Tag Archives: parenting

I both feel over peopled and deeply lonely

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parenting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s going to be a long 10 years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m scared.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wish I could stop crying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am struggling.

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

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

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

Today is 6.5 months after Noah dying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That feels hard to admit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was worth it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It feels respectful to wait.

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

I need to stop looking for bad guys.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe someday.

Life isn’t fair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have to make the future easier.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m pretty scared.

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

Whoa.

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

That’s going to be complicated going forward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh. Shit. No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I just need one

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

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

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

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

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

I just need duty.

Patterns and cycles

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Folks keep asking how the kids are doing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t know where this will go

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the fuck else is the goal?

“Qualifications.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I found him so fucking attractive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is hard.

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

I have:

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

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

I will deal with that when we have to.

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

It’s a lot to ask of my body.

Keep moving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He’s gone and I will never be ok again.

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What I am doing is making sure my kids are ok. That’s it. I got them out of the house into time with supportive folks so I could strip Christmas from the house. The older two have already told me that they are not ok with us decorating next year.

I’m deep in the regret stage I can list 9 million what ifs that don’t result in me losing the only person who has ever consistently shown up and cared for me. There are a lot of people who have shown up at times. I am deeply lucky like that. Pam will be here in 13 hours. It’s a good thing.

Do you know what isn’t going to be the same cost/reward ratio going forward? Writing. For about 20 years I’ve been writing for Noah. He was my ideal reader. He was the person I most wanted to share my thoughts with.

My smallest one is telling me about how she is going to grow up to be like her dad: happy and joyful the vast amount of the time. This is a big change from the grumpy butt she often is. I told her that she is going to have all the feelings as often as she needs to happen and that is a good thing. She conceded that she will have other feelings, just like her dad did, but he chose to be happy and joyful because that is who he wanted to be and so does she.

When I cried just a little as I climbed into bed she told me, “You are safe. I am here with you.”

I sucked back that sob and said the same back to her. She relaxed into me and went to sleep.

It is remarkable that all of my children have embraced, “This hurts but we will keep walking and we will be ok.” We are roleplaying how to handle different situations that will come up at school. We are talking about how to not piss people off all the time and get hit. For the first time in my fucking parenthood I am saying with my whole heart, “If you know all the answers for the love of Cheese don’t raise your hand every time. Wait until no one else raises their hand, then you do it.” Don’t draw too much attention to yourself. When someone uses a word you don’t know, calmly and with curiosity ask them what it means. You are going to actually learn how to speak Scottish now! This is exciting! When they tell you a funny/clever one compliment them on their fun usage of language.

Don’t go looking for fights.

I went and saw a doctor yesterday. She told me that I could have benzodiazepine or melatonin for sleep because nothing else exists. Yeah. Neither is an appropriate choice for me to lean on as heavily as I would need to lean on something to sleep right now. I’m not going to sleep well at night. Frankly as long as this continues I should use as much time that the kids are in school to nap as I can.

I’m shaking all of the time. I’m being hooked up with bereavement support. I wish I thought it would help me. I think this is going to turn into another time where I am a bad person if I share any details about my past. I think it is going to end in me feeling more isolated and alone.

One of my ex’s is hitting on me and it makes me feel sick.

He got what he wanted. After the kerfluffle in 2016 he had permanent monogamy with me. I wish I could have given him a lot more years.

We touched each other all the time. We were both in the house most of the time and we’d walk past each other and trail a finger, or lean, or kiss, or wipe a cheek on one another hundreds of times a day. Even with how much contact the kids need I feel completely touch starved because I only need one person’s touch and I will never get it again.

It is so clear in my mind that I am not allowed to blame myself because then I would be a bad mother. It’s not my fault. There were a series of places where Noah made choices that should have been fine only they weren’t and if I try to take responsibility I will drive myself mad. This was a terrible accident. People die. I miss him so much.

Noah made a lot of choices in this life. Some of them worked out and some didn’t. That is the summation of a human life.

Soon I think I will need to pull back hard from social media. I can no longer sustain the level of typing I do since I don’t live with an in-house massage therapist.

I wanted to spend the rest of my life worshiping his body and telling him how grateful I was that picked me. He had gotten fucking fit over the past two years of us exercising together more. It was a wonderful body to worship. Every part of us fit so well. I liked where my head hit his shoulder. I liked how we lined up when we were in bed. I miss grabbing him and saying, “Mine.”

Combined with the rape abreactions that are still happening I feel deeply scared and out of control in my body. It doesn’t matter how I feel; it matters how I act.

One of my friends is setting up weekly knife/axe throwing with my son as a specific way to get him out of the house and into a relationship with an adult man. I have told him that he has to start doing things out of the house every week many days a week. Without Noah in this house we aren’t a full and complete ecosystem. We have to go meet other people and make more connections.

It’s remarkable how little I needed other people when I had Noah. He was everything.

Middle child is both looking forward to and dreading school. I think it will be ok. They really want to go do drama with people every day. I think that is a wonderful idea. Noah and I both loved theatre in high school.

I am going to start implementing a move towards school timing immediately because it will be an adjustment. My life is going to become very small and very routine and very rigid because it has to be. When they are at school I will exercise and garden. My mother in law is insisting I get weekly house cleaners; given that she is supporting me for the rest of my life, fine.

