Happy New Year!!

2021 is off to a bang for us! We manifested a new home on five acres of beautiful desert in Landers and moved in on NYE!!

It’s been 16 months since we lost our apartment in Long Beach. We spent 3 months living in a mini van, 3 months in an Airstream, 6 months in a converted school bus and the past 4 months moving between 3 different Airbnb’s.

That’s 12 months with minimal or no indoor plumbing and insufficient temperature control, and 16 months where we never fully unpacked or moved in. Basically looooooong term camping.

It’s been an adventure and a hugely transformational learning experience but we have never been so happy to finally GO HOME!! And it is such a great situation for us in so many ways…great location, great neighbors, great landlady, great lease terms, great price, and gorgeous views!Thank you to everyone who helped us get through this crazy time!! So many beloved friends, healers, and new connections that made this transition into our new chapter possible.

We’re on the move again. We found out this week that we need to be out of the vacation rental we’ve been staying in for the past two months by Monday. So far we do not know where we’re going next.

If anyone knows of any homes, apartments, rooms, or RVs for rent anywhere in Long Beach, Orange County, Riverside or San Bernardino County, please let me know! Monthly budget for rent is $1000-$1200 per month.

I still have not received a penny from EDD for pandemic unemployment benefits. My claim has been held up in processing since June. It was finally approved this month but the payments are still ‘pending’ and have been for over two weeks. I had hoped we could stay in this rental until my benefits came through, then get our van repaired (it’s been un-drivable since June), and then find a home that we can rent long term. But the owner needs this place for herself in November.

So I either need our long-term home to manifest right now or I need another temporary place to stay until we find it. This would just be for Richard and I. I’m envisioning a private apartment (with a bathroom!) for about $1000/mo in a quiet place where I can continue to work with clients over zoom and phone. I rented a car for the weekend and what stuff we have is packed so we are ready to go whenever we know where we’re going!

If you have any leads on rentals, please share. And if inspired, please help me hold the vision of an easy and comfortable transition into our next space.

And so it is. Thank you!

I feel for everyone losing friends and family to the QAnon cult.

I lost several new friends to it recently, people I had come to love deeply and was somewhat dependant on. I thought I had discovered a new tribe of open-hearted, loving souls who embraced me and my family and were on the right side of history on matters of human rights. It confused me, scared me, and cut me deeply when I discovered that these people had become QAnon believers and started saying things that were so clearly elitist, racist, mysogynist, and transphobic. I tried several times to reason with some of them, to no avail.

My attempts to understand the QAnon perspective and to try to find ways to preserve our connection caused trouble in my partnership. My partner had plenty of prior knowledge of Q and saw this cult coming. He watched this decline in our friends and my attempts to stay connected to them and worried he would lose me to the same cult. We had a few conflicts where I thought he was being too judgemental against our friends and he thought I was being too forgiving/accepting of QAnon’s teachings and their supporters.

It took me a while to give up on these people and it broke my heart to do it. I was so hurt and offended that supporting trump and defending his transphobia and other evils was more important to them then our friendship. Sometimes they even tried to debate with me and convince me to accept Trump. I tried to ‘agree to disagree’ for a while and eventually these “friends” pulled away from us…probably at least in part for being “evil Democrats who support pedophiles” (direct quote from one of them). I finally accepted that they were lost to this cult and the only thing I could do was to get some distance and hold strong boundaries with them so I could stop feeling angry and hurt by their words and posts. Once I did this, a lot of tension lifted off my life and my relationship with my partner.

The experience caused me a lot of confusion and fear over my own discernment and character judgement. If I’d let myself love and trust and become dependent on people who then reveal themselves to be transphobic Trump supporters, how can I create a good life for myself and my daughters? How can I trust anyone!!?

