Transplanting a Seattleite

I’ve been getting robocalls from a Templeton MA number saying my National Grid account is past due. But when I check the account, it’s fine. I mean, the end of November was weird, but I figured that was no problem but then they started up again. So. I’m thinking I’ve been here before, and it was when the accounts switched over. And I know there are two services on the construction site, so I eventually reach a human being at National Grid, and after she confirms, yeah, you are not past due on your account, I ask her to see if there’s another account connected to my phone number where I’m getting the calls. I tried to do that through the phone tree, but it couldn’t find anything attached to the phone number, which was obviously incorrect. Sure enough, the other service was there, not linked to my dashboard, unpaid, etc. I got it attached, paid, signed up for paperless and auto pay, thanked the nice person at customer service and then contemplated. I did check with JB to make absolutely sure they were using power on both services (they are) before I paid it because I am not charitable enough to want to pay for someone else’s power bill.

JB also said they have this problem at other sites. A. was horrified that the default is to bill the service address via snail mail, so I wound up explaining a whole bunch of stuff about legal requirements around billing before you can access the court system to force someone to pay up. Fun world we live in, half the planet cannot figure out why so much is still done on paper and the other half cannot understand why we should ever change that. It’s part of a longer set of conversations I’m having with A. where I explain things like logistics, or exchange / trade and its permutations and so forth. No one ever explained this shit to me, I had to figure it out on my own. I’m not at all convinced anyone explains this stuff the way I think about it, which is likely to be a big part of how I spend my time starting in a few years when I’m not dealing with construction related tasks.

The day started with someone I’ve known since I was in junior high with her sending back to me the birthday money I’d venmo’d her. I’m an adult. I get what that means. I texted her this:

“I see that you have returned the birthday gift I sent you. My disappointment cannot be expressed adequately in words. Please know that if you change your mind, and would like to have an ongoing connection to me, I will always welcome you reaching out to me.”

Which has been on “delivered” but not “read” all day. So either someone else sent the money back, or that’s probably staying on “delivered” forever. There was no fight. The last live conversation we had was by phone in 2024, and she accepted last year’s bday money with gratitude (belatedly, but still, nice thank you note). Since then, she hasn’t reached out to me, and I haven’t reached out to her. I was pretty unhappy over the last couple years, as I tried to help Not Son find a path to independent adulting (yay, success!), and I kept hearing all the many things he had to say about his parents. But life is complicated, and it takes a village so I wasn’t looking for any kind of bridge burning. Maybe that bridge didn’t have to burn. Maybe it collapsed due to lack of maintenance and probably extensive abuse by a third party.

I vaguebooked about it, and people were kind and supportive. I sent holiday cash to Not Son and his older sibling. I’m Team Kid, and the increasing distance definitely involved my reassessment of my friend in the face of their first kid opting to go No Contact followed by really clear abuse of the second kid by their father / husband of my friend. I’m tentatively planning to see Offspring #1 in the summer if schedules work out.

Obviously, I have detailed personal experience with estrangement between a parent and offspring, but you could argue it is not representative because of the presence of that cult thing. I have a cousin who was estranged from his mother for years, and whose son has brokered a little bit of a reconnection after limiting contact with his own parent for a brief period of time. I have a friend whose son went no contact, but they are back in limited contact again. I have a friend who has been no contact with his mother for many decades, and whose brother has long since given up attempting reconnection. This isn’t even a complete list.

I’m Team Kid. If my own kid doesn’t want to be around me — and that has happened — I assume the fault lies at least as much with me as anyone else, and I go looking for what I can change and if nothing springs to mind, I wait. Because sometimes no one is wrong or everyone is wrong and time can help everyone get to a point where they have the perspective and energy to try a reset. I have yet to see a case where the younger generation was clearly in the wrong, and I say this as a person who has been closer to one side than the other on the parent’s side in some cases, on the kid’s in others, and been close to all parties in others.