I did not cultivate a relationship with my in laws because I was preparing for this. It makes the kids feel better. I think it even made Noah feel better. I gave him a way to have a relationship with his parents that made him feel connected but not smothered. I am proud of that.

I wanted to see what would happen if Noah and I made children together. They are amazing and wondrous. This is going to be a big painful loss but we will walk on. He taught us to be strong. He showed us endless resiliency. He really was joyful and happy most of the time. And we were all such surly bastards so much of the time. I don’t think we will keep falling into that trap.

I told my Shortie that when someone does something and she has to think of how to respond she can think, “What would Daddy do?” Because he would tell a joke or be silly or lighten the mood–he wouldn’t pick a fight. That was not his way. He wasn’t a fighter. He was someone who wanted people to feel special and loved.

I would know better than anyone else.

Don’t make changes when things are bad.

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My brain is a fucking asshole right now. I’m isolating a lot so I don’t take it out on people. I’m coming out periodically to do work for people and announcing loudly, “This is my love language. I love you. I am not avoiding you out of dislike. I am keeping my shitty brain to myself until it stops being so shitty. I don’t want to wreck a relationship saying something I don’t mean in the long run.”

This is how I feel deeply privileged in this life. I get to do this. Golly this is amazing. I don’t have to shut up and keep it together at work. That feels like such a luxury.

I hate being depressed. I hate how every single thing comes out harder and more sad and feeling pointless and I feel worthless. It’s stupid. It doesn’t allow me to have reasonable or rational conversations.

Today we hop on a train and go south for immigration stuff. I’m tired and overwhelmed already and I’m not even required to be up for an hour. Another day, another step towards permanent settlement. Holy shit. I might never have to go back to Gunlandia! If y’all somehow get your shit together and oust the fascists and pass serious gun reform I may consider coming back. Those two things seem absolutely impossible. So even though the UK is far from perfect, I’ll stay in the place where my children won’t get shot.

It is actually a clear and pressing and overwhelming worry in my mind. I’m scared of bringing my three loud mouthed trans teenagers (one is a Bonus Kid) to the US if Harris loses in 4 days. I’m freaking scared. This seems stupid and unwise. I may not be able to handle doing this. I may feel like I can’t depending on what happens in the next month or two in the US. If there is more violence in January? How can I justify that?

I don’t know. But I’m pretty scared. Life is hard and a lot and I feel deeply out of control of it. I feel like I won’t be able to get my feet under me till after the trial. I am going to feel entirely out of control until then.

Hey, I started this then walked away for a few days and didn’t hit post. It was an eventful few days! Yesterday was the best day I’ve had in a long time. There were ups and downs and stress points but we had some genuine fun together and we laughed. That was so nice. We have now submitted our biometric information to the UK to help with the process of permanent settlement. All of our paperwork is in. Now we wait for the wheels of bureaucracy to turn.

Then we walked to the train station past racial discord as crowds were outside yelling about fireworks and bonfires. Apparently we were walking on a part of a street we weren’t supposed to be on. Folks were very unhappy seeing white people there. I just held tight to a hand and kept going. If you pass through quickly enough you can get through almost any territory without a problem, at least that has been my experience. As long as you are not staying it’s ok to hurry through while obviously not from around here.

It is hilarious that people really clock me as an American without me having to say a word. It happens constantly. I continue to have weird public shaming experiences in public toilets. This time someone was going off about how disgusting I was for pooping outside of my home. I should only pee in public toilets. She was almost apologetic for being nasty, but then she saw me and said, “Oh an American.” Then her friends cackled about how it is fine to be rude to Americans.

Every single conversation I have starts with “how long are you here”? Folks don’t warm up much when I say the rest of my life. Xenophobia is awesome.

I am at the point where I am watching the US election with frozen horror. It was wild going past all the bonfires, most of which did not look government approved. Only one involved a tense racial situation with the Black folk on one end of the road clustered around their firework display in the park and the white folk just outside the park on a patch of grass with a fucking giant fire that included pieces of furniture. That was a rowdy group and I didn’t feel safe. I got out fast.

I’m having difficult feelings about a lot of the racial tension I see online and that I feel in interpersonal dynamics. I feel like at some point I stopped believing the myth that only white people are racist. The genocides that are occurring in the world right now are not all white people killing other folk. It’s more complex than that. People are deeply xenophobic and racism is an intense part of that and I think it is in every person and in every culture.

Yes, the US and the UK have structural racism problems that need to be addressed in concrete and specific ways. I am 100% behind ancestry-driven reparations. I think there is a legacy of cultural debt that colonialist powers have that we deserve to pay back in ways big and small. Yes. But there are other debts.

It is feeling weirder and weirder to me to act like the US and the UK are a substantial portion of the people in the world and what is true in those countries is The Truth. It is really bothering me. It is making me feel more and more revolted. It’s like how I didn’t vote in the US election this year. First time in my life. Do you know why I didn’t? Because I never want to live there again and it is morally questionable for me to exert influence in two countries because I am just more important and people deserve to have to live under the effects of my choices even if I never have to live under those effects. Why in the fuck should I help pick a mayor for Fremont? Do I know how good of a job someone is or isn’t doing? No and I’m not fucking going to know. Why should I be making choices about who is the board for BART. It’s not my damn business.

