About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
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September 27, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 190: I woke up and realized it was Monday. Boo. But it doesn’t feel terrible right off the bat. Especially since Smol managed to sleep til 615 and PiC took them for an hour so I got to roll over and doze for a little longer before getting up and getting breakfast ready. I’m liking my current iteration of eggs: scrambled with diced tomatoes, ham, and cheese. It checks off the JB requirement of cheese and mine of incorporating some kind of vegetable (or … fruit?).
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PiC and I are so different. I interrupted him doing his pre-walk round up of things and he forgot to grab a poop bag for Sera. Me? I won’t risk running out without one so I stuff two bags in every jacket pocket and two rolls of poop bags in my dog walking pouch.
He buys supplies as we run out. I insist on stocking up two months’ or more of non-perishable or long-storing food and supplies.
I think this is fairly representative of our different approaches to life and money. 😂 (more…)
September 24, 2021
1. I didn’t feel good Saturday morning, having been up until about 3 reading with painsomnia, but I was in a surprisingly ok mood anyway. I reminded PiC that I would take the kids so he could go for a run, and then he came back in time for me to have a brain therapy session. While he was gone, JB and I did some Lakota Family giving work together so we could talk about ideas like understanding how fortunate we are compared to others and how that means we have a responsibility to do our share to support our community. Also the idea that we can only do the best we can with what we have, and we can’t help every single person all at once right now as much as we want to.
2. I was thinking last week it’d be great if my stuff on Poshmark would sell so I’d have more cash to put towards giving, so many people need some help right now. Then on Monday, I got a half decent offer! Woo!
3. A copy of my Milestones book sold. Eep! I hope they love it.
Challenges this week: My pain was sky-high this week and there’s a lot of direct aid needs right now.
- My dear friend has had an incredibly tough year and a mutual friend set up this GoFundMe for her. Her situation has spiraled terribly since her major heart attack, despite her best efforts. She was so close to getting out of her abusive situation, then was sandbagged by a devastating financial secret her abuser had been keeping for years. I very much remember that feeling of being financially devastated by the lies of an abusive parent. If you’re able to help or share, it would be so much appreciated.
- Chad Methner and his partner Nancy are having a tough year.
- This Native family is trying to get together funds to buy the house they’ve rented for generations on ancestral lands.
- Anne is organizing this year’s support of the kids in Nunavut.
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September 21, 2021
Every so often, a PF blogger tweets: do you think you’re rich?
For myself, I like Done By Forty’s approach to the question. I like reflecting on our good fortune and where we’ve done well, where we’ve made mistakes, how we can better appreciate all that we have.
The conversation on Twitter took a somewhat irritating to me turn. In the land of at least semi-self-delusional personal finance, you apparently can’t be rich if you don’t have at least $10M in spending money, or if you don’t make at least $100k more per year than whatever tax bracket or income level is being scrutinized for tax purposes. It turns out the latest furor is something along the lines of $400k annual income “isn’t that much”.
O RLY.
This latest meltdown was linked to the proposed changes to the treatment of the backdoor Roth. People can really fix their mouths to say that four freaking hundred THOUSAND dollars a year in income doesn’t equal being wealthy or rich or whatever equivalent to NOT POOR that is. Look. I don’t make that kind of money. Together with PiC we still don’t make that kind of money. But we also aren’t playing the kind of nonsense that is PF bloggers crying poor. That’s just ridiculous. Tennis coach ridiculous.
In any case, with that sort of conclusion, the phrasing seems silly. You can think anything you want. That doesn’t make your thinking right or true. Case in point: One blogger who regularly tweets about their $4.4M net worth replied that he doesn’t think they’re rich. Okaaaaayyyy. If they can snow themselves into thinking they’re not rich, I wonder what other lies they tell themselves. Then I walk away because I don’t like hanging out with liars.
We may not FEEL rich when compared to our neighbors and coworkers but we are. Here are a few ways that we know. (more…)
September 20, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 183: Ow.
Spiritually: I had a dream about dead loved ones being alive and that always hurts my soul. Emotionally, I’ve been reading Codependent No More and some of the stuff I identify with there is slightly jarring. None of it is actually a surprise, I’d already identified those compulsions in myself as things that don’t serve me and need to stop. But it’s still a bit jarring in the early phase. Physically, I put Smol Acrobat in the baby carrier for a short walk today and the impact on my entire body is unbelievable. Ow ow ow and ow.
Parenting pain: we’re in some kind of regression with Smol where they don’t want much solid food, we have to compensate with formula, and they aren’t sleeping even 9 hours at night.
*****
I could feel the urge for retail therapy nipping at me today. I noticed it and I acknowledged that I felt like that. Eventually it passed.
Which is not to say I don’t have plans to spend money. I have a couple but they’re very intentional. One is for my holiday gifts for a large swath of niblings and supporting a creator while I’m at it. One was for supporting an author whose work I have long enjoyed. I did the latter already.
But those plans exist separately from that urge to distract and numb from my real feelings.
After a while, I felt like I recognized what was bubbling up. I’m feeling lonely and isolated emotionally. I miss my dearest friends. I feel like my second child isn’t nearly as loved and cared for within the community as JB was. I know a huge part of that is because of the pandemic. People literally cannot be here to visit the way they did with JB was this age, nor does anyone really have the capacity to show their caring in other ways. That doesn’t mean they don’t care, they simply can’t be here. Much like my pregnancy, the flip side of not hearing all the judginess and the snark and the unwelcome advice because no one was around is that I also didn’t get to feel loved the way I might have in non-pandemic times because no one is around.
