Tag Archives: parenting

Things I’m proud of

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When my kids come home from a sleepover they say “The next meal has to be entirely vegetables because holy moly that was quite a night. Meat. Starch. Sugar. I need veggies really bad.” I was not able to feel that kind of thing in my body when I was a kid. My children can.

We don’t talk about food in terms of calories at all. They are about as ignorant of calories and weight control as a 21st century person is capable of being. I’ve worked really hard on that. We talk about fiber. We talk about slow burning energy and quick release energy. We talk about what you need in order to poop. We talk about how different organs in your body need different nutrients and that’s why we eat a rainbow. We talk about how sugar is an inflammatory and it makes it harder to deal with your emotions and have patience and feel good. Sugar increases pain in your body.

They can tell when they have done things to make their bodies feel icki. I taught them that. I feel really good about that.

My children can cook. They know about balancing food groups and timing things so they finish at the same time and they are getting better at cleaning as they go so they aren’t left with a huge mess at the end. They can do a bunch of work to convert recipes including multiplying and dividing fractions. It’s beautiful. We covered a whiteboard with math equations for our last cake.

Their handwriting has improved in the last couple of weeks again. I think that would have happened in school too–they are just ready.

They are taking a bunch of initiative with their learning process because they are so happy that they aren’t being controlled by an outside force anymore.

They are kids and they fuck up and they break rules and they make mistakes and when they do they are fairly good at being able to learn from the mistake and figure out what they want to do next time. I know adults who can’t do that.

They are self reflective. They actively work on growing and doing better. That doesn’t mean they never backslide–of course they do. Growth involves regression. But they try so hard. They are open to becoming something new.

I love that we are back to devouring books at a furious rate instead of barely having time to read because school takes up so much time. I love that we have time to do our chores when we aren’t tired so it doesn’t take as long and we can have more relaxation time at the end of the day.

I love that my children aren’t in a race to grow up and leave behind “baby” activities. The big kids are back to a ton of intense fantasy play and I am so glad. They have no inhibitions about what kinds of toys are “for their age”. I truly admire how fearless they are about trying art techniques. They are better than me at a wide variety of techniques and I’m super thrilled to watch them shine.

I love that my children cannot imagine living more than a mile away from me. By their ages I was already planning how to get away from my family. They like me.

I like that when I want them to behave I can say, “If you feel yourself wanting to bicker or start a fight I suggest that you think “Four hours of yard work per day until mom is no longer cranky.” I hope that will help you hold it together” then they are polite and they work out their differences in a reasonable way.

I love that they feel safe enough to share the really hard stuff.

I love that this baby will say things like “Not ok a be rough! Be gentle! Don’t push!” and “No kisses a baby, just snuggles.” (she uses “a” for “to”/”for” at this point; that’s ok) I like that she is so fierce about defending herself and asserting boundaries. You just keep that right up. She apologizes when she hurts someone on accident without being prompted.

I love that my children feel free to sass me until I give them the look then they back right the fork off. There is a line of respect and I’ll let you know when you cross it. I don’t disrespect you and you don’t get to disrespect me.

I like that we still say “yes ma’am” to each other.

I like that they think really hard about the balance of ethically made/materials used/cost of items. I like that they think really hard about what it means to be in a world with a lot of other people and how can we be polite to as many people as possible?

I like that they are making their own friends here despite complications and speed bumps. It is taking time and we are learning how to be ok with that. It’s healthy.

I really like my kids.

Shades of gray

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I was in therapy for such a long time. I feel like part of what the point of a lot of it was to help me mature into the idea that not everything in life is black or white. I spent a lot of time and money trying to get to the point where I could wrap my brain around complexity and see that not everything fell into good/bad dichotomies. Occasionally I run smack into someone who still has such a view of the world and it surprises me. I feel like it was drilled into me because I was trying to get to the point of being like everyone else. But maybe not.

The only way to live a black or white life is to limit what you actually do. Once you get into the nitty gritty… people get complex. Good people do bad things. Bad people do good things. People are redeemable. People are worth effort even when they fail to be perfect.

People don’t improve or get better in a black or white dynamic; there is no reason to keep trying. There is no reason to bother trying to do better if you are forever damned by the worst thing you have done in life. It’s important to remember that people only improve or get better if they want to. You can inspire people to change; it rarely works out to force people to change. Forced change is rarely for the better. Forced change often makes people feel dead inside.

Recently I was arguing with someone on the internet about a specific of parenting (for the record, THEY WERE WRONG) and we were debating how to handle a misdeed on the part of a very young child. In her mind she has to force the child to not have that behavior. I said I am utterly incapable of forcing my children to be a way. I can inspire them to be a way. I can coax them towards having the behaviors I want them to have. I can model the behaviors I want them to have. I cannot force them to have or not have behaviors. People are not clay.

Probably the single biggest thing I have learned from parenting (and I bless the fact that I have been able to do this basically 24/7 for over 11 years now) is that if I want my children to behave a way I have to figure out how to model it. I can’t tell them to do something and expect them to do it. I really can’t expect them to be better or have more self control than me. (Which is utterly infuriating sometimes.) They have had a child’s limited set of life experiences and if I want them to have a set of perceptions I need to live in a way that shows it.

In home schooling, if your child doesn’t know something it is all your fault. It’s a lot sometimes.

My children struggle. My children have hardships in their lives even if I kind of wish that they didn’t because I have given up a lot to make the ease that they have. Life is struggle. Life is suffering. I cannot save them from that; not even with home schooling.

Something that is both exciting and terrifying is watching my children go through things that I had to go through. They are not me. They have a different set of expectations and experiences than I had but they also have half of my genetic experience and many similar tendencies. Parenting is an opportunity to give someone else what I wish I would have gotten.

Sometimes they trigger the shit out of me; I am fully back in a moment of extreme trauma and it is very difficult to react to the moment I am in. Other times they upset me or behave in a way that leads to me feeling a lot of rage. I get to decide what I do with those feelings. They frustrate me on the regular.

I get to show them what it means to be a grown up and have to deal with hard feelings. They are going to have to grow up and handle hard feelings too–how do I want them to do it? How do I want them to feel about themselves as a result of having these big feelings?

There are a bunch of things I want to write about in specifics right now but I can’t. My children are not little amoebas anymore. They are fully people and people deserve privacy even if I want to write about myself because they influence me. People don’t like to be talked about. I learned that from Sarah. Even if people tell you that they like being talked about they are lying. People lie so much. And if I decided to talk about my children because I didn’t care about their privacy it would lead to other people judging them harshly in ways that aren’t balanced or fair. People judge the shit out of each other.

People perceive others in black or white. You are good or bad. Broken or whole. Defective or normal. Inappropriate or appropriate. Shitty or excellent.

People are all of those things; it just depends on which minute of their life you look at.

Sometimes I wish I could mold people like clay. I want to give them feedback “If you did x more like y things then you would get closer to the result you want.” But help that is not wanted isn’t help it is interference. I mean, I think it is important to give feedback that a specific thing is not a good choice sometimes… but that doesn’t mean you can correct the behavior and tell someone what to do. It’s a balancing act. “It is not ok for you to _______. There are many other things you could do instead. If you want help brainstorming a list I’d be happy to help you figure out what your options are so that next time you are in a similar situation you can find a different path through it.”

Getting better is a choice. It is a choice you can make. But you have to decide for yourself. Nobody can force you. If you get to being old and you have never decided to improve or look at why your behavior causes the problems you have… well… I have some judgmental words for that. When does the cut off line start though?

If you have a shitty coping method before you are 10, that doesn’t make you an asshole, right? What about if you still have that coping method at 20? 30? 40? 50? 60? 70? 80? I believe people can always change if they choose to, but what does it take to motivate change at different stages of your life?

As a diagnosed autistic person I don’t get to be shitty and say “Well I’m autistic so you have to put up with it.” It may be harder for me to learn what I need to learn to change but I don’t have an excuse for not trying.

These are not rhetorical questions for me. I have some shitty coping methods. I’m almost 40. Am I damned because I have not fixed everything already? I have fixed a lot of my shittiness but I have not been able to get everything fixed already. Am I damned because I didn’t have a different priority list?

If I hadn’t worked on a lot of my shittiness I wouldn’t be where I am to complain about the shittiness that remains. Maybe I didn’t have your priority list for dealing with my flaws but I have been on a grueling path of unrelenting self improvement. That’s a literal fact. I can trace my history through massive changes in personality and behavior.

Some people like to sit back and not do much with their own life and judge the shit out of other people for failing at things. At least we tried.

Reevaluate everything

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I don’t really know what I’m doing as a parent. I read things, lots of things. There are so many opposing opinions on literally everything. So I try shit out and then I talk to my kids about how it is going. In the long run their opinion of my parenting is the only metric I care about.

I asked them last night if they think getting paid for chores is motivating them or taking away motivation. EC eloquently said, “Well, on weeks when I don’t need any money I don’t see any reason to do chores.” So that’s not super helpful. I asked if they think paying for their own stuff is helping them feel like they are more responsible with how they use up products. They said that part is working well.

We also renegotiated their pay for babysitting because that’s different from sweeping and tidying. They did some practice on how to state how they have increased their responsibility (closer to babysitting rather than just being a good playmate who distracts YC while I have to do all the ‘work’ stuff) but they still aren’t ready to be fully independent about it. We talked about what adults/older teens get paid and what sorts of qualifications those people have that my kids lack. I did this same sort of process with their former babysitter. How do you negotiate for pay increases, how do you talk about your increasing level of responsibility?