Reading about the QAnon phenomena has helped to heal the hurts I felt from these experiences and to forgive these friends and myself. As I’ve been hearing more about this rise in QAnon followers, I have come to understand that it’s not personal. QAnon is a shrewd cult, exploiting sophisticated psychological methods to draw in people from the New Age community. QAnon believers have had their reality so rearranged by this cult that they truly do not realize that they are furthering efforts to hurt already marginalized communities and are actually impeding true efforts to stop child trafficking.  The ones I’ve tried to talk to don’t seem to even be able to comprehend how they are hurting me and my daughter. They just feel sorry for me that I can’t “wake up to what’s really going on” like they think they have.

It’s still heartbreaking to lose beloved friends but I am grateful that QAnon didn’t pull me in, hasn’t ruined my partnership, and that I haven’t lost longtime friendships or family to it. So far. To my friends who are going through intimate relationship ruptures, I feel for you. My advice is to hold strong boundaries around your own reality and heart-knowing,  and enforce these boundaries with compassion for those lost to the cult. You can’t save them by going in after them. I hope they all find their way back to the light and the right side of history in time. 

So disappointed in JK Rowling.

I actually had this come up recently with a respected friend and felt so offended by his words.

But the honest truth is I didn’t really understand this issue very well myself before my own daughter came out as transgender a year and a half ago.

Transgender women are women

Transgender men are men

When you say anything to the contrary, it is extremely triggering and hurtful to transgender people and their allies. The perception that trans people are somehow “pretending” is just not factual. And this uninformed, transphobic paradigm is the basis for horrific systemic and societal discrimination against transgender people that is the direct cause behind 40% of transgender teens taking their own lives.

40%.

Gender is determined in the brain, not the genitals and for some people the two do not match up the way we’ve been taught that they “should”. Moreover gender is a spectrum, not a binary category. It has always been this way, in every cizilization and every country all through time. Yet we have been gaslit into believing a fictional paradigm that invalidates these people’s very existence.

It took me all of 90 minutes to better educate myself on this issue after my daughter courageously told me who she really is. The information we have on this in biology, psychology, history, and lived experience is very consistent. There is nothing up for debate.

Transgender women are women

Transgender men are men

It is NEVER any of your business what someone’s genitals look like.

If you don’t get this…please read up on it. This article has some good info and resources, as does the one I posted in the comments.

If you are not interested in trying to understand, please unfriend me immediately.

#happyPride

#togetherwerise(P.S. I am still new to allyship in this area. If I misspoke in the above I openly invite my LGBTQ friends and their more experienced allies to help me learn to do better. )

Thank you to the friends who have invited me to create a fundraiser to help me and my family get back on our feet. It’s been hard to share my story or to ask for help, especially over the past year and a half. There has been a lot of blame and shaming coming at me and I’ve found it hard to just shake it all off. In the last few weeks though, I have been opening up more to sharing and to receiving support and love, and my load is really starting to feel lighter. Thank you to everyone who has been helping us and to everyone who donates, shares, or leaves comments of love and magic.

You beautiful people keep me sane.

I am raising this money to help get us through a challenging time of transition. The last ten years since Brooke’s initial leukemia diagnosis have been pretty consistently challenging and the past year and a half have been particularly chaotic. It’s a long story that’s difficult to sum up but the situation now is that I have been homeless for the past 6 weeks, sleeping in my van/staying with friends. My partner of 2.5 years, Richard, is with me. My kids have been staying extra time with their Dad since we lost the apartment, and I’ve only been seeing them every other weekend. Their Dad (Mr B) is currently unemployed and is also homeless is staying with some friends. I’m working but not enough to afford Long Beach rents. Thankfully many earth angels have already come forward to make this period liveable and among other blessings, we have been gifted the use of a beautiful Airstream to live in. We still need to secure a long-term place to park it. We’ve been applying for jobs like crazy with very minimal response and now finally we both made it to a second interview for a gig we’re super excited about! It would require us to move out of the city, but it feels like an opportunity not to miss and even comes with a place to park our Airstream! Hopefully this or something better will manifest for us soon. Once we can get settled, the girls will be back with us every other week and Richard can request more custody of his two kids as well, as they have long been asking for. And I can also start seeing clients again too!