I’m at an age where waiting involves an acceptance someone’s time runs all the way out before a change happens. Obviously, that can happen independent of anyone’s age, but the odds run a certain way. I know humans and I know myself and there’s no way in hell I’m entirely innocent of anything or everything. But I definitely was the person who did the vast majority of the phone calls and messages and scheduling of phone calls, and I am keenly aware of the balance of contributions when it came to helping out with kids and money and so forth.

I miss who I wished she was, but I’m pretty sure she never was that person, and that’s on me. I guess if I ever hear from her again, I’ll get to know who she really is, and decide whether that is someone I would accept as a friend.

ETA:

Also, if you know me in person and you don’t want to know me in person any more, please don’t wait for your birthday or holiday gift to tell me. Pick any time of year other than that, drop me a line, say, “Hey, don’t communicate with me. If I want anything to do with you in the future, I’ll contact you.” I’ll take you off the holiday card list. I’ll make a note in my contacts. There’s just no call to make the holiday season unpleasant.

A. really needed to wash her hair yesterday, and I commented that showering on Saturday would remove one of her Sunday tasks. I reminded her again in the evening. Around midnight — my hard stop for her, no more phones, and no more noise because I need my sleep — she said she wouldn’t be able to sleep without showering.

!!!

So I marched her through the shower in record time, and then she took forever to even start brushing her teeth. She was trying to get her hair dry with a towel. That only works with several towels. *sigh* So I got her hair dried with a really nice hair dryer that we normally never use (this is why we shower earlier!) and she finally got to bed, but by then, I was pretty awake and it took a while to settle down enough to sleep.

Around 9:20, she comes into my room and wakes me up. It has not been 8 hours since I fell asleep. I napped a bit longer, got up, got her breakfast, got me breakfast, go ready for an 11 am walk (which was fortunately canceled) and then tried to get her through the checkin process for tomorrow’s annual in the morning before school. But she wanted to read all the disclosures. No obvious way to download them or link to them — which honestly, is probably illegal? — so I screenshotted them but I don’t normally bulk screenshot files so it took me a while, and I couldn’t remember how to get the little thumbnail to go away immediately so I was waiting for it and at that point the 11 am walk was looming and I was hungry and she was sloooooowly eating and I started losing my shit.

Walk got canceled, I figured out how to swoosh the thumbnail, I got the various disclosures screenshotted and sent to her phone (which I also took away from her), and then I explained to her in some detail how I was feeling about things. I had been yelling, but by this point, I had managed to convert it into a job for me. I said, basically, you know my one rule is let me sleep. I said, you may have it in your head that you want me to prove that I truly love you, even more than my sleep. You are going to be wrong. We’ve talked about what methamphetamine does to humans, but what it really does is it stops them sleeping and the bad things that happen thereafter are what humans do when they have not gotten sleep. Violence. Violation. Not caring about relationships. All the horrific stuff that the Japanese army did to China mid-century. Etc. I told her, you may have it in your head that I should prove that I truly love you, and sleep when you are not around, so that I am always available to you, which is something I gladly did when you and your brother were babies, but I am not doing that now because you are a full ass adult. Not a legal adult, but an adult. If you don’t let me sleep, I — and your dad, if you don’t let him sleep — will leave you here in the house and go sleep somewhere where you do not have access to us. I also reminded her that I went No Contact (before that was a meme) with my mother (sometime around 2002 +/-) and refused to see her again (she died in 2017, IIRC). I told her I am not threatening, but this is who I am and what I am capable of, when someone is actively harming me. And then I sent her upstairs to brush her teeth, do her hair and put on clothes to leave the house, which is something I long ago stopped requiring her to do on weekends except when we are on vacation.

I think I’m going to send her out with R. to get some groceries. We also need to pick up the advent beer box. And I need to get a walk at some point.

I think one of the reasons I find this all so incredibly infuriating is, in true teenager style, she has zero interest in interacting with me during the day (except for the occasional, do you know about infodump, what you don’t know about infodump? How can you not know about infodump? Which I am sympathetic to as a conversational style because I have for sure committed this myself and also please find another overture), doesn’t remember to eat on her own until she has a hangry meltdown, will tend to put off offers of a meal or forget to eat the meal in front of her until meltdown, etc.

