Category: Journal

Well, my dad is in jail and I probably should be able to muster a feeling other than numb inside, but aside from a flash of guilt that there isn’t anything I can do right now and a lot of empathy for my mom, that’s all I’ve got.

I’m home solo with Louise for seven more sleeps and she is extra defiant the last two days so I don’t feel like I have much space to process any of this. I’m just checking on mom a lot.

He’s charged with aggravated assault and intimidating a witness for being belligerently drunk last night and threatening himself and mom with a gun. Mom had the guns removed from the house which is a start and since he’s in jail until someone posts bail and she is the victim so she was told she basically can’t post bail this is just a holding pattern. It’ll get figured out I guess.

I wish I were better at compartmentalizing my frustrations around Louise but also feel like I’m compartmentalizing all of these feelings too much.

As promised:

• Read books
• Podcasts
• Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp
• Cook thoughtful dinners
• Watch Chicago Med, The Good Doctor, Broad City, SVU, The Bold Type, etc.
• Give myself manicures and pedicures
• Play with web design
• Long showers, baths, and face masks
• Yoga
• LTAB

India, one of the young women in LTAB the last few years, performed this poem, “Kavanaugh,” in her bout on Saturday and I asked her to share the text of it with me.

the spider stands trial and screams silk at the ghosts of all the girlhoods he stole. the spider council looks at the 56% of this spider and fly country that does not believe he should make decisions about more posthumous girlhoods and decides that his web is worthy of defining the most important opinion that can be had.

my mother comes into my room crying when they announce it and my mouth fills with corpses. I am nothing except everything she has told me of moments she won’t call rape. her two sons unbirth in her shaking skeleton and her two daughters are in every tear track and i feel so bitten, so caught, what is the world if not a web for me to trip over, to count all the ghost girls in my life and divide them by five to figure out exactly how much trauma each of my shattered teeth are worth. how much venom can I fit in that cracking bloodshed? how do i stuff my tongue full of all the poems I wrote out loud in the car and immediately forgot? my heart has been racing since i heard my first horror stories, full of ghosts and blood and girls that got cut into pieces on their way to school. that heavy knowing was the payment to walk home alone at 11 years old, to fear every slow-moving car, to run from the old men that shouted obscenities from porches when my best friend and i were barely the shadows of what might someday become women. in a way i hope we never do. that’s a heartbreak i don’t know if i can endure.

i have been holding my breath for seventeen years because i know it is safer to be quiet, always wear headphones on public transport with nothing playing in them, lock my car the moment i get in it when it’s dark out. there are no girls left in this world, only clenched fists. we are born clichés about destruction, born “femininity is a razor blade”, we are born wood to be whittled into Fuckable, into worthy of bruise and broken blood vessels. into art the spider would finally call beautiful, all black and blue and red, a bloody midnight. a rotten patriotism. my lungs are full of a decade and a half worth of stale secrets and air i know im not allowed to expel for fear of taking up too much space.

but why shouldn’t i breathe? why shouldn’t every stretch of my ribcage push poison into that beast, why does he deserve oxygen when all these ghosts are lungless? are loveless? why should i feel guilty for all this not-dying I am doing, for me. for all this venom coursing in my veins. for my mother. and for all of my mothers. bitten. standing. still here. still alive.

“Kavanaugh” by India W.

I’ll journal on it a little more later on.

I spent the whole day planning a journal entry about how I don’t want to optimize myself anymore and then I walked by this at the library and checked it out without a second thought:

So, way to hit my goals?

I’m on this don’t-optimize-yourself kick because I read “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation” by Anne Helen Peterson a couple months ago, and I guess it resonated with me.

I did so much in the last couple of months to optimize my housekeeping habits, in the last year to optimize our finances, and in the last five years to optimize my productivity. I’ve put a lot of focus on dishes and to do lists and reconciling bank accounts and having my phone organized in a specific way so that it’s less of a distraction.

After all of it, I’m burnt out and these attempts at optimization have become the distraction.

The more I give myself things to do and habits to form, the more perfectionism creeps in and highlights everything that isn’t crossed off a list. I’m not sure that I’m any better for it.

I told Mallory last week that I think I should work on being more independent in my emotional anchors. I think one of the reasons that I feel bad right now is that I rely on external validation when I’m depressed or anxious to pull me out of it. It would be nice to source that strength within myself.

