Tag Archives: self actualisation

You only have so much time

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I don’t know how much of my difficulty in regulation/scheduling/consistency is rooted in my neurodiversity but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it is most of the reason. When I was younger, in order to get stuff done for school/theatre/projects, I would write meticulous schedules like I was gettin a CEO through meetings. People told me that my schedule looked terrifying and nightmarish and they could never do it. I always found that confusing because I was trying to do the same amount of stuff I saw them doing and I couldn’t understand how they managed without tracking it down the 5 minute block.

This becomes a big problem when I have projects that I can’t get done in a reasonable amount of time given all the other schedule considerations (bathroom remodel, painting this house) and I toss my regulation out the window to fall into flow and hyperfocus around work. I could absolutely be a crazy genius who only ran on the spark from my own motor but I would be horrible to live with and I don’t think I’d be a good mother.

Being a good mother is the task I care most about. Over being a good friend. Over being a good tool. Over being a good wife. My kids are neurodiverse and really struggling in a few key ways. Ways that I could fix if I excised most of the filler I’ve added to my schedule and went back to basics.

I’m part of a lot of unschooling support groups and in many ways I deeply respect it. Many of them even focus on neurodiversity and finding ways to help folks allow their quirky little people to focus on being emotionally ok over productivity. I can understand that. But in every conversation around parenting priorities and supporting children there are a lot of factors that are hard to talk about without it being an argument when I really don’t think it should be. I love when folks can feel safe and confident and say, “We’ve tried a bunch of stuff and what works for us is ______.” I’m here for it all day. I may take inspiration from 1% of what you are doing and the rest isn’t for me but that doesn’t mean you should change!

Every family is a mix of personalities, experiences, strengths, skills, challenges, disadvantages, cultural perspective, gendered socialisation, education, and ambition.

People who are neurodiverse need coping skills for living in a world that is not suited to people who are constantly distracted by shiny butterflies. I’m not saying we need to learn how to fit in or how to conform more and stick out less, fuck that. What I am saying is that we need to survive and that means we need to look for ways of adapting information and tasks to our ability to follow through.

So. I have been loosely keeping my life together for decades with paper planners. I will also use white boards and online calendars as supplements but I am a paper girl. I neeeeeeeed to write it down. The act of holding the pen and writing it down creates the picture in my mind I can bring up later. All days of looking at a computer calendar blur together in a mass and I can’t get a clear mental picture of any one day in particular. But paper calendars can’t make my watch harass me. So, both!

Today I begin the indoctrination of usage of a planner. They will live on the table in the kitchen. We will track things. We will write down our to do lists. We will talk about what we need to do during the day and block out how we will get it all done.

Because of my intense habit of overworking or adding in things last minute I am including private down time for all of us. We neeeeed to be able to rest and self soothe sometimes. The cheese falls off my cracker if I don’t have this time. It’s a need. We need to exercise–we have upcoming plans (more on that later) and we need to be fit enough to enjoy that time. If you don’t train and work up gradually you are going to suffer a lot. If you won’t enjoy this trip you have scheduled… why pay for it?

I think that part of this is going to include me needing to get up earlier and come out side to write. The random “I have to say something ok fine Facebook” posting needs to come to an end. I am curating that in such odd ways. I need to go back to writing for me with the whole story attached. I don’t think I’m opening up the archives at this point, but I need this.

I need this in order to track what I’m doing with the kids. I need this so I can communicate more clearly with Noah. I need this because it makes me happy. I need this because writing is what makes me feel like a whole synthesised system. Most of the time I feel like a collection of separate personalities/actions that barely overlap. But I am whole. I am complete in ways I never anticipated. I think the hibernation of not really talking/writing about my emotions for several years was useful in a way. I had to put everything in a box, tape it up, then stick it in a cupboard. When I have peaked in the box over the years for brief seconds it’s been remarkable how much smaller, less intimidating, less dominating than they used to be. Even the experiment with stimulant medication was not anywhere near as bad as it could have been in the end.

(Lisdexamfetamine situation is in a weird limbo. Won’t be able to talk to a new person till the 19th. 40mg was too high and was becoming a problem. Then scheduling challenges.)

Like that. I am not going to explain all of that right now but I’m allowed to put a pin here. I would feel awkward doing that on Facebook.

It is incredibly dramatic to me the way that none of the Scots use Facebook the way my American friends do. But then again… almost every single person I am friends with from the States are people who are old-school BBS users or people from livejournal or academics and many many many of us are ok with being very public and loud and messy about our ups and downs and our struggles and our neurodiversities.

It’s weird that I am going to have to keep the writing on the downlow-ish. I need to not mention to people that I do it. But if people google me, Hi!. I should change the splash page with trigger warnings.

This is the beginning of our fourth year in this house. Lockdowns have dramatically altered the flow of time. *They say that it takes 7 years to feel like you really belong in a new community. I think that will take more than that to really feel settled I can see glimmers of that forming. When you plant a vine there is an adage that you should expect the vine to sleep the first year and put all of its energy into putting down roots instead of growing up In the second year it will creep a little and you will wonder if you did something wrong or maybe you killed it. Then in the third year it will leap and grow massively.

I am looking at those three time considerations and trying to build a theory for myself of what I am aiming for. Oh, and child development. Ha. I think I started creeping before I was really fully ready. I had more sleeping to do but the children’s needs and the challenges of joining a community meant I didn’t really allow myself to just sleep in my space. I hit the ground running.

I need a schedule. I need to keep it. I need to measure my time and weigh out the importance of the various factors and I need to change what I have been doing in some very big ways. Or I am going to fail on the very most important job at all. The one I have 14 more years on. All the other everything will probably still be around in one form or another. In reality I have about 10 more years before being a mother is not my primary all day role. What do I want to do with it?

I see what is going on with the kids. It’s time to build a new scaffold and then I have to fucking stay in it. They cannot build their scaffold if I am not in place. They aren’t ready for doing it from the ground up. This is the deal.

Time is up for the day. Now, breakfast.

*whoever “they” are

We’re All Mad Here

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I was reading an article that included the phrase “Mad Pride” about how mental illness has been perceived by society (mostly the US/Canada/UK) over time. It made me stop and think hard about how much my life has changed. I am in the closet now in a way I was not in California. There were times in my younger years where I would keep some things under wraps (I was militant about limiting sex life conversations with some groups of people) but mostly I didn’t hide any aspect of myself to such a degree that anyone and everyone couldn’t find out if they tried even a tiny bit. 

There is a big difference between “I don’t share personal stories about my sex/romantic life with students or homeschooling parents but I write about it explicitly on my public blog” and “I took my writing private so that someone would need at least a basic understanding of the internet archive in order to find out anything about me, I stopped writing about myself publicly on any topic that might be controversial and I no longer bring up or mention most things about my past and I am actively evasive with every person who does not have connections to my former life.”

It’s different. I am feeling more comfortable in the community. I feel like I probably do not have to remain quite this guarded permanently but I feel intense gratitude towards myself that I allowed myself this runway of time to have a place in the community where I am already seen as stable and competent and fairly well educated, especially in topics that are not well understood already here. I am starting to have that boost to the ego experience of having people say, “Oh Krissy I wanted to ask you about something. I don’t understand why ____?” When that something is often related to an aspect of interpersonal communication. I’m also getting more requests than I can take when it comes to organising level responsibility for different community groups or associations. And folks are asking me how I have taught my kids (thing). That’s definitely one of my sweet spots for feeling like I am not an imposter who should shut the fuck up.

