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 đ¶ 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.
July 26, 2022
Where we are in life: Married ten years, two kids, a dog. Mostly still hermiting with the pandemic and not hating the much reduced social life aspect of things even if I hate almost everything else about the pandemic, though we have in person school and camp and may have childcare this year.
I don’t think I’d have predicted any of this back in 2006. Maybe marriage, definitely dogs. Actually, I think PiC was in the picture by then so I think my line of thought was we’d probably get married but I was open to the idea that we might go a different way.
I think about the number of people who made it to the 9-12 year range and divorced recently. I’m glad they could divorce because they were so unhappy in their marriages. People deserve to be respected and loved in their relationships. I am also grateful that we still very much love and respect each other even when we experience friction. When we have conflict, it’s uncomfortable for a while. Usually, we figure it out in some kind of way and move along. Some dear friends are peeking at 20 years just over their horizon and I’m so happy for them too.
I like that we can tease each other mercilessly, but very fondly, about our flaws. It’s good natured, not mean spirited.
We’re deeply imperfect people, and we recognize that, which makes it possible for us to critique the decisions we’ve made, respectively, and talk over what we would do instead in the future so we’re more constructive. Particularly with parenting. We struggle with our flawed parenting but it’s helpful to work through that struggle and self doubt together.
Both of us are established in our careers and are at the same mental place right now: holding steady and keeping on top of our financial goals is good enough. We aren’t feeling any desire to climb ladders and be ambitious. Surely that’s because we’re living the survival lifestyle right now, just making it day to day, but also, maybe that’s where we are with our life priorities and that’s ok too. It would take LOT more money, twice as much as least, to make it worth making our lives any little bit more challenging and even then I’d think twice. Maybe double the money isn’t worth it even if it gets us to any goals faster because money can’t directly buy rest or sanity and that’s all I want right now: my family to be safe from medical long term effects of COVID and for us adults not to go stark raving before things get better.
I’ve done a lot of self reflection with therapy in the last few years. Don’t love what I see, but seeing it is one of the most important reasons I’ve made any progress. Seeing my past for what it was, seeing how “funny” stories actually affected my thinking and my attitudes. I have a ways to go still but this has been good for me in ways I never thought possible.
Living in 2022 feels absolutely surreal most days.
Big picture: We lost Roe v Wade and much of the Democratic leadership has been hair-pulling-out frustrating in response. I see how other rights are under threat and it feels like if things are going to get better, it’ll be a long time coming and a lot of people are going to get hurt along the way.
In big and small ways, the losses from this time of COVID are still reverberating and I can’t understand how so many people are just absolutely impervious to the notion that a million people plus have died whether COVID related or not. Hell, my own circles are now at 10 deaths over 19 months. That’s not normal. That’s so much loss.
So much has changed drastically in a short time and people just want to go back to some normal that was never really good anyway. I wish we had more collective desire to have vision for a better future.
Small picture, well. There’s stress and cracks in the system everywhere. We see it in the daycare center being at 3/4 capacity for many reasons, but most particularly lack of staffing. We see it in the community programs that are so oversubscribed that they won’t even wait-list us. We see it in the inability to buy a car without paying a giant premium we aren’t willing to spend. We see it in the choices we have to make about travel because so many around us only care about themselves and won’t mask or vaccinate. Or our choices to see family, if we see them, because some of them don’t take illness seriously at all and so I guess we just don’t have a whole branch of family until we have enough personal protection in place. It doesn’t matter to them, I guess. I miss my dear friends who have been, in some way, deeply affected by the stressors of these years and have gone offline. I miss feeling like we belonged and feeling connected to people we care about.
The big hurts and the little hurts all add up.
I take comfort in my little family here, my chosen family who remain supportive, but it’s truly a strange time in life right now.
Also? I’m about to have a second grader and I truly can’t comprehend THAT. đ
January 25, 2022
Welcome to our fifth year supporting families on the Pine Ridge Reservation Okini! I never would have thought we’d be doing this five years later but this amazing community really comes together every year and I appreciate y’all deeply!
Some background on this amazing project:
In 2018, a small group of us came together to give holiday gifts to Lakota families. In 2019, I organized, this time earlier in the year, and expanded to include holiday needs.