It was interesting listening to how they have no real interest in renegotiating what they get paid for chores because that has an opposite effect on their motivation to do the work, but babysitting is different. If I were to guess about why these things are different (I don’t know for a fact I can only use conjecture) chores are things they are doing in preparation for being an adult and it’s part of being a citizen of the household. Babysitting is different from just playing with their sister and being part of a family. It’s exhausting in a different way and they are doing this training partially so that when they get older they know how to advertise their services to other people. Neither of them anticipate a career in janitorial services, those are skills they are learning for themselves.

That’s my guess. But I could be wrong.

So we are going back to a flat allowance for most chores with the exception of babysitting. The first five hours/week of babysitting is payment for their cats since they don’t want me to feel like I own the cats. They get paid over that threshold. So technically their pay can still be variable, but frankly most weeks I doubt they will do more babysitting time than the basic hours.

It means that each big kid will do a couple of hours on a weekend day with their sister and then an hour most week days. I will get to rest more.

I’ve tried creating this with adults for pay. I signed back up with Care.com and the like here in Scotland. I have ads. I’m looking for support! I’ve sent messages! No bites. I’m not sure what it is about how I advertise that makes people have so little interest in working with us. Ah well.

I might get to actually date my husband again one of these years. Woo.

MC’s “babysitting” is still at the level where I have to be available to provide food and nappy changing services but she’s getting really good at playing with YC for a while if I have chores I want to do. I think EC is at the point where Noah and I could disappear down to the apartment for a few hours. I still wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving them alone in the house as a regular thing.

EC did take care of things when my wound popped open. Getting a taxi for 5 is… hit or miss. Sometimes they send an adequate vehicle and sometimes we have to send back a smaller car and wait for a bigger one. So she stayed here for two hours with YC while I got stitched up. I am grateful that we now have that level of assistance, but I don’t really think EC feels ready to take on that level of babysitting on a regular basis.

Babysitting usually means Noah and I get to be in our bedrooms with the door shut for a little while. So we have half an ear out for stuff we need to mediate, but we get to do something without toddler “help” for an hour or so. It’s a work in progress.

We are all just works in progress.

I do these kinds of negotiations with my kids partially to model for them that relationships are not static. You try something and if it isn’t working you can change it. Just because you agree to try something that doesn’t mean you are stuck doing it forever. You are allowed to grow and change. You really should change over time. And it’s hard to figure out what should change when things aren’t working; sometimes you need to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

We are talking a lot about what we want from home schooling going forward. I’m doing more research because that’s my place of comfort. I’m looking into what the exams are like in secondary school. When do they happen, what do they mean? How do we prepare for them in a home schooling environment?

Well, me screaming about them not working hard enough… that needs to not be part of it. MC is just to the age where I started sitting on EC really hard to force her to “catch up” in a few subjects. Turns out I didn’t make her catch up to grade level I made her get way above grade level but I did it at the cost of both of us being miserable for a long time. I need to learn from that mistake.

Why is it that people who beat the “handwriting is important” drum think they are being the voice of dissent and advocating for The Most Important Life Skill? You aren’t the voice of dissent. You are literally parroting The Man and being as fucking basic as possible.

But the exams here all handwritten. So my kids need to practice for that. I get it. Just, ugh. Don’t act like handwriting is the measure of the anything other than the ability to jump through an arbitrary stupid hoop. It is not the measure of intelligence or knowledge or wisdom.

My mother’s handwriting is exquisite. That hasn’t helped the woman get a good job, ever. My handwriting is shit and the only thing it ever cost me was a masters degree. I still got the pay raise associated with the masters degree in my career of choice. I still have never had difficulty applying for any work I’ve ever wanted to do. I didn’t want the career that a masters would enable. I wanted the knowledge so I could be better at the career I was in without having it at all.

Just… ugh. Why in the fuck do handwriting advocates think they are so… revolutionary? “I’m going to be the voice of dissent that happens to agree with every bureaucrat in existence.”

Like, really? Voice of dissent here? Come on now.

Oh… you were just trying to say that if there are disability related reasons that handwriting is a problem I should not seek out accommodations because who gives a fuck about those disabled kids. Right. How very ableist of you. One of the fucking diagnostic tools for EDS is difficulty/pain in holding a pencil. Our god damn joints don’t stay in place to hold the pencil the way it works for other bodies and we can end up with permanent fucking pain.

That’s not the “voice of dissent”. People have been telling folks with disabilities to suck it up since forever. But sure. Keep feeling superior over there. What was that you said? You don’t have a job and you need to go back for extensive training to get another one because your qualifications lapsed? I guess all that fucking handwriting you did wasn’t enough to save your ass?

Sure. Keep telling me about how handwriting is The Way, The Truth, and The Light.

I’m clearly frustrated with someone. But yes, I know my kids have to work on handwriting. Even if it wrecks ECs hands she has to do it anyway.

THE FUCKING VOICE OF DISSENT HAS SPOKEN.

“It is no sign of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” – Krishnamurti

Sigh.

If you look up recommended accommodations for children with EDS, “eliminate handwriting grade and substitute grades for content and effort” is on the list.

Sigh.

We’ll figure it out. I’m just frustrated. People are challenging.

Uncomfortably not-numb

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I am trying to sit still and heal. I really suck at this part. I slept well last night but I feel groggy and stupid. My back still burns and aches.

I feel frustrated with myself for not doing more research on EDS before the surgery. I have a history of complications and no one is going to track them or advocate for me; I have to do it. I told EC this morning that I am glad that she is learning these lessons before she is even a teenager because someday something is going to go wrong with her body and she will know enough to advocate for herself early and hard. EDS means difficulty in healing: our collagen is different. I already knew that I had issues with local anesthesia. This is the first time a wound has popped open like this, but I’m getting older and it’s going to be a bigger concern as time goes by.

I’ve been talking to a buddy who has EDS and a bunch of similar issues. She’s trying to help me figure out how to present this information to the doctors here. She’s upset because the surgeon told me that EDS wouldn’t have any impact on this kind of surgery. That’s not a great sign for the folks around here knowing how to handle my condition and it’s a small pool of doctors here. I am going to have to educate them all.

Festive.

But if I frame it as “There is a small pool of doctors here so these are the same people who will treat EC when she has issues” then it feels a lot more worth the hassle.

I’m tired and I hurt but I’m bored too. I want to be working on something. I want to be moving forward on something.

My last contact with the shipping company says that the next company that will touch my stuff is just waiting until they next have a delivery scheduled to come to the Highlands. It could take a while. Our stuff has sat in warehouses for more than three months. That was supposed to be the maximum amount of time for shipping it. So the transit time is within the estimated time… but people just don’t feel like doing the transit part very quickly. Still no sign of them wanting to do this soon. Fuck everything.

Oh crumbs. I just remembered that we are going back to Edinburgh on Tuesday. That’s going to be fun right now. That means I get three days of “rest” before getting to travel/walk/take care of business for 16 hours. Fun.

I put rest in scare quotes because I was alone with the baby for five hours yesterday.

Shit.

I feel like absolute shit. I’m past the point where I’m holding my right arm to my torso to prevent any muscle movement. Yay? This is all massively confounded by the fact that I feel really guilty about “Noah’s month off” turning into “Noah doing everything for Krissy for a month”. I feel so overwhelmed and guilty.

I’m in the narrow window of the month when I’m more likely to be interested in sex but hahahaha no.

I feel really bad about myself right now. I feel useless and lazy. I feel like somehow I did something wrong because I should have known that I needed to do a bunch of research before the surgery and come in with documentation of my fucking special needs. I should have known that it was too soon to take the sutures out. I…

I should have done everyone else’s job for them or it is my fault things went wrong. Because I didn’t do more than my share now Noah is getting stuck with my share and that feels really unfair.

I’m tired and sad and worn out. I’m sick of resting.

But, I emailed the professor who has been on my mind for over a month. I did a bunch of research into the education system in Scotland. I know more about what I’m going to need to learn over the next few years.

Even being idle doesn’t have to be idle.

Sidebar: I WANT MY FUCKING STUFF.

Complications

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I had the stitches out yesterday from the surgery I had on the 31st. Then the wound popped open and I had to go see another doctor to have the giant gaping wound restitched. Apparently that’s called suture dehiscence and it’s common for folks with EDS. I’ve been doing research this morning. Apparently EDS means I should have had my sutures left in for twice the normal healing time. I am going to figure out how to get a bunch of research on EDS to my medical team. I mentioned on the operating table that I have it and the surgeon said it wouldn’t matter.

My kids were understandably pretty freaked out. MC told me she had an unhappy tummy when she thinks about the wound.

I said that being afraid of the wound is like being afraid of riding your bike. I am going to die someday–that’s the end result of being alive. You are going to fall off your bike sometimes and the only thing you get if you are afraid of it is that you can’t enjoy the time you are on the seat. I am going to die some day and my body has a lot of complications that I’m trying to manage so that I can stay alive as long as possible. My body has more complications than average and that means I have to do a lot of research and I have to advocate for myself because keeping me alive isn’t the same process as it is for other people. If we waste a lot of time being afraid of my eventual death we won’t get to enjoy the time I am alive.

This research is extra important because EC has the same condition and the more I find out about myself the more I can save her from suffering through similar issues. She can advocate for herself earlier and harder.

Now I need to figure out how to get this research to my medical team. It’s entirely from highly reputable/peer researched locations. I’m not researching on blogs (Even though blogs are often pretty fucking accurate) so I hope this is taken seriously.

I need to assume this will take twice as long to heal as “normal”. I need to have the stitches stay in longer than expected and I need to say that to the doctors involved in my case. I need to be proactive because I am the only person who suffers from these fuck ups. My back hurts a lot again today. There was partially healed skin there that ripped open. It doesn’t hurt as much as it did the day of the surgery but it probably hurts as much as it did on day two or three post surgery.

I almost certainly tried to bounce back faster than I should have. I feel so much shame for “being lazy” when I don’t help and do chores around the house. But here I am with more complications post-surgery because I didn’t let my body have the time it needed. It’s like what happened after the septoplasty when I probably had three or four times as long of a recovery because I didn’t take the twice as long I should have taken.