It’s not that I think everyone should do what I do… that would go poorly. What I really appreciate is when people are interested in the process of how I figured out what was right for me because understanding that process is the bit that can help other people. They will have a different right answer in the end, but maybe seeing how I made decisions that align with my values will help them crystallise what their own values are so they can feel confident in their own choice. I like talking about parenting philosophy, not parenting choices. Because we are going to make different choices and that’s absolutely great. It’s mandatory. It’s as it should be for there to be the delightful variety of folks that this world needs. But the philosophy behind parenting is a place where you can discuss motivation and intentions and you can learn from each other without getting into a pissing match about technique. 

Technique is hard because it’s a minefield of traps for not understanding your own privilege when you frame what you do. Noah says that society has as much justice as it can afford. It’s complicated because often a family has as much justice as they can afford. And from family to family that is such a complicated and loaded concept that oh goodness just no. Can’t.

Anyway. The article. It goes through who is allowed to be mentally ill in public now. Who benefits from hashtag campaigns and public awareness movements around mental illness? It’s a short article but provocative in a way I agree with. I am so deeply aware of the privilege I enjoy at this point in my life. 

But this privilege comes with costs too. Costs I could not have imagined when I was on the far side of that particular privilege slider. 

I’ve been watching a lot more sci-fi/fantasy shows and movies recently. I am particularly drawn to things that are depicting ways that people live with an understanding of there being completely opposing truths/narrative/existanses existing all at the same time. 

So, I like to talk about money. If you have been here for a while you have seen the arc of that from poverty to (I think) fairly substantial wealth. When you are new to a community you only really exist from the moment they meet you. Your past is invisible and unknowable. Ok fine with google they could look me up but they don’t. I write all over the fucking internet. I have one handle I use on every site and I am so trackable it is definitely what a security expert would frown upon and give me a lecture for. I am consistent in part because that is my absolute only talisman against being called a fraud. My story is too whack-job. But I gots receipts, bitch.

I have suppressed so much of that over the past few years. I have been so very silent. It is taking a toll. 

The pendulum is going back and forth on so many different dynamics in my life. In one way I feel like my kids just got out of a big disequilibrium period (or at least some combination of them) and I am slamming my way into one with full force and fury. There are a whole bunch of things that are not working and I need them to change. 

I say over and over that disequilibrium is a necessary feeling for everyone because without it you probably won’t grow. You will get complacent and comfortable and you won’t want to face the terror and uncertainty and pain that comes with change. I have to get angry to have the force to demand change. I have to feel like I will wreck big things if the change doesn’t happen.

I am doing a med change. Amitriptyline and Lisdexamfetamine are not working for me anymore. There are enough negative symptoms with using them that I just cannot. Sex just hasn’t been happening. I’m not happy. I’ve been intermittently explosively raging for quite a while and it’s just not ok. I don’t like me. I need Patience, and I don’t mean the drink made with a whole lot of bourbon.

It feels silly to say this but I want to drink less. (It’s silly to say because Noah and I both have recently put in MASSIVE orders of alcohol.) I got variety. I got stuff that I want to invite other people over and say “I have x and y for you to taste test.” I want a social gambit, I don’t plan to consume much of it myself. I is making friends. 

I have a teeny tiny bit of regret about buying this house because it is huge and has been really rough to repair but I can’t tell you all about it because a Shorty has just informed me that there are gingerbread pieces waiting to be made into a house and I am all out of time.

There is always a cost

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I am so worn out and I am trying to both rest and catch up and it strikes me that they are diametrically opposed. My growing zone has an annual last frost date somewhere between the last 4 days of April and the first 5 days of May. There was snow on the ground last week. Because of the world-wide problems with insect die off it is widely considered wise to wait until the average temperature is 10C or above. This is slightly hilarious to me because only July and August have night time averages above 10C… the average is 11C. Does that mean we shouldn’t ever disturb gardens here? It’s a thought to ponder. (Waiting until the temperature rises is because bugs hibernate when it is cold and if you go out and tidy up your garden you may well kill off a generation of wee beasties unintentionally.)

Tasks I need to perform:

  • install bike pulleys
  • install trailer pulleys
  • build a better compost unit (my pallets are all rotting and sagging)
  • sift my compost pile and distribute the lovely material around my garden
  • get some fertilizer on my hydrangeas and all the food plants
  • finish taking apart the old shed for boards
  • build the potting benches for my poly tunnel and the raised beds I want to have in there
  • weed, always weeding around the fence borders because the ground elder is fierce
  • get more wood chips and cover more grass with it because by golly in about 4 years I will have subdued it enough to make a serious start on alternative ground covering plants
  • get more seeds because I only had like 5 packets of veg seeds left, and they were mostly gone in any case, and I need to get cracking on starting this year’s plants
  • figure out storage for the mountain of costumes I brought home from Texas
  • respond to cafe owner about holding meet ups for the youth group
  • schedule a walking munch and the 101 workshops
  • clean my dang bathroom
  • tidy up my room because right now it is a royal mess
  • restart the subscription orders from the grocery service
  • do a bit more pushing with the mum bike group to get some activities scheduled
  • figure out when the group camping trip is happening and get myself organized for that
  • install the trailer hitch on the new bike so that I can have towing capacity when I have extra passengers
  • get YC more time out on the balance bike because she has nearly outgrown it and I don’t really want to buy a bigger one I want her to progress to pedals, dangit
  • schedule with a freakin roofer
  • schedule with a plumber for the apartment bathroom (the sink is leaking)
  • schedule getting the retaining walls repaired around the property because it is past time
  • I really should be reading books because, dude
  • don’t forget the damn skin care routine
  • oh yeah I should eventually have sex with my husband
  • all of my kids could do with some one on one time because they are all feeling super needy and emotional
  • I really need to organize group bicycle skill training for my family because my instructions are not adequate to help all of them know what they need to know
  • I need to organize specific training in bike maintenance because this is causing a lot of fighting and fussing and it is driving me insane
  • I should submit data to the national database about when my fucking fruit trees are in flower because tracking this stuff is important
  • the XR people would really appreciate it if I took on more duties, as would the allotment people
  • oh yeah, I also need to schedule some physics experiments because my kids really don’t understand some basic elements that would make cycling go better
  • I need to sit on my kids more industriously about working on their school work because that is literally one of my main jobs
  • I haven’t touched up the sloppy paint areas in my room I was going to come back to
  • I want to move the white board from the kitchen into my bedroom so I can use it to track forking lists like this
  • I also want to change a bunch of how I store things in the kitchen/dining room/laundry room because the current set up is inefficient, sloppy, and difficult to keep tidy
  • I should also be more industrious about exercising and eating vegetables and going to fucking sleep at a reasonable time

Yeah. Fuck me. I still have almost constant headaches and neck aches from the concussion. The sensitivity to light is really bothering me but I have to push through it anyway. I am still feeling stupid and like I am not retaining new information. I feel unmotivated and weary and frustrated at basically every moment of every day.

Visiting Noah’s family was intense. I feel like I understand the dynamics a bit better. I have much stronger opinions about what I would guess for various folks’ diagnostic labels but I try not to say those out loud too much because I am not an expert and I am not seeing any of these people in any kind of professional capacity so it’s a dick thing for me to call out. However, it helps me decide how I should respond in terms of my own behavior and as long as it is my opinion and judgment and it exists in my head and I’m not trying to influence other people I think it is ok. It’s funny to me how much I can now go, “Oh yeah. I’m trying to place a rules system around this topic because that helps me understand it.” I don’t want to make other people agree with me or change… heck I don’t plan to see any of those people again for 3-5 years. I will barely communicate with them through rare letters.

