I don't want Florida's weather, please send it back home.

It is going to be a short post because it is the end of the day. It has been hot and humid. Surprisingly, my plants outside are doing ok. The Japanese beetles have slowed down their destruction of my rose bushes out front. They have yet to discover the one on the back deck. I am not completely sure what's brought about this change. Perhaps my flicking them off the bushes in the morning has been helping, I don't know.

I have been sorely tempted to take the boys over to the park so that we might spend some time in the water cooling off. The problem is, pretty much everybody and their brother has that idea, and there's still a pandemic going on. So, today I let them take extra long showers. They seemed to be refreshed after that. If nothing else, they were clean and smelled good. (Cuddle Bear is beginning to have a distinct scent to himself now as puberty is sinking its claws into him. I had wished we had a little more time before we had to work on stuff like finding deodorant that agrees with his skin and such. I was wrong.)

Summer session is challenging. Cuddle Bear is in Extended School Year program and visits the school four days a week for an hour and a half. They're practicing social distancing by having two students per classroom and the staff all have masks. He is being transported to school in a car with the driver wearing a mask and the car is cleaned up between students (each student being transported alone). They're not requiring masks for the students at this time. Beloved and I are talking about getting the boys a set of masks for when the school year begins and they are out in public more. Right now, we're home 99% of the time.

The big challenge with summer session is Snuggle Bug. He is in the Summer Skills program. They are doing that via distance learning. It's a little easier because I'm not rapidly switching between two different grade levels to do academic support for. At the same time, Snuggle Bug is attempting really hard to have fun instead of learn. He makes silly faces at the camera randomly. He throws out random jokes or starts making duck noises to make people laugh. He's a real character and trying to rein that in has been really hard. But, when he does get to work, his work is an unexpected approach. Their current project is planning how to run an imaginary ice cream truck. The teacher asked for songs the truck would play, he was first in the list with a suggestion: AC/DC's Shoot to Thrill. 

It's been an adventure to say the least.

Not quite right in the head...

I was ambushed on FB by a video of an ambush. I could theoretically track it down but I don't think it would do my brain much good to do it. There's enough videos of this going down, I'm fairly sure that just a search string of "BLM police ambush" would bring it up. There was a black couple driving in their car away from where the principle activity of the protest was going on. They were going away. Neither of them were doing anything of particular suspicion except driving while black. Their car windows were up. The driver's intent was on navigating traffic as the passenger was staring ahead, presumably looking out for pedestrians because there was a lot of foot traffic.

A police officer in riot gear walks up to the passenger side door and starts banging on the window. The passenger looks over, clearly alarmed. The driver is doing their best to keep driving despite the distraction. In a matter of seconds, they swarmed the car. A pole weapon of some sort was used to puncture the tires of the car on the passenger side. They attempted to force open the doors of the car (which leads me to believe they were locked, it looked like a newer model car and those auto lock the doors once you go above 5 miles an hour and won't unlock until the car is put into park, regardless of if you slow back down below the threshold). Then they broke the window on the passenger side and reached in to wrench open the door. As they did this, they broke open the window on the driver's side. The passenger was dragged bodily from the car and thrown to the ground. The driver of the car was tazered multiple times from multiple angles. I couldn't watch the rest of the video.

The majority of the "officers" engaged in the activity here were not clearly marked as police. The only reason why I knew the one who walked up to the car and started hammering on the window with his fist was a police officer was because he was accompanied by a police officer in tactical gear carrying a round style riot shield with the word police clearly printed in bright yellow across the back of his vest. The rest of them, gods only know who they were. But they were carrying weapons. They ambushed this car in traffic leading away from the protest and dragged these citizens out.

I don't know where this happened except it was somewhere within the United States. I would assume Portland, WA because that's where the majority of this bullshit has been happening. The sight of it, however, looked like it could have been downtown of the city just north of us here, of any city in the country. These people were not being violent. They were not breaking the law. They weren't given the opportunity to "obey the police." They were ambushed and violently assaulted under color of law by unmarked agents of the government. Because they were black and in the wrong place.

