the tiny little matter that he was the only real witness to my life. It’s overwhelming how hard it is keeping all of my shit off stage from the kids. I feel like such a liar all the time. I don’t share every thought with my kids.

They definitely think I exist to be an external hard drive for their brains though. Holy shit.

I am struggling with getting us to all the appointments. All of our fucking bodies are high maintenance and I don’t know how much it is ADHD and how much it is perimenopause and how much it is grief and how much it is cumulative brain injuries but fuck I can’t remember anything. I listen to my friend cite to the penny how much money she has in her bank account and I feel deep shame. I couldn’t keep numbers in my head right now if I was paid for it. I’ve always struggled with dyscalculia. It feels worse than ever. It’s a good thing I have people who are actually watching my finances. I can’t fuck anything up too much. The money is out of my direct control. That is both terrifying and quite a relief. I am scared of being this person. I am scared of having this kind of responsibility.

How in the fuck did I manage to end up the fucking heiress for some generational wealth bullshit?! This was not something I fucking planned for. It will allow me to keep my babies safe. It reminds me of the story Peter wrote about me. He depicted me as quite a savage creature, covered in scars and wounds. I crouch over my sleeping babies with a knife prepared to end any creature who accosts them. I don’t actually think the knife will be necessary. This is good. I’m not a particularly violent human as they go. No matter what my father would have wanted for me. No matter what my blood thirsty ancestors would have done.

I feel alone. I feel like I must be alone for all the hours of the night and day. I feel like this is a terribly heavy burden to carry forward.

I feel terrible because I should be soaking in how awesome my boyfriend is. He really is. Instead I ruminate on the story in progress from a holistic point of view. There are so many moving pieces. I feel like I am drowning. On I swim anyway. No time to stop.

Tactical errors, failures, and belonging

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The younger kids and I tried to finish The Great Glen Way over the weekend. We are not managing. Both my feet and Shortie’s feet were A) not properly conditioned for this much exercise and B) improperly shod in shoes that did little to hold out the wet. We could not finish walking 29 miles in wet socks. So we bugged out and came home again. This is the end of the world but we had to cancel hotel reservations at the last second and I’m out a few hundred pounds. I feel upset about wasting the money. (It won’t cause a hardship but I will have less to spend on fun for the rest of the year.) I feel upset about not properly training. (I have been so tired I couldn’t demand that everyone prep with me.) I feel upset that when I asked for help from a pal the response was, “I knew this would happen.” I feel like I am going to spend the rest of my life failing at everything I try.

The upside was that the kids and I had a lot of fun together. We bond really well when we are being active outside. That’s really lovely. I appreciate how much MC still likes hanging out with me. They are going through a lot lately. They are nearly 16 and they are hurting pretty badly about the fact that they have not managed to make any close friends while living here. There was a boy they chased hard for a few years but eventually his complete lack of reciprocation was a turn off. They need friends and no one in this town seems to have any interest in spending time with them one on one. I can understand why that is making them feel so depressed and desolate. The other day we were talking about their despair and I said I hoped they know that I always love and want them. They gave me a long, level stare. “Mom, I know you want me and you love me. I also inherited my dad’s overwhelming anxiety that no one can really accept me and there is the rest of the whole damn world that is treating me like shit. It’s hard.” They have so much wisdom. It broke my heart. I have tried really hard to make up for the rest of the world but they are right–I can’t. I am just their mom. That’s all I have to offer. I can’t also be their peer. I’ve been super good about making that clear all their life.

Shortie and I need proper waterproof shoes and then we need to break them in and then we need to try again. One of these days we will do the whole trail again in one go. We can train and get to that point. I’m not sure which year it’ll happen in, but it will be great when it happens. In the meantime both kids are excited about the possibility of going camping with Gentleman and doing day hikes to build towards that. They like his company.

I think it was a bit of a tactical error moving to an island where the national pastime is taking the piss. Gentleman doesn’t mean to hurt my feelings. Logically I can tell that he is being playful in his way. The trouble is, I’m still me. I have always been painfully earnest and credulous and gullible. It’s connected in big ways to moving so much as a kid. I went from one school and culture and home life to another and people would be sarcastic about me not already getting how things are as if their way of being is the singular experience people have. It took a lot of testing and experts to convince me that I was smart at all. Eventually I developed a strained rigid kind of self esteem around my intelligence but mostly I feel stupid a lot. I miss details. I fail to finish things. I misunderstand how much preparation is necessary for things. I believe people when they say things to me and when it turns out they were “playing” I feel like a stupid piece of shit again.

I came home yesterday feeling really on the edge of losing it because I failed. It was hard that my ride said plainly that my failure was expected. That cut to the heart for me.

This is when I miss Noah super hard. Even when my failures were kind of predictable he was always surprised. He thought I was overwhelmingly competent. He didn’t tease me because he didn’t want to make me feel stupid. He wanted me to feel smart. He believed I was one of the smartest people he ever met and he wanted to keep me on a high pedestal, he never wanted to knock me down pegs. He was so careful not to be sarcastic with me unless he used a silly ostentatious voice. As a family we have developed specific verbal habits around only using sarcasm in an over the top distinguishable voice. We have an environment in our house where intensely literal autistics are set up for success when it comes to understanding verbal playfulness. My children chorus delightedly “That’s your sarcastic voice!” There is no ambiguity between our normal speech and our sarcastic speech. We might as well be turning on a bright blinking neon light every time.

I like my boyfriend. I’m not trying to be nasty about him at all. He has a super intense and dark deadpan sarcasm as his natural approach to surviving a life that hasn’t been full of fun and ease. Even when he’s being cheerful and upbeat there’s still a lot of sarcasm and insincere statements. I am struggling with it a lot in general. Yesterday I lost it and ugly cried for a really long time. I had invited him over hoping to get a bit high and a little tipsy and then have fun exploratory sex to distract me from feeling like a failure. Then he came over and made a series of small, individually insignificant sarcastic statements. By like the 5th one I was done.

Reader, no fun sex happened. I couldn’t even cuddle he spent the night in my bed. I was pulled into myself hard. I feel bad for it. I wasn’t doing it to punish him. I can’t reach out when I feel like this. I feel stupid. I feel worthless. I feel unworthy of kindness or understanding. I feel alienated from connection. I feel othered and unwanted. In local parlance I feel like a daftie. I want to stare at the floor and not engage in conversation because I’m going to be too stupid to follow it anyway. I definitely don’t want to increase my offer of vulnerability. I feel kicked in a way that I want to curl around myself and protect my sensitive bits. I feel like I am never going to have a relationship where someone thinks I’m smart again.

It was a big part of my relationship with Noah that a lot of the permission he gave me to have control and be an authority was based on my supposed towering intellect and ability to know the right things.

Now I feel like a fucking moron who can’t get anything right. I keep running into all the ways that Noah smoothed out the edges of my diagnosed disabilities and made me superhuman.

I know that Gentleman had no intention to make me feel bad. I am sorry that I am reacting like this. It doesn’t seem fair to him to have to deal with my over the top hours of sobbing over stupid small sarcastic statements. He wasn’t trying to be mean. I’m ridiculous. And also I’m up to maybe hour three of crying in the last 13 hours. It’s not his fault that I am such a broken piece of shit. He should be allowed to relax and play in his relationship.

It’s not his fault that I am a fucking retard who breaks down crying at the drop of a hat. I have to admit that it’s a bit nice this morning that he is still asleep and I can scream/cry and walk around flapping without him seeing. I don’t like demonstrating this behaviour. I don’t like being visible as a pathetic baby who still feels like I will never be loved or appreciated.

I have mixed feelings about having my kids these days. I feel a lot of guilt for how bad ECs health is. I gave him these problems. I am very conscious that if Noah hadn’t stepped forward to offer me my dreams on a platter I probably would have suicided. Maybe that would have been better for all concerned. He promised he would let me die first so that I didn’t have to be alone and unsupported any more. But he fucking left me. Now I get to spend the rest of my life feeling stupid and unwanted even when people like me fine. I can’t read the signals. Being kind to me takes too much effort. I can’t expect people to bother. I have to take what I get and deal with it.

Well hey, at least I get to have a whole separate building in which I can scream and cry and rant? That’s lucky at least. Thank you, Noah.

I did try to have a conversation with Gentleman in between sobbing bursts. He didn’t mean to make me feel bad. I know that. I feel like my reaction is so far out of proportion that I can’t justify it at all. He wasn’t trying to make me feel sad. I’m over reacting. I am the problem. I should learn how to take a joke.

I’m almost 45. I kind of think the ship has sailed on me getting over being gullible. Instead I choose being alone a lot. That is how I can make sure I don’t have to take jokes. I miss being married to someone who believed I have a tenuous grasp on staying attached to life. I miss the ways that Noah bent over backwards to make me feel seen and important. I don’t think I will have much of that going forward. I think most of my future is going to involve a lot of sneaking off to cry in private because I opted in to a culture where making someone like me the butt of the joke is most people’s reason for living. This is my future now. I miss Noah. I miss the way we soothed each other’s anxiety. I miss being known. I miss having someone believe in me obsessively. I miss having my house be a place where no one said things to make me feel stupid. My home was in Noah’s arms and he thought I was a fucking genius.

Now I’m just a fucking daftie.

Defrocking a saint

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I’ve been calling him Saint Noah in a mixture of scorn and admiration for a long time. People started telling me that he was a saint not long after we got married. Obviously someone must be a saint to put up with me. He wrote a lot about how challenging it was for me that people would hear me talk about him and think I was so lucky to have him but also he would talk about me and people think I was so lucky to have him. People didn’t, by and large, think he was lucky to have me. People pitied him for putting up with me. It’s been a hard thing for me.

In the past few days I’ve had chats with my kids about their grief. We are all on different roads. We don’t have to perceive people in the same way.

One of the reasons I felt deeply compelled to have a third child was because we fell into habits of Team Virgo vs Team Gemini. When there were only two children we divided them as being more like me and more like him. This was manifested in ways big and small. My kid is still dealing with the results of this. I wish they had been given a chance to have a more mature relationship with their dad but life isn’t fair. As it stands, what they remember is they had a dad who didn’t like them very much. They remember having a dad who was constantly impatient with them and scornful about their challenges. They remember that when it was their turn to go to a programming conference with dad after years of waiting… he took their brother again because that was going to be more fun for him.

The patience that Noah gave me was all he had. He didn’t leave any in reserve for the kid who has a huge percentage of my challenges. My experience of raising this kid has been “Holy shit. A huge chunk of the stuff I’ve blamed on trauma was really just me being autistic because here is my mirror copy having the same struggles with an entirely different origin story.” Noah didn’t have the patience to help this one sort through food struggles after helping me. I have done it instead. I helped this one sort their feelings and learn how to have physical self control when it feels impossible. I helped this one feel normal and not broken.

My son still has a hero worship thing going on with his dad. Noah was the best parent possible for that child. The two of them had a lot in common. It’s interesting that my son keeps commenting on all the ways he is finding that we are actually super alike in a shocking variety of ways and he never noticed while his dad was alive. I feel like this is good. We are leaning into each other and discovering new levels of closeness. I fucking love having him be my adult child. We get along so well. We are so deeply compatible. This is great.

I am having a lot of mixed feelings every time one of the kids volunteers that if one parent had to die early, they are really grateful I am the one who is left because no one thinks Noah would have done well without me. This feels like a sharp contrast with my belief that he was the functional one and I am the failure. He was the designated grown up and I was the chaos. Enh, in some ways.

I have been holding on to a lot of guilt and shame for Noah’s death. I feel responsible. There are aspects of the story I can’t write yet and that is eating me alive. I feel like a liar. I can’t tell the whole story until the kids are grown. They all understand that someday I will write it all down eventually but they get to grow up first. They get to have their own story first.

I was talking to MC yesterday about my feelings of guilt. They told me that he didn’t die because he was sacrificing himself for me. He did something selfish and impulsive that I told him not to do and there were consequences. That isn’t my fault. My therapist and my boyfriend have both been telling me similar things for a long while. It hits different coming from my kid. It hits differently when my baby, who lived with both Noah and I and watched our relationship, says that their dad wasn’t a saint. He was a flawed human.

I don’t spend a lot of time shit talking Noah in front of the kids. That’s a no go topic. I will say that we had struggles sometimes but I don’t get into the nitty gritty much. Maybe I will as they get older. I’m certainly answering my son’s questions more honestly now.

My kid was telling me that they feel very guilty because people around the world have mourned for their father harder than they have. It sits heavy in my belly that part of the reason all of those people felt so connected to Noah was because he gave his time and his focus to them instead of to MC. MC is the one who lost out on the best parts of him because Noah didn’t make MC a priority.

A long time ago a therapist told me that when you want to evaluate a human, don’t ask their friends or coworkers; ask their children. Children see the best and the worst of their parents. They suffer from the failures and they benefit from the successes that come through their parents lives.

My child feels like their dad didn’t like them very much and never put much effort into seeing them. They feel bad about feeling like that. They feel like they should create a narrative that puts a better light on Noah since everyone else liked him so much. That’s a terrible kind of pressure to put on yourself. They have told me a number of times throughout their life that they are grateful to have me as a mom. I never make them feel bad about themself. When they struggle I help them feel like it is a speed bump and not a dead end. I am their biggest fan. I make them feel like they are a wonderful and deeply valued human.

My son has told me the same thing.

My daughter is young enough that I can be a self depricating dickhead and I can still write off her opinion as being developmental.

All three of them have said that if they had to lose a parent they are glad to still have me because they don’t think their dad would have coped very well. He was too dependent on me. Even my fucking 8 year old has said this. They all feel like their father would have abandoned them if I hadn’t been around to kick him in the ass and tell him to be a good father. I am so sad they saw him that way. I don’t know that I agree with them totally. I think he would have tried.

I can’t really say they are wrong though. Noah didn’t want kids on his own. He wanted me and this was the price. He was able to feel close to the children when they reflected him back at himself, when they were good at math, when they were precociously verbal, when they were very far on the stoic end of emotional expression.

I love MC to the moon and back but stoic is not a word that can be used to describe them. They are now a very controlled kind of volatile. They have the feelings and they express them without inflicting destruction at this point. We don’t quit. We complain. When I watch them clear the room before they start working because they will stomp and curse and shout and if they are alone they don’t have to deal with anyone getting butthurt about it. They learned that it is ok to do this watching how I put together Ikea furniture. Leave me the fuck alone. I will come back and not be angry when I am done with this task. This task is fraught with frustrating moments and my fingers will hurt and I will cry and scream. Don’t worry about it. That will happen and I will then move on without it being a big deal as long as no one around me makes it a big deal.

Noah made it a really big deal when MC needed this space too. It was hard to watch.

I miss Noah so much that sometimes I struggle to take in breath. I don’t think I will ever stop missing him. He was my companion at a soul level. We were so enmeshed we weren’t really separate people anymore, not completely. My son misses his father a lot. He is sad not to have that relationship. He cries about it on a regular basis.

I have told MC and YC that it is ok that they aren’t crying. There is nothing wrong with them. Everyone has their own path through grief. Even though all three of us are people who cry easily for many reasons that doesn’t mean they are obliged to cry over losing their dad. They are allowed to cry about the things that move them to tears. No one gets to judge what goes on that list.

I am grateful that my children are affirming for me that I am nailing the landing on this job. It is the most important thing I will ever do. I wanted to be a parent for selfish reasons. I wanted to be part of changing the dynamics of my family. I was going to make people who didn’t hate themselves for having needs. I was going to create a happy family that doesn’t have to lie and fake the happiness.

I have done that. We are a happy family. We love spending time together. We love going on adventures together. We love sharing care and support. We feel supported and encouraged together.

I am sad to know that pieces of this will be easier without Noah. Lots of other pieces are much harder. I am sad to know that my baby experiences less stress in their home without their father around. I never wanted that feeling for them. I wanted him to be as good of a daddy for them as he was for me. That’s the thing–he was also hurting me. He hated lots of things about me and he absolutely did his best to make me feel bad about myself for existing in ways that didn’t serve him. He also built me up. He was very blunt about his attempts to break me so he could build me back better. I think of him as being like a harsh Old Testament patriarch. Sure, sometimes he was a fucking asshole but he was an asshole because he was doing what was good for me….. right?

Right?

He wasn’t always good for our baby. Sometimes he was just an asshole. They feel bad about being relieved at not having to live with an asshole anymore. I knew he was an asshole. That was explicitly ok with me. My child didn’t get a choice in that agreement.

No, baby, you don’t have to cry.

I will cry but I cry over my mother and my father and Noah and Vicki and Andrew and Michael and and and. I am one who cries a lot. That doesn’t mean anyone else has to match my efforts. That would be a weird thing to push for.