Ugh.

I should probably sit in this chair for ten days or more this time. That’s hard for me. I must work to feel worthy. But if I don’t rest I will be less able to work in the long run. It’s complicated.

Always more

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Yesterday I was looking at the “body battery” function on my watch. I know it isn’t perfectly accurate or anything, but it measures how my heart rate is doing, compares it to how much exercise I’m getting and how my sleep I get and it sort of figures out when I need more rest and when I should probably get off my ass and exercise some more because I have extra body reserves. It was really low. I got down to 3 by the time I went to sleep. This is not a battery you are supposed to use up every day. It’s a negative thing to keep it under 20 on the regular.

Yesterday was a high heart rate, stress the fuck out sort of day. I don’t think it had to be and I don’t really know how to calm down. I opened the box of Christmas card (I’m never using Minted again because they ship the cards straight to you instead of to all the fucking addresses we entered) and learned I had to put return addresses on every envelope and stuff the fuckers. Just what I want to see when I really need to get those bitches in the mail. Surprise! Fussy work! Noah helped and it got done in a bit under two hours. Our address is a pain to write that many times.

I walked over to the Tesco and mailed off the Christmas cards, a letter to the grandparents from MC, the birth certificates we neglected to bring to the Consulate, and the notarized documents for selling our DVC property. Even with extra fast shipping and tracking on a lot of it… postage was a whopping £40. I sent all the US cards to a buddy and she’s opening the box and taking it to the post office to have them all stamped and sent out. If we had sent them all individually from here it would have been in the neighborhood of £140 all told. We are getting a deal. Thank you, kind friend.

I’m having some big feelings about freakin Christmas presents. A whole bunch of presents were in the boat stuff that is… I don’t know where. I am starting to feel really paranoid that they lost everything and just haven’t told us yet. I haven’t heard a word from the UK company in 11 days and that’s a bad sign. The last time I was told a UK shipping company would be contacting us for delivery it turned out the company was given our contact information in error and our stuff wasn’t on the god damn boat it was supposed to be on. This is incredibly distressing and I don’t know how to get my heart rate to stop skyrocketing every time I think about it.

Noah’s Santa present arrived broken in November. I’m glad I ordered the blasted thing as early as I did. The replacement is sitting in customs in town and has been for 3 days. I don’t know why since it already spent several days in customs in a different part of the country. My stomach hurts.

The parent of a kid who has been whacking on MC came to the school yesterday to intimidate/threaten my children (EC had told the boy to stop hurting MC or she would tattle… she didn’t threaten to hit him or anything) and that’s causing some rage and panic. The school needs to handle this mother-fucking today or I am going to cause a massive stink. I don’t give a flying fuck that it is the last day until after Christmas holidays. I’m not giving the school a lot of leeway here. I will go to the Council first and if it can’t be resolved to my satisfaction then I’m withdrawing my children. Fuck school. Other parents do not get to harass my children.

No wonder my heart rate is sky high.

My body feels like I am gearing up for a big fight and I hate it. I feel sick.

Oh, and YC is sick. Life is awesome.

No stockings

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The boat sucks. Transparent International sucks. Putting our stuff in storage for months sucks. Our stuff supposedly arrived nine days ago but the company on this end hasn’t contacted me. Either customs is taking absurdly long (it generally takes 48 hours) or it didn’t arrive for the second time. Or the company who is delivering it just… doesn’t feel like working effectively and quickly. Who knows.

A whole bunch of the stocking stuffers are on that damn boat too. Well… I guess some of them can wait for Easter? Others will just be given late. We will still have magic. Frankly… the kids will get plenty.

The trip to Edinburgh went fine. We did our paperwork. Now some bits have to be mailed off. I think that will happen tomorrow. Every day a bit more gets done, we take a few more steps towards being fully settled. I’m told that once our stuff arrives we will be offered compensation for how terribly over-estimate this has gone. If it takes till after Christmas (looking likely) it will be more than 18 weeks, on an 8-12 week estimate. Awesome.

I’m starting to feel scared they lost our stuff and just don’t want to admit it yet.

I’m trying to find joy though. Today a tree surgeon came and took out some non-natives and we now have a giant pile of stumps and tree chunks and wood chips. We will have a lot of fun with that. I am really looking forward to setting up a proper mud kitchen out there with rough materials instead of something store bought. That makes me feel… really happy. That speaks to my values.

It’s weird figuring out what things are part of your values. I want my kids to be happier playing with a pile of logs than sitting and watching a screen and I teach them that this is the way to be by going out and doing it with them. I want my kids to turn to me when they have emotional distress instead of eating their feelings or hurting themselves or finding awful romantic partners and so far… they do. They talk about the things that upset them and they try to find ways to solve their problems that are fairly constructive for little kids.

I want my children to be doers, not people who sit around being entertained as a lifestyle. I model that. I live that. And so far… they are running into slight troubles at school because they are not people who sit and wait for life to happen. They get up and do things. Will this make them suitable for every job? No. But it will help them find the right one for them someday.

A long time ago I was drawn to people who were very certain of their own “rightness”. I was like a moth to a flame. I wanted to be near people who felt confident and sure of their own path. I became that kind of person and it makes some of my old connections trickier. I am absolutely certain that those paths do not work for me. Is there anything wrong with them? No. We all get to be however works for us. I’m just grateful that (so far) my children have very complementary personalities to my own.

When I go check on Youngest Child lately, she is more and more often in the lounge sprawled out reading a book. She’s going to fit right in. She talks up a storm. She demands to go outside and play. I like her so much. Sure it’s going to take her a few weeks to wean off of demanding the iPad every single time she opens her eyes… that’s a hazard of travel. We can’t bring books with us in large quantities. E-readers are not the same in the eyes of a toddler. I am buying books. Not tons. Well… a fairly surprising amount considering we have been here three months. I think if I include Christmas presents I have bought 6-10 books for each person in the house already. Once the boat arrives that won’t feel as important. We already have books… we just don’t have our books and the pain is becoming unbearable. We are readers and our books have been in storage for a year. We have all used e-books… it’s not the same. It doesn’t fill the same need in our souls.

I found the local used book store and I’m already making friends with the proprietor. I think we will get to know each other quite well.

The guy who did our tree removal asked about getting our families together for dinner. He wants me to hurry up and make more friends locally. I think he sounds delightful. He spent several decades riding his bike around foreign countries. We will have lots to talk about.

I have a whole bunch of tendrils out into the community. The beginnings of beginnings… but I’m not following through very much yet. I talk to people when they touch my life incidentally but I’m not following up with more close contact. I’m still so tired. I still feel so overwhelmed. I don’t know how long it will take me to feel like I have anything to give a real relationship but I’m not there. I still go to sleep and wake up feeling so weary I want to fall over. I still feel like my days are completely packed with chores… I don’t know when this will change. I don’t know if or when this will ease and until it does I should not lead anyone on with the belief that I have something to give.

My bucket is empty.

I haven’t had 24 hours of down time in over two years. I know that is pretty par for the course for parents… but not many parents do continual travel and interact with their kids 24/7 the way I do. Shorter breaks don’t feel very refreshing because my level of over work is so extreme.

If I get four whole hours off in a week… it feels like a drop of rain in the ocean. I don’t notice it. I don’t settle or relax. I have not yet figured out how to recharge, not really. I just keep pushing through.

I am reading the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence that is the basis for all of their education theory. It’s really quite refreshing and more in line with my overall belief system and educational theory than I would have expected. I really hope I can help MC pop a wheelie and get over the hurdle of school feeling just that teensiest bit too hard (fucking handwriting) so that she can go back to full time school next year. This is about the best school is going to get.

I’m going to make “lines” with sticks and then we are going to shape letters with wood chips and talk about why the proportions are the way they are. Why do you space things this much. Why do you need the arches and the curves in these places. Why do you need these kinds of gaps between words to be readable.

Kinaesthetic education, yo.

Because when we are all done we can use a broom and sweep up the results and then try again. It’s perfect. I’m actually really excited about this.

I have so much confidence in my children that it sometimes feels unreal to me that anyone can feel this way about anyone else.

The other day I was wandering somewhere with EC and we saw some of these abstract statues of a mother curled around a child. She said that when we get the house more properly settled she wants to find something like that for us to have in the house because that is how she thinks of me. My heart exploded. I had so many feelings at once. I wanted to create children who felt tenderly held. I wanted to create relationships where my children felt adored and respected and appreciated… I did it and I will keep doing it. I said, “Ok. We can do that.”

I kind of love that my baby will say her name all day long “_____ hat. ______ bear. ______ shirt.” but when a stranger asks her what her name is… she smiles at them and refuses to answer. It feels like she only wants to share her identity with us. I know that isn’t it. I know this is just a normal developmental stage… but it feels really lovely anyway. This baby feels really lovely in general.

On the train home last night a guy was sitting at the table next to ours. For the first hour or so he kept his airbuds in and I worried about disturbing him. Then we ended up in line at the snack stand together and he started talking to me. He told me that he has rarely ever seen three children as well behaved as mine. Yes sir, I’ll take your random approval… Our train was over an hour delayed and we just talked and played and read and drew and had a good time together without being fussy. Even though we arrived home more than two hours past our bed time. My kids are tough cookies. They rarely whine and when they do it is generally a sign that something pretty serious is wrong. I trust them.

That’s part of why I am going to listen to MC and flexi school for the rest of the year. She is good at telling me where she needs to be and what she needs to have happen for a given period of time. She has sure changed a lot over the course of her life. She has tried out some pretty intense things… but she tells me when she needs me to shift and that’s the best I can ask for.

We will figure out this journey together.

