Change in all the areas of my life...

The literature I have read said that kids over 10 definitely spread it to the same level as adults. I worry about the autoimmune conditions triggering. Kiddo has eczema and asthma and a few others.

We are undecided if we will let Kiddo interact with vaccinated people if he isn't yet.
 
Ahh, my kiddo's only health issues are, well, mental, so once the adults are vaccinated I'm willing to let him see people, it's just a question of who he can see at that point.
 
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It's also the work of detangling if the marriage got too enmeshed. I know some people are so used to having the spouse be their sounding board for everything from habit that they just take the spouse and services provided for granted. They don't seek consent first by asking if the spouse wants to even deal in this conversation. They just start inundating the spouse inappropriately with their polydating problems like "pass the buck" stress whooshies just assuming spouse is up for it.

On your end? You might have been used to always helping him with his problems as spouse/helpmate. But now that you polydate, some areas of his life don't actually require your assistance and may bring to light that you were overassisting before. So it may feel weird to stop yourself and take a step back. "No, that's not actually my job." Or say "Hey, you know just because I'm your spouse, it doesn't mean I have to..." Or say "Hey, you know just because I'm your spouse, it doesn't mean you get to..."

In the past you may have taken things done to him personally. Like you get all annoyed on his behalf, when someone annoys him at work. But is it actually your problem and your feelings to manage? It's ok to let him deal with his own problems and manage his own feelings without you along for the ride.

Wow. I think @GalaGirl must have known me as I was before I joined this board (or even right at the time I joined). I *still* have a hard time not being pissed at people who are not nice to either of my partners, honestly, even in situations I had absolutely nothing to do with. But at this point we've... mostly... stopped assuming that we can just vent about poly stuff, and that's actually a massive improvement. I have better relationships with metas if I don't end up pissed at them on my partners' behalf...
 
A thread elsewhere on here about territoriality made me think of something funny - Joan and I mostly get along great as far as being housemates - I probably am not neat enough for her but overall it works. Of course, like any situation where people live together, there's going to be moments of friction, and I currently have a weird thing that's bugging me that I can't quite figure out how to address (well, realistically I know how to address it but it feels complicated because I wildly overthink things).

So I don't talk much about it on here, I think, but one of my "things" is that I cook. A lot. Like from scratch most nights, occasionally making very fancy things, etc. And back around the time when Chase was born (actually I got pregnant in the middle of the renovation but anyway) we ripped our kitchen down to the studs and rebuilt it. So for a long time it was far more "mine" than anywhere in the house (less so now that I have my room done the way I want it). Because of the size of the house, though, it's a bit quirky. For instance, we've converted what the builders of the house probably meant to be a coat closet under the stairs into a pantry, which is fairly convenient to the kitchen but there is a doorway that one must go through to get to it, and that doorway space feels a little narrower than standard just because of how it sits in relationship to the counter and kitchen trash can.

The thing is though, because of a combination of anatomical quirks and habit Joan ends up preferring standing to sitting down a lot. Except... the one logical place in the kitchen for her to stand to talk to me and Knight while I cook dinner is basically directly in that doorway, in a spot where technically I *can* walk through with her there but it feels like I'm squeezing past rudely. And so every time I walk over to the pantry to, say, get an onion or some flour or whatever while I'm making dinner, and have to get by her, there's this, like, one second flash of intense annoyance.

And of course I haven't said anything because it feels like such a petty, petty thing to be frustrated by, and feels like saying something feels very territorial in a way I very much don't want to be. So I can't really say anything until I figure out how to say something without feeling like I'm being a bitch.

Ah well. If that's the biggest of our living together problems I think I'm doing pretty damn well.
 
