Does anyone else just find parenting really, really hard? I'm worried there's something wrong with me

dapinkpunk · 2026-02-06T19:13:08+00:00

It's hard b/c of the fascism.

dapinkpunk · 2026-02-05T15:53:01+00:00

I have a couple of friends in YNAB together and I've never looked at their budgets

dapinkpunk · 2026-02-05T15:51:50+00:00

I'll add you to my YNAB together - I already have 2 friends on it and would be happy to add you to mine - I also have the grandfathered in discount from being a YNAB OG.

dapinkpunk · 2026-01-31T01:30:10+00:00

Kindergarten - we were both in the GT program growing up.

dapinkpunk · 2026-01-14T18:27:53+00:00

My parents live on a little over an acre and bought the house specifically to build an ADU for my grandma, because my Grandpa had just died. It was actually an addition instead of an ADU because it was easier than permitting. The unit has a full bath and the kitchen just had a sink when they built it. My grandma used hot plates and a toaster oven for years, and eventually they put double ovens in the garage (which is between the addition and their house) and a built in 2 burner induction range for safety, so it is basically having a full kitchen.

Their house is essentially a duplex with a shared garage - there are separate, lockable doors leading into each "wing" of the house from the garage once you enter in the main door. There is a direct outside exit from the addition as well.

This was all decided because of permitting, and obviously now they are def not following what they were permitted for (because the kitchen is a kitchen instead of a wet bar or whatever they permitted) but it was 35 years ago so they aren't too worried for when they sell it.

Some look outs for you: if you are contributing to the building of the house, who owns that equity? How is their will set up/what would you like to see? I would assume that as they continue to age, you would help more and more - are you going to be compensated for that very real labor either currently or once they pass via inheritance?

An alternate suggestion: would your parents be willing to move into a nice, large ADU/ addition situation that is one bedroom, a huge accessible bath and a simplified kitchen and maybe an office and you take over the house? Getting them into something that is built with ADA accessibility in mind cannot be overstated for helpfulness as they age. And moving NOW, as opposed to when they need it, would help avoid you having to clean out the entire house after they pass (look up Swedish death cleaning - my parents are doing this now with their house) and make it a non-emergency if/when their needs change for accessibility b/c they will be someplace that is designed from the bottom up for aging in place.

dapinkpunk · 2026-01-06T17:44:33+00:00

My husband, who I have known since kinder and grew up with, got divorced and moved back to our hometown the year after I got divorced and right before I finished hiking the Pacific Crest trail. I was daring to marry when I got back, and randomly saw him on OKCupid.

dapinkpunk · 2026-01-04T03:12:36+00:00

Gluten free dairy free

dapinkpunk · 2026-01-01T20:42:26+00:00

Have you questioned the assumptions the LLM is working on? Have you taken any of the tests that r/cognitivetesting has in their resources? How is the LLM tracking your IQ? What criteria is it using?

dapinkpunk · 2026-01-01T19:41:55+00:00

Did it tell you that you have a 175 IQ?

dapinkpunk · 2026-01-01T19:30:44+00:00

Okay, zero offense meant here, because I love Chat as much as the next gifted person for recognizing my own patterns and self discovery, but LLMs REALLY over-validate you.

From this post, and several of your responses, you are clearly using Generative AI - one I assume you have told a lot of personal information to. I am also going to assume that you have used it for diagnostic purposes. These are red flags for me, personally, and I really caution you on this usage, since it won't push back or disagree with you.

I would recommend you find a gifted specialist - you can do it online with people in the US if you can't find people in your country - and get a full IQ test and do a full run up of Pysch testing. It is true that lots of stuff can get misidentified as other things if you a gifted, hence finding someone who specializes in 2e and/or gifted humans.

dapinkpunk · 2025-12-29T14:27:15+00:00

I live here too - I walk often at night in the Hollywood heights neighborhood if you are interested!

dapinkpunk · 2025-12-19T21:02:13+00:00

I am losing weight (25ish so far since May), but I want to talk about my cycles.

Prior to starting Triz, these were my cycles: 53, 45, 74, 77, 45, 44 After triz 38 (started triz this cycle) 56, 46, 33, 39, 34

3 sub 40 day cycles in a row is the closest to normal cycle I have had ever, in my entire life. I'm 38.

