March 26, 2024
I think they’re mostly organizational and social anxieties.
- Forgetting to pick up JB from school (Again grateful that Noemi mentioned phone alarms ages ago which gave me a tool to snap me out of my focused fugue)
- Booking a flight for the wrong day and/or time (am vs pm or vice versa)
- Running out of diapers for Smol Acrobat when we’re out and about (also related to are we ever getting them potty trained???)
- Saying something really stupid and/or too true to another parent at school in a moment of unbridled honesty
- Forgetting the stove on and causing a fire (PiC has actually forgotten it twice and I haven’t but it haunts me.)
- Oversleeping and missing another staff meeting (this has happened once in my entire career)
- When once-close friends stop talking to me, I wonder if I’m too much work as a friend. (at least once)
- I can’t start or finish certain types of projects or commitments. I can’t identify in words what the pattern is but I shy away from taking on certain things because I know I can’t finish them. It’s not a rational weighing up of commitments and choosing not to overcommit. I overcommit all the time. It’s something more visceral than that.
- The sight of dishes piled high in our sink, in between emptying and reloading the dishwasher, reminds me of how I felt when I used to see that in the family sink. And that always brings on embarrassment and regret for not being more proactively helpful to my mom when I was growing up, and particularly not in my early teen years. I had more of an excuse as a late teen. I started working full time at 17, supporting the household, so I’m less guilt-ridden over not keeping up with the dishes from 17 on. But that math struck me today. I’m still punishing myself for not being a better kid between the ages of 13-17. Why do I feel so bad that, for a short span of teen years, I wasn’t as responsible as I am now? Maybe I’m now old enough to fully empathize with how my mom must have felt as a more than full time working mom with a spouse who was (self described as) useless as a co-parent. She died when I was 27. It feels like I didn’t get enough time with her as an adult (9 years) to atone for how shitty a kid I had been (since birth I guess, I was a tough kid). Or at least I hadn’t gotten enough time with her to repair our relationship so that I didn’t feel like I had to atone for being a crap kid. Or maybe while I knew I was loved by one parent, I don’t think I ever felt liked except by a very few people. No wonder I don’t feel likeable.
- Not being loved or part of a family beyond the little unit that PiC and I created here. The teen years, if they do that whole rebellion and hate your parents thing, will be hard.
March 12, 2024
I started writing this the week after the weekend’s events but ran out of time and energy to finish it as we cleaned up.
I knew that the weekend’s atmospheric river could bring us some real grief. High winds are dangerous – we had a narrow miss with our car and a lamppost in last year’s last big storm. Floods from the excess rain are dangerous, too. We keep getting just soaked a week or so ago so the soil’s not ready to absorb any more, making flooding more likely. Our own neighborhood is less likely to flood but still, being aware of the risk, we try to stay out of the way as much as we can.
We’ve been added to our emergency / disaster preparedness kid over the past several months. Our latest purchases were a set of cheapish lanterns and an expensive electric generator on Black Friday. The Yeti 3000x was on sale but I still wondered if that was an extravagant overly paranoid purchase. I stopped second-guessing this weekend. In fact, I think we need a second one!
Day 1: Our power went out several times on Sunday, so of course, hubris set in. I stopped worrying so much about a few hours of outage at a time. Then it stayed out the last time. PGE gave us a really big window for power restoration on the last one, and the affected area on the outage map showed that well over 10,000 residences were affected just in our region. This was true of the top half of CA on the outage map. That last estimate was well past the 4 hour window of safety for the perishables in the fridge, so we hauled out the Yeti and went through all the first time set up pains by lantern light while I grumpily kicking myself for not doing the test run I had intended to do before we needed to. The kids squabbled, played, and bickered while PiC and I discovered the shortcomings of our plan: the extension cord for the fridge seemed like it didn’t work, the extension cord has to be flat for the fridge to be pushed back again so it instead had to hang out obnoxiously blocking our path.
Day 2: We snuck the behemoth over to PiC’s work into an abandoned corner to charge. We knew that charging devices was permitted but felt sheepish about bringing the whole power station. We got enough power to get both freezers back down to 0 degrees and keep the fridge running overnight.