People never actually quite leave your life, do they?
I seem to be talking a lot today, call it advanced procrastination. But the last couple days have been amusing on a "people circle around again" level. So Wednesday night I was cooking dinner and my phone lit up with a WALLLLL of text (seriously, I think I had to scroll the screen 3 times) from somebody I hadn't expected to talk to again... MartialArtist. Wait what? yep, after causing like, stupid drama in summer of 2019 and then promptly disappearing not long after, he showed back up with another apology for the drama / explanation of disappearing / etc. So I guess we're talking again? I mean it's sort of a moot point as he lives several states away, but still, I'm glad he's crawling out of the hole he was in for a bit there.

And then there's Ginger. So talking to MartialArtist made me a bit nostalgic about people I wasn't talking much to anymore, and she was definitely at the top of that list. After we quit trying to do the video dating thing the texts faded too, and she even dropped out of the D&D game we were in (I don't think that was because of me, she had also gone back to school in the meantime) and so I hadn't talked to her in months. But all the "it's been a year" posts made me think of her, and I was tipsy enough that evening that I didn't manage to tell myself NOT to do the thing, so I texted. So... yeah. I admit I'm kind of low key hoping we spend some time together again post vaccines - I get my first shot tomorrow, she has her second next week so in six weeks or so...
 
That's great news! It's much easier, imo, to maintain a relationship on socially distanced dates and video chats when there's an end in site!
 
That's great news! It's much easier, imo, to maintain a relationship on socially distanced dates and video chats when there's an end in site!
Ha, well, so far it’s just texts. But we’ll see what happens.
 
Never Play Solitaire Again.
Read an interesting article the other day, by Tom Hanks of all people. (Sorry if the link is paywalled, I tried to find a free one). Anyway the TL;DR is that while he was stuck in COVID quarantine Hanks developed a Solitare habit - not the phone game, but the physical cards - the essay is a meditation on what a waste of the moments of his life that was. And it is making me think all sorts of thoughts.

First off is thinking of my adoptive mother, which is... weird. There's a lot of context I may not have written enough about here - she was quite possibly one of the most trapped by her life people I've ever known, and I never knew her as not depressed. (Not sure she ever WAS not depressed, truthfully, like literally in her entire life - and honestly she had a lot of reasons to be.) Her trauma and anger made her emotionally abusive, so I cut contact at 19 (mostly, with minor exceptions) and she died when I was 24, though I didn't know until a year or two later.

So... Whether it was depression or a quirk of aging and physiology, she used to get up at 4 in the morning because she literally couldn't sleep anymore, and one of the things she would do to pass the time is play hand upon hand of solitaire. It started, I think, as physical therapy for a broken wrist (the shuffling), but got to be a habit, and I remember at the time being very confused by why she did it, it seemed so boring... while at the same time burying myself in computer Tetris for similar habitual and psychological reasons. And really, therapy aside, it was just something to fill the time until she died. That sounds like a terrible thing to say, it was a worse thing to watch and know that your mother really didn't think she had a reason to live and probably would have died by suicide were it not a sin, and were it not for me. (Knowing someone thinks that you're the only thing between them and death is not something anyone should ever live, as a side note, especially not at age 10.)

I never realized that the silence in the background of my childhood was the... "cut-flower sound of a {woman} who is waiting to die."

So... that. And that was a bittersweet memory enough.... but then there's the part where I think about how I acquired my Tetris (and other similar games, Minesweeper and Pinball and whatever else ran on a x486 computer... and yes digital Solitaire) addiction back then. I wasn't waiting to die. But I was waiting to leave home, whether home referred to my house itself or the small town I grew up in (being the overly intelligent and didn't-realize-I-was-queer-yet atheist kid in an Appalachian mountain town is not something I'd recommend to anyone), and those things filled that space when I couldn't stand to read any more.

And maybe that set some pathways in my brain, or maybe that was just pathways that would have already been there (see also: ADD dopamine cravings)... but I still play too many of that sort of game, whether it's Candy Crush or {list of games I actually play deleted as it's not the point}. The better times it's just something to do with my hands while I listen to an audiobook, and that's fine... but I end up playing too much before I got to sleep or right when I get up, in a "not quite ready to be human or too late to" sort of way... and if I'm having a bad mental health day as far as motivation and ability to DO the things I'm suppose to be doing? the number of hours I've lost that way are uncountable and thankfully uncounted.