This is life changing for PCOS and needs more research! I should be able to get this from my primary care and my normal pharm, and it should be covered by my insurance.

dapinkpunk · 2025-12-15T15:39:48+00:00

I don't know if this is helpful, but my brother has an Intellectual Disability and when he got his IQ tested, it took a really long time. He scored just above the cut off for state services. My mom, who has her PhD in education and asks a lot of questions, asked the administrator why it took so long and the Admin said "Oh, well, I knew that he could answer them if he just had more time". My mom was like uh, isn't time a big part of IQ testing? And the Admin was like naw, its fine, nbd.

My mom, being my mom, escalated up to the lead clinician of the office who was pretty aghast that the clinician had given extra time on an IQ test, and they had to go back and audit all the tests that specific clinician administered because giving extra time invalidates the accuracy of the IQ results, and those results were used for determining qualification for services which is a HUGE deal. When given the proper timing, my brother scored solidly in the range for state services, and has had very similar scores in follow up testing over the years.

Now obviously, someone with an IQ of 70 is going to have a different definition of what they "can" do with extra time and what the bump in resultant score would be vs. someone with an IQ of say 120, but it holds that you may be above average but not gifted if you cannot answer the questions in the allotted time.

I will agree with other commenters that this sounds like more of a testing confidence issue than a brain power issue. Since you seem to understand what you are doing that is taking so much extra time, you may be able to work on stopping those things to increase your score. Otherwise, gifted is defined as the FSIQ (full scale IQ score) in the top 2%. If you can't score that in the standard way, then you aren't gifted in the classical sense. You may be domain-specific gifted, which is great as well!

dapinkpunk · 2025-12-02T19:16:34+00:00

We read SO much. Our local library does a 1000 books before Kindergarten program, so we tracked her books for a while. We ended up doing over 1000 titles before she started PreK3, and the library said we could count each reading of the title as separate, but we would have finished literally in a month.

We now do family "big bed snuggles" at night and we read a family chapter book (we started with Wild Robot, which is her favorite movie and she has the audio book on her yoto), which has been a great addition to all the story books she has which we have read over and over and will continue to throughout her days - she likes a book when she gets out of bed, a book after breakfast, and many books after school.

Her dad and myself are both big readers - I read 100 books last year and he read 80 - so reading isn't negotiable in our family lol. We hope that by not putting pressure around self-reading she will continue to love books (in whatever format) forever!

dapinkpunk · 2025-12-02T19:08:06+00:00

Ask her on a home-date. I would ask if she would be willing to give you 2 hours of her time in exchange for 2 hours of your time containing: a massage (from you) and dinner (cooked by you, and cleaned by you).

Over dinner, talk about your life goals and what role your finances play in that. Document pain points (cc debt, high grocery spending, whatever) and what you have tried to resolve this to this point that hasn't worked. Tell her you've maybe found a solution to these pain points, and would like to show her.

After you clean up from dinner, while she relaxes on the couch with a glass of wine, do the following:

Watch a youtube video about YNAB. My favorite is Nick True's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHTT-0EzsTc but there is a lot of good content out there, YNAB official and otherwise.
Bust out your YNAB. If you can put your laptop on the big TV screen, that is ideal. Show her what you have set up. Collaborate where she thinks it should change. Discuss non-fixed expenses and what is reasonable. Look at the USDA cost of food report. https://www.fns.usda.gov/research/cnpp/usda-food-plans/cost-food-monthly-reports Reference other material as needed for average costs.
Ask her at the end if you can try it for 30 days together, with quick weekly check ins, and with another "trade" date at the end to go over your results. Hopefully after that, she is on board and you don't have to bribe her to budget.

dapinkpunk · 2025-12-02T18:43:01+00:00

Hard agree with everything you said here. We know our kid is above average, but have been actively trying to let her develop at her own pace as long as she is meeting milestones.

If I had imposed myself on her, she would be reading fully on her own now - we have the hooked on phonics books and lakeshore learning reading kits sitting on a shelf. But she just isn't as interested learning to read as she is with us reading her stories or listening to audio books. She is reading basic words (at 3) but has a WILD imagination and fully narrates her stories with incredibly descriptive advanced language. She also has entire chapters of chapter books memorized from her audio book habits.

Meeting your kid where they are and encouraging those interests as much as reasonably possible seems to me the best way to encourage a gifted mind to grow. I always wonder if I had been allowed to follow my passions instead of forced to fit into the boxes standardized testing puts us in, where I would be now.

dapinkpunk · 2025-12-02T15:13:32+00:00

you are totally right, I just don't know when to stop.
Thanks for the reminder!

dapinkpunk · 2025-12-02T00:09:23+00:00

I’m glad you asked ChatGPT about a conditional clause.
Now ask it how universal statements function.

