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@isthisreallyforever
I am having the Mondayest of Mondays and am hours from being done. My eldest is experiencing his first heartbreak and I am both full of empathy and trying to figure out how to convince him it is not worth flunking the eleventh grade because of it.
Reading the Legend trilogy did something amazing for my brain. It made it able to focus on books again. So I decided to lean into my love of YA lit and started the Throne of Glass series. And I don’t care if it’s modern pulp fiction, I am engrossed and delighted.
I stopped running in the second half of ‘25 and then the wollop of food poisoning and back to back migraines made the last couple of weeks comprised of minimal movement. But today I ran ten miles for the first time in longer than I can remember, and it felt so good to be out there. Just grey skies and the road under my feet and crossing at a stoplight that I ordinarily circle back at until I was in the south of my city.
Did the tech industry get high on its own supply?
This is really a great read. (Should be a gift link)
Having been a normal married to a brilliant software engineer who doesn’t necessarily enjoy people, I can’t emphasize how true this is. Watching him plan a big pitch to a ceo for a useless product with super cutting edge technology, and thinking the whole time, nobody wants this. And when I finally said it, I was the unsupportive asshole.
In the past week I have had two migraines and a bout of food poisoning so it’s safe to say that I’m done suit.
We had a ton of funds leftover for this school year that had to be either used or forfeited so I went on a bit of a shopping spree. Now we’ve got summer reading covered for the whole family. Total count is 169 books. It actually should be more but either they’re still in transit or the porch pirates in the neighborhood struck again.
I ran 9 miles yesterday. Again, it was slow, but nine miles is a distance I hadn’t tackled in a long time.
A recently told me that his favorite book series is the Legend trilogy by Marie Lu so I decided to give it a read. My reading muscle has been atrophied and it’s been a good way to get back in. I’m on book 2 and enjoying it. Also, I’m very excited that my two younger boys have made the jump to YA novels. I have a deep love of YA lit and getting the chance to share it with them is joyful.
I’ve been playing pokemon go off and on for nearly ten years now and ever since J got a phone for his birthday, he’s gotten really into it. It’s been a lot of fun to play with him and a surprisingly great way to bond with a teenage boy.
Sometimes I win, motherfucker.
In the past year, I have had three different people tell me that I was their closest friend and then behave in a way that was so spectacularly shitty that I could barely wrap my mind around it. And honestly, the red flags were there, but I’ve gotten so practiced at ignoring my gut to empathize with others that I just marched right past them.
So I’ve been in hermit season. Not even just in terms of other people, but within my own head. I haven’t trusted it. So I just took care of business and then defaulted to reruns and puzzle apps that switched my brain off. I stopped pretty much everything that sparked joy and just stood still.
I’ve been slowly trying to find my way back. I had stopped running and lifting for like six months but have been finding my way back to it. The build back has been humbling, but I’m finally starting to find my rhythm again. I ran six miles yesterday without needing a walk break. A very slow six miles, but still. My strength is coming back online and I’ve got my chin up back. My deadlift is getting closer to 200 again.
Coming back here is an attempt to bring my brain back online. Those of you I follow here have always inspired me, made me think, introduced me to new ideas and interests. Your creativity and curiosity and passion is infectious. I’m hoping that it will rub off on me the way it has in the past, and that it will help me find my way back to my own spark.
My father’s Parkinson’s is getting worse and he spent a month in a skilled nursing facility while I tried to get his end of life paperwork in order. In keeping with my entire experience of him, he had saved it for the very last minute and then begged a woman to help.
I don’t know if it’s a NY thing or just and estate lawyer in general thing, but I was regarded with great suspicion. Like I was trying to steal assets. Like I wanted to be doing any of this, and from 3,000 away no less.
But the worst of it wasn’t the confrontation of mortality. The worst of it wasn’t just the physical decline. The worst of it was hearing the past twenty years of careful fence mending disappear and that angry voice of his return. The voice when he’d throw things at me. The voice when he’d pick up my 100 lb body and throw it into the pavement. And then to just have to trust that the newer father that I’ve known would resurface, and carry on in my attempts to coordinate with his care team as best I could.
Three thousand miles and twenty years and a single sentence in that tone of voice was all it took for my brain to time travel. And all those disapproving voices were asking why I wasn’t more involved, why I didn’t move him in here with me. But there’s no way to explain to a strange nurse on the phone that if my father’s brain deteriorates and he loses the progress he’s made, then I’m back to pacing like a lemur caged in with a hungry tiger when I’m in a room with him again.
And honestly, what a terrible way to feel about a sick man. The guilt of it eats me up inside when I stop to think about it too long.