Part of me wants those hours back, which clearly isn't gonna happen. Part of me says I should just delete all of those games now, but I won't as to think about doing so makes me ridiculously anxious - much like the idea of time-blocking when I can interact here or Facebook or Fetlife. Still, I'm pushing 40. And the idea that it is possible that I have fewer hours left to me than I've been alive (I don't come from good genes and I'm not good at taking care of myself even when I mean to, and I often don't mean to because I'm a hedonist who lives for the now, I'm sort of gonna count myself lucky to see my late 70's). So is playing _insert game here_ *really* something that ought to take up those hours? But what else should I do with the gaps in my day?

Lots of thoughts there.

 
I think seeing Artist twice a week might be the exact perfect amount - often enough that I never quite get to *missing* him, but far enough apart that I crave his touch the other five days of the week and don't take his presence for granted. And that particular change in schedule - from alternating 1x/week and 2x/week to just flat out 2x/week all the time was his suggestion, so also yay.

Still a little bit back and forth with my relationship with Knight, as far as intimacy and romance goes, but... the thing is on a lot of levels the highs are higher and the lows aren't as low as they were even six months ago. I mean, I'm not saying we don't have our disagreements there but they have... mellowed? Which leaves more room for good? I'm not sure I can describe it well but... my point here is that I'm pretty happy with both of my relationships right now.

Sometimes, even as long as we've been doing this ::waves hand to encompass all the relationships of the past several years:: the fact that I really am polyamorous and it's *ok* still surprises me. The parts that end up surprising me now are the tiny ways that Artist is part of my everyday life, not just a totally separate "vacation". Last night was a good example. I've talked about Knight and I setting up separate bedrooms (still a wonderful thing for our relationship, as a side note); while mine is 80% the way I want it I still have a lot of art to add. What I've planned to do is actually a pretty cool thing - there are a couple pieces of sort of sensuous black-and-white art I already have; I'm adding a BUNCH more along with some framed bits of poetry and other pieces to make a gallery wall on the one big open wall of the room. Gallery walls are, obviously, kind of a pain to put up, and when I told Knight about this, he pretty quickly noped out of the project as it's just the sort of picky thing he does NOT like doing (and really, he already hung one for me as we have a wall of our medieval-org award scrolls in one hallway. Anyway). So Artist is actually pretty enthused by this project, and promised back when I had the idea a few months ago he'd help hang them once I bought the rest of the art (both the art and frames are still in the process of being acquired). I bought a big chunk of pieces off Etsy yesterday, and Knight started talking about hanging them and how we'd need a particular gadget thing for doing it well. Which led to the amusing conversation of "err, you already said you didn't want to help with this AND Artist said he would AND already has that gadget". On the one hand, Knight is happy he doesn't have to. On the other, it's *weird* doing that sort of incredibly domestic project with someone else. And yet Artist sleeps in this room far more than Knight does... (Knight tends to come cuddle with me or have sex and then go back up to his bed to sleep, or I sleep upstairs with him, as he dislikes my smaller bed.)

3 weeks till freedom day (my other shot is next Friday and then two weeks after that). Perhaps that's an overstatement, but... I have to admit that I'm definitely not going to be amongst the most cautious people I know after that. No, I won't be going to, like, packed bars... but I will definitely be having other vaccinated friends over for dinner and spending time at outdoor restaurants and maybe even going inside to a few. (That last will probably wait til June or so, depending on how the numbers are around here.) And I've gotten a bit less strict with MiniMe as far as distancing. He had already been spending one night a week with my mother since she had her shot; there's another kid his age that lives in her neighborhood that he's recently hit it off with so he wants to spend all the time ever over there with her. I don't mind, she's not particularly into video games so she drags him outside and has even gotten him to start coming to martial arts classes with her, so I'm going to call that a Very Significant Win. Amusingly, it's the same type of martial arts that MartialArtist does, at his old dojo, and is the second time MiniMe has gotten started there - the first time he just didn't deal well with the organized class part of it but he was only 4 so that's not surprising. He loves it this time though, although it's only been a week of classes so far.

