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?
May 9, 2022
Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 3, Day 45: What a terrible night of sleep that was. I thought I was physically up for a walk to the play structure with the kids because I made it there and back without feeling like a hollow simulacrum at the end of it but last night’s many many hours of pain say different. Between Smol’s waking up at 1045 pm crying, and my pain, sleep was a series of catnaps, at best.
*****
I don’t understand why people act like divorce is a failure or bad. For example: a commenter or two here but they are just an example of what I see/hear a lot. Sure it doesn’t feel great if a relationship doesn’t work out but isn’t it better to have a way to walk away with both parties intact, should you grow apart, instead of being quietly or destructively (or somewhere between the two) miserable / unhappy? I think it’s wonderful that we have the legal option to exercise even if it wouldn’t feel great at first. Especially women.
Though, I suppose as a currently not-religious person, and who very much ignored all the patriarchal bullshit embedded in the religious background that I grew up in, perhaps that’s where the moral judgement stems from?
Personally, I celebrate all people having the legal ability to leave rather than having that limited just to straight white men with power. I wish everyone had the economic ability to leave too, if they needed.
*****
My 3 hours with Smol started too early because Nap 1 was shorter than usual. We went straight to playing instead of starting with a snack as normal. They were very intent on the new stacking rings toy from the Borrowed Toys box. I used that time to rest a bit, tidy a little, and pack away another bag of 9 month old sized baby clothing for our third and maybe fourth donation box. They cycled through a few more toys solo which bought me time to grab lunch from the fridge (I made the egg salad, PiC made them into sandwiches, teamwork!) and set the table. Usually I don’t have a lot of time before the hawk screeches the walls down around me so that was oddly peaceful. We ate up and then released the Acrobat to play with the vacuum while after clean up. They’re obsessed with both the floor vacuum and the robot vacuum and ask for them every day. Usually it means I’m vacuuming while they sit on my lap and observe with keen interest. It’s a sitting down activity that gets things clean, works for me. As we came up to the three hour mark, they got very cranky and started hitting themselves on the cheeks in frustration over … I don’t know what, but that was a good sign they were pooped out. For good measure, I asked “all done?” and got a very affirmative “all done” sign in return. The attempts to nap were rough and involved at least one round of me going in to give them a cuddle and help them try to settle again. That tear-soaked face was too much. But they finally passed out after an hour of fussing and slept deeply. What a relief.
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This tweet hit a little close to home.
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The SCOTUS leak about the inevitable overturning of Roe v Wade was a real winning way to end the night. I’m putting together a list of the funds we’ll donate to tomorrow. I need a little time to process and plan. NNAF’s site is down right now anyway because of traffic so I’d like to let that ease off a little for them and the smaller funds that are on our list.
PiC and I hugged for a long time as I wept my fury at the horrible people in this country tearing down our rights, left, right and center.
Year 3, Day 46: Tiny terrorist number 2 started the morning festivities at 530 am. Thank goodness for PiC.
*****
After school dropoff, Smol signed “all done”. They hadn’t been up 3 hours yet but I gave them a drink of water and we headed for the crib. I’m really glad they’re trying to communicate tiredness again, though I should teach them a sign for that, since “all done” could just mean all done with the thing we’re doing right now. They dropped off to sleep pretty fast for which I’m thoroughly grateful.
*****
After that body blow that is SCOTUS likely overturning Roe v Wade, I really needed some good today. I’ll be donating to abortion and reproductive justice funds later this week.
I put together an update for our Lakota Family contributors. We’ve helped six families directly to date with loads of food, clothing, and household basics. We also sent their Youth Center 35 lbs of supplies, mostly for babies, to distribute to the families when they need them.