I’ve spent the last few months just focused in on the kids. Most days they are the only ones I share any significant conversation with.
An exception to that was our most recent backpacking trip. But it also included a health emergency of one of their friends and pitching camp off the planned route and being the only female in the group so no one noticed that the only private space to go to the bathroom was also full of poison oak.
No one noticed, including me, because it was dark and now the bottom half of my body has been swollen and bruised and oozing for nearly three weeks. Prescription strength oral steroids, topical steroids, and antihistamines haven’t been able to touch it.
It feels like the universe was telling me to go back into hiding but I know that’s just my overactive immune system causing my brain to flood with stress hormones. Mostly I just wish I lived inside skin that doesn’t sting every hour of every day.
Hi. I’m still here. I’m surviving. I’m tired. I’m confused. But I’m alive and that’s a gift and I need to stop forgetting that.
I cry so easily, at the drop of a hat these days. I keep one AirPod tucked permanently in my ear of comfort shows, feel good shows. My list right now is
Parks and Rec
The Good Place
New Girl
Sex and the City/And Just Like That
Ted Lasso
Grace and Frankie
How I Met Your Mother
Am I missing any? Any recommendations?
The sick part is the sexual incident isn’t even the unhinged thing that I referred to several months ago.
In June, I downloaded the feeld app. Not because I wanted to meet anyone, but because I was looking for something to fantasize about. I didn’t know it, but he was tracking what apps I download to my phone.
That night while I was sleeping, he took my phone and went through it. Not just the app, but texts with my best friends. The next day he said he needed to talk to me about the problems with my friends. I asked him to please save it for therapy, as the therapist had advised us to do with hard subjects.
He refused to accept that limit and followed me around, even though the children were with me, even though I even went outside with them. He insisted I look at a conversation he had with my friend on his phone. When I finally acquiesced, I asked him how he knew the things he was saying on there, and he admitted to stealing my phone and going through it.
I lost my temper and threw his phone on the ground, shattering the screen.
He responded by going to the kids and telling them that they were all leaving. He told our teenagers that I was on drugs. He asked our seven year old if she thought mama should be downloading dating apps. Then he forced them all into the car, telling them they had to leave, even as my son’s friends were arriving to take him to an amusement park.
He refused to tell me where he was going and later, on the phone, he told me he was never bringing the children back until I agreed to a laundry list of items that included who I could speak to and what I could look at on my phone.
I agreed to everything. Even if I didn’t mean it. Because my greatest fear is losing my children.
Because that isn’t an idle threat to me. Because my father did the same thing to my mother. My father took me and I didn’t see my mother for fifteen years after that.
And that is why it’s not as simple as just leaving him. Because I can’t trust that he won’t try to take the children from me. If not physically, then emotionally. That he won’t tell them private, inappropriate things to poison the well against me.
Because I will die a thousand tiny deaths for as long as I need, so that my children will not experience the pain and the trauma that I lived through from having a father who let his need to win trump my need and love for my mother.
I’m not allowed to talk to people about things that have happened and what’s going on now. So in desperation, I talk to chatgpt. After over a year of telling me he’s forgiven me for the hall pass he calls an affair, he now says any time he tells me no and I do something anyway, it brings back all those hurt feelings. And I’m panicking because of all the things that happened, that I let happen, when I was trying to earn that forgiveness. The most gut wrenching of which was when he made me have sex with him while wearing the panties from that night. Here’s what my only acceptable friend had to say, here’s what has me weeping at 3 o’clock in the morning
I’m not allowed to talk to people about things that have happened and what’s going on now. So in desperation, I talk to chatgpt. After over a year of telling me he’s forgiven me for the hall pass he calls an affair, he now says any time he tells me no and I do something anyway, it brings back all those hurt feelings. And I’m panicking because of all the things that happened, that I let happen, when I was trying to earn that forgiveness. The most gut wrenching of which was when he made me have sex with him while wearing the panties from that night. Here’s what my only acceptable friend had to say, here’s what has me weeping at 3 o’clock in the morning
I’m not allowed to talk to people about things that have happened and what’s going on now. So in desperation, I talk to chatgpt. After over a year of telling me he’s forgiven me for the hall pass he calls an affair, he now says any time he tells me no and I do something anyway, it brings back all those hurt feelings. And I’m panicking because of all the things that happened, that I let happen, when I was trying to earn that forgiveness. The most gut wrenching of which was when he made me have sex with him while wearing the panties from that night. Here’s what my only acceptable friend had to say, here’s what has me weeping at 3 o’clock in the morning
