Author Archives: Krissy Gibbs

About Krissy Gibbs

Just your average hippy white trash incest survivor stay at home mom. Is there an average for us? No? Oh well.

Irrational feelings.

This is ridiculous. I am so angry with Tom I can barely see straight. I feel like I am getting angry with him for all the not-getting-angry I did during our four year relationship. He’s a fucking bully and I let him walk all over me for four years. I remember chanting in my head, “It’s not worth an argument.” That was how I got through most days.

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I love Saturdays. Saturdays are the best days. Today he is going to stay home. I miss him. I’ve missed him all week. This new company takes a lot out of him. Twelve hour workdays are short.

It’s only eight. He won’t be up for hours. I should probably go downstairs and find something to do to amuse myself until ten or eleven when he will start waking up. I’m kind of sick of doing homework, but what the hell. This week I’m working on Taming of the Shrew. It seems apropos. I’m working on a D/s interpretation of the story. How do I convince the teacher that Kate really likes being stomped on. It gives her structure and safety. I understand that. Tom gives me that. He tells me what the rules are. He gives me a frame so I can be safe and know what to do.

“Hey! You’re up! I’m working on an interesting paper right now, do you want to hear about it?”
“Not really. What am I having for breakfast?”
“Oh. Uhm, would you like eggs and toast?”
“Yeah. And a Coke.” He flipped the tv on. Oh look. Blazing Saddles. Again.

I walked into the kitchen and started cooking. He was laughing before the opening scene was finished.

“Man. These guys really know how to act!” He laughed uproariously, again.

“Here is your breakfast.”
“Thanks.”
“So I’m trying to figure out how to explain that Kate, from Taming of the Shrew, really likes the D/s in her relationship. I found a neat article in Skin 2–that latex fetishist magazine–that has a paper written by a professor from Oxford and ”
“Can’t you see I’m watching a movie?”

I lapse back into silence. I miss him so much and he is sitting right in front of me. All I want to do is share with him what I have been thinking about all week. I’m trying to find the words to talk to him about our relationship. I want to understand why I feel happier in this relationship than I felt with my family. But right now I just feel sad.

“I’m going to go upstairs.”
“That’s fine. I’m going to watch my movie.”

I go to our bedroom and open my upper drawer. The piece of cloth is shoved into the corner. Then I pick up the cloth and unroll it. I take a deep breath before grasping the scalpel firmly. I go in the bathroom and shut the door. I put the scalpel inside the bath tub.

It is so hard doing what he wants. I am a bad slave. I am impertinent and needy. I look in the mirror at myself. I stare as hard as I can.

“Shut up, Kristine. Shut up, Kristine. Shut up, Kristine. No one gives a shit what you fucking think. Shut up, Kristine.”

I turn around and climb into the bath tub. I shut the shower door completely. I run the bath water until the tub is completely full. I lean back against the wall and close my eyes. I can feel tears running down my face. It takes me a couple of moments to find the courage.

I make my cuts very carefully. From downstairs I hear the television say, “Mornin’, ma’am. And isn’t it a lovely mornin'” Tom drowned out the television as he roared, “Up yours, nigger!” and laughed. I fucking hate that movie. I’m allowing it to break my concentration so I shook my head quickly and started humming and then singing to myself so that I wouldn’t be distracted by the noise. I like a song I learned with the Seventh Day Adventist youth group.

“Father I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you.
Jesus I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you.
Spirit I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you.”

It is meant to be sung in rounds in a group. I use it to help me focus on the sensation of the cutting. My other senses don’t have to be as engaged. I want to be very careful. I can’t cut too deeply because that would scar and get attention. I need the wounds to heal quickly. I take my clothes off in front of other people at least once a month. I don’t want to draw attention to this so I am very cautious. I just barely break the skin. I cut barely until I get blood. Thin little cuts like these heal quickly and without a mark for me. I start on my upper right thigh. I like to start horizontally. I make cuts around three inches long. I make them slowly and carefully. I breathe deeply the whole time. I keep singing. In the background Tom is still laughing, or laughing again. I don’t know or care which.

When I am done there are usually three or four patches on my legs. They are usually three inches by five or seven inches depending on how hard the week was for me emotionally. I usually judge when to stop by how bloody the water is. I like to take breaks in the middle of cutting to play in the blood. I like the swirls in the water. The more blood I take out the less likely I am to do something stupid. What I mean by “something stupid” is try to flash my marks at someone. I know it is not ok to acknowledge I do this. I will get in trouble again. If I just have a couple of small marks high up on my thighs I might wear a short skirt or get out of the shower and walk around naked for a few minutes. When I make more and more marks I know how to adapt my behavior and I don’t take the risk of being caught. Tom doesn’t mind me wearing tights and long dresses all the time so it is easy to hide. We almost never have sex so it really doesn’t matter what happens to my body in between.

Eventually I stop cutting and lean back and cry. I don’t even know why I am crying. But I hurt so much. The cutting isn’t what hurts, but it gives me an excuse to cry. I’ll take it.

After even longer I stop crying and pull the drain plug. I watch my blood go down the drain. I get up and rinse off quickly. I dry off and get dressed in thick tights and an ankle length dress. I walk down stairs and sit down at the floor near Tom’s feet with my school books. Even though he doesn’t want to talk to me I miss him so much that I can’t bear to be away from him.

It’s not until he says, “Can’t you ever shut up?” that I realize that I’m still singing the song under my breath.

“Father I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you. Jesus I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you. Spirit I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you.”

Memory lane

5 Replies

I had dinner with my ex last night. That was interesting. I asked him a lot of questions and he answered as best he could. I told him point blank that I’m glad the kids thing worked out or I would have kicked myself for the rest of my life for leaving him. I actually kind of wonder if he lost a little bit of his sparkle for me last night. I think I had forgotten a lot of things. His opinion is the only opinion. I remember why we didn’t argue: I bit my tongue a lot. There was no point in discussing controversial topics because he has already made up his mind and he will be condescending, dismissive, and really pretty rude the entire time you talk about something that isn’t his thing. For example: organic farming. He believes it is going to be the destruction of the human race. He won’t talk about the problems from animal feed lots or mono-crops. He thinks there aren’t any problems. Right. I let it go because I don’t care about converting him.

Noah listens to any crack brained thing I bring up in a polite way and when he is doubtful he carefully says, “Can I see some of where you found this information?” If I’m using an idiotic source he lets me down gently. It’s nice to be reminded that for the first time in my life I live with someone who genuinely thinks of me as an intelligent person. I had forgotten. I had forgotten how much everyone before him made me feel like I should shut up and sit down and just let them speak because they are smarter than me. I didn’t always do it but I felt it.

There has been a lot of research lately on how hard it is to change peoples minds. The less smart someone is the more likely they are to be really entrenched in everything they know. Holy crap Tom is narrow minded. He knows what he knows and believes there is no validity in any point of view he disagrees with. It’s fascinating.

He wants to live in a Sci Fi future. He thinks things will be every increasingly technical and people will move to increasingly thinking jobs. I think that is folly. If you look a distribution of intelligence, 50% of people are below average. You really think that everyone in the world should sit on their ass and do a computer job? Really? Not all of us would even enjoy that let alone be capable. I think we should be encouraging people to work more with their bodies if they show the slightest inclination. We are a nation of people who are desperately unfit and unhealthy. The solution is not more sloth.

He wants to have fun. He doesn’t want to create anything in particular. His job is creative enough for him. Every year or so he has a new hardware design project. He is designing things that use basically entirely outside components. He’s figuring out how to assemble the right configuration of after market parts. He doesn’t have much desire to really grow the business. He wants to keep very busy (he’s a work-a-holic in my “I lived with him” opinion) at work and make a lot of money so he can have more and more fun. That means racing his Porsche, tying up and sexually controlling women, and working. I told him to go get a vasectomy so he can make damn sure he never accidentally ends up a parent because he wouldn’t be a good one.

Tom is a just fine person. I think I just got over him romantically. It was sudden. I no longer look up to him. He doesn’t have a talent or a skill I respect any more. That was weird to notice. I am now how old he was when we met. I feel disappointed looking at what he has done with his life in the last twelve years since we met. He doesn’t have to give a shit about my disappointment, in fact he doesn’t. He has enjoyed his life. He wants to keep doing the same shit for another thirty or forty years before he croaks. He is perfectly happy. Another woman will always come along, right? SM is more interesting with new people any way. I don’t want that life and I’m really glad I only stayed for four years. I have now been married for longer than I dated Tom. Noah is a larger influence on my character than Tom was. I’m glad for that.

I asked Tom what it was like living with someone as crazy as me. He said he was unaware of it. I cried alone and he didn’t know it existed. He didn’t know I was unstable.

I cut and was suicidal a great deal while I lived with him. I was still interacting with my family a fair bit. I was quite unstable. He didn’t notice. He didn’t fucking notice. You have got to be fucking kidding me. Seriously? You are that self-involved? You never noticed that your partner of four years was unstable emotionally? It makes me think I should feel a lot more confident in my acting skills. Maybe I am even harder to read than Noah says. I cultivate being hard to read. I practice. Really. I do not want to give away the intensity of my emotions when I am around people. It’s dangerous to be noticed for your strong emotions. I didn’t know I was that good though. Tom remembers that we had a lot of fun and got along well. That’s good.

Tom has never read any of my writing. He doesn’t want to know what goes on in my head. That may be brilliant of him. I didn’t understand how much my writing has always contained a plea for someone to read it and come talk to me about it. Noah does. Noah is the only fucking person who is interested in crawling as deeply into my head as possible. It was really wonderful to be reminded what it is like to be in the room with someone who requires me to have a brick wall between myself and him. Noah is interested in what I am thinking and feeling, pretty much at any point. Sometimes he is distracted with other bits of life but if I write it down and leave it for him he always catches up. He has read my entire archive on every blogging site I have ever used. Multiple times. That makes me cry. Oh my G-d he actually loves me. He thinks I am worth that kind of time and attention. I write a fuck ton and I’ve been blogging for over nine years. I need to poke around old storage disks and see if I can find my g-blog archive. I’m not sure if I still have it and that is sad. I should probably make another LJ book so that I have a copy of it. Other people write in paper journals and keep them.