I mean, I get it. This is what happens with kids. You get the worst aspects of yourself at some point. And also my mother went down from dementia, and she spent a lot of years not sleeping at night and I see a real connection there that I have no intention of repeating.

I drove to RTE. I got there about an hour early, and was glad I did because it was tough finding a parking spot. Yikes! Since I had time, I looked up vegan / dairy free Dunkin’ options, and used the app, and $50 I put on the account years and years and years ago, to buy avocado toast, hashbrowns, and a coffee with brown sugar syrup in it. It was all fine, and I might do it again if I was at RTE or somewhere similar, and it was this or Cafe Car options for food.

The B.’s arrived barely in time (horrible traffic) and also had trouble parking. Fortunately, the Acela was a little late and it all worked out. We took the subway to 72nd, and walked to Arthouse, because we all had backpacks and no rollers. Go us! Once checked in, we met up with Priestess, and had drinks and the jalapeno hummus and listened to some jazz. After a while, we went over to Amsterdam Ale House and had more drinks (I really liked the Victory Sour Monkey) and food. The truffle popcorn was odd. The chips and salsa was fine. I had a burger and fries, and it was fine. It got crowded and loud after a while, and we returned to the hotel and slept. It was so simple to be alone and getting ready for bed without having to nag A. to go to sleep.

On the train ride down, I checked in with A. and R. and boy did they get into it. He was stuck in traffic; she wasn’t ready to leave, they both lost their temper and did regrettable things. I made it clear to her that throwing a (metal) water bottle was not a good choice, and I made it clear to him that I did not appreciate him wanting her to feel abandoned. Ugh. Whatever. They still have to live with each other because I’m not returning home as a reward for any of that.

For the first time in over 5 years, I had an in person Dutch lesson! It was so good to meet the new(er) dog, see Maddie (love that dog!) and of course hang out with A. and converse in Dutch. Woot! Looking forward to a weekly routine that I loved before and love again.

I’m going to turn over more of the Getting Up In the Morning and Getting Going routine to A. T. would just unilaterally take over stuff, but A. doesn’t. She instead becomes increasingly hypercritical of whoever is doing the task that really probably ought to be something she does for herself and then we don’t notice for a while because we’re just not that bright. Well, today I noticed.

I was ghosted by the person who was supposed to pick up the Ninjago set. The guy who picked up the Haunted Mansion was a little late, but that was fine. He kept me up to date, which is really all I need. I’ve already reached out to someone else and she will pick up the Ninjago set on Sunday.

Tomorrow is A.’s haircut and both of our shots. Fingers crossed we don’t forget the haircut this weekend, which we did last weekend.

Look, it’s a Monday in the first weeks of school, so I do recognize that this is always a little rocky. But this morning, I got up at 8:30, because I didn’t get to sleep until after 1:30 this morning. I woke A. up after I got through the laundry I forgot in the machine (weirdly did not smell, so I hung it up to dry and fingers crossed).

R. came down after that, and started making coffee, which is annoying, because the last thing I need when I’m this exhausted is someone underfoot. I saw a plate on the counter (I’d emptied the clean dishes from the dishwasher during my meltdown last night), asked, “Is this for you?” He said, “No,” so I started putting it in the dishwasher. At which point he said, “It’s for Ali’s pancake” and I completely lost it. I couldn’t start my tea, because he was using the kettle for coffee. He got up _after_ I’d already gotten up later than usual and after I’d already started waking A. up, and at no point in this whole process had he said anything about planning on taking care of the morning routine for A. I mean, obviously he meant to be helpful, and I did acknowledge that explicitly in my morning meltdown, along with, I get what you meant by saying, the plate was not for you, and also, do you understand how maddening that was. You had to have known that I wanted to know if I could put that in the dishwasher or if you were using it _which you were_. He didn’t realize he’d gotten up too late to start the whole process for A. Also, he couldn’t remember how I make the pancakes. Just all the things.