I believe it is important for me to think about things in this way because I have to think in a long term way if I am going to manage the historical trauma my children have inherited. I happen to be a big believer in the epigenetic nature of trauma. The things that happened to their parents impact them. The things that happened to their grandparents impact them. The things that happened to their great grandparents impact them. That said, neuroplasticity and resilience count for so very much. And let’s not discount the benefit of various levels of privilege.

I don’t need to try hard to control other people. I need to know what I need to think about when it comes to my own behavior and what I am modeling for my children. That’s what I am doing here.

I mean, I can worry about the gardening and the social life and the academics and the house maintenance… but what I am actually fucking doing here is figuring out how to raise people who can come from a fairly intense amount of ancestral trauma and thrive. Their mental health, their resilience, their ability to grow and change and find a better path is what I am fucking doing with my life.

I lose sight of that. I get mired in the weeds (literal and figurative) because it is easier to put my head down and just do whatever is in front of me. When I do that I invite inconsistency and acting out unconscious patterns. I invite the repetition of behaviors that have already damaged their bodies through their inherited genetics and what the fuck am I doing; I know better. I don’t need to shove them through survival. I don’t need to create lists of tasks so long that no lifetime can contain them all and then convince my children that they are inadequate if they aren’t working their bodies into dust.

Life is not about grinding yourself in a mortar and pestle. It’s just not. There are costs to those behaviors and attitudes: impatience, lack of understanding, lack of dignity, unkindness, addictive behaviors, unhealthy bodies and minds.

Noah’s grandmother survived, but the costs her children paid were so severe that they cannot bear her presence. There is duty there, some of them still serve that duty, but there is no love. Her grandchildren can barely tolerate her. Her great grandchildren are split on despising her or on not knowing her. She accomplished fairly impressive things. What was the cost? She lies on a bed alone in a room day after day. Most of the people who have ever known her have no interest in her company. Was what she accomplished worth the cost?

Noah’s mother mostly has good relationships with her children. Noah fleeing the nest as early as he did and with such intensity seems to have made a lasting impression. She worked on her behavior. She came to therapy late in life but she did get there. That’s something. Is she perfect or healed or a person I would want to spend much time with? Oh goodness no. But the difference between how she acts now and how she acted when I met her over 15 years ago is dramatic. Not different enough for me to leave my children alone with her, even though she did ask politely.

I have stopped looking at the long run. I no longer weigh and measure how I behave based on the relationships I want to have with my 30 and 40 year old children. I am sloppy. I am messy. I am inconsistent. I am pursuing short term goals at long term cost. That is stupid. I am not modeling what I think should be modeled. I am not showing how to make better choices with a joyful heart. I am dragging myself through a series of tasks and I am short tempered and impatient. I don’t think I am being vicious but that should not be the bar. Frankly I am not happy with how I have behaved for a while. I’m distracted. I’m snippy. I am not performing the behaviors I believe are necessary because I am wearing myself to the bone on things that matter so much less.

This is not what I want my children to remember. Do I think they need to have some challenges and some difficulties in life in order to build resiliency? Of course. That doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to be outward focused. I want to be focused in on the people I made commitments to.

Krissy, you know who you are supposed to be. Go fucking act like it. Or you will pay the cost.

What is a witch?

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Recently a little girl told me that all witches are ugly and old and have green skin. Hm. I’ve been thinking a lot about what being pagan means to me lately. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to manifest in this life. I believe that magic is focusing your intention and your will on making something real. I don’t think it has to be about repeating prescribed words or chants that someone else made up. I honestly don’t see much point in following someone else’s path, even as I read books that other people write about their paths.

I think the painting is part of it for me. I often think of it in terms of creating the background setting as if I was creating a theatre set. All the world’s a stage and all the people are but players. (I don’t believe in a binary of genders so the original quote doesn’t seem so fitting.) I am shaping how people see me. I am shaping who people perceive me to be. It matters to me. I put as much effort into this as someone else would put into a spell. I want to draw the right people to me.

Sobonfu told me to make my own community as I will never belong in one that other people have made. I need a place to invite that community. I need a space where people will feel the force of my will and feel influenced without me even having to say anything. If I have to say something then I have missed a window. I have missed an opportunity.

I don’t know how many opportunities I have left in this life. Everytime you miss a window you change the course of your future. You change what opportunities will fall into your lap in the future. There are limits to what any person can accomplish. I know that I will hit limits. I just don’t want to miss opportunities that might be well within my limits.

It feels like it matters so much.

It’s the waning crescent moon. The end of the cycle. Time to let things go, but what? It’s almost time to think about new beginnings again. Oh golly. I don’t know what to let go of nor what to start. So much happening. So many balls in the air. How can I narrow my focus to be more effective? Right now I am spread in so many different directions that I hardly know what to change nor how I will manage.

I know that tomorrow will involve maths, breakfast and a visit with friends, then painting. Friday is a park date with homeschoolers then more painting. My arm is only a little sore. My hand isn’t even numb. Surely that means I am ready for more work. I really want this part of the hallway done.

I really want all of the high stuff done so I can go back to working at reasonable heights with a step ladder. There is no way to get to the other side but to go through. I can do it. I will do it. It will feel good to be done on so many levels. All it takes to get through is doing many more hours of work.

Now that’s magic I can embrace.

Chasing happiness

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Recently some dude I don’t really know was talking in a chatroom about how it wasn’t fair that he doesn’t get to be happy. He didn’t get to (insert hobbies/relationship structures) and that means he is doomed to be unhappy. Instead he has traveled to so many countries I can’t name them all and he’s done (long list of interesting things) but none of that counts.

Man. I feel you. I have attained most of the goals I set for myself. At this point… I don’t seek happiness. Happiness is elusive. Happiness is a myth. Happiness is an illusion. I seek connection. (Fuck you pandemic.) I seek the ability to control my brain enough that I don’t wreck relationships with being an asshole. Happiness is a bar too high to even grasp with my fingertips, let alone pull myself up and over.

Last night I dreamed about seeing an acupuncturist. I was desperate to deal with some of the pain in my body and I’m well aware that acupuncture is helpful. I went in to a clinic. It was hard to find to start with and when I got in and got in front of the clinician she told me I could have exactly one needle because she wanted to go on her lunch break and she didn’t have time to fuss with a lot of needles/help. I picked a thing in my neck/shoulder because it is causing intense headaches and limiting my movement for painting. She left it in for 10 minutes (which isn’t a long time in that sort of treatment) and then told me to hurry out. At the payment desk with the receptionist we had trouble figuring out what currency I should pay in. They kept switching back and forth between various currencies I have used and yelling at me for not having a full wallet of all of them. Why didn’t I have baht handy. Where are my pesos? What kind of stupid bitch doesn’t have her yen with her? Where the fuck were my ringgits? I left crying. Even my dreams are painful.

I’ve been looking at photographs of an autumn afternoon in Scotland. This is going to be tricky as fuck. I need to layer blue and yellow and orange and gold. If I try to do that while the colors are wet I’ll end up with green. This is going to take days of adding layer upon layer upon layer until I figure out the correct proportions. It’s not like the clouds in the dining room where I could just slap on blues and whites and greys until I liked it. And the ladder I am going to need to use to paint a lot of the high stuff in the hall is already scaring the shit out of me and I haven’t even gotten it out of the shed yet. Oh boy. This’ll be risking life and limb.

