There’s not enough room on AO3 in the notes section, so I’m putting this here.
Series: Actually, I Do Make the Rules
Story: Healing Rules
Note from 2017: Okay, my god. So, so many things have happened since last I worked on this. I mean, Jesus. The election. Yuri on Ice and 200k worth of words over there (and as will surprise no one) I’m back over here working on this while the thing I’m working on there is percolating. Distract me enough and the original stuff I was working on becomes the distraction. And I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, because obviously I need one more thing. Two more things, as I seem to be developing small fiber neuropathy. I’m now on my fifth RA drug this year. And I started publishing my original web series at Lonstory.com. So that’s all very exciting (please for the love of god go read it, it’s free.) Meanwhile, the plot for this has never let me go, so those who were worried about whether I’d finished this? Yes. I will.
If it wasn’t for the chapter titles, this would be a separate story. I’m writing it in almost every way separate from that which has gone before. When we left our people, Bitty had left Samwell at the start of his senior year, Shitty was thinking about leaving law school and moving to a tropical island with Lardo, Jack was doing his thing, and Theo’s dad had been found, introduced, and turned out to be a good guy. It was September 3, 2016.
Where I’m picking this up is not that far after, but sometimes the world changes overnight, and you don’t realize until later that there was a line in the sand that you crossed. There was, for them, the off-season, where Jack was mostly home and Bitty was getting his feet under him, and then there was hockey. Oh. And a little matter of an election. (Also, I wrote everything prior to the October 3 segment in this chapter before the last batch of Year Three dropped.)
I tried to work on this in 2020. Lol.
Mid 2022: Since I last seriously worked on this, um, a lot has happened, both personally and politically. I’m finally stable on my 15th RA drug, but stable is not “cured”. And that’s about enough said of that.
The reason this wasn’t done sooner was Trump, the same way the reason I can’t work on YOI right now is Putin, in most simplistic terms. One of the reasons, anyway. Between Trump and the pandemic I think it’s pretty easy to see how the optimism which permeated the rest of this could have taken a hit, but this story, specifically, hits harder on a personal level.
Rereading Broken Rules was like a kick to the gut, personally. The idea that it might be possible to dearly love a teenager and be unable to meet their needs in your own home… In retrospect, I was just barely starting to grapple with my failing health and the deteriorating situation with my middle child. Without going into too much detail about her medical situation, I will say that she was 11 when I was writing this, and I was nowhere near as disabled as I am now, and we were still regularly running into enormous needs conflicts. Things like, “I cannot take my own child to the bus without feeling like I’m going to puke on the way back and she’s not safe to do it by herself for developmental reasons that are in no way her fault.”
She is now 17, in therapeutic foster care, in a family with no younger children, with a highly skilled foster mom who is honestly amazing and so good with her, who is not disabled herself. She is better off there than she was here, with more opportunities (especially because I’m immune suppressed and she desperately needs the stimulation of other people) to travel and do sports and have a life which meets more of her needs than we could. I’m better off with her there, the stress level is so much lower, and my youngest is capable of wearing a high quality mask and doesn’t need to go-go-go the way she does, so the immune risk with him is much lower than it would have been with her.
And it doesn’t matter how much I tell myself those things, she’s still the baby who I fought to keep alive against huge odds (we were told she had a 70% chance of dying before age 2 when she was diagnosed), still the child I nurtured at my breast and carried on my back and if you’d told me before she was born that I could ever let one of my kids go live with someone else at age 14 I wouldn’t have believed you. It doesn’t matter how impossible it would be to bring her home (we see her, and talk to her regularly, but she has not been in this house since) my heart knows someone is missing.
I used to have a very busy house full of people, and now it is just the three of us, my husband, my son, and me, and it’s very quiet, and calm, and there are few emotional disturbances, and I don’t have to deal with very much drama and yet part of me deeply misses the people who have fallen away.
My health could not take the stress. My heart is still aching. And this story so far has come from a tremendously optimistic place that I don’t live in anymore.
But from the beginning, I knew what these chapters would be about, and a huge part of it is about finding positive things to do in response to terrible, realistic fear. Maybe now, with my life calm, and the stirrings of movement, finally, in a better direction than we’ve been, maybe now is the time for that story. I’ll do my best.
Late 2022:
Recently someone close to me needed help, and our house is not so quiet anymore because I just couldn’t, rattling around in this large house, turn a blind eye to a parent and child in need.
So our house is full again, and I regret nothing. It is a gift to watch people unfold from constant struggle into safety. It costs so little to be kind.
This has been ridiculously hard to make myself write. The combination of not wanting to think about 2016, being entirely over the whole fictionalized wedding writing, and grieving the fact that I may never be able to go to another event or party (I caught covid and flu this year at the same time, going to the grocery store, despite being fully vaccinated and wearing an N95) made it very difficult to write this story.
Also, this fic raised $110 for Fandom Trumps Hate, specifically for the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund. I encourage people to support this organization, especially now when trans rights are under attack in so many ways and so many places. Thanks to PathsofPassion and Anyawen for both, independently, asking “Can my prompt be for you to write another chapter/finish Healing Rules?” Now that I’m finished, I’m glad I said yes.
I probably won’t be doing FTH this next year, but if you have a pressing desire for a specific prompt and are willing to donate to charity about it, it doesn’t hurt to ask.
