“It sounds a paradox, but kindness and good intentions can be an insidious path to destruction. Sometimes doing what seems right is wrong, and can cause harm.”

– Terry Goodkind 🕊️

GOAL REMINDERS:

ANTI-DEMENTIA REMINDERS:

Stuff coming up: March 14th Neighbors Coming Over

Next year: Jan-May 15th Turn in 990.

VALUES REFLECTION REMINDERS:

SAT Faith in myself. 🎵 SUN Unity, feeling comfortable in a family. MON Proactivity, know what I want. TUE Teamwork smarter group work. WED Connection, sharing my passion with the world/accepting others gifts. THR Purpose know what I can do. FRI Creativity thinking of new ways to do better.

HEALTH JOURNAL:

Mental Health: Monday – My mind feels a bit foggy and negative, I’m assuming it’s just because I have a moderately bad sore throat working its way through my life. It makes me wonder if it’s from stress or randomly happening at the same time as the stress of birthdays and our dog’s hospice/impending death, I’ll never really know. I feel like it’s random though, but almost a positive, because I don’t want to be pressured to support other people right now, and being sick pretty well ensures that I won’t over-extend myself that way. Thursday – I feel so positive about life, I don’t know if it was a rebound from being sick or just because I passed the day with my friends yesterday, but I do feel really hopeful about continuing to teach science/martial arts where ever I am and doing my best.

Physical Health: Monday – I’m pretty ill, not so much I want to go to the hospital, but enough I am taking anti-biotics for a sore throat. I want to be better already, I didn’t love being sick without kids, but I hate being sick with my kids around. I want to take them outside, I want to do their music lesson, I want to do my best, but I find I can’t, I find I can do things like dishes and laundry, but some stuff just becomes too much. Tuesday – A day later and I feel so much better, still a little sick, but it’s amazing to me how when my physical body is better my mental health is automatically much better. I do know that isn’t the case for everyone and I hope more can be done to help out people with ongoing depression in the future, but for me being sick is like a little taste of depression. I just extend the current hopelessness into forever mentally and all my dreams seem silly and pointless, doom seems inevitable and interacting with other people seems unfairly torturous.

Social Health: Monday – I miss being alone while sick, not having to smile, being able to watch movies and take naps and skip meals, I don’t like having to get up to help when I would rather rest, I don’t like listening to arguments and not knowing how to solve them when I’m sick, I don’t like the parade of illness from the kids to me, back to the kids, trying to calculate when I will be back to our playdates and classes and when we have to call off. Worst for me is my dad, since his dog is dying he wants to discuss grave digging and the dog and his headaches and I really don’t care to discuss any of it, I can’t take the dog’s tumor out, I don’t care about a grave for the dog but I don’t want to argue either, I don’t care about his headaches if he doesn’t want to drink water or take an anti-headache pill or see a doctor, if he doesn’t care to action about his health I don’t care that it is still the same, I had a lot of health problems as a child and my parents left me on my own to grow up, make money and see doctors and pursue treatments to resolve them. I hate how my dad wants to be babied and be completely free, he wants me to get his water cup and then takes off to dig a grave in the yard, he wants to not find solutions for his problems but not listen to anyone else’s possible solutions, maybe a better person would have compassion for that, but I sure don’t, being civil is my absolute best I can offer. I hope to move in the future, but my husband hasn’t decided between this state or another move so therefore it’s far away mentally without either a timeline or a location. I’m grateful that my dad let us stay in his home so we could move into the state easier, but pretty much every day I realize I want more space from him, much more than I want a discount or more physical space. Tuesday – I realize now that although it may be good long term to get another house and space, what I really need is just my own mental permission to hold emotional space from my father when he is being paranoid or negative or critical, I can do it right here in the same house as long as I let myself do it. Boundaries again, I should revisit Sarah Knight or the new book about it… Thursday – Everything feels different when I am not sick, I met a lot of new friends yesterday, I had new friends over, the little boy said “awesome” about our hay, which made me happy, it’s so messy and unfinished, but I was happy he was happy.

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LIFE JOURNAL:

Saturday: Last Saturday we picked up my dad at the airport and tried a new burger place. This Saturday I was really sick, I had a sore throat that hurt all the time, not when I was eating or drinking, my eye got swollen closed with tears, I was just crying and leaking mucus like a baby, I was able to eat and drink, but breathing was tiring and I had to find the right positions to make it easier. I think the breathing thing is because I have asthma, I think when I am 100% healthy my breathing is like 80% good, but who knows.

Sunday: Last Sunday I was starting to get crazy overwhelmed with two birthdays coming up in a row, but with one down I feel much better. I guess I know why I hate parties, I feel like I am going to ruin them, which hasn’t happened much, I don’t recall exactly why I feel that way, but maybe it was a real, early traumatic event because it’s a very strong feeling, not a medium-strong negative belief feeling.