I need to be looking to the Highland Council and learning what is going on in the place I live and be a part of that. I no longer believe it is ethical for me to try to control the destiny of a place I have abdicated. I am still required to pay taxes and I’ll do it, but golly. At this point voting in both places feels like trying to be an absentee landlord. It feels like being a colonialist. It feels like trying to have my cake and eat it too.

I do not want to be in the US. I do not want to be tied to its fate. Hell, the main reason I’d ever work in politics is because that is one of the easiest ways to renounce citizenship. I feel sorrow for what my ancestral line came and did to the North American continent. We hurt a lot of people and we participated in a lot of violence.

It’s funny that we started as Europeans who came and hurt the Native Americans/Indians/Indigenous/whichever word fits the preferences of the group and now we are Americans who have to try not to hurt the Europeans. I’m watching the UK go through a different set of issues around racism. Here, the average non-white immigrant came here themself, or their parents did, or their grandparents did because they wanted access to opportunities. They chose this. That is not such a neat and tidy story in the US though we desperately wish it was. We wish we were “a nation of immigrants”. Instead the US is a nation of immigrants, the survivors of the genocide we perpetrated, and people who were kidnapped and enslaved. Like, that’s a fucking different set of issues to have around racism.

It is interesting walking through very different cities in a variety of countries and experiencing very different crowds. The undercurrents are strange to me. I don’t know the history. Almost every single one of these people thinks of their life story as “normal” and “just life” and “just how things go” and they can’t imagine people having an entirely different set of experiences beyond fantasising about being rich. That’s a thing most people try to imagine. It’s not what I imagined when I was young.

Having enough money to fix the roof and put food on the table doesn’t remove stress from your life. It doesn’t remove trauma. It doesn’t mean that things always go well or easily, it just means that you have the privilege of being able to fix some things before they become grindingly painful. I can’t fix everything. And I can’t avoid grinding pain. I’m out in the studio right now medicating because my whole body hurts like a motherfucker after the last 36ish hours. We did a lot! I didn’t sleep much. I don’t think I got an hour of sleep last night. I did make good progress in my book and I am really enjoying it.

Those are positive emotions. This is good. I am not out of the woods and I expect to have some shitty days as a rebound. I still have a lot of underlying disordered thinking going on. I can see pieces of it. I’m fucked up around a lot of food stuff right now. I’m having a lot of alienated feelings about my body and desire to hurt it. I am struggling between wanting to fast/starve myself and wanting to eat as much as possible so that men are less likely to be sexually attracted to me. Neither is healthy at all but my brain is flip flopping like a fish between them.

I had a few really positive exchanges with all of the kids. It was a good trip. We got along and had fun together. We went to the Science and Technology Museum and then we found an international food court and got one or two entrees at a time and ate our way around the globe for three hours. We waited a while in between orders to see if anyone was actually hungry enough for more. It was amazing and also expensive. That’s our eating out for November.

It sucks having my brain be a dickhead. I am very lucky that for this rodeo I live with people who love me very much and who are willing to do a lot to show me. I wish that meant that my brain wasn’t a dickhead. That would be so awesome.

Thank cheese for a good day

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I’m really grateful that Noah and I had some good talking yesterday. I am glad that we hugged and touched each other in mellow and non-scary ways. We are both going through a ridiculously hard thing. It is really important to remember that this is a terrible thing that is happening to both of us. More to me, but he’s getting whacked hard too.

My brain is being a giant asshole right now and it means that mostly I’m only remembering the hard and scary parts of my marriage and my relationship with Noah. I did go very far out of my way to find a Big Bad Wolf.

He’s really not a terrible person. All of the shitty things he has done have come with the halo of consent. It’s been a fucking trip. When I say I deserve things that he does to me… well… he and I discussed doing it and then we did it so I guess in the most literal sense of the phrase, I do deserve things that we say we want to do together. It’s a complicated thing. No person arrives at the decision to do a thing completely unshaped by the life experiences they have had.

Noah observed that what we are expecting of ourselves and of each other is quite literally inhuman. People don’t do these things. What we want to be to each other is not standard. I get that. Like, that was not really enough sleep last night because sex after a while of no sex was a lot more important. It was good sex.

I wish that means that I woke up today full of resilience and definitely over my depression. I didn’t though. I still feel shitty and stupid and it takes a very small comment from a teenager to set me off. Teenagers are assholes. Teenagers are trying to create a reality in which they don’t need their mother anymore and that’s pretty fraught for me. The point of my job is to work myself out of a job. I am working towards my sole future occupation: Noah’s companion.

There’s this way his cock gets right before he nearly comes. I notice it best when we stop having vaginal sex and switch to oral. The head feels really tight and swollen and like it is about to explode but most of the shaft is actually fairly soft, it’s nothing close to his most erect. Details like that are going to be most of what I think about in the future. Savouring that feel and texture difference in my mouth and in my hands.

I used to tell my mom that I wasn’t going to be able to be successful as an adult because the only thing I was good at doing was reading fast. I’m really good at making Noah’s dick happy.

It is hard for him and it is hard for me that it doesn’t feel like enough. I’m not saying that I have to suck other dicks. I am saying that I don’t do well when I feel disconnected and unwanted.

My day job is in a complicated place where 2/3 of my primary charges now resent and scorn me. I’m just counting the days till number 3 joins in. I know that Noah sees this with impending glee: soon he will have me all to himself.

Given what happens to me when I try to make friends it is a mixed bag from my view at the moment. I am really upset and sad that I am scared to make friends now with the idea of sex being entirely off the table. That is feeling dramatically unsafe. It also makes me question the sex and friendships of my youth.