Why do I need to do this? Why is this important? Is it going to make me happy?

Does anything make me happy?

I learned how to paint from doing sets. From creating backdrops that taught you about the characters without them ever having to say a word. I miss therapy. I miss being able to explore who I am and figure out why I am feeling a way and what meaning it has in my story. Now I don’t talk about myself that much. But I can paint.

I am starting a new stage in my life where I am going to be presenting myself to a whole new bunch of people. Sobonfu told me I had to make my own community. I am trying to create the backdrop against which this is going to happen. The people who are drawn to me and want to be part of the story going forward will be influenced unconsciously by the setting I create. Life is like that. People are like that. We influence each other. We change each other. We connect with each other and become something different now that we are more than our separate pieces we are a new whole together.

It is a kind of magic.

Will it bring happiness? Fleeting moments, of course. Will it bring pain? Talk to my neck that cannot stop grinding as I move it. I need to see a chiropractor. Ugh. We only get to live one life. We only get one run at this gauntlet of opportunities. If I do not share what is in my soul because it is too hard, because there is not enough moment by moment reward then I have lost The Game. My children talk a lot about how they want to keep this house forever and go to and fro with this house as the place they are centered. They are children and all children have fuzzy grasps of the future. But some people do that. Some people have a home base and it is important forever. They could be people like that.

I asked my oldest if she wanted to help me paint the hallway. She said she didn’t want to. She wants to see what I create because she likes the way I paint better than how she paints. Sometimes I wonder if she limits her artistic mediums away from the ones I use because she is afraid of comparing herself to me. I’m not actually that great, my love. You will be better than me across the board by the time you are an adult and even your youthful scratchings seem pretty rad to me. She is sticking to graphite and digital arts for now. That’s fine. Your journey is your own.

She is horrified that I don’t mind her reading smut. Oh my darling. If only you understood how very very very softcore your smut is you would understand why I just grin. I am glad you don’t understand. I am glad you haven’t already been reading hardcore for years. I’m glad you understand that your sexual blossoming is still entirely future tense and you still thrill at the idea that someday you will get a real kiss.

That right there is the satisfaction of a lifetime goal. What is happiness next to the surge of power and righteousness I feel when I think I have kept them safe. That’s not a given in this life. And there is no true shame when other parents don’t attain the same goal. Life is so very hard and unfair and terrible. But I broke the cycle in my family for my children. If I had failed it wouldn’t be fully my fault because it would be the fault of the perpetrator. I have sat like a fire breathing dragon over the cache of gold that is my children. I have kept them safe.

This feeling is better than happiness.

My hands hurt and my neck hurts and my back hurts and I feel sad and I feel lonely and I feel frustrated and irritable and like I want to be nasty to everyone and everything. I really need to start bleeding already. This phase of the cycle is brutal.

What I will do is try as hard as I can to speak gently to the children and I will paint as much as I can this morning. I have a three hour window. If I waste it then I only have myself to blame.

It may not lead to happiness in this moment. That’s ok. Happiness on a moment by moment basis isn’t really the goal. I am building for future me. I am creating because I believe there will be an After Pandemic Time when things are different and I will get to build the community I want so badly to have. I will bring people here, to my lair. I will throw open the doors of my soul and hope that all of the breaking open leads to more love in the world. I will try as hard as I can to tell other people that they should do the things that they feel moved to do. They should embrace the identities that are already true for them. They should yearn and aspire and go do the things that they dream about.

We only get one shot running through this gauntlet.

Go.

That is the deal.

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My oldest child is off having adventures on her own. Separation is great! She loves getting to come home and tell us all about her day. Of course she’s an intense person and she isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and she’s having to deal with social friction. This is important for a lot of reasons and I have no desire to take this experience away from her. She needs to learn who she is.

The trouble is, when someone starts some shit she retaliates just a little enough to keep a slap fight going. She doesn’t want to be perceived as a coward so she feels she must respond but she also doesn’t want to be a bully so she doesn’t want to escalate. We’ve been talking constantly for weeks about how that just encourages the situation to keep going at a simmer and she’s obsessed with talking and thinking about her negative experiences all day long. She feels like when she is at school she never stops looking over her shoulder. She’s developing a lot of anxiety and her stomach hurts most of the time. It’s making it hard to eat.

She keeps telling me that she wants to be a badass like me so she has to respond, she can’t just run away from the issues or people. One of her new buddies at school is the tallest boy in her grade and his response to bullying is to run away 100% of the time. She is very conflicted about watching his response.

I told her that as long as she sits on the fence she is going to encourage the problem to keep happening. Either get in a serious fight and really hurt someone… or decide you are committed to non-violence and start running. I will support you in whatever you decide. Sitting on the fence is going to go really poorly in the long run because it will egg the situation on and it will never improve.

She told me that she feels like she is letting me down if she runs because she wants to be brave like me.

Oh baby.

I fought when I was your age because I had a dad who raped me and a mom who mostly didn’t want to talk to me and I had been in foster situations for most of my life and I had gone to 19 schools and moved like 40 times. I fought because I was a highly traumatized feral animal who was trying to not die.

It didn’t make me a badass. It made me a traumatized feral animal.

She said that sometimes it is hard that she is so exceptional that sometimes I act disappointed when she is only average. I agreed that it sounded very hard. I can’t identify with that struggle. People expected me to be shitty and worthless and were shocked when I demonstrated anything else. I cannot understand what it feels like to let down your parents by not being perfect.

I told her that I don’t ever get to be the judge of whether her life has been highly traumatizing because my perspective is so fucked up and extreme that I am not in any way qualified to decide if her life experiences have been abusive. If she needs to react to the trauma she has experienced with violence… I am going to try hard to not judge. I’ve tried hard to give her stability and love and support so she doesn’t need to but there is the real chance I have failed.

I told her she is heading for a crisis of faith because sometime very soon she is going to figure out that her parents are fucked up assholes and she is better than us and she should not be aspiring to be like us. She has every chance of being so much better than us that we can’t even imagine what it is like to be her.

Aspiring to be like me at her age…. is not #goals. It’s not an improvement over who she is right now. I was worse, and meaner, and less loving, and less caring, and less educated, and less equipped in basically every way.

I told her that I try very hard to be like her. Because I can see which direction is an improvement in this house and it’s not being more like me.

I asked her if she feels I am more brave and badass on days when I lose my temper and scream and I behave like a bully towards helpless little people? Or am I more brave and badass on days when I can redirect and help my kids move towards their own aspirations of who they want to be?

I asked her what things make me a badass at this point in my life? I gave up fistfights more than 25 years ago. She said what makes me a badass is being brave and going on adventures and making things that other people say “I can’t do that”.

I asked her what part of me being a badass is making other people hurt and feel small?

She said none of it.

I asked her if she really wants to be aspiring to be the wounded traumatized part of me that had nothing better to offer the world or if she wants to be working towards the me that had a lot of therapy and a lot of privilege and a lot of time to pick and choose who I want to be and how I want to live in the world.

We cried together and she said that I really see the worst of me and I’m a lot less of an asshole than I think.

I said maybe. I said if I am less of an asshole than I think and I have treated her better than I fear I have then maybe she doesn’t need to lash out at people who are sitting in their own trauma; people who have nothing better to offer the world.