This is where I want to be. I am with the people I want to be with. Sure, there are bumps and inconveniences… that’s because life is an adventure. And sometimes adventures make you cry.

Ugh, dreaming is terrible

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I woke up rather early from an awful dream where I moved to Canada to marry this horrible man I went on two dates with from the dance community. There is zero chance I would do this. Even dreaming about the possibility makes me sick to my stomach. His second wife, the mother of his child, is one of my least favorite people on the planet and I don’t want to ever be in a room with either of them again because how they parent is so repugnant to me. So dreaming that I would be marrying into that shit show… blurgh. Stupid brain. I hate you stupid brain. Why do you even consider such gross options in life? I miss pot and the lack of dreaming it facilitated. I’m a complete moron in my dreams.

Middle Child is having nightmares about school. There’s a boy in her class who tried to knock her down the stairs. On the first week of her being in school she watched him drag younger children around by their hood. Eldest Child says she’s afraid of this kid too because he’s pretty violent.

I told the Head that my children were having bullying problems. She asked me for names. I said I could not give the names but she should ask my children. My children went to school and asked to speak to her. She acted confused why they would think she would make time to speak to them. I’m not happy about that part of how things are going. In my next round of emails I will mention it again. She needs to talk to them about the bullying they are experiencing.

She wants my children to stay in school but she doesn’t want to have to put in effort to find out who is giving them problems. I mean, I know I wrote positive things about the fact that they seem like a better group to work with than other teachers I have known… but it is still school. School is shit and I understand why MC is feeling over it after two months.

EC is feeling pretty annoyed because her class’ performance for the Christmas show involves the kids having to sing very loudly over a recorded song with a loud singer. Most of the kids in her class won’t sing at all because they are not interested in performing. She started off being angry with the kids because their lack of intensity leaves her feeling like she must sing twice as loud to make up for them and she is damaging her throat. She’s been doing some name calling of the kids and insulting their work ethics. I told her that she has not had seven years of being beaten down and constantly forced to do bullshit for school that she doesn’t want to do so she doesn’t understand their position. None of them opted in to this activity and they don’t want to be there. Why are you calling them names because they are engaging in the only form of protest available to them?

I asked her if it would be appropriate for me to call her names when she doesn’t feel like doing all the chores my greedy little heart might like to assign her. Her eyes went wide. Then she said, “Ok well it totally sucks that the teacher picked a song where we have to sing really loudly to drown out the singer–that’s not fair.” I agreed that the teacher made a rude choice. That’s totally fair to criticize. But criticizing people for not going along on an activity they don’t want to do? Meh. I can’t get on board.

It is utterly striking to me what a rule follower EC is. She wants to conform to the demands of authority left, right, and center and she thinks it is shameful when others don’t want to do it. But she’s also starting to notice that authority in school is not at all like the authority she grew up with. In school the authorities set rules based on their convenience or on arbitrary standards and the teachers really don’t care if the rules are appropriate in a given context. Such as: all children must carry a coat out to the playground for breaks and lunch because it is Scotland and it could rain. It frequently doesn’t rain and the children overheat in jackets so the kids leave the jackets sitting around and then they get lost and the children are in trouble. EC has been complaining about constantly feeling overheated and uncomfortable and she can’t understand why the staff wants her to feel that way.

Because the staff doesn’t care about your personal comfort. The staff cares about enforcing “the rule”.

Whether it is raining or not you have to have a jacket on.

Apparently the staff is giving her lip for showing up in shorts and short sleeved polo shirts because it isn’t “weather appropriate” but she is constantly overheated. They don’t think this is possible for someone who is from California because it is colder here. Dude. She lived in her underpants in California because she was always uncomfortably warm. I promise you that she can overheat here. She doesn’t understand why the school doesn’t care that they are making her miserable.

Welcome to school. You wanted to find out what it was like.

There are eight more school days for my kids in before Christmas break due to our trip to the Consulate. I put the chances of MC going to part-time school in January at about 80%. Do I want to do it? Not particularly. But I did not force EC to go to school when she wasn’t ready and I don’t feel ok about forcing MC to go. I am more than capable of teaching the subjects she is struggling with and the teacher is literally unable to provide the one on one attention I can provide. Of course the teacher thinks that MC would learn much better by being in a group of peers and normalizing off of other students. I don’t agree. I find that dynamic pretty fucked up.

The teacher did not look like she appreciated it when I said, “As someone who has been a public school classroom teacher the thing I appreciated the most about home educating is the lack of wasted time for transitions. In a class room you are lucky to get ten productive minutes out of each hour because getting all of the children to focus at once is practically a miracle. With home educating that whole hour can be productive and that’s why I don’t start academics until many years later and we blast through many years of progress in a short period of time with far less effort.” School is invested in believing that it must take many years to force large groups through a given set of knowledge. It literally doesn’t have to be that way. It is how school does it. But it is not a necessary part of the learning process.

Home educating (I’m trying to adapt my language because the local crowd is hostile to the “Americanism” of saying home school) is much more concise and effective than school. I can understand school feeling insecure about that. But I don’t care about your feelings any more than you care about my children’s feelings. And thus the world goes round.

I do not exist to provide you with little people to affirm your feelings about yourself. I am here to support my children.

I will have to ask for a formal explanation of the layout expectations so that I can help kiddo figure out how to do it. We’ve been talking about presentation differences for years. It is utterly hilarious to me the way the teachers here are super smug about their layout being standardized in primary schools so every child must be held to it. As if I haven’t already had to learn APA and MLA and a variety of other standards for different earlier schools. This standard isn’t somehow more magically wonderful and correct. It is just what you prefer. Whatever.

Do I want to keep home educating? No. I don’t. I’m exhausted and I’d like to be selfish and have more time for myself. But if it is what my child needs I am going to do it. This is her decision, not mine. And I’m about 80% sure at this moment that she is going to pick home educating because she learned that school sucks.

Yup. I hated school. Your father hated school. School is a miserable experience. I don’t blame you for wanting to opt out now that you have had a taste. The more I think about it the more I feel a little sick about the school trying to say that she should have to spend six more months there before I let her decide. It feels like “We haven’t had enough time to break her spirit and convince her that she’s not allowed to opt-out of abuse. Please keep letting us work on it.” The assertion that you must learn to conform to an arbitrary, abusive environment or you will never be able to have a job is so repugnant and repulsive. I don’t believe that.

My shitty hand writing has never prevented me from getting a job I applied for, no matter what the schools like to tell me. I mean, I didn’t apply for being a college professor… so I guess the timed handwriting aspect of the final exam for my masters did limit my potential… but I absolutely loathed being an adjunct instructor. I hated teaching college students. So was there really a loss of life potential there? I don’t think so.

My hand writing kept me teaching the kids I wanted to teach. Was that really a limitation? I don’t honestly believe my hand writing is going to keep me from future work I want to do. So how about if you fuck right off with your nasty attitude about how hand writing is the measure of intelligence.

“It is clear that MC should be in the highest reading group based on comprehension but her hand writing isn’t good enough so I won’t allow her to be in it.”

And you wonder why she is bored, acting out, and doesn’t want to be in school. Hm. It’s a fucking mystery. You think I should work with you to convince her that she has no option other than comply with your demands or be punished by being forced to work below her intellectual potential. She has to jump through an arbitrary hoop before she is allowed to learn anything interesting.

Or she could stay home.

Yeah. That’s school for you. MC wants to set project goals and work towards them. She knows that she is currently in the grade where EC got to work on a music video (to learn programming) and a big comic (with lots of supportive research because the comic was about California history), she did a couple of big fun real-life based maths projects, there were countless hours spent on art history as a passion project, and we went through three different fun science curriculums. EC spent this year working on learning more like how college classes are run. MC is being told she has to read baby books that are boring as shit because she doesn’t write well enough to learn anything interesting.

I FUCKING WONDER WHY SHE WANTS TO LEAVE SCHOOL.

Home educating is both a real education and fun. School has fun elements too–I can’t provide all of the group access that school can and they have resources I don’t have… but it comes in a whole package with kids who want to knock you down the stairs. It comes packaged with people spitting on you. It comes with constant name calling because you dare to be proud of being intelligent and bookish. Nerd is a constant refrain. And these kids don’t mean it as a compliment. They are trying to be derisive. Luckily my children have not been in school their entire lives so they respond with confusion, “Of course I am a nerd. Why wouldn’t I be? Nerds grow up to be rich and have good lives?” The other kids are not getting the power they would like to have from this exchange.

I am happy to the core of my being that my children are not building their sense of self-identity on the other children at school. Kids suck. Kids are assholes. Kids want to keep each other at low levels so that no one will be expected to work that hard. Fuck the expectations of kids. Keep reaching. Keep growing. Keep having high standards for yourself. You will be ok in the long run.

Sometimes people make comments about how if I have an abrasive personality I won’t have friends so I should conform more. Hahahahahahahahaha. I am abrasive as fuck. I have absolutely all the contact with friends I can possibly handle and sometimes too much. Our first overseas visitor is here and it’s going super well. It’s absolutely perfect that she can have space in the apartment to herself when she wants it and she can opt-in to conversation and food and companionship when she wants it. I’m really glad she is spending so much time sleeping. She desperately needs it. When she wants to come out our topics are ranging from education to philosophy to psychology to remodeling projects to books to cooking/food to animal training to parenting to cultural mores to group dynamics to stress management to nutrition to exercise to limiting our children having access to time wasting entertainment. I’m utterly thrilled.

But sure. If I don’t learn how to be more conformist and people pleasing I won’t have friends. Right. That has sure been demonstrated over my lifetime. Not. Yeah my 98 person Christmas card list is evidence that my behavior is totally off-putting to all people. Why don’t I get my shit together so maybe someone will like me.