I saw the new therapist again this morning and explained to him that I still have so much fear of abandonment because of things in my childhood:

1. Three grandparents dying within 18 months of each other when I was 4-5
2. Getting off the bus after grade school, expecting my dad to be home, and finding out later that he had taken the day off so that he could move out; and my mom being (understandably) emotionally unavailable in the immediacy of that event
3. My mom deciding she was going to move out for a while and “maybe never talk to you or your brother again” when she couldn’t handle my bisexuality

These things all spillover into my relationships and it’s hard to do therapy on them because adulthood obviously has its own challenges and those are always more pressing concerns for therapy. Harley suggested a book, Running on Empty by Jonice Webb. I can’t find it at a library, but I’m very interested in it. I’m somewhat reticent to do that work right now, but it may a good time since the fear of abandonment is so relevant right now.

I think therapy via reading and thinking is good for me right now. I’ve always been such an overly educated and analytical therapy patient. Therapists like that, don’t get me wrong, but it sometimes feels like I could get the same benefit of therapy session by talking to an empty room. That’s not completely fair to therapists, but lately I’ve felt like I walk in and explain everything that’s going on, do my own therapy on it, and then leave. It’s helpful to have my instincts validated, but I’m confident that I can do therapy work independently through books.

I finished The Art of Money last week. I took a solid month and a half off from it because I felt like I needed to go a little more slowly. I took so much from that book. I need to reread my notes every now and then so that I can think about it.

This weekend was weird. Louise has just started declaring that things are weird. She says it with this cute little pronunciation – wee-erd. She uses it when things act unexpected, its a nice synonym to silly – si-wee – in her vocabulary.

We spent Friday and Saturday night at the Lake of the Ozarks to celebrate Maggie’s birthday. I’m really proud of Lou for how kind she was to Maggie while we were there. She never seemed to get jealous of her even when Kyle or I gave her attention or when she was getting gifts and lots of attention at her birthday party. She didn’t do anything unkind, accidentally or otherwise. Exceeded expectations.

Speaking of expectations, it was my first time at the Lake of the Ozarks. It has that strangely familiar feel, even when you’ve never been there. Sort of like Times Square. It was exactly as I expected it to be.

We learned at the lake that Suzi is expecting their second baby. They’re only five weeks along, so he or she will hopefully be here in late June. I had a weird surge of emotions about it. I currently have an IUD and I use an app to track my cycle so that we can avoid my most fertile days, but we lost a little track of it this month. I’m not late yet and all signs point to my not being pregnant, but I have been off and on anxious that this is a similar scenario to when my IUD failed before. Yesterday, I felt some of that anxiety, coupled with a lot of jealousy that Suzi is pregnant. These are contradictory emotions, right? And likely could only be held in the head of someone with something hormonal like PMS going on. But, man, I just couldn’t shake my bad mood yesterday.

Add to all that being around Suzi’s family who are all somewhere between loose acquaintances and strangers at the lake house and having trouble keeping Louise inside of the house during the birthday party, and I was completely overwhelmed.

It reached a head when Louise dropped her fishing pole in the lake and Kyle decided to go in after it. It turns out going in after it was only wading to about chest deep, but someone thought the dock was out at a depth of about 10 ft., plus the water was cold and the air was colder. I was nervous about him going in, Louise kept trying to get closer to the dock to see what was going on. When he recovered it, we went down to the dock to get it and she saw him swimming in the water with his clothes on so she started to leap off to join him.

Thank God that I am so closely observant and saw what she was doing before she was committed, and I caught her in the air before her feet were even over the water. It was too much though. She started crying immediately because she didn’t get to go in, and I started crying immediately because it was terrifying. It’s hard to feel like everyone is seeing you be a terrible parent, even when they’re mostly inside and close to unaware about what is happening or how many times your child has escaped through one of SIX exterior doors during a birthday party.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the idea of having another baby. I’ll admit that Louise is so adventurous and brave and interested in the world around her – plus stubborn – that she can be hard to parent sometimes. Harder to parent. But, it’s hard not to feel like I’m failing her. It probably doesn’t help that I used to be pretty weak-willed when it came to saying no and enforcing rules or what not. I read a book called No and why children of all ages need to hear it back in April that helped my parenting so, so much. I am almost 100% positive that Kyle hasn’t criticized my parenting since I read it. It has been transformative.

So even though I know my parenting has improved, parenting is hard on the hard days. And yesterday was a hard day as a parent and as a person (as the card Cara sent me this mother’s day would say).

When I put Lou down for bed tonight, I was thinking about all of the feelings of yesterday and how great today was. They were almost opposite days. Today, I woke up with her at 7:15, we were out “fishing” off the dock by 8, on the road back to KC by 10, home by 1:30. We went grocery shopping as a family and watched the Sporting game. I made a yummy dinner that we all ate well and appreciated. So I was reflecting on my day and felt like the thing that was making all of my feelings so powerful in my head is that I want to try to have another baby ourselves.