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2 hours with Smol: we played with musical toys and “your toe wears a block as a hat”. They did a lot of yelling “ja ja ja ja!!!” and a lot of unexplained screeching. After a carb-y lunch, I took the kids out for a walk. PiC had to come along because Smol was being kind of a whiny pain about it. They don’t walk well with just me and Sera. With someone to chase, though, they were happy to walk at least partway around the block. We worked off some of my simmering internal rage at SCOTUS on the weeds and then we did a bit of wandering around in the sun before they pooped out. Weirdly, though they insisted they were all done and wanted to go to bed, they didn’t nap AT ALL. It was just a long solo play session.
*****
I finished enough work earlier in the afternoon to take Smol when they were ready to emerge from solo play, and then took the kids to do another curbside pickup. It’s time to upgrade our toothpaste to the enamel friendly stuff, my dental enamel is not happy. I waved the “old people” Sensodyne at PiC when we got home, and then we enjoyed an earlier than usual dinner of tamales and leftover chicken adobo with rice and green beans.
It was an oddly balanced day: work, Smol Acrobat / JB time, loading and unloading the dishwasher, making PiC’s coffee, and sitting down with our sample ballot for the upcoming primaries to do some research.
There are some candidates on the gubernatorial ticket whose platforms I could get behind but realistically it’s hard to believe they’ll get anywhere. There are some Senatorial candidates who will be about as useful as half a pair of scissors and are about as loopy as a ride at Six Flags. There’s an anti-vaxxer on there, several “my God and my religion will save California” types (no, keep your religion to yourself) , and a few Law and Order Dems that are absolute nos. One of them, a white male Dem who also called himself a hero and incorruptible, and thought his lineage “related to signers of the Declaration” were important to cram in there, touted his Asian-American wife which was kind of gross. It’s mildly cathartic scribbling out those terrible candidates. That leaves a small handful of possible candidates to consider and weigh the likelihood they’ll get anywhere if we vote for them. The candidate from the Socialist Workers Party has the platform I’m most in favor of right now but again, will she get anywhere? Hard to say. Down the ticket, some of the Green party candidates have the stances on issues that I want to move forward but most of them don’t sound even a little prepared to do the work. Their statements are mostly slogans with nothing useful to tell me whether they’d actually understand how to do what they want done in the system we have. One of them is “End poverty in California! Fund schools, housing and healthcare.” Ok, yes. What’s your plan? You have space for at least 500 more words and you did nothing with it. Seems to me if you can’t even write a real candidate statement, you’re not serious about the work. The candidates for AG were particularly irritating. More than half of them were fearmongering and yes, sure, the job is to prosecute crimes but there’s something very unattractive about an AG who’s all about throwing people into jail and says we should “stop emptying our prisons”, or “support the brave men and women of law enforcement”. Sir, we’ve seen the videos. We know who is disproportionately being harmed and it’s not the people in uniform. It might be throwing my vote away but the Green party candidate is a criminal defense and animal rights attorney who said the magic words of “end mass-incarceration” and “reform the criminal justice system”. Do I think he can manage both those things? Well… probably not. But I’d feel a lot less gross voting for him than another compromise candidate. I sure do wish he had a plan of some kind.
Year 3, Day 47: Another 5:30 am wake up with Smol. We spent the first hour together since PiC was crashed out after one too many late work nights.
This early waking thing has gone on more than a couple weeks now. At first, I thought Snough had a point about increasing Smol’s daily physical activity so even though we can’t take them for daily swims, I’ve been taking them for more walks outside. They do PLENTY of running around the house, lots and lots of it, but figured outside air and exertion seemed to be a good idea. Alas, it’s not making any difference at night which, combined with their rash of middle of the night wakings, probably means that they’re getting too much daytime sleep. I hate this. As it is, I’m lucky to get 4-5 hours to work a day so I’m working at hyper speed.
After doing school drop off, three hours with Smol, and school pick up, I was just on the edge of being utterly done in for the day so instead of doing the smart thing and going to rest for a while, I cooked dinner. It was a delicious dinner but I sweated my way through it. Did you know that intense pain can make you sweat? That’s a fun development.