Dude I need to be more abrasive so that I cull the damn list of people in my life because I’m overwhelmed trying to pay attention to so many people. Shut up.

I am going to do fine making more friends in Scotland. I am always fine at making new friends. The adults I talk to here tell me that rather than conforming to authority the expectation here is that you will just lie to any authority that questions you. I get that.

I already have a list of local people I need to follow up with for our next round of contact. But I’m tired and I haven’t wanted to get to it yet so I haven’t. It’s not a requirement that I hurry up. I plan to be here for a while. I’ll get to it. Maybe I will get distracted because it will be more important that I devote my limited energy to building connections to the home education community. We’ll see.

I’m tired and I should be asleep. But dreaming about following that annoying douchebag to another country is so obnoxious that maybe not sleeping is better. Stupid brain. ugh. He wasn’t even a good lay, what are you doing stupid brain? He’s a terrible parent. He’s whiny and self important and self aggrandizing and ugh. No. All the no. Ew. Never. Blurgh. It makes my stomach recoil in utter panic. Not for all the tea in China.

My brain is an asshole.

It’s kind of funny: having this lovely guest and having MC tell me fervently that my company is better than anyone else’s company… it reminds me that yes, my company is lovely and I would like to have more of it. Hahahaha

Ok. And now my frequent flier miles are gone because I have booked three friends coming to see us. Schweet. I’m really happy that all of our traveling has been rewarded with such a delightful outcome.

That happened.

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I had a meeting with the school, specifically with the Head and with the main classroom teacher. (It’s a complicated set up.) I feel that those two women both listened and advocated really well for their agenda. They want my kids in school. They were fairly eloquent and patient as they explained their reasoning.

They asked a lot of questions about how I homeschool and what my philosophy is for education. They asked about methodology and why I have the preferences I have. They explained their methods and what they are held to when it comes to transferring children on to secondary school in this country. It was an incredibly productive conversation. The Head was stunned when we said that the kids are almost never on video games unless they are programming them to create their own. That was not a concept she had ever really considered as an option before.

The next couple of weeks are mainly prepping for the winter concert, parties, movies, and fun stuff. We are going to ride out the end of this month in school. The Head is emailing the Council (like the district) about setting up the paperwork for part time schooling; there are already several other kids in the school doing part time so they are both familiar and comfortable with this process. I appreciated how much the Head stressed that I have the legal right to require part time schooling or home education any time I see fit. That was really awesome. I felt quite supported in that way. In the states a principal would have danced around that conversation and not explained my rights in such a straightforward manner. That was really nice. That builds trust.

We are going to have another meeting in January to decide for sure if we are going forward with part time schooling. Frankly I would prefer to have my kid in school. I am so utterly exhausted. I was shown writing samples for the entire last two months and kiddo is making big strides of progress. I’m not sure she would make much faster progress at home.

We had words about the aid who is using inappropriate words and both the Head and the classroom teacher apologized and said they would handle it. They have already spoken with her about never using that word about a child again. There is another aid who works in that classroom and she will be the one who handles my kid going forward. That’s a really good sign.

I actually really like most of the staff as professionals, I would be quite happy to work with them if I were still teaching. I like their attitudes, I like their methods, and I like the way they listen. I really hope we can figure out the growing pains and just keep kiddo in school. To be completely selfish: it would be better for me right now. I don’t know about what is best for my kid. I suspect that she fondly remembers the pair of them wearing me down and getting out of a lot of work and getting a lot of free time. If we part time schooled we would have to spend the mornings sitting at the table doing school work before she went off to school for more work. I could not use any of that time for work around the house and the baby would pretty much get left with the iPad, which I strongly dislike as a coping method. To be fair literally the only thing available to watch is Signing Time and she has picked up a huge ASL vocabulary from the iPad so it’s not all bad. It’s not like she is just watching generic shows that will make me crazy.

We will have another meeting in January and see how things go. I am starting kiddo up on Khan Academy for math in after school time (the teacher said she would stop sending homework home) because she doesn’t feel she is making the kind of progress she wants to make right now and it’s a really great extra curriculum; in my experience it is a poor primary curriculum. I always use it as a supplement anyway. I am going to start making her write every morning while she’s sitting around waiting on breakfast. I really hope this much supplementation is sufficient for her to feel like she is getting the support she needs from home on these subjects. She wants to be in the advanced groups across the board. Her teacher said that intellectually she is clearly at the top level… but her writing is so many grades below that she can’t be put in any of those tracked groups and I get it. I have said approximately 5,203, 839 times to my children “If I can’t read it I can’t grade it” and now they are hearing it at school and acting like it is news. Insert eye roll. I know that middle child is still really struggling with letter and number orientation. It’s a process. We are playing with Play Doh and we are talking about it a lot. We need to make up stories about why the letters face the ways they do to create mnemonics. That is the worst god dang word to spell.

I do want the kids to transition to needing less from me. It’s complicated. I think we are getting close to the time when I am going to request that they try ADHD medications because I am struggling with how much they want me to be their entire executive functioning process for them. I am pretty sure that EC is doing fine with the transition to school expectations. MC is… still in the gray area where it’s a struggle. I know we are more dependent on one another than average. The Head commented that she is really surprised my children like being home with me so much given the way we live (no tv, minimal screen time, lots of enforced exercise and healthy eating habits) because she doesn’t think most kids would be open to how we live. It was a somewhat funny thing to say. We really like each other. We really like all the time we get to be together.

We pay attention to our kids and talk to them for hours and hours every day. Our children feel heard, seen, and respected and they believe we make the choices we make because we are trying to shoot for longevity so we can have as much time together as we can possibly have. It’s a bit sad that the Head thinks most children would hate this.

I got pushy

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The school keeps hinting that they will call for a meeting… then not doing it. So yesterday i said I would like one and it is happening today.

I am going to ask for flexi-schooling. In the US it would be part-time schooling. There are aspects of being in school that my child will benefit from experiencing, I agree. There are aspects of being in school that are not going very well and I would like to opt-out. I have done my research and whereas it’s not common in Scotland (only about .5% of students flexi-school compared with something like 1%-2% who home educate) but there are students in our Council who do it.

Not surprisingly the overwhelming evidence is that flexi-schooling is most common among students who need extra help who cannot get it in schools.

The aid who is supposed to provide such assistance in my child’s classroom is fairly clear in her dislike of my child and frequently refers to her as deficient. I would like her to spend the morning at home working with me one on one towards developing the skills I want her to work on in the manner I have already stream lined with my oldest child. The school cannot argue that there is a problem with my methodology given that my oldest child is at the top of her grade. I did not have the crucial two year period my middle child is now entering. I’m going to take it. Fuck school.

But I do want her to go to school part-time. I think it would be best if she arrived at lunch time to do the afternoon with her peers. The morning is when her class does reading, writing, and math. Those are subjects I am more than qualified to teach and I have been wildly successful with my older child. It is not benefiting my middle child’s reading ability to be told she has to read books that are way below her level and only read 1/3 of the quantity you are capable of reading then stare at the wall while your peers catch up.

I understand that the classroom teachers would prefer if my child were less animated. I am mindful of the fact that on a global scale we will need people who are self-starters, people who are able to find their own motivation to accomplish things, and people who are generally willing to disrupt the social order and demand change. I do not want her to be less animated. But I can offer up less disruption to school time as a compromise.

Of course, I am waking up with a very sore throat. By afternoon my voice is going to be raspy, I can feel it. What optimal timing for a school meeting.

One of the few things I liked about the US school system was the ambition to have an IEP for every child. It is never going to happen for reasons of scale, expense, and lack of support but it is a beautiful ambition. I know my middle child needs a lot of one on one help. Believe me I am aware. I don’t believe this to be permanent, but at this stage she genuinely does need it. If I am getting the support of the school for part of the day I can supply it. I do need some help at this stage. I am really tired. But I can see that my child needs me to once again dig deep and just figure it out.

I’m capable. I’m willing.

It’s time to go negotiate for my child. Alright. Bitchy nice. Implacable. Decisive. Commanding. This is how it is going to be because my child needs it. She needs time to practice writing. She needs kinesthetic support for learning to spell. She needs time to seriously actually read instead of bite sized chunks of not getting much out of the experience. She can come home and get a much better environment for supporting her in gaining those skills. She is following the typical learning curve for her bloodline. I will not tolerate her being insulted in that process.

I need to calm the fuck down and organize my thoughts.

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I have been researching educational theory and child development for nearly twenty years. In that time I have come to some very firm opinions. It is never appropriate to refer to a child as deficient. Deficient is a very final word. It means not good enough. When you describe a child this way, even when you feel you are describing behavior and not the personhood of said child, you damage the child’s sense of self. I’m not even saying self esteem; the child learns that who they are is not good enough. When you tell a child that they are deficient they learn that there isn’t a lot of point in them working hard to improve because they are not good enough.

All human beings have areas where they struggle. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses and areas where they could improve if they worked hard enough. If you shame people for this natural variation it does damage that can be permanent. They can learn that there is no purpose in attempting self improvement because they are simply less than.

When you tell a child coming from a different culture that the way that they are, based on their culture, is rude you are shaming them. Shame does not motivate change nor improvement it teaches a child to shut down and feel wrong.

It is absolutely possible to work with children who come from varying backgrounds and encourage them to change in ways you feel are appropriate. The best way to do this is through emphasizing where you see them behaving or reacting in ways that are in alignment with your values and praising them. Telling them that they are rude Americans and correcting them is not actually helpful. If you must correct them saying things like, “Ah, here we really like hearing _____ instead of ______” is both more effective and more kind. You do not need to shame their culture of origin to encourage them in how to change. It is unhelpful and harmful. They cannot help being American. Telling them that being American is wrong, less than, or rude is damaging.

