!What else but mom --- agk's diary 28 March 2025 @ 01:42 UTC --- written on Evy's GPD MicroPC while daughter chirps happily to Evy in daughter's bedroom long after bedtime --- Evy wanted someone who could take care of her. I'm not good at it. The house is cluttered with toys, projects, dishes, laundry waiting to be washed or folded or put away most of the time. Evy mostly prepares her own food, I don't think enough about what she likes when I cook for daughter and I. She pays the rent and credit card bill almost every month, while rising to the challenge of a grueling accelerated nursing school program. I give my daughter a structured life, full of friends, variety, care and discipline, math and stories, music and wilderness, good food and good memories. Almost all my thoughts are about us. I only have brief flashes of me as a singular creature, or us as me and Evy, a marriage. Singular me wells up tears in prayer in church a few times a year. She journals once or twice a month and talks on the phone with an old friend on her drive home from work once a month. Sometimes her life experience and attention to the humanity alive and deciding amid droves trampled by horsemen of apocalypse is strategically helpful to groups of conscience. Singular me remembered this year I stole a large sum from an ex eighteen years ago, justified by means some of which I'm only gaining awareness of now. I find the falsely justifactory means intoler- able once I can notice them, but can't discard them with willpower alone. Singular me suffers from her inability to free herself from such bedevilments. Singular me may be the only source of ethical me. I don't give her much of my time. Married me doesn't get much time from me either. I don't feel one bit desirable to my spouse. I don't know how to live my life to do the things and live the way she found desirable. I courted her by cleaning her kitchen, becoming versed and skilled in rope bondage, taking her on adventures by vintage motorcycle, overwhelmed almost constantly with desire for her which is still there, but what good is it when our marriage is an afterthought, conversations interrupted by our daughter yelling to stop us talking, even yelling nonsense when she has nothing to say, the kitchen not clean, one or the other of us sleeping with daughter each night, the motorcycle needing work in the garage, the rope something she does with other people because I'm afraid to let it transport me and I'm out of pract- ice as a top and when would we anyway? I'm a pretty good mom. Maybe sometimes I'm crazed, obsessively learning how to do math with preschool- ers or something like that, but she eats well, she trusts me, she acts right at daycare, at church, with her friends, and in the wilderness. She is gaining an ethical, Christian and humanistic under- standing of the world and our place in it. It's not all me, of course. Some of it is the unfolding of her innate capacities, some is Evy's raising, some is grandparents or wilderness teaching her, but I create her daily world, and I think I am giving her a good childhood and shaping her to be able to be amiable, flexible, loving, and free to chose an ethical life having seen examples that will allow her to ask what it means to be a decent person and if she will choose to become what she is. I'm a pretty good mom because our us does things that don't enrich me at undue cost to her or enrich her at undue cost to me. We live a life in which we both can grow, and grow together. If I could do the same in my marriage---maybe after I make my amends to the ex I stole from, some of my layers of dis- honesty to myself, defensiveness, self-righteous- ness, bankrupt idealism, contempt for others, fear that the good in my life is temporary and could be gone tomorrow, feelings of helplessness---maybe some of those defects that interfere in my marriage could be removed, and I could also be a more con- sistently good wife. When, suddenly, I'm not an us with daughter, when I was unprepared to yield her parenting to Evy for example, who loves her every bit as much as I do, and has every right, I don't like to realize how unmaintained every part of me that isn't a mom is. When I'm tired, and daughter goes to daycare or is off to her grandparents for her monthly overnight, when I could run several carloads of baby clothes and toys to goodwill, fix the bike child trailer, put multiple consecutive hours into making the house a beautiful home for my wife, I'm often shocked because my we, my structure, my reason is gone, and I read the news, or fall asleep. Another day or two and I'd gain footing, plot a course, but by then my life is back to her breakfast, her lunch, her nap, her snack, her afternoon, her supper her bath, her snack, her book, her bedtime; comforting, reassuring, rewarding, I'm a person again because I'm a mom again. My parents left me to roam into the woods, into books, into abuse or something by a group of boys, into jumping from trees, running away, cutting my- self, wanting to be loved and held and kissed by someone, living in my imagination, reaching out to pen pals, with zines, by working, into dark and violent culture, into psychedelics at 13, for some- one to care enough to kill me or stop me or go with me to the intensity of possessive lustful care I craved. Dad took care of his parishioners, mom took care of her clients. They didn't know what to do with me and my brother when we broke doors and wallboard in our fights, when I cussed out my parents and pushed my mom down the steps, then ran away to the woods where police could not find me and I could live off the land easily for 48 hours before finding some boy to give me something to eat and a blanket to range back out among the catfish and mosquitoes with again. When I was asked to permanently leave 8th grade, my mom stepped up in a big way, keeping records of whatever I was doing in a portfolio for the social worker we had to see once a year to prove we were homeschooling. Dad renewed his love for ancient Greek drama and philosophy, and the night sky, and shared them with me, as his work schedule permitted and took me on his sabbatical backpacking in the wilderness, with him, not alone, while the living room ceiling fell in at home. Mom cooked dinner and we ate it as a family, some- thing I fail to do. But by the time they stepped up in response to the end of my formal schooling, I'd been abandoned too long, and the psychedelics had bored an unfillable hole in me, a loneliness deeper than any well. My brother and I swore we'd never have kids. We didn't want to raise them like we were raised. Now he's a chef and a devoted father who shares custody with his son's mother and lives close enough to our parents that they can be devoted grandparents, the stable ones when my nephew's parents were either or both not. And I'm a good mom, but maybe a pendulum swing too far. Maybe I'm overcompensating. Maybe that means I could be a much better mom if I somehow found the structure, discipline, and honesty in myself to balance my motherhood with being a better wife, a better housekeeper, and a better a better singular person. Too scary, too scary. But once the possibility is thought, written, voiced, it does not go away. Too scary, but it calls me like sun to a plant. Maybe, but how? Too scary, too scary. Fear can't flush the maybe, it won't take tail, and not today, but maybe I will. Maybe this Lent I'll be stripped bare of pride, escape the lying sirens of suicide that once heard bedevil forever more, long after the cessation of the temptation to act as if their promises of peace were realizable. On the other side of them is the singular me, capable of growth, understanding, and ethical, loving life, but standing in the need of prayer. Before Evy's and my life twined together in love, motherhood, and marriage, I lived in resignation. My life had been lived, it only remained to be re- counted wistfully in conversation with old friends on significant dates or chance meetings. The we I became with her had life ahead, not behind. No longer transfixed by repetition backward, I made new memories with her, repeating forward in faith and love. Now, the mom twined into an us with daughter sees maybe something like that wants to happen again. Family dinners, cooked by me, dinners Evy will like in a house that's usually clean with a wife who isn't a defensive resentful little bitch. What goes to make way? Friends? The little political involve- ment I still do? Math games? Caving, wilderness, church? Or is what goes some sick encumbrance in my soul? To be submerged in the headlong rush of each day is bliss compared to stopping and noticing the wreck, mess, and lack of maintenance. A blissful life and a good one aren't the same.