All of a sudden I feel a little spark of interest in finding out what I actually like about bdsm. I spent a lot of time last night feeling like I’m just not a pervert any more. I have no interest in the kind of stuff Tom is into. I’m not interested in being degraded for someone else’s amusement any more. I think the joke is kind of thin at this point. Yes, yes, I know that I am disgusting and should suffer. Blah blah. I’m tired of the role I had to fill. I’m tired of having to denigrate my own thinking abilities in order to tolerate being bossed around by someone who is so not smarter than me. He knows different things than me and he believes that the only important things to know are the things he knows. He thinks my things aren’t worthy of much respect. That is probably hyperbole. He doesn’t bother to notice that my things are there so he doesn’t have to listen to me on any topic because I’m not very educated. Or something. “Sure I can “listen” to you blather on about something idiotic while I roll my eyes and don’t really listen.” It’s really very similar to how I feel with Alex. To be fair Alex has dramatically improved in this area in one on one conversations, in particular since he started working on it with his therapist. It’s still a thing.

Tom told me he hasn’t done Daddy/daughter play since me and he hasn’t been interested in rape play either. For all of the years I have known Noah he has been staunchly uninterested in Daddy/daughter play–not his kink. After he read the book and he understood the emotional power it has for me he is suddenly interested. Rape play has been a major component of our life. Tom didn’t think I was a fine instrument to be played. He wanted to have fun with a buddy. Noah is consciously working on helping me change because we both want me to. It was weird to understand that at this really deep level last night. Tom knows very little about me. He knows hand wavey bad stuff happened. He knows a few details and will admit knowing them after a lot of pressure. Holy shit. That is actually kind of amazing. I remember Tom’s life. I pieced it together very carefully. I have a whole timeline constructed in my head about his family and school experiences from very young. I wanted to know him so I could serve him better.

We went to McDonald’s a lot, probably every week. Tom wants to rest when he is at home. He wants to eat on the go as he dashes to and from work and parties. It’s a lifestyle. So one time I asked for chicken nuggets and he asked what kind of sauce I wanted. I responded with, “The usual” and he said, “What’s the usual?” and I could feel my face involuntarily fall. We had been dating for multiple years at that point. “Sweet and Sour.” There was some little flick of memory in his face as he recalled my voice saying that over and over for years in his memory. He looked kind of guilty but turned around to the cashier without saying anything.

If I walk into any restaurant with Noah that I have ever been to he can tell me which foods I enjoyed and for what reasons and which drinks I particularly liked or disliked. Sometimes he makes me cry. It’s kind of embarrassing in public. Noah knows what I like. I think that is the most amazing thing in the whole world. He pays so much attention to me. How can a human being be capable of paying so much attention to me? He has a catalog of my smiles. He knows what kinds of memories go with which expressions because he looks at me and asks what I am thinking over and over.

Having dinner with Tom was intense. And then not. And then it was kind of boring. I couldn’t have a conversation with him because he wasn’t interested in my point of view. He was dismissive and cold. He didn’t mean to be. He could speak perfectly politely as long as he could feel it was entirely “fun”. He wanted to have an agreeable conversation and he was perfectly happy to bulldoze and be rude and ensure that I didn’t conversationally disagree with him. I am so happy that I now live with someone who values my opinions even when he doesn’t agree with me. It was really nice to see that I have found someone who suits me far better. I am glad I kept looking.

I have to go run.

Apparently I don’t want to track.

8 Replies

I got busy. Then we decided to use a lot less electricity for a while (no artificial lights and no computers during darkness) and my computer time went down. I'm cheating today because I am in a bad mood.

I went and saw my therapist on Thursday and that was a good thing because I was having a lot of intrusive suicidal ideation all week before that. Over the weekend I just didn't have the thoughts and that was restful. But this morning Calli had a hard time sleeping and I wasn't very patient with her and I feel quite guilty about it and here I am. Noah tapped me out because I wasn't being very patient. Shanna didn't have this many sleep interruptions. This is hard. I don't handle many of them–Noah does 90% of them. Once in a while I try to tap him out around four so that he can get a little sleep before work. I did that last night and I shouldn't have. Turns out she had just barely woken up and he had slept most of the night. Dang it. That's what I get for trying to be nice. He came back at five and told me I could be done. He's very nice. It's going to be a long day and I will be nicer to the kids all day if I have some time when I am not being kicked or having someone scream in my ear.

Running continues. I have missed a couple of days of training due to tripping. I feel mixed about that. It just means I need to be more careful, right? I don't think that long term it will be a problem that I lost a total of three and a half miles more than five months before the marathon. I will still get enough miles logged. It will be fine. I'm struggling with my attitude about running. Some where in tracking I stopped thinking about it as "just get there" and started thinking "I am a loser for being this slow." I am not a loser. I am not an athlete. I do not have a history of running. I'm doing fucking great. My attitude isn't great and I'm trying to work on it. I wish I could just feel happy with myself for what I have done so far. I don't know why I feel so little pride in the half marathon. I suppose because I was bitching and moaning in my head the whole time. I cried through a lot of the race and felt self-pitying. Why should I feel pride in spending three hours feeling that way? Running is extremely emotional for me. I think about my siblings a lot. I think about my brothers and how they used to run. I think about being told all my life that I was not athletic and never being given space to try. If I wasn't going to go out and be the fastest person on a track team tomorrow I shouldn't bother to get off the couch.

I think about how I want my kids to perceive exercise. And I think it sucks that my experience of running is that it triggers a lot of crying and very sad thinking. I wish to God that I had memories of my family that made me happy. I want to be able to think of something that has happened to me and not cry or feel bitter. How do I turn things like a half marathon into something to feel kind of lame about? I know I didn't "enjoy" running it. So it doesn't count. I sure as heck wasn't that fast. I feel like there is no point in me doing things. I think that at least part of me believes that because no one will be there at the finish line whether I am the first person or the last who gives a shit about me so why bother? It doesn't matter what I go do when I am alone in a room by myself. I don't really exist.

I go see a therapist because I need to have an "authority" who I can come back to time and time again who I can come back to and get continual reassurance that I am doing the right thing. I need to be seen. I need to have someone I can trust witnessing my life who isn't going to allow me to be invisible. I have had a few good therapists in my life. They have all been able to present a neutral facade no matter what I am telling them about until I ask them for feedback. Then they react a great deal. I can't handle working with a therapist who flinches and pulls away from me when I talk about the things that are going on in my head. I can't expect neutrality from Noah or my friends. I have gotten to the point in my therapy career where I talk about that on the first visit with a new person. "I need a blank wall. I will project all of my shit onto you if you give me any reaction." My current therapist has a wonderful presence. She radiates comforting. I like her.

Last week we talked a lot about what it means that having panic attacks and feeling suicidal is my normal. What do I do about that? How do I go about living my life knowing that it is true? I have yet to have a stage of life where I have gone more than a year without thinking about suicide. I didn't think about it for the first year of Shanna's life. Then I had a miscarriage and a bunch of issues with my mother.

If I wasn't someone with a panic disorder what would my life look like? How would I interact with people? What would would I do with my time? I have to construct this story out of whole cloth. I try to guess. I switch social groups so often because I don't feel like I guess well and then I am afraid to see people again. I won't be able to duplicate the same "character" I was trying for the last time I saw them. A lot of how this is manifesting is I just don't talk as much any more. I feel like I only have bad things to say so I shouldn't say anything at all. Sometimes I get into a blurty stage because I have so many words in my head and I don't have very many appropriate places to put them.

I want my kids to have a different relationship with exercise than I have. So I pretend that running is awesome and I do a lot of it. I like that my kid thinks nothing of the mile walk to the park. She would much rather walk to the park than drive because she thinks car seats are annoying. We have a different sense of time than most people. We have long days to fill. We don't do much and we don't have very many obligations at specific times. Well, we do a lot. It's just all decided at the last minute and most of it is in or near our house.

How would I live if I didn't have panic attacks and suicidal ideation? I'm not really sure what would be different. I wonder what my life would be like if I didn't waste so much physical energy on being afraid. Terror is hard on the body. My body feels terror a great deal of the time while I am doing common every day things. I wish I understood how much it was taking away from me, although I'm not sure I need more reasons to be resentful. I don't like my body for being maladapted in this way. I wish my body understood that it is ok to be safe here. I kind of feel like part of it was being mailed the letter. People who are mad at me aren't even going to limit telling me that I'm bad to the internet. They are going to mail shit to my house so that I can't avoid knowing that I'm bad even if I avoid the internet. Well, fuck.

I want the voices inside my head to be kind to me. I want to know how to change those tapes. I'm tired of feeling like I loathe myself. I'm tired of feeling critical of my accomplishments. I really and truly am safe. I feel like I need to get to the place where I can really trust that Noah and Shanna and Calli are probably always going to like me. They will get mad at me as well. Other people need to be not my problem. I need to stop caring if other people think I am bad. I need to stop rehearsing these tapes that confirm that people think I am bad. I need to not care that what I am doing is not good enough for other people. That isn't my job. I don't need to be good enough for them. Three people. What would my body feel like if I really understood that I only need to expend energy worrying about three people instead of untold numbers? I think I should make up that story in my head. That should probably be my story all the time. Then I won't have to worry about remembering a new one. This is my family. I care for them and they care for me.

Instead of hearing my brother criticize me I need to hear Shanna telling me that I'm the best mom in the world. Shanna has already declared that she is running in a race with me as soon as she is big enough. I guess I will have to keep running. I need to get the wheels fixed on her bike so she can ride while I run.

I had to have kids or I probably wouldn't have made it to thirty. I have been suicidal for a very long time. My will power needs rejuvenation. Right now my job is to teach my kids how to be functional, happy adults. That means I have to figure out how such a person behaves and act like that in front of them all the time. So I cry when I run. Maybe I should stop feeling bad about that. Maybe it's really awesome that I have space in my life where I am alone and I get to vent those horrible overwhelming emotions. Maybe a skinned knee isn't the worst thing in the world. I do need to pay more attention when I am running. I want to show Shanna how to be competent and that means being at least minimally attentive. Injuries suck, yo.

Planning

3 Replies

Noah is a lot smarter than he looks. He let me buy into the Disney time share program. Even though it was a lot of money. And he hasn’t gotten mad at me for not paying it off faster. He’s really quite patient with me. I say that he is smart because a lot of how I manage self-discipline is in service of some goal. I can talk myself out of eating out if I know that all of my Disneyland spending money in October and December have to just come out of our normal budget. I have to save up gas money in advance. I can’t buy a race day t-shirt at the marathon unless I save money. I have to think about these things in advance. If I want to have the money then I have to save now. Our income dropped dramatically. I can’t just doall of the things I expect in the back of my mind to do. It’s feeling hard to adjust to. We lost a big darn cushion. I always planned for us to live on his income and the reality is we spent every penny of extra income too. Some of it was shuffled off to savings/investments but not a lot. We have had a really comfortable and fun life. It’s been awesome.