I home schooled my children because I spent a lot of time and energy researching best practices for educating children while knowing that very few educators actually believe it is worth the time and effort it takes to do it right. When I was a teacher I worked 70 hour weeks because I stayed late with my students who needed extra help. If they hadn’t learned something yet it was a failure on the part of the teachers not a failure on the part of the students. All of my students made substantial progress, often multiple grades in one year. It is not that hard to help students learn if you get them to feel like you care about them and you genuinely believe that it is worth your time and effort to help them.

If your mannerisms, tone, and words convince a child that you do not care about them then no matter how much you profess to “caring” a child will not learn from you. That is not a failure on the part of the child.

At this point my children believe that if they breathe wrong the teachers are going to reprimand them. Middle Child in particular thinks that the teachers actively dislike her.

This is not becoming an atmosphere in which my children are going to be able to make much learning progress. They are going to stall. I have touched base with the local home education community and I believe we would be able to get to know the community pretty well through those people. There is a lot going on.

I would prefer to have my children in school. I really would. I am tired. Educating little people takes a lot of time and energy and effort and frankly I would like to turn it over to people who are being paid to provide such a service. If my children are going to suffer because the people who are being paid to provide such a service are not able to work with my kids, then it doesn’t matter what I would prefer I will educate my children.

This is a time of great potential for my kids. They could be growing by leaps and bounds. They could be massively expanding their abilities and skills. Or they could deal with adults who want to focus on their few weaknesses and decide that those weaknesses mean they are deficient and subpar.

I am not going to allow my children to suffer because of the stereotypes, biases, bigotry, and judgments of adults. Not when it is fully legal for me to withdraw them and just see to it that they have what they need to be successful. I am not trying to raise compliant, obedient children. I am trying to raise successful adults.

The boat

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I don’t care if it is a ship instead of a boat. It was an interesting cruise. The highlight was the acupuncturist. She is hands-down the most effective acupuncturist I have ever worked with. I am pretty sure she is the most effective medical provider I have ever worked with. I’m not in pain. I have a few places where I feel a little bit stiff and a little sore, but not pain. I usually have to do fantastically heavy drugs in order to feel this good. I’m really pleased with her work. And she wasn’t expensive for what she did.

I spent a lot of the trip processing stuff with Sarah. There is a lot I have not been willing to admit to myself about how bad that relationship was for a lot of years. I am really struggling with dealing with that emotionally. She used me.

I think this is going to negatively impact my ability to trust people for a long time. I have been very willfully not seeing the problems because I didn’t want to lose her.

I am feeling a little bit nervous about this perpetual travel thing. I have not been as nice to the kids as I should have been. I am struggling. For a long time I used Sarah loving me as proof that I was worthy of love and that allowed me to feel gentle and like I had some love to give. I feel like the bottom opened up beneath me. I feel unworthy of love and like I am bad. And it makes me feel mean and vicious. I don’t like me very much. That’s never good for my behavior.

I wish people wouldn’t tell me that I am inspiring. I talked to a few people on the boat about life and stuff. There was one guy in particular who was born and raised in San Francisco. He had a lot of questions about what being homeless was like. He had a lot of questions about why I hate the rich the way I do. He could not understand why I believe that billionaires are evil. After I talked long enough, he got it. It took some talking though.

I have a sore in the middle of my forehead from the acupuncture needle. It’s kind of funny, the acupuncturist constantly smacked me in the center of the forehead. She told me she was waking up my third eye so that I could accept the blessings of the universe. It’s funny that I am walking away with a scab there. It’s like my third eye really doesn’t want to open.

San Francisco is so cold. We were warm just a few days ago. And we will be warm tomorrow. I used to think that I like the cold more than the heat. But my bones ache.

Monsters and good people.

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I had my first therapy session in a while. I haven’t been driving for health reasons and this session was via technology. Yay technology.

Most of the session centered around something having to do with my kids but it has to do with my identity in this community too. One of my children is struggling to deal with shame. Ah shame, my old nemesis.

My therapist told me that until I view myself as a good person who makes mistakes instead of as a monster who sometimes does the right thing… I can’t help my kid.

Given the stuff I’ve been reading on fetlife lately about redemption and making up for mistakes and when are you allowed back into the fold and to do which behaviors… this all feels connected in my head.

I’ve done wrong and I’ve hurt people in my life. I have done everything in my power to make amends. I’ve tried to help my victims and I’ve tried to help the victims of other people. I’ve tried to not hurt more people, with varying degrees of success. I haven’t had a big flagrant boundary violation in well over a decade, approaching two decades. I did learn from my mistakes.

But at what point do the mistakes of the past no longer define you? How many fuck ups are necessary to make you a monster forever?

What kind of fuck ups can be waved away as “just a mistake”?

I don’t know.

Pieces of dysfunction.

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Mostly I keep my crazy ranting on my blog. I figure the few people who want to know my wackiness follow me over there and writing on a more public site is… I don’t know… forcing my insanity down peoples throats. But the thing is, the stuff I have to work on changing next is stuff that is rooted in my sexuality. That’s a journey that has been highly shaped by folks who hang out here. So once in a while my insanity will leak out a bit here.

I’ve worked pretty hard on changing my perception of myself over the years. I no longer believe I am worthless. I have substituted the belief that I am an incredibly effective tool. I know how to do a lot of different kinds of work and when I show up to do work… I get a lot done. I have developed quite a bit of pride in how effectively I can get work done over a broad swath of types of work. I’m not a one trick pony.

My family wanted me to perceive myself as stupid but all of the GATE testing when I was a kid and grown ups going “Holy crap this kid is SMART” means that their attempts to make me think I was stupid just kind of failed. I’m brilliant and I’m comfortable with acknowledging that. The rate at which I read complicated non-fiction books helps me not ever succumb to the belief that I might be stupid. But I have to keep working consciously on expanding what I know or I would start chanting this at myself. I view smart as something that has to be constantly worked on or it doesn’t count.

I could go through a long list of specifically triggering things I’ve worked on, but the problem that keeps coming up and I just can’t fucking deal with it in a rational way… is what I was born to be.

Let me explain. My father raped my mother when she knew she was fertile and she didn’t want to have more kids. He wanted to make another kid to rape. He was already raping the children they had. Like a true pedophile, gender wasn’t that important to my father.

So from when I was a tiny baby the story I was told about my existence is that I was made so that men would have more holes to use and how I felt about that really didn’t matter.

This is the problem I keep coming back to. This is the core belief I have not been able to shake or move or change in years of trying. This is what I am here for. It doesn’t really matter if it feels good to me or if I like it or if I want it. That’s why I am here. It is literally why I was made.

I don’t know how to alter these wires in my brain so that I stop giving a shit what my father’s intentions were and start feeling like I get to define what I am here for.

This piece is just sticky as hell and I have not figured out how to change it. This is what brings me to my knees over and over sobbing and feeling like I need to die to get away from the terrible burden of being responsible for taking more and more and more pain inside my body.

Even when my partners (my husband most of all) have tried to figure out how to fuck me without hurting me we always run up against this strong limitation that I can’t really talk in the moment about sex hurting my cunt. I dissociate away from that so fast I am literally physically incapable of talking when it happens. Even though I’ve done decades of work on trying to fix this.

I’ve fixed a lot of pieces of this. But this spot still persists and I have not yet figured out how to rewire this in my brain.

I can write about it when it’s not happening. I can barely speak out loud about this topic without melting down into tears or screaming swear words like FUCK YOU FOR HURTING ME. Which is not all that productive.

I continue to be impressed with my husband’s persistence in wanting to help me deal with my laundry list of problems.

I sabotage efforts to make sex not hurt me. Because I have this internal motivation that I have to be providing a lot of sex, even if it is damaging me and I have to initiate even when I’m in pain and….

I know I create a lot of this problem with my utter unwillingness to act like pain in my cunt is worthy of acknowledgment in the moment. There were a few times when I was very young when I mentioned that it hurt to partners and the response was a solid wall of “So?” and I just completely lost the ability.

The kinds of 25 year olds who like to fuck 12 year olds really don’t care.

This internal belief, that fucking is literally why I exist, is why I push so hard for sex with so many people. I have an internal programming that dictates that I must ask for sex. Because this is why I exist. To give this experience to people who want it.

This has gotten more complicated as my partner has gone through a shift from actively wanting polyamory when we met to very actively wanting mainly monogamy with very rare occasions of group sex.

Fitting into the expectations that are currently held for me takes a lot of work. I’ve adapted as best I can. It’s not always easy. But the good I get from being part of this family is so breathtaking. I get to belong somewhere. People care when I’m crying. People care about me in this house. I am important to them. It’s worth a lot of pain and suffering to try and deal with more layers of my mental illness to try and stay here for more of this.

Recently I went through a multiple month period where I genuinely didn’t want to die. That is the longest I can remember feeling like that in my entire life. I have always wanted to die. That has been the drumbeat chasing me through life for just about 30 years now. “I should die because this hurts too fucking much.” I want more of the not-wanting-to-die feeling. And I have to change this belief to get there.

This is tricky because I partially married my husband because he has the highest sex drive of anyone I ever seriously dated. He’s been the only one who wanted to keep up with what I wanted to initiate.

But a lot of what I initiate hurts me. And then there are waves of consequences.

This is so unfair.

It is desperately unfair to my husband and frankly it isn’t fucking fair to me either. It is fucking shitty being in my head and in my body. It isn’t anyone’s fault at this point that it sucks so much to be inside of me… but it’s a fact.

One of my buddies idly mused that I get a lot of self esteem from my interactions with my children.

Children are the only people I know how to interact with without feeling like I am failing in not offering sex. That’s the only time I feel like it is completely appropriate for me to not be offering sex. It’s safe in a way nothing and no adult ever is.

