Nurshable

10/10/2025

Someone once told me that I hate men.

I would like to talk about this idea here.

I have frequently talked about not liking the 'bad guys vs good guys' narrative because anyone can do good stuff and anyone can make bad decisions and society is really messed up with the binary of "good guy" and "bad guy". The people that intentionally do horrible stuff often do good stuff to take advantage of how society's sorting. And people that try to mostly make benign positive decisions can also make pretty terrible ones.

Sorting all men into the category of 'bad guys' and all women into the category of 'good' would be weird and internally inconsistent with my own plot.

I don't enjoy the company of people that have been raised and socialized by people that look down on men and boys and view them as incapable. Men and boys are not incapable. They're very competent at learning all of the same things that girls and women are capable of learning.

I don't enjoy the company of people that have been raised and socialized to look down on women and girls. Women and girls are not incapable or incompetent.

I am not overly comfortable with certain skills that I was not encouraged to practice as a child and I have an internalized distrust in myself/disinterest in those things because I was not seen as someone who would eventually do those things.

As with all things, when I focus on learning a thing, I can improve. And when I do it for long enough with focus. I can become pretty okay.

My husband usually cleans the ice cream maker that I use to make ice cream because he has a higher standard for cleanliness of the ice cream maker and because he put in the time to learn how to clean it properly. I will eventually allow him to keep the task since I'm the one that makes the ice cream and it's his participation. But first I would like to level up on my cleaning skills and recognize each indicator that it has not been fully cleaned, and I would like to learn how he brings it to completion because it is a skill. Skills are good. There is apparently a small white gasket that is under a nut that holds the churning paddle on. And apparently I have been oblivious to a real or imagined need to carefully scrub that spot. I'm kidding. There's definitely a need to make sure it's clean even though it only becomes exposed to cream and liquid during disassembly for cleaning. My husband helped me see that it's a sort of weird design with a little indent I hadn't noticed.

There are things he doesn't notice as well. We're both human with varied eyesight, attention to detail, different things we are interested in and different things we care about.

The other day an old man with a cane rapped his cane on the edge of my shopping cart to get my attention and asked me to get something down from a high shelf. I was amused and delighted. I'm taller than the average man but frequently when there is a man available that is shorter than me, they will be recruited for the height-based tasks. 🤣 Which is fine. Just a little weird.

On the way to visit my mother, I stopped at a rest stop and had an awkward experience of holding the door for a man that was behind me who then needed to hold the door open for me while I went in and opened the second door and he then needed to hold the door for me. And I was amused and delighted. Neither of us quite knew what we were doing in the situation where our socialization lined up awkwardly but we made the best of it and smiled and thanked each other. Teamwork makes the dream work. 🤣

I don't hate men.

I don't think men are incapable of self control, participating in life, understanding emotions, expressing what they feel, understanding that different people will feel different things. I don't think men are incapable of doing things or learning to recognize what needs to be done. I don't think men accidentally sleep with people or that they can't be friends with other human beings.

Sometimes people describe a version of men to me that I do not like. I do not like the belief that men are naturally controlling. I do not like the belief that men have to establish hierarchy where they are above someone else. I do not like the belief that women are illogical and that men cannot have feelings.

But I believe that people who believe those things are the ones that do not like men. "Controlling" is not a good thing even if we slap a trendy label of "alpha" or "benevolent dictator" on it. "Unfeeling" is not a positive descriptor. Belief that men p*e on floors and are helpless to stop it? It's misandry.

Feminism talks a lot about internalized misogyny.

I've started recognizing that the things that distress me about the way some men (and a lot of women) describe men is internalized misandry.

I used to view it as a way to avoid accountability. And yeah. It can definitely be used that way. And I'm not sure why I should like it.

My husband is slow at following recipes because he's meticulous about them the way he is about cleaning an ice cream maker.