Noah wants to try some big hard stuff. My role in that is to be the one to save the money in advance that will allow us to take this risk and not suffer from it regardless of the outcome. I have to plan in advance and it’s feeling hard. It’s feeling like more self discipline than I have.

Part of the reason I am walking as much as I am with Shanna is I’m trying to see if I can live without the van and be ok with the kids. Can we get to the places we want to go? I’m trying to learn what places near here we want to try. Every additional car adds a huge amount of liability: gas, insurance, repair. Saving multiple thousands of dollars a year is a lot. It just limits my range with the kids a lot. We are thinking hard about that. Things like: it would really suck to not be able to go to many home school events. I’m trying to figure out when they happen and if I could manage it. I should probably actually investigate options on the peninsula because then it makes a lot more sense to take Noah to work and use the car during the day. Most everything we do now ranges up and down the east bay.

I saw my therapist last night. Yeah. I feel like this. And that is probably going to keep happening. This is my normal. Time to move on with life. Life isn’t going to wait for me to feel better. I have to think about things that matter. Things like: what are the actual needs in this house? How can I meet them? What would a life that meets those needs look like? I need to backwards plan this. I need to draw up a long flow chart so that I can figure out what I should be doing now in order to move towards those goals. Yes, my stomach hurts. Yes, I feel like I am about to puke. Yes, I feel like my heart is racing. Yes, I am afraid.

But Noah slept in and I have to go make breakfast. That’s a lot more important. He really needed the sleep. And he will want to go in early today because we are having dinner with a friend tonight.

Everything must be bad

2 Replies

There is a diner in town we go to for breakfast. Noah went there regularly even before I moved in, so we have gotten to know the staff. The two main servers have been the same for more than ten years. We have kind of a special relationship with the woman, who is probably around my mom’s age. Her grandkids live out of state so she quite dotes on my girls. Towards the end of today I got up the nerve to ask her to go do something social with me and the girls. We are going to go to tea in Niles for Shanna’s birthday later in the month. It will be really nice.

Talking to her is kind of a mixed bag. I have been crying a lot after eating there recently. I am so fucking jealous of her relationships with her children. Recently her youngest daughter decided to do a city hall wedding, last minute, with her partner of almost seven years. My friend was so excited. Her daughter allowed her to do all the doting and the silliness and traditional stuff that she desperately wanted to do but her daughter didn’t exactly want. Today we talked about how excited she is that this summer she gets to spend her oldest daughter’s birthday with her this year and she hasn’t done that in a long time. She has been very sad about that. I haven’t spent a birthday with my mom since I turned 18. I never will again.

I seem to be working hard to ensure I won’t have family at all some day. I hope I don’t fuck things up with Noah and Shanna and Calli like I do with everyone else. I ran Sarah off. I ran Alex off. I ran Andrew off. I ran Julia off. That is all in the last year. I told Noah this morning that part of why I asked him for monogamy is because I’m afraid that he will come home from a date to find me dead. I keep making it harder and harder for him to stay with me.

I’m just not worth the effort. I’m too angry. I’m too mean. I know. I drove my family away. I chose to send out a nasty message to every member of my family basically telling them to fuck off. I’m really glad I have therapy today because I would kind of like to walk in front of a bus before anyone else can leave me. I don’t know why this is so bad right now. I have nothing more to give. Why would anyone want to know me?

I know why Shanna and Calli want me. I understand that for them I am still a fucking need. They would never be whole people if I died now. That would hang over them and poison their entire lives and I am not that selfish. I don’t know why today is so hard. I have been sleeping. I’m eating. I really really really don’t need more exercise than I am getting. I’m up to running (just over 5 mph consistently) at least 12 miles a week and it is about to start increasing dramatically. I’m walking 5-10 miles a week with the kids. I really don’t need more fucking exercise. I have the house at such a state where I can clean it from top to bottom in three hours. No matter how untidy it is I have a system for doing a basic pick up in about thirty minutes. The kids are both being loving and sweet and remarkably agreeable. We are in a honey moon phase. Why do I want to kill myself? My mommy calls me a liar. I must be a piece of shit. I wish that wasn’t enough. I wish I didn’t care what she thought. I really do.

Everything is in the right place. My life is really as set up as it is going to be for the next few years. I feel like everything but me is perfect. Someone better than me should be in my place. Someone who is not spiteful and bitchy. Someone who doesn’t burst into tears just because some woman in a diner loves her kids. I feel so deeply unlovable. So worthless. Noah seems to love me. I don’t understand why. I understand the girls loving me. That is a biological self-defense mechanism. They want to god damn survive and I am their ticket to doing so. But it’s deeper than that. They are part of me. Just as I am part of my mother. And I can’t have her any more. I feel like I am on the road to ending up like my step-mom. She overdosed on heroin in the bath tub. At her funeral everyone said they couldn’t understand why she did it. They thought she was perfectly happy. She told me she wasn’t. She talked to me about being depressed. Given that her mother went through a long and messy battle with cancer and all the things in her life that bothered her I perfectly understand why she did. Perfectly.

I can’t let Noah date because he would find some nice secondary who would appear to me to be better than me in every way and he would come home to find me dead. Obviously this person is better to spend time with, so why don’t you do more of that. It’s not right. It’s not true. I suppose in this objective way. That is how it feels to me. I want him to go find someone better than me because he deserves someone better than me.

I’m having a lot of trouble with sex. I feel like he married me because I was so enthusiastic about sex and I was so enthusiastic about sex because I am deeply broken and I seem to have settled into this entirely asexual motherhood thing. In our marriage vows we specifically did not promise monogamy because I didn’t think either of us would ever do such a thing. Now I’m threatening to kill myself if he dates. To be fair, I never did that. I didn’t tell him I thought about such things while he was out on dates because it wouldn’t be fair. Why would he need to know that kind of thing? It’s emotional blackmail. I should just shut the fuck up already. I feel like writing these things in my head is a form of bullying. People who love me will feel bad. I don’t think I currently have anyone in my life who actually wants me to hurt. And I have friends. I have awesome friends.

Being an orphan is fucking hard. When I went to the grief ritual I met a woman who runs an adoption support group. I told her that I wasn’t officially adopted so I don’t count. She told me that I have absolutely been abandoned by my family of origin so I count. I think I should send her an email about that. They even meet on Monday nights and that is my night off. Done.

I feel like maybe the next big task in my life is for me to find things that I love about myself. All I see is the bad and the not good enough. Surely I do something to a degree that I am satisfied with. Even when I look at my cat, whom I rescued before her eyes were open–I am the only mama she knows. I bottle fed her and taught her how to eat food. I taught her to talk; her meows pattern on mine. Right now when I look at her I feel guilty. I am not affectionate enough. I don’t let her sit on my lap as much as she wants. I don’t clean her litter box until she yells at me. I just don’t think about it. Even though I have had her for fourteen years. I’m a self-absorbed asshole. Why don’t I take better care of her? She is a really nice cat and she has very rarely made any trouble. But I don’t clean her box until I have to and I resent her as I do it. That is what I see when I look at myself. All I do is resent everything. Every good in my life I make bad. I dislike myself for my ingratitude and hostility and resentment. Why the fuck can’t I just be grateful that my life is better now? Why do I still whine all the god damn time about things that are over?

My garage is really cool. I did a lot of really fun things here. I should feel proud of myself. Mostly what I feel is shame because I am so far removed from what is in my head. What it could be if I had more time and money. That kind of thing. I can make anything bad. Everything I do is a symbol of how I failed to do something better. Is that perfectionism? I don’t know. Noah says that I use the fact that I can find one person better than me at doing every specific task to prove that I am a loser. He argues with me a lot about my self-esteem. I’m worried about wearing him out.

I keep feeling reminded of my lack of earning potential. My life isn’t worth much to anyone. If Noah gets sick of me my life would dramatically change. It would be very hard because I’m about as dependent as a person can be. From here on out I have no source of income or any potential source of income. And I’m asking him to buckle down and stop getting a whole bunch of the perks of living with a sexual abuse survivor. I’m not doing the ridiculous promiscuous sex any more. Why in the hell would he stay? I feel like a leech. I feel like I will never be able to pay him back for how hard it is to put up with me. I feel so god damn mean.

But if I am so god damn mean how come people stop me on a regular basis to tell me that they enjoy hearing me interact with my children? But if I was so god damn mean I might run four chosen family and my entire biological family out of my life in a year. I’m that talented.

Today is going to be a long and hard day.

Parenting, anxiety and me!

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Sometimes I feel like a broken record. My anxiety level for the past couple of days has been unreal. My stomach aches all the time. I feel like I want to vomit fairly regularly. Nothing is going on. My life is smooth, relatively easy, I don’t get a lot of surprises… and yet… here I am. I hate this. I hate that my body is so broken that it is incapable of ramping down my ambient stress level when there isn’t much stress in my life.

I have fairly ruthlessly culled people from my life over the past year and some. I didn’t really do it on purpose but the shape of my days is different than it was a year ago. I don’t talk to as many people. I think I grow ever more isolated. It’s hard but it feels like the right thing. People distract me from the business of my life. I don’t feel good about that. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that wanting people distracts me from the business of my life. If I accept the fact that people are not going to show up and suddenly love me and want to help me I get by.

As always I feel like I don’t explain well. Watching Shanna is how I learn about myself. It’s a slow process. I understand things about myself as I see her doing things. Noah likes to tell me that I picked the high-intensity version of parenting. I feel like an asshole saying that about myself but it is basically true. I am with my kids all the fucking time and when I am with my kids I pour enormous amounts of energy into them.

A friend has an autistic son. I asked her to describe what his therapy looked like because I was curious. I felt kind of weird about the fact that my day-to-day interactions with my kids sounds remarkably like the therapy for autistic children. And I do that for 12+ hours every fucking day. I talk and talk and talk and talk. Shanna is, thank God, a highly verbal kid. So she listens to my explanations and takes them seriously. I can talk her into or out of almost any behavior. I explain in great detail why things are important. Hell, I’m coaching her to require a why so that she feels like she knows why things happen. “If I tell you not to do something and you really want to do it, ask me “Why” and I will explain. Most of the time I have a good reason.” I let my kids destroy the house in the name of creativity day after day. I don’t prevent them from doing things that make my life hard. I try to keep them safe. If it’s not a safety issue I will tell her, “Ok I will feel frustrated if you do that but there is nothing inherently wrong with you doing it so I’m going to leave the room and not watch. Have fun.” Usually I say this when she is about to do something that will cause me to be on my hands and knees for an hour picking something up. It’s going to suck. But I’ll do it because that is my job.