Anyway. I was very clear about the importance of Using Your Words, and if you are going to help out (thank you for helping out last night, which I did say out loud, Using My Words, because it was actually helpful that he got A. some real food to sop up some of that lake of chocolate milk she swallowed), then we should plan that the night before. Also, totally pointless, because I gave up on sleeping in in the morning and having R. get through the routine, because every single time it resulted in A. screaming and ranting and I had to get up anyway. Not Restful. And that isn’t years ago, either. That’s like, last school year. That’s how we settled into, fine, you can pick her up in afternoon routine, which is a genuine improvement over me having to do both sides of it while supposedly I’m doing the afternoon, but actually I wind up having to drive her in the morning, too.

They actually have a really good relationship. One of the reasons I’ve been pushing on the idea of me traveling alone more is because they definitely need more time to figure things out without me getting sucked in by screaming. (I want to be absolutely clear. All this is autism stuff. It’s genuinely screaming. People are genuinely distressed. This is not people being manipulative. This is people running off the end of their rope.)

R. drove her into school. She was apologetic about the previous evening. She was only about five minutes late to school, which is honestly somewhat amazing. I asked her to really work to get along with R., because he is trying to be helpful, they both made an effort. I walked with M., and ranted a bit about the whole thing, and we talked through an interesting story idea she had, which was fun.

A little side note on that. She was thinking of having one of the vampires of Shadow’s Brook consult / do work for the government on matters supernatural. Some of that would be supplying background, but some of it would involve actually dealing with threats / bad actors / wtf that involved other supes. This is obviously a common device in lots of series out there, and often it becomes a way of describing how even supernaturals can wind up suffering at the hands of malicious bureaucrats. I find that obnoxious, so I asked how she intended to deal with that issue. She didn’t have a plan — no one ever seems to — so I suggested maybe this work fell under some kind of treaty between the supes and the government, perhaps negotiated by the fae, as that would be the kind of thing they might do. She liked that idea, and then I asked about enforcement and since she’s brought up the idea of a geas to do enforcement to prevent supes with magic from using their magic after they’ve been convicted of serious enough magical crimes, I suggested perhaps any bureaucrat that is read into working with the vampire on this kind of consulting situation might have to swear and oath that connects to that kind of enforcement. It was a fun thing to think through; I’ll probably eventually use the idea myself elsewhere.

After we had a walk and visit, I had a brief conversation with D. from the builder, which was enjoyable. I then went and laid down in a dark room for about an hour, which was very helpful.

T. came over. He picked up the bag of spices I found in the pantry with his name on it. He’d forgotten them. He wanted to see the progress on the guest bedroom. Also, he wants a TV stand and his TV from his bedroom. He had an idea for one, and I thought it looked a little suss, so I did some research on other options, came up with a plausible one, ordered it. I had made fried chicken and salsa (sort of) without garlic or onion in it, so I put a piece of chicken and some salsa in a bowl for R., walked it out to where he was playing bridge on the porch and got his signoff on the plan. It should arrive on Thursday, and R. can assemble it, try the TV on it, and if all is well, he can drive it over to the dorm Friday or over the weekend and install it with T.

Things are definitely better now (I mean, fried chicken, amirite?), altho I am not caught up on sleep. I’m probably going to go continue dis-assembling lego next. Altho when I went to put the bucket away (I got it out of the tub to give to A. in case the bad judgment wrt chocolate milk led to vom) where it belonged, there was no space, so this morning I pulled out the foot cleaning appliance and set it next to the tub because it has some staining. If it can clean up well enough, I might list it on FB marketplace, so that might distract me from lego dis-assembly.

I will catch up on blogging.

Slept in, cleaned my sheets. I had a visit with M. I brought some stuff from the attic room — which STILL is not empty — down to the basement. But a lot of what is left is purely R.’s and he wants to sort through and get rid of things (which I am in favor of) so it’s taking a bit. I did get a bunch of exercise going up and down, tho. I also listed a few things (a keyboard tray, a keyboard and mouse, a desk lamp). I don’t think any of it will move, but you never know.