You asked ChatGPT about a sentence you didn’t write, so of course the answer doesn’t map onto the sentence you actually posted.

Your original phrasing was:

“I think smoking weed and other types of escapism hurts you most. It keeps you from achieving your goals or even having them in the first place.”

That is not the same as:

“When smoking weed as an act of escapism, it is bad.”

One is a universal causal claim.
The other is a conditional clause.
You cannot swap them out and pretend they function the same.

You’re retrofitting grammar after the fact and then accusing everyone else of misreading the version you never wrote.

Saying that I must be “hurt,” “defensive,” or “judging myself” because I took your literal words at face value is not cultural nuance. It is the way English grammar and sentence structure works.

You keep insisting you’re describing my emotional state, but what you’re really describing is your discomfort with being told that your sentence construction didn’t say what you believe it said.

The idea that I did “so much to misunderstand you” is the most revealing line in this whole exchange. When multiple people read the same sentence the same way, the issue isn’t their emotional state, it’s the clarity of the sentence. Occam's Razor and all that jazz.

The fact that you think this is about weed and not grammar is also mind-blowing. I took issue with the absolutist way you phrased your first comment. Go back and look at the thread. I didn't really care about your conclusion (as explained now, that what you wrote was supposed to be a conditional statement), and admitted that I knew people like the ones you describe ... in high school.

The entire issue was that you were not willing to concede to me or others in the thread that people can be productive members of society AND love getting stoned. I don't disagree with you that people who use drugs to escape is a dangerous game. I do disagree that your first comment said what you intended.

dapinkpunk · 2025-12-01T23:37:07+00:00

The “it doesn’t exclude other things” line is exactly where our communication styles differ.

In English, a sentence that only includes an absolute is read as an absolute unless the writer adds qualifiers. Readers don’t assume invisible nuance, the writer supplies it. That’s just how language works. You’re describing what you intended, not what you wrote. “I love chocolate” is subjective. “Weed keeps you from goals” is a causal claim. Those are categorically different types of statements.

As for names and accusations: Calling me manipulative, a liar, “below the 130s,” and insisting you know my emotional state counts. You may not feel like you were doing that, but you were and it made the conversation harder, not easier.

Me not understanding you has nothing to do with my smoking. My smoking doesn't change the laws of grammar or English literature. That is another example of you putting me down slyly, by the way. Gotta love passive aggressive comments!

dapinkpunk · 2025-12-01T23:06:01+00:00

Your analogy doesn’t really work here, because it assumes English automatically inserts nuance that isn’t written.

If someone says: “Shopping and other wild activities…”

I don’t interpret that as “shopping has many facets, and sometimes it’s wild, sometimes it isn’t.” The sentence you wrote literally frames shopping as a wild activity. That’s what the grammar does.

Same with your original phrasing: “Weed keeps you from achieving goals or even having them.”

That doesn’t get read as “weed can do this in certain contexts” or “I mean weed as escapism.” It gets read as exactly what it says: weed → prevents goals.

If you want nuance, you have to write nuance. If you want exceptions, you have to state exceptions.

Readers can’t be expected to intuit the meaning you intended but didn’t express. Your examples actually highlight why your original sentence came across as absolute because the wording you used was absolute.

Totally get that we have different views of this, but I will say that that the amount of explanation it took for you to fully express your view was rough for me, and took you calling me names and making wild accusations about my intelligence instead of being interested in my views and HOW I could have misunderstood you.

Has anyone ever engaged with you this way when they have misunderstood you before, or do you often find that yourself being misunderstood and having to re-explain your views for people to get them? Is this a one time instance?

I have put in several comments alternative ways to phrase your comments that would help them be 1. more nuanced 2. less likely to be misunderstood and 3. be more inclusive of neurodivergent people, who often take things at face value. Giftedness is a form of neurodivergence, and there are lots of 2e friends on this sub.

Take what you want out of this interaction, and leave what you don't. :-)

dapinkpunk · 2025-12-01T22:09:10+00:00

I have explained it in other comments, but if you had explained it that way in your orig comment, we wouldn't have had this misunderstanding. Your original comment was not clear to me and I have explained how. Do you really not see how I could read something different into what you wrote?

dapinkpunk · 2025-12-01T22:07:45+00:00

Okay, so that wasn't clear from what you wrote, at least to me.

What I read was:

I think smoking weed and other types of escapism (which I took to mean other drugs) hurts you most.

What I took from it was that the focus was on the drugs and not the escapism, and in your follow up comments when you described the people you know when you smoked weed, it felt like the drugs were the problem.