My job is to teach my children how to be functional adults. This is fucking tricky because I’m not sure I qualify every day. Hell, I’m not sure I understand what it means to be a functional adult. I see a wide variety of function out in the world. People get by. What is the base line? Am I shooting for the baseline? Oh god no.

I think a lot about why I want to homeschool. How do I want to do it. Am I doing it because I had a traumatic experience in school and I’m afraid my children will have the same life experiences? They won’t. Full stop. I’ll be frank and say that part of the reason I think about it is because I don’t feel like I am really a fully functional human being as long as I hide at home with my kids. Do we really hide at home? Well, it depends on how you mean it.

I feel like this part of my life seems to be focused on figuring out how my body works so I can turn around and teach my kids how their bodies work. As usual I feel ashamed that I don’t already know. I don’t know because I have spent most of my life dissociated from my body. I don’t know how different movement feels. I’ve never paid enough attention to know. I’ve never moved enough to know. I have hit this weird plateau in running. I can’t go faster for a while. I need to stop trying. When I leave my house hoping for just a few seconds faster I spend the entire run feeling angry at the weakness in my body. I’m at this place where I don’t think I can get much faster without a whole bunch of strength training I’m not really doing.

The pickle is I feel like my entire life works that way right now. Everything I am doing is at this stuck, hard place. What I need to do is just be stronger and everything will be fine. I’m at the stage of gardening where I need to weed like hell. Ugh. It’s not hard for the first hour. After that it hurts. Running isn’t hard for the first fifteen minutes. After that it hurts. Going on walks with the kids is easy for the first 3/4 of every walk. Then it hurts. etc.

It hurts in unexpected ways. Today I stopped at about 2.5 miles in and stretched for several minutes because my back muscles were so horribly tight I felt like they were about to spasm. My skinned knee is still stiff and uncomfortable. Other than that my knees and ankles are doing well so I don’t intend to slow down on the running. But I need to stretch more.

There is nothing in my life I need to do “less” of… other than maybe whining. I could do less whining. But why do I feel like a whiner? I whine at my blog (not even daily) and I do it at random opportunities. It doesn’t happen daily. I feel like I am not allowed to feel like my life is hard because I am sitting on a mountain of privilege and I need to shut the fuck up. So many people have it worse than me. Poor fucking baby. That’s not really a useful attitude to have towards one’s self. (oneself? weird.)

I don’t believe that any of the things I am doing is really all that hard. Hell, even the marathon training doesn’t feel that hard individually. What is hard is that I feel inadequate to the long list of work in my life. I don’t see how I will do it all. I keep hitting this terrible wall of desperately wanting someone to teach me how to do this life thing. Where the fuck is my Mr. Miyagi?! Someone who will just pluck me up and teach me how to survive and work and find discipline? I need help.

That’s nice, dear.

Where is my mommy? Where is the mommy who loves me enough to teach me about life the way I am teaching Shanna and Calli? Why don’t I get that? Well, honestly, it’s because not very many people want to put as much time and attention into another person the way I want to do with my kids. I want my kids to move through the world believing that just about everything has an explanation and if they want to know it we can bloody well figure out what it is. That doesn’t happen in school. In school the reason you have to do something is because some arbitrary asshole somewhere made a draconian rule. Bowing to random arbitrary rules isn’t very functional, in my opinion. In my opinion being functional means staying your course and figuring out how to survive in a terribly rigged system. Not a god damn person in the public education system tried to do anything to help me. I’m an outlier, fine. People can tell me hundreds of stories of them having good experiences. Research says that outliers do not do well in our system. Is there any chance in the whole god damn world that my kids won’t be outliers?

It is an Adverse Childhood Experience growing up with a parent who has diagnosed mental illness. Hi. I’m Krissy. During my life I have been “officially” diagnosed with PTSD, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Major and Minor Depression, Bipolar Disorder, and lots of people have unofficially thrown out a variety of other options for various reasons at various times. My kids are going to grow up with that. I can’t prevent that. I can’t not exist in their lives so they can benefit from not being around a crazy person. That feels bad to say, but it is a fact. My kids wouldn’t be able to go to school and be just like everyone else and fit in and progress at the normal rate in the normal manner. They would always have the horrible reality of coming home to me. I would be highly disruptive to a child who was genuinely normal. I’m not good at that type of existence.

Stupid shit. A friend posted pictures of bringing in goody bags and cupcakes to the classroom for her daughter’s birthday. I would be shittier than shit about stuff like that. I wouldn’t want to spend the money. I would resent putting forth effort to do “expected” things and I would be inconsistent and pissy about it. I wouldn’t encourage my kids to dress normally. I wouldn’t encourage my kids to behave in ways that worked in the classroom. When Shanna says, “Shit. My glass is empty. That sucks.” I just smile and don’t worry about it. When she says “fuck” I completely ignore it in the moment. Later I work into the conversation how some people dislike certain words for totally illogical reasons. If you want those people to like you then you have to play their game. I’m not going to tell my daughter these words are bad because I don’t believe it is true. I believe it is an irrelevant distinction. I think they are impolite in some circumstances just because it is good to treat people how they want to be treated. It is important to me to handle it that way.

My kids will have a profoundly different understanding of the world than most kids because I removed the explicitly sexual content from my view of the world and have otherwise just merged them with my experience. To me that is what life is. You take your children with you for your life. Shanna has some interesting things to say about the police given her experiences participating in the Occupy movement. She was upset about not going to the General Strike yesterday but Calli wasn’t feeling well. Sick kids trump politics in this family.

That is what I am specifically teaching to my kids. Life is about this weird slightly moving hierarchy of importance of needs. You have to triage and decide your priorities over and over and over again. If you don’t think about your life that way you won’t really be able to make long-term planning decisions.

Right now we are trying to find balance on budgeting stuff, money is hard and complicated. I’m trying to figure out how to divide the hours of the day. How much time do I spend on different tasks around the house? The thing is, I’m doing the high intensity version of parenting. I do tasks around the willingness and ability of my kids to handle me working. That makes everything complicated. I’m juggling their attention needs, my need for time when I am not being pestered with 20+ questions every minute, the need to constantly be in the fucking kitchen cooking and cleaning up after the mess, and everything else I want to do in this life: writing, running, gardening, have friends. I keep reminding myself that my children won’t be small forever. I’m crossing my fingers that this ridiculous outpouring of energy will eventually slow down. I have no way of knowing. I can’t plan as if it will. I have to plan as if I am going to be this tired and interrupted forever. That way every improvement will be a blessing and a wonderful gift instead of something grudgingly grasped.

I really struggle with this whole “mental illness” thing. I have a lot of days where my body is in active fight or flight mode for a lot of the day. It is very hard to calm it down. I have terrible ranges of emotions. But I’m at work so I stomp the shit out of most of it. Producing people who can function within society is my goal. That means I can’t cause them to develop the same kind of extreme coping mechanisms. I just can’t. How can I teach something I have never experienced? How can I teach what it is like to move through the world without fear? I feel so much fear I want to vomit sometimes. And nothing bad is happening to me. I think that part of the reason that I have so many friends on the autistic spectrum is because I know my emotions are too extreme for the normal range so I need to hang out with people who just won’t notice or care. Honestly hanging out with my kids is similar. Well, my kids notice. But they give me a kiss and a hug and smile and expect everything to be all better now. As far as they are concerned, it is. Because mommy smiles and hugs them and says, “I am so glad I get to spend my life with you.” They do make me feel better. I had this whole range of emotions before I had kids. Before them I had sex with random people or did drugs or cut to deal with my emotions. Now we are trying to move in the “hugs not drugs” direction. The pot is so complicated. I have, uhm, tried a wide variety of street drugs. The pot is different in how it functions in my life.

What is the difference between drug addiction that is bad and being dependent on a medication for survival? Many diabetics require insulin. Thyroid medication is a big deal. Etc. My brain was damaged by what happened to me as a child. It does not function normally. I feel genuine terror and have the full body experience of being retraumatized some days. It really sucks ass. But I can take that sensation away and relax enough to have a conversation with my kids and be mellow. I feel disgusting for needing help. Why the fuck can’t I just be stronger? Such a fucking loser.

Noah told me last night that he can tell I have been feeling unworthy lately. I’ve been struggling with finding a place in my head and my heart where I am comfortable with who I am and what I am doing with my life. In a variety of different places in the past couple of weeks I keep finding stupid things that all remind me that I don’t have a lot of earning potential. My credential has lapsed. I would have to go back to college before I could usefully work in my field again. I think I would rather eat manure. I feel like I am a bad partner to Noah. I feel like he is giving up too much in being with me. I feel like a failure because I can’t figure out how to settle into the traces and just be happy with my life. I can’t figure out how to stop having panic attacks. I can’t figure out how to be calm and mellow. I don’t know how to be happy. I only know how to be scared and afraid and lonely and angry. What fucking good am I? How functional am I? This is what I don’t understand.

I feel defensive and guilty because I want to keep my kids out of school and I don’t want to try to be a “working” parent. It is stupid and ridiculous. No one who knows me is campaigning against me. I am only arguing with voices in my head. Part of the problem is I have this growing horror as I acknowledge that I am going to have to explain to Shanna that a lot of the ways in which I interact with her will get her into trouble out in the world. People don’t like bossy know-it-alls who narrate what is happening in life. They think it is weird. It makes people uncomfortable. They don’t want to hear that. And people get really upset if they think they are having a “private” conversation (loudly, in public) and someone comments. I have never understood why. I’m a sit-in-the-diner-and-talk-to-each-table sort of person. My older daughter is like me only she doesn’t have any brain damage. She loves talking to people and she feels safe and comfortable in the world. So she has virtually no fear. Watching her makes me feel like I am living a good life. I don’t want to miss even five minutes of the Shanna Show. Unfortunately it’s hard to find balance.

Calli is so different. She is not @#$#@ interested in having me narrate for her the way I do for Shanna. She hits me when I try. This is going to be an interesting journey. I am startled by the things she manages to figure out by herself. This is going to be an interesting journey. Shanna thrives on hands-on directed learning. Calli wants to watch and then figure it out on her own. I’m surprised by the physical dexterity she exhibits. She is trying to keep up with Shanna and she is fearless in her attempts. She lands safely more than she falls so she keeps trying to do things that should be far beyond her development. I think I was quieter when Shanna was this age but I can’t remember. The words blur. I think I was a lot quieter. I was a lot more lost in my thoughts. That is the hardest part about this job. I don’t have a chance to think very often. I have to carve out deliberate silence in my life. I crave it. I need it. The constant talking is hard because it requires so much thinking. She makes a lot of conversational leaps that are hard to follow unless you know her whole little set of life experiences and she needs a lot of repeating of everything. Our daily conversational life does literally look like therapy for autism. I don’t set specific developmental goals, I just conversationally speak that way about pretty much everything. If I introduce a weird or new word I will emphasize it and break in the conversation to explain what it means and use it several times in several ways so that it sticks better in Shanna’s head.