The libraries were opened for charging services too but we didn’t want to take up an outlet spot away from someone who didn’t have an alternate location to go to. All the local businesses in our local area are down. It was so weird to see all blacked out while it’s business as usual across town.
Our 6 pm power restore time was pushed AGAIN to midnight and at this point I’m skeptical we’ll get anything.
Can’t vacuum, can’t run the dishwasher, can’t wash clothes. Kinda feeling like I’m in a weird version of Vietnam on grandma’s farm where everything shuts down at sunset because there’s only generator electricity and that’s wasteful if you don’t need it.
This was probably the least worst case scenario possible, so it was perfect for a stress test. Boy, was it stressful. We made it through this ok, but the many gaps in our coverage make me uncomfortable.
What we’ve learned
We need better lanterns. The UST solar LED lantern is the best one but sadly we only bought one several years ago. I was being cautious of buying too many at first without testing them first. Too cautious, they’ve discontinued the exact one we have and love. This is the one they have now. I’m really hoping the quality of this one is just as good.
The Yeti can run the fridge off a full charge for 31 hours uninterrupted with about 40% charge left. It can probably up to 36 hours or more uninterrupted. The fridge draws a range of 8 to 420 watts variably. We can stretch that even longer if we unplug it for 2-3 hours at a time every so often. We bought an extension cord for the fridge, so that it can be plugged into the Yeti without being pulled 2 feet away from the wall, and I did another stress test. It can keep one fridge going for a full 24 hours with 9.7 hours left until it ran dry. We could stretch that out by only keeping it plugged in for 4-6 hour intervals as needed.
We need more variety in food. PiC and I both felt sluggish after the high carb Mountain House dinner the first night. Maybe that was mostly the stress that was dragging us down but it’s worth being more on top of the variety. REI had a 10% off backpacking food sale so I ordered 13 replacement Mountain House meals, a few of the same, a few new meals, to replenish our stock. This gives us variety in types of meals but not the starch theme so I’ll have to figure that out.
Edit to add: we also have the Anker Power Bank 737, and the Anker PowerCore+ 26800, plus a very old Anker PowerCore 13000. These covered our phones, lanterns and other smaller miscellaneous things that needed USB charging. We never ran them down this time. I keep them fully charged between uses just in case.
November 3, 2023
1. I planted 3 new onion sprouts and 3 sweet potato sprouts. Fingers crossed that they all take!
2. The 6 first onions we planted just passed 60 days in the ground. I think they need another 30-40 days before we can attempt to harvest them. Sources suggest that we wait until the green tops turn yellow and fall over. Only the tips are yellow just now.
3. I alternate between feeling quite pleased with the current plants in the ground, feeling impatient for a harvest, and feeling like I should grow more things that we have no room for.
Challenges this week: What A Week.
I need about six days to recover but instead we have a busy weekend trying to get Comic Con tickets and then our friends’ kid’s big birthday on Sunday.
No wonder the holiday season always feels like such a slog.
(more…)
July 18, 2023
JB and I were discussing spending habits and inclinations. I shared that I’m happiest when I preserve half of my spending budget. Even if that money was earmarked for spending specifically, I like coming home with half of it still in my pocket. Budget. Whichever.
They like to leave it all out on the field, so to speak.
It occurs to me that when I think of spending in retirement, I get nervous because it feels more constrained. It worries me to have a ceiling on what we can spend. But even if I didn’t set a ceiling on our spending, our incomes necessarily provide a ceiling. We don’t have a money tree to harvest when we’ve spent all available income. We have to stop spending sometime. Doesn’t matter if it’s an artificial or real ceiling that we’re choosing to stop at, we have to stop.
So what’s different about having a set budget in retirement?
Is it because artificial ceilings feel safer, knowing I COULD dig into the allocated savings if I want to? Or is it because we’d presumably be only spending and not saving in retirement, and the mode of “not saving” is only associated with bad memories because the only times I wasn’t saving in the past were for bad reasons?
Maybe it’s a spicy cornucopia of everything. But I should spend some time thinking about this and how to adjust my attitude a little over the coming years. I can’t be in Prepper (Chaos and Emergencies are Imminent!) mode for the rest of our lives.