I don’t think I am going to stop feeling depressed and frozen and scared until the trial happens and that feels dramatically unfair to my family. I go to sleep every night angry with myself for not getting more done and I wake up every morning feeling frozen and stuck and unable to move because I will be wrong. It was really hard to eat this morning.

Today will be less perfect. That’s ok. There are brighter days to come. My local garden store had plants 50% off because they are going out of business. I have some holes to dig. Let’s see if I can get off my backside. Ugh.

Sorry about the spam

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I updated all my WordPress stuff. Sorry about the spam dump of all the posts from the past few years. Now I don’t know where the fuck anything is and the layout looks really weird. I’m not pleased. Assholes.

I managed to run yesterday. The mile with a tail wind was 12 minutes flat. I’m pretty happy about that. The mile with the massive head wind was 16 minutes and *mumble*. Yeah, the wind makes a huge difference. My muscles are confused. I’m trying to wake them up but I’m doing it haphazardly. My hips and legs and low back are really upset.

I didn’t sleep enough. I woke up to cry for hours. Noah did not take the opportunity to lecture me more, that was good. But I can’t get out of my head that the only way I can stop doing the things that feel like such a betrayal to him is to stop doing anything. Who and what I am is not pleasing in its current form. I don’t know how to be better.

“You should be dead”. So many people have said it to me. So many doctors and nurses and therapists. At this point it feels like them speaking a wish. It feels like the wish of the NHS. It feels like the only way I will stop being so offensive and damaging to Noah.

There have been moments where I thought that me dying wouldn’t be ok because who would Noah look to for support? I’ve been reminded that he has needed support a fair bit in our marriage. He always finds other people to turn to. I should trust that he will continue to do so. He could find someone naturally monogamous to bond with. It would be better if I did it soon. He could still have a longer than 20 year relationship with someone else.

My daughter has been telling me that she wishes she could die when I don’t give her candy.

It is hard to believe that I am doing anyone any good.

Harsh

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I’m not screaming and frantically wanting to hurt myself. I do feel harsh and angry and sick of being flexible. I feel like I cannot keep jumping through hoops to try and be good when there is no good that is good enough to not keep getting yelled at.

Parenting is a shitty gig in a lot of ways. Kids are feral creatures doing their best and you can’t regulate off of them. It’s not ok. There are predictable stages that are frustrating in their own special ways. It’s not that the kids are being extra hard. I just have so much less to give than usual. I feel depleted and diminished.

I’m really struggling with what it means to get help in this country. I am told I can’t get support from more than one person at a time… until suddenly I am told that if I wait to get help from different services one at a time I am told that I am declining help from one of the services and they won’t help me later if I turn down this offer. I’m deeply confused and overwhelmed. I feel like I’ve been threatened repeatedly by NHS doctors that if I am not properly compliant I will be barred from basic medical care from the NHS. I feel scared. I feel fucked over and abused.

Seeing more than one therapist is medical malpractice… until it isn’t and refusing the second person who is offering assistance means I am not compliant and I don’t deserve future help. I felt like I was going to get help from the ADHD prescribing lady until I talked to her boss and now I feel more hopeless, helpless, scared, and vulnerable than I did before.

I feel like I’m about to be barred from medical care because I can’t perform patient properly.

As we have just hemorrhaged money to be able to live in this country permanently, I’m feeling very scared that I will be unable to access the normal medical treatment that citizens get here because I don’t know how to be good enough. I feel deeply abused that this is getting so much worse because I was foolish enough to report a crime. I feel punished. I feel sick to my stomach every time I think about having to deal with the doctors here.

When I think of that insulting lecture about how people don’t get better because the glacial pace of the NHS is deeply painful and they don’t continue to come back for inadequate, inappropriate care. I can literally tell these people that I have paid for tests that reveal that genetically a drug won’t work for me and they tell me I have to take it anyway or I am being uncooperative and I am not interested in my own mental health.

I am fucking livid.

Mama was asking me if most of my feeling bad-ness is coming from Noah and the way he is melting down. No, he’s not helping overall at the moment but he’s not the reason I feel as bad as I do–certainly not on his own. I do feel really bad that he thinks I betrayed him but he’s entitled to evaluate my behaviour in any way he sees fit.

I mean, 2016. I will never be done being yelled at for my craven and disgusting behaviour. I can’t describe myself in mean enough words to convince Noah that I am sorry. I can’t debase myself enough to satisfy his feeling of being wounded. I don’t think he will ever forgive me.

I feel absolutely overwhelming like the next time I am raped I need to die. I cannot survive any more of this. I can’t. People are so fucking mean about me surviving. I can’t keep doing it. If I were a good person I wouldn’t be able to keep going through so much evil. The fact that I keep walking is part of why I deserve every punishment and insult. If I were a good person I would have been destroyed. I am a monster and I deserve every scrap of bad I receive in this life. The only thing I could do for the smallest ounce of redemption is to just fucking die already.

It doesn’t matter though. I have 11 years, 3 months and 19 days on my indenture. I am not allowed to die. I have to, in fact, work really really hard night and day to stay alive. I have to be careful about every fucking aspect of my life if I am not going to die in my 50’s. Between my 4 grandparents and 2 parents there were 2 suicides preventing folks from hitting their 50’s, and 2 folks who died because they wouldn’t take care of their bodies, and 2 motherfuckers who are too god damn mean to die–my grandfather made it to 86 and my mother is still alive.