The goal for 2020 became to make this a year-round project and amid COVID sweeping the world, pregnancy, and a tumultous Presidential election year in the United States, we put $2153.05 to work responding to ten separate requests for aid.
I kicked off 2021 with a boatload of goods to the Allen Youth Center dedicated to helping Lakota youth specifically: diapers, wipes, body soap, shampoo and conditioner. We ended the year with gifts to the Youth Center for the holidays – almost. It turns out that folks had more to give through the end of the year and we helped another family with much needed diapers before I had to take a break.
All told in 2021, we deployed $6606 responding to 18 requests and helping over 60 people. What a year.
This year I am tweaking it a little bit. Last year I sent around a last call for the start of November and then… we just kept rolling anyway! I’m not going to turn down resources to help people, but at some point I do have to take a break.
I will accept donations all year round and the cut off date will only apply to the shopping part. Anything that isn’t spent on 2022 families will roll over to 2023 families.
I hope you can join me and/or share the project!
You can make contributions to âŠ.
1. My Ko-Fi page (note: Ko-Fi flows through Paypal so they do take fees out of what you send)
Update: AGSL’s PayPal can’t receive friends and family gifts anymore so we’re updating contribution methods soon!
:: Contributors get first updates by email, and I include some details in my monthly money reports afterwards.
October 18, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 211: Smol woke up at 245 needing a diaper change, overfull and leaking diapers has been the problem this week. After a change and patting, they went back into the crib. Except that was insufficient service and they demanded my presence for another rocking on the shoulder song before they’d go to sleep peacefully. Terrorist. (Which is weird BTW, when they are being settled for a nap, they just want to be put down, they don’t want any cuddling.)
*****
I hit my tipping point on clutter and had to do some real tidying today: I put away all the baby veggies and cleared out JB’s now 2-3 year old Halloween, Christmas and Easter candy stash. I left a few pieces that weren’t too old. I ate their Oreos. Best by Jan 2021? Eh they were fine.
Took out an armload of recycling: plastic and paper containers that had been lingering and almost finished packing up a care package I’ve been working on for a friend’s little one. That one can go soon.
*****
We had my Hainan chicken and rice batch cooking failure turned porridge for dinner. It works great as a porridge so I guess we can call it a transformed meal rather than a failed one. Even Smol likes it!
Speaking of Smol, this little smudge decided they have a top tooth and a bottom tooth, they can bite food now! And they can! We learned this when they snatched a quesadilla from me and took the tiniest little chunk out of it. They glowed with pride and satisfaction.
*****
We’ve had another loss and I’m at a loss for what to say.
It feels like we have barely had time to cope with any one of the losses in the year. The cumulative weight of all of them together is simply too much.
(more…)
July 27, 2021
Or is this just the pandemic? How can we even tell?
My current job pays decent money and I have the accommodations that I need. I’m treated with respect, my staff are treated with respect, and my voice is heard. I’m genuinely good at the work I do and the work does matter in the world, to some real extent. I don’t want to have to find a new job or make the compromises that I’ve had to make at every other job.
So this is a not-awesome thing to feel: I don’t want to work. I am so tired of making my life and energy fit around work. I also can’t help but wonder how much longer I can ride this wave with this job. I would need my bosses not to do anything stupid for the next ten years. That seems like a really long time to hope they don’t make any changes I hate.
A friend reminds me that having the kids off to school will likely change the landscape too, which could influence how I feel, and maybe that’s part of the pressure cooker feeling: I have to do ALL THE THINGS ALL THE TIME right now.
Maybe when daycare is back and school is in session and my daylight hours are mine again, maybe I won’t hate spending those hours working.
I want to do nothing useful for at least six months. Just read and eat and walk the dogs and sleep. Maybe even twelve months. Then I will want to do something that feels good to me, and something that makes money. Maybe it’d be nice if they were the same thing. But I have zero desire to go from a reasonably comfortable good fit job to entrepreneurship if we actually need the money to live. That’s too much pressure of a different kind. I’d like to have enough saved that I don’t have to compromise on our standard of living and make real money without depending on it. Is that too much to ask? (When you factor in the part where I have no idea what I’d want to do and I don’t want to do anything I’m really good at professionally because I don’t love any of those tasks…. Yes. Yes that is asking too much.)