I'm a whirlwind in the kitchen and sometimes I abandon complicated recipes halfway through with the declaration that I will save the next fifteen steps for when I retire and I improv a mash-up of another recipe I make regularly with the key points of the Very Long Story the "jump to recipe" skips over by scrolling back to find the step that is annoying me and figuring out why the author considers it Absolutely Necessary in perfecting the craft.

When he and I work together on a recipe it's often amusing.

But it's as easy as breathing because we don't view each other in some weird way.

I can't hate him because he does not hate himself and he does not hate me, so I also can't hate myself.

I do not enjoy being around people that hate themselves and me because of gender nonsense that I did not sign up for.

We're a scatter graph of human traits and socialization. To hate "men" I would need to view men as being fundamentally different from myself in a way that makes them bad.

Logically breaking down the idea instead of accepting it, dismissing it or defending against it is an interesting act of self reflection.

I don't hate men. I hate social parodies that are harmful and demeaning.

10/07/2025

I would like to write about my distress, but I am not allowed to. This is a very generic statement and a very generic post about a lot of experiences that are all happening all at once.

I'll write about bare feet on asphalt instead. Of the feeling of standing outside my mother's car as a child when she had told me I should consider putting on shoes and I didn't. The back and forth movement of my feet as I opened the unlocked door and grabbed a towel to stand on. And the not-quite burned but definitely tender-soled relief from the uncomfortable consequences of choices.

I'll write about climbing too-small trees with brittle branches as footholds and the snapping underfoot and how four points of contact was something that I learned by feel as a child doing things that distressed my mother.

Yesterday I made a mistake. But it's a mistake I am okay with because it is only positive for people that I love, and it hurts only me.

I wish all of my mistakes were like that. Mistakes that hurt only me.

I have spent the past several years in a state of self reflection. I am comfortable with spending time with my flaws, my faults and my own negative contributions. With feeling the edges of defensiveness and recognizing it for what it is.

I am currently in a position where I need to make a decision about whether I am able to uphold the other end of agreements without dropping my end.

I would like to be able to do this.

I'm not.

I can show up for my end. But I need to take a good hard look at why I feel like I need to show up for the rest of it, because that is a mistake that I have been making for a long time.

And when I drop the other end and mess up my own as well, I hurt the people that I'm trying to help.

I need to be more honest with myself about the load on those branches and the heat of the pavement. About the limitations of what I can offer of myself right now, and about the weight of what I am responsible for.

I can do my own part of the group project. I can't jump in for the people that want me to do the entire thing.

I never have been able to. I regret not understanding that a lot earlier.

I can do my best.
My best is not enough.
And that's okay.

I'm responsible for my own failures and my own choices, not for those of other people.

09/25/2025

(...Manipulation continued..)

Persuasion, manipulation, coercion. Word definitions and meanings. Communication. Boundaries. Wants. Needs. Clarification. Twisting of the tale. Accountability. Scapegoating. Collaboration. Informing. Guilt tripping.

I think we use a lot of words and are not always clear on what the words we choose mean, or how other people will hear them based on their lived experiences or even what they are currently going through in the moment.

I have been trying to understand the words that people use, and to understand my role in life and who I am as a person, as a mother, as a wife, as a partner, as an ex-wife, as a co-parent to different co-parents, as a daughter in law, as an ex daughter in law, as a daughter, as a sister to each sibling that I have, as a mother to different children with different lives, as an employee, as a freelance gardener, as a parent that a teacher communicates with, as a neighbor, as a friend, as a community member, as a human being, as a member of a category called "women", as an (often unwilling) participant in a gender role.

And finally, as a self.

But I think as a self comes first unless I want to be a reaction and a shifting unstable human being. And "I need to understand myself first" sounds selfish or self centered but I mean it as a responsibility, not as a desire.

Anyway. I have a lot of time to think while gardening.

I think we talk about a lot of overlapping concepts and try to simplify things that are not actually simple, while complicating things that actually are simple.