My indenture runs out when I’m 54. I am going to have to work at making it that long. This is why I couldn’t have another child. Here is a fucking horrible thing: if I fell pregnant this week I would abort. That’s how not fucking ok I am. The idea of extending the indenture by an additional almost 8 years? Now. Not fucking ok. I am not working for that. FUCK NO.

Every time I do that silly thing where I bring up the 60th birthday party I want to have it is me trying hard to believe that I have that much of a future. That’s a sand castle I am not sure that I believe I will ever live in.

I don’t know how to get my head to be ok with the idea that I can’t survive the next rape. How do I endure the days of fear between now and then? I feel like I can’t get yelled at ever again for surviving. I can’t. If I am bad for keeping this shitty meat sack moving then I need to stop. I don’t want to be bad.

I am unable to perform the behaviour as a mother that lets me feel good in that role. I am not being a shitty abusive mother, but I’m not hitting the metrics I self assign.

I am definitely feeling like a shitty wife. My lack of instinctive monogamy is hurting my husband deeply.

Maybe it won’t matter. Knowing that I really should not survive another rape is going to be a good reason to never be alone in a room with people. Maybe I can cut off enough of myself that I will never be put in that position. I don’t think I would be forgiven for whatever I do so I need to ensure it doesn’t come up again.

The only sure fire way to make it not happen again is to die. The second most effective way is to be alone in a room as much as possible until I die. I feel really scared. I feel really helpless. I do not foresee a path forward where I can be alive and good and that hurts very badly.

The NHS is going to be a mixed bag for me

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I am experiencing some frustration. This week I learned that the NHS would have denied me the vast majority of the care I received in California because a lot of it ran concurrently. In Scotland one is not allowed to work with multiple therapists and on varying parts of mental and physical health at the same time. It is medical malpractice in this country.

Well, shit.

It was kind of fun recognising that I will have to route around the NHS while in an appointment with a psychiatrist. She got to try and talk me into not giving up on myself. If I come back and beg enough times maybe the NHS will agree to me having more than one form of care over a long period of time where they control all the aspects of deciding what and when.

Oh. It’s like that, is it?

I am going to learn a lot more about private health care in this country and I’m going to get better about lying and denying the care I am receiving. That sucks. I’m not really into lying as a lifestyle.

The NHS will not allow me to have EMDR before the trial. Thing is, I’m not sleeping so good. Flashbacks/abreactions are really bringing me down. My PTSD responses are really dramatic compared to where they have been for years.

The NHS won’t allow me to talk to anyone else while I’m talking to the nice counsellour lady in town. The nice lady who is a student. The nice lady who works for an agency that is supposed to get me help as an overwhelmed mom supporting disabled kids.

That’s what I get.

She’s a nice gal and maybe I am underestimating where I am going to get in the 6 sessions I have with her before I maybe get another 6 sessions through a different charity agency.

Yeah. That’s going to dramatically alter my life trajectory. I’ve been through 34 years of trauma therapy. I’m sure this student will dramatically make progress with my usually “treatment resistant” PTSD in 6 hours. It’s going to miraculous.

I feel very much like I need to settle down and become a wraith. This country favours passivity and non-action in a way that is going to be a problem for me. I am not a person who sits and waits doing nothing. That leads to deep depression and self harming behaviour that I can no longer sustain physically. I can’t. I can’t go back to hurting myself to cope. Too many pieces of me are broken in ways that could be life ending if I keep it up. Too many head injuries.

Is it weird that I am not fucking ok with the idea of accidentally killing myself in a panic attack in a form of self harm that I intend to be a momentary relief of pain going too far?

If I am going to kill myself it is going to be in some way that is absolutely unmistakable. I don’t want to accidentally cause a stroke. Fuck that shit. If I swim out into the North Sea or go to a supervised euthanasia clinic so you fucking know I picked that. I desperately hope that the people who love me will find a piece of comfort in knowing that I waited as long as I possibly could. I know that probably something is just to break on its own and it won’t be my choice and that’s ok too. Then it really isn’t my fault in the same way and it won’t hurt the people who love me in the same way.

I can’t accidentally kill myself by going too far with cutting. That’s not ok. That kind of thing is messy and dramatic and traumatic in a way I don’t want.

Today is not as bad as a lot of days have been this week but I’m still not feeling strongly attached to the idea of being alive. I can’t hasten my death, and in fact I am required to act in ways that will push it away to further in the distance. It’s feeling really hard.

Like most people I don’t love being in pain. It is hard knowing there isn’t a way out. I sure as shit am not going to be asking for much of the NHS. As much as I don’t love being in pain I’d rather just go through my life in pain instead of hearing over and over that I am not good enough for the thing I know will help me. I don’t qualify. I haven’t jumped enough hoops. Why don’t I jump a little higher and wait a little longer?

These are the people who think I shouldn’t be allowed to have the sex life I want or the marriage I want and they probably think I shouldn’t have been allowed to have children. I should have waited until I was all better to go have these normal things. I haven’t done enough time waiting to deserve the things that other people get as table stakes. I’ve heard this story my whole life.

I am allowed to have what those people need. Fuck my needs.