I don’t know how Kyle will feel about it, but it feels like maybe it’s time to put the idea out there in the world. We’re so much more together than we ever have been, even if that means that we’re paying down debt aggressively and don’t have piles of extra cash to spend.

I went to Joe’s wedding last night. It was great to see and catch up with his family again and I hope that the wedding video I shot comes out okay. I’m always worried about audio quality, but it was mostly out of my control and what I have seems to be mostly okay. I’m excited to see what I can string together, even if I’m dreading actually doing all the work of editing it. It’s good to get an idea of what someone would need to pay me to be able to do it.

The whole day was beautiful. I find it funny how nice of a wedding Joe had. I’m not sure how that sounds (or how it’s supposed to sound?). But it was just out of character nice with a good attention to detail. I think it probably shows how much he loves Anna and that she’ll compliment him nicely by helping him pay attention to those details.

I feel like this is the first real relationship he’s had with a Catholic whose faith rivals his own. He dated a few bad Catholics, he helped me convert (into a bad Catholic), and he converted a good Christian into a Catholic in Jacquelyn, but I can tell that Anna’s whole family background in so deeply rooted in Catholicism, as is his, and I think that will be good for him.

His wedding toast (12.5 minutes!) made it clear how truly he feels called to be her husband. It reminded me that one of the things I know to be most true about him is that when he feels discord about a decision in his heart, he is basically insufferable. I hope that he remains free of doubt about her. Seems like she deserves that.

Because of his wedding and my realizations about the night before I met him, I’ve been thinking a fair amount about our relationship. It really required so much work on my part to recover from it. He was often cruel and manipulative. In my rereading of my journals, I recently reread a chat I had with his ex-girlfriend when I was still with Steve but they were no longer together. It made me realize that a lot of those things that happened at the end of our relationship had also happened at the end of theirs – misleading people or misconstruing their statements in a way they would not have agreed to and trying to isolate her the way he did me.

Twelve years is a long time, and, surely he has matured. But how much is our twenty-one-year-old-self an indicator of who we will become?

I feel like the average reader would find it odd that I’m still friends with him, but I think that once someone is meaningful to me, I’ll continue to have concern for them as we age. I speculate that our friendship is my way of controlling the narrative of our relationship, or was at one time. I will not give someone the satisfaction of seeing me too weak to speak to them. I’ll admit that it’s a weird character trait, but I feel like it paid off this weekend.

I joked when he told me that he was going to seminary that I always knew he’d be a bad husband, but last night, I could see how he could be good to Anna. And I hope that for them both.

And finally – yikes, not writing longform journals for years and years has meant that I’m not the best writer in this form. Hopefully, my voice will be refined in the habit of writing more regularly.

Kyle got offered a contract back at Northwest. Obviously, I’m super excited and my head is spinning and I can’t get him to campus fast enough to get his signature on that contract.

We’re in the middle of the first really hot few days of the year. It’s 86 degrees and almost 9 p.m. This is my favorite kind of weather. Except today has not been my favorite kind of day.

After a long day of work that I mostly spent fretting because it looked like the problems with our car are problems with its head gasket (read: I had a panic attack over the lunch hour; update: it’s not the head gasket, it’s two fans that need to be replaced and will cost us a little over $100 to fix). I came home from work mildly satisfied because I suggested that we push our education committee meetings back to every six weeks and my committee decides it would be better to do it every two months. There sits Kyle who looks super hot and defeated. It turns out, our air conditioner isn’t kicking on.

He called a friend of ours — Greg, the guy that basically turned into our lead guy during the re-model. Greg came over and started troubleshooting the problem. After he called in a friend of his, they traced the problem to a break in the electrical line and fixed it really quickly. So it’s cooling down in here and that feels pretty good.

And I need to spend a little over $100 instead of getting a new head gasket for $1500 or a new car for .. you know .. more.

“Summer” in the school sense of the world is just around the corner, or I guess, for Kyle it’s already started. His teaching appointment ended the first of May and we found out this past week that they’re not going to be able to renew him for next year. We’re trying to look at that as a positive thing but it’s still a major bummer. We were hoping he’d get another one-year appointment at the same school to direct their debate and forensics team. I know he would have been a great fit and a great candidate for the job, but I guess it’s a little hard to compete against people with PhDs when the department looks at it as a way to add another tenure-track position to their department.

I think he’s doing better about it than I expected him to if this happened, and now we’re really back where we expected to be last August, except this time we’re not dealing with the financial strain of having just completed graduate school, or of having just moved almost 600 miles, and we’ve both been more gainfully employed for the last 9 months than ever in our life and we have a house with a mortgage payment smaller than any amount of rent we’ve ever paid and we even have some money in savings. So, all in all, it could be worse.