I managed to finish enough work so I could lay down for an hour with a fistful of OTC pain meds. We made it through an early dinner and bedtime to start recovering a little from the day’s energy expenditure but this is definitely one of those wallops that will takes 3-4 more days to come back from. It hardly seems fair that 6 hours of effort translates into 4-5 days of pain and diminished capability but that’s my life.
*****
Also frustrating: Smol is on an anti-vegetable strike. Even when I cut them up into tiny bits, they’ll eat it up from the spoon and then spit out all the vegetables. They were always fine with the taste of veggie purees, so it seems like it’s the texture they object to, but this is so frustrating!
Year 3, Day 48: After a 230 am sobfest where Smol required a bit of comfort, and we all crawled back to our respective pillows, they slept in until 7 am. That was sorely needed. My entire body is down to the dregs again, and both my hands are feeling fragile. This isn’t going to be a day I can handle the cast iron pan.
Is this the day we go to an official one nap schedule for Smol? PiC protests but I think we should try it even though it makes my heart sad and my body sadder. PiC’s had three 8 am meetings this week and that always makes our lives extra complicated. I have to take a heavier share of the running around with the kids without the ability to take breaks or pace myself like needed. A one nap day is going to make things even harder.
*****
After dropping JB off at school, we did chalk art on the driveway. Or we tried anyway. They asked for more colors and after I brought out more colors, they locked onto the chalk chips from the broken piece of chalk instead and spent their outside time finding little caches for each chip. Good enough activity. I wanted to pop them in the stroller and take Sera for her belated walk but I could already feel the telltale twinges that signaled my body’s need to crash. I knew that Sera could hang out for a little longer so for once, I listened to my body and kept Smol on a low-key activity run until PiC could take over.
Even after two hours of sitting down, the pain was creating waves of nausea. I vaguely think about how much I don’t want to play through the pain but that’s not really a choice now, is it? At around hour 3 and a half, the nausea eased up a bit. Just in time for Smol to wake up from their one nap of the day. O_O
PiC and I swapped off every two hours of Smol-minding which got us through enough work to end the evening at a reasonable hour. I took the kids for a short walk for the pre-dinner hour and he started reheating the leftovers. Teamwork! Very tired team. But it works.
Year 3, Day 49: Phew. Every night gets more brutal. Smol woke up crying three times in the middle of the night, needing brief consolation before they could go back for another nap. I couldn’t get back to sleep properly between each wake up so the 45 minutes that I finally got when PiC took them out at 630 was not even close to enough. PiC took one of the wake ups, he was still working during the first one and solidly passed out for the third, but he has this gift of being able to sleep through almost anything when he’s tired. Unlike my body which makes no sense and can’t sleep when exhausted. I’m starting to think it’s something to do with my hypervigilence. Some day, I will learn to sleep soundly. Until then, willpower and water.
*****
After their first nap, during which I was both thoroughly mired in brain fog but still got a whole mass of work done, Smol and I shuffled to the kitchen for cleaning and cooking and snacking. They were amazingly cooperative, for them, and sat in their high chair poking and prodding their food and occasionally even eating it while I cleaned the counters, unloaded the dishwasher, handwashed all the stuff that needed handwashing and got ready for the main event: getting 16 lbs of pork shoulder cooked. The smaller half of that went into the crockpot, it’ll become Kahlua pork and cabbage for the weekend. The larger half went into the oven for a very low and slow roast. That’ll be one dinner tonight and the rest will be frozen and help us out one night and a couple lunches down the road. After you take out the fat and the bones, there’s a fair bit of meat but not as much as you’d expect.
After a full afternoon of work and a little work on the Lakota Families tracking page to log a couple new contributions, I was pleased to be cutting up the shoulder and prepping the freezer packs. Something about cutting up sale priced protein and putting it away for a later meal felt like home to me. Felt like I was myself again for a few minutes. I guess I feel most comfortable when I’m putting a lot of effort into saving money and planning ahead to feed my family.