Until the next opportunity pans out, we are in a very tight situation. The money we raise here will go toward food, gas money, moving costs, unpaid utilities and rent for the apartment we left, some minor camping/van life equipment, clothes for the kids, and if there’s enough…a downpayment on a small truck or SUV that can tow the Airstream.

For those that are curious about our journey, I want to share more about how we got here. It’s a long saga that includes a 10-month family court process with 6 court dates where my kids’ dad came up with outlandish false narratives about both me and Richard and brought in lawyers in an attempt to get full custody, almost weekly incidents of harassment from him regarding my parenting and my life choices, verbal abuse toward the kids and many incidents of unsafe behavior around them, very inconsistent child support payments, an unplanned sabbatical from my healing business, a challenging new job that pays very little, an ever-present court-required 40 min commute each day to get my kids to and from school on my custody weeks, acting out and suicidal ideation in my oldest, anxiety and deep depression in my youngest, panic attacks and tons of tears all around, the unexpected gender transition of my AMAB daughter, her father’s transphobic reactions and ongoing attempts to prevent her from transitioning, a CPS report from the school, 3 police reports, 3 emotional breakdowns after the one year mark at said job and a subsequent reduction in hours, the complete failure of my old van, frequent breakdowns of my new one, and ongoing issues with the voyeuristic slumlord who owned my tiny, rundown apartment and lived next door. As you might imagine, these adventures also came with a hefty dose of my own mental health challenges including sometimes debilitating anxiety, depression, and PTSD symptoms. It has been a remarkably intense roller coaster that has been anything but comfortable but it has taught me many priceless things about resilience, authenticity, healthy boundaries, integrity, this crazy society, privilege, love, friendship, and impermanence. Experiential lessons and gifts that I may never have received otherwise. I have been fundamentally transformed by it all, as have my children and my partner. I am still getting to know these new people in my life and in my body. We are grateful for help getting back on our feet and appreciate any amount donated. It means the world that our community is here for us when life throws us curve balls. I can see the light at the end of this tunnel but damn those walls look like they’re closing in sometimes!

We believe in paying it forward so your donations will not only help us, but will also get passed on to someone down the road who gives us the opportunity to help them when we can.

I know that everything is unfolding for my highest and best, and for that of my whole family. I know that we are healing generations of family wounds with what we are working through now. I know easier times are ahead. And I know that we will have all we need to get there. And when I feel overwhelmed in spite of these truths…I try to remember to hold just myself until I feel ok again. It’s an all day, every day kind of meditation practice. And I think it’s working! I can finally see some possible paths to alignment coming into clarity. I don’t feel as trapped anymore.

I have so much love and gratitude for all the amazing people in my life who have been here for us through the hard times.

I’m finding it difficult to share these days because frankly it’s not that much fun telling my story right now. But the isolation is worse so here goes…

It’s been 4 weeks now since we became unexpectedly homeless. (The short version of that if you missed it is that my kids’ dad lost his job and unexpectedly stopped paying any child support at the same time that my car broke down repeatedly and my hours got cut back at work.) It hasn’t all been easy, but it’s a very privileged version of homelessness. Richard and I have a full size bed in our van and thanks to all the great people we know, we have had a great place to park with access to a bathroom, bathtub, laundry, a fridge, and a big patio area. We also have a beach day pass that gives us all day parking and showers.

We also have a beautiful Airstream camper available to us that is going to serve us well and some wonderful friends are helping us get it moved to Long Beach from Joshua Tree in two more weeks! We are still on the lookout for a long term place to park the Airstream. I think we will be ok where we are for a few more weeks before we wear out our welcome with our gracious hosts.

Nadia and Brooke have had to spend extra time with their dad while we wait for the Airstream to get here. We did get to have them with us for four days last week thanks to another earth angel couple who let us invade their guest room for a few nights. This whole thing has been pretty tough for the girls of course, but they are strong and resilient. They’re getting through it.