R. and I had a late lunch at Benjarong and strategized how to handle A.’s schedule. I’ve concluded that trying to maintain a consistent getting-up-time is not leading to her being willing to go to bed at a reasonable hour (and when I do, she wakes me up at 2:30 in the morning). Even if we split things up, she would be getting increasingly sleep deprived, and she is already popping more symptoms. Sleep deprivation is a known risk for seizure and mania, in addition to increased symptoms with personality disorder, and all of those are well represented in our extended family.

So in the interests of all of us having a better life, I’m going to take over mornings so R. can sleep in, and he can respond to requests for meds to help with burping / reflux / etc. in the middle of the night. She has already asked for gas-X to have in her room so she doesn’t have to ask someone else for it, which seems really fine since it’s hard to imagine getting into trouble with that medication. R. can supervise the pepcid. By taking over the morning routine, I am going to work on speeding up the various elements of it (especially the hair, but other parts as well), with a view to getting the whole routine to 45 minutes so she can get up at 9, instead of sometime between 8 and 8:30.

She’s got a lot of days in her schedule this term where her first class is lunch at 12:30 or 1:30 if she has lunch at home. That’ll be interesting. If it is literally one class, it’s worth it to just sit there and wait for her to be done. And R. wants to make an appointment at the Apple Store for a longer day to have his phone battery replaced. But we’ll figure that stuff out on a day by day basis. Fingers crossed we can all have a better sleep pattern going forward.

This whole go to bed really late and keep me up thing is dragging me down very literally, so this morning, I told my daughter that I thought she was trying to avoid thinking by staying up really late so she was too exhausted to lie awake in bed with her thoughts.

Turns out I was right.

She had a lot of the normal anxieties of girls / women / at this age, and didn’t realize it would help to talk about them. We talked about them. It seems to have helped a little. We’ll see.

R. had a meeting with the landscape folks on zoom. He also got most of the shelving away from the walls, prepping for the basement insulation project.

M. is really distressed, about politics, and how poisonous the news is, and also her mother’s health. But while she couldn’t walk right away, we had a snack and a chat and she felt better and we got our walk. I went over to CVS later to replace her broken heating pad with a new one. Having now bought on short notice two heating pads at CVS, I’m really tempted to order one on Amazon and just keep it in the box for when another on breaks and we need it on short notice.

Piano lesson went well today. T. is here for a few days. That’s kind of fun.

Regular readers know that when I say “a bit more” or “a few words” or similar, brace yourself or possibly skip reading.

I’m reading through the cards section of Fair Play, and the CPE structure kind of drives me bananas. It is concealing too much. The goal, of course, is to be able to turn the mental / planning / reminder load off of the person who is running the household / handling most of the kid duties. That’s a great goal, and there is a lot about the CPE structure to love about that. However, there are really serious problems, too. Like, there’s a card for Special Needs / Mental Health (kids) that is separate from Teacher Communication. First off, I don’t understand how that could work. A lot of times, the author explicitly says that people holding one card will have to work closely with the person holding a related card (kids parties and kid transportation, for example), or she’ll say that if you have this then you have to deal with the transportation component of it as well. That’s confusing. But there is NO SUCH COMMENT on Special Needs / Mental Health and Teacher Communication. Further, there’s NO COMMENT about redealing Special Needs / Mental Health. And there’s NO CONNECTION made to the Discipline card. I don’t understand how these are separable tasks AND if you have multiple parent-figures / caregivers, you have to involve as many as you possibly can in IEP processes or the IEP won’t work. Literally. I put a ton of pressure on R. to go to these meetings even tho he didn’t see any purpose in his presence, because there wasn’t a lot for him to say. But it was incredibly important to everyone for him to be there to hear what the team had to say, and when there was something for him to say, it was important for him to be there, notice and say it.

This is a great book, and a needed book, and the author, as a mediator, is very, very good at creating structured opportunities to help families get to a better working relationship. But boy oh boy the specifics of the cards are utter bullshit.

There’s other minor stuff, too, like, dishes. My sister has carved up the dishwasher project to have one piece for each kid, altho she is the manager of the structure. We worked pretty hard to move kids along the process of understanding how to load the dishwasher, because it’s a critical life skill. I’m still working on making sure the last person to bed starts the dishwasher, but honestly, we’re nearing a point where that will be a programmable part of a smart dishwasher (if closed and if it is after a certain time of night then start running, type of thing). Having this be a card between the parents and not involving the kids in the process seems weird. And there’s a lot of stuff like this.