Related to this:
Maggie tipped me to this podcast interview with Mindy and Carl of 1500Days. I mainly know Carl through his blog and mutual friends, Mindy has supported a number of my initiatives in the past. I know them but don’t know-know them.
There was a LOT of food for thought in that episode. It’s really interesting to hear how two people, one of whom retired early and the other of whom still earns money, view their money and their spending habits.
I had to laugh at how many habits we share, how many times I nodded in agreement with something Mindy or Carl said, even as I recognized our shared irrational fears. My need for control, and my fear of lack of control, have always played a huge role in how I handled our money and it’s a slow process in undoing those fears and worries.
Carl said: “My money hoarding tendencies were borne out of trauma and insecurity.” While this is still true for me, I am working on it.
Much like the issues I have with my dad, my deep-seated insecurities born from a childhood where people I trusted betrayed me repeatedly, I’m identifying where those issues drive fear responses and am slowly unraveling those tight reactionary cords twisted around my heart.
I don’t have half as much fear as I used to about money. We save a lot for the future and we also spend on huge ticket necessities like childcare, camp, my therapist, some extracurriculars, take out to make our lives easier, convenience foods also to make our lives easier. If we had lower incomes, I would have much higher anxiety and feel the need to spend less. Making more money absolutely enables me to relax more than ever before because I can save and spend on the income we have.
The x-factor for me feeling comfortable with spending and retiring, always, is the healthcare question. Our employer-sponsored healthcare plan is the next to cheapest one offered and it’s still excellent and it’s still very expensive. We pay about $4000 in premiums, annually. The employer pays $19,000! That’s $23,000 for a year of premiums. Granted, we have really excellent coverage.
We haven’t needed very extensive care, the worst has been my labor and delivery x 2, but my doctor orders labs and x-rays and other things as needed just to rule out more serious ailments whenever my body does the weird things that my body does. I’ve never once had to argue with them about covering anything, or get pre-approval, or been retroactively billed for anything they retroactively decided not to cover. That last part is almost priceless.
When I see horror stories, which are all too common, of folks who have necessary procedures and treatments denied, I can easily imagine the hours of fear and stress of fighting with the horrible healthcare companies which only care about making a profit. We know they automatically reject claims with the knowledge that some people will be too sick or too tired or not knowledgeable enough or don’t have enough time to fight back. We know they don’t give half a hoot about people’s health if they can generate higher profits or instant savings. The vast majority of healthcare companies are absolutely nefarious.
July 11, 2023
How do you think you’ll be remembered? How do you want to be remembered?
I was thinking about this four years ago and shelved it. It’s hovered in the back of my mind as I take notes for my elder friends I will have to write obituaries for.
It bubbled back up after a recent therapy session: What would people say about you at your funeral? What do people think of you as a person? What do YOU think of you?
It’s always made me wonder if people know how they’d be eulogized. What would be the summary of their existence?
I buried this post because I wasn’t ready for that level of introspection. I’m probably still not, given my reaction to similar questions in therapy (I make it a point NOT to think about that!)
Back in 2017….
I’ve kept JB alive for going on three years but that’s a reasonably human accomplishment. Besides, after the first year, that’s less of a hazard pay situation and more of a fight the toddler’s instinct to self destruct. Our home was the result of a lot of hard work but survival isn’t a true achievement. (Well, it is, but not in this context.)
My soul is searching for learning and doing. My brain is craving new things to read and do. BUT. My body says no. It is succumbing to fjaka. Weariness weighs down my limbs, lava boils my joints (metaphorically but I also feel it literally), and no amount of metaphorical browbeating can get them to buck up unless and until they’re ready.
My brain craves a hit of accomplishment dopamine very regularly, was satisfied by the tangible completion of the house renovation weekly, and now that I’m off that particular hook, I’m in serious withdrawal. For someone who usually believes she can do anything, being in an “idle” refortification phase of life feels both strange and sometimes deleterious.
Now in 2023….
With the addition of Smol Acrobat, I still feel like my achievement wheels are spinning in mud. I don’t know what matters for me.
I did pick up sewing which has been an incredibly painful, though satisfying, hobby, when I finally figure out how to do something new. I’ve learned how to attach zippers and sew packing cubes and I’ve repaired (sort of) my longtime travel backpack.