You don’t owe anyone anything. You don’t owe people a performance. It’s been so cool talking to them about masking and acting and how the two are similar but different. It’s been really fun talking to them about the difference between the masking that I see and I can also see them drop the mask. They feel uncertain about their “true” personality because they mask so much. I feel really good about the fact that I can rattle off all the things that come out when they are under the most stress and they have the least cope. I have memorised you, muthafucker.

(Yeah it was funny at dinner when one of the big kids made a joke about Gentleman being the only motherfucker at the table. Yikes. The jokes fly hard and fast.)

I love that I can tell my children about themselves in tiny minute detail. I have been staring at you intently trying to learn how to understand your needs since you were created. I have read books and consulted experts and sought out evaluation over and over. I exist to streamline your jagged entrance to the world because people of our bloodline are going to have jagged entrances no matter what.

I have this overwhelming waterfall of acceptance for the challenges that come from existing in the world in the bodies they have. I get it. I help them feel like they are part of the range of human normal even when they are on the edge of a bell curve. They tell me that I make them feel important. This is good since I have devoted 28 years to study for taking care of them at this point. It is very good to hear that the only people who get to evaluate me think I am extremely good at my job.

I think Noah could have learned to communicate better with MC as an adult. I am sad they didn’t get that chance. I’m sad that Noah needed MC to come more than halfway to understanding him before he could understand them. That is truly unfortunate. I can’t change that. Noah did what he did as a father. Now we all get to live with the consequences.

I am still grateful to have had him. Marrying him was the best decision of my life. He really did make all of my dreams come true. He also made me safe for the rest of my life. He gave me the ability to be the mother that I am. I have about as low stress of a life as a human can have in this day and age. (My therapist would strenuously disagree with that statement and give me a very intense “give me a break” look.) Fine, I don’t have to earn money. At this point I am paying people to play with my money so I can have more money. My life is unreal. I read about shit like this in books as a child. I couldn’t imagine it being my future. Noah didn’t hand me this. Noah handed me a decent Silicon Valley paycheck. I scrimped and saved and gave me this. I created this future by denying myself lot of things for many years. This is yet another thing that Noah would have failed on without me. He would not have been able to scale back and live on less. He would have kept working to fund him being impulsive and selfish and careless.

I shudder to think what would have happened to the kids. He did not have my backbone of rigidity when it comes to serving the children first.

I didn’t wish him gone. I wanted to cling to him until I died. But he is gone now. I can fuck up my life now by not recognising the ways he created harm or I can help to heal that damage. I can insist on better going forward.

I am grateful for being the kind of mother who is safe to talk to about these hard things.

If I don’t do too much not enough gets done.

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My body is not happy with me. I am not doing enough cross training. The kids have been grumpy with each other. This means I am not asking for babysitting much. These periods are rough. Disequilibrium comes for us all. Mostly my children get along ridiculously well. Sometimes people are cranky. This too, shall pass.

Instead of being at lots of yoga classes and running I have been gardening a lot more. Things are really coming along. I’m going to get a lot more food this year and that’ pretty exciting for me. It’s definitely time to be picking greens every single day. This is good because I’ve been having an unpleasant IBS flare. The kids have been opting into cooking instead of other chores. They haven’t been wanting to bother with making vegetables a part of meals. I’ve been eating a lot of starch and cheese with occasional fatty meat. My body hurts. This is not sustainable for me. I’m feeling incredibly ill from it. I miss Noah.

This time is not forever. At some point I will have less overwhelming need to be present in the house. Then I will be able to go back to running on a schedule. Really, I should be doing it in the wee hours of the morning since I’m not sleeping anyway. It’s too bright (yes I have blackout curtains) and too warm (it’s 11C/51F at night). I am ridiculous. Maybe. Or maybe it is my body trying to shift with this season. During the winter time I sleep a lot more. I have actual data on this for almost the whole time I’ve lived here. I sleep around 6 hours a night in the summer and 9 hours a night in the winter.

I’m struggling with task initiation. I’m being hella productive in a revenge procrastination kind of way. I have so many things to do in every day that I wake up behind even though I have more hours a day to do stuff. This is highly annoying. Noah isn’t here to prompt me towards doing the “correct” task. I really hate being the designated adult. I have a lot of meetings that freak me out. I have to do a lot of paperwork. Holy crap did I under-appreciate him while he was alive. He did all the previous rounds of immigration paperwork. Ugh.

My nerve pain is terrible. It feels like no one in my house is fully able bodied. Every day is a triage between who is most able to function doing more work than is strictly ideal. We are still learning. We are still interacting with humans out of the house. We are still cos-playing as functional people but the cost is really high. We do too much borrowing from the future and having to pay back our functionality with extra painful levels of non-functioning. It happens for literally all of us. A lot of it is hormonal and cyclical. Given how synced up we are that means there’s about 18 days a month when everyone is doing well at the same time. Then there is the rest of the time.

The coil has seriously helped with my PMDD and painful periods. At this point I’m spotting a little bit when I have sex and otherwise I don’t bleed. I still have times when I feel a bit sad but that feels reasonable. I’m not having the hyperbolic suicidal jags. My brain has accepted that it’s not an option and I don’t experience the frantic keening need for it.

I feel both like I deeply and desperately need to integrate more people deeply into my life and I am feeling afraid and like I need to reject any offer of anyone getting close to me. I keep feeling trapped in the loop of feeling like I “know” that I will be rejected anyway so why bother trying. I have to try because I can’t get a yes without going through a lot of no’s. It’s the process. It hurts. I don’t want to go through the process.

Viktor Frankl teaches that humans can get through horrifying trauma if they have a why that drives them. My why for a long time has been modeling how to be a healthier human for my kids. That means I don’t get to stop. It is hard giving them what I did not get. It doesn’t matter that it is hard I have to do it anyway. That means I have to work harder not that I get to quit.

I’m tired though. Ugh. Oh well. Get up. Go shower and get dressed. Today I do need babysitting. I need to move and I need to see my friends. Part of modeling being a healthy human is having relationships. I make them tend to their friendships. Friends are the waves that carry you through life. They are very important.

“That’s not poly, it’s sequential monogamy”

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So here’s the thing. Poly doesn’t mean that you are fucking multiple people every day. It doesn’t mean that you decide “I have 15 hours to spend with people I’m fucking so I will give 7.5 hours to Person A and I will give 7.5 hours to Person B.” Well, I guess someone could do it that way if they really want to. It would be highly unusual though. We aren’t Mormons with sister-wives fighting over a shared husband.

Particularly I am in favour of the flavour of polyamory that is referred to as Relationship Anarchy. What it means is that each relationship has the ability to filter into my life as far as is fitting for that relationship. It means I take my non-sexual relationships as seriously as I take dating. I will pick platonic friends over lovers to share key moments of my life because they are the ones I want to be in that moment with.

I’ve spent a lot of my life deferring joy. “I will be able to go do a fun thing in 6 months and that will let me eat a shit sandwich every day between now and then,” I was negotiating for poly with Noah before he died. I was negotiating for being able to be allowed to pursue someone in ten years–now 8 years away. I was looking for the ability to upset the apple cart a lot when I have my last quasi-adult in the house. That was when I thought I’d be able to seriously go nuts having fun playing with lots of people. I didn’t think it would happen before then.

As I look at my life right now I am fairly convinced that timeline is still going to be a big deal. That’s when my kids start pulling away really hard. That’s when they want only a few hours a week of intense time with me. I won’t have an empty nest (I’m not sure if that will ever happen) but my time will be my own. That’s when I think I’ll be able to escalate seeing new people a lot.

Before then every change in my life is going to happen at a glacial pace. We have a really good thing going in our house. We like each other tremendously and we have a fairly well oiled machine.

We have our ways of coping. Like, MC started out bitching massively about how they aren’t “allowed to have boundaries” and then we talked a lot about the difference between a boundary and having control over other people. In the end there is a ban on anyone walking into the kitchen between 10pm and 12am. That’s when they want to be cleaning and they can’t cope with people being in there while they clean. I have to walk through the apartment patio door and go through the hallway to go between the studio and my bedroom instead of taking the straight path. When they want to do a cooking project in the middle of the day they will use the apartment kitchen and no one is allowed to enter the room. I feel so much relief in my heart that we have enough privilege to have these things be possible. This house is a really good set up for us given our challenges around interruptions and noise. We have ways to adapt the space so we are all capable of sharing our best selves.

That’s something I can work with. No one is allowed to be in the room when I assemble Ikea furniture for the same reason. I will scream. I will yell profanities. I will be entirely out of chill. I can’t control it. I can keep people away from it. MC has lived with me all their life. Sometimes when they are working they are letting out all their ambient frustration. It’s cathartic for us. When we can’t verbally express love to each other (because we are having Big Feelings) we can know that we are showing through work a demonstration of taking care of each other because we love each other. We accept that we are all people who have to go off and have our tantrums. We don’t mean anything by them. We don’t want anything to change. We don’t want people to walk on egg shells. We don’t want to upset anyone. We need to let big feelings out of our bodies. We have found ways that work well for us–as long as people stay the heck out of the room. If you come into the room when we are storming you aren’t a victim you are a volunteer. You were warned.

We always give warnings about this. We know it is happening. If a stranger walks by we can break character and apologise profusely for our manner of dealing with frustration–we thought we were alone.

If someone cannot see the benefit of something we do that’s fine. I assume most people think we are crazy. It’s going to go rough if instead of asking questions with curiosity you attack and denigrate us. We don’t respond to that. All of us can fight but we work really at making sure we don’t do that within our house any more than necessary. We have very passionate discussions and arguments at times. If someone is about too go far and say stuff that might have consequences any one of us will call a time out so that we can retreat and clear our thoughts and feel our feelings before we come back and try it again. We all know how to watch for signs of someone is about to cross a line because they are too upset. I love my housemates so much. I love the way we have decided together how we want to feel in this set of relationships. I love that we all feel we have the right to be demanding because we know people will compromise to the degree we are able. We won’t get everything we ask for. That makes it safe to ask for the stuff that is hard to ask for. Sometimes we get it because it turns out we are not able to evaluate what is easy or hard to give for someone else.

I was thinking about this last night as I was going to sleep. People are only compatible with my life if they are deeply curious as a reflex. If someone is instantly judgy I don’t have the time or energy to deal with the fall out of that. I cannot have patience for someone projecting onto me and assuming the worst. Naw. If you don’t see my desire to be there as evidence of my interest then I should walk on. I can have patience for all the respectful questions in the world when I’m in a room with you. I can’t answer pages of questions for you in writing. Mostly because my hands hurt. Also because I don’t have time. Also because I’ve already answered that and 9,127 other questions in the Archive. Go spelunking by topic in the tag list over to the right side of your screen.

My friend who is going to help with catching up old entries has had a few things come up but eventually she will get started. I’m looking forward to that. I have lots of patience for “You can earn money whenever you can squeeze it in.” She has a busy life. She will do a few hours of this when she needs a bit of extra cash. Happy to be a steady side gig for a couple of months/years/however long it takes.

I decided to ask her for help because she was already the local friend who asks me the most invasively insightful questions about myself. She’s really intelligent and keen on what I think about social dynamics. We have amazing conversations. She tells me equally intense stories about herself. We’ve been chatting for years now and we see each other when she comes to town.

I truly am finding my people in Scotland. I don’t think I will ever have a network like I had in the US. I don’t have enough spare time to build the relationships. I keep trying though.

I will keep trying because I am poly. Being poly doesn’t mean I will be fucking everyone I have an intense relationship with. I fall in love with people and they filter into my life to the degree that is suitable. One of the five folks I think of as my Kids around here comes over the most and helps me the most. He is filtering into my life to the level that is right for him and the other Kids see me in the ways that are right for them. I don’t duplicate time or ways of communicating. I’m not weighing and measuring things so everyone gets their “fair” share of me. Everyone gets what feels like a stable level between us.

The first year of someone filtering in is slow on purpose. I used to be a very hasty person. I made big commitments and then 3 months later the relationship fizzled out. Of people I have gone on a first date with 91% end in the first 3 months, 4% make it to 9 months/1 year, and 5% make it past 2 years. If there is too much intensity in the first few months it can burn out the relationship. Those are counting all the friendships that involve sex. If you look at people with whom I was seriously trying for a Relationship instead of a friendship + whatever it’s only 3 people who have ever made it to 2 years or longer. I see no good to making big changes or promises early on. Most people won’t be able to handle putting up with me.

I won’t be having an intense amount of sex with new people any year soon. I can’t see a way for that to happen. I’d have to feel safe and I’m not sure I have it in me right now. I feel so fragile. I feel so scared of getting hurt in a way that would make me a bad mother.

The fact that I’m not rushing into intensity with a new person is a conscious choice. When I’m in a really bad mood and I think I won’t be able to keep my tone of voice nice I tell Gentleman not to come over. I am not stress testing this relationship. I am terrified of the very idea of that. No. He can help me with tasks that I can do in a good mood. I’m still keeping my awful side away from him because I don’t want it to be his problem. Noah got used to ignoring stuff I said on bad days because I was reacting from pain and stress. He said that on those days I admitted to problems I wouldn’t admit any other day so he paid closer attention to what I said then compared to every other day. The stuff I can easily and casually complain about is not what is making my heart bleed.

That is part of what I don’t want to have with anyone anymore. That is going to be a major barrier to intimacy. This is a place where I am broken right now. I don’t want to hurt people like that. I want to be more gentle than that. I can’t always be a nice or gentle person though. It’s part of why I like being alone so much. Then I’m not hurting people by existing.

I wish I liked me more. I wish I didn’t feel like the problem. I wish I wanted less. I wish I had less to do. I am drowning in paperwork and phone calls and responding to people I really have to respond to or there are legal consequences. The emails that get sifted out for immediate response before my brain stops being able to focus as I look down the rest of the list. How to do this triage. I don’t know. I need less on my to do list.

I really appreciate the friend who takes Shortie out for a few hours on Monday so I can work without interruption. I get more done in those 5 hours than I do in three weeks of constant presence. I know because I just went more than 3 weeks without the respite and my to do list is still very long. Maybe I’ll be able to get it all finished next Monday.

Why don’t I write more fun emails? I am being selfish and cruel and unkind. I am abandoning people. Yes. Clearly. My friends all hate me because I don’t write them enough emails. Right. Sure. Ok, turns out I am actually quite salty about that. I want to not be thinking about this anymore. It was an attack on a core wounding. Is my behaviour so poor that people can’t love me?

I am torn between feeling a wild amount of justification and security in how I live my life and this pernicious anxiety that people are going to have a lot of bad things to say about me. They aren’t going to like my results. I am not creating children with a lust to work themselves to death earning money. I am failing at capitalism. Instead I am having them read small business books about how to market and sell things they make because they are crafty little fuckers. An awful lot of the income around here comes from tourists. If we have to put up with the fuckers making the roads clogged, at least they can give back more money.

I did not raise people to succeed in big tech or high finance. I didn’t want to. I know people in those worlds and they are miserable motherfuckers. I raised people to feel like they have a lot of ability to learn new things and give back to their community. I don’t know where they will go with it. They get to choose their own adventure. Their stories aren’t really about me. I’m the spawn point. I’m part of the origin story. That’s complicated.

It’s weird hearing EC describe his childhood in stories. He gets feedback on body language. People ask him if he was abused a fair bit. He says he wasn’t but both of his parents were and he learned how to exist in the world watching us. Sometimes I wonder though. There were times I crossed lines. It happened way more often in the beginning. I haven’t been long term or large scale abusive. I think there have been moments I crossed lines. Not enough that he feels the need to hold me accountable for them. We’ll see if that evaluation changes over time.

I always tell my kids to leave space in their mind where they know that everyone opinion they currently hold very strongly might change. That doesn’t mean they were wrong in this moment. It means they learn new things and develop new context.

I have a lot of abandonment issues. No one is going to enter my life quickly. It’s going to take a long time before I build intense trust with anyone. I’ll keep trying though. You never know when serendipity will arrive. I simply sigh and nod knowing that I have an over 90% chance of striking out.

I fully understand that the level of harm I have experienced wasn’t intended. I know that. I’m not angry at her. I am processing what happened in my body when that thoughtless bit of communication was lobbed my way. It’s fine. I won’t be butthurt forever.

A long time ago a wonderful sex worker told me that I couldn’t be a sex worker because I took myself too seriously and I couldn’t laugh at myself. I still think she is right. I am not cut out to be in that casual of a role.

I believe that if one wants to be a slut then one must get over being butthurt at fast as possible. Not every swing connects with the ball. It is sad. Keep moving. The fact that I do not have another partner equally in a place in my life as Gentleman is not “proof I’m not really poly”. That is reductionist. I am going to hunting events. I am meeting people. I am working on putting tiny drops of comfort into buckets with new people. I am trying to build a community of people I can feel safe connecting with like that. I think it’s going to take me a while. I need more meat life time. I need to feel in my bones that I am not ever disappointing Noah again because he is gone.