Richard and I have been applying for lots of jobs but have not had much luck so far. (Things move slowly when projectors are trying to initiate.) I know there is something out there where I can be valued for my wisdom and experience even though I’ve spent most of the past decade “out of the workforce” and I’m calling it in! I also applied for CalWorks and Calfresh and am waiting to hear back. I have little hope of getting any child support again. The kids’ Dad is pretty unstable at this point and last I heard he’s not even looking for work anymore as he and his friend have decided to start a business.

The kids have been without medical insurance since Aug 1. I tried to apply for Medi-Cal for them but couldn’t because I’m not the one who claims them as tax dependents. I have tried four times to communicate with their Dad about getting Medi-Cal or coverage through Covered California and each time he has either changed the subject, gone on the attack, or refused to answer. I am beginning to suspect that he is intentionally keeping Nadia uninsured so that she can’t move forward with her gender transition.

The lawyer that offered to take our case pro bono has a busier case load than she had anticipated and isn’t sure how much she can help now. She said she would help with some requests for court orders but is taking a long time to respond on everything because she’s so busy. I feel like I may need to move forward without her but I am not sure how.

This morning I got a message from the girls’ Dad saying he can’t keep them this week because he has job interviews in Northern California. I dont know if this is true or just his latest attempt to make my life difficult but I dont know what I’m going to do. I have nowhere for them to stay this week and there isn’t room for all of us in the van. The Airstream doesn’t get here for two more weeks. And wherever we stay, we still have to get up before dawn every weekday morning to get them to two different schools 40 min away in Anaheim Hills. Even though their Dad is in Long Beach too now. It’s just ridiculous.

We may just have to pull the girls out of school for the week and go stay with Richard’s grandma in Morrow Bay. I hate to disrupt their lives even more, but otherwise I think we’re looking at homeless shelters and I don’t think that’s better for them.

Does anyone have room in their yard where we could pitch a tent for a week? Or some couch/floor space where my girls could sleep for part of this coming week? I know it’s a big ask. We will find a way to pay forward all the kindness we are receiving.

I’m doing my best to stay positive and trust that everything will work out. Some days the feelings of defeat win out, but not every day. Little by little I am making my way out of this storm.

Huge thank you’s to all the amazing friends who are helping this feel more like an adventure than an ordeal! Shannon Salonga, Catharine Dada, Stephan Dada, Catherine Evan’s, Teri Colette, Robert Jecmen, Amy Lee, April O’Brien, Missy Carter, Emily Mattek, and Yve Hart to name a few.

Please send love and light and hold a vision of my family living in peace, balance, love, abundance, and trust.

Today we’re moving the last of our stuff out of the apartment that has been my home for the past 8.5 years and beginning our adventure in temporary homelessness.

We have not yet been able to find a campground, yard, or driveway that could hold the trailer we’ve borrowed, so it’s still in storage in Joshua Tree. Richard and I will mostly be living out of our van for now. We can go stay with his grandma in Morrow Bay some of the time, but that’s 5 hours from our kids, their schools, my lawyer, the court, and my job so if it’s going to be our long-term solution, some big things will need to shift.

Nadia and Brooke will be staying some extra time with their Dad until we find a place to stay or camp. Of course they don’t love this, but they’re being great about it. I am hoping we can at least find somewhere to stay overnight a couple times per month, even if it’s in a tent, so that I can still have them every other weekend until we sort out a long term solution. I miss them already.

I’m still calling in the income and housing combo that allows us to rebuild our home in a healthier building and circumstance. Can’t wait to see how it manifests!

There have been a lot of tough feelings to move through this week. This is not easy. But it does feel good to be letting go of several toxic dynamics at once, so I’m trying to focus on that.

I’m grateful for the memories this home has held. I’m grateful to have this opportunity to experience life with less priviledge as it is already deepening my understanding of priviledge and my compassion for marginalized people. And I’m excited to see what happens next.