I don’t ask everyone for sex all the time for a variety of reasons (I’m pretty sure you don’t want to be asked, I’m pretty sure my husband would flip out, etc) but I have had to grow up and work on my boundaries to get to this point. It took a fair bit of maturing before I understood that my father was lying and not everyone wanted that from me.

Thanks to all the folks who have skillfully and tactfully turned me down over the years. I’m glad you didn’t follow that up with refusing to know me because I was so rude/tactless/gross/insert word of choice.

I’ve tried to grow up as fast as I have been able. I’m a lot closer to my goal of “grown upness” than I actually believed I would make it to… but I’m not there yet. I’m hoping I manage around the time my 9 year old makes it to adulthood.

What am I here for?

That’s this huge existential question, right? I’m super partial to the work of Viktor Frankl, a psychotherapist who went through the Holocaust. He wrote the book Man’s Search For Meaning. His general hypothesis is that folks can survive any horror in life if they have something they believe in and it doesn’t matter what it is. It could be “I want to see my wife/husband again”. That kind of belief is enough. If you believe that your love for someone else is your reason for continuing to be alive then you can make it enough to see you through anything.

I can’t control why I was made. I can’t control the intentions behind my makers.

But why do I stay alive?

Maybe that needs to be the focus of the next stage of work. I can’t change what I was made for or whether I did my best to live up to that for the first few decades of my life.

But why now?

I feel really guilty that a lot of why I’m staying alive at this point is a science experiment. Will I be a good enough mother that my children will want to know me when they are adults? Am I capable of treating them in a way that will cause them to want to know me?

I feel guilty about this because I feel like I “should” pick something that is more oriented towards my husband and… that’s different. It’s really complicated that I already feel like I have failed at being a good wife and I feel like there is no walking back from that. He’s not leaving because I’m better than nothing but I will never make it to good. I can’t hang my hat on that in this life.

Ok, so “I am bad” and “I am a monster” are strongly tied in with what is causing me these eternal problems.

It is hard because my husband is having a hard time with how much the shift into being a mother has derailed a lot of the hypersexuality and a lot of my strong need to be hit so much. I’m boring now.

I feel like I am bad for even trying to work towards a future where my cunt will hurt less because that will mean I am not meeting his expectations for how often he wants to get laid.

And the cycle continues.

Reinventing yourself

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People who have known me since I was a kid tell me that I don’t seem like the same person any more; I have changed so much. I changed a lot in my time in the scene, then being a teacher was a huge shift, being a parent has kind of forced me to complete a lot of huge seismic level differences in my life.

For the first few years I had kids I went through a Madonna/whore problem where my body stopped wanting sex or bdsm. It was the way that my brain managed to pick a path through my personal history of having no healthy boundaries around sex. It wasn’t a healthy response because it was bad for my marriage.

But I grew up watching all of the adults in my family have sex. I needed to have some kind of shift in my brain that ensured that my children would not see me have sex. My kids have still never walked in on me having sex and I’ve been doing this gig almost a decade. It is a huge accomplishment for someone with my background.

I think that my libido partially shut off because that was a lot of what I saw happen to my mom’s life. She had a few boyfriends (all of whom I saw her have sex with) and she realized that I was acting out a WHOLE LOT and she… shut it down and to the best of my knowledge has never had sex again. I think she stopped when I was around 10. That was a quarter of a century ago. I’m pretty sure my mom has been celibate because she decided she didn’t know how to have a healthy sex life.

She might be right. She picked some awful people.

I feel this kind of long drawn out pleasure and shock that the vast majority of people I slept with are really awesome people and they are still all invited to my house if I have a Christmas party. Only a few people have fallen off the list because mostly… gosh I picked good people.

I read in a book about postpartum recovery that it takes a body 4 years to fully reset after having a baby. My libido came back like a sledge hammer about 5 years after having kids. 4-5 years is a natural child spacing in nomadic societies so it isn’t that shocking that my body picked that window for saying, “Moar seks please.”

It’s been complicated since then. My poor husband has adjusted from the extreme hypersexuality I experienced when we first got married and before our marriage to me shutting down completely to me being a bitch and fucking lots of people as my libido exploded and… now I’m pregnant again.

What is going to happen next?

I don’t know but healthier sex has to be part of this experience.

It is complicated for a masochist to stop something because it hurts. But there are kinds of pain that are positive/emotionally expressive for me and there are kinds of pain where I shut down my brain and go to a bad place. There are kinds of pain that increase my general feeling that I should die because I have no other escape from pain in this lifetime.

My kids and my husband tell me all the time that they want me to live for A VERY LONG TIME and I’ve tried to change how I live to reflect the fact that they don’t want me to die young.

I have to figure out how to convince my body that I can be in less pain. (Fibromyalgia makes this super complicated.) I have to figure out how to stop shutting down my self-protection mechanisms during sex. Because the specific pain I have during vaginal sex sometimes (it’s not all the time) is a problem. It is directly tied into the abuse from my father. It is a mainline to my internal reaction that I was born from rape; I was born to be raped; that is all I should deserve to expect until I die.

I have changed so much about my destiny. I didn’t think I would ever have a forever home. I didn’t think I would ever be part of a family.

I have a really cool family. I mean, we are all flaming weirdos… but we like each other a lot and we spend a lot of time together and it is all so intensely positive…

I didn’t think someone like me would ever get this far, let me tell you. But I did it.

My current shrink is probably the most bdsm aware/positive shrink I’ve ever seen. They suggested that I’m going to have to face my dissociation head on and in their opinion I am going to have to do it within the structure of my M/s relationship.

Now that’s some awesome feedback to get from a shrink. I’ve never had a shrink talk so specifically about the difference between therapy and therapeutic and bdsm can be so very therapeutic…

I know. I used to not be able to set any boundaries at all with my body. Bdsm taught me how. My beautiful friends and play partners taught me how. Very therapeutic.

It is complicated on so many because having my husband hit me a lot is different from having my lovely friends hit me a lot. My husband is the only person on this god-forsaken planet who has given me any real safety. It’s complicated when he hits me. It isn’t that I never like it. It’s that there are so many layers of psychological events that happen around the physical events that… it’s hard to manage that and bounce back into my life.

My life is very constrained. I have to “behave” and project a kind of behavior that is very hard for me. I believe that children learn primarily through modeling and if I want to show my kids making good choices I have to make good choices and I’m really more inclined towards being a fuck up and doing everything wrong.

But the children. Sigh.

My kids are the reason I get up in the morning. My kids are the reason I put breathtaking amounts of effort into being a healthier person. My kids are the reason I’m trying to learn how to stop hurting myself so that I can handle being alive long enough to watch them grow up.

I haven’t cut myself in over half a decade. I have burned myself in longer than that. I haven’t beat my head on concrete in a bit longer than that. I have made a lot of progress on my self mutilation.

I really want to know what happens to my kids. I think they are so neat. I feel so lucky that I get to have another child. These people are the best people in my life. I wake up and go to sleep seeing their smiling faces.

I did not believe that my children would like me. I expected to be the recipient of contempt and apathy. Instead my children adore me like I adore them. It feels like magic.

Is it magical enough to propel me through figuring out how to stop allowing more pain into my body that damages me?

What does being kinky mean anyway?

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I feel like I’m in such a weird place in my body and in my mind. Yes, pregnancy is weird… but this predated the pregnancy. This got started over a year ago.

I still like the idea of being tied up and hit. When it happened last year I still liked the reality of it. But this is compounded by the fact that I don’t have a lot of childcare and when I did… it was not really during hours that were conducive to kinky play. I know that most of my friends have had a “Whoops the kids walked in during sex” story but I don’t. My sex life is off. fucking. screen. My children do not walk in on us having sex. And I don’t think they ever will. I have sturdy locks all the fuck over my house to prevent such a mishap.

Because given my background having my children SEE me have sex is a major violation and one I won’t be able to shake off.

If I could forget the sight of my mother and my sister fucking people maybe it would be different. My children will not learn from me.

Things with Noah are complicated for a lot of reasons. I have a strong sense of debt. Noah didn’t rescue me from the streets, I did that for myself thank you very much, but he did rescue me from being alone and that’s a big damn deal. Noah gave me a forever home that he’s serious about. If we divorced he would probably want me to have the house and he would leave. I’m a stubborn piece of shit and I wouldn’t accept but that’s different. Noah gave me a family. He didn’t share his family I’m still basically a non-person there (except with his grandmother and his aunties–I am glad for those women) but he gave me children. He helped me create a family where we both get to belong.

I owe Noah a lot. Noah has cared for me through several periods of time when I was all but nonfunctional. He feeds me. He makes sure I take my meds. He asks after my appointments and reminds me to go. When I express my overwhelming shame at stealing so many resources for my health he tells me over and over that keeping me alive and healthy is the point of us having money.

And the primary thing Noah wants from me as a demonstration of love is physical contact. Specifically, sex. The talking is awesome. The snuggling is great. He really gets a lot out of the sex.

My body is complicated though. I arrived at this marriage with sexual dysfunction in place. I arrived in his life with scar tissue and pain through my nether region. It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t cause any of the damage. But it’s there and I have to cope with it.

In my brain I want to be available for sex at any moment because that would be hot and fun for him and it would make him feel really loved. I tried to meet that standard for years. I hurt myself in the process and I damaged the trust in my marriage.

It isn’t Noah’s fault that I did that. He was negotiating in good faith. I was doing the best I could and I fucked up.

The thing is… I’ve been hurting myself for almost 30 years. This was just the latest incarnation and in some fucked up ways it was a healthier way of hurting myself than most I have tried. I still need to change it. But I also need to acknowledge that I am not as pathetic and back sliding as I feel.

This is complicated.

I feel like I don’t count as a kinky person anymore because in my mind kink is associated with exhibitionism and public play. The fact that I call my husband Daddy when he’s fucking me is just kind of meh, whatever. Basically vanilla people do that too.

cough

I may have some weird assumptions here and there.