This is where I am an absolute rubbish example of living consent culture. I was told no, I couldn’t have what I asked for. So I went out and found a way to fucking steal it anyway.

Not exactly but it sure feels like it standing where I am in this moment. Really I just found a way to pay for it and I hunted high and low before I found people who would help me on my journey. I’ve done a lot of things to try and be more ok. I’ve been doing really well for a lot of years now with only a fairly normal person amount of range of volatility.

But hey, it doesn’t even count as rape in this country. It shouldn’t bother me so much.

In a major way I feel like I am far more wounded by how this affecting Noah than I am by the assault. My life is different than it was 4 months ago in ways that feel savagely unfair and painful.

I’m not working hard at chasing down Vicki interviews. I can’t focus. I can barely think. My productivity is somewhere between 25% and 50% of my normal and it feels like an enormous stretch goal.

I feel like a wraith who should fade away to mist. The fire and energy that usually propel my survival have abandoned me. I don’t feel like I have enough faith in what I am going to do moving forward to just charge forward blindly with great force. I don’t have the energy for a bunch of false starts. I don’t. I want to curl up under a bush and never come out and let my body go back into the earth.

I feel ineffective. I feel useless. I feel like there is no point to how hard I work because it will always come back to how fucking worthless I am.

It’s hard home educating three autistic kids. They need a lot from me. Most of it I have to repeat many times. It’s exhausting. I feel like depression is covering me like a weighted blanket on top of the burn out I’ve been feeling for a long time.

One of the hardest things about the way we home educate is we don’t have the neat and tidy ways to check and see if you are doing it right. We don’t have marking periods and standardised tests. We are just living and no matter how much I do for them I never feel like I have done enough. I always feel like I am failing to teach them a lot of the things they are going to need to know. I felt like that as a classroom teacher too, even though my students went up by more than one grade level on average after a year with me. Many of my students caught up on four or six years of learning with me because I could tune in to where they needed to be reached. I worked with kids who had a lot of emotional struggles.

My adult life has been spent trying to give children the things I never got and I am feeling like a very empty bucket. I have been doing this work for 24 years now. Hell, I was a nanny and a babysitter before then. Normally I’m pretty ok with taking it in stride that young people need a lot of reminders. Right now it is hurting me desperately.

I don’t think anyone is doing anything wrong in my house. It’s hard when I’m off my game. Noah does a lot of consistency management for our family but I’m usually the motor. I feel like I lost some integral part of my mechanism and the gears are just not going and I don’t know what to do.

No, I don’t want psych meds. They are not going to clear the cobwebs they are going to make my body start feeling like I am trying to kill it. No. I have walked that road. I’ve tried so many drugs that doctors pushed on me.

EMDR would be very helpful. I’m going to look for private. I think that’s a thing I can make happen. Holy shit. Maybe I really fucking should not. I am not a good liar. I’d really like to sleep better.

It’s been hurting so much that this overlapped with getting kicked out of bike stuff. The woman who had invited me into things in the first place no longer wants me there. She asked me to stop coming because I make her uncomfortable. It’s not that “everyone” there dislikes me–she was the person I was there to get to know because I liked her. I never tried hard to get to know anyone else because my assumption was that I would be too weird. I hope they do well in the future. I think it is important work.

It is not the fault of Highland Pride that I was sexually assaulted in any way shape or form. I am going to be scared to step forward with that community in the future anyway. I feel like I am trying to back out of a lot of kink stuff locally because I am obviously making so many people feel uncomfortable.

Hey look, the bitch who was “too much” in California is also too much in small town Scotland. Duh.

Maybe if I hide for a while before coming back some of my spiky edges will be forgotten. Maybe I will figure out some piece of work to do that will buy me a place even though I am so awful.

I don’t really have hope for things feeling better right now. I know they will at some point but in this moment that seems ridiculously impossible. This always/never place is really dark. I feel scared and empty. I don’t know how to keep giving right now without a lot of very bitter and sharp detritus coming out instead of water.

I’m in a bad place. It is what it is. There is no way out other than going through it.

I know Noah is trying to walk it back because this is hurting me, but I am deeply wounded by him saying that I betrayed him in this situation. I feel wrecked by this. I wasn’t a little bit bad I was so bad.

Right now I feel like I don’t know how to be good enough to deserve anything good. All I deserve is pain until I die. I’m not working enough to be a good tool. I do bad things that hurt people. I speak too sharply because my entire consciousness is permeated with pain and it leaks out and then I am even more bad.

I feel like no one should have to deal with someone as awful as me. I feel empty of goodness. If I ever had any it is gone.

All that is left is a haze of inefficient malice.

See, I’m being good. This is not social media where I will have lots of people yell at me that I am bad for saying any of this because it is not fair that I am “triggering them”.

Fuck me. Why don’t I just shut up or die already?

Keep resting

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It’s weird having a 16 year old. In many ways it feels like I should have this person basically cooked and ready to be an adult. Yet sometimes it is glaringly obvious that he still *needs* me. I’ve been antsy during this surgery recovery. I really *want* to get up and work/exercise more. I am struggling with the bullet train inner monologue of “If you sit around all the time you don’t deserve sympathy/help for your health problems. You aren’t looking after yourself so you deserve every bad thing that happens.”

He’s been talking a lot about how scared he was when he watched me have massive life threatening bleeds after surgeries. He’s kinda fucked up about it.

I am currently in the period of time where a normal person *should* return to exercising.