We had so much fun marching in the Long Beach Pride Parade yesterday! My girls have been watching the parade for the past few years and loved getting to march this year. It felt great to celebrate Nadia’s courageous transition over the past year and the fact that she is now out and expressing as her true self in both homes and at school! She feels accepted and supported by those around her and she says she is happier than she has ever been!! She was deeply moved by the vast crowds of people cheering on the LQBTQ community yesterday. I love this city!! 

I’m so incredibly proud of and inspired by my sweet girl. Yesterday she announced to her 8th grade class that she is transgender and asked everyone to start using her chosen name, Nadia. She had tons of support from her teachers and she said most of her classmates responded really well! She went in nervous but came home smiling and said it was amazing to have everyone using her real name.

There was one kid who shot some really awful side comments at her, but she didn’t seem too affected by it. She told me she’s heard him use the n-word in the past, so she was expecting hate from him. She’s really good about not taking people’s hate and ignorance personally. She focused mostly on the support and love she got.

In other good news, her Dad has really turned around and is being much more supportive now. Nadia just kept telling him what she needs until he heard her. And I think the CPS call got his attention. Now he’s using her name and pronouns and seems to have stopped trying to talk or coerce her out of being who she is.

She’s spreading light and love everywhere she goes, just by being herself. I’m so lucky to be her mom.

Please send love to my daughters and I this week if you can!

Things have been a bit dramatic lately. Nadia has been really struggling at her Dad’s house. He’s been having a very hard time accepting and supporting Nadia’s recent shift in identity. From what she tells me, she has had multiple yelling matches with him, trying to get through to him about how she feels and what she needs. Since he is not only transphobic but also a bullying narcissist, he has said some terrible things to her about how he doesn’t believe her, that he knows this is a scheme that I put her up to, and all the reasons why he’s so sure she’s not really a girl. Some of his words hurt her so badly she has nightmares about them even when she’s at my house. She has also had many thoughts of hurting herself. In the last several weeks Nadia has made some minor progress in getting through to her Dad, but it’s just not enough. He sometimes tells her he supports her, and has even been trying out her new name sometimes. But then he also told her that she has to hide her identity from her 11-yr old step sister because he and his wife don’t feel like she is old enough to understand. This means that they expect Nadia to wear boy clothes and go by Aidan and male pronouns when she’s at his house. They also expect Brooke (also 11) to call her Aidan if their step sister is around, even though she’s used to calling her Nadia. The whole thing is very painful for Nadia, who is dealing with lots of gender dysphoria as it is. And Brooke feels stuck in the middle of it all.

Last week Nadia’s school principal called Child Protective Services on her Dad because they found a test where Nadia had written “PLEASE HELP ME. IF I DON’T GET AWAY FROM MY DAD, I’M GOING TO KILL MYSELF”. The principal has had some of her own dramatic dealings with Dad in the past, and knows some of Nadia’s struggles, so she took it quite seriously. CPS sent the police to my home (since it was my custody week) to do a safety check on Nadia. She told them that she’s fine now, she only feels suicidal when she’s at her Dad’s. She told them she doesn’t want to go back there. They told us they cant override a custody order unless there is imminent danger. I talked to CPS and they told me that nothing that the school or I reported to them constitutes child abuse, so there’s nothing they can do. They advised me to go back to family court.

And all the while he sends me relentless messages about how all of this is my fault and accuses me of all kinds of crazy things. His grasp on reality, his obsession with control, and his respect for other people, including his own children, is similar to that of other people with NPD (i.e our current president). There’s really no way to reason with him on anything.

So yesterday I had to send my girls reluctantly back to their Dad’s for another week with him.

And now I have to get ready to go to court again where he’ll have lawyers who help him tell his lies and it’s up to me to get the court to hear what the kids are actually saying. Uuuuuuuuuggggghhhhh.

Just trying to trust. Could use some good juju.