I think he really believed that he had the strength of will to ensure he lived longer than me so that I would not suffer from the loss of the things he took away. He thought he would always be here to meet my needs.

Even when people are saying things they believe that doesn’t mean I can lean in to sharing that belief. The more intensely someone promises “forever” in the first couple of dates the more likely they are to flounce away when I don’t match the pretty picture in their head. I am a deeply flawed motherfucker. I am weak. I am over-committed. I have only tiny shards to share. If that shard is good enough then maybe we can have some fun. If it is not, no hard feelings. I know that what I have to share is not very big. It’s ok if it isn’t enough for you.

I wish you happy hunting. May you find what you seek. May the Slut Gods smile upon us all.

Good information to have, and why dating me is not a lot of fun.

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Shortie was not grounded for 4 days. Only 4 days. Then she took a packet of ramen noodles and a couple of packets of instant oatmeal and decorated the lounge. Sigh. I was talking to her about this today and she said that she feels like she got grounded on purpose. Even though it sucks to be limited in what she is allowed to do, I stay within a meter of her the whole dang day. She wants that kind of contact with me so much that being grounded is better than not being grounded.

You know what? I can work with that. If she is aware that this acting out is a cry for attention then I can handle that. I’m proud of her. That’s intense emotional work for an 8 year old.

Our life is hard because she used to spend 4-6 hours a day intensely interacting with Noah and now the other three of us are having trouble with increasing our hours. I have her in activities! Don’t tell me to add more fucking activities, ok? I am ferrying her around to as much stuff as my crappy crippled body can manage. I have no ability to do more. Would it be better for her to go to school? It would be if A) the kids wouldn’t beat her and if B) the school didn’t punish her for getting beaten and reporting it. We’ve tried school here with the older kids. I don’t need to put my last kid through that delightful formative experience.

Instead she has asked to be stapled to my butt going forward. She doesn’t want to be grounded but she doesn’t completely want to be not-grounded either. She wants more attention and connection and being in the same room even when that is slightly annoying. Ok. I will find a way to manage this even though it is hard.

I am reflecting a lot on the ways in which my most recent attempt to onboard a new person failed. I assume that a huge part of the failure is on me. What can I control next time to make things go better? I can’t control everything.

It is going to be hard for people that I genuinely need to have 12 months of building a relationship with you before you get to integrate with my life. I know that other people want that stuff to happen faster and I really don’t give a shit. If you aren’t willing to invest a year into getting to know me one on one then I don’t think you have the patience or ability to integrate with my life. Dealing with my actual children is far more difficult than dealing with a courting period. I promise. My children are not easy people to build a relationship with but we are likely to remain closer than average as time goes on. My 18 year old is not in a hurry to move out. He likes our life. He wants to keep doing this with us. He had about two weeks when he was 14 where he tearfully talked about “Maybe I will move out when I am 16 since YOU DON’T LIKE ME ANYWAY.” Noah and I spent a lot of time very submissively talking about how much we liked him and we didn’t want him to go and that passed quickly. Otherwise he is as convinced at 18 as he was at 8 that he is probably going to live with me forever, or at worst move out in his 30’s. My 15 year old kid is somewhat interested in pursuing jobs that travel and using our house as a home base to come back to. They want to explore but they don’t want to go.

Dating me means understanding how polysaturated I am from the beginning. My children occupy a huge piece of my heart and mind. They are my vocational focus for this life. They are my reason for staying alive. Having a happy family is the single thing I care about most in this life. Noah and I both sacrificed a lot to build this. And we are very happy together. My kids think I’m amazing. I think my kids are amazing. We are all very defensive of each other. We understand that we are all intense, challenging humans and not everyone is going to respond well to us. None of us are willing to listen to people badmouth the folk in our family. If you try you quickly get an icy reception. My son hates a few people in town for talking about how domineering I am. I think my earnestness can easily sound domineering and I can’t appeal to everyone. It’s not a big deal to me. He is fucking furious that they stated those opinions out loud. It’s fine to have them, but sharing them at a group social event went over his line. Ok.

We are a unit. We are a pod. We come as a package deal in a way I have never experienced as a person dating. I think it must be intimidating as hell to try to find a place in our tight knit little crew. You have to come in with curiosity, an open heart, and very few demands. You can’t date me if you are not exceedingly patient. I am difficult and my kids are difficult and combined we are orders of magnitude more difficult than someone else would be.

When I was young I believed people who instantly told me they loved me and would be there for me “forever”. I now know that when people say that in the first few weeks it is wise to carefully not invest too much in the dynamic because it probably isn’t going to last. Anyone who instantly professes how much they will do for me is going to have expectations I can’t meet. This happens over and over and over again. They aren’t in love with me. They are in love with an uncomplicated, undemanding, totally unrelated to me projection they have made up.

I think my kids show a really extreme amount of maturity and wisdom when they say “Spend a year figuring out the relationship, then you can begin integration.”

Yes, I prefer talking into the void over sending anyone emails. Even though I don’t get comments. I wonder if you know how scathing you sounded when you asked me why I prefer this. I prefer this because then I don’t have to wonder if someone is going to respond in a positive way or a negative way. I don’t have to carefully anticipate what kind of topics this person can handle. I don’t have to try and proactively deal with insecurity. I am kind of brutal and harsh while I talk to myself. I try not to soften the edges much. I feel how I feel and I don’t need to apologise for it.

I will not consent to having a relationship where someone expects me to write a bunch of messages to them. I don’t want to. It hurts my hands. I don’t get as much out of it as you do. It drains me. It makes me feel like I can’t handle doing the things I’m supposed to be doing with my time.

Two years ago Noah and I were talking about poly. We were doing so because I was infatuated with a guy I’ve known since I was a teenager. We had a holiday together. On the other social media site I called him Travel Boyfriend. We never kissed or had sex but it was emotionally intense. Right before Noah died I decided it wasn’t a good thing to pursue and I ended the courtship.

With Travel Boyfriend, Pretty Lady, and Good Trouble (a random pick up from a swinger website), all of them were pushy about meeting my kids. They wanted to integrate faster than I was comfortable with. In all three cases pushiness about the kids was a big factor in why I ultimately broke it off. If you can’t respect that my kids asked for a year I don’t trust you to ever treat my kids with respect. I don’t believe you care about them as humans. You are thinking of them as pieces to move around the board to suit your whims. Every single one of them was pushy because “they wanted to help me”. It doesn’t help me to make me feel anxious and like people aren’t respecting boundaries. That’s a hindrance to good mental health. That isn’t help; that is interference.

My son made the comment that he doesn’t care how many people I go have relationships with, he cares that only people who have both staying power and respect get to come into our house.

Personally I think I need to make it much more clear way faster that if people want to read about me, the Archive exists. I will not be typing my history to people in emails. No. I don’t want to. I find it distressing. I will talk about stuff in a room with you but I won’t write it down for you in an email. I find that specific framing of inflicting my writing on an individual to be highly distressing. Part of how I make peace with writing things down is people have to opt in to reading it. Emailing people isn’t the same opt in experience.

It doesn’t have to be rational. It doesn’t have to be what would make other people comfortable. I’m not existing the way I have for over a quarter of a century because of you. I am like this because it works for me. If it doesn’t work for you that is completely ok. I won’t hate you because we aren’t compatible. I am not compatible with nearly everyone. I am compatible with very rare souls.

I am having a bit of a hard time here. I know a lot of people. I feel emotionally connected to 6, maybe 7 adults in this town if you squint and include EC in that total. That’s a low rate of connection vs how many I know for me. In the past I was used to feeling emotionally close to a much higher number of people. I can tell that I feel deeply bothered by my inability to spend the kind of time with people that would lead to such closeness.

I wanted it with Pretty Lady but I wanted to wait and develop it in the room and that made her feel abandoned and ignored. I feel so flat most of the time. I’m really struggling with the amount of cheer and patience my day job requires. I don’t have good cheer most of the time when I’m alone in a room. I just have apathy and ennui and burn out. Writing emails when I feel like this is fucking exhausting. It makes me feel like I’d rather carve on my legs with scalpel for entertainment.

That’s not a standard way for humans to feel. I’m the aberration. This being true about me is going to make me hard to date. I don’t have to want to make people feel bad to effectively do it.

I need to have relationships build in the room. I can’t have these long torrid email things these days. I genuinely can’t. I want to build stable interactions. I want to choose people over and over because being in a room with them is better than being in a room alone. The thing is, I really like being in a room alone. I am fucking awesome.

I want to date people. I want to have serious, long-term, interesting relationships with lots of room for growth. I’m willing to wait and be picky and see who comes along. I’m not in a rush. If someone is in a rush they are not for me. I’m not offended by that or upset. It is what it is. We all have to be free to go our own speed. I move at a glacial pace. I have to. I have a lot going on. I can’t inflict sudden drastic change on my life. Nothing is stable enough for that.

I keep feeling surprised that Gentleman keeps hanging on. I keep expecting him to get sick of my bullshit and stop coming over. Instead he leans in a little more. He waited 12 fucking months to meet my kids. He had to go through the process. No one else is going to be so fucking special they get to leap from the process. If you want to believe that you deserve better than to go through our process then you won’t fit with my family. Sorry.

My life has been full of people coming and going. It has hurt my kids. They have learned how to protect themselves from my endless searching for new connections. They know that most people flame out in the first year. Hell, most people flame out in the first three months. I have stats. Sometimes people make it to several years of friendship before things go south. I’ve had a few long term intense friendships end with fireworks. I try not to do that anymore. It hasn’t happened in a long time. I’m a lot more cautious about not stress testing relationships anymore. I keep my messy bits more private. Now that I don’t have Noah to talk to about any of it I don’t know that I will ever talk to anyone about my harshest pieces. I don’t think it will ever feel appropriate. I don’t think I will ever feel safe enough.

If you feel entitled to know stuff about me, you can read the Archive. Otherwise I’ll say what I say in the room and no you don’t get to be pissy about expecting me to write you emails. I can’t be doing that. I am not able. If you think you are more inconvenienced than I am by the ways I am disabled let me fucking set you straight.

I am grateful that Gentleman spent the night last night. I managed to get almost 10 hours of sleep. That’s a miracle. I’ve been struggling with insufficient sleep for weeks.

I feel deeply inadequate and unworthy of love today. Which is funny because I went to the park for a birthday party of a little person in our community. Many of the folks there like me just fine. We aren’t close friends but we are community and that’s great. We’ve been doing stuff together for years now. I behaved. I was good. I did what I was supposed to do. I interacted how I was supposed to.

I did it while feeling like I barely know these people and I’m scared of all the things I can’t/shouldn’t say to them. I did it while feeling physically weary to the point I needed to sit down almost the whole time I was there. I did it while feeling exhausted by the knowledge that I choose actively to live in this place as an alien invader and that’s complicated.

I got cursed out by some guy on the way home. He wishes all the fuckers like me would leave and not come back. I don’t look like a local. They can tell at a distance. Fair enough. In a field of gorse I sprout up like a redwood tree. I take up wayyy too much energetic space. This is true.

It is weird feeling exhausted by the strain of trying to integrate more fully into this life in town. I need to do more with my kids around people here and it sounds so terribly exhausting. People are so loud and pushy and difficult. Being out is hard and draining. It’s supposed to be “good for me” but it leaves me feeling wrecked.

I wish I felt less like an invasive species that no one ever wanted to have planted here.

Priorities and patience

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I haven’t responded to the last email yet but I will. I find myself torn in a lot of different directions. For one thing: I know how hard it sucks to date a breeder. We are selfish fucks who put our kids above other people. That’s hard to deal with. It feels invalidating. It can lead to all kinds of weird jealousy over time spent (that was an issue early in my parenting experience even inside my marriage) and I know people end up feeling left out. It sucks that when a short person has a need that comes over all the wants and needs of the grown ups. I can really understand not feeling ok with that kind of sacrifice when they aren’t even your crotch droppings. I can even more fully being over that kind of limitation when your own children are grown and gone. You are ready to be selfish about your time. Fair!

I am not ready for that. I am not going to be ready for that for a long time. In American terms my kids are level 2 autistic. It means they need quite a lot of support. If I were in California I would know exactly what levers to push to get exactly the appropriate support for my kids to go to school so I could get a break from them. Here in Scotland that support doesn’t exist and I would be laughed at in a meeting if I requested it. I would be told “That’s not how it works here”. I opted out of the schooling system in California because the live shooter drills were a bridge too far. I watched that fuck kids up. I couldn’t let the system do that to my kids. I can’t let my kids fall through the cracks in Scotland even though there aren’t any guns. This means that people who would normally spend many hours a day with specialists are stuck with only having me and I’m not really enough. This is why we go to classes and activities and have regular events at our house so we can build a community. My kids need more than me and I give them as much as I can within a structure where I supply all the extra support they need beyond what “average” kids need.

That means I don’t get a lot of time off and my brain is deeply overwhelmed pretty much all the time.

If you need me to lavish attention on you every day I am going to be a failure for your expectations. I’m not saying you don’t deserve that. You totally deserve that. You are wonderful and shiny and fun and you have earned all the good things you want to get. That doesn’t mean I am in a place to give them to you right now.

When I chose to give birth I was signing myself up to a contract that I take very seriously. I have seen with my own eyes what happens to people when their parents don’t take that contract seriously. It wasn’t pretty. I am going to take this very seriously. I have 9 years 8 months and 2 years to go. Until then all the fun I want to have has to fit in the cracks around my duty to these humans.

That’s going to make me hard to date. It’s going to mean that someone needs to have a lot of patience if they are to survive a relationship with me. I know it is a big ask. I don’t feel owed that patience. I don’t really feel like I deserve it. There is a big part of me that feels like I should listen to the people who tell me to abandon my kids more because “I deserve a life too.”

Thing is: I had a really fantastic single life before I had kids. I fucked all the people. I traveled. I did the fun drugs. I did all the crazy bdsm most people put on their bucket list.

I am not in that season right now. If someone is impatient with me being in the season I am in then we are not a match. It’s ok. No hard feelings about that bit.

I am struggling with having some hard feelings about you deciding that you being upset with me was somehow a proxy indicating that all of my friends are upset with me. That feels manipulative in a way I can’t abide. That feels deeply cruel. I have struggled so hard with feeling like anyone might ever be able to like me at all that attempting to pull that scaffolding out from beneath me is unacceptable. I think that is an awful thing to do. It is hard for me to leave my house sometimes because I am so overwhelmed with anxiety because I feel like exposing people to knowing that I exist is morally questionable. People shouldn’t have to know about me if they don’t want to. People definitely don’t owe me anything. Nobody has to be my friend. No one has to like me.

I know. It’s hard for me to understand how anyone could like me at all most days. I don’t feel worth it.

Coming for my support scaffold like that is cruel. Trying to shake my faith in my friends is pretty abusive. I’m already more socially isolated than is good for me. Don’t tell me that my friends are going to have no compassion for my social issues. That is so mean.

The backlog of email basically started when the last rape happened. I have lost a lot of functionality over the last two years. I have withdrawn from society a lot. My life is 1/5 the size it was 2 years ago.

Don’t tell me that no one will like me on the far side of being in this much pain. Don’t try to take hope away from me. That’s not ok. I started trying to kill myself when I was 7 because I didn’t think there was any point in carrying on because no one could love me. I had already been kicked out of 6 foster homes. I was on my 8th school. I started after the first non-family member rape. I’ve been institutionalised for suicide attempts a few times.

Don’t ever tell me that my friends are going to stop loving me because I’m not good enough.

It’s a good thing I have all these cards from Bailey sitting out. I couldn’t believe that everyone will give up on me if I tried. I wear your backpack every day and I know that even though we can’t be in a close relationship you haven’t stopped loving me. Even though I am so hard and I was awful to you, you still love me.

There are people I can’t date. If you are going to fight dirty the first time you feel a little butthurt we can’t be in a relationship. If you are going to diagnose me with personality disorders when you are mad at me then we can’t be in a relationship. I have worked really hard on my shit. I am fair in arguments. When I start to go too far I back it off real fast. I deescalate. I accept lots of responsibility for my failures.

Yes. I should have tried harder to email more often. That wasn’t very kind of me. It’s true. I told you I wanted to build the relationship in the room. I wasn’t clear enough about what that meant. I wasn’t clear enough about a bunch of things and you were completely not ok with that. Fair enough. I was waiting to talk on our next date. That wasn’t cool of me in this modern world where I am expected to respond to everything instantly no matter what else I’m fucking doing.

I leave my phone in the house while I garden. If you can’t handle waiting that long then it’s a you problem, not a me problem.