I am still experiencing pain. I am now in the window of time where I normally start to push myself.

Then either my skin opens or a blood vessel bursts. It’s part of a genetic condition. It’s predictable. Especially since it’s happened *in my body* several times. It’s not paranoia. It’s awareness of risk.

This is where “invisible disability” stuff is hard. It’s hard to predict and make general statements about. It’s hard to exist in a way that allows people to understand when you do and don’t need help that is friendly and kind and gentle enough that they don’t get mad at you.

What does the future hold?

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The last few months have dramatically not gone to plan on many levels. Everything has ended up being way harder. In a way that makes me feel sad. In a way it almost feels like a relief. I’ve been waiting for the results of the last round of “My efforts towards the first wave of people have either flamed out or settled into a secure relationship”. I now feel more secure and confident about where I should and shouldn’t be putting energy. I learned who actually likes me and who likes me if I can lie really well all the time and care about their feelings instead of my own.

It’s ok. That’s normal human stuff. I’m not angry about it, just resigned. I’ve been saying since I moved here that some attempts at relationships would work out but most would not. It’s turning out to be true. I’m not shocked or upset.

I am in need of resting and regrouping. I am desperately in need of a chance to refocus on the parts that matter the most. The only people who are likely to show up for me in my old age live in this house. It’s simply, literally, true. I’ve been looking outside my house a lot over the past few years in ways that have put me in a tough spot.

Heck, even reopening the conversation about polyamory. I am patting Past Me on the back for saying, “Let’s start talking about this when we have no chance of either of us going out on a date with someone anytime soon.” Yes, I have a lover-in-waiting but from the very first day there has been the understanding that if it turns out this would be a bad thing for my marriage we won’t do it at all. I’m pretty certain it won’t harm my marriage. What might it turn into?

I think I am going to have an old friend I love very much I see sometimes. It’s difficult trying to figure out what is the best path forward for all concerned. I would respond more to stated wishes of the folks involved if they were more willing to state them. Instead I am just flying blind.

I’m thinking about the series of steps relationships usually have for me: getting past the first date, 3 weeks, 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, and a handful have morphed and changed over much longer periods. In terms of roughly the number of people I have dated: 78% only get one date, 10% made it to 3 weeks, 5% made it to 3 months, 2% made it to 6 months, 2% made it to 9 months, 2-3% make it more than a year. I’m counting the ending point only. I break up with ~95% of the people I date by 6 months. That’s fucking dramatic.

I’m 3.5 months into courting Travel Boyfriend and I’m having a lot of feelings. I wouldn’t say we are dating yet, not really. But we are courting to see if there is the possibility of a relationship there that could be good for both of us. Noah is being patient and understanding and supportive.

Most humans take on jobs, tasks, and relationships without really understanding how hard they will turn out to be in advance. This is the human “normal” as a way to approach the future. If we knew how bad it would be we wouldn’t try. So in a way this hubris is important and great and absolutely necessary for the species. The trouble is, when you sign on for something not knowing how hard it will be you sometimes get yourself into a situation where you can’t finish something and other people suffer. That is part of life. That failure is part of life. I feel like it is the kind of thing where people learn their own limits through trial and error, mostly.

I have failed a lot of times. I am pretty clear about a lot of the scope of my limits.

I am a human with a lot of limits. I have to respect those.

I am very nervous about aspects of this relationship with Travel Boyfriend. The very best role I can play in his life is to push him through fixing the stuff that stands between him and seeming like someone who would be a really great primary partner for anyone. There are specific aspects of his life that make it pretty impossible for him to find what he says he wants to have. Every single one of those things could be changed with conscious effort. If he actually wants what he says he wants. They are things that would be hard to change completely on his own. They are things that are significant enough that it’s hard to get buy in from a stranger that the payoff off for the work will be worth the effort. Every relationship is a crapshoot. Everyone is operating at a deficit these days. Who has the energy to help other people work through their shit?

Amusingly I’m writing this while listening to the song that played in the strip club the first time he ever saw me with my shirt off. I was 18. It was a friend’s birthday. I was pulled up on stage by the dancers. I had awkward tights and shorts on under my skirt so I didn’t try to remove my bottoms. I was fine with the ladies taking my top off.

I have to stop and think about our old Theatre Director. (That’s now his official nickname.) I don’t think I have written about this much over here. After I moved to Scotland Theatre Director ended up back in Texas providing hospice care to his parents. He helped them die. I knew he was a bad alcoholic. Before either of his parents died he and I talked about how he really didn’t know what he was going to do when his folks died. He’d have to leave the house and go somewhere and that was a big question mark. I told him that when he had to leave he could come stay with me for 6 months on a visitor visa.

Eventually he did come after everything finished years later. He stayed in the studio. He had a lot of identity wrapped up in being “that guy”. That guy you know who you can always call because he knows how to fix the problem. Time and grief and trauma and addiction were all weighing very heavily on him. He felt the weight of the failures in his life very keenly. It went about as well as such an experience is going to go.

I worry a lot about people writing checks they can’t cash. I worry about doing it. It’s not that I only worry about people handing them to me. I worry about the balance I get in return for how much effort I am putting out. There’s no fair here. I have already written a lot of big checks. How much do I really have left in my budget? What is realistic?