I still measure my successes in the tiniest of measuring cups: did we feed everyone with a minimum of stress this week? Did we make it to each commitment on time this week? (Usually) Did we help out a Lakota family this month? (Usually) Did we send a birthday card on time? (Sometimes)
How would you want to be remembered?
My hope is that I’ll be missed, that I meant enough to someone for my absence to matter. I hope I’ll have helped people.
Don’t know that I can ask for more than that.
May 9, 2023
When I set up our Synology system, a few years’ worth of photos didn’t transfer over so it’s been on my to do list since, oh, 2020? That’s about right.
Out of the blue, last week, I was hit with the “the moment is now” feeling that lets me actually do something on the list, so I’ve been doing manual photo backup for a week and change. All of 2018 is now uploaded and half of 2019 is too. That takes care of the big gaps. Once that’s done, I’ll have to edit the metadata for a chunk of photos that got relegated to the year 1970. Technology is great but also weird.
This process has brought up a lot of memories. Missing Seamus 🐶 a whole hell of a lot. Seeing the pictures of when he met Smol Acrobat for the first time, and finally realizing he had a “you’re joking” look on his face when he looked up at me after a long sniff. Then he took another long whiff and gave PiC the same look. It might have actually been an “I’m too old for this shit” look. It was an entire world away from when he last deeply sniffed a newborn and immediately claimed JB as his very own. That made me laugh and made me sad all over again. A dog’s love is so sweet. A totally invested clever dog’s love is intense.
The photos from the hospital stay, with occasional videos of Smol Acrobat snoring like the tiniest of frogs, reminded me of how deeply lonely that time was. Just me and my day old baby, with short drop ins from nurses, or PiC checking in because he also had to be home caring for Seamus (who’d only have another couple months with us). Smol Acrobat was so tiny. They’re still small for their age now, so I get to cuddle a smallish kiddo for a little longer.
As much as I will always and forever love cuddling itty bitty infants, I don’t ever want to do any of that again. Pregnancy was weird the first time. It was unbelievably scary, bizarre, unsettling and strange the second time in the first year of COVID during shutdown.
It got me thinking about how much things have changed in the past three, seven, and ten years.
I’ve gotten mighty comfortable in my current job, which was unexpected. This was my risky leap, a decade and change ago, I truly didn’t know what to anticipate.
I’ve become even more of a homebody, unexpectedly thanks to that same risky leap job that has become much more stable than I ever had the nerve to hope for. Travel doesn’t feel appealing anymore, especially with our small circus, but maybe that’ll come back in a few years. We’ll see!
We’ve made new friends because of the kids. Neighbors who never acknowledged our existence before JB came along slowly warmed up to us and some of them became, and stayed, friends. JB makes friends with the whole world but a select few classmates have parents who were open to socializing and we enjoy their company. That’s been a new experience. A lot of parents around here don’t seem to have time to even acknowledge a familiar-from-dropping-off face.
Our relationships with some chosen family has gotten a lot stronger. Our relationships with some family has gotten much more distant.
Feels like lots of new, mostly small, stuff to take the place of things I haven’t done in the past decade:
- Interviewed for a new job (less than zero interest)
- Dated someone new (also less than zero interest)
- Spontaneously agreed to vacation with a friend (semi interested in the abstract, depending on the friend)
- Gone out for drinks (zero interest)
- In the workplace: felt compelled to prove that I’m a good person, really, even if I would dropkick a person in a professional sense for being an asshole. I’ve never been good at pretending to be ok with politics playing assholes and I’ve gotten even worse at hiding it since my job got so comfortable (zero interest: but also I have a couple hypemen colleagues who warn people, ever so congenially, never to fuck with me as I can professionally dropkick them.) I like that the folks in the Kaiju Preservation Society understand you can both be a great person and not mistake that for weakness.
August 16, 2022
At the wedding, I was welcomed as my own person and not only as my relationship to another person. It was jarring, to say the least. I started to form hypotheses why I have, until now, been unable to assert in therapy that I had worth, apart from whatever I earned through caretaking during therapy. The words simply wouldn’t come out of my mouth. My whole being rebelled against stating that as fact and I could recognize it was fear but I didn’t know what the fear was about.