I am online a lot. It’s how I cope with how fucking lonely I feel. But I can’t always be in one to one chats with people online. I find them draining and exhausting. I’m constantly trying to gauge tone and what I should or shouldn’t say. It’s super high cognitive load. I think it is fucking great that my boyfriend has a job that makes it hard to chat all day. It’s tiring.

I am in this 24/7 dance of trying to find the balance between being understimulated and being overstimulated by my life. There is no happy medium.

Dealing with me requires a lot of patience. Not everyone has a lot of patience. That’s ok. Dating me means accepting that I already have a really full life. Someone has to be ok with something that has no resemblance to het-monogamy expectations. I’m a free bitch. I’m focused on my life. I want to be in the moment. If you are scheduled to be in this moment with me then I will give you my full attention. If you are not scheduled to be in this moment with me then it is fairly presumptuous to decide I should give up my this moment to write to you alone because you are so special. If you want to fucking learn about me I have written millions of fucking words and it is entitled as shit to expect me to duplicate them for you.

Really. Have you fucking considered as you lecture me about how I should be explaining myself to you in greater detail that you can search by fucking tags on the blog you are reading so that you can learn all fucking about me? I have fucking books about me. You can download them online.

Are you shitting me? You are going to throw a tantrum because I’m not writing you enough emails about myself so you can understand me better?

It’s kind of funny. I like dating people who are older than me because they tend to have a higher maturity level. Apparently 65 isn’t high enough. 65 and still bitching that it isn’t fair you have to go read the source material instead of having it explained to you one tiny bit at a time.

I am livid. Telling me that my friends will abandon me if I don’t get better at email is a real fucking problem. Every single one of the people sitting in my inbox read my fucking blog when I post there. They write me letters and emails in response to the stuff they read. The fact that I don’t get a lot of comments on my blog is because I am a salty bitch who is talking to myself. I don’t want advice and people really can’t help themselves. The long time people all understand this. Don’t fucking throw me pity because I don’t get comments.

I use cool tracking software on my blog. I can see the ISP of people who log in. Over time I have mapped a whole bunch of my friends. I see them checking in. I don’t need comments.

Trying to make me feel insecure about my friends’ love is hitting me super hard the next day.

There is no fair and there is no deserve. Even so, I am not going to put more energy into someone who tells me that my friends are going to stop loving me. That is putting a scorpion on my back and giving it a ride. I feel no call to be that kind of “nice” anymore.

I am worth better treatment than that. I am glad I know that now.

Vagueposting

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It’s a lot harder to figure out my feelings without Noah to talk to. I used to dump thousands of words on his lap and he’d sort them out and figure out what I was really trying to say. I am doing some of that with Gentleman but mostly he stares at me with big eyes waiting. Sometimes he asks questions. Rarely there is a comment. Then I start crying and he hugs me. It’s different. It’s good. I’m not complaining in any way shape or form. It’s really helpful at this stage.

There are things I’m going to have to sort on my own though. He can’t be handed all of my thoughts so that he can explain them to me. He hasn’t studied me for decades. That’s not a reasonable expectation. The hugging is good.

I try hard to be fair about the fact that a given behaviour isn’t necessarily a red flag for all people. It might be yellow or even green for someone else. There are things that I should pay a lot of attention to. I have a limited amount of precious time in this life. There are specific things that are going to be a problem for me. It’s good for me to think of them very specifically.

I can’t have lovers or friends or play partners who spend a lot of time negatively judging me as a parent without knowing my children. If someone watches me parent and thinks I’m doing something wrong I am shockingly willing to discuss my methodology. I fucking promise that I have put more thought into everything I do as a parent than almost everyone (or possibly literally everyone) you have ever met. I can tell you why I’m doing everything I’m doing. I have a motive, a method, and I can break down which theorists I am basing my principles on. I studied child development and education for 10 years before having kids. I was in therapy for over 20 years before I had kids. I did a lot to prepare for this gig. If you are in my house watching and you think I am doing something poorly, uhm sure. Share your feelings. If you aren’t in my house, and especially if you have never been in my house I don’t actually want to hear your opinion. I don’t. You don’t get to evaluate me. You have never watched me work. You don’t have anything to base your opinion on. It’s worthless. Don’t share it. There are reasons I get my kids in front of professionals for evaluation on a regular basis to see if I’m fucking up. I’m scared as hell I’m not going to do as well as these people need. I don’t need to have a relationship with someone who is going to run their mouth and insult me as a mother.

I struggle with feeling like I am judged on a large scale basis. I make a lot of unconventional life choices. I am different. People let me know that there is something wrong with me on a regular basis. It’s always weird how they think I don’t know that I’m different from them. They have to tell me. I’m existing wrong. If you want to tell me that you don’t like what I’m doing that’s fine. If you need to tell me how much other people don’t like what I’m doing then I have an issue. That’s not your place. Who the fuck elected you the speaker for the choir? I don’t recall any time when you would have been in a room with the people you are presuming to speak for. How in the fuck do you know their opinions?

If I am trying to explain the ways that my disabled ass is FUCKING DISABLED I am not going to be super patient if you tell me that everyone has to triage and I should get a notepad to help me remember things. Implying that I should take a biscuit and a coffee and get back to work is not going to be something I respond well to. I’m just fucking saying. That kind of implication is going to mean that I need to treat you as an active hostile force. Your advice could severely damage me. Your demands could cause me to harm myself in a way that harms my life. That’s not ok. That’s asking too much. That is not showing any respect for me at all.

Yeah, I am a picky bitch. I am fucking demanding. I need to be seen. I need to only have relationships with people who can fucking remember that they can’t have standard expectations for me. I’m not saying your standards for me always need to be low. Sometimes I’m pretty great. Just not in every way and not on bad days. Telling me to eat a fucking biscuit and get back to work is callous and destructive and hostile but oh you didn’t mean it that way. I’m over reacting.

I’ve played this game before. I know how this one goes.

Combine all that with the comments about obesity…

I think that’s a mast full of red flags. I think that’s incompatibility. If the first time you get upset and feel neglected you read me for filth I need to walk on. You deserve someone who can pay attention to you all day every day. I deserve someone who won’t make me cry and feel shitty about myself.

“Date a queer,” they said. “It’ll be better,” they said. “It’s way less work and way more reward to date someone who isn’t a cis het white guy” they said.

I dinno. Maybe mileage can vary.

It’s ok for us to each have deal breakers. Fatphobia isn’t something I want in my life. If you make those kinds of comments I don’t think I can be in a room with you on purpose for any kind of intimacy. If you make scathing comments about how impossible it is to have sex with someone who is obese I think you are a terrible lover and probably not a great person.

I have to think very carefully about who I bring into my house. I need to think about what kinds of off hand comments they are going to make. What kinds of jokes will spring out? Is there a tendency towards demeaning people or shaming them when there is a disagreement or rupture? These are things I do not allow in my home. If you do them you can walk the fuck out. My kids simply are not allowed. You can have an argument or disagreement without demeaning or shaming anyone. We do it all the fucking time. I know it is possible.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

This is why I don’t say I will show up very often. I will come when I can and it won’t be much. If that’s not good enough for a relationship with you no hard feelings. I am one of those selfish asshole breeders and my life revolves around my kids. It’s going to stay true. Implications that I am doing this wrong are not going to win you points. If I feel sad and upset and shaky after interactions that is bad for my day job.

I can only have net positive relationship right now, fair or not. I don’t need anyone to be perfect but hoo boy. That’s a lot of flags.

The process is messy but I like the results

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Noah was retiring so he could forcibly take work away from me. That was well on its way to happening. Our kids are incredibly high needs. They need a lot of mental stimulation and a fair bit of physical support. I appreciate that my kids don’t have any shame for having a lot of needs. They don’t feel bad about themselves because they need support. We get on with it. They’ve not had to deal with being in an environment where they didn’t understand the rules and had to figure it out on their own. I feel mixed about this on a lot of levels. The older kids have done fine when they are tested out in the world. I feel both like maybe I have overly coddled my kids and like I don’t coddle them nearly as much as other people seem to coddle their children. Recently my parenting has been described as both entirely based on nurturing and draconian and Victorian. Where is the truth?

My therapist has applauded the weird grounding my daughter has gone through. I communicate with her about why I need it. She still has joy and support and physical activity and love but my central nervous system requires a break from being activated. I need to not suddenly find new messes/things to correct. I don’t need it forever. I need it to last a few days consecutively because I am deeply overwhelmed and on the verge of over reacting in ways I would not be proud of. I arranged respite care for a couple of nights this month. A good friend will come over and stay with the kids while I have 24 hours off. I need it really badly. It’s hard being on duty 24/7. It’s hard being patient all the time. It’s hard feeling like I have to provide anticipatory service for their needs all the time. The first one was last Saturday night and I’m feeling much better.

Also, the grounding is over. A three day grounding lasted 31 days because she kept sneaking out to do stuff she wasn’t supposed to. It was a learning experience all around. The big kids reflected on what they learned from their own epic grounding experiences. All three of them come out of these groundings saying that the biggest thing they have learned all the way down to their bones is that mom doesn’t bluff. If you push me hard enough to make a dire threat I then have to follow through. You and I will both suffer. I don’t care. I will be consistent with what I say. This is why I’m never allowed to use violent ranting language. It’s a bluff. There’s no bluffing in this house.

I appreciated the big kids talking to Shortie about how she has now seen for herself that when you break a rule you need to be very certain that it is worth the consequences you will receive. In many parts of life it is worthwhile. There are times when breaking the rules is worth the cost and you need to go into the act knowing that you will suffer for doing it. The ability to spread food through every box of toys in the library is not a good example of that. You don’t get to eat the fun food. It goes in the rubbish. Then you get grounded and lose good things. When you fuck around while you are grounded you find out that it can always get worse and it does.

By the end of a grounding my children are all super emphatic about the fact that most of the time their life has layers of awesome built into every day. I think about their preferences and I do things to benefit them all day long. I literally build my life around making sure they get as much happiness as possible. I think a deprivation vacation is good for the soul.

As I’m reading this book from my mother in law I feel ever more affirmed in my beliefs. It literally is harder for my children compared to most people like it was harder for me. There are genetic legacies here that mean we are playing a slightly different game than other humans. Our impulses are bigger. Our compulsions are terrible and driving. Our self control is barely there and requires a lot of outside support while we develop if we aren’t to fall into life harming habits. I knew I would have children who would need more support.

Here they are. The living embodiment of my planned science experiment. Can people like me grow up to be happy and functional human beings? Are we doomed to lives of intense misery and suffering before we die young? Everyone in my house has rough days and rough phases but we work through them. When someone is blindingly furious we give them space and we don’t allow ruptures to happen. You are entitled to your feelings. You are not entitled to be allowed to hurt us. Have the feeling. Work it out of your body. Then when you can be calm, come negotiate for how something needs to change. We are infinitely malleable in this house.

I love that my 8 year old can say, “I’m going to work hard not to get grounded again. Food stays in the kitchen. If I am grounded for another reason I am going to stay in my room for the first three days because I can’t take another long grounding. I don’t have the self control yet to wander around the house while I have limitations. I will wait it out in my room. That’s the way I can make myself follow the rules.”

Frankly, I’ve come to the same conclusion in my own life. When I have urges that are very dangerous or inappropriate I hide alone until they pass. It’s how I stay out of a lot of trouble.

I feel comfortable and safe in my family. I feel grateful that I am helping my children learn in their bones that suffering for a set time period is possible if you put your head down and breathe through it. (They are suffering through boredom and I choose to believe that they will be able to generalise that to other things later. It works for the big kids.)

They have learned how to not be a zoo animal like me. They are more domesticated. They do not instantly start hurting themselves when they get bored. They know how to channel frustrated energy in more healthy ways. I watch them and marvel and desperately wish I was as good as them. They are the ideal models for me to live with.

It’s a funny thing, teaching. I can teach all kinds of things. I taught a boy trigonometry. Do you know what class I have never taken? Trigonometry. Using the book and the knowledge the boy had from all his previous maths classes I talked him through teaching himself trig. He got an A on the final. He said I was the best teacher for maths he ever had. I thought that was hilarious. I was literally incapable of doing what he was doing. I would fail that test. I can’t do trig. I don’t understand it. Not even the basic bits.

My children understand things emotionally that I don’t. They have access to deep wells of understanding and knowledge that is outside my ken. They say they learned it all from me. I say I am a conduit and conduits don’t hold on to the thing they disperse.

Sometimes I feel as if I spend most of my life as a vessel where I am not. I can help people go through the journey they need to experience. I leave almost all of me out. I don’t say all of what I’m thinking. I don’t reveal the layers I am experiencing simultaneously. This is hard. I used to share them with Noah. There will never again be a person who knows so much about me. Now there is no point in talking about most of what is going on with me. No one has enough context for it to be useful.

My children now see the most of me and they still only see a comically small part of me, let me tell you. I ache with the lack of feeling witnessed. Honestly that drove Noah’s insistence on us spending so many hours together. He was trying to fill his own staggering insecurity and my deep wounding over not feeling seen.

Moving over 60 times in my first 25 years of life left a harsh mark on me. I feel like a fractional human in every circumstance. My children will be the longest relationships of my life in terms of time spent together. Now that Noah is dead I’m pretty sure no one else will even vaguely come close. I didn’t live with anyone in my family of origin much. I spent almost 10 years living with my mom spread out in chunks–never longer than 3 years at once. She only managed 2 jumps of living with me for 3 years. The first 3 of my life and from 15-18. I spent a similar overall, sometimes overlapping, amount of time with Auntie and Uncle. My mom could best handle living with me when her big sister was there to do all the work for taking care of me.

I’m very scared of coming to need someone and having them run out of give for me. I don’t feel entitled to anything from anyone. I don’t feel deserving of much. I’m achingly aware of how unfair it is to befriend/date a breeder. We are selfish. We put our energy into our children instead of into reciprocal relationships with adults. We have the need to take more than we give when it comes to adults because we are being drained so constantly in our homes. I don’t feel like I have paid enough into any local relationships to deserve that.

Whether or not I can pay it back now or not I have to be selfish right now. I am asking friends for help. I am trying to make my job easier. The transition into trying to carry my load as a single parent is achingly complex and there are layers that are going to take many years to sort out. I am really grateful one of my Kids is coming over and helping the house feel more maintainable a few days a week. I’m so grateful he has the time available and the willingness to spend his time this way. It is such a gift.

I ask for a lot from Gentleman. I am crossing my fingers he doesn’t think I’m going too far. I’m scared. I’m scared to get to the point of feeling like I need him a lot more than I do now. I already feel like my life would be tremendously harder without him. He makes me happy. I really need to feel happy. It’s hard to feel happy in the 24/7 demand cycle of my life. I have moments of happiness in my life but mostly I dwell in patience and suppression. Most of me is not allowed.

It would be really easy, right now, for me to fall into “mother” being the only identity I get to have. That will crush me like a bug. I can’t. I can’t subsume my whole self that way. I will explode. I will break and I will act out in problematic ways. I can’t feel too trapped. This is what Noah and I were working on at the end. His death flattened me almost as hard as having a baby does. Only I need sex.

I need a lot of things. Most of them I don’t get. I work as hard as I can to share as much as I can but it’s not enough. I am not enough. I am reminded this morning that what I have to give is not enough. I was silly to think that putting up with me is worthwhile. I am too hard.

I should have kept my head down and my mouth shut. Then I wouldn’t have hurt someone I never wanted to hurt. My inadequacy causes pain. I have to live with knowing I do that. It’s going to be a hard, slow day. I feel so sad.

It doesn’t matter how I feel. It matters what I do. I have to get up and serve. It is all I have.

Coming back is feeling hard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We all must control ourselves.

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

We don’t quit, we complain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am really glad he let me leave.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drifting back

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Sometimes I feel guilty while I read Tamora Pierce. Bonus Mama introduced me to this author so the association is strong. I am sad I didn’t get to stay in the lives of her children. I loved them a lot. I will never see them again and that’s hard.

Mostly though I am finding it amusing that I didn’t want to read the second book from Sandry because wealthy perfect princesses are not my speed. I also skipped the second Daja book because her students were pampered rich obnoxious people. I’m having a lot of class issues in my head, that’s for sure.

Noah’s birthday is soon. I feel like a mass of anxiety. I am not functioning well. My productivity is in the toilet. It’s hard to not beat myself up over it. I really struggle with failing as a worker bee.

Stuff with the kids is all over the place. It would have been a surprise to me if you had said that by 16/18 MC would be bigger, stronger, and more consistently capable than EC. EC’s health absolutely sucks. He has 3-4 productive days in a week and then he often crashes the other days. I don’t mean he is lazy. I mean his joints don’t work properly and he can’t stand upright. He falls down on a regular basis. He looks like a marionette because his body hangs so bizarrely. I worry a lot about him. I think he is going to struggle as an adult. I am grateful I don’t need to kick him out at 18 to make his way alone. I think it would go quite poorly.

