By: Revanche

Random bits of life right now

May 10, 2022

Parenting is lonelier than ever. As much as I like alone time, that’s not what we’re getting. It’s the worst of both worlds. No actual quality alone time, combined with relative isolation from community. It’s wearing on many levels. We went months without contact with other parents, and now we occasionally speak to JB’s classmates’ parents which helps but it’s still a drop in the bucket. We haven’t hosted or been to some friends’ houses in weeks, months, years. There are so many pieces of connection that we make do without but their cumulative absence is sad. We try to do our best. Sometimes our best feels like a poor imitation of parenting.

I miss my dear friends who are going through their own life struggles. I feel for them. I miss them, for themselves. I also miss their clear-minded loving non-parent perspectives that are much less fraught than my lens which is skewed badly (permanently?) by this job in front of us that feels so hard and some days impossible.

I’ve had to temporarily disengage from family to whom I have provided many tons of emotional and financial support. After years of carrying their emotional burdens, not being able to dial back my empathy is a problem, and they don’t have the capacity to return any real measure of support. Instead of being a mutual relationship, it’s become a drain and I needed space before it became poison. My therapist points out that just from what I share weekly, there’s always something terrible going on in their life and there’s never a time when anything is good or peaceful. Naturally that makes me want to help more, but I don’t have more to give. Stepping back has helped my baseline stress a lot. It’s a bit sad in that I don’t know when I’ll be able to open communication again, their life is going to be dramatically rough for a long time, and I don’t want to never be there. But I also have to carve out space for myself.

I miss Seamus.

I miss believing that maybe America could be better and maybe live up to the ideals that were taught in school but never actually had. I miss living in a country that didn’t openly embrace fascism. I miss a world where the Tea Party and QAnon didn’t exist. I miss “knowing” (ignorance was bliss for a moment) we had reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. These beliefs came from a complex place: as refugee immigrants, our family had to believe we’d come to a better place. Schools were happy to teach a sanitized version of history. I am glad that I know better now, I just wish that the truth weren’t so ugly.

I played with a number of retirement calculators. I want to have an idea of how much we need in our taxable brokerages to have enough money for the time between retirement (whenever that is) and age 60 when we can draw from our pre-tax accounts. This calculator says that if we retire on what we have in 2026 and withdrawing my rough guesstimate of a high annual spend, we’ll run out of money in 26 years. Now, if my typo adding a zero at the end of our assets balance came true, it says we’ll never run out of money. Stranger things have happened? This calculator says that we’d make it to 2066 only if we spend 2/3 of what I projected. I have no good answers because I don’t like the “spend less” option. I assume a high average spend because we’ll probably cashflow some of the kids’ college, we still have a mortgage, high property taxes, and big ticket home maintenance that’ll come up intermittently to be averaged across the low/high spending years.

My eyes make me feel old. I now feel the strain when I don’t wear my computer reading glasses. I feel old for other reasons too. Turning 40 this year, for one thing.

Why are the handles on syrup bottles so tiny?

A few people on Twitter got really weird when Ursula Vernon and I agreed that we wouldn’t be hitting a spouse lotto twice so if anything happened to our respective spouses, we wouldn’t be looking to remarry. I’ve said it before – we are deeply imperfect people but we happen to be quite an excellent fit for each other flaws and all. I don’t have patriarchal bullshit problems with him. He believes in doing his fair share and more in all our responsibilities and he respectfully stays clear of the ones I’ve Gollumed. There are very few people I tolerate and get along with day in and day out, under normal circumstances. The pandemic confirmed that we didn’t have deep or previously unknown fissures to intensify under pressure which did happen to longstanding couples that I know. We had our normal level of disagreement and conflict, if that. Should the worst happen and I be left without him, I can’t imagine I’d want to attempt dating, much less remarry while I had kids to take care of. I read Abby’s stories about dating! *full body shudders* There seem to be a plethora of dolts and louts out there. That’s not to say I wouldn’t miss affection but it’d be the comfortable affection I share with him that I miss. Anyway, lots of people feel the same way about their current spouses and I hope we all get a long long time with our good partners. Even if mine does ask me to help with his haircuts which stresses me out because I can live with a screwy coif on my head but making a mistake on his hair feels like too much pressure. Still, it’s that or he gets frequentish haircuts unmasked in a shop where no one masks and neither of us are really up for that. So we make do.

My hands have been twanging a lot the past few weeks. My normal MO would be to get really upset and scared about the loss of the use of my hands, and upset at myself for doing something to cause the pain to start. Then the pain would intensify, rinse and repeat. I’ve been extra mindful about deep breathing and reminding myself that it’ll pass when it passes, and I’ll do what I can to be careful between now and then. That’s helped.

Why is there so much more laundry with 4 people than with 3?