I asked her how she wants to remember this time of her life when she looks in the rear view mirror? Do you want to take pride in hurting people who don’t have a better way of living in the world or do you want to be someone who shows other people a better way?

I will support you and love you as you stumble through either path. I love you. I accept that you are not perfect and you have to make your own mistakes.

On the day that you were born I forgave you for everything you would ever do wrong. Because that is the deal.

Coming full circle

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I will never forget when I said to a therapist that I felt like I didn’t have high self esteem and she burst out laughing and said I had the highest self esteem of any client she has ever seen.

Oh.

I come at it sideways. I doubt myself. I question my decisions and my beliefs. I do not believe I am always right. I do not believe I always come to the correct decisions on the first try. I think I need to keep trying and keep growing and keep changing because being correct is never a fixed position.

But you know what? I really fucking like me. I really like who I am. I think I reach a lot of correct decisions. I think I am an ethical person. I think I have worked really hard at becoming a person I could respect.

Two things can be true. I can be open to the idea that I am wrong and I need to change/grow while also believing that I am really fucking cool. I can believe that I make a lot of correct decisions while also knowing that I still fuck up.

As my beloved Jenny said in the birthday book (paraphrased) I look at myself and see how far I have to go and she looks at me and sees how far I have come. Those can both be true.

I feel like I have had several days lately where I have felt extreme doubt about my moral compass and about my coping skills. I moved to a new country and the rules are different. But I did what I do and I went and talked to a lot of different people about the mixed feelings I am having and what I heard consistently over and over and over from a variety of different sources was: don’t change everything about you because you are really great. Figure out what you want to add on to who you already are.

That is so much more attainable than “You are wrong and you have to change everything.” I don’t hold back. I will tell you how I really feel. Even if that isn’t the British way. I have always loved having friends who were immigrants because they challenged me to look at myself and my life through new eyes. Maybe I can be that here. I will change a little to adapt. And other people will change a little to accept me and we will meet in the middle.

Do you know what I have no doubt about in any way shape or form? I will make friends and I will build a community.

It’s what I do.

I like that about me.

All communities pick a side. No community is neutral. No space is safe for everyone. I am very clear about who I will pick. I am very clear about who I want to make safe space for.

I know who I am. And today that feels very good.

So close and yet so far.

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I was done. My share of the project was finished. I had no more painting to look forward to. Then I noticed… Middle Child is really and truly not ready to do her own room. She tried. She did a lot! She did great! She can’t edge to save her life. And she takes the dark edging color and smears the brush all over the super light colored wall when she thinks she has too much paint on it. Insert head smacking emoji.

My hands are in a bad place. Holding a paint brush sucks. I’ve got about three hours of pinchy movement in my hands in a day before I have shooting pains. I did three hours of trim today. I will do three hours of painting on Sunday. And on Monday. Hopefully I will finish on Tuesday. I am both looking forward to and not looking forward to this process.

Eldest Child says she is done and her mural looks fabulous.

Now we get to wait for carpet fitting to be done. ECs room smells strongly of nicotine–that was part of the motivation for her paint job and the carpet is gross too. I don’t like the idea of her having to breathe that crap through another winter so we are making the room less nasty. Apparently the teenage boy who used to live in the room was a heavy smoker. Ugh.

MCs room had a shower/sink wash room taken out of the corner so there is a big patch with no carpet at all and that’s not going to work in the long run.

Neither bedroom has carpeting on the redone closet and they should have. The sub flooring is not meant to see the light of day.

In 34 days we have been in this house for a year. I’d really like to be done with the big fixing jobs. I’d like to spend a lot more time puttering in the yard but by the time I’m done with inside chores I’m so wiped out. I’m still trying to deal with the sleep deprivation I put myself through for the dining room. In 27 days I missed 8 full nights of sleep. That’s too much. Ah well.

I have new glasses! They are amazing! I can see better than I have in such a long time. I like the cool grey metal.

I’m having more interactions with young people here than I am used to. In California my friends group skewed noticeably older and here I seem to be finding a lot of folks in their 20’s. I suspect it is related to people my age being busy and not having time to go meet new people. This is leading to a lot of feelings. Some of the folks are really stellar–don’t get me wrong. I’m truly thrilled about some of the folks I have met. Ironically the ones that please me the most are the in person ones.

I’m having a fair number of online interactions that I’m struggling with. I am a judgy motherfucker. When I was 19 I had this interaction with a 39 year old woman who told me I shouldn’t be in the scene and I should go off and have normal people sex for a decade or so. Now I get it. These kids scare the hell out of me. They… sigh.

They scare the hell out of me. I’m not going to get into what they are doing.

I worry a lot about them as individuals and how their behavior will contribute to their community. I worry about the girls and young enbys in the community and what they have to put up with from the macho “lad” crew. I feel like I can watch this chat room for a couple of days and go “Ah. You either already have or will have a bad reputation because you are dangerous.”

These are instincts I totally lacked 20 years ago.

I have so many mixed feelings about myself these days. I have come so far.

Recently I pissed someone off when I said that I didn’t feel like 9/11, the 2008 financial crash, or this pandemic are going to be the central life changing traumas of my life. I was told that saying that meant I was rubbing my good luck and privilege in other peoples faces. 9/11 happened across the country and I was at least two or more degrees of separation away from people who were really effected. I would feel like a poseur if I said it really changed my life.

I mean, this explosion in Beirut isn’t going to be a formative trauma for me either even though it is absolutely a horrifying trauma. It isn’t mine.

Most of my friends were either above or below the 2008 financial crash. I was in the process of quitting teaching when it happened. Teaching was a career that was insulated from the results. Is that all luck or privilege? A lot of my friends were in marginal jobs or retail or child care and they weren’t impacted. Is that luck or privilege? I lived in a house that had been purchased long before the crash so my housing was secure. That was both luck and privilege.

I feel weird about having white people who started out in the exact same place as me at the brink of adulthood tell me that my life is different from theirs now because of privilege. I think almost everything that has happened to me since I got married has been about privilege. But there was this gap period that I have funny feelings about. I lived a hair above the national poverty line for the first seven years of being an adult in one of the most expensive places in the country. I definitely had times I went on dates in order to eat. Being told that everything that happened to me in that time period was because I was so privileged is complicated. I’m not saying it is wrong.

Sometimes I’m not sure what privilege means.

I’m ready for slower days. I’m ready for shorter days. I’m ready to stop with the fucking pinchy work. I am pretty sure I can finish the painting this week. When I do I think we are entirely done painting for a long while. That’s good. This year has been so slammed and I am so utterly exhausted. I feel half dead.

I want this toddler to stop waking up three times a night and climbing in my damn bed.

Oh, toddler sayings I want to remember: “I have a pooty” for I have a poopy booty. “Clean the pipes!” is emphatically screamed when I am cleaning her up after a pipe. It’s time to go to sleep.

Compartmentalize, look for your contributions

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I am not being fair. I am conflating my feelings about a lot of different people and situations and I am bordering on cruelty. I don’t mean in the “everything is all my fault because I suck” way.

When I rant ad nauseum about chosen family letting me down that is taken in very general ways and implies things about people who are not in the group I mean to be speaking about.