I am incredibly lucky that Noah has been unemployed right now. I have needed a lot of support and he’s been able to provide it. That means I haven’t asked local people for help. That’s what makes people feel like neighbours. I really can’t. I don’t feel like I’ve done a great job at making friends. People say that I can ask for help. But I can’t. I would much rather wither clean away than ask for help from people who have not demonstrated a desire for my company.

I do asks things of my Bestie in town. She is carrying a very heavy load though and I don’t do a lot to make hers easier. We are doing the best we can through this phase of life together. She is the sister of my heart and I followed her across the sea and I do not regret that. I am lying when I say that I can only depend on the people under this roof. Bestie has been a fair and foul weather friend for 30+ years.

When Theatre Director was here what he really needed me to do was participate in a facade where he “helped” me do projects that I could do on my own. The trouble was, I can’t do those things alone. He wasn’t actually able to help very much. That got me into some bad spots with my body and he expected me to ignore my pain to assuage his ego. That was not a thing I could do. That really hurt emotionally on top of the physical pain. Theatre Director was not able to assess “This project is too physically difficult for us and we should not do it.” When I said that he did not want to believe me.

The kindest thing I can do is try to understand when other people are trying to write checks they can’t cash and give them the pretense of belief. Meanwhile I must mentally put the claim into the “this is a pie crust promise” bucket in my head. I’m not very good at this. I have to consciously fight my inner fury about being clearly lied to.

It is hard that people don’t know they are lying. They mean it when they say it. They don’t know what they are promising and they don’t mean what they actually express most of the time. So much of the casual discourse people have in life is full of casual half-truth promises that have no intention behind them. That’s hard. I got hard dumped as a friend this week. It is stinging a bit. Ah well. Move on.

It is scary trusting someone enough to put time and energy into them. I don’t know how much this is social anxiety rebound from how much social time I had in June, how much is PTSD avoidance after the sexual assault, how much is surgery recovery, how much is (fill in the blank).

I just know that right now I feel absolutely terrified of risk. I have a lot to lose. If I don’t do the next few years right I will regret it forever. When I hit the end of surgery recovery I have to start doing a level of support work my kids aren’t used to. They are choosing tasks that are frankly obscene and in order to make it possible I am going to support them like they took on something that hard.

The thing is, doing it myself is faster and fucking easier and they have learned the skills. They will be able to get their cleaning deposits back someday. It’s time for them to focus away on other skills. I’ve always said this would come.

Hell, if the kids notice that with proper negotiations and exchanges of kinds of work I can be a lot easier to live with maybe they will do their chores more promptly in the future when we renegotiate? It’s a dream.

If I can understand clearly where someone’s limits are then I can understand with compassion where they are making pie crust promises. My life is going to require a lot of that very specific compassion of me over the next couple of years no matter what I do.

So what do I do? I complicate my life extra with something ambiguous and with a high potential to hurt a lot. I am scared this might end up in the loss of a dear old friend because one or the other of us does something unforgivable. It could happen. It wouldn’t be the first time in my life it went either direction.

The most likely outcome is a few fun holidays and then wishing him well on the rest of his life. Sure, it is having a really melodramatic long lead in and everything. I am too old to make rash decisions based on sex. I can’t withstand a lot more casual damage. I need to act like I am fragile. I need a melodramatically long and involved courting process before it is a good idea for me to give someone the opportunity to hurt me. My body is fragile. Someone needs quite an education before touching me is a good idea. There is a lot to communicate if someone is going to have enough information to make safe choices with me.

Over the next few years I think my dating opportunities will be few and far between. I think I will have very little to give and a lot of needs that I will be blatantly ignoring because I don’t have the ability to take the risks required to fill those needs. Making friends requires social rejection. I am bound and determined that I am going to know most folks in town before I ever go out on a date. I don’t want to date strangers ever again. I’ve had some success, but look at those numbers.

That’s a lot of fucking failures.

Are they all failures? Were any of them failures? Or did they just run their course and we moved on? I like to say that the great part of dating a lot of different people is you learn a lot about what kinds of things you can and can’t compromise on and that’s very useful.

Noah and I courted for six months then eloped. We weren’t dating when he showed up out of the blue and asked me to marry him. It’s a longer story but not for now.

How to measure time with someone I have loved for 25 years? TB is a very good friend. It feels more important than ever to make sure I don’t hurt someone negligently by being selfish and short sighted. Trying to figure out what is the most good for the least amount of cost is hard. There are so many variables out of my control.

Maybe I should just thank my lucky stars that TB waited this long to start getting his shit together because I get a chance to have a short term positive relationship that ends when it is a natural time to grow past it. It won’t be a failure. If the point going in is that it is going to end fairly soon then I can grab all the good I can for the amount of cost I can bear. I will have to be realistic to myself about my priorities. I am going to have to be realistic about how much rejection I can handle. I am, predictably, feeling it as a wave of rejection right now.

I have a lot of people counting on me and I can’t let them down. That means I need to limit the things I add to my life that hurt me. That’s complicated.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Tag Archives: parenting

I both feel over peopled and deeply lonely

Parenting

It’s going to be a long 10 years.

I am struggling.

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

Life isn’t fair

I just need one

Patterns and cycles

I don’t know where this will go

This is hard.

Keep moving

He’s gone and I will never be ok again.

Don’t make changes when things are bad.

Thank cheese for a good day

Sorry about the spam

Harsh

The NHS is going to be a mixed bag for me

Keep resting

What does the future hold?