Though freedom day *doesn't* mean, apparently, that I get all of my life back. I'm still trying to figure out what to do about the medieval thing; our parent org has come out with rules as to what we can do when events start again and at least for right now, there's literally a rule against providing food to other people outside your household either as an official part of the event or even just as an attendee sharing with others. Which pretty much guts the thing I do completely. And I was just trying to get back in when the world stopped... in fact I had just won a competition that I had been trying to win for *years* at the end of April, which felt like a first step towards really trying to achieve the group's "big" arts award (for lack of a better analogy, it's a little bit like a black belt in a martial art except it's for knowing and doing and teaching some facet of medieval life). And yet here we are.
 
Aww, that's really too bad about the food thing!
 
It's just so trippy reading about stuff like martial arts classes! We're back into a third lockdown because cases are through the roof. Literally everything is closed here, and our vaccinations are 16 weeks apart because of short supply. I am glad things are better for you guys!

I'm sure once things settle down the food rule will change and I hope you can do the thing again.
 
I’m sorry for you having to go through another lockdown. There are parts of the US that really ought to do the same, but luckily not mine, at the moment.
 
I've mentioned his hotwife-type kink a bit here; I don't share it but I'm willing to indulge it sometimes via storytelling (yes I have consent for this) because it tends to lead to about as much intensity as we ever get - which isn't a lot by my standards but it seems that level of intensity for him doesn't coordinate to style of sex in the same way. (I made a comment about how we always have sort of mellow sex and he was surprised by it as his perception of it was very different. :🤦:) Problem is I'm not willing to indulge that particular fetish ALL the time as it feels like my experiences are being used as personalized porn - and while sometimes porn is a fun indulgence, watching porn also feels like it makes desire and the resulting sex something external and not based in the actual relationship between the people actually physically involved.

Friday into Saturday was a particularly lovely day, and for once this particular fetish actually worked in my favor, LOL. Knight and I spent the day together, sans kid, road tripping to get our second COVID shots then stopping to have outdoor pizza+beer on the way back. Literally this was the first time I've sat down in the vicinity of a restaurant in over a year... yes, I know immunity doesn't quite kick in until April 30 but it seemed like a reasonable choice. Most of the reason I hadn't done outdoor dining was about it not really being worth it both as a risk to myself and as a risk to the waitstaff, but given how isolated we've been and even the partial immunity from first level of shot it seemed unlikely to be a problem. And it was a lovely day...

Artist had planned to come over that evening anyway, though we had decided to do something kind of low key in case the vaccine side effects were kicking in by the time he got there. They weren't, but we ended up going to bed early and watching the last episode of Bridgerton and the first episode of The Nevers, interspersed with some noteworthily enthusiastic sex, even by our standards. (Absence of kid leads to a bit more abandon, I think...)
 
This past weekend was, perhaps, one of the best weekends I've had in over a year - or at least one that felt closest to normal. Like I said in my last post, April 30 was Knight and I's vaccine freedom day, and technically May 2nd was Artist's. So Friday night Knight and I went out on an actual *date* - he had even bought me a cute dress to wear! (sadly I learned that I should not trust cheap Amazon dresses' zippers; we actually had to come home so I could change clothes between our first stop at a local brewery and our second stop for outdoor dinner...) But we found a lovely little restaurant with good food and a romantic patio that had actually opened DURING this whole thing and managed to survive, and it was just... this is going to sound weird but having really good food that someone else cooked and that wasn't cold from delivery was exactly what I needed. Shallow right? I mean I still haven't managed to spend time with some of my friends, although maybe this weekend... but somehow restaurant meal that basically felt normal was like this moment of magic that said maybe we're on the other side of all this.