I have so many conflicting feelings about the Godmamas. I did not behave entirely, totally honorably there. I liked one of them and I grudgingly, barely tolerated the other. I judged their relationship in ways that were none of my business. As a result the one I didn’t like very much quite deliberately got in between me and my friend. I asked to support M after the head injury and her wife told me she would let me know when that was ok. Then when I contacted M after a while she was very upset I had left her alone. But I did behave in less than supportive ways towards their marriage and it was fair that M’s wife didn’t like me very much. She wanted me to treat her like an authority and respect her despite her having beliefs that were very counter to mine and her being a lot younger than me with very little relevant life experience or education on the topics she wanted to tell me how to manage. I was a dick about it. I don’t think I am blameless. But other than accepting direction that really didn’t work for me or pushing past boundaries that were put up I’m not sure I could have done more.

When I’m ranting about chosen family I am talking about the various people who told me that they wanted to be my mothers or fathers. There were more than a few of them. For a while I collected Daddys. My leather mom wanted me to do things for her and show up for her events and make her feel special. On holidays or in times of crisis she had real children to take care of and I was supposed to go manage my own life. Dad explicitly told me that he wanted to be in my life but I couldn’t ever expect him to do anything to help me because he has biological children to support. When he needs money he comes knocking on my door. To the tune of tens of thousands of dollars and many requests.

I’m talking about people in the poly community who told me I was family and then when I stopped fucking them they never called me again.

I’m talking about Sarah. So. So. So. So much about Sarah. My baggage around Sarah could fill several jumbo jets. I feel like an exploited resource. I feel like my help came with strings of expecting something back from her and that is fucked up of me.

I can’t even begin to parse the ways my expectations of Pam have been inappropriate. I just can’t right now.

I showed up in Scotland with so much pain. I feel full of rage and disappointment and distrust. It’s not a good head space for dealing with Jenny. She has tried to help in the ways she perceives me asking for help while not fully understanding the intricacies of what that means. She has misspoken. She has apologized.

I have not been able to accept that apology nor have I been able to be there for her. I feel like I have been a user. I have felt judged and I have done a fair bit of being vicious in my head. I have mostly contained that viciousness in my head, but not perfectly. I can be so mean.

I am upset about a lot of people and I am taking it all out on Jenny. That is horribly unfair on a lot of levels.

I can go through our history and point out times when I felt belittled by things she said. Did she intend to belittle me? Did she intend to insult me? Did she feel negatively in her head?

Didn’t matter. I felt it. I reacted as if that was her point. I am assigning her motive and intent when I have no way of knowing what is going on with her. I know that she fairly regularly puts her foot in her mouth and says things in ways she doesn’t mean. When she does this in my direction I act like it is a vicious attack and totally intentional even though I see it as a pattern in her entire life so it clearly can’t be about me.

But I make everything about me. I act like everyone is mean to me so that I can be a victim of everything and everyone.

That’s…. really shitty and unfair.

I think I project my dislike of myself onto other people and then get angry with them and act like I should cut them off for being mean to me. I want to get chances from other people but I very much act like other people don’t deserve grace or forgiveness. I am selfish and cruel to people who have done quite a bit to show love for me.

For all that Jenny’s words sometimes… definitely lack grace and can feel very hurtful her actions aren’t vicious. When I hurt myself trying to help Sarah years ago she showed up to help me. When I needed support after the suicides in my family she showed up. When I have directly asked her for help with almost anything… she showed up. She did start out judging me when she didn’t know me and over the years she has learned about alternative lifestyles and she has been supportive of my behavior. She offered to throw me a party in celebration of me hitting a three digit body count. That’s… not exactly the action of someone who thinks I am bad for doing that.

But I judge her so harshly. I assume so many negative things about her intentions and her motivations and that sucks so bad.

I can think of years of times when I have over reacted to things she has said and I have been nasty in response to feeling hurt. In the vast majority of the times I can remember being hurt by her words she has apologized.

She’s spent a lot of fucking time apologizing to me and I don’t act like that matters very much compared to my towering feelings of rage because how dare she offend me.

I feel like such an asshole.

I am not great at setting boundaries with her. That’s a fact. I have been thinking that it is kind of like sexual boundaries with Noah. I don’t set them until I explode with rage and act out in ways that hurt him very badly. I mean, I tried to set them but I wasn’t very clear and I wasn’t direct and I hurt him.

Given how much time I spent talking about wanting and needing a break from my kids it doesn’t seem like a cruel and vicious attack that Jenny pushes me to send them to school. I absolutely act like I need to martyr myself to my children and she pushes back on that idea with force. I act like I need to martyr myself to bullshit repetitive tasks that get on my nerves and she pushes me to consider that I don’t have to do that. And I get really angry with her.

Because being a martyr to my children and boring tasks is part of my core identity? Then I get mad at people who don’t affirm that view. That fucking sucks.

That was where I got to on day one of trying to process this. Now it is the start of day two. I spent yesterday arguing with people I used to respect about UBI and how to survive the pandemic and I got told how stupid and ignorant I am. I’m waking up in a bad fucking mood.

How can I be both a martyr to my children and a big fat meanie pants who expects so much work out of them that other people gasp and tell me that it borders on cruelty? (Uhhhh I have cleared my chores expectations with experts because I am a fucking coward.) Other people think it isn’t worth their time or effort to teach kids how to do things because it is easier to just do it themselves and therefore they think that how I raise my kids sounds super high effort and not worth it.

But my Middle Child (9 years old) made dinner last night. She made a green salad, fried potatoes with leeks, and venison with spring onions. Then she thought it would be good with a wine sauce so Noah talked her through how to do that.

I think the effort I put into teaching my children skills is paying off very much!

Sure, an adult stood nearby the whole time to say things like “this is when you should seasoning, what herbs and spices do you think would go well with this?” and “you need to scrape the bottom of the pan pretty hard or you will end up with a burned layer that will taste bad” and “let’s talk about how to make a sauce…”. But she did the work. We are still around for supervision and advice. My nearly 12 year old Eldest Child does not need such advice or supervision anymore. Sometimes I feel nervous and I stay in the room anyway and keep my mouth shut… but that kid is more competent at cooking than I was at 21. I didn’t have anyone around to teach me.

My kids know with surprising sensitivity the difference between a well swept floor and a crappily swept floor. They know what a good mop job looks like and they can critique the hell out of someone who does a bad job (i.e. their sibling).

They can go through whole maths curriculum books and ask the occasional question and otherwise do the work correctly 90% of the time.

They can go to foreign countries and plop down and talk to people and have interesting conversations. They are getting better and better at asking questions instead of treating themselves as a traveling monologue show. They are curious about people and they are learning how that goes.

They are currently doing a grid layout of the yard for science and looking up what plants we have so that they know what to weed in the future. They are digging a pond (sometimes with whining) because they want our yard to have one. (This was their project suggestion!)

Their unit project is coming along nicely. We are working on it fewer hours a week at this point because with the pandemic anxiety, frankly we are all super exhausted and we needed to trim our academic hours a lot and that’s ok. They have made sample meal plans–checked what that means against the jobs they gave their families, checked it against the dietary needs of the families (they really like giving the people in their families disabilities and food allergies?) and had to start over from scratch with an entirely new understanding of how calories and carbohydrates play in people’s lives. They understand what insurance is and how to use it. They have learned a lot about mortgages. They are having to talk through interpersonal dynamics around family layout in order to explain/justify how things would work in their house.

In short, they are learning what it means to be a grown up and they are doing it at fairly high speed. I am really impressed with how much they have learned in a short period of time. This project covers maths and nutrition and handwriting and typing and internet research as a skill. Hell, one kid is having to learn the layout of a town in the middle of Australia because that’s where she wanted to put her family and that means she’s learning about central Australia’s supply chain and what it means for people who live there and where the kids in the family are likely to go to college.