ETA:

The card “Informal Education” is a whole bunch of stuff that PE and related should be teaching, and the extent of riding a bike is learning to balance — nothing about adhering to traffic rules, local rules about sharing sidewalks and bike paths with pedestrians. But that’s not what I’m here to complain about! I’m here to complain about “(Hint: If your kid is the only one in class still wearing Velcro sneakers, you might want to remedy that by teaching him to tie his shoes.)”

Nothing referring back to the Special Needs card, either. Entirely un-inspected assumptions.

ETAYA:

In the section about why not to break up a task / ask for spousal help in Execution, there’s a story about parent heading out the door to pick up could-choke-on-things-offspring from mom’s who asks other parent to pick up the “Marvel Legos”. Other parent hears “marbles” can’t find any leaves legos on floor. This is given as a reason not to break up a task.

!!!!!

How is there a parent in this scenario — this is the _younger_ of _two children_ — who doesn’t realize that when the kid-who-could-choke-on-things returns home, there must be nothing (not marbles, not marvel legos) on the floor!

Same section, story about hears the drycleaning please drop it off. Person tries to drop it on a day when the drycleaner is not open. Person _would have made this mistake themselves_ if they had been responsible for conception and planning (ask me how I know. Just ask me. I’m not even talking about R. here. I know too many people who’v made this mistake). And yet somehow, it’s “solvable” by having one person do CP and E. No it’s not! It’s “solvable” by someone habitually doing the drycleaning dropoff OR by having the drycleaning dropoff time put on google calendar where it fucking well belongs.

There is so much stuff in this book that basically amounts to, CPE will fix this! And if you need help with E, ask your village, not your spouse! Some of these are things that would be way better fixed by teaching people to use gentler language with each other, and how to be consistently emotionally validating (even in a mechanical manner). Some of these things are a matter of one person in the partnership hasn’t been doing a lot of stuff and basically needs to learn how. CPE is _a_ solution, and it’s not clear it’s even a _great_ solution.

Then there’s crazy shit about resolving disagreements in the Minimum Standard of Care. In the event you can’t agree on an MSC, the players are supposed to ask “Would a reasonable person (in this case, your partner, spouse, babysitting, caregivers, parents and in-laws) under similar circumstances CPE this card in this way.” _Really_?!?! That guy a couple paragraphs up left legos on the floor with an under 3 year old coming home. _He is a dangerously incompetent visitor in his own house._ _He would not know to ask this question much less what the answer is._ Fine, he’ll learn by doing, and fine, maybe his spouse isn’t the right person to teach him, but how does any of this help?

Reading through the Need Execution Help again, and just cannot get over the request help from someone in your village other than your partner by providing full context and an explicit request. So, like, if you have a medical emergency and have to go to the hospital, and you haven’t done your Daily Grind tasks, you have to arrange outside help from someone other than the parent of your children, and fully explain how to do everything, rather than ask the other adult in the house to deal with it while you drive yourself to urgent care / the hospital?

Really?

“My husband taking full CPE ownership of the ‘auto’ card was worth ten cards to me because …” Oh boy. This husband had dropped the ball on car care?!? The Superwoman vibe in this book is _wild_.

“When my husband took over “extracurricular (sports)” for Zach and Ben, I gained back eight hours a week.”

The husband had dropped the ball on _sports_ _for_ _sons_. And this book is intended to reduce men resenting women for nagging and ordering them around? The men in this book are … something else again. Car, lawn, sports for boys are well within trad male responsibility.

A. is at Fusion for her first day; we are very excited and hopeful.

Meanwhile, I finally emailed the counseling office at ABRHS again to try to finalize the withdrawal process.

I had sent the counseling office this email on March 20:

“We’ve been working through both identifying some neurological problems she has been having and also finding a different school for her which we think will be less triggering for the problems she has been having.