My legs and back were not so pleased, but when are they ever happy with me these days? The gel mat in the kitchen makes a world of difference though. I wouldn’t be able to move for a week if I were on my feet on the tile for that hour. The gel mat is old and the edges are curling up and breaking but the main part of the mat is still saving my bones.
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Smol was very pleased about the boxes I’ve been leaving out for them. While JB worked on an art project, Smol was putting things in the box and taking them out again for companionship as they cruised around the house. They also like tearing bits off the cardboard and eating them or dipping them in Sera’s water bowl or bringing them to me as small temporary offerings. Then they ask for them back.
Still no luck convincing them to color with the crayon eggs, those eggs are still nothing but entertaining toys to be rotated in their tray repeatedly.
May 2, 2022
Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 3, Day 38: Yesterday was a rollercoaster day: lots of conflict with JB; made egg salad for today’s lunches; worked some but mostly laid down as much as I could. After all that, I anticipated today would be Extra Rough. BUT *happy surprise* the day started with slightly lower than nausea-inducing pain. Dare I hope that today’s pain and fatigue on a PiC away at work day will be approximately at normal levels rather than the past few weeks of awful? I need to practice having hope. I’m going to pace myself, not take the emergency meds, and hope for the best.
*****
These sparkly flats made me smile. A shame they can’t possibly have all the cushioning I need in shoes but I appreciate their adorableness.
*****
We have entered the age of tantrum and going boneless. I didn’t miss this!
Our three hours today were packed: We read two books, then had a big bowl of fruit for snack. Egg salad for lunch. Washed up and then Smol asked for some time with the vacuum. We vacuumed the closet and once it was cleaned, moved along to trying a new to us toy. Once they got bored, I suggested a walk so they brought me some socks. We took Sera for a poke-along 9-cracker walk. We all got very brisk fresh air. Smol pooped out at the end of our walk on their last cracker and kept sitting down on the sidewalk but they had plenty of energy to continue playing in the backyard once I hauled them there like a sack of squirming potatoes. Sera sunbathed while we played, and had music time. Smol was increasingly whinier with each “no” until they finally caved and admitted with their sign “all done”. They slowly settled down for a nap while I hit the books again and did as much work as I could.
Physically, I’m bone tired, even my face hurts, but I don’t want to crawl under my desk and stay there. This is definitely better than last week.
PiC picked JB up from school while I kept hacking away at piles of work and minded both kids for a bit after Smol woke. I did just about as much as I could stand and hit the leftovers for dinner. Thank goodness for leftovers. I’ll try to cook dinner tomorrow morning.
Smol development!: We got to work on boundaries over dinner. They Greatly Desired the fortune cookies across the table. I allowed them to have half of one. They wanted “more, please.” I said sorry, no, those are not ours. We had ours. Their face scrunched up in dismay and they squealed with anger. Nope. Face scrunched up and this time, actual tears. Still no. Higher pitched screech. Still no. We experienced a new octave, prolonged. Nope.
We worked through all the upset and emotion, we had a little chat about how even if we ask politely sometimes the answer is no, and we definitely don’t get things by way of tantrums. They eventually calmed down and moved on.
Year 3, Day 39: I’ve never enjoyed drinking a cup of coffee in my life, much as I want to, but I’ve made many coffees for PiC over the years and he always claims they were good. He takes it seriously enough that I don’t think he’d pander to my ego if they weren’t good. Since my experimenting with the French press a few days ago, I’ve been dubbed the superior coffeemaker. It turns out that’s because I don’t follow directions. Or rather, I don’t remember them. I asked him for his ratio of grounds to water and then promptly forgot. I feel like he said something like 1 tbsp to 4 oz? Maybe? But it was late and I wasn’t that invested in remembering so I brewed it my way, at twice the concentration and voila! Liquid gold! He was duly impressed until I revealed the ratio and then he was appalled at my profligate use of beans. What? It made an excellent cup didn’t it? So the next batch I made, he got to choose: liquid gold or meh silver?
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