MC is not enjoying how poorly this term is going at theatre. I think it is a good learning experience. Suffering is a lesson. They are really stepping up as the most able bodied human in the house. They now do nearly all the dishes and kitchen clean up. It has made my life so much better. They don’t do any other chores, but this is an acceptable trade in our house. We cook a lot.

YC is on my last nerve. Why did I move to a country where I’m not allowed to beat her?!?! (Because I do not believe in beating children and I’m glad the state agrees with me. BUT SHE IS SO ANNOYING. Deep breathing, Krissy.) I struggle with the period of time where kids are transitioning from being incompetent to being competent but they have not yet internalised self control. It’s rough. Now she is like 5,028% more capable of being annoying. This is when Noah and I used to do a lot of tag teaming. As someone felt frustrated or overwhelmed the other stepped in. I’m struggling with this on my own.

YC is grounded for the second time in her life. The first time she obeyed the limits and the grounding was short and sweet and didn’t drag on. This time she keeps breaking the rules. I am very clear with my kids that I don’t like grounding. It happens when I am on the verge of losing my shit and going too far from accumulated stress and frustration. This is giving me time out to calm my nervous system down. I am having a hard time because she is pushing really hard against following restrictions. I get it. Being grounded sucks. Breaking the rules and sneaking out constantly until we have to have a person on duty babysitting your door or standing next to you all day is uhm… not great. It doesn’t give me the space to calm down that I need. It escalates my vigilance requirements. I am not having a good time. If I can’t stand at the door I need to use an exercise band to hold the door closed so I can do crazy things like go to the bathroom. Or she will sneak out and get into things.

I know this is developmental. I know that to a large degree she has no self control yet. Our life is different from other peoples lives. If I don’t teach my kids lessons who will? They are not part of the normal mill of human enculturation. They have to learn that I mean it when I say no. They have to learn that there are consequences for out of boundary behaviour. We are being clear all day every day: she is grounded because she needs to learn that smearing food all over the house is unacceptable. I can’t find open cans of juice/soda in every drawer of the house. I can’t find ramen and muffins stuffed through all the baskets of toys. I can’t have sweetened condensed milk spread all over the closet and the clothes that are in there. No. Just no. That’s not an acceptable behaviour pattern and we are going on a year of it. Food stays at the table. Food stays at the table. Food stays at the table. I’m not saying you can’t sit and eat a can of sweetened condensed milk, I’m saying you can’t create four loads of laundry while destroying the wood in the closet.

I am communicating the lesson that most of the time you have a fun life with much goodness and freedom and independence. Don’t fuck it up for yourself by making problems for other people. You don’t need to be perfect but you can’t destroy property willy nilly and it’s not fair to waste that quantity of food. Over the past month she has wasted/played with/spread around close to £40 worth of food. This is way out of control. No.

So she’s been grounded since the 15th of May. It started out as 3 days of grounding. She is still grounded because she was doing things like sneaking out of her room to get a pile of books. Sometimes she went and got snacks and tried to hide them in her room. At this point I took the furniture out of her room so she has nowhere to hide anything. I’m freakin serious. You will follow the restrictions for the named time period or you can stay grounded forever and all our lives will be miserable. I do not fucking play. My older kids have been telling her, “Mom is going to win this battle of wills. You do not want to find out how long she can last.” My oldest was only grounded twice but the second one was really epic. My second kid was grounded at least four times. I can’t remember the exact number. I don’t do it a lot given how old the big kids are now but I forking mean it when I do it.

It’s harder to feel justified this time. I feel a lot more paranoid about how maybe I’m going too far. I am certainly surrounded by friends who would not parent this way. But their kids all have different lives. We are such a bizarre little pod away from humanity. I tell my children quite frankly that we come from blood lines of people who struggle with addictive behaviour and anti-social behaviour. If I address it hard and fast when they are young then they develop the sense that you should only break rules when it is really important. It has worked well with my first two kids. We are close and we have intensely respectful relationships that have not involved any kind of punishment in many years. Everyone has to try me a couple of times when they are young.

This seems healthy and normal to me. Sure, my way seems overly strict to people on first glance. That’s a funny contrast with how permissive I seem compared to the average the rest of the time. You can have a looooooooot of rope to run with but when you reach the boundary you need to stop or it’s going to hurt. (Not like I am going to smack you hurt. Like you are going to be so bored you feel like you are losing your mind for a couple of days.) I feel the need to defensively include that we have long conversations during the day about why the specific rule that is being broken is necessary and unacceptable to break. We talk a lot about how I am not saying they are bad people or undeserving of love. I am saying that behaviour is unacceptable and must stop. If you need help stopping I will help you but neither of us will have fun. It’s better for you to stop yourself. You will feel in your bones that it is better for you to stop yourself.

While grounded you still get morning snuggles and hugs and kisses and lots of positive attention during the day. This is not a stonewall of angry seething. I am more prone to being bitchy and complaining about stupid stuff. You are making me do a bunch of oppressive work to ground you. I hate this. Don’t make me do stuff I hate and we can get along just fine. I am praying we hurry up and get through this in a timely fashion. Please stop making it longer kid. Please. Please. Please. I am, of course, keeping my therapist up to date with this. They understand why I am doing this and they are glad I am setting limits in a way that is not overly punitive. She isn’t being harmed, she is having some of the good things be less available for a while. I am not making her feel like life has no value. I am showing her that when I say no I really mean it. I need her to be able to trust me. This is how I earn that trust. I don’t like the cost of being consistent. I like having kids who believe me when I say something. That means I can never bluff.

This is helping to create a different hurdle for Gentleman and I to run into. When I’m in a lot of pain and I’m grumpy and I feel frustrated with the kids leading to feeling a lot of shame for my impatience with the kids I stop being particularly good at initiating sex. I feel empty and like I lack anything interesting to offer. I certainly can’t run the fuck. I’m timid. I’m out of the executive function that makes me lead. So we went almost two weeks without sex. It’s dramatic how hard that hits my body.

I am coasting super far into burn out. I want to be more exciting but it’s not available inside my body as an option. I am not sure what I can do to recover at this point. My brain keeps shutting down in the middle of stuff I want to do. I’m so tired I can’t do my normal level of forward planning. I’m too exhausted. I can’t predict what will be true or not true by then. Sex helps when I can get a lot of it. We managed sex over the past couple of days and I am already doing better than I was over most of the last week, but I need it daily for a while and that’s not going to happen. Life and work and such. I need sex so much.

I wish I could simply send my daughter to school but they’ve already hit 2/3 of my kids here. I don’t really want to throw the third into the mix. I don’t need the school to be perfect. I need the adults to be in charge enough that my children are not beaten. I also need their safety to happen while around other children instead only when they are locked into a room alone. If they need to be locked in a room to be safe then they might as well be at home. What is the fucking point of school? I’m really frustrated by the way society lets down families. Smaller classrooms should be mandated by law. Limit of 18 children in a room for the maximum level of safety for all involved.

Oh well. Society doesn’t want to spend money on that. Better to spend the money on wars.

At least the garden is seriously coming along this year. I’m pretty excited about all the stuff we have available already. Soon the fruit starts and then we have kilos every week for months. Yay!!

I’ve added two more artichokes this year because I don’t get to eat enough of them and it makes me sad. I love artichokes. Nom nom nom. It’s been fairly warm and intermittently raining and I’m hopeful that bodes well for the year. I am weeding as much as I can, which has been a lot more than over the past two years. I’m happy about that. I also got more mulch and I will be spreading that around as much as I can. This is good. The food forest is coming. I love my garden so much.

I really need this grounding to end. It’s wearing me down. We are now at the point where we are body blocking most attempts to break the rules. Maybe we can force her into compliance long enough to get through the tenure. I hate this. It feels so awful. But when I say no I fucking mean it.

Deflated by feelings

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I feel weary in my bones. The last 7 days have been incredibly emotionally intense. I finally saw folks in the chronic pain clinic and it was a very positive appointment. I am on the road to finding the right specialists within the NHS for my particular issues. They are putting in a letter that cannabis is the most appropriate medication for me and this will allow me to pursue getting a prescription through the NHS. This is going to be incredibly helpful because I will be able to stop smoking and go back to capsules. This is great news.

The thing about living in the UK is that everything moves slowly. Getting good news means that in a few months or a year I might see an impact on my life being different. The speed is hard to live with at times. It’s like how Noah’s estate isn’t fully settled because the rules here have hundreds of years of precedent and they are picky about paperwork. It’s nearly done but it isn’t done yet.

Both of these things being in limbo for so long is feeling hard on my body. I feel tired and worn down from being anxious. I was on the chronic pain waiting list for about 5 years. The NHS is very slow but it gets to people. Middle child had their adenoidectomy after being on that waiting list for years. Recovery is a process. They are excited about being able to breathe. Eldest Child hit the top of the gender affirming care list a few weeks ago. They called to tell him that seeing him down in Glasgow in the clinic that used to do care for minors is pointless. He will switch to our local NHS waiting list at 18 and he will probably be at the top at that juncture. Local will be easier for a lot of reasons.

Living here requires learning a kind of patience that feels unreal in some moments. My American nervous system is not trained for this much freezing and waiting. I learned long ago to act, to fight, to do anything to make things change. Here that’s not a good approach. Here, being messy and active slows stuff down. It’s hard to integrate this knowledge in my body.

I’ve talked to my solicitor and a lot of doctors this week. Every single one has emphatically told me that I am managing freakishly well and they are impressed that I am keeping everything together. I think they aren’t seeing all the balls I drop. It was nice, in a way, that the receptionist at the dentist was very kind about saying she can understand why stuff is hard because Noah used to do so much to keep us all on track. She could see that just from us moving through the reception area for appointments.

I feel less competent than I used to. Noah isn’t here to patch over the cracks of my mistakes. I make so many mistakes.

I am really struggling with all the ways I feel bad and too much and sad. My emotions feel too big to share with anyone else. I don’t want to drown people. Noah wanted all of me. He could handle it. I don’t feel like it is ethical to share very much with people now. Tiny drips and no more. I am feeling like a tsunami of pain and if I let it impact anyone else there will be consequences.

There are always consequences for being me.

How funny. I can tell that my face is scrunching up when I cry just like my son’s does.

There is no doubt in my mind that if I didn’t have the kids I would be dead now. Noah promised me that he would let me die first so I didn’t have to be alone. I am alone in my brain now in a way I haven’t been since I was in my teens. By my early 20’s I had people around me who were opting in at full speed. I think there are people in my life now who would say they want to opt in to the fullness of my brain and I am not able to trust them. I have been left too many times. I’m afraid to need anyone. Everyone goes away. I’m not fully alone. I spend time with my Jenny. I have made some really nice friends here and they care about me a lot. They show up. My boyfriend is a great guy. And still there is so much of me that I could only share with Noah. I miss Noah. I miss being good enough even when I sucked.

I hate that I feel no resilience. A very soft amount of correction feels like evidence that I don’t deserve to be alive or have relationships. I can’t react in a proportionate way and I hate this. I hate feeling like even the smallest amount of frown invalidates me existing. This is what Noah gave me. I annoyed the shit out of him. He corrected me harshly and I could handle that because I knew that nothing I ever did would be bad enough for him to leave me. Back I go into feeling like I don’t belong anywhere or to anyone. Being necessary for the kids is different.

It’s good! Don’t get me wrong. I am really grateful that I have positive, uplifting experiences with the kids every day. We get along. We are well suited to each other. We have a peaceful, loving coexistence. This feels possible mostly because I keep most of me in a box off-stage.

I am not sure I will ever feel seen again. I miss Noah. I miss the way he clutched me like I was his security object. I miss feeling like I was the reason someone felt whole. Instead I am back to being someone who makes people feel awkward and uncomfortable. I don’t like being me. I want to be someone who was born good enough to love. I have to work like a dog around the clock to earn my right to keep breathing.

I am really tired. I slept ok last night. This is exhaustion at the soul level. It is so hard going on without Noah. He needed me. He needed me so much that all by himself he justified my existence. Without him I feel like a burden the world doesn’t need. I know that my kids need me for a while longer, but I am afraid of their complete independence. I am afraid that I will see all the signs that I trained them to not need me as reasons I should go. The point of being a mother is to raise people who will be fine without you. If you don’t do that, you haven’t been a good mother. You can’t train apprentice adults to be dependent. They need to be able to survive my death.

I am struggling right now. I will get through it. I always do. Right now it hurts.

Users Guide 4.1

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Users Guide 4.0

Holy shit. I’m heading into the 4th chapter of my whore life. That’s pretty intense. Time for a total rewrite.

Decades ago I copied the idea of a users guide from Lee Harrington because I know that I have a different approach to sex than other people. Therefore it seems like a lovely idea to have some sort of cheat sheet about how to handle me in general. Some of these things I have figured out on my own, some of these things I have had pointed out to me by friends and/or lovers/husband, some of these things are constantly in flux and will no longer be true in just a few months. Of course this is a living document and therefore subject to change and revision without notice. Just because something is in here doesn’t mean you should assume that for now and all times this is the only thing I like/want/don’t like etc. After the roller coaster that is pregnancy/giving birth/having chronic health issues, I promise you things change in my body over time.

It’s fairly cis-het centric, but I tried to not lock myself in a ghetto I don’t want to live in.

Index:
A. Before sex (including courtship/getting to know one another)

B. During sex (including bdsm play)

C. After sex (including relationship level interactions)

A. Before Sex

a. General

Never assume that you are going to get to go to bed with me. Yes, I go to bed with quite a few people—that doesn’t mean I will choose you. The phrase is cautious optimism. I expect and require that people treat me as an equal, and more importantly as an intelligent, thoughtful, responsible human being until otherwise negotiated. Please don’t act like I ought to be honored to teach you whatever it is you want to know about play/sex/whatever. I have taught classes, thrown parties, run a conference, and initiated both virgins and newbies alike. I’ve put in my time to the community. I can coast on doing what pleases me and only what pleases me.

b. Specifics in a Having-Kids-Lifestyle

I don’t have a lot of free time. I have even less time for dating. What little free time I have during the day is mostly spent alone exercising because I have a very high intensity life that requires me to be well regulated emotionally. I can’t focus on getting to know new adults in a really concentrated/intense way. It’s not that I am flakey, I don’t have much availability. Well, to be honest I’m a little flakey. My priority at this stage of my life is being nice to my kids. I have to keep the rest of my life quiet enough for that to happen or I have to drop other stuff. That is the deal until 2036.

c. Kissing

This gets a whole section. Way before sex because it often happens long before sex happens. I like to kiss. Kissing is a big thing for me. I think kissing is one of the most intimate activities and if I am going to bed or playing with you I am seeking intimacy. Intimacy doesn’t mean you’ll be my one twue love or that we will settle down. It just means I want to know you. If I want intimate contact with you, I probably want kissing to be part of that. (See below section on STI’s.) I do not like to kiss tobacco smokers.

a. Hair

Once upon a time I said that I prefer clean shaven men, but that has radically changed during my adulthood. My opinion now varies tremendously based on personal attitude, grooming standards, and just plain what suits each face. As for the hair on other peoples heads: I don’t care anymore. I barely notice. I’m interested in your mind. I like body hair on anyone of any gender. Pubic hair doesn’t affect me one way or the other; suit yourself. I sometimes shave or epilate large portions of my body. I sometimes skip shaving for over a year at a go. You have to be totally ok with either or go away.

b. Weight/height

My weight usually goes up and down in a 40 pound range like a yo yo, semi-annually. Over the past three years I have lost 75 pounds from my lifetime high after my second round of cancer followed by lock downs. (I’m sorry that I’m a fucking American, ok. I’ll translate a lot but the body weight one is hard.) You can’t be attracted to me for a specific look of my body. It might be different next month. My health is variable and my body shifts with my ability to exercise. I like people with bodies. I like fat bodies. I am more appreciative of slender/”fit” bodies than I used to be, but I still prefer some heft. I used to be a bit hung up on height (not that into anyone over 5’11”) and now I don’t care. I like people.

c. Gender

I am a cis-gender woman. If you haven’t picked up on the fact that I am queer then you haven’t been reading closely. I have had strong attractions to people at every point on the gender spectrum. I am completely comfortable having sexual contact that begins with, “What words do you want me to use for your body parts and how do you want me to touch you?” because I can’t guess. Everyone is unique.

d. Cocks (What the hell—since I am listing my preferences…)

Everyone should remember that the vagina is all about potential space. Yes, it can technically stretch, but in a normal resting spot it isn’t particularly large. My body doesn’t stretch terribly well or willingly (even after giving birth to three children) so I am not a fan of overly large cocks. If it is going to cause my jaw to be sore within five minutes of oral sex I will probably experience a lot of pain during vaginal sex and that isn’t good for me. I will not even attempt anal if you are large, are you insane? I am not a size queen. I do not have lower limits on the size of cocks I can figure out how to enjoy. Not all sex is about penis in vagina sex. But I do have upper limits. Ow. No thank you. It’s not personal.

e. Race/marginalization

This is complicated. I am aware that I am most comfortable treating heterosexual white men like pieces of meat. If I fuck them and don’t call later I don’t feel that bad. I clearly negotiate and label the deal I am offering. I have major hang ups around using people of color and women and folk of ambiguous gender in the same way. I feel tremendous shame and guilt around hurting already marginalized people and I don’t have a lot to give. Which is to say, I really like having sex with people who are not het white men. I have a hard time approaching them. I don’t want to hurt them and I am less clear on the boundaries. I err on the side of not being a user asshole. But if you are interested, let me know.

f. Oral Hygiene

YES. Bad breath/teeth that look unclean is really really really repellent to me. I generally won’t kiss someone with bad breath. I will elect not to even if you are a nice person. Just no. I smoke pot and that has impact on my mouth. I do not mind kissing other people who smoke pot. I still really am not fond of kissing tobacco smokers. I don’t like the taste at all. Notice how it is mentioned twice? Really not into tobacco smokers.