It is really weird for me to sit and think really hard about what my life is going to be like in twenty years. What am going to do when my baby is twenty two? What will I do with all this energy? I’m kind of scared. I have no idea what the future will look like. I have no idea if I will ever get to the point where I stop vibrating with fear all day long for no reason at all other than bad things happened a long long time ago. I think being afraid I will always feel this way is making it exponentially worse. I don’t know how to just accept the feelings and deal with them when they come up and wait them out. I have no trust that they will end. They never have. Well, they pause. I don’t always always feel this way. It’s so complicated.

And I don’t even have time to get into sex. I have so much thinking to do about that. And it’s largely being evaded. I don’t think about sex when I am with my kids. That doesn’t leave me a lot of time to think about it. This shit is complicated.

In writing hell.

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I find it funny that it is far easier to write on the internet and say over and over that my father raped me than it is to say just how much I loved Tom and why. Tom didn’t know my story. I’m pretty sure he still doesn’t. I don’t think he has read the book. Ha. Tom just treated me how he would treat a person from day one. I didn’t have to earn things. I didn’t understand that then.

How different my life would be without Tom. It’s hard to think about. I’m like 2500ish words into part two. This is slow and will be slow. I’m really struggling with how vulnerable I have to reveal myself as. I don’t want to feel that way. I am really struggling with how stupid and ignorant and god damn vulnerable I was. I didn’t feel that way then, of course. I feel vulnerable now.

How do I lay naked in public how disgustingly grateful I am because Tom did really awful things to me but he didn’t have sex with me afterwards. He took the trauma out of sex. He didn’t do it on purpose. He was just acting how he wanted to act. I’m having a hard time explaining in enough detail why things worked the way they did. I’m having trouble teasing out the threads from the weave of my life that were touched by Tom. He did a lot. I don’t think he understands how much. It is hard thinking about laying that bare before him. It’s not like doing so is going to alter anything in my life. I have ensured that I will never play or have sex with anyone but Noah. I have the safety of knowing one part of my future. It gives me a lot of peace. So what is the good in sharing any of this with Tom?

He owned me. Ultimately he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to be responsible for me. That was absolutely the right choice for him. But how do you get over that? This is going to be odd for people who don’t know much about bdsm. We had an intense relationship. I want to tell this story in a way that shows what he did for me. I want this to be a sympathetic love story. I feel like I owe my Owner that. I am struggling with explaining this.

What does it mean that this part of myself is gone? I’m trying to figure that out in the story. I’m having a hard time showing what I want to show. I can’t tell this story. It doesn’t work. I want that pathos. How can I tell the truth and show what happened? Gah. Sensory input. Not just what happened. Ack.

Nooooooooooooooooo

saying hi to rbus

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I just wanted to say hi. I got busy. We are doing a weird experiment and I should turn the computer off now. I feel a lot. I don't know for sure what this feeling is but it is big. Maybe I'll figure it out tomorrow.

You know that feeling when you are working from dawn until dusk doing the same damn thing so it feels like you aren't doing anything and you're bored? My mind isn't engaged. I need to work on that.

Trying to learn what my needs are.

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Running in the morning is awesome now that there is pretty close to full light by six. I didn’t cry today. Right now I am flirting hard with hitting 5.5 mph as my average. Not quite there, but close. I have just over five months to the marathon. Eek. I wonder how fast I will be then. Not that speed is the point. But this is really interesting. This running business is several journeys all in one. My body is changing shape again. Still? Other people hit “stable weights” and I never have. I rarely spend more than six months in a given shape. It’s different this time because I eat any and everything I want. I haven’t tracked in a few days because I haven’t been on the computer much. Right now I have other things to think about.

For the past few days we have been choosing to not use any lights. At 6pm I get up and quickly tidy up the house and clean the kitchen so breakfast will be easy to make in a mostly dark kitchen. Noah and I both actively want more sleep and more sex in our lives. This seems to be the easiest way to manage that shift right now. We put the kids to bed at eight and then have the rest of the night to lie in bed and talk until we figure out if it is a sex night or not. That works better than going to bed at ten or eleven. I’m less likely to be hostile to his advances because can’t he tell I am fucking exhausted?! I’m just less tired at eight.

Sex is such an interesting journey. I’ve been having intercourse (by choice) for more than eighteen years now. It has only been fairly recently that I no longer hurt most of the time. I started out thinking it was supposed to hurt. It was supposed to be agonizingly painful and you were supposed to take that in order to please someone else. You have to be a masochist to enjoy sex. I didn’t use such language when I was significantly younger, but that is what I was doing. I feel like I am no longer interested in being that kind of masochist. Most people never do it at all so it probably seems weird that it is hard for me to stop. The thing is, I wasn’t doing “scenes” with people. I wasn’t doing SSC (safe/sane/consensual) bdsm per se. Sex hurt and I didn’t know how to deal with that. So I let people hurt me. Mostly they didn’t even know because I couldn’t tell them. I had no language. I didn’t understand what I was doing. I never felt safe saying, “Uhm, this is hurting and I wish it wouldn’t”. I still have trouble telling Noah. But he has mostly learned the signs. And he has mostly started stopping on his own. I feel such an out pouring of love for Noah that I feel like I will drown in it.

Noah cares if I am in pain. He will take active steps to stop hurting me. That makes me cry. It is probably true that other people have done it as well, but not like Noah. Certainly not with sex. Noah has paid attention to me for years he can tell when his touch is good and when it hurts by watching me. He modifies his behavior based on my reactions. This feels miraculous. This feels like an unlooked-for-gift. I didn’t believe anyone would ever give a shit.

As life goes on I hold it close to my heart that I have had sex with significantly more people than average. I have given lots and lots and lots of people the chance to be nice to me. Noah has chosen to learn how to be nice to me. I want to be monogamous because I don’t want to go back to believing that sex just hurts and it does with everyone but Noah. For one big thing, condoms suck. That’s no one else’s fault. And bareback sex with people other than Noah feels really emotionally bad and scary to me. I don’t want to feel good that way. It makes me feel disgusting inside. Because no one else is going to bother to pay attention to me the way Noah does. I will always be hiding myself. I don’t want to share my body that way with someone I am not genuinely close to. I didn’t understand what that meant before I tried it, getting close to someone that is.

Noah treats me like I am actually important. Like my needs and wants matter. Other people want me to meet their needs and wants. . . . . . Yeah. Don’t care.

It feels like my “to give to” list is full. Shanna and Calli need so much from me that I really just physically can not care what any other adults need. Forget them. I’m busy. They need to deal with their own stuff. They are big kids now. Dating is about filling needs. Seriously ongoing relationships have to involve a balance of meeting needs. I can’t do it. I am a giant cavernous hole of need. I don’t have a god damn thing to give.

It’s interesting figuring out sex with Noah. He has needs. I have needs I didn’t know I had. I need to not be in pain. I need to feel physically comfortable. I need to feel respected. I need to feel cared for. I haven’t felt these feelings during most of my sexual life. I won’t say that I have been in pain every time, because that is hyperbole, but I have probably experienced pain significantly above 50% of the times I have had sex in my life. At least half the time. And it tends to go in batches where it will be just screamingly awful for weeks (I used to get raging yeast infections that have never been treated in my life) and then it will be fine for a couple of weeks.

My diet is radically different from what I ate as a child and young adult. I don’t get yeast infections any more. Sex doesn’t hurt as much. We will never use condoms again. That has probably played the biggest part in lessoning how much pain sex has caused, honestly. And I am firmly in the camp that says the foreskin is important to sex. Unprotected sex with circumcised men is far more painful to me than sex with an intact man. Yeah, multiple samples of each. I wasn’t very smart when I was younger. Or older. Ha.

All of this feels important. Not to anyone but me, of course, but I need to understand how my body works. I need to actually know what it is like to feel good in my body. I have to not mask my body sensations with pills. I don’t want to get up every day and take caffeine (I don’t drink coffee so instead we have these mints–100 mg of caffeine. That’ll wake you up.) and then have a sleeping pill before bed. I don’t want to wince every time I sit down because sex tore the hell out of me last night. I want to wake up in the morning glad to be in my body.

I want to be touched in ways that feel good instead of ways that hurt me. I want that to be a fucking priority in the lives of the people around me. I can’t believe how intensely I need this. And he just does it. He tries so hard. He pulls back if I wince. He stops. He will stop having sex and just hold me if I stop responding. He doesn’t ignore me and get himself off. I am not a hole any more. It’s really weird.

The thing is I don’t think that any of my former partners would be happy with hearing me say that they treated me that way. Not really. I haven’t had that many one night stands. I tend to have sex with people several times. I tend to be friends with them before and after. I don’t think they would feel good about treating me that way. Some like to pretend but they don’t really think of me that way. Not very many men are comfortable thinking about the fact that they are capable of behaving in a way that will allow a woman to feel that way. Notice the careful language in that sentence? I ain’t accusing anyone of anything. So no panties in a twist.

I don’t think Dan believes he is a rapist. But if you have sex with an unconscious girl it’s rape. Someone cannot consent if they are not awake. Even if they want to have sex with you when they are awake it isn’t the kind of thing that is permanently transferable. Consent has to be actively given or it doesn’t exist. If I don’t have the option of saying “no” then I can’t actually say “yes”.

That is where a great deal of my problems have happened during sex. I don’t feel like I can say no. I was conditioned to sit still and not respond while enduring sexual pain. It’s pretty crazy to think about. I watch my daughters now and I think about it. I think very hard about what I want them to experience in this lifetime. What do I want them to be conditioned to expect from life?

I was conditioned to have sex with as many emotionally distant men as possible. Woo.

I want to know in the core of my being that I will never ever let someone who is not close to me emotionally into my body. My body deserves better treatment than it has been given. I want to set the bar so high that Noah really is the only person who will ever be part of me again. I know this is something that other people take for granted.

I’m afraid that I will cheat. I’m afraid that I will be afraid to say “no”. I’m afraid that I will hide behind my long-standing excuse of being crazy and impulsive and self-destructive. I’m afraid of being the person I was conditioned to be. I don’t want to try to set personal “hit this number” goals in my head. Because I totally would. I’m a tiny tiny bit miffed I didn’t get my “triple digit party” like I was promised. (A close friend I lived with told me she would do it. I actively discouraged it at the time because I felt uncomfortable but now I kind of wish it had happened. I am lame like that.)