Segue into thinking about planning for financial independence: number crunching is my attempt at stress relief but it’s just fake endorphin juicing. Diving into the spreadsheet burrow and inputting a series of equations to game out possibilities temporarily generates a sense of accomplishment, a sense that I’m doing something to get us closer to the nebulous goal in the future when we know that the crunching alone can only draw a roadmap. It can’t move the game pieces around. Then the hit wears off and I’m deflated again because I can only do what I’m already doing: earning W-2 income, be here for my family, spend judiciously, invest regularly. Try not to freak out about the stock market highs that seem outrageous and overvalued.
Sometime in the last three cycles last week, one new realization dawned on me.
We are currently careful with our money, though we do enjoy creature comforts, so we can save aggressively. We save aggressively so we’ll have plenty of money in the future, we hope, to live off of for as long as we need it (we hope). My simulations are based on quite high annual spending projections to, as best I can, ensure that when we choose to step away from our jobs, we have the freedom to keep spending if we want to or have to. I don’t want to go back to worrying about money. Except, if we’re being honest, I’m always thinking about money now so why would that change later when I have more time on my hands? It won’t. I love thinking about money.
I’ve been thinking about how many early-retired people caution others not to rush to early retirement and to enjoy the journey there. Carl of 1500Days recently said: “All of this money stuff is fun to think about, but the real goal is to enjoy life. If youâre so obsessed with winning the money game that you forget to enjoy life, youâve lost. I know this from experience. If I had to do it over again, I would have gone slower. Hell, I might of actually still been working.”
I get the point. I haven’t forgotten to live today in pursuit of the far-off tomorrow like I once did. PiC and I spend money on things that make us comfortable (insulation!) and happy (cool stamps! special cheese!) and sane (childcare! again! someday!). I even dumped our rental because it was eating my sanity and happiness. We aim for an equal amount of removing alligators and adding kittens. We’re doing the best we can without sacrificing the important things of today. But I can’t help quietly fretting over our savings rate. It feels like we’re creeping along at a snail’s pace and it feels like we’re not going to get there “in time.” My health is improving with therapy and exercise and diet changes, but it’s still a vast gulf between where I am now and being healthy, free of constant pain and fatigue, with energy.
It feels like I’m not doing enough. It feels like there’s so much more I should be doing to grow this nest egg exponentially so that we don’t run out of good years and money to support those years. This year’s rash of losses underline the fact that while we ARE living today, we also don’t know how many more todays we have. I don’t want to spend the majority of them working, and I don’t want to run out of the freedom (aka money) to enjoy life today and tomorrow and next year. I feel like I’m walking a tightrope.
:: How are you feeling at this stage of life with your job and your future plans?
October 20, 2020
If youâd like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,816.35; Rural libraries, $346.69.
Week 31 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Week 31, Day 213: We had a talk with JB’s tutor about the two priorities we’re balancing: academics vs structure. Structure is the part that they have always had with daycare scheduling to prepare them for the way a traditional classroom is run, vs the learning itself (academics).
Kindergarten completely lacks consistency and structure. We never know what they’re going to be doing at any given time of the class session, or even what time the class will end. Daycare was incredibly structured down to the five minute mark and we always knew what they were expected to be doing at any point in the day. Our tutor expressed concern that if JB were to continue on a trajectory where they are academically a grade level or two above their current grade but continue to lack that ability to handle the structure, skipping a grade would be a real problem. We appreciated that insight but we realize that JB’s social development isn’t progressing at a pace that I would think skipping grades could work well for them in the next year or two. That could change, but at the moment, with the few opportunities they have to socialize, I have my doubts it’ll shift much over the next year.
We decided that within the tutoring session, focusing on the academics will be our higher priority. PiC and I will continue to work on balancing flexibility and structure across the whole day so that they aren’t completely feral by the time first grade starts.
Today I introduced a short post-kindergarten class exercise session. We took the dogs outside for a very short walk to a safe part of the street where I could send JB to do wind sprints. I posed this as their “real dog owner training”. They need to build up strength and stamina if they’re going to have a hope of keeping up with running Sera one of these days. Then they get to do a quiet activity of their choice for up to 40 minutes, followed up by an assigned chore. We’ll go into lunch and rest time before their afternoon educational session from there. (more…)