Witnessing this brutality second hand triggered my ptsd to some extent. I got a little spacey and had a hard time thinking clearly. It brought up memories of my parents brutalizing my brothers and I was helpless to stop them. I am a bit more oriented in the present. I am saddened that my trauma won't let me act in some fashion to stop this. I am terrified what this means for people who would be branded political dissidents. I have the luxury of being fairly inobtrusive because I am a white, middle aged woman. I have over the years moved from wearing my fancy headcoverings to just a bandanna. It helps me blend in better. It keeps me from having people slow down and give me dirty/threatening looks when I'm out taking a walk. I dress relatively conservatively. That with the bandanna has people assuming that I am one of the local more conservative Christian mothers.

I, however, am not what they assume. I don't know when they're going to start coming for people who are mentally ill. I don't know when they're going to start coming for the people who oppose Trump and his party. I don't know when they're going to start coming for the people with autism and other disorders. But I have studied history. I have watched this since the inception of the Department of Homeland Security. They're going to come for us. They were just biding their time until the people who fought against fascism were dying off.

The Boomer generation will write this off as a mad woman's ramblings. They'll call me a "snowflake" or something else stupid. Now is not the time to try to reason with them. It is clear that they have been duped (willfully or not) into thinking that fascism will bring back what they consider their golden era of their youth. Now is the time to pour sand into the gears. Now is the time to lose paperwork. Now is the time to sabotage the machine. Until someone comes and puts them down. 

Of course this has to happen in the midst of a pandemic. Gods help us.

Ramblings

I feel like garbage right now. I have a migraine. My mood is a dumpster fire because of a combo of depression and ptsd bullshit. I just find myself wanting to have a shot of whiskey and smoke a cigarette. Because of the cocktail of medications I'm on, I can't have the whiskey. And I can't have the cigarette because of my asthma. I still find myself wanting them. I don't even know why I want the cigarette. The last time I had one, I think I was 20. I didn't smoke for even a year. 

We're still doing distance learning. Summer school is a major pain in the ass. It's not the teachers. It's not the tech. It's not the students. It's all of it and none of it at the same time. I am just exhausted from being "on duty" all the time for the last several months. I had considered home schooling the kids at one point in time. I have learned from this experience that I clearly do not have the patience, skill, or spoons to do it. I might have before the bipolar came along and drop kicked me in the head. I might not have had it in me, we'll never know.

In the news, I learned that one third of the population of the USA believes the Covid-19 death toll is overinflated. That horrified me as much as the sheer number of people I see going about their business as if nothing is wrong. Way back in April, more people were masked up and practicing safety measures. But now, most of the people I see out and about are not. It'd be one thing if they were practicing social distancing, but it's not happening as much as it should be. As a result, we stay in our home most of the time and only go outside to the front yard. No trips to the park this year so far. The kids are not happy about it but they're resigned to it.

I have no idea what school is going to look like. I don't know if I have the fortitude to continue distance learning in the way that we're doing it right now. But I don't want my kids catching this thing. It has been claimed by some people that Covid-19 doesn't impact the younger age bracket. That's a lie. There's been a bunch of lies like that told by high profile figures. As a result, we've got 1/3 of the population thinking that Covid-19 is just the same as a bad cold. 

And all of this is before you get into the Black Lives Matter business. (I am pro Black Lives Matter, if you don't like that, stop reading my blog.) I just don't have the energy to post about that right now. Maybe I'll be able to summon something up to post about it tomorrow.

Screw Bipolar with a Rusty Chainsaw.

It was literally the day after the solstice when my depression began to rear its head. Here I am a few weeks later, I feel exhausted, burned out, and like I'm a complete failure as a parent. It's clearly my depression talking. It's clearly the fact that my screwed up brain chemistry is cycling my mood downwards again and complex emotional trauma is spurring it on. I had this weird thought that I was going to be able to write again and get myself a bit of work going doing readings. After all, I was sort of managing it in April. I didn't plan for my brain to say "Fuck this shit, I'm done."