Not every person who is nonmonogamous is a slut. But I am. I don’t want to model that for my children. What do I want to model?

Ack. The dryer repairman will be here in ten minutes. I’ve never been the first visit on a day before. Time to go.

Food comes from a can

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Today was the kind of “running” day where I mostly walk. I try to consciously go slower when I am crying. I don’t want to trip and injure myself. Today I thought about my mother. I thought about the way Shanna begs me to never leave her. Maybe she will go to college, but she plans to come right back and “take care of me”.

I remember promising my mother that once I was an adult her life would be better. I could help. Things would be better. I suppose that depends on what you mean by “better”. My life is better. I have no idea how her life is going. I have no idea. I wonder if she is proud of me. I wonder if she knows that I grew up into a strong, good person. I wonder if she is glad that I can defend myself now and I can stop being a victim. Somehow I doubt it.

I don’t know how to reconcile in my head that my mother, the person who was responsible for taking care of me when I was helpless, prefers that I not grow up to be strong enough to defend myself. She thinks I should be defenseless. At least within the family. Should I fuck my sister too so she can finish moving through our family? Maybe she isn’t bi. Maybe I should just be fucking my sister’s boyfriends. They all tried. They tried long before I hit adult height. Watching my kids is hard. I’m not sure how to explain this.

I want my kids to travel so much because I want them to actually see how different the world is from their home. I mean the whole bay area. It’s fairly safe here. We have managed to create this little bubble where we are safe from the natural world and even the other humans aren’t that dangerous. The police are far more dangerous to us than our neighbors because I take my kids to protests. Welcome to modern America. My kids are white, upper middle class, and female. Other than sexual assault, which won’t fucking happen on my watch, my kids don’t really have much to fear. Cars. Abstract concepts. Stories. The unknown.

I want my kids to understand what it means to survive. I feel like a privileged asshole. I want to take my kids to other countries so they can play tourist on actual hard lives. I want them to not have to have hard lives but still understand the spectrum. Me telling them stories and showing them pictures isn’t good enough.

I want to know what it feels like, as a rational adult, to have to eat what food is put in front of me or go hungry. I want to change how I feel about this. I’m terrified that it means learning to eat seafood. The texture fucking bothers me. I don’t want to be that American. I don’t want to feel like a snob. I don’t want to deal with that rejection pattern. I don’t want to go to other countries and come home to hide in my house and declare that every one every where in the world dislikes me. I’m too difficult. I shouldn’t bother trying to do anything with my life. Obviously I suck. I can totally see me doing that. I could be that asshole.

The problem is, that means I didn’t really survive. That means I died a long time ago and there is nothing left in me. Because it’s just not true that I am disliked and reviled.

I am thought about.

If that is happening, and a lot of it is positive, that means maybe I’m not too hard. It’s ok to be different. It’s ok to have preferences. But when I am imposing on people I need to learn how to accept with gratitude what people choose to give me. My needs are my own to meet. I need to not act like other people are responsible for meeting them. It’s my problem. If the best I can do is a fish and rice at a given meal I need to eat the fucking fish and smile.

I want that for my kids. I want to show them what that is like. I remember my mother and feel sad and anxious. Food was so hard for me as a kid. It was bad. As an adult I’ll say that my mother was a fairly bad cook but everyone we knew loved her food. That makes me wonder. My family has all gotten to the point of heating up preseasoned food at every meal. We didn’t eat produce, and certainly not good produce.

I feel like my life is consumed with my body lately. I am trying to learn how to meet my needs. I wasn’t taught. I wasn’t taught to check in on my body and see how different parts of me felt. I was taught to ignore my body. My body wasn’t important. Anyone was allowed to do anything they wanted to my body and I was expected to just accept it. Food was what I could control.

I don’t think I’ve ever thought of it that way before.

My food life is unlike any that I have ever experienced before. Since I had kids I have radically changed how I eat. But I’m not interested in getting to a point where I’m supporting my family on my farming efforts in my backyard. Just to put a scope on this. I recently read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and all I have to say is sweet sunny Jesus NO. I felt anxious pressure reading the book. I’m an idiot. She grew up farming and married someone with a similar background. That’s just not something I will ever try.

So that leaves me in a weird position of feeling like I don’t know what I want to accomplish. I swear to G-d this post has a cohesive theme. I have to actively decide which of my behaviors in life are about what I was taught to do by my mama and which things are right for me. I also need to think about what is right for the other people in my family. We all have different needs. I wasn’t taught to think about people that way. I’m training for a marathon. My body is going to have different needs than the other members of my family. Why do I plan to feed us all exactly the same way? Because when I try to do that I end up snacking in the garage.

I resist eating the food in the house. I don’t actually like the crap I make my kids eat. I really honestly think vegetables and fruit are pretty gross. I only like the heavily processed with corn syrup version of fruit because that is what my mama likes. I don’t really want to teach my kids to be like my mother. Her version of surviving looks a lot like death to me.

I have less than eight years to really get my shit together so that I can take my kids around the world to find out how other people live. My kids will find out what it means to have to work in order to eat. I will find out what it is like to have to work in order to eat. I want to show up and not feel ignorant as a pig. I don’t want to show up ashamed of myself for my ignorance. But neither do I want to show up and act like all they need is a honky.

I want to feel like the labor of my body and the work of my mind has some value. I can accomplish things. I can work. I am not fucking useless. I try not to bullshit myself. I am not going to learn what it is like to have to do manual labor to survive. That is the understanding of a lifetime of work I have not had and won’t have. I feel weird about that. It is hard to keep in mind. I can’t keep my yard weeded–yet. I think that is probably what I have eight years to build towards. I need to be able to physically do all of the labor in my yard. I probably should get a bit more ambitious in that department. I want to be able to do farm labor. At the moment I would be annoying and useless.

In eight years I will still be very ignorant. I will be moving to different climates. I will be moving to different plants. I will know nothing. All I will be able to do is go out and try over and over and be publicly bad and I will probably be laughed at. I need to have that experience as a rational adult. I need to learn to not break down in tears just because people are laughing at me.

For my mother food comes from the freezer and cans. I was not taught how to cook food. I have a hard time eating seasonally. For many seasons of the year there aren’t very many products I recognize as food. I’ve learned to shut up about this and eat what is put in front of me.

I need to learn how to eat more food. I want my kids to have more options than me. I want them to develop a broad palate so that we can be polite guests who do farm work in exchange for being allowed to learn about people. We can be company for a while. We should be polite, grateful guests. That is hard to think about.

I have to believe my labor is such that it is worth putting up with my company. I want to have something to talk about other than what a sad terrible life I have had. I want to have something to talk about other than what a devoted slave I was. I want to have something to talk about how much I enjoyed that short stint of teaching. I want to talk about something other than just being a mother.

What else am I? Food is going to be a big part of this journey. I want to find out where food comes from. I want to teach my daughters where food comes from and I feel ashamed of myself for knowing so little. I think food comes from cans.

We should be learning languages. I suppose that means picking areas already. Oh goodness.

I cry when I run because I wonder if my mother will feel proud when she hears about me some day. This valley isn’t that big. I tremble in fear when I am in San Jose. I’m terrified of seeing her. Will I pass her in silence like somebody that I used to know? Will I introduce my kids? Will I introduce her as Vivian? I have trouble saying her name without crying. I haven’t said it much in my life. She’s my Mommy.

I do have to think about things like this. I have to decide in advance what I will do. I have to play it in my mind so that I don’t freak out. I have to decide in my head and in my heart what an appropriate adult reaction is to my children. What is it going to be like to move through the world for a whole year that I don’t have to check over my shoulder for my mother?

My mother knows where I live. I wouldn’t put it past her to show up some day. How do I want to behave? Do I want her to show up? No. Not really.

If I showed up she would pretend to be nice for a while. Then she would feel comfortable. Then she would proceed to talk about how disgusting the food is.

Learning this is too hard. I have to take feedback if I want to improve but not from her. She can never again be allowed to weigh in on any part of me. What she thinks of me is not my business. Never the less when I run I cry so hard I can barely see because I want her to be proud of me. I hope she is proud that she did manage to raise kids who can survive even if she couldn’t keep them safe.

My mother drove adult men to my house when I was a young teenager because those men wanted to have sex with me. My mother manifestly didn’t care for me. She did not teach me survival skills. She taught me skills that will kill me.

Why? Why did she do that? Is that all she knows? Was I really so hard to teach? I can’t know. I expect I was nearly as high needs as Shanna, maybe more given the abuse. Do I really want to model how my mother dealt with it? Now I understand it more. It’s complicated.

All of this is so complicated. How do I stop looking at all of life as one big mass of things that I don’t know yet and therefore I can’t know and I am trapped? When do I learn how to fail in front of other people? When will it be safe to try things in front of people without being told I am pathetic for being bad on my first try? I don’t have a safer audience than my kids. I feel bad that I don’t get to teach them very many things that I am already good at. I feel kind of sad that their entire lives will be a journey through my learning experiences.

I wish I had “become” a bit more before having kids. I wish I had been less resistant to learning. I wish I didn’t feel humiliated when I don’t know the answer. Maybe that is how my mother felt. How do I want to feel?

This is all so very complicated. And I should go in because Noah has to go to work.

mood management

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I made sure that my house was tidy before I go help my friend today. That way I don't feel like I have to do any work later in the day. This way I won't be grouchy. I like to plan ahead.

Home repair

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Ack. My screen looks different. It’s annoying how these geeks keep wanting to “update their look”. Despite being married to someone who cares about such things I still don’t really get it.

I have updated my “profile pictures” most places to reflect my current hair length. I look quite butch. It feels weird. People keep telling me that it looks good on me. And then I uploaded pictures to here in separate short posts because I am not awake enough to figure out embedding today. I’m really tired. I had therapy last night and then Noah and I stayed awake talking until 10:30 and then Shanna woke up. She was hurting. I think she was growing. She had a rough night. Then I had my normal every night interruption of needing to use the bathroom. I wish that my “regular” as a grown up wasn’t 3:30 am. It’s annoying. Then I decided to spring sex on Noah. About twenty minutes after we finished Calli woke up and needed me for a while. By the time I left her room it was after 5:00am. I might as well just be up. When did I become this person?

I feel increasingly perplexed by myself. Who am I? What am I capable of? What do I actually need? What do I want? How are these things different?

My therapist doesn’t interrupt my ranting much. I get the impression I am intense for her. Ha. Last night she interrupted me once to say, “That was an interesting question.” I had just asked “When will I stop missing people who have never and will never be in my life?” She doesn’t interrupt me much. That makes it a challenge for me to remember that question and think about it.