Today, we enrolled her at Fusion Academy Burlington. We do not yet have a start date for her, but I expect we’ll be figuring that out over the next few days.

We’re not really sure what the process is at this point, but we understand at some point we’ll be withdrawing her from ABRHS but we do not want to withdraw her from special ed.

I’m not really sure what my next couple of days are like. They are currently open, but if we hear back from the neurologist about the results of the EEG, that could change; also, if we have an appointment happen with the new school that could change.

Please let me know how I can help this process go smoothly for everyone.”

The next day I got this response:

“Thank you for reaching out! I am cc'ing here our counseling support staff, xxx and xx, who can assist you with the withdrawal process so it goes smoothly for you all and especially for A. I am sorry to hear she is experiencing neurological problems and hope that things get better!”

And that was the last I heard from them.

In the event, I didn’t have an official start date for A. until Tuesday (of this week) and there was no school at ABRHS on Wednesday (and we were in transit on Tuesday anyway), so I punted until today on poking the school about the withdrawal process. I emailed all three of the people in the counseling office, sat and thought for a moment, noticed I had an extension for the counseling office, and called it. I got xxx, and said, how do I do this, and she was, have your student go fill out the form. I’m like, she hasn’t been there since March. And then xxx says, well, the usual process is to have the student go fill out the form. I just let the pause stretch because, I mean, what, time machine requirement now? On brand as a requirement. I ask if I should come in, and that doesn’t get a better response — something like, you should have told us sooner, and I’m like, _I sent the department email on March 20_, and have not yet heard back and you should have that in your email on March 21.”

Anyway.

Registrar — who had been _awesome_ about rapidly turning around the transcript for the initial application to Fusion early on in this process — called me back, and was generally easy to deal with, and then called me back again to say, drop off the stuff at the front desk, fill out the form there, I sent the official transcript to Fusion and removed A. from PowerSchool. Which, you know, is really all I was looking for here.

As I noted to the Registrar on the first of those two phone calls, I’m not at all sad about pulling my daughter out of a school that pulls shit like this. How overwhelmed are they, over there, one has to ask, but one does not have to stick around for the answer.

ETA:

So, I went into the school and the form was sitting there but it was super unclear what all I was supposed to do at this point. Apparently, withdrawal from school forms really are signed primarily by the student? I’m just like, aaaanndd even when they have an IEP? I mean, the whole thing feels like some weird bad joke of a process. There _is_ a line for the parent to say, “I know my kid is doing this.” But what a ridiculous thing.

Anyway.

I was sent to the library with the form to drop off the Chromebook, stylus and charger. The librarian nearly left the charger at circulation, but I was like, you’ll want that too, right? She was trying to find the stylus without telling me, but I figured it out and handed her that box. She was happy about that. We took them back to someone in another back room at the library, and _that_ person was much younger, and quite clearly used to this process not going well which honestly cheered me enormously. And obviously, people were happy to get the stuff back which, predictably, does not always happen.

Then it was off to counseling with the textbooks and the form, and then I checked out of the visitor log at the front desk and left. I _did get it all done in a single trip_, which was my primary goal in this whole fucking outing. I had not been back to the school since that meeting in the vice principal’s office and intended to minimize my time there because I just do not have the self-control to not say what I’m thinking when I’m there, and that’s basically What the Heck is Wrong Here I Do Not Remember You All Being This Incompetent Before.

I’ve got so many questions about why.

I’ve been making pizza-sandwiches lately. Basically, take a piece or two of bread, put some tomato paste on it, sprinkle some basil, oregano, black pepper, layer it with pepperoni, mushrooms, (in my case fake — cashew mozz) cheese. Put it in the countertop oven until it’s cooked, eat it with sprinkled red pepper flakes.

I’d had been looking at the dates thinking, hmmmm. Today, I sliced one up and added it as a layer. Holy crap that’s good. That’s going on every pizza ever from now on that I possibly can.

Also!

https://www.feministsurvivalproject.com/episodes/episode-08-the-monitor

The Nagoskis have stuff on frustration! Yay!