It doesn’t help that when I got into the scene there was a lot of nasty back and forth in email lists about how having a strong focus on sex instead of just the SM part of bdsm meant you weren’t really kinky. And I like fucking lots of people so I’m more of a swinger, right? Only at swinger parties I have to ask humbly for exceptions to the rules because I really want to make this person cry while I’m sucking his dick.

Ok I didn’t actually make him cry. He’s really tough. But he made lovely noises.

I don’t feel like I fit in a community. I’m too sexual to feel properly “kinky” and I’m too kinky for most of the sex-only spaces.

And it doesn’t help that my behavior in private is way more timid and unwilling to set boundaries than I am in public. In public I am responding to the crowd and crowds take rock solid boundaries. I have to protect myself. At home…. I don’t want to. I don’t want to say no. I don’t want to set limits.

Which is incredibly fucking stupid and creates problems all over the place. I know.

Playing at home is complicated because the kids are always god damn here and I don’t want them hearing or seeing anything. Ever. Period.

It isn’t that I will never be “out” with my children. It’s that my sex life will always be off stage and kind of a mystery. I’ll hint. I’ll answer some questions in broad ways. That’s it. I will never discuss my kinks with my children. They know I have not been monogamous all my life. They know I went out with a lot of people before I got married (How are you supposed to know if someone is right for you without trying out lots and lots and lots of wrong people first?!) and they know I’ve been on dates since getting married.

I think that’s plenty.

I’m ok with talking to my kids about sex in the abstract or in ways that will increase their future safety… they don’t need to learn how to have sex from me. My way is kinda fucked up. Like at one point my daughter asked if there is one kind of sex (or something very like that question) and I said, “Oh no! There are lots of kinds of sex. There’s manual sex (with fingers/hands); there’s oral sex (that involves a mouth and a set of genitals); there’s anal sex (playing with a butt–can be with fingers or a penis); and vaginal sex (can be with a penis or with toys).”

My daughter’s response was to raise her eyebrows and kind of say “hunh.” We didn’t keep talking after that. It wasn’t a conversation that needed a lot of in depth follow up at that point.

I just will never have a child who is talked into anal sex because it “doesn’t count”. What bullshit. Also: a huge swath of teenage girls these days are being pressured into oral sex because it “doesn’t count” and it’s a way to keep from having “more happen” and oh hell no.

My children will have language about sex and about their body. They will know what they are saying yes to and what they are saying no to. And I’m pretty damn sure my kids are growing up with the idea that sex is a super fun thing to do when you are ready and with the right person(s) but until you are ready it’s a problem.

And that all feels weirdly tied up in my kinky. Because I still struggle to set the boundaries I want them to have. I still struggle to say out loud “I want _____.” I can ask for abasing things very easily. Not affirming things.

I still struggle with the idea that sex is supposed to feel good for me. When the first several decades of your sex life is incredibly painful… that’s a hard thing to rewire in your body. It is hard to change my expectation.

What does being kinky mean?

I think it is funny that my current M/s contract has been going on for 9 months and I still don’t think I’m that kinky. Even though I have rules around my body and my sexuality that I follow.

WHAT IS BEING KINKY?

In flux x-post

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I feel like my periods of equilibrium are short and not satisfying. My life has been in limbo for pretty much all of my life. I’m always transitioning. I was transitioning from “done breeding” into “more exciting” and then that got… interrupted. Instead I’m back to breeding.

If only I didn’t want more children so much that I cry with every period.

I miss being exciting. Being a wife and a mother doesn’t feel exciting. Being sadistic and masochistic and slutty feels exciting.

But I want these children so much that I deal with not feeling exciting. I want these children so much that I will defer most dreams. I will put off most goals. I want these children so much it physically aches.

I thought that having two kids might scratch the itch. No. I want more. I want more kids so much I feel like I can barely cope with the urge. I feel no end of gratitude that my partner changed his mind about two and done.

But I’m struggling with feeling like so much of me is shoved into a box in the closet indefinitely. It’s like those other parts of me don’t exist.

I am sadistic. I am masochistic. I am submissive.

How much of me are these things?

Not as much as being a wife and a mother. No matter how much I resent the fuck out of mostly being a wife and mother.

I want to be something different. But instead I’m typical. I’m a wife and mother.

I really want to be a badass motherfucker. Instead I’m a wife and mother.

How do we decide who we get to be? What we are? What makes us?

I don’t know. But I struggle.

My partner has gone from saying “One kid… maybe two” to saying “As many as we can” given the constraints of our life/age/health. That means we will have three or four. He’s open to five. The reality of my age is that probably won’t happen.

I feel like there is something I have to give to these children. Something that is so important that it is more important than fun or excitement or personal projects.

I need to have these children to repair the damage I feel inside me.

I don’t know how to get over grieving that I didn’t get to grow up in a family. I didn’t really get to have a mother or a father. So instead I give to my children. That is my only route to having a family. Because I feel like I am dying from lack of care and love that I should have gotten from a parent.

Instead I have children who shine with love, attention, and good health. Because I wither on the vine because I still miss my mother. I still wish someone wanted to mother me. But no one does. That door is closed. I get to give, not receive.

Life works that way, sometimes.

Gratitude bandwagon

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Today I am grateful for being the mom. I’m not every day so I thought I would note it today. (full disclosure: I am always grateful for my kids, but being the mom sucks rocks a lot of days.). Last night Shanna asked to sleep next to me. She doesn’t cosleep anymore so we had to maneuver a bit. Some time in the middle of the night she woke up, sat up just long enough to look for me then she threw herself across my chest to snuggle. She’s a cuddly kid in general but that instinctive “where is my mommy” in the middle of the night feels different. That is primal. I am the one she wants and needs and loves the most in the world.

Calli has been resisting napping alone. She wants to be on my lap. I haven’t been willing to give her this for most of her life but I’m doing it on vacation. Sometimes she wakes up just a little and starts to panic, then she notices that she is on me and her whole body relaxes. Oh Mommy.

This is why I had children. I wanted this. I want this so much that I ache with it. And I have it. It’s a gift. I constantly feel like I don’t deserve these amazing kids, but they think I am perfect. I am so grateful that I get to be Mommy.

Good parenting.

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I asked on MDC what makes good parents and someone turned around and asked me if I would like to have me as a parent. Yes. I really would. I would so love a mom like me. I am empathetic, strong, dependable, mostly consistent with my behavior even though my moods are unpredictable, I am fun! I like to play. I like doing all kinds of neat things and I think, “Why not?” is a great answer to questions like, “Can I cover my entire body in finger paint?” I am fiercely protective. I fight through my touch issues to be incredibly snuggly with my girls. I think that everyone needs to scream sometimes–just not in the house. I think that everyone has bad days and they do not in any way reflect your value as a person. I am loyal. I am honest. I am kind. I am considerate. Loving! So! So! Loving. I pay so much attention to my kids. As people. I like to stare at them.

So it seems that I am a great supporting character. (Like I was a good secondary.) I’m not that great at being the main character. Maybe I should just like me more. Maybe then I would do better at being the important one in my life.

Also, really thrilled about the push to recognize Shanna’s behavior as Not About Me. We’ve had a really great day and a lot of it is when she starts pushing on something I am stopping to think how it relates to her and her needs instead of mine. *That’s* good parenting. 😛 Thanks for telling me to do it, blacksheep.

I think I needed that.

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Today my therapist laughed at me. At some point we worked our way around to how to continue processing abuse stuff in a limited way in that little box over there in the corner so that there isn’t ‘leakage’ into the rest of my life. These are important things to consider when planning how to end the cycle of abuse or build a nuclear reactor plant. Just sayin’. I came around to the idea of a support group. Yes! That is what I need! A support group for mothers with mental illness or mothers who are survivors of abuse. Yes! Because then I can have people who are in the same place as me who can give me advice because I suck and I’m not figuring it all out. She almost fell out of her chair laughing. Apparently she thinks they don’t have much to teach me. We actually spent the rest of our time together talking about a workshop she has been dying to lead…and she has been trying to figure out how to talk to me about it. Because she thinks I have a lot to teach about doing this. She views my recent blip as as really… nothing to write home about when dealing with mothers who were victimized. No lines have been crossed. No one has been harmed. No actual damage has been perpetrated. Ok, my tone of voice sucks sometimes. Why am I crucifying myself? We spent a lot of time talking about victim/rescuer judge/(can’t think of the word but you catch my point). It was really neat. It was interesting having her point out on this little graph how I was moving around in my relationship with Shanna. We talked about specifics of how to step out of it and she said that really the only thing she would have suggested is what I started doing yesterday. It was very validating. She more or less gave me a check list of things to think about when considering parenting stuff and that was extremely useful. It was also nice to be reminded that as a parent it really and truly isn’t my job to ensure that my kids like me. Making them happy at all costs is really not the right road to a happy adulthood because they will be total assholes. But I digress. 🙂

I’m always going to be kind of messy (like emotionally and psychically) and weird. But that’s ok. So is everyone else if I look at them closely enough. I am not a bad person. I want to stop treating myself like I am. No matter how much I want to believe that I am a monster in the making, I’m really not. I’m not abusing my kids. I’m not hurting them. I’m loving on them and giving them lots of attention and affection and support. Why do I only see the 4 seconds I yell and decide that is the only important 4 seconds of the day? It’s really not. All the time I spend patiently showing Shanna every step of ‘how to do things right’ even when it is challenging to let her do it. For every time I say, “Man you’ve been working on that! You couldn’t do that a week ago. I wonder what you will be able to do next week.” I see her. I love her. I don’t need to buy her love. I make a vow today, I will stop acting like I have to buy my daughter’s love. That course of action will result in both of us losing.