My husband likes to joke about "purple flower plants" because then I try to figure out what purple flower plant he means. Violet? Deadnettle? Salvia, lavender, sage-flowers, coleus? Gomphrena? Can I remember what color the flowers of purple-leaved basil are off the top of my head or do I need to look it up? Hosta, floss-flower, mint, catmint, some hydrangeas but not all? The sun-stressed version of a plant that is not otherwise purple.. No, wait. Sun-stress mostly impacts leaf color. Right? Do I know enough about plants to identify what plant my husband is teasing me about?

Today he said "I don't know how you manage to switch between all the different kids and developmental stages and remember how to communicate with each kid."

I know enough about the story of the tower of Babel to say that maybe this is what it references. That all the language in the world won't solve the problem of not being able to understand each other. I'm probably taking a story I have heard a million different iterations of and my brain is trying to use it to explain a generalized feeling that I have been having about communication and all of its shortcomings instead of trying to understand the meaning of the story itself.

That is what we do as people. We try to be understood. And we have a lot of ways to describe the ways in which we try to be understood.

And a lot of them enable us to shut down instead.

Which can be a good thing if someone is presenting us with false information to influence our actions.

Or it can be a negative thing if someone is presenting us with true and accurate honest information to try to figure out how to navigate a situation or to help us navigate a situation in a more ethical/productive way.

Coercion is manipulation with threats.
Manipulation is the presentation of false information with the intent to change a person's actions.
Persuasion is the presentation of information that we believe to be true, in the hopes that a person will make use of that information to improve a situation.

That is how I personally view and define the words.

So my sanity-checking process when someone mentions manipulation is "Am I sure that the information being provided is false?" What are the outcomes of assuming the information being provided is false? How will this impact the person providing me with the information if I assume it to be false when it is actually true? How will this impact me or the situation or the person if I assume it to be true when it is false?

If someone says about themselves that "I am manipulative" what I hear is that they are willing to provide false information to alter someone else's choices. This is a violation of consent. I find it abhorrent. If someone says about another person that "that person is manipulative" what I hear is that they feel that the person is providing false information to attempt to change a situation unfairly.

Sometimes we provide misinformation unwittingly because we believe it to be true. For example, a person may say with absolute certainty and belief that they believe a newborn baby is manipulating me.

To me, this feels like I am being manipulated by the person telling me that my baby is manipulating me into doing something that the person providing this observation wants me to do. Which is ignore my baby and view my baby as a dastardly provider of horrible false misinformation because they want me to be their puppet.

In reality, they are very likely just not very well versed in the skills or abilities of infants and they're repeating things that they've overheard. They're not intentionally trying to manipulate me into viewing a newborn baby as intentionally misleading. They're trying to be helpful and keep me from being manipulated.

I don't enjoy the whole idea as a topic of discussion. It feels really weird and accusatory and bad-faith and not really what I want to base my family on or around.

Honestly, a lot of the time it just feels like a cop-out or a tactic used to dismiss and not deal with legitimate issues. If you can accuse someone of being manipulative you don't have to deal with whatever it is they're bringing up.

And that.. is absolutely manipulation.

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09/24/2025

Manipulation. (Continued)

So. Society is fixated on manipulation and not giving in and honestly some of it is.. just gross. And black and white and.. weird?

Let's back all the way up and start at a newborn baby. A lot of babies have feeding cues that come before crying. They make little mouth o's and stare and make sounds. And ideally we have been exposed to the idea of introducing communication by talking to our babies while we take care of them so they learn the language of their needs.

We are told that literal newborns are manipulating us.

My question is this: why would they need to? What giant horrible master plans do they have for me where they need to artfully maneuver adults into doing something that the adults absolutely should not want to do?