Also, definitely hits different knowing that surviving 2020 only gets you to 2021 and we probably all remember more about 2021 than we are exactly comfortable with.

ETA:

OK, did a 3 mile walk with R. and talked about some stuff including this. I’m increasingly focusing on A.’s perseverance / autism rage loop / high-stakes affect when “working” as the problem that may persist when she is in classes again. I’ve talked to A. about frustration and what it feels like, and she says she often has a list of, say, 3 things, to try to do something, and when she has tried all 3, she is already depleted and has no energy to think of more things to try. My immediate reaction was, oh, yeah, no, don’t do a list of three things. Do one thing, and then the next task is to figure out what to do after that, based on whatever you learned from the one thing. If you have a list of three, you might learn something from the results of round one that will make the others irrelevant. This was interesting, but I wasn’t necessarily satisfied with my explanation.

The Nagoskis have this:

“We've got three different targets for solutions, right? So option number one is going to be changing the kind of effort you're investing. Solution number two is going to be just making a decision to change your brain's assessment of how hard it's going to be. And then our third option is going to be changing the goal.”

They are working with a model of approach / avoidance (discrepancy decreasing or increasing), and frustration is the affect that arises when the criterion velocity is too low. I have some very real issues with this model, but we’re going to play along at least for a paragraph or two.

The “kind of effort” turned into a discussion of what I have as the Basic Needs Theory. It’s less developed than my theory but basically same same. Get enough sleep, eat better food, etc.

The “how hard it’s going to be” is basically a redo the schedule to be more realistic.

The “change the goal” is super weird, and I’m not 100% certain I even understood much less agree with that make Andrew experience joy thing.

“ The new goal has to be soon, certain, specific, concrete, positive and personal.”

No explanation on this. In my world, the absolutely crucial element of any goal is that it be attainable. Which is not on this list. Which I find extremely worrisome, because an unattainable goal is going to bring us right back to frustration. It’s easy to think, but how do you _know_ it is attainable? Well, it has to be something that you know to be fully within your control. So, “drive to the mall” is kind of a sucky goal, but “try to drive to the mall” is a great goal. You try, and if it turns out someone else already took the car, well, you tried! You met the goal, even if you didn’t make it to the mall. Let’s say the car is there, and you drive partway there, car breaks down, resolving the car breakdown takes the rest of the day / money. You still tried! You didn’t make it to the mall, but you tried! If you get stuck in traffic, and by the time you get there you would have to turn around and go right back home for some other part of the day’s plan, oh well! You turn around right away, because you tried!

Yoda’s there is no try is absolute bullshit. Try is a great goal, and a great way to reduce frustration.

Another change-the-goal is “do a bad job quickly”. Then you can decide whether the bad job is good enough (now you have extra time!) or you can decide whether it’s worth spending any remaining time allocated to the task to improving the the work.

“Do a bad job quickly” for “go to the mall” might be, well, I wanted to look for a pair of shoes or a sweater, and I can do that online and maybe you find good enough shoes and/or sweater online, place the order and the amount of time spent on the task is a tiny fraction of the time it might take to drive to the mall. Or maybe you go look in your closet and discover a pair of shoes or a sweater you forgot you owned that is kinda cool and because it had been forgotten for a while, it feels like new. Fastest solution ever!

I’m not sure if this is going to help with A.’s frustration, especially when it comes to words or concepts that she does not understand and wants to understand. I use these techniques. Like, why does Germany / German have so many terms in different languages (Alemanni derived, German, Deutsch). We talked about migration, and terms from outside vs. inside a group, and concluded that Deutsch, like so many terms used by a group of people to refer to themselves, just means “of the people” (I predicted that, actually, and was pleased that that turned out to be the case.) Alemanni was a reference to a confederation, so probably it means something close to what it sounds like (all the tribes). We still don’t know what’s up with the German/Germany one, tho. So I tried to answer, told her it would be harder than expected (reset expectations), and punted on a complete answer after getting answers to parts of it (reset success criteria / abandoned part of it). And she’s mostly been okay with me using these techniques. But it’s less clear how successful I will be at teaching techniques like this to her.