I feel pretty deeply offended by the idea that my way of raising someone will retard them. Do you know what is coolest about all this learning? Less and less of it is hands-on for me. I sit nearby and I answer questions and I give suggestions about where they can go to find their own answers. I critique work and explain why it isn’t the solution to the problem they were trying to solve and I tell them to start over from scratch over and over and over again.

But sure, let’s go with the idea that she just meant that my kids lack the social skills to deal with the school environment because they have been blessed with not having to deal with bullies.

I am sure that there are adults in this world who have to deal with school-yard level bullies. I have had many jobs. Noah has had many jobs. Most of the people we know work. I have not had the experience as an adult that primary-school-type-bullying is a thing that extends beyond that age group. Are there some stilted people in the world who try it? Sure, of course. But you can route around them once you leave school. That’s the important part. In all of life there is one period of time where you are locked in a room with bullies and told to not inconvenience adults with complaining about it. Why is that socialization desireable or something to tell me my children must acquire? Why is that something to bring up in nearly every conversation to say that my kids must learn it? Why? Because it is what you experienced? Because it is what you choose for your child?

I’m not teaching my kids to follow your religion why would I pick teaching my children that an artificial education environment is mandatory?

I mean… I actually support public school quite a bit. And if I had to work I would help my kids work through how to survive in that environment. It’s not that I don’t understand that sometimes it is unavoidable. I don’t think everyone has the correct personality or education to home school! I think schools must exist! I think my kids are privileged (insert vaguely negatively-judgemental word because despite making my kids rich I still have negative feelings about the rich) who get to avoid a major trauma that is inflicted on the vast majority of “normal” people.

There is no fair.

My Middle Child is quick to tell me how unfair it is that she has to do chores because when she went to school almost no one in her class had any chores at all and they mostly got more allowance than her and had almost no limitations on screen time when they got home!

I don’t give a flying fuck.

Everyone gets to parent how they can afford and how they see fit.

I can afford a lot of time and energy spent on my kids. Do I spend a lot of money on them compared to average? Well they have a lot of learning materials. They have gotten to travel a lot. They eat very well per my definition of eating well. Do they have a lot of toys? Not really. More toys = more shit for me to clean up and feel angry about. Do they have fancy clothes? hahahahahahahaha they are still wearing third-hand hand-me-downs from the kid down the street in Fremont along with a few cheap replacement items from when we traveled. Do they have expensive electronics? Well, we did upgrade to a nice desktop unit that is shared by the whole family when the hand-me-down 12 year old laptop stopped being able to upgrade to modern operating systems and could no longer run necessary programs. The other kid is still on one of Noah’s old work laptops from several jobs ago. They do technically have phones, one has an old phone of mine where the battery dies in less than 24 hours and the other kid has a phone that was new about five years ago. Neither kid has turned on one of these phones since we stopped traveling because we have our paper books now and they don’t need them. These phones were always about being reading devices…

So they are definitely part of the modern world but they are not tremendously spoilt in the “having stuff” department. They got mocked at school for how out of date their stuff is. I don’t give a shit. I’m from Silicon Valley. I’m not impressed with trying to keep up with the technical standards of anyone because I deeply understand how messed up that process is.

I don’t think 7 year olds should walk around with phones. I think the city we walk around in is about as safe of an environment as can exist and children need to be able to be away from the control of their parents. My kids go on walks and runs without me. They know when to be home and they bloody well make it back in time.

If the school stuff was being pushed because there was the perception that I need a break… well… there are lots of more creative ways to manage that.

Slowing down to the pace of this place and no longer having a bunch of friends I feel like I “should” be seeing has done a lot to lower my ambient anxiety. That is a break by itself. In exchange for the cats (which apparently belong to the kids and not to me) each older kid does 5 hours of babysitting a week so that I now have a reasonable amount of time kid-free. I did join hook-you-up-with-a-babysitter-sites when I moved here. Guess what I got? The privilege of paying for a matching service and a chance to send emails to lots of people who didn’t respond. Basically my entire experience of searching for childcare was duplicated directly from California. Fucking cheers.

But between the big kids helping with the toddler and Noah not having a full time job… I’m exercising independently more. I have more time to vegetate. I’m getting a lot of stuff done that makes me happy. The big kids are pretty close to where I always wanted them to be on independence for school work. When the big kids faff about and refuse to get their chores done when I ask they get to do fuck tons of extra chores until I’m not annoyed anymore and I get way more down time.

I am taking more of a break. And it didn’t require school. So pushing school as the answer to my problems does not feel like a very honest explanation.

So saying now that you never meant medically retarded you meant school dynamics would be hard and you were just trying to help me get a break… feels like gaslighting.

Breakfast is ready and the day must begin. I will come back to this. I need to figure out what the fuck I am doing with this topic in my brain. I need to fully process this so I can decide how I am moving forward. I need to separate how upset I am about this topic from how upset I am about everything else in the world and I’m totally failing by keeping it in my head.

The thing about sand castles… you can’t live in them.

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This is the chapter I couldn’t write in November for Part 2 for the kids.

Occasionally people will ask me why I am so focused on friendships. Why do I pursue them with such vigor and to the point of my detriment. Because I am both trying to replace and replicate family relationships. Because without my friendships, for many years, I felt like I had nothing. As much as my romantic partnerships have tried to form “family” feelings with me… I’ve always been deeply aware that they could end at any time. I am tremendously aware that I am lacking in many ways and even with Noah I am always kind of holding my breath waiting for someone to leave me. But my friendships lasted through so many romantic relationships. They had more staying power. What was the price?

I spent many years talking about the tripod of women who supported me and made me feel like I could keep going through anything. In order to do that I had to be in an awful lot of denial. I had to do a lot of pretending problems weren’t happening.

All of those relationships are in a state of collapse. It is hard for me to wrestle with how much of it is “my fault”, how much of it was ever in my control, and how much it was inevitable if I ever developed a higher level of self love.

Sarah I’ve been writing about for quite some time. Sarah used the shit out of me and made big promises and didn’t live up to them. When I got angry she would tell me that I have a personality disorder. She had almost ten years of using me to partially fund her vacations. She literally took money from me (intended as food money for the household) and used it to go visit her sister. She said she would be there to do the hard work of raising children. She lied up one side and down the other. Instead she took from me until she wrung me dry and then I was the problem because why did I have these outrageous expectations of her–it wasn’t her job to support me. No. It wasn’t your job. But you told me you would do it because I did so much to support you.

Pam has always been in my life in flighty hit-or-miss ways. I spent over a decade dropping anything I was doing (at work, at school, with friends, with people I was dating…) when she wanted attention because “she only had a few minutes to spare in between her exciting life.” I always felt honored she wanted to know me. I was the only person in her life who was supportive of some aspects of her behavior and she wanted access to that support 100% on her own timeline. The couple of years when she consistently came over to our house in Fremont? That happened because she was otherwise an around the clock care giver for her elderly grandmother and she wanted a break and no one else had that kind of time available to spend with her. I loved seeing her! Don’t get me wrong! I appreciated all of the time she chose to share with me. But I can no longer pretend it was ever about my needs–I was there for her when she wanted me to be. We were supposed to go see her in December. We didn’t go because the flights were going to be over $5,000 and right now I just don’t have that going spare. After the fact she said, “It was a good thing you didn’t come to Taiwan because it turns out I wouldn’t have been able to spend any time with you.” I feel utterly gutted. I am glad she sees that she wouldn’t have spent time with me, at least she is that self aware. I am glad that I now know that I will never ever prioritize going to see her like that because if I try to ask for time on my own schedule I can go fuck myself.