It's been nearly two weeks since I have written in my daily journal. My planner is all a mess because I haven't been keeping it updated all month. My daily routines are screwed up, even the new ones that I established with the attempt to keep the kids on top of their academics. I need some time that is relaxing but that's impossible to find. I need some time to get housework done, but it's hard to juggle that compared to the need to monitor what the kids are doing. Since school's been out of session, boredom has been driving Snuggle Bug to making some reckless decisions in an effort to alleviate his boredom. That's made it harder to keep track of things.

I don't know what to write. The longer I go without writing, the more readership I lose on my blogs that are work oriented. But I'm stuck in this  mental fog that makes writing relateable content really hard. I'm at this place emotionally where I feel like no one wants to read my work because it just isn't any good. I have all of the garbage that my parents said about my career goals ringing in my ears right now and it's pretty damn awful. (Thankfully, I'm not hallucinating them haranguing me about how I'm a failed investment because of my college debt and the fact that I don't have a career that's making big money right now. It's just all memories getting triggered.)

I was less a cherished child and more a potential meal ticket if I made it big in my writing when it became clear that I actually had some talent for it. That was when they started to 'sorta' support me when it came to my writing. Before that, it was made very clear to me that my value as a person was weight against what I could materially contribute to the family and that I owed them a debt of 15k because of the cost of my birth. I was told that I was an investment and that I had better pay out well or I'd have hell to pay for it. When I went off to college, they expected me to leave Beloved and marry a doctor or lawyer (and thereby become their meal ticket because I'd have married into money). When my mother wasn't working to sabotage my relationship with Beloved, she was trying to get me to consider leaving him for an arranged marriage with some rich guy in Texas who was looking for a young, pretty wife who could cook. (The bitter irony that my mother who spent all her time in my youth telling me that I wasn't ever going to find a husband because I was a bad cook in her eyes and a lazy housekeeper wasn't lost on me in her efforts to arrange this union.)

So, I'm depressed and having all of that garbage come up while I am trying to deal with kids who are about at their limit for staying home all the time. The park is open, but if we go there they'll want to use the playground equipment. I don't have the supplies to clean it all off before they use it. So, we haven't gone over there since last autumn when the weather was nice. They're beginning to wear a rut into the front yard as they ride their bikes around it. My attempts at gardening are going poorly. Some of it is the heat and some of it is just ... Well, I've been depressed and the weather's been awful for gardening, so I haven't been doing much outside with it.

I don't know what I'm going to do. I have to figure out something to get me out of this spiral before it gets bad. I just have no idea what it is going to take.

What the actual fuck?

I broke contact with my parents after my grandparents died. They're toxic people. I'm just going to call a spade a spade here. They're toxic and dangerous to the mental health of the people who are vulnerable around them (like children). This is the second time I broke contact. 

The first time was after my mother decided it was a good idea to threaten the welfare of my nieces in order to force me not to allow their mother (who is a good and decent person despite whatever garbage you've possibly heard my mother spew) to watch my young children. I literally couldn't sleep that night because I was so distressed by her threat. So I emailed my father and explained in great detail what happened and stated that if anything happened to any of my nieces and I had reason to believe that they were involved I was going to go to the police.

My wonderful mother proceeded to bad mouth my sister-in-law even more and told the rest of the family that SHE had said that, and that SHE had driven me away from the family. Cue five years of not speaking or dealing with anyone on that side of the family except for an aunt and my grandparents. Then my grandparents got sick and I was told by the dead relatives that the family needed me. I put out an email to my parents asking what was going on (they didn't reply) and I went to my grandparents. I informed them that I was back in contact with my parents. My grandfather wept with relief. This was right before he informed me that he inoperable brain cancer.

An awkward year followed with Mom doing everything she could to keep me out of the loop. When my grandfather died, I was literally the last person she called and she made sure to tell me so. I stuck around for my grandmother, whose dementia was so advanced that she was in bad shape and barely recognized me. That was when Mom started taking shots at me again and doing stuff in an attempt to trigger my PTSD symptoms. It didn't work, she was clumsy about it. I got mad. I then decided that after my grandmother passed on, I was gone. Because my mother was still trying her damndest to psychologically abuse and manipulate me.