My current theories: A, I was so hurt with my defense mechanisms up, how much more hurt can I get if I choose to be vulnerable? B, admitting or accepting that I have intrinsic value felt like making myself more vulnerable. So maybe I stripped myself of any perceived worth in self defense so that no one else could hurt me by suggesting that I prove myself a worthy daughter. Shortly after our wedding, I had in-laws “welcome” me to the family by saying “don’t be a burden on (your) dad”. (In hindsight, I wonder how much of that was about tearing me down and how much was about their own perceived shortcomings. Regardless, it stung in that moment and long thereafter.)
And after all, I’d already failed to be worthy through beauty or brains, what was left? Working hard.
The warped logic is this: If I have worth that I earned, no one can take that away. I suppose it never occurred to me at that subconscious “I’ll prove you wrong” level that they could only undermine my confidence, not actually take away my worth as a human.
This proving oneself path, of course, is a capitalist hamster wheel: I always have to keep earning. Because what else have you done to prove yourself lately? That’s an obvious issue when I clearly still occasionally feel guilty over not bailing biodad out of whatever situation he’s in now, as if I haven’t already done my time twice over. Another fun (no, not fun) side effect is that I question every single relationship I have: why would someone choose to be my friend unless I served a purpose?
In thinking this through, I actually remember a conversation where biodad compared me to a cousin. Parenting “better” than others is often treated as a cultural Olympic sport and you win by having “better” progeny. He said, with some pride, “well, she’s no beauty but she does work hard.” I’d never had any illusions about my lack of beauty, I was only what, 10?, but that gave me a distinct roadmap to earning my place. So I leaned into that. I can’t change (won’t, actually) how I look, but I can and will work harder than anyone else.
It’s a bit roundabout but I’m testing the theories to see how true they ring.
For the first time, I’ve been able to allow for the possibility that I can be a person with worth that isn’t dependent entirely on my earning my way. It’s still not comfortable and I can feel parts of me straining to kick out the thought but it exists.
Perhaps I’m evolving from Nutt’s survival mechanism?
Being of service, being a provider, has been a huge part of my identity. If that’s not necessary to prove my self worth, as a friend asked, what does that mean?
Off the top of my head, I expected to redefine myself when I cut off my biodad. But I didn’t because I pivoted and the mission went from providing for my dad and brother to protecting my husband and child and dog. So I’m confronting this now.
I don’t think that my desire to help others in and of itself is the problem, it’s the part where I didn’t set any healthy boundaries for myself. So, as an example, I’m not martyring myself for the Lakota Giving project. I feel strongly about it and do make some choices to prioritize them over my own wants on occasion but I’m not depriving myself just to serve this purpose.
I’ve also decoupled my sense of worth from work for the most part.
On pain and loss
I anticipate pain. I don’t anticipate rewards and joy. In my experience, pleasure is never guaranteed but pain? Pain is certain. People will leave. People will die. Lots of people I care about have died and lots more will. Some day, my kids will grow up and move on and stop needing me. And that should be a good thing but the loss is what resonates most right now. This isn’t about the desired empty spaces in my life. I continually and consciously subtract as much as I can to create pockets of space, physical and emotional, for myself. That’s good space. And I need good space to thrive. This fear and foreboding is about loss of control. I can’t control when people move, grow up, leave, die, make choices that I cannot live with. I can’t help but feel those losses as keenly as my first fundamental losses of the people I should have been able to trust from my nuclear family.
On brain weasels
Since the wedding, some nights, I sleep deeply instead of waking every hour or few hours. Usually, the tradeoff is that those nights involve stress nightmares about my brother or my family in some way.
I think the underlying stress of processing my world view, my family dynamics, and all the unknowns is creating a fair bit of mental and emotional pressure. I’d gone a while without consistent nightmares or conflict dreams. I am guessing it’s venting in dreams since I don’t really have anyone who has the bandwidth to ruminate with me.
That reality also raises a sadness that a dear friend of many years is still MIA and I don’t know if she’s ok. I don’t know if I somehow drove her away. I don’t know if she’ll be back. I suspect there is some depression creeping in around the edges but I’m not prepared to meet it head on.