In small pre-verbal children there is no manipulation. There's communication and usually crying is communication that has been escalated because we have missed earlier communication efforts because we were distracted, didn't recognize the attempt, pushed it back.. or our young child was distracted and didn't recognize their need until it became too big for them to communicate calmly about. Overstimulation is a thing. Bodies being strange and confusing.. is a thing. Having needs that a very young child can't communicate is a thing. Needing to be held and close to feel secure... Is.... A... Thing.

Communication is not manipulation. Having a need is not manipulation. In young children that depend on adults for regulation, being dysregulated and crying is not manipulation. They're not artfully directing us. Their brains are offline.

Now. When a baby starts becoming a toddler we have some different experiences. And the discussion around "manipulation" becomes more complicated.

(...to be continued...)

09/22/2025

I would like to talk about manipulation. The word immediately makes me grind my teeth, and I really feel like people use it to mean a lot of different things.

*Trigger alert- mentions of self harm

I have a negative reaction to the word 'manipulation' because frequently the word is used to dismiss people or assert control over them. If someone decides that someone is communicating something "to be manipulative", they can then avoid the conversation completely even if the conversation is about something necessary.

For example, in high school I was deaf. I still am deaf. I have been consistently deaf since I was five years old. I learned something called PSE (Pidgin signed English) in elementary school to supplement lipreading. I was never taught ASL or exposed to ASL. To make matters even more fun, I had no clue that what I understood was "PSE". I learned that term in my 30's. I was told that I was using "sign language" or even "ASL". In order to attend high school I needed an interpreter that used PSE or that was legibly lip-readable. Instead of learning about the communication needs that I had, I was put into a place where I needed to explain to people that were not asking for an explanation. I was seen as manipulative, unreasonable and un-grateful. I was a kid trying to complete school. With an interpreter that I was able to understand I was able to achieve high grades. Without an interpreter I could understand I was not able to pass classes because of the high content of oral instruction that was not in the books and because I was expected to "participate" and "be present in class". I experimented with self harm during this period of time because I felt less than human. I wore long sleeved shirts because of this and because I was not comfortable with my body in general. Gym class required us to change in a communal locker room. I would change in the showers and deal with wet socks. For some reason this bothered someone and I was told that I needed to change in the communal area so I would change under a shirt to avoid taking my shirt off. For some reason the long sleeved shirt bothered someone and the requirement changed and we were supposed to wear short sleeved shirts. At this point the scratches on my arms were labeled manipulative. I dropped out of high school. I felt at that point that I was being manipulated into something and I couldn't understand what I was being manipulated into. Prior to dropping out I tried to explain what I needed and what my hopes for my own future were, and I was told that I "took myself too seriously". I dropped out because I was able to recognize that I was starting to feel as though the only way out of the situation was to no longer exist. I am grateful that I rejected that idea and said that I could just refuse to return to that school and find another way to exist instead. (When trying to express my experience the school's infinite wisdom resulted in them suspending me and having me go for a psych eval to make sure that I was not going to cause the next Columbine. The entire experience baffles me to this day.)

Prior to that, I had been accused of "selective hearing". This is actually sort of true! But it's not me that's selecting what I can hear. you see, hearing losses are not on and off switches. And they're not like vision where things are blurry without glasses and clear with glasses. Hearing loss impacts what frequencies a person can hear and there are a lot of different kinds of hearing loss. The most common hearing loss is a hearing loss that impacts higher frequencies. There are less common hearing losses where random frequencies are impacted or where low frequencies are impacted. As luck would have it, I have a low frequency hearing loss. It is observable and consistent with an audiogram and hearing tests that show what frequencies I can and cannot hear.

The thing about low frequencies is that if they're loud enough you can feel them. So I can still react to some low frequencies that I can't hear because they... make the floor vibrate. They make everything vibrate? And I can hear and react to things like bird sounds.

As a child I learned that I needed to try to recognize when I could and could not react to the sounds that I heard and when I should and should not use my residual hearing. I can hear certain words and phrases sometimes. With wildly varying accuracy. If something is said close by in a higher pitched (naturally not forced) voice and it contains the right balance of sibilants and is a commonly used phrase, I can magically hear it.