B. During Sex

I will say clearly and plainly that I want to have sex with you. Consent will be clear. Once consent has been established, game on. If I say no later, I mean no. I am not looking for resistance/rape play at this time. I don’t intend to pretend I don’t want to be there. I want to be there, probably quite badly.

The first thing that ought to happen before foreplay is a discussion of STI testing patterns and safer sex expectations. I don’t have habits at the moment because I’m just starting. I’m still adjusting. Depending on my rate of whoring I will go back to either every 3 months or every 6 months.

I have had HPV. I tested positive in 2003. I had cryosurgery. I have tested negative since.

I also test positive for HSV1, commonly known as oral herpes. I have had a few cold sores as an adult but they are rare and I feel them coming. If you think that HSV1 is a deal breaker for you for oral sex or for kissing, we are probably better sticking to being friends.

I am a big proponent of the idea that we are having “safer” sex. The only safe sex is with your hand. There is risk involved in the play I do and I acknowledge it and try to minimize it. I do not have a desire to play with people who are in denial about said risk. I like the current acronym: RASH. Risk aware, shit happens. We’ll all do our best but at some point something will happen to someone. Let’s cope like adults. Test often, use barriers.

I have gloves with me in my whore bag. I will be using them and asking partners to use them. I also have dental dams and flavoured condoms and lube.

Condoms are not negotiable for vaginal penetration with new partners. I have chosen to fluid bond with my boyfriend. I take it very seriously that I am responsible for his health. I will be operating like everyone is positive for multiple bugs and I will use the appropriate barriers. Safety is important, y’all. Luckily I’ve taken a bunch of classes on making sex fun while using barriers. San Francisco was a great place to become a pervert in the 00’s.

Blood play requires extensive blood testing in advance and long-term negotiation. I do not do it casually. It would require a long-term serious relationship and given the limits of my life I can’t imagine being able to get there any year soon.

a. Breasts

This has morphed so much over my life. Dang. What I like can vary dramatically over the course of my menstrual cycle. I like everything from mild sensation to extreme pain but all pain play requires a warm up. If you act like you can just yank super hard at my boob out of nowhere I may elbow you as hard as I can. However, if you do it right, hurting my nipples gets me off a lot. But you have to do it right. On the right day of the moon. It’s a moving target. Always a fun adventure of discovery no matter where the journey takes you.

b. Ways to turn me on

First and foremost: talk to me. Tell me how hot you think I am. Tell me what you want to do to me. Tell me what you are doing while you are doing it. Just hearing you narrate how wet I am when you slide your finger into my cunt will increase the quantity of wetness. Read me porn. Have me read you porn. My brain is the most potent sexual organ in my body. Pay attention to it. Do you know why I like having sex with my friends? Because the ones I have sex with are the ones who have spent years buttering me up talking about what they like from sex.

Stroke my legs, particularly behind my knees. It is very easy to turn me on when I am lying on my stomach and my legs and back are stroked lightly. This is by far the most sensuous activity for me. I love having my neck and head stroked gently. It’s not a massage–it’s a waking up to sensual contact type of touch.

Receiving biting is hard. I like it when it is gentle but if it hurts too much it can cause me to go to dark mental place and I am prone to dissociation. To be fully clear: I haven’t done any experiments with biting in over a decade. I have done a lot of work on dissociation in other areas of my life but I haven’t done the work on biting specifically. It never hit the top of the triage list for fixing between Noah and I. It isn’t off the table but it’s complicated. Be really careful. Watch me. Make sure I am still “there”. Probably don’t try this on a first or second date because we should have some established trust first. I fucking love biting other people.

Tell me how to please you. I love having someone tell me how to get them off—it will usually be enough to get me off. An awful lot of what I get out of sex with people is that thrilling feeling of, “Yay!” We are feeling alive together!” So lots of instructions about what you want and how you want things to be done to you turn me into butter. (Once you have permission to talk to me like this. If I indicate a boundary you had better back off like you hit an electric fence or you’ll get the full force of my fury and I promise you won’t like it.)

Orgasm control is a complex part of my life. I tried to eliminate it from my body before and had poor success. I am going to continue to try to make progress on this but for now it is what it is. Guess what folks, long term M/s relationships have side effects. If we have sex you need to give me permission to come. You need to do it every time. “Yes” is a good enough answer. “Please?” “Yes.” is a great way to manage this with the least amount of embarrassment for me. Having to give the full freaking explanation every time because you forgot gets embarrassing. If you tell me to wait that is a D/s interaction. If we have not negotiated that you are jumping a fence. If you tell me that you won’t give me permission, I just have to come when I feel like it you are telling me that I don’t get to come. What happens is my body shuts down that part of me. I become a hole for use but I won’t feel almost any of it. I have a really extreme trauma history and dissociation was once a nearly full time survival tactic.

It’s not a fucking casual scene for me.

I like giving oral sex. A lot a lot a lot. I like it the most if there is some degree of being strongly encouraged involved. I’m not talking about serious forcing, but pushing my head down toward your cunt is going to get me all wet. Telling me to suck your cock will get me all wet. Asking me politely is a complicated thing now that I live in the UK. The level of manners is just different and I am having to find a new normal. I have no idea how this will shake out down the line. Given that my vanilla shagging skills are on the rise I expect I will find a way to cope.

For the record: if I have given you oral sex I consider you one of my sexual partners. None of this “oral sex doesn’t count as sex” crap. Don’t bloody ever tell me that we haven’t really had sex. You have fucked my body or I have fucked yours and probably (hopefully) you have come inside or on me. We have had sex. Sure, it was a different hole. Whoopie. It was still penetrative sex. Don’t worry about asking me if it is ok to come in my mouth. If I like you enough to let your dick in my mouth, I’m happy to have you come. I do prefer being told when it is happening so I can sync my breathing, but it is just a preference.

I do have a strong gag reflex and if I seriously fight to bring my head back after you have forcibly shoved my head down on your cock, for the love of Cheese let me go. I may be on my way to run to the bathroom and vomit. It has happened. It will probably happen again. I accept this. Please don’t let the possibility of this happening prevent you from fucking my mouth with enthusiasm. It is great for me. This being said, I’m not terribly thrilled with having a relationship centered solely around me giving blow jobs. I will feel used in a way that isn’t fun for me.

Since I’m talking about dicks so much. I haven’t played with someone who has a cunt in many years. I remember them fondly. I would like to believe I will figure it out with gusto if given the opportunity but there is the chance I am lying to myself. I could totally fail to be fun.

Also: I really like getting oral sex while wearing a strap on. That is fucktastically hot. The grinding is good for me.

Receiving oral on my pussy is a thing I do because I like you. You kind of have to have a magic wand to get me off that way. Some of you have one. I like you. It starts with the thighs. Stay on the thighs for a very long time. You think you’ve done long enough and you are ready to go for the little man in the boat? You are wrong. Stay on the thighs. How long? Three times that long. And then you touch the lower labia. You stay the fuck away from the little man in the boat. Am I making myself clear? You go back and forth between the labia and the thighs for a whole lot longer. Eventually I will indicate, yeah, go for it. Then and only then do you go for the little man in the boat. Being impatient will only make it suck in a not fun way for me. I guess we’ll see whether you are doing it for me or for yourself. Fingers are a very important part of this process.

I am old, cranky, and I have chronic pain. There are times when I am up for acrobatic porn-star sex. There are days when it is, “I am here. What more do you want from me?” I can be fun enough whatever my range for the day. But you will have to respect where my body is on a given day. Your fantasies take a back seat to my physical limitations. I have disabilities. Such is life.

Holy moly this section is changing. I might have vibrators in my whore bag. If you want them to come out, ok. I am unlikely to bother. I would prefer you. I am there because I want you.

This needs a whole section. Slut and whore are both words I have intensely positive associations with and they do not feel like degradation for me. They mean I embrace pleasure in this life and feel a sense of responsibility around sharing that with people. That’s not something that makes me bad. I’m very good because I do this. They are both affirmations of parts of myself that I am proud of. They do not belittle me. They do not mean I am bad or unclean or gross or shameful. Being both a slut and a whore is connected to how I am good.

However, I am not a bitch. I am not being mean. I am not gross or dirty or bad. I am a very nice woman who has come over to make your life a more fun place for a little while. I need you to pay me respect for doing so.

In short: “Slut and whore: good. Bitch: bad.”

Complicated. Once upon a time I spent a lot of time tying people up and being tied up. I miss it fiercely. I really like being tied up. I really like being suspended. I really really like being suspended and fucked. Oh the good old days.

I’m in a weird spot with group sex. I am theoretically open to it but I would need to feel like everyone involved was there as a completely autonomous adult to have fun. I am not ok with ever feeling pimped out again. Don’t fucking ask me to bring you women or I will want to burn you to the ground.

We need to be equals.

a. Choking

Choking is completely off the table. I have a long and storied history of head trauma and pre-stroke symptoms that are very concerning. I have children who need me. I cannot risk my life for your orgasm.

b. Impact play

I like punching and kicking. Those are basically my favorite things.

I thought being hit with a giant rubber mallet was absolutely awesome. Single tails are harder than they used to be, but I am open to learning how to process them again. I have a long-term love/hate affair with canes. Sting from a broad hand slap is really hard for me. I like thud. I dislike floggers because they impact too much skin at once.

c. Pinching

Don’t pinch me. Don’t pinch me. Don’t pinch me. I will fucking hate you. (Other than nipples. Do that slowly.) Grabbing a whole big handful of muscle/fat is different though. It can be really nice sometimes.

Due to some of the stuff that happened when I was very young I have a whole lot of scar tissue throughout my vagina/labia/anus. Scar tissue is like a dotted line in the skin that means, “Please tear here.” Despite my very strong desire for rough, and rougher, and rougher sex… I can’t actually handle all that I would like to handle. (Damnit.) Don’t pull roughly on my labia. Don’t pull my ass cheeks apart with any speed or force. Just DON’T. The skin has the potential to tear open and it will hurt and that might curtail sex for hours if not days. It sucks ass and so I try to avoid massive tearing. Gentle handling of the bits is important. I am delicate in a way you would not expect from someone with my overall temperament. I’m a fragile toy. Treat me with care.

But also finger bang me like you are playing the fastest game of ping pong in your life because I can squirt like a motherfucker and apparently that is amusing/satisfying/something.

Because we will be having sex with condoms lube must be very close by. It is my friend.

My third kid wrecked my asshole. I’ve had multiple surgeries to repair the area. It’s still not perfect. I do like anal stimulation it’s just fraught. I am interested in finding out what I can handle in the future after the last round of surgery but it has to be done with extreme care and deliberation.

C. After sex/play

Immediately after sex/play I will want to breathe and hug for a few minutes. I will probably want to spend an extended period of time talking and making out. I will want a check in email afterwards for any bdsm play–I do not need it for vanilla sex. I like being friends with people but that has to happen around my schedule. It is highly limited. I’m not rejecting you. I’m dealing with the fact that right now my life is about figuring out how to be healthy around my kids and that is much harder for me than you might think. It takes a lot of time and energy. It is very important to me that I do this right because now I am all they have. It will remain my focus for quite some time.

For the foreseeable future I am going into any and all sex or play with the mindset that there are no promises to be made. All encounters are done if they are fun for all involved and they work in that moment. I would like it if things started out with the option of being open ended if we both have enough fun, but no pressure if we don’t. I am not looking for anything that is a conscious one off from the outset. Vetting is laborious. I do not relish doing that much work for only a couple of hours of reward. That’s super low cost to benefit ratio. I want to have consistent and predictable sex with people who are going to be kind to me.

I have a boyfriend. I have a nice lady I am courting. I am solo poly with a hard bent towards relationship anarchy. I want more connection than I am capable of maintaining without giving up sleep. It’s going to be a balancing act for the next few years.

If you are already a part of my vanilla life with my children then I am probably going to decline sex with you for the foreseeable future. I need that community to stay stable for them. Sex is a catalyst for all kinds of change. Those changes can wait for a different season. I need to preserve the stability of my family above all.

Old shit and new shit

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It’s been on my mind a lot lately how much Noah resented me having a lot of friends in the kink community. He acted like them liking me meant he wasn’t really part of the group. He did have his own friends who came to kink events, but he considered them more “visitors” to kink from computerland. He thought of himself and his friends as weekend warriors who “didn’t really count” in the eyes of the Leather people. He wasn’t all wrong.

He didn’t want to put the time in to go sit at munches or go to parties without any hope of play. For him if there was no payoff there wasn’t a point. Then he resented that I had so many friends. He resented that I had so many opportunities to play when he didn’t.

I practically lived at scene events for 5 years. I was at scene events at least 4 days a week and often 7. These events would last anywhere from 2 hours to all weekend. I was spending probably a minimum of 15 hours a week at scene events. Then there were the immersive conferences I went to many times a year that lasted 3 or 4 year. Even more rarely (but ever more precious) were the ones that lasted 7 days.

Of course I had friends in the scene.

If you assume 15 hours a week (totally ignoring conferences) and giving me two weeks off a year for illness, that is 750 hours a year. Given that a weekend event would add at least 50 hours to that and I went to several most years I hit at least 1,000 hours a year at scene events for 5 years running.

No fucking shit I made a lot of friends. That’s not including the time I spent with friends. I was one of those assholes who “only knows scene people” for a few years. I was grateful my vanilla friends forgave me for being a neglectful asshole for a while after I came back. I made a lot of them take minor walks on the wild side and they learned that they were not kinky. Oh well. At least they can say for sure that they didn’t like being tied up all that much. I have some very funny pictures that are on paper and will never be on the internet. I like that. In the old days, privacy was a much easier thing.

Some things are great to remember forever. Some things should be forgotten because they were only meant to live for a moment in a very small container.

I do really wonder about sending my buddy one of the pictures of him tied up and suspended. He is very very very very Catholic with his 7? 8? children. I wonder how old man him would feel about our youthful games. It was good clean fun. Sure, it was sex but it was the kind where everyone stays fully dressed and nobody touches any junk.

It was wholesome, damn it!

I could send other pictures to the dear old friend in Utah doing his best to expand the tolerance level of the Mormon church. He believes God brought me into his life and his heart for a reason. He is militant about advocating for people like me.

A long time ago I was learning and exploring and I was brand new. I didn’t feel responsible for the outcome.

Now I feel really shitty that I bumped into someone at the munch repeatedly in a playful way without ever having a conversation about such things first. I am grateful that he has accepted my apology but I’m too fucking old for this shit.

I feel this overwhelming responsibility to do it “right” all the time and I don’t.

I am having a hard time with the amount of personal space awareness the kink scene requires. I have fucked up several times since I came to Scotland and I am really upset with myself for being so messy about these things. They are small mistake size but there have been a couple and I don’t like it. I am not reticent enough. I am not contained enough.

I struggle, often, with how reticent and wary to act folks are locally. I have the polar opposite problem. I am overly comfortable with the idea of acting. I am the exact kind of asshole who, when someone is passing, will bump into them and say “oops” a couple of times. I don’t do it hard. I don’t try to hurt anyone. I’m playing. But I don’t have the right to be familiar with anyone’s body.

Noah wanted me away from my friends and he got his wish. I have very little time in a room with anyone here. Even the people I’ve spent the most time with I’m still awkward and I feel like I don’t understand the boundaries. I sometimes wonder if Bestie and I like to dance together so much because that is the only way we can manage to be in that kind of proximity to each other. We aren’t snuggly at all. I touch my kids. Gentleman and I have sex.