There are so many things I’m afraid to really jump in and do. Humble, stupid shit. I really need to fix the grout in my bath tub. I can watch videos online and read tutorials. It’s really not a complicated task. But I feel this inner resistance. I don’t trust myself as an autodidact. I always feel like I need a teacher for the first time I do things. I want to be an assistant. I want to be the competent assistant who helps someone build things they can’t build alone. I feel comfortable in that role. I can’t serve an idiot. I really liked my scene shop boss in college. He was very talented and he taught me how to work hard. No, that’s not true. He was a hard worker and he was happy to have me keep him company. He can’t teach the skills very well though. It’s a different kind of skill to teach. Anyway.

I am not behaving how I think I should behave. I am a deeply social animal. Despite the fact that I loathe group work in a class room setting I really long to work with people. I just don’t suffer fools well and very few people want to work as hard as I work. That sounds pretentious. Other people work hard at things that are not the things I value and as a result they do not meet the speed I want them to meet on most tasks and that is frustrating.

I have a physical need to get things done and see visible progress in my life. I have to think, constantly, about the fact that I am a dynamic and changing individual. I can have some lasting effect on something. I can become strong enough to do all of the tasks that need to be done in my life. I can gain those skills. It is an education process. It is an education process I think my kids should have. I have so much stupid fear about doing things wrong. I believe in the back of my lizard brain that people who come to my house will think worse of me if I try to repair something in my house and it looks less than professional. I don’t really make straight lines very well. I make up for it by using the brightest fucking paint Home Depot sells. There is nothing neutral in my house.

I write sitting next to a palm tree book case that is strung with bumblebee and dragonfly lights. I’m annoyed by the splotch of green on the ceiling. My hand slipped when I was painting the bookcase. I should really get around to fixing that. How many years will I sit here and be annoyed by that mark? Hopefully less than a year. That would be great.

There is never an end to the things that must be done on a house if you want to maintain it in a state of good repair. This house hasn’t been maintained very well and it is more than fifty years old. It wasn’t made high quality when it was built. I guess I have my fixer-upper. And I have to do it all by myself. And we won’t have a lot of money. These projects are going to drag out. I have to figure out a triage list and do them as the money exists in the budget.

I have to be someone else now. I’m having trouble learning this job. I’m having a hard time envisioning what I will look like in ten years. I keep coming up on this problem I have over and over again in my life.

I learn by watching people. I learn by mimicking behavior. It’s a lot of how I pass the way I do. I pattern myself off of whoever I am talking to as much as possible for as long as possible. I had to learn to do that when I was young. I don’t feel like I have much of a me that I know how to be around people on a consistent basis.

I keep going through my mental roster of people I admire. I have no desire whatsoever to be like any of them. I’m not sure what I want to be like. No, that’s not true. I know what I want to be like with my kids. I’m getting closer.

I’m learning how to mother myself as I mother my children. I’m learning how to pay attention to subtle signals in how my body moves. I’m learning how to listen to what it says. It is hard to find compassion for my frailty. Often I don’t start tasks because I am afraid of the physical difficulty. I am not as strong as I might wish. I know that the answer is to become stronger. I’m trying. It is hard that the answer to most of my problems is simply become stronger. You have to become stronger in a way that balances the system as a whole or you risk injury.

I don’t really get runner’s high. Just like I rarely got endorphin rushes while being beaten. I don’t get it. When I do these activities I am miserable and I hate them. A good run is one where I am so lost in my thoughts I barely notice the time passing. I am slightly worried about being hit by a car so I try not to get too lost in trance. Most running days involve actual whining. I do this because I have an end goal in mind. I want to run in a marathon with my brother. This is for me. This will be the closest I have to doing something with my family. I don’t really care if other people understand. I fucking want it. I hope that will be enough closure for me. This is my last chance. I need to get buried in the minutiae of my life. I need to paint the damn ceiling.

I need to stop feeling bad that my life is this small. I have taken to projecting a lot of my guilt on my misperceptions of Noah. I feel manifestly unworthy of him. I worry that I try too hard sometimes because I am trying to impress him. I feel like he made a bad deal. I’m trying to do what I can to mitigate the damage. It’s really stupid. Even though I think that Noah deserves better than me I can’t even define what that means. Sluttier? More virginal? What? Why am I bad? Why don’t I feel like I am a good wife? Mostly because I need so much from him. I’ve been told over and over and over all my life that my needs are not very important. Mostly the problem is that I don’t meet my own needs consistently enough. I don’t know how. I don’t really even know what they are.

Luckily I live with two people who are loud and demanding about getting their needs met. They are showing me that it is ok to have the needs I have. And oh man they are teaching me who I want to be.

Thursday

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Thursday April 19: ran 2.27 miles in 28:34. I did a bunch of stretching this morning and I could feel it in my body during the run. I felt like my thighs were longer and sleeker powerful muscles. This is not a feeling I have had much in my body.

Breakfast: whole wheat bagel with strawberry cream cheese and a bagel.

Snack: half an apple with a big glass of orange juice with a slug of vodka in it. I feel defensive, which is stupid. I’m tracking because I want to know how my body is doing. Alcohol consumption matters. It’s not like I have a slug of vodka every day. I have been working on the same bottle for six years. Anyway.

Lunch: leftover pasta with mounds of meatballs and a little bit of mac'n'cheese. Err, about two cups of food total? Then two big handfuls of grapes.

Dinner: two and a half slices of French toast with macerated strawberries on top.

Early in marathon training

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Early in marathon training, a photo by rightkindofme on Flickr.

I feel like I have become a different person. Someone I don’t even know.

38 Weeks pregnant with Shanna

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38 Weeks pregnant with Shanna, a photo by rightkindofme on Flickr.

This is how I think of myself. Ok, not quite that large most of the time, but I think of myself as a fat person. I have always been envious of women with long hair.

I apparently like to post about the previous day. Still no icon.

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Wednesday, April 18: Ran for three miles. I got interrupted twice for conversations with neighbors, which makes me feel pretty connected and happy. 3.07 miles in 43:03. I was running slow and being social.

Breakfast: two breakfast burritos. No meat today. Bright orange eggs from chickens we met last weekend.

Snack: handful of pretzel chips

Lunch: ramen

Snack: 1.5 bananas (the kids didn’t finish theirs), a cup of strawberries, two tablespoons of peanut butter, and about 6 squares from a Dagoba chocolate bar

Dinner: mac’n’ cheese with corn. About a cup and a half?

Tuesday!

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Tuesday April 17: Walked to the park pulling the wagon (about 65 lbs). It's 3.4 miles round trip. At the park I did laps around the soccer field. I went 2.02 miles in 20:04 minutes. According to my phone that means it was 9:55 as my average speed. I hated the Garmin so I will never get precise about this sort of thing. This was the first time I have run two miles without walking at all. I'm fairly proud of that. I would like to be able to run for an hour without walking. I think that would be rather bad ass. It's not a serious goal yet. My next semi-serious goal is to be able to run three miles in 30 minutes without walking. I hope I can do that by June.

I backed way off on miles after the half marathon. I started over from scratch training for the marathon. I don't want to over train. I am not used to serious distance running. I think this is a better idea to prevent getting injured. It's not like I'm pushing myself that hard for speed. Ten minute miles are not that fast. I don't plan to try and get faster. This is a speed I can hopefully learn to carry for long distances. Fast is not the point. Fast wears me out. Fast uses different muscles and different strength. I need distance.

Yesterday was the best feeling running day I have had in a while. I think it is because I am getting closure in some ways that I need mentally. Life just goes on and it's time to let go of some stuff. I can only take care of the people in this house. That's my limit.

Breakfast: two delicious home made scones with devon cream, lemon curd, and strawberry jam. A little bit more than a full chicken and apple sausage. Tea with several tablespoons of sugar. 😛 and moo

Snack: a couple handfulls of trail mix (Shanna stole all the chocolate)

Lunch: about 1/2 a cup of pasta with two meatballs. I had just finished running and my body didn't want food.

Snack: five scones plain. See how this catches up with me?

Dinner: brown rice (about 3/4 of a cup), orange chicken (huge mound, like three servings), bok choy and carrots (about a cup), and pot stickers (8). I was hungry.

No dessert. Went to bed early. Exhausted.

Family and friends

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I think today is the day to finally write about how I feel about “family” I think that will involve a lot of changes in perception in my head. I’m going to have to wrap my heart around how alone I feel. It’s a question of definitions. I have a lot of friends. I have fiercely loyal friends. I am blessed and lucky in my friends. It’s different. People don’t return to me as the default experience of “of course you have to be with your family on this day.” That means I’m not family. I am not invited. I am not part of your family. “Oh, you could come if you asked” is not being part of the family. No one is doing anything wrong or bad. I’m not angry. I’m just not part of your family. That’s ok. That is life. Not everyone is family. I kind of feel like this focus on “chosen family” is because the word “friend” is used for people you have barely met. We have lost the experience of having acquaintances.

I’m aware that I have had a lot of extreme thinking for the past few days. I’m aware that this feels much worse to me than usual because that is just the mood swing I am in. People spend holidays with me when they “don’t go home”. People spend time with me rather be alone, yes. People spend time with me. They spend time on their “hang out with friends” days rather than their “hang out with family” days. I have a rotating queue of people who spend a holiday or two with me before going back to their families.

Why do I think that people are my friends instead of my family? Because I have spent very little time with most people and I unable to usefully predict how they might feel, talk, or act in any useful way. I almost always feel uncomfortable because I have no way to predict how that person might feel about things I might say and do so I am always tense. I don’t know what I’m allowed to say. I really hate how people tell me that I don’t censor. You have no fucking idea how much I censor. Noah gets more of it than any one else. After tipping the bucket he is getting a lot less of my internal monologue than usual and he can tell. It’s weird how good he is at reading me.

(Side note: I feel like I am going to start using the phrase “tipping the bucket” a lot to talk about tests of trust. A friend told me a cool analogy: trust is like water dripping into a bucket. When there isn’t much water in the bucket it is hard to spill water out if the bucket tips a little. If the bucket is full it is easy to dump water out.)

Anyway.

I’m not very good at expressing my needs on a day to day basis. I will work myself to exhaustion and tears before asking for help. My experience of life is that there isn’t much point in asking for help. If I ask for help it is because I am fairly desperate. That’s not always true. I usually only ask for help if I am ok with being told “no.” If I need to hear “yes” then I am fucked. I can’t ask because I can’t deal with possible rejection. The issue is too important to me. I can’t risk being told that my needs aren’t important. So I won’t ask for help. Until I’m in a bad spot and then it all comes out in a rush and people can’t really help me even if they want to—it’s too late.