We got chicks for my son’s birthday, they are super cute, but my dad was moody about it and that makes me angry, I mentally remind myself people should be allowed to feel bad, but when he does it, it makes me really angry. The cycle is like, something great happens for someone else, and instead of being neutral or supportive he throws a bit fit about his fears and his problems, seemingly trying to steal the attention away, I don’t blow up, but the joy is deflated and it makes me really angry that he is not towing the normal social line of when you don’t ruin other people’s fun. As a child, I didn’t think about it, but as an adult, I don’t know if my dad isn’t autistic or something else really different socially. As a child, I hated my mom for leaving my dad after 10 years of marriage, but as an adult, I don’t see how she could have stayed.

Monday: Last week I finished painting a griffin, I thought I was being lazy, but now I can see I was already getting sick and especially flagging at night time when I am already naturally tired. This week I spent Monday halfway sick and halfway doing school, theatre class on Expressionism, Epic Theatre, some restrictions in England from Walpole in 1737, sound design, and wardrobe staff functions. We also covered commas, their start as breathing room for actors, the “eats, shoots and leaves” example, and some other English basics. My son is hitting graphs in math hard and that’s cool, that happened way later when I was growing up and now it’s a first-grade thing.

Tuesday: Last week I watered the lawn, weeded it further, I’ve neglected it since then, relying on a rainy week to help me. I’m recovering from being ill, but I really hope to do some basic check-ins on the garden progress so that I don’t lose all the progress. We covered Bach in school, it was really cool, I was craving Bach for some reason and I didn’t take the time to just hear some.

I also love this kid’s song: “Banana Pants”, I’ve been keeping it to myself, but today I’ll just say it, I love Banana Pants.

I had a few good hours today, now it’s almost noon and I feel like throwing up, but I’m glad that I had a few good hours and I’m optimistic that I’ll feel better tomorrow. Even though I’ve been sick a bit over the last two years, it’s been better than when I used to have food allergies and IBS, and it’s better than when I was a sickly child with weird allergies, migraines, asthma attacks, and lingering colds and flu almost constantly.

After feeling good in the morning, I was dog tired for a few hours, then I felt really bad, then great, it’s been an interesting amount of variety. I made it outside just to water really quickly the patio, the grass, the bamboo and check on the plants, but of course, it rained later, so I could have not watered… at times it looks horrible, at times it looks beautiful and sometimes just plain and mediocre, but it feels like the space is improving no matter what plants end up there, it feels like things are getting better bit by bit.

With the lawn, it’s still super patchy, but in some places where the new grass is coming in, it’s coming in much thicker than it has before, and in the places, there were a lot of weeds there are a lot fewer clovers or dandelions, and the grass is very green whereas last year it was pink with a red thread fungus, so it’s better than last year, but that doesn’t mean I won’t have to reseed… I have been resting up while sick the past four days, and today it feels like my mind is just now “restarting”… which is a weird feeling, knowing I’ve been alive for four days, but just thinking for one…

Ordered some bent creeping grass, about a pound, hoping that it will go in well with our cold-ish weather, we just did bermudagrass without thinking, but if the bentgrass will take it would be better.

Wednesday: Last week I got through a stressful beach birthday, this week was another birthday, but more relaxed I hoped I had done enough and knew I didn’t have everything perfect and just went with it… I tried to learn all the rest of the Hebrew alphabet because I know my friends are leaving soon, and it’s heart-wrenching.

א (alef), ב (beit) , ג (gimel), ד, (daled), ה (hei), ו, (vav), ז (Zain), ח, (get), ט (tet), י (yod), כ (kaf), ל (lamed), מ (mem), נ (noon), ס (sameh), ע (Ain), פ (pey), צ( tsadik), ק (kuf), ר (reish) , ש (shin), ת (taf).

Today one girl’s father said to her, that “the whales will be here all the time you are here”, so I knew then that she was going home to her mother in the summer, and that he would miss her too and that he loved her, it was so sweet. I was glad to be a host to our scout group at that moment, many people here have seen the whales or don’t care to see them, but there are some people who haven’t seen them, and hosting the group at the beach gives them that extra chance to see the whales migrate by through the spring, that moment made everything worth it.

Thursday: Last week I got sick with a super sore throat and we found out the dog was also ill, this week I’m spitting up mucus, but I feel four thousand percent better than last week, which didn’t feel great. It felt so not great that I jumped on the chance to take some antibiotics my sister had from her dental surgery, I don’t always take illegal prescription drugs, but when I do I take antibiotics! I felt so much better and my stomach didn’t get messed up this time, which was a consideration. I’m grieving my good friends moving away even as I’m continuing to engage with new people for my kids and for the scout group, old me wouldn’t have done that, new me knows that these new people are not replacements for the old people, but rather people who are “sharing tricycles” with me for now. It’s not that I don’t want them to be special to me, but your heart won’t just take anyone in the way your mouth will eat junk food. The heart makes bad choices, but it has some boundaries at least. The dog is also doing better, which I don’t know how to feel about that, I don’t know if it’s worth letting my guard down or not, because it was super super almost deady last week. My son’s birthday, it was the first one post pandemic, he had two pandemic ones and this last one right at the tail end… it felt right, his first birthday was just a cake slice, his second he had a cake at home with us, his third a real beach party and then a dinner at home the next day with two cakes… we bought more clutter toys than I like, but it didn’t feel wrong, it felt right having three years of balloons, cakes and toys this year after having no fun for so long.