And I have not been writing about Jenny. That’s been very much on purpose. If I look back in time… I have chased Jenny from the beginning. When we met I basically begged her to be my friend. I always called her. I asked to come over. I offered her a chance to go swimming in my pool. (It wasn’t my pool, but I lived in a house that had a pool and she was a competitive swimmer.) She thought I was super rude because I thought she was judgmental but she described me as being a stupid slut and she thought that was totally ok. Through high school I chased her. Through college I chased her. After college I chased her into hobbies and blogging and social groups.

I have been chasing Jenny and begging her to be my friend for most of my life. She was the person I went to when my dad and my brother both killed themselves. I thought that meant she was there for me. I never wanted to look at what that meant I had to put up with.

I wrote about her when I first arrived here in Scotland. I said she was a ride or die friend who was doing so much for me. All of the stuff she so thoughtfully provided to ease our transition? Was stuff she didn’t want anymore but she didn’t want to deal with doing the work to donate it without owning a car. Most of it was broken or has broken since. She was here when one of the glasses finished shattering. She said, “It’s ok I won’t be mad at you.”

She said that my children are retarded. She said that anyone who is home schooled is going to end up retarded–she doesn’t mean that in “the mean way” she means it in “the medical way”. So she constantly tells me that I have to make my kids go to school so that I can stop fucking them up.

She has almost zero Scottish friends. Her friends here are all American Ex-pats but she constantly tells me all of the things I am doing wrong and why I have to change in order to assimilate. SHE HASN’T ASSIMILATED. But she is right and I am wrong and I need to stop being like me. You know how chatty and sociable and outgoing I am? That’s wrong and I need to stop it. Whatever I am doing that gets people to open up to me is wrong and I need to stop it.

I don’t think Jenny actually likes me very much. Hanging out with her makes me feel terrible about myself. I leave visits with her and feel like I want to cry and cut myself. I am just so fucking wrong. Nothing about me is ok or admirable.

Oh, but can I make a cake for her daughter’s birthday? Thanks.

Pam has literally talked to me a couple of times since I got here. I still send her emails. Why do I chase these fucking women? Pam only wants to talk to me if by chance I happen to stumble upon a topic that is part of her hobbies.

In general my anxiety and depression have been better since I got here. I only see Jenny about once a month and I think that is going to end. I called child protective services on her. That’s a story. She came over for a visit and she was telling me about how her seven year old was having a tantrum (it sounded like an anxiety attack) and she didn’t want to deal with it so she spanked the kid. That’s literally illegal in this country.

I was talking to a buddy about this (I do have some people I am still talking to a fair bit–I really like the Marco Polo app) and she told me that she thinks it is really weird the way white people are so anti-spanking. She’s from China and in her experience parents are considered abusive if they don’t spank their kids. You are neglecting your responsibility to shape their character. I told her that in my opinion there is a difference in result for kids who are spanked in a society where freaking everyone gets spanked and it is the norm and a place where spanking is not acceptable and you now have to hide your parent’s secret. I think that the secrecy and the shame of “I am so bad that my parents are forced to break the law to deal with me” is as big or a bigger problem than the spanking. The fact that Jenny doubled down and defended it because “There was nothing else she could do to stop the behavior and it had to stop right now” when the behavior wasn’t hurting anyone else it was just annoying and inconvenient really put up a whole passel of red flags. So now her kid’s doctor and school and everyone is on notice that the family isn’t coping.

I think I may have just burned that bridge to the ground and I don’t feel bad. I didn’t make the call because I wanted to nuke the relationship. But I was not going to live in Jenny’s fantasy world where she is “always right” and she can do whatever she wants to her kids because they belong to her. Fuck that. The kid has rights. It’s not ok to spank a child just because you don’t like them having a tantrum. Gain some new god damn skills.

Ok, full disclosure time: I spanked Middle Child once. She spent months beating on Eldest Child to the point where EC was bleeding. We tried a lot of things. She was in therapy. We tried a variety of interventions. We did a whole bunch of fucking things. I talked to her therapist about it. I finally told MC “If you do this again, I am going to have to spank you because apparently nothing else I do is going to convince you that being hit sucks. You don’t get to beat on your sister every time you have a bad mood.” She beat on EC again. We separated. We all went to different spaces to calm down so that nothing was done in the heat of the moment or as a rage reaction. When I was fully calm I went back in and asked her what happened and why. I asked if she understood what was going to happen now. Over her clothes with my bare hand I swatted her.

She has since said that it didn’t hurt physically almost at all but she felt emotionally devastated. She continues to fight with her sister verbally and in normal snotty kid ways like throwing things, but she hasn’t made her sister bleed again. I’m glad. I don’t ever want to do that again.

You can’t beat your sibling until they bleed forever without consequences. If I allow that I am neglecting my other child and I can’t do that.

Is that different than spanking a kid because you don’t like their temper tantrum and buying their cooperation didn’t work this time? I don’t know. I don’t sleep easy at night knowing I did this. I don’t feel good about myself. I sure as shit am not going to stand up and say that I did the right thing. I know that we worked on it for months. I don’t really feel like I have moral superiority. I did it in a place where it was a legal parenting practice for me to do. Does that make it more ok?

I don’t know.

But the only things Jenny has tried are offering toys, candy, and money as bribes and when that doesn’t work she said “Ok fine then I have to hit you”. She won’t set boundaries because that’s “too mean and she is supposed to be their safe place where anything is ok.”

My kids have thrown a lot of tantrums. I have never decided in the moment to hit them to make it stop. I don’t know that it is morally superior, but I have a fuck ton of tools in my tool belt for handling misbehavior without having to hit a kid. I ran out of tools when it came to making other people bleed on a regular basis. That was my failure. Has every parenting tool I have ever tried been good? Oh hell no.

When my kids tell me that a thing we are trying makes them feel bad we don’t do it again. I apologize for failing. I don’t act like it is their fault for failing to comply in a way that is easy for me. I am failing to figure out how to meet your need in whatever manner it is coming up right now. I am sorry that I fail so much. It isn’t your fault. Sometimes my best is genuinely not good enough.

That is the part that never feels reciprocated in my friendships. Not Sarah, not Jenny, not Pam can admit that sometimes the best they can put into the relationship is not good enough and they are failing and doing wrong. I am the problem if I am not willing to describe whatever they offer as the best.

That’s the part that is toxic as fuck. They are right and I am wrong. I know that I am fucked up and I often create that dynamic in my head without help but a number of people have heard me describe these relationships over many decades and in general that is feedback that other people give me. “Why are you always wrong and that person is always right? I don’t think that is true.”

Sarah would absolutely act that way. Jenny literally has it as part of her internet presence that she is “always right” and she moves through the world that way. Pam would never ever admit out loud that she uses me.

I’m the one with the fucked up expectations. It’s totally reasonable to expect your friends to just be happy funding your lifestyle or to have to drop whatever they are doing if you want attention or to accept being told how stupid and damaging to my children I am.

I am the one who isn’t ok. Duh.

I circle back and back and back to these women.

I think it is time to let the waves knock these sand castles down.

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.

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?