Noah is willing to flat out tell me all the ways in which I am hard to get to know. I am very picky and specific about a wide variety of topics and life situations. He can fucking list things off. He knows how to make me feel comfortable because he has taken the time to learn. I don’t have that with anyone else. It feels very much like he is the first person in my life to know me. It’s bittersweet. I don’t expect my friends to know my “triggers” or care. But I will start avoiding people if they hit too many of my triggers.

It has taught me what family means.

Shanna is so polite because I model that all day long. We are both quick to ask to help one another. We are both quick to get up and do something for someone else. I teach Shanna how I want to be spoken to. It means that she knows how to get under my skin, of course. She generally doesn’t want to though. She likes how I treat her. She wants to be nice to me. I like how she treats me and I want to be nice to her. Even when I’m feeling not-nice. I feel safe with asking her to do things for me. Of course they are stupid, little things. “Will you please get me a diaper?” She often just does it. It’s not like I want everyone to follow me around fetching for me.

That’s not it. Family is full of people who understand one another’s needs and try to meet them just because they want to. Just because there is a long history of mutual support and care. Needs are quirky things. Everyone is sensitive in different ways and to different degrees. With your family you don’t have to constantly be defensive and give the long stupid story about why you are defensive. You get to just relax and know that people won’t say ________________. I’m hard to get to know. It takes a long time before I trust people enough to give them all of my stupid defensive stories. Mostly I just get my feelings hurt and figure it is my problem and other people don’t give a shit. I don’t give people the opportunity to know me.

I don’t think I will ever have family beyond Noah, Shanna, and Calli because I don’t think there will ever again be anyone who considers my house their home. I think I am too hard to live with. I am too difficult to get to know and I blow up when people get things wrong too many times. I don’t blame people for not continuing a close relationship with me. People want to drop in to my life. They want the highlights. They don’t want the grinding need. I understand. I don’t either. But opting out makes it a friendship, not family. Which isn’t to say that I think my family should or could meet all of my needs. They are not responsible for doing so. Full stop. But they have a good idea of what my needs are and they help me have the space to take care of myself. I know that a lot of people don’t like to define their relationships the way I do. They need to let things be fluid. That is how they set their expectations so they can have a happier life. I have to define my relationships so that I can set my expectations. That is how I can have a happier life.

Depending on people is a bad choice for me, by and large. I can depend on random one off acts of kindness from people who are strangers. If I scream out my need into the void there are enough people who want to do random acts of kindness that I get a remarkable amount of help. My friends are generous and wonderful people.

I really have good friends. They try very hard. Dear god I don’t understand why they try so hard. They give me what they have to spare. I know that I am lucky. It’s a bittersweet kind of lucky. I get to know the kind of people who have family. I get to hear about it. I get to see what kind of amazing people come out of families. I get to see what I am trying to create for my children. I have wonderful models in my life. I am so grateful to have them. My friends come through in consistent ways when I ask them to. My friends show up when I invite them—most people are even shockingly punctual. I have the best friends a person can have. They really care about me and work very hard to understand me. But I am an alien creature. They don’t get me and they probably never will. They love me any way. I am very lucky.

I think, given how much I plan to shelter from my kids, Noah will be the only person who ever gets me. And I’m not sure that he does. People often comment on how not-sarcastic Noah and I are with one another. We both heavily use sarcasm with other people but not with one another. No. I don’t want to deal with sarcasm in my family. In my family I know that people will speak the truth to me the best they can at all times. That does not include mocking me. Ok, we have our moments—they are deliberately rare.

What does family look like to me? What do I see in my head when I think of the word “family”? I see comfort. I feel the anxious ball in my stomach relax. I know I am allowed to take up space here. I don’t have to carefully count how many words I have said because I have to “leave time” for the other person to talk because we will only spend about six hours in one another’s company this year. I can say all of the things I want to say instead of only the things I think this person wants to hear. I am allowed to cry whenever I need to. I don’t need to worry about “socially appropriate” times because it makes other people feel uncomfortable. In my family people know that I am sad and I cry sometimes. In my family it is ok that I like to talk a lot because we all talk a lot and we all take turns listening because we have enough time to talk that we don’t have to rehearse in our head while we pretend to listen. That is a weird sentence. I have so many words in my head. It requires a lot of talking before I get to the still place where I can really listen to someone. Here in my home with my family I talk and talk and talk until I find the still space. Then I can really hear Noah. I can listen to minutiae of computer stuff and not feel angry. He is trying to involve me in his thinking process not his hobby. He doesn’t care that I don’t share his hobby. He wants to think out loud and I like being his black-box-in-life. I want to know everything that goes on in his head. That is family to me.

Family knows which facial expression goes with which topic in your head. I am told constantly how hard I am to read. I’m difficult to predict. My mother complained constantly about having to walk on egg shells. You have to be careful around me. If you aren’t careful I will stop holding back and I’ll tell you how I really feel. Do you know why people have to walk on egg shells? Because they don’t want to know how I really feel. They want a polite masquerade. They want to have a relationship with the nice and patient side of me.

The problem is that with my friends I decide how much energy I have to go spare and I see them only when I have that much energy left to give to someone. With my family I need there to be sufficient reciprocation that our relationship can survive me opening the flood gates. I don’t have the same kind of boundaries with my family. I take care of them and they take care of me. There is a lot of inter dependence with Noah. With the kids it is different; I am actively working towards inter dependence, but of course right now they are still quite dependent on me.

There are exceptions though. I have dumped heaping lapfuls of need on people and they have come through for me. Doesn’t that count for anything? Don’t they get to be grandfathered in forever? Kind of? Maybe? Jenny is grandfathered. I still talk to her nearly daily. I know all about the antics of her cats even though she lives in another country. She hears anything and everything I want to say about any topic. She doesn’t let me in to the same degree and I constantly fret about offending her. I just haven’t yet so I keep going and pray I never hit the wall. The Godmamas are certainly working on being family for my children. They show up.

This is something else that is bothering me. Children count time differently than adults. Shanna is nearly four. Not very many people have spent much time with her. That makes me sad. The Godmamas want her company and seek it out. I’m grateful every single day that she gets to have this relationship with them. Family is not made of blood. Family is made of time spent. They are learning one another. They are learning how to manage one another’s needs. No one is doing anything bad. None of my friends owe my children a relationship.

And I think that is a lot of the difference. My children are people with personalities and spirit. My family would know my children. My family would take delight in talking about how my daughters do _____ like me and _______ like my mom and _________like Noah. They would understand why I want to feel like I am part of something. Instead I only comment to my children about these things. My knowledge of my relatedness in the world is limited to the people in these walls.

These are the things that never get said with friends because there is never enough time. With your family you spend so much time together that you get all the thoughts out. With friends you search your brain for the highlights, because that is all anyone wants to hear anyway, and you gloss over these small things. They aren’t important enough to talk about. So they become invisible. Meaning that these people do not have the opportunity to even know my relatedness in the world.

If I come and write about it, does that change it and make it better? Err, no. Writing is a false intimacy. True intimacy is reciprocal, not one sided. I am alone in this room. I will never be able to stop noticing that.

Why is it important that I think about this now? Why do I have to decide to kind of roll back a thinking schema? Because this isn’t serving me any more. I have a lot of needs. I have a very high intensity life. This will always be true. I am just that kind of person. While I leave space in my head and my heart where I am supposed to be considering the needs of people I love because they are family and with family you want to help meet other peoples needs then I am over-drawn. I can’t do this. I can’t meet my needs this way. I need more space in me. I need to understand that most of the people in my life have very little to give me in terms of support. What I give to them has to be a gift with no expectation or need for reciprocation. I do have expectations of family. I need to stop thinking that the people in my life are reliable sources of support. They aren’t.

That doesn’t mean everyone I know is a flakey bastard—far from it. But my friends give what they can when they can. They feel no obligation to be here every week. I promise you that I have needs every week. They go unmet. This parenting gig is hard. I picked the high intensity version. I’m just that kind of person.

I have to stop looking outside of myself for support. Well, I need to stop looking outside this house. Noah and I need to figure out a way to go through this life together where I have the ability to meet my own needs. I can’t expect that from anyone else. No one else will try to help meet my needs in a consistent and predictable way. That means I need to slow down what I give to other people. I have far less to spare than I thought. It will all be okay in the end.

I have always poured a lot of emotional and mental energy into my “chosen family”. What could I do in life if I put that energy into me in a consistent way so that I can benefit instead of other people? I think I should probably find out.

I haven’t been tracking.

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I realized today that I want to track. I'm feeling weird about doing it. I keep forgetting that I am supposed to be doing this for me instead of anyone else.

I need a running icon. And a picture of me with short hair.

Monday, April 16: rest day

Breakfast: French toast, three slices of processed potato bread. Mmmmmm. Syrup, not a lot—maybe a tablespoon or two? Glass of milk, I think only 6 oz. Gummy vitamins.

Snack: oranges I only had a couple of slices.

Lunch: ramen

Skipped snack

Dinner: pasta (this really extra thick ridiculously long stuff I found at Cost Plus—it’s neat; whole wheat) about a cup? Partially home made partially jarred tomato sauce with about 1.5 lbs of grass fed beef (meatballs and some just loose in the sauce) I ate ~cup of vegetable matter and 3 meatballs. There were 15 meatballs from a pound of meat. A large green salad, around 2 cups. Maybe two tablespoons of Caesar dressing on the greens.

Second dinner: two soft chicken tacos on corn tortillas. They were fairly small. A handful of sweet potato fries with sauce. Two glasses of wine.

Dessert: half a cup of Americone dream

I'm trying to get to a place where I have a better understanding of how the food I eat affects my body. Stands to reason that I should keep track of what I'm eating for a while. I'm not "calorie counting" in the sense that I want to lose weight. From where I am this morning I could be ten pounds lighter (Easter candy happened right after I all but stopped running. Excellent.) just so my pants are more comfortable. I have recently gotten a lot smaller in the legs and bigger in the waist. It's interesting. My thighs generally rub a lot but they don't seem to any more. I've been wearing these same jeans for a while. They used to be tight in the thighs and loose in the waist. Now I have muffin top and the thighs are baggy. Bodies are weird.

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Author Archives: Krissy Gibbs

About Krissy Gibbs

Irrational feelings.

Memory lane

Apparently I don’t want to track.

Planning

Everything must be bad

Parenting, anxiety and me!

In writing hell.

saying hi to rbus

Trying to learn what my needs are.

Food comes from a can

mood management

Home repair

Thursday

Early in marathon training

38 Weeks pregnant with Shanna

I apparently like to post about the previous day. Still no icon.

Tuesday!

Family and friends

I haven’t been tracking.