Even if it’s not true, the feelings feed the monster in me that insists I don’t deserve love and my fear of rejection. One of the things my therapist will ask me is “is that reality or is that perception?” In a lot of cases I don’t feel like I can tell the difference. It feels true that I don’t deserve love, that I won’t amount to anything, that nothing I do matters. I don’t know if that’s true because if not by my own measure, then by what would I be judging this stuff? In this case even if it feels true that I am isolated from my community and I feel that it’s because no one cares about us, it’s probably more true that people are just really busy with their own lives and own troubles and it has nothing to do with us.
I’m noticing this more as I make my way through therapy and my reading. I’m partway through “Codependent No More” and so far it’s not telling me anything I don’t have some sense of but it’s good to read it.
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September 17, 2021
1. Feeling super grateful for our food exchange friends. They dropped off a bounty of fruit and a super special treat of ribs fresh from a beef share they had picked up. We’ve never had such fresh beef! I had a meal from a recent big batch of cooking saved specially for sharing with them but it pales in comparison to their trades. I’m looking forward to making a giant batch of lemongrass chicken to share with them. I just need the chicken. And energy.
2. My body was so thrashed after a hard week that all Saturday was spent in some stage of rest and recovery. The good part was that PiC and JB had gone out so, with only Smol Acrobat to look after, I managed to execute a long-awaited big tidying up in the office. So satisfying!!
3. Oh thank goodness the recall failed. I’ve been faintly nauseous during this entire campaign imagining the worst.
Challenges this week: we are struggling a lot with our interactions with JB right now. I hate this.
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September 13, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 176: I’m feeling so conflicted. Day to day, I feel like we have more than enough to share more generously with people who need a helping hand. Everyone else’s struggles remind me frequently how fortunate we are. But I worked my tail off to get here specifically because I am concerned about the murky future and my ability to work. It’s very important to give but I’m also responsible for keeping our own parachutes in good repair. Even with whatever work I do to improve my health, which I can only do now because I’ve been so aggressive with saving that we can afford some of that crucial healthcare, my baseline immune system is unreliable. I need to be able to step away from work earlier than later. Mortality aside, I don’t have good years in the tank. At best, they’re slightly less crappy than before years. They’re dominated by pain, fatigue, and limited range of motion. I want to have more freedom to use my precious energy only / mostly on what’s actually important to me and my family, which doesn’t include working a job. I feel selfish about taking care of myself financially. I shouldn’t. But I do.
In writing this, I just realized what it is. I feel selfish for taking care of myself first. If you told me that I had to look out for JB’s health future because they had chronic health issues, I would take on the world to make sure it was as secure as possible. If it was Smol or PiC on the line? Same thing. But because it’s me who is the “weak link”, well, I’m reverting to form and saying that I’m not good enough to be a priority.
Look at that, spotting an unhealthy pattern happening right there.
It’s wild that it’s hard for me to say: It’s ok to take care of myself. It’s ok to secure my future. It’s ok to make sure that I have choices even if I wasn’t thinking about making sure I wasn’t a burden on my kids in the future.
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We’re so grateful for the holiday weekend. I still had work to do but the reprieve was so much needed. We spent the whole weekend at home doing all the needed chores and trying to rest and reset.
Year 2, Day 177: Related to yesterday’s thoughts: My job isn’t actually a bad one, especially when I remember to put reasonable limits on the madness during times of extra stress, but I am definitely still reacting very negatively to the most minor provocations that at best deserve an eyeroll. I’m so tired of work. I’m also just so tired. This tiredness frequently puts me in the negative spiral mood: thinking that I wish we were further along in our FI journey so I could exercise the choice to not work for a long period of time. Getting mad thinking about all the money I wasted taking care of a lying, selfish grifter father because that much money invested back then would have made SUCH a massive difference in our choices today. I can’t even let myself run those numbers because to have the confirmation in numbers that it would have made it possible for us to have better choices during this terrible time makes me mad enough to spit.
Sadly, I can’t take a leave of absence and come back to this job. The team is too small to do without me and keep my job for me. I’m also very much not interested in any of the compromises I’d have to make for every other job out there, I’ve looked, so keeping this job is the least worst of all the available options that I am aware of. Sigh. Anyway, getting that off my chest periodically helps release that pressure and stop the If Only spiral by reminding myself I did the best I could with the knowledge I had at the time and now I’m doing the best I can too.
Part of me grumbles that I did a piss poor job back then so why should I take comfort now with the knowledge that maybe I don’t have all the relevant information and maybe I’m just in a perpetual cycle of screwing up but I suspect that’s a new bad spiral.
*****
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September 10, 2021
1. I’m pleased that on a Saturday I: cleaned a counter, did a load of laundry, paid two bills, finally finished off doc review that I’d been avoiding all week, had therapy, planned some cooking and made some headway on searching for hard to find ingredients, donated to a friend’s GoFundMe, and donated to the CRR. This was all very satisfying.
2. I also managed not to completely blow my stack at JB several times for behaving like your average 6 year old with their foibles. It was hard and I’m trying to remind myself that I did my best and parenting has rough waters. Not feeling great about it all the time is part of the gig.
3. It’s really nice to WANT to cook again. The desire in and of itself doesn’t create the time or energy for it but it’s the first step I always need to making it happen. I’ve been hatching a plan to make a huge batch of my special chicken and rice, some for the week, some for the freezer, and some to share with our food-tradesies friends. Sunday morning, I cancelled our other plans because I simply didn’t have the energy for socializing and spent it putting the cooking plan in motion. There’s something so soothing about cooking, when it’s something I want to do.
4. My PIKAOLE package arrived and I’m thrilled to bits at the small pack of cuteness. I refused to even tell JB what came in the envelope because I’m not sharing my quite expensive special stickers and postcards.
Challenges this week: Everything in the outside world is overwhelming. Most things in our personal life is, too. We’ll get through eventually but it’s going to take some doing.
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