As for Artist? Let's just say we celebrated Beltane properly. ("First of May, first of May... ..." ... if you know you know LOL).

And MiniMe's new friend was over a lot of the weekend - weirdly the house is *quieter* with her around than it would be otherwise, they run around outside and even if they're doing video games it's more chill than MiniMe is by himself. I think she's actually a good influence on him, so that's lovely.

Meanwhile, busy work week *and* I have an interview for something that could potentially be amazing Wednesday (ya'll cross your fingers around 10am eastern US time, ok?)
 
As for Artist? Let's just say we celebrated Beltane properly. ("First of May, first of May... ..." ... if you know you know LOL).
Jonathan Coulton is a genius. Lol...
 
Just had a job interview for a potential full time job. I'm really hopeful about this one - it's a good fit for my skills, the compensation is amazing, and the company sounds like a decent place to work. :: crossing fingers SO hard ::
 
It's funny that the question of abandonment came up on the board this morning, as I had actually come here to write about being fairly happy I'm making real progress against those issues in myself. (It's also funny how many problems are both products of and solved by modern technology, but that's beside the point.)

So the plan was that Artist was supposed to come over last night, yay! And I had sent him a random text about that around, oh, 11am or so. As I've mentioned here before , I think, it's perfectly normal for us not to text much if we don't have a lot to say, having never bothered with starting the whole good morning/good night text thing. I wasn't really expecting an instant response, as his work has been wildly busy lately, but the weird thing is that the message was showing up as "Sent" not even "delivered", as if his phone/webclient for messages weren't even logged in, and that was wildly out of character. Things that are out of character twig my "something's wrong" sense like whoa, and so I ended up keeping an eye on the message off and on a lot of the day (but resisted texting again!) until like 4:30 that afternoon when I gave up and was like "...err, is everything ok?", and that message ALSO showed as sent not delivered with no response. At that point, my anxiety went into utter overdrive, to the point that about 5:30 or so I was in the middle of texting a friend to talk me off the worry-ledge when Artist popped up to say he was on his way over. (It was totally a combination of extra busy and technical glitch.)

So this doesn't sound like "progress" on the abandonment thing, I'm sure... but the thing is, my internal narrative was all "something bad has happened *to* him, or to ArtistSpouse, and that's why he hasn't picked up his phone" rather than "he's mad at me" or "he's ignoring me on purpose" or anything relationship based.

I admit it's a little weird to think that it's progress to worry that someone was in a car wreck instead of worrying that they were abandoning you, but for me? It 100% totally is.

Also progress? I actually admitted I was worried and didn't just pretend that I never felt that. Go me.
 
having really good food that someone else cooked and that wasn't cold from delivery was exactly what I needed. Shallow right?


I don't think so at all. IMO, it is really the little things that matter and after a year (give or take) of cold delivery, there is much pleasure to be had in having a hot meal plunked right down in front of one. :)
 
I wasn't really expecting an instant response, as his work has been wildly busy lately, but the weird thing is that the message was showing up as "Sent" not even "delivered", as if his phone/webclient for messages weren't even logged in, and that was wildly out of character. Things that are out of character twig my "something's wrong" sense like whoa, and so I ended up keeping an eye on the message off and on a lot of the day (but resisted texting again!) until like 4:30 that afternoon when I gave up and was like "...err, is everything ok?", and that message ALSO showed as sent not delivered with no response. At that point, my anxiety went into utter overdrive, to the point that about 5:30 or so I was in the middle of texting a friend to talk me off the worry-ledge when Artist popped up to say he was on his way over. (It was totally a combination of extra busy and technical glitch.)


I'm not sure if this will make you feel any better, but I am not going to lie, I actually had the same response that you did just reading this. I have this quirk (habit? thing? 🤷‍♀️) of my anxiety going through the roof whenever someone I care about does something "out of the norm". And tbh, I would have also sent an "Everything ok?" text as well.

I am happy to hear that things were not that crucial though. :)
 
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