I didn’t feel like a bad mom, which surprised me. His photo book didn’t come in time, but at least I made it and it’s shipping already. His drums didn’t come in time, but we got an unexpected mountain of toys from friends and family. Just in general when I watched him play I knew that he had enough friend time, enough beach time and enough rest at home time, none of those things were true until this year. But it’s because of my friends from Isreal who are leaving, they got me out of the hole I was living in, they made me come out once a week and they helped me hope my home could be pretty someday, that it could be a blueberry farm, that life could be worth living. I shouldn’t have to lean on another family to have hope and dreams and try to live well, but I needed to. And now that they are leaving I’m happy, sad and ashamed, and humbled. I’m happy because I think they are going to be happier elsewhere, sad because I will miss being with them in person, ashamed it took their cheer to lift my spirits to hope at all, humbled that they would have liked to help me. My mixed-up feelings are even more mixed up than that, I know I am going to cry at some point, but I don’t know when. I’m thankful that they started me teaching martial arts again, grateful they taught me Hebrew. I hope they will find a place they can all be at peace and thriving. There are a lot of things different about us, but some things I can’t put my finger on that are the same and I wish I knew more about the details and the significance of that, but what I know was that around them I was able to be the person I want to be more easily and it didn’t wear off when we parted, it lingered.

Friday: Last week I learned the legal pandemic restrictions in our area would soon expire and I pushed through being sick to quickly water the patio garden (even though it rained afterward).

Each time I read that the bamboo is stressed but alive, I think “me too”. The week felt tumultuous, having new people over is a huge thing for me, that happened Thursday and it went well, meeting a ton of new people Wednesday is getting easier because the setting is fun and controlled and I can literally just walk off into the ocean if I don’t like someone.

On Wednesday I was notified that one of the gardeners from our bulb challenge two weeks ago had bloomed their Narcissist flowers, I was so excited, but I didn’t say anything cool or encouraging, because I don’t have the words fast enough in person. I just give a confused look or a bland statement at least 66% of the time in person.

Going through the garden with new people is fun because they see the garden a different way, similar to how I did when I first met this garden, but differently as well. They infuse me with new hope and new ideas and new enthusiasm. I’ve got to get the slug traps baited, I’ve admitted I need to do that, I bought them, I received them, I’ve got to do that soon… for my own integrity.

We golfed on the green (semi against my will, I was pushed by a cute four-year-old) on Thursday and it’s a lot different using it compared to looking at it. I need to trim the grass down, I have more seeds to seed the bare spots. I should mark the curb so I can keep that at 2″ as I bring the rest down to .125″ as best I can… It made me sad though because I built the course to entertain another little boy who is leaving. All the sweetness this week has been very bitter-sweet, I wanted to grow rhubarb for my friends who are leaving, I still have one who is staying who wants some, but it’s become bitter-sweet, as opposed to incredibly exciting.

My lavender is sprouting now, after many times trying (and failing!) I have the cold stratification down, you need moist media for the seeds in the fridge, but it can’t mold, so the secret is airflow, not a ton, but some airflow. I don’t know how to feel about the garden, my life, my future, the house, but I do know that I’ll try to take better care of the garden this year, I’ll try to follow up with the projects I’ve started and if someday I can’t, I will have whatever joy or benefit I was able to have when I was here in Hawaii.

I am jealous of my friends who are moving, that they are going to the unknown, while I stay here in the known, that they may find somewhere they all feel at peace, that they may live in their sielumaisema, while I like the garden here and the people here, I am not in the place I most love (Yosemite) and I don’t think I will be since my husband hates snow. Maybe I can have my own writer’s cabin someday as a maid or something? I would have to get better at cleaning.

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Poem for the road?

☕

I can’t light no more of your darkness
All my pictures seem to fade to black and white
I’m growin’ tired, and time stands still before me
Frozen here on the ladder of my life

Too late to save myself from falling
I took a chance and changed your way of life
But you misread my meanin’ when I met you
Closed the door and left me blinded by the light

Don’t let the sun go down on me
Although I search myself, it’s always someone else I see
I’d just allow a fragment of your life to wander free
But losin’ everything is like the sun goin’ down on me

I can’t find, oh, the right romantic line
But see me once and see the way I feel
Don’t discard me just because you think I mean you harm
But these cuts I have, oh, they need love to help them heal

Don’t let the sun go down on me
Although I search myself, it’s always someone else I see
I’d just allow a fragment of your life to wander free
But losin’ everything is like the sun goin’ down on me

– Bernie Taupin

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