Because of this I had to be sedated as a child and have testing done to verify that I was not just faking the hearing loss.

To say that I hate the word "manipulative" is an understatement.
..(to be continued)....

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09/15/2025

I am baking bread.
I will pack lunches.
I will hug my kids.
I will pat my dog.
I will invite people for coffee.
I will plant flowers.
I will pull w**ds.
I will step back and admire my work as nature tries to undo it.

I am thinking a lot about the impact I have on the world around me. The good, the bad. Apologies I owe. My contribution.

I am a single individual human being and I am the only thing that is within my control.

I would like for the world to be different.

It isn't.

It is the summary of all the efforts of all the people.

I can only control my own contribution.

Today I would like for my contribution to be positive, giving, and kind.

It is not what I currently want to contribute. I want to try to feel seen as a human being and for people to look at each other and see human beings.

But that is something found in other people's bodies and in other people's brains and is outside of the scope of anything I can do.

I can make each of my choices today as I make them.

That is all.

09/06/2025

08/28/2025

A friend without kids suggested that parents should use AI to get ideas for how to deal with parenting stuff.

It's a good idea in theory. And I hate it.

The internet has become full of AI generated recipes that will not work with AI pictures of amazing food.

It has also become full of AI generated posts about raising kids that remind me of AI food. If I didn't cook I wouldn't pick up on the fact that the recipe would be a problem. If I didn't bake I wouldn't pick up on the fact that the beautiful cake would not be the result of the recipe as it was written. Because I bake a lot and have made many mistakes and now am at the point where I improvise. I can look at the cake recipe and try to figure out how I could get the recipe to work.

AI can give some good advice.

It can also create bizarre stories and advice that may be harmful.

There's a story circulating about a child using the word "blueberry" to let her mother know something was wrong, and her mother calling the police.

Blueberry is a commonly used word and the post is obviously generative AI because it describes things that don't actually happen the way AI imagines they would happen and encourages us, as parents, to act on the hallucinations of AI in weird ways.

There are actual humans that write things on this topic that are valuable and useful and experience based.

But people that are looking to learn ... Don't have experience..and people that don't have experience aren't going to recognize that something is off. Just like someone that doesn't cook will probably recognize the AI cucumbers are AI because they're rectangles, but a lot of things are going to sound plausible. And when a novice cook "messes up" a recipe that was never meant to work.. they are going to blame themselves for being bad cooks.

Apply that to the parent child relationship.

It's everything I hate about "parenting experts" that tell you that if their method doesn't work you're just doing it wrong. (In reality kids are people and nothing is always going to work because sometimes kids are just going to insist on doing something that is awful.)

People at least have experiences to base things on. AI is generating fake experiences from its interpretation of real ones that it has read and it's re-combining things in ways that often make no sense.

08/28/2025

There will be no processing. Some stories aren't meant to be told after the fact. They were already told by others along the way and that is all that will ever be said.

And it's fine.

There are other stories that are all mine.

Hot summer days with toddlers and small kids. Long meandering wanderings to a playground a few blocks away with a bumpy bumpy bridge and an old pine forest where, if you wandered in at just the right spot, there were clearings and moss.

I was a character in a story being told.
While also existing in the day to day.

The story? I have permanent anger about the role I was assigned.

But the role I tried to find for myself? That is permanently precious and is what has become my job now, and hopefully a growing business.

I tried to be outside as much as possible when everyone was small. Outside was a yes zone with no dangerous furniture, fewer ways to make a mess, and a lot of ways to absorb sunshine and tire ourselves out.

I was a programmer and systems administrator for most of my 20's before kids. Children are deeply wonderfully fulfilling and lovely and days can be full of games and fun. But I have always needed intense physical activity and something to occupy my brain with.