Noah touched me for hours and hours and hours every day.

I feel desperate for kinesthetic, tactile relationships. Being sober is the fucking worst. I don’t feel sexy and I’m not going to initiate sex. If I look anything other than horny he doesn’t initiate.

My body aches with the desire to be in contact with humans.

It is feeling a little rocky as I start adding stuff back into my life because I desperately need more fucking contact than I am having. Most of the time I’m filling is kid-stuff adjacent so it means very minimal physical contact and only that initiated by short people.

It is the size and shape of life I was allowed to have with Noah. He allowed me to have more than a full time job worth of socialising while he was working because I could justify pretty much all of it for the kids. It is literally my fucking job to socialise these children. That was well done of me to get my whole life set up around filling my particular needs.

As it gets warmer I keep thinking about the fact that I have about 5 months to go until It’s 2 years out from the rape. The last year and a half have been brutal on my sense of community. I am so lonely. I don’t get out enough. We don’t get out enough. Home educating is harder here. The community is spread out so far it’s a real problem since I don’t drive.

Building community here is a much harder path than it was in California. The population density is small. Also: I used to drive. This whole fucking process is a fucking nightmare sometimes. I choose this. I can’t go back, not for a million reasons. This is where I have to bloom. Maybe it’ll be ok. This country does glorify the thistle.

I’m not going to be able to get to scene events very often and when I go I am going to want to be fully present with the people in the room. I’m not going so that I can have a place to do public scenes with my partner. I mean, yes, that’s on the list of things I’m happy to do. It’s not The reason.

I’m having to think about this really hard because both Gentleman and Pretty Lady are making comments about wanting to be part of this. That’s fucking complicated. Because when I go to a party I want to see the people I don’t get to see all the rest of the time. I don’t go to a party to be watched. I go to meet people and talk and play with new people. I need to build a bigger friends network in this country. I need it. I am not saturated in terms of relationships. Nothing of the sort. I don’t know how much more serious dating I have space for at this point. Definitely not with anyone outside the radius.

My life is constrained. I want to get to know people who live on the coasts, and Borders, and central belt. (I am honestly not sure how I should be capitalising that sentence. Feedback? I go back and forth on whether Central Belt should be capitalised. I think “Borders” is a specific region and thus a proper noun? I’m trying to guess based on how people speak and I’m forking confused.) I only have chances to see those people at parties. Like, I’m not going to spend the whole time hanging out with my Kids either.

Mama is going to play. If I can. If not, I want to make new friends. It is less important to me that I find play all the time. I must feel the freedom to be able to get into a really deep, meaningful conversation with someone without checking my watch.

I am tetchy as all fuck about this. I’m being defensive when I don’t have to be. Maybe this is a bad month for a tolerance break. I am going to have to have a lot of control over my tone of voice in ways I’m not doing great at today. My kids don’t tell me to use this medication because I am easy to live with without it. “With your medication you are a very happy mama. Without your medication you are rather a fucking bitch. Go take your medication.” Direct quote.

I feel bad about that.

I don’t know how my relationship with Gentleman is going to survive a tolerance break. Maybe this month is not a good idea. We are going to have to talk through me going to a party on my own and going to a party with him. Maybe I am going to need an amount of control I just literally don’t have available while sober. My choice is not speaking at all because no, I am not going to be able to say it as nice as you need me to. I can’t. I literally fucking can’t. This is why I take medication. So that I fucking can.

Drug dependence is fucking real. But the thing is, I have all these issues without the medication. I’ve had problems my whole damn life. On the medication I am a moderately functional human being.

I remember when I went on the road trip I got into an argument with my Utah pal’s mother in law. She was taking something like 18 different medications. We talked about them a great deal. I went through the research on cannabis and how using it would probably knock her down to 1 or 2 pills. She said, “No. It’s illegal because it’s bad for you. Nothing about it could ever work or be useful.” The conversation went on for a while. She said a lot of things. I found it really amusing. We make ourselves believe so many things.

Literally 8 fucking doctors all signed on that cannabis is the most useful medication that exists for me and I should use it for the rest of my life. That included a fucking pediatrician and ob/gyn who worked with me through multiple pregnancies and I breast fed for 7 fucking years. That’s not good enough for this country though. I have to wait through the waiting lists then get rejected by the NHS for multiple kinds of treatment having no effect before I can get capsules here.

Life does not give a flying fuck about anyone. These things are silly.

I’m feeling oppressed and pieces of it are mildly reasonable even if they aren’t personal.

I feel exhausted to my soul.

One day of break. I don’t think this is the month. I think that’s going to go poorly. I don’t think I have that resolve to give. I think I will be too snippy and bitchy. I don’t think I have enough relationship capital in this relationship to be allowed to have a bad mood. That’s good to know. It is very important for me to respect the limits of a container. When I understand what caliber of self is required I can select the timing of my performance and make sure I don’t exceed my limits.

Noah and I took turns taking tolerance breaks and being grouchy shitheads. We knew to sigh deeply and ignore each other for a while. It will pass. Every feeling passes.

I don’t think I have space in my life for volatility right now. I don’t think that self is acceptable. That’s a hard thing for a bunch of reasons. Physically I do need the break. I don’t do them for fun.

I think this is one of those times when I have to pick what kind of selfish I am going to be. I can either be sexually selfish or I can be selfish about being moody. I don’t think I get to have both right now.

I think I’m getting close to 15 people with whom I’ve had enough conversations to fill more than 24 in person hours of friendship. That’s 6.5 years in.

I’m not popular here. I have an asshole telling people wild stories about me and my dead husband. I’m kind of an abrasive bitch and I’ve already had a messy falling out with one dude and that’s not great. Someone dislikes me for very good cause. I was far too aggressive in questioning them about a rapist. I was really selfish and it was wrong.

No, I don’t have a bunch of fucking friends right now. Well, I do, but my friends are mostly thousands of miles away. I don’t have a community here that I have built with time and shared connection. I have a bunch of strangers and a lot of hope. I have a desperate need for the kind of communion I have found with Leather people.

It’s not the same here, but it’s close enough. I’ll accept kinksters instead of Leather. I’m not snobby.

Now I have more like 12 hours in this month where I get to be around kinky people. Last month, because of the house party, it was like 72 hours of being around kinky people. Most months 10 or 12 hours.

I do not feel like this is all happening super fast. This feels glacial to me. I’m not going to have a lot of time in public kinky gatherings. I am going to talk to people and get to know everyone I can. Even the ones you don’t like. Even the ones I end up not liking. I still want to meet them all. This is a fucking small pond and I want to know who is in the ecosystem.

Why?

Because that makes me feel like a whole person. I don’t want to tell you what to do or boss you or decide who is good or bad or moral or ethical. I want to feel like there are a lot of people who are going to need to come together for my funeral. I want to be part of a lot of stories. I need it. I won’t be a main character for them, don’t be silly. I will be a recurring walk on with a scenery chewing personality. You can’t keep me around too much because I will steal the show. I shove people into building their own lives as hard as I can.

I can’t help being loud and sometimes difficult. I can make sure that people don’t have to put up with me when I am feeling like that. There are reasons I wanted a detached house so no one has to hear how obnoxiously loud and American we are.

I am feeling intensely harsh and imperfect. Feelings. Feelings I can’t word. Feelings that I would regret wording.

There is no fair to the fact that I am still over reacting to the repression Noah enforced. It’s not nice for Gentleman that I’ve had a lot of years of the same damn argument and I react like it’s the thousandth time instead of the sixth.

I think one of the big differences in my mind is that kink is for individuals more than couples. It’s not like swinging where there is the priority on enforcing the outside dyad dynamic. There are couples who are intensely together and monogamous entirely who are active in the kink community. That’s a fine and dandy thing. Most people are at least play poly even if they are otherwise monogamous. We come to make friends and share time exploring a mind bending hobby. It’s better than drugs.

My order of safer sex supplies arrived. I had been missing a few things. This is good. I sincerely doubt any of them will get used this weekend. I would put it below a 5% chance. It’s not a sex party. I like serendipity though. Chance favours the prepared mind. Those who fail to plan, plan to fail. Or plan to get cock/cunt blocked by their own stupidity and laziness.

Realistically I’m going to be lucky if I can get past feeling anxious as fuck and even talk to people much. I am opening a door Noah didn’t want opened. This feels existentially terrifying and hard and painful.

The thing is, I’m on the other side. I want to be fully me again and I am feeling inhibited. I am feeling like it isn’t ok.

The fun thing is, I won’t be going as a piece of meat. I’m too old and picky and bitchy for that shit. I’m a bitch who expects people to jump over hurdles for me. I can’t expect to find that at a random party. One can always maintain hope though. There are a lot of ways I can think that through to find some fun.

It all depends on who is in the room and I don’t know yet. I don’t know if I might as well rock up in my stretchy leggings and a prairie dress because comfort is over fashion while I’m chatting and getting no action. I’ll dress up if I have to. I am very lazy though. I like being comfortable so I’m not sure the kind of dressing up I’m up for will even count these days. I’m old and in pain and I don’t give a shit if I look like a fetish model.

If I run a lot more and maybe uhhh cut back a tiny bit on the cake I might be able to fake that shit for a couple of nights. I have some really cool leather dresses. Amusingly, Noah bought them both. He never wanted to go anywhere with me where I could wear them. That was always so strange to me. He knew that wearing these made me feel like a fancy bitch. He thought that owning them was the same as wearing them. He was so smart and also really stupid.

This is one of the things I am going to have to get used to and react like a grown up. I will never have a Daddy again. Daddy’s have to tolerate their children being moody and petulant sometimes. It’s part of the deal. I don’t have a Daddy anymore. I should be in bed. This is when Noah had an alarm. He’d come and get me and give me a stern look.

He took care of me in so many ways. He made me believe that I was worth an awful lot of effort and then he left me alone.

I think solo poly is awesome because I can appreciate a relationship without needing to be upset about all the things a relationship is not. In my home I will always be safe to have all the feelings without having to constrain them to what people want them to be. Come over when you can handle me. Go home when you are done with my bullshit for the day. It seems quite reasonable to me.

Oh shitballs.

Tonight has been a lot of screaming and sobbing. I don’t think I can do a month off right now. It doesn’t matter how much I hate this cough. No, I don’t have better options. Don’t bring them up. You can’t fix everyone’s situation. Your resources are different. We all have to figure out our own shit and it fucking sucks.

I am so tired of curling inward with shame because existing as what I am hurt Noah so much. I did. That’s a fact. I also made him beam with love and go out and do really cool things with his life because he wanted to fund our adventures as a family. He wanted to support us doing cool shit.

He’s gone now. I don’t expect anyone to be patient with my bullshit. When I am given grace it is a gift. I need to work very hard to make fewer mistakes. I need to practice more. It’s really hard finding the time. Typing at people doesn’t actually count, not really. Not for what I need.

I need to know which people in the room I can walk up to with great enthusiasm and throw myself at them because they enjoy that kind of thing. I need to know which people I should smile and wave at, maybe we will chat a little while snacking. I need to know who is going to light up when they see me.

I won’t find out if I am looking at the floor and bouncing my eyes. I hate that I feel like I am fighting against intense pressure. Oh wait, there were literal hundreds of hours of hypnosis about this topic. I’m not supposed to do this.

I’m going to have some feelings as I do it. It’s going to be fucking gnarly. I will be torn between crying and grinning like my life depends on it. Like I will get hit if I don’t.

I don’t believe anyone in this environment would strike me if I had resting bitch face. This is not rational. I am fully aware, thank you very much. The thing is, what I need is to be a positive force for folks. I have to show up when I can show up.

I have seen a lot of people live life to the fullest and I have seen a lot of people squander their precious time. The older I get the more blessed I feel that I had to move so many times. It’s funny how I don’t want to give that to my kids. It was a trauma, sure, but it gave me insights into the similarities of humans that not everyone sees.

I want all of you. Even the ones I don’t like. I need you. I need you to need me too. That means I need to show up and be open to serendipity.

I have to go meaning to say “yes”.

Invitation

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I feel like I have found my little livejournalesque bunch here and there are so many amazing ideas floating around in my brain. I find myself drawn deeply into the stories told by dominant women lately. A long time ago I found no draw there at all. I have changed. The funny thing is, I still don’t think I will grow up and be a domme. I don’t think that will ever be my primary identity. Not all that yields is weak. (Thank you Jacqueline Carey.)

I am freaked out by the idea of figuring out what to wear because I feel like I don’t know how to invite anyone into any kind of anything. I feel paralyzed, frozen, unable to assert my longings once I am in the room. It has been a very long time of being punished for identifying these longings too closely. He didn’t hit me or anything but he did talk to me most fiercely. It did redirect the mind control efforts quite a bit.

The worst punishment in the world is knowing that I disappointed Noah. His disappointment was crushing and devastating. He was my Daddy. He was my God. I wasn’t letting down an ordinary man. I was committing heresy.

I was talking with a widow friend in town a bit ago. It was sort of intense when she grabbed my arm intently and leaned in and said, “Don’t get married again. Hold on to your freedom.” Her second husband has been in the mental hospital for quite some time. He only got there after sufficient violence in the home.

Life is terrifying. There is so much risk. So many bad things happen. It’s always funny when some loud feminist tells me that obviously I have the views I have because of my enormous privilege and lack of trauma. I mean, I do have an enormous amount of privilege. That’s a fact. I completely agree with that assertion. My life is staggering. There are a lot of problems I don’t have to have.

I would quibble a tiny bit about “lack of trauma”.

I really like the way my brain works in musical interludes. I intensely walk around with my personal little sound track going in my brain. Right this minute out burst out with Garth Brooks belting [Standing Outside the Fire.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IaTYqFZ4-4) This was one of the songs I listened to for every ~~nitrous trip~~ dentist visit from 12-18. The dentist used to be so fun. Oh well.

I feel absolutely unable to contain the inferno inside of me. I don’t know how to express it. I don’t know how to invite contact with it in a way that feels fair and reasonable and appropriate.

Mostly what I am looking for is friends. People I can egg on into adventure. People who want to laugh and cry and experience life together. I want to have fun on my own terms and not at the direction of anyone else.

I want to search for sadomasochists. I want to find people who will lean in and encourage me to go harder when I hurt them. I want to find people who will be torn between wanting to hurt me and getting distracted by me hurting them. I want to tussle back and forth never certain about who is going to win until one or the other of us collapses from excessive want and someone can’t fight for control anymore. I want to not know going in over and over and over. I want to find people whose desire crashes over them as harshly as mine does. People who feel absolutely driven by the need to experience pain.

What I miss the most is Black Sheets. A long time ago there was a recurring party in a house that was normally closed to women. The entire house was decorated with phallic art from around the world. It was an experience. It remains crystalised in my brain as the epitome of what I wish kink parties were like. It was a queer sex party with heavy bdsm encouraged. It was what I dreamed of in my feverish masturbatory fantasies early in life. I got to participate. It was incredibly fun. All the fucking in all the ways with all the peoples. It was amazing. I loved my friends so much. I went often enough and socialised with folks outside the party so the sex was icing on top of a really great cake. The relationships were deep and complex but had very little to do with what one might think of in terms of a cis het mono “Relationship”. There were people who came to these parties and had no penetration of any kind with anyone but there was still a lot of sex.

I feel like I got through the monotonous torture of early parenthood by remembering that I had a really fun self before they came along. Without Noah here as the bridge sharing before kids and empty nest with me the journey is going to be different. I agree with my therapist on this one. I can’t go back. I wouldn’t go back in a hundred ways, top of the list meaning I won’t go back to the US if I can help it. I do have to move forward.

I appreciate the kind offer of a permission slip. It worked really well when Noah did it.

I am going to have to find this somewhere else. I have to make some kind of peace within myself between feeling like being a white trash whore makes me essentially toxic to humans and feeling like I have a lot to offer. I do have the potential to be toxic to people. I am not in denial about this. There are going to be a lot of people who can’t be near me. Sometimes for reasons I completely agree with and support and sometimes for reasons I am going to hate. It doesn’t matter. Either way my responsibility is to back away as much as I can.

I believe that is the social contract.

When people tell me about the bus that hit them I am probably going to ask why they stepped out into the street and they are going to be incredibly upset with me. They are going to ask why I am victim blaming. They are going to accuse me of minimising their trauma.

I am really not trying to. I am trying to help you find the pattern so that next time you can avoid the next bus if that is very important. If possible I can help you decipher if a given bus is actually very fun to get hit by and maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Not because I will tell you that you should do it.

I am going to tell you that the sane thing is not opting into getting hit by a bus.

I will do that while consciously and deliberately looking down at the transit map for the perfect timing on stepping in front of certain busses.

I feel like certain other tantalising women do a better job of making this sound poetic.