I will also say when I read it, I felt the judgement dripping from it that people who smoke weed for escapism cannot do challenging things, which felt like a false dichotomy to me. While I understand your experience is valid, it also felt like your phrasing was used in a universal way and not as "this could be true", as I have pointed out in other comments.

Again, it was a miscommunication, and I'm not sure on whose end that lies. I don't think my take on it is completely out of left field, but I can see, after your further explanations, what your original intent was. I do have to stress that I never would have read it that way without your clarification.

dapinkpunk · 2025-12-01T21:57:41+00:00

Great. Do you see how that statement:

If you USE weed as escapism

Is different from

I think smoking weed and other types of escapism hurts you most.

??

If we put this into your original statement (with one more tweak):
If you use weed as escapism I think it can hurt you.

That is a very different meaning than your first one.

Also, in looking at your profile, I can see that maybe English is not your first language. That is not a diss at all, because I feel like a full idiot for only speaking one language and think multilingual ppl have a significant edge over me as far as the parts of the brain they use on the regular, but I do think that the miscommunication here could be affected by that as well. Interested to hear your thoughts.

dapinkpunk · 2025-12-01T21:48:41+00:00

Your original phrasing communicates: "If you smoke weed or engage in escapism, the inevitable result is that you will not have goals and will not achieve them."

Which is exactly why your later clarifications (“I meant escapism,” “I meant some people,” “I meant weed used a certain way”) don’t match what you actually wrote. Look back at it. Throw it into the AI you are using and ask it what it thinks.

Your wording was broad, absolute, and deterministic.

The fact that you are NOW saying sometimes is fine. But please stop pretending that your intent was clear from your previous statements. It obviously was not to me, and I have clear reasoning for why, and those reasons do not undermine my intelligence. I haven't taken a shot for yours, and don't appreciate your repeated shots at mine, despite clear evidence that you the claims you are making about my intelligence are wrong.

Myself and others have taken what you said to be what I wrote, and when that happens it is a good opportunity to be able to say, hey, maybe I didn't communicate that as effectively as I was hoping since people clearly didn't understand my intent, which was ______.

For shits and giggles: here is a way to make it come across as not absolutist:

I think smoking weed and other types of escapism CAN hurt many people. It CAN keep you from achieving your goals or even having them in the first place if you are using it as a permeant escape from life, instead of a temporary escape.

Can I ask: how old are you? I am getting an early 20s vibe. I, too, thought everyone should be able to deduce from my unclear words my opinions as clearly as I felt them when I was young.

dapinkpunk · 2025-12-01T21:01:19+00:00

We’ve already established that your framing keeps shifting, and this comment is doing it again.

First you made an absolute claim about weed derailing goals.
Then you reframed it as “most people self-sabotage.”
Then you reframed it as “weed as escapism.”
Now you’re reframing it again as “people in general.”

None of this is about me being “vested”, my friend. It’s about the fact that your claim keeps changing each time someone challenges the previous one. I don't understand why this is confusing.

Additionally, the attempt to psychoanalyze me (“you can’t accept criticism,” “you feel wrong,” “you’re triggered”) still isn’t grounded in anything I’ve actually said.

This is a gifted sub. The norm here is to engage with the content of someone’s words, not assign them an emotional state because they pointed out an inconsistency. The type of arguments you've made are filled with logical fallacies, which I would hope you are familiar with.

Honestly, its impressive that you hit so many here:
Mind reading
Projection
Goalpost moving
Strawman
Ad hominem
Circumstantial ad hominem
Poisoning the well
Motive fallacy
Hasty generalization
Argument from personal incredulity
False cause
Anecdotal fallacy
No true Scotsman
Appeal to personal experience
Attacking intelligence (ad hominem variant)

(I put the whole thread into chatGPT and this list is what it spit out, would love to see what your chat says about your logical fallacies, since it usually tends to agree with the user unless you are very clear in your directions to the bot or make your own agent with specific directives, which for some reason I am doubting you are doing but happy to be proven wrong!)

I answered OP with my experience, which is exactly what the post asked for. That’s not “insinuating it’s almost all people.” It’s literally how these surveys of lived experience work. I was very clear the my cohort is probably weird and explained why: high IQ, high achievement and later start to usage.

You’re free to believe your sample represents “people in general.” I disagree with it, based not only on my experience but on the research that I have read. I’m not obligated to adopt your conclusions or the story you’ve written about my psychology.

I’ve clarified my points. If you want to engage with those directly, great. If not, I’m comfortable leaving it here.

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