That thing ended up being plants. When I was upset I would look at plants. I would try to describe the plants in my head. I would try to find out the names of them by going into local plant ID groups on the internet and sharing pictures. I'd plant things in the backyard and try to learn about growing them and would learn about all the ways plants can die in the process, too.

While going through the initial stages of divorce I felt completely worthless and incapable of getting a job other than possibly childcare jobs, but all of the childcare jobs would mean I wouldn't be there for my own kids.

I did not want to monetize Nurshable. It has always felt wrong. It exists to try to be helpful, not to "create content". I didn't want to be a "parenting coach" because I can talk about the tools that have helped me and my kids. But ultimately being a parent is just a relationship and it has always felt wrong to charge or earn from trying to figure out ways to solve problems there. Parenting approaches have also been a source of conflict in my life and.. lots of stuff there. But I was not going to turn Nurshable into a business.

A local farm posted a listing looking for someone to "feed the animals" in the morning. Obviously not something that was going to pay any major expenses. But I was hungry for any kind of autonomy and was currently sustaining myself on the thankfulness of my son's employer at his animal care job when I helped out and did more around his job to keep myself busy while he worked.

I mentioned my kids would need to be with me. At this point I was still homeschooling.

I got the job and while it started out as just animal care, other tasks were quickly offered and I found myself planting and w**ding and it all felt familiar and wonderful and I found myself recognizing all the plants. And learning more about each of them.

My kids would come and set up a blanket in the shade and do their school work as I worked, at first. Skylark would come with me in a carrier and as she became more independent she would sit in a milk crate and play with toys. She learned about road safety at my job with all the private roads and golf carts and slow moving trucks and cars. She still finds ride-on lawnmowers absolutely terrifying because they break the rules of "when there is a car you run onto the grass because the cars cannot drive on the grass."

I adore that job, and still work there.

Along the way I realized that I can remove poison ivy without breaking out in a rash, and that it's a good side gig.

This ended up being a whole thing. An absolutely wonderful woman hired me to remove poison ivy and asked if I could also w**d. She had been battling thistle in her yard for many years. I was able to clean up all the w**ds in her yard while Skylark napped in a carrier and played.

Then a friend of a friend bought a sprawling horse farm with amazing gardens that were overgrown and they didn't know what was a plant and what was a w**d.

That was what led me to the absolutely amazing experience of enrolling my youngest child in preschool. She had been asking to go to school for a while because all her siblings had been in public school for as long as she could remember. Her experience of school was coming with me to hatch chicken eggs in an incubator in her sister's class. (This has become an annual thing for our district's first graders, now)

I had an income. A bank account and a job that had too much work and that paid well enough that I could afford childcare.

And I found a preschool, invited her dad to tour it, filled out the paperwork, paid, and enrolled her in preschool.

I absolutely adore my children. They're amazing. But being dependent after having worked since I was a teenager... Was incredibly difficult. Not having access to resources to make decisions like the one I was able to make. And not feeling like I could manage to do anything other than hemorrhage money was awful.

I felt like a useful thing.
A useful inconvenient bad at her job thing that had an always growing list of ways im which I should be doing better.

I have found that the ability to cope with complete overwhelm and wake up every day drowning.. has become the thing that allows me to work at the jobs that I work at.

Completely overgrown? Sure. I will jump in here.

Then during the winter and when it is raining I help people de-clutter and clean and move heavy things and unload moving trucks because of all of the times that I did all of those things on my own with kids and varying degrees of aches and pains and sometimes pregnancy.

It's funny how the things that I did for years for free while drowning and never being good enough are now the things that I can show up for, plan out, jump into, get done, and that people appreciate and pay for.

I get to hear words like "magic", "fairy", "things feel hopeful now and it's motivating" "the gardens are looking like they were meant to look again."

Everything we learn and do and grow into and become? It all has value.

It's nice. That is all. The whole story that needs telling.