So much of this desire is brutality and I don’t have the ability to make it sound ethereal and soul elevating right now. I’d better get ready to because book club is in 5 days. Woo!

I am very cheerful about getting to talk about this kind of stuff theoretically with other word people before going to the party. I won’t be actually doing any useful social networking because Americans but it will still feel reassuring. I’m still scared of the ways I will have to proffer my meat sack in order to build what I want to be part of.

I would love to find people in this country for the kinds of parties I think of with so much longing. I want to find the fire that lives in other people and stoke it higher. I want to be kindling. I want to help people feel permitted to desire.

I want Church. I want a river of desire and lust and wanting and permission and pain and transformation. I want to leave bite marks on chests while I use them to gain my pleasure.

Do you know how incredibly fun it was to go to a sex party with a bunch of friends when a verbal order to orgasm was fresh in my programming? I really really really appreciate that my partner went to such trouble when I was 19. That’s been fucking handy in life in all kinds of ways. It has also lead to a really deep and abiding alienation between me and the topic of owning my cunt. It doesn’t matter how dominant I act most of the time, I still need permission to come.

I can get to the point of begging from fairly little stimulation. If I don’t ask when I feel the urge I can make it go away entirely and then I won’t get off at all during the sex. That’s a complicated place to live in.

I cannot actually take my pleasure. Permission must be given. I really am a vampire. I cannot come unless you invite me in. Luckily when no one is in the room I’m fine. Or my life might be a much more miserable place than it otherwise is. I like this part of this timeline.

It complicates inviting anyone in. Needing to bring up that uhm situation fairly immediately creates a lot of tension and dynamic from the get go. Any amount of advertising myself in a sexy way brings with it the mandatory early conversation about orgasm control. It’s not an easy 101 conversation to have on the fly. “Well it’s fine if it’s just an impact scene.” No. No it is not. A lot of things drive orgasm in my body. I take nerve pain medication every day because my nerves shoot off in some troublesome ways no matter I do. Some aspects of this are very fun. I like that a lot of activities make me get off. It’s not that hard to get me off.

I have a sense of alienation from this at times. Needing this permission really triggers a lot of bullshit dominance behaviours from men. It’s a complicated dance at times. I feel like I have spent a lot of my life bouncing around in the manic pixie dream girl trope. Do you know what men want to do when they find their own manic pixie dream girl? Lock that shit down.

I do really love hearing about how other people pick their style. It would be convenient if I didn’t have such a knee jerk reaction to purple, perhaps. You know why and that’s enough. I don’t have to explain it to anyone else. I find this presence that is not present deeply comforting. Thank you for allowing me to talk to you again. I have missed you.

I have missed the me that I was with you. I have missed exploration without specific limits. “Go out; have adventures! Come back; tell stories!” I cannot go back.

How do I move forward inhabiting that kind of space, though? I’m still toying with the idea. Agonising might be a closer fitting term. This doesn’t feel fun. As the wise lady said, it’s a lot easier to gloss over how much suffering happens as you figure things out. Another wise lady was talking about why she stopped talking about her personal life in a public way many years back and she’s very happy about it.

This is how I figure out who I am and what I want and what I need to change to get to where I want to be from here. My life would be much easier if I fit neatly into boxes and didn’t need to explore the pain I feel when I consider exposing other people to the deep core of fire that is inside of me.

I do know that the power comes from me. Permission to exhibit it comes from relationships. Permission to radiate that power comes from active consent.

How in the fuck do I radiate a kind of sexy that contains the conundrum that while I want to rip you apart and savage your body I will still need you to control a pretty essential aspect of my biology. This is more than a little insane.

Honestly this is part of why I want to keep my clothes on with Pretty Lady for a very long time. Touching me changes the dynamic. If it is done in a wide variety of ways there I am begging and pleading for release.

I am not looking for people who want to have a go at the pinball machine. Not at this time. Maybe later. That’s for when someone is a friend and has already paid into the Bank of Krissy and _______’s Relationship. That’s for parties like Black Sheets.

In my mind and in my soul there is an understanding that such parties are not available at this time at any cost for me in this environment. That’s fine. I have less than 10 years left on the indenture. 54 is going to be a really good birthday for me. Halfway through the year after that I am free. Not that I will have an empty nest. But I will be free to pick up and go where I want and do what I want when I want.

Fuck. I want to feel E Ticket Ride sexy. You have to be willing to pay a whole lot of extra costs for me. I’m a lot. I have a lot to give. I have a lot I need to get. You have to jump over hoops to really get me to offer you my time in an ongoing way.

I don’t know how to describe this headspace. I want to open the door to serendipity. I think there is a very important difference between this and the app-driven mindset of “I have to keep looking at my options.” It’s a very serial monogamist way of looking at it. I don’t want to see if I can get an upgrade on the boyfriend unit.

I want to find out what kind of torment I can find with other people. Torment is my love language. How fucked up and awesome would it be if someone had to give me permission to come over and over while I told them no?

I MEAN, HOW COOL DOES THAT SOUND?! I mean, I have mental possibilities of sound tracks but they are all vague because this is potential space.

I have never done what I want to do now. This is a huge amount of moving forward into a kind of power I did not and could not have when I was young.

I don’t know how to radiate this power because I don’t know what it feels like yet. I have not yet been sexy in this way so I have no idea what it looks like or feels like. I took the yielding, perhaps too far when I was young. I didn’t know how to protect my crappy meat sack. I did not know how to limit the checks my mouth wrote by the amount my ass could cash. I was hit by a number of very large busses. I am not sorry.

I want to pick a route with a smaller bus next time.

I want to feel the sparkling electricity that comes from masochists slamming into each other with mutual gasps and squeaks and moans because does it hurt or does it feel good? I don’t know or care just don’t stop.

I feel like a raging volcano. Advertising as if I were just slutty would be underselling the experience by a lot. It would feel really unfair. It would feel like false advertising and trying to draw people into a web of intensity they are not actually prepared for. They would interpret my intensity as drama. I don’t intend to create drama and I work really hard at not disrupting peoples lives in bad ways.

It’s a risk though. If you trigger people to go through transformation sometimes there is some drama. Change is not always appreciated by the other folks in someones life. They liked things as they were.

Chaos agent. Chaotic good, if you will. Mostly? I strive but I fail. I am only mortal. I like to bit off more than I can chew and then I wonder why I choke.

I want so much that I am burning with it. I don’t know how to keep being normal without getting to bleed off this energy. I want to hurt someone so much my fingers itch. My cunt aches and longs for interaction. I want to rake my nails down your back because it makes you lust harder.

I do not know if I want a glamour. I do not know if I want to come naked under a sheer supplicants gown. Please use me. Please allow me to use you.

I actually own the dress I have in mind. I need to run a few hundred miles before wearing it again will happen. I am going to go for a run today.

I want and I want and I want. I do not know what manifesting this in fetching garb looks like yet. How do I attract what I want? I force and interest in leaning in to change. I don’t want to do the same tricks you have done with everyone ever on repeat. I want to find new tricks together. Don’t tell me what was best with other people as if I am supposed to try hard to best someone else’s personal score on the video game of your personal pleasure.

You don’t want to play that game with me. You really don’t. My pinball machine best score list is not something you want to think about. I was married for a long time to a really good lover. The person who instilled the initial programming considered a personal hobby to help me hit 4 digits of orgasms in our relationship. It was an intense experience.

Please, for the love of Cheese, don’t whack the pinball machine like you are desperate to be the high scorer. That’s just not a good look.

I don’t want to just be a pinball machine. Sometimes I refer to this feeling as being treated like a service provider. I’m a vending machine of the experience someone wants to order up.

I am not real big on “spontaneous” but I am huge on serendipity. It’s not an accident I walked into that room. I probably planned it weeks or months in advance. What happens once I get there is not fully under my control. I have to throw the dice and see what happens.

It’s not that “dating” means nothing to me. It is that dating is not the same as marriage and it is not the same as ownership. It means I have not relinquished my autonomy as a single adult head of household. I need to go in. Time to do that head of household bullshit. I want to alternate between typing and masturbating all day. Oh well. Such is not my lot in life. I wanted this Indenture. Time to serve it.

They won’t know that hiding behind my grin and cheerful, “Good morning! Good to see you again” will be a simmering need to savage someone’s body.

I am an excellent liar.

It’s Ostara.

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Today I finished tidying the garden and planted the bits of colour. I’m trying to add more plants every year that bloom earlier. It’s a process. I started with like 6 plants that flowered by Ostara and I’m up to many dozens. In my defense, I didn’t fully tidy up because I know better. Not before May. But I did clean up all the tripping hazard sticks and I unburied some of the stepping stones so folks can see where to go more easily.

This has always been the season shift I feel the most intensely. It is time to start being outside planting, working, and playing. It’s when I start seeds inside because it’s too early to be doing much outside. After the party I’m chucking all the seeds onto my bathroom floor again; it’s warm enough to get stuff going. It’s awkward in my bathroom for about 2 months but oh well.

It feels like I am trying to co-opt this energy away from gardening into pruning my emotional landscape. That’s probably wise at the moment. Well, not pruning. Examining.

There is a part of me that teeters, on this equinox between the knowledge that having two people I see fairly seriously for different kinds of adventures and limiting myself to them would be less work, less anxiety for all involved, and way easier to schedule and the self awareness that forces me to admit how much I want everyone. I want to go flag down a rugby team. Not because I’m that into rugby. Because they would probably be able to literally hand me around and that sounds absolutely amazing. Sometimes I find myself checking people out at the rock climbing gym in ways that are wildly inappropriate. I have full on movies play out about what they could do with hands that strong. Holy shit for shoe shine I thirst so hard I worry that I will crack teeth.

It’s not because I’m that into fit people aesthetically. Strength is hot. Someone who can hold his body to a wall while dangling fully horizontally is someone who could do magical fucking things with his fingers. If he doesn’t know how yet that’s fine. I’m bossy.

I have to admit. I’m really bummed that Closed Book didn’t work out. He could have been a lot of fun if he had some boundaries. Ah well. This is how the cookie crumbles. Even though he lives exactly .4 miles from my house that does not make him a good person to mess with.

I am managing to say no to bad ideas. Pat myself on the back there. But what about questionable or neutral deals? I mean. There could be a lot of those over the next few years if I play my cards right. I want to be pithy and say “And I am very good at cards” but it would be a giant fib. Sometimes I get very lucky. The rest of the time I suck.

Which is how it goes when you are throwing bait in the water. It’s how I found Portland Boy all those years ago. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. He was the friend of a friend I did random pick up play with. He’s still my friend. I get to be a friend to his life. I get to watch his joy with the right partner and family.

So like, I feel like I would be down to go to a bathhouse and pick people up for sex but maybe they will stick around in my life for 20 years? It could happen. Literally, I know people.

I feel so torn. I know the lower stress route would be easier on all concerned. I feel really bad because it’s not as fun. I’m supposed to be teetering on the balance of equality today. I feel like I want to plunge off into the deep end. Sweetheart, this isn’t all happening all at once. I am moving glacially slowly for me. I’m being careful and mindful. I long but I haven’t made big self destructive choices recently.

What if the play wasn’t self destructive? What if playing with new people is healing and part of bonding and creating a new web of people? What if the play is a necessary step in ensuring that I will survive the next major catastrophe? I’m a fucking anime protagonist. There will be another major catastrophe and then one after that. Mostly they won’t be my fault! Ok, sometimes they will be my fault. This is because I am stupid and make bad decisions. This is one of those phrases I use that bothers people. I’m not actually stupid but sometimes I think with the wrong head. I am impulsive.

I went and saw Sue Perkins tonight. I have seen three comedy shows this year. I’m seriously on a roll. I loved this show. I have to admit it was quite hard to contain myself when she said, “No one wants a 56 year old sex addict.” I really wanted to yell, “I do!!!”

This is a small town. People fucking notice me around town. That would not play well. Sometimes people claim I have no tact. You people can fuck right off, I do too have tact.

I feel bad because it drove Noah insane that the more sex we had the more I craved sex with other people. It’s not that I was unsatisfied. It is that every act of sex feels like fuel for the next couple of times. It feels like bonus energy for existing and working and loving people.

My compost pile is absurdly high and I need to pull it out and sift it. I also need to get my hands on a serious wood chipper and go through my giant pile of logs. I need the wood chips. I keep thinking that if the universe were fair someone would want to do the labour to flip my compost pile for me in exchange for me feeding them and kicking them in the nuts.

Yes, this nut kicking topic is a thing. I’m pretty obsessed. It’s an intense focus that I’ve had for at least 30 years. Kicking people in the testicles is FUCKING HILARIOUS. I derive so much joy from the act that I can barely contain myself. I will always have gratitude in my heart that someone allowed me to have a container where that was a really good part of our relationship. I am sad the rest of the container didn’t work out. This is how life goes. We can’t keep all the containers.

Pavlov made excellent, important, accurate points about how it is broken to think of relationships in terms of transactions. I’m still really broken. I’m very very Silicon Valley about this sort of thing. “Let’s discuss the frank exchange of activities we want to have between us.” I fill your bucket by doing x. You fill my bucket by doing me. It’s very simple. Let me sell you on the services I have to offer. It feels dirty and I’m not sure if it is dirty in a bad way or a fun way. Not all the services are sexual. I am patterning off Auntie more and more as I age. She patterned off her mother who fostered a lot of children. Both Auntie and my grandmother were women who severely neglected their children in favor of the kids/grown ups they took in. My mom was sandwiched in between them, eternally the child needing to be taken care of.

Pete Walker says, in his book on C-PTSD, that every human should receive entirely unconditional love and support for the first two years of their life. After that it is basically a sliding scale as you move towards adulthood where you do have to earn love.

My therapist asked me today if I loved myself. I said I do. I listed off the ways I have earned my love.

I feel really bad for the ways I was not able to be what Noah wanted. Part of it was I was using so much bandwidth on being the mother I need to be. The amount of devotion and sacrifice required by my day job is pretty fucking overwhelming. It is not enough for me to be present. I am active and directive and patient and considerate about developmental levels and constantly adapting our environment to be easier to bear for my kids. They all have really intense sensory challenges. Living is painful. Managing their environment so that they can have optimal functioning requires a massive amount of bandwidth and energy from me. I am deeply relieved to see this work falling off a cliff as the people approach adulthood. I don’t have to do it for my son anymore. He knows how to manage now. It took a while. I know the others will get there too.

This work consumes me. I want to be able to give it my absolute best. My best is pretty freaking great. I’m a walking circus full of know it all monologues on hundreds of topics at the slightest hint of a key word. I trained for this. I watch these people suffer in ways I feel responsible for–my genetics are responsible for these challenges.

The Indenture is feeling long. I won’t have Noah here stepping in to give me breaks. This is me.

I feel really bad that before I wanted “a partner” I wanted children. That was my focus. Ok, yes I wanted a coparent and what I needed was already so long and specific and demanding that requiring them to not have a penis felt like too tall of an order. Now I have the children and nice people I date.

This is a thing I have to think about and be clear about. This shame is not useful. I didn’t use Noah up and throw him away. This was not my fault. I have done a lot of bad shit in my life. I didn’t kill Noah.

My therapist is uhm encouraging me quite a bit in the direction of putting my wings on and exploring as much as I possibly can. They think that me being selfish is a healthy correction from the tight constraint of my marriage. Of course it is convenient when I feel told to do what I want to do. Of course it is deeply problematic that I have a pathological demand avoidance response to being told what to do. My brain is a little bitch.

But I also feel pushed towards monogamy. Pushed is too strong. I am aware that the desire exists. I feel like a constant failure, still. I am really frustrated and tired of this exact specific ache in my chest. Monogamy isn’t on the table. Ok, second preference would be one woman because that’s the easiest to kind of wrap a brain around.

I feel like I’d be pretty happy taking on the task of making sure the average orgasm count for the Highlands increases. That sounds like fun. I know that realistically I can’t schedule it. I probably would get tired of trying very quickly but that doesn’t mean I can’t give it a good old college try. (Is that an idiom on this side of the pond?)

I need to go to bed. People will be here in 10.5 hours.

I want. I feel flooded with this aching burning and want. I am really tired of feeling bad about it. I want to put myself in a room with people who might want to ask me to do things. I want to say yes.

The downs are harder to write about now

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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.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Tag Archives: parenting

The roller coaster of emotions continues

I miss sharing every thought with him.

Tactical errors, failures, and belonging

Defrocking a saint

If I don’t do too much not enough gets done.

“That’s not poly, it’s sequential monogamy”

Priorities and patience

Vagueposting

The process is messy but I like the results

Coming back is feeling hard.

Drifting back

Deflated by feelings

Old shit and new shit

Invitation

It’s Ostara.

The downs are harder to write about now

Bragging

I am so proud of my babies