I stayed connected with her for a time on FB because I worried that I was literally going to be the last person to know if my dad dropped dead. Then I stopped giving a fuck about that when they showed up after the fact and informed me that he had heart surgery and she was having him carry a heavy box full of random shit (christmas presents and whatever else) as he was in the recovery phase of it all. To make it even more grotesque the goddamn woman was all but laughing when she was talking about my father's surgery. They then lamented about their financial woes and dropped hints that I should plan on taking care of them because they have no retirement. They looked around the apartment to try to figure out what valuables I had, but nothing was on display. They assumed that because I was writing and publishing books that I had money to give them.

They thought I was their meal ticket. The same people who called me a failed investment when I couldn't get work immediately after college came sniffing for money. They tried to pull on my heart strings and they got nothing. They said that they were having financial difficulties and I answered, "Yep, it's rough out there." They went radio silent until my 40th birthday, when my mother sent me the present of a guilt trip for my birthday via FB. Again radio silence.

My eldest niece moves off the farm with her fiancee. A few weeks later, my insane mother sends me a Trump rally video. They're straight up Trump supporters. It is an embarrassment and a shame. My paternal great-great-grandfather saw the writing on the wall during the Weimar Republic and took his family and fled to the US right about the time that things were preparing the stage for the rise of the Nazis. My great-grandfather fought in WWI. My grandfather would have fought in WWII except for the fact that he wasn't permitted due to regulations (he was a year too young for the draft). My paternal side of the family here in the US did not support the Nazis or the German-American Bundt (the pro-Nazi wing here in the US).

So, to see my parents supporting a fascist piece of garbage like Trump is humiliating and I am glad that my grandparents didn't live to see it happen. I don't know what I am supposed to expect out of this rally  video. I don't care either. I've decided that I am going to block them on FB. This will likely cause ripples. I don't care about that either. Only a few relatives have reached out to me from that side of the family to see if we're ok in the midst of these years of silence. A cousin of mine is getting married, we got an invitation. We're not going. Because my mother will create a scene. This is, after all, the woman who told me that everyone would think I was a whore if I wore a red wedding dress (which I wanted since I was a girl) but decided to wear a chinzy, cheaply made, tacky black "evening gown" to my wedding and attempted to gaslight me into believing it was navy blue.

I'm sure that there's a statistically good chance that she might read this. I've posted links back to my FB with public rants. If she is reading this, I hope she realizes that she's as good as dead to me and so is my father for supporting and encouraging her to continue to abuse people at her leisure. I tried twice to have a serious relationship conversation with my parents about their behavior and the toxicity in the relationship. It got turned into "you're crazy" and "look how you're upsetting your poor mother" with a few threats to possibly throw me out (this happened while I was still living under their thumb).

But you know what, when I got really sick and lost my job because of how sick I was, they threw me out. And had the gall to claim that it was because I wasn't contributing financially to the household. Never mind that my brother could sit on his unemployed ass and play video games all day. Never mind that my other brother could ignore his family when he was over seas or on leave, choosing to stay at my parents house and play video games all day. And when he was over seas he was drinking away a paycheck that should have been getting bankrolled to support his wife and three children. But I was the "problem child".

So, in short, fuck my parents. To Hel with them and everyone else who says I should forgive or reconcile with them. I don't fucking support abusers, especially MY abusers. I don't truck with wanna be Nazis who bring shame on the entire damn family with their bullshit. And I sure as hell am not going to allow them access to my children. Not over my dead body. Go fuck up your lives, mom and dad. Go make everything about you when your lack of effort and drive, your lack of responsibility, and your tendency to blame everyone else for your fuck ups comes back to bite you on the ass. I'm done with you. I don't care if you die or not. You can take all of my stuff that you've been holding hostage (including my inheritance from my grandparents and my great-grandmother) and fucking burn it. My dignity is worth more than that pile of stuff. My sanity is worth more than that pile of stuff.

I'm sorry, mom, I turned out a lady instead of white trash like you. I know you tried your hardest but you couldn't break me.