The inmates are running the asylum.

Lately I’ve felt limited in what I can write because the kids are getting older and their stories are less mine to tell. In other words, if I wrote about them ad nauseam the way I used to here, practically reporting on the colour of their poops (Will had a green one this morning, by the way, and called me in to see, #blessed), they would shake with rage at the violation of their privacy. They’re already saying things like “Don’t post that!” when I snap photos, displaying an awareness of social media that I’m simply not ready for (but also, to some degree, an aversion to it, which I am totally on board with for, like, forever).

So now, more than ever (in this realm at least), what they say goes, autonomous and privacy-deserving individuals they are. Which hobbles me a bit when it comes to (over)sharing–or maybe that’s just an excuse. Maybe I just haven’t found a way to venture back into vulnerability with my own story. I’ve gotten used to skipping around moments that I might’ve dived into here before, and in so doing have become satisfied (until I realised I was dissatisfied) with a more surface-level reporting style.

There’s also the fact that, as kids grow and our family becomes more cemented, there’s less of the rawness that defines life with babies and young children. The newness of diagnoses gives way to self-education and the daily putting-into-practice of that education, which undoubtedly has its fraught moments (the other morning, I told The Kid that I love everything about him, to which he replied, “I love everything about you, too. Except your temper“), but most of those are vented to friends at school drop-off or over text, then give way to the next item on the to-do list.

I guess that’s the thing–there’s more doing, less reflection, in this stage of life. Especially when I’m OD-ing on podcasts on the reg and trying to keep up with just all the shows.

But I am aware that the point of having this blog is to explore the truth of my/our story, not some polished-and-branded version of it. I never want to get to the point where my well-being relies on my life looking a “certain” way, unless that way is, well, a bit of a mess (to wit: the other morning I met a friend for coffee, by which I mean half of that coffee ended up on my white shirt, then went through the self-checkout at the grocery store and complained to the staff it wasn’t working and she quietly let me know that I was putting the groceries on the wrong side. Again.) There are enough people covering the Fabulous Life territory while ignoring the dumpster fire of actual existence. I’d rather stick marshmallows in that fire and tell ghost stories beside it with a bottle of wine.

In The Body Keeps the Score, a book on trauma that I’m reading because I do love a mess and, as Taylor might say, “Hi! I’m the mess, it’s me,” psychiatrist Bessel Van der Kolk writes about veterans with unprocessed trauma who nearly always fashion more publicly palatable cover stories that explain their difficulties without delving into the horrors they actually faced. “These stories, however, rarely capture the inner truth of the experience.”

Yeah, that’s what I don’t want to do–a cover story. I want to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth–as long as it doesn’t violate my kids’ privacy/dignity (forget the poop story I told above, tks) or venture into fetishistic oversharing. Balance, amirite?

So I’m sure next week I’ll be here writing about how Neurodiversity Day at the boys’ school went (with in-depth descriptions of all the water weight I lost sweating through my fire-hydrant armpits), or telling you about how maybe I’ve overcompensated for the rigid swearing policies from my childhood as evidenced by a certain Little Brother who has a bit too much fun with colourful language (when The Husband pulled him up on it last week, LB replied, “FINE, I’ll use your fancy words“).

It’s just a matter of figuring out how to shift with the sands of our story, how to ride the waves of life, how to please the new management. They run the asylum, after all, but what we forget is that long before asylum meant “an institution for crazy people” (btw, crazy is ableist and we don’t use it anymore), and long after such institutions are a distant memory, the meaning of that word–asylum–was, is, and always will be, refuge.