I want to paint a picture.

3 Replies

Picture a huge cement room. Huge. Like 30′ by 30′. Every two feet throughout the room on the floor, in a grid pattern, is a water spout. So you can shoot water up into the air like they do at Disneyland.

Big cement room, water spouts spitting into the air every 2′ in a grid pattern. You with me?

Now, above this room there is a raised platform walkway. It is barely big enough for you to walk on. There are no hand rails.

It is definitely not 2′ wide, so it runs maze-like in between the jets of water.

But the trouble is, the water kinda sprays sideways at the top. And the platform is just high enough that you are on eye level with the top of the spray. That is coming sideways at you from every direction.

The different jets of water are different emotions.

You don’t really know which really strong jet of water is going to hit you in the face next. All you know is that it is inevitable. And you have no way out of this room unless you walk the maze. And you get no support.

Go.

You are going to go from happiness to sadness in a breath. You will go from feeling like you have everything in the world to live for to thinking that you cannot bear this pain for one millisecond longer; you have to kill yourself–now. You will go from feeling excited about upcoming plans (always plans to look forward to–otherwise not enough reason to not commit suicide) to feeling like you are stupid for ever trying anything at all. You are a failure. You should die. You are evil. You should die.

Then you are ok again. Just because another burst of water hit you.

And you have no control over any of this.

Run, run as fast as you can.

This morning is starting out better

Leave a reply

After having my teeth chatter all day yesterday (nerves) I didn’t sleep very well (Noah was up working and it was too warm). But Noah did his bat-like-ears thing this morning and we had a nice cuddle (no euphemism) and chat.

I sometimes really consciously limit things at cuddling if I’m really emotionally volatile. Those are the days I dissociate really early and I’m just taking one for the team. I’m trying to do less of that. If I don’t want to get off I shouldn’t have sex.

(Side note complaint about The West Wing. How would it be possible for someone to accidentally get GHB when they mean to get ecstasy? I mean, I get why Zoe didn’t know something was in her drink. But the French royalty boyfriend is retarded to such a degree that he shouldn’t be able to tie his shoes if he didn’t know the difference in those drugs. GHB is a snotty salty liquid. Ecstasy comes in powder or pills. HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW THAT YOU ARE GIVING YOUR GIRLFRIEND THE WRONG DRUG?! Fucking idiot. Having consumed more than my fair share of both drugs I feel qualified to speak.)

Speaking of fucking. I screwed up yesterday. We didn’t make it to National Night Out. Calli insisted on riding bikes. Then she didn’t want to ride, she wanted me to hold the bike and push it the whole way. That makes my back hurt really badly so I was pretty grumpy before we got halfway down the block.

On the way home (we literally only went past four houses) both kids were screaming at the top of their lungs at me about how terrible I am and I kinda lost it.

I screamed: “I am not fucking taking anyone to any fucking party. You are fucking crazy if you fucking think I will give you fucking ice cream after you fucking scream at me. I am not taking you fucking kids anywhere.”

I think that was the whole rant. It’s really not good.

We brushed teeth and I put the kids in bed. I didn’t yell again. Well, from the garage I yelled, “Go back to bed” once or twice but I didn’t yell it loud–just enough to be heard through the door.

After an hour or so the kids were still up and I was calm. I went in to lay down with them and snuggle. Shanna was very specific that it was not ok to call them “fucking kids” and she asked me to explain what “fucking” means anyway.

That was hilarious and awkward.

I told her that it is one of those words that has more than one meaning. We’ve been talking about idioms a lot lately. So I started with saying, “Mostly it is an idiom that means ‘I’m frustrated’. When people say fucking it is just a way of saying out loud that they are frustrated about something.”

She said that next time I should just say I’m frustrated because it isn’t ok to call them fucking kids.

I said that she was right. Then I paused and tried not to be awkward as I said, “There is a second meaning. The second meaning is why people say it is a “bad word”. You know how (babysitter) tells you that ‘stupid’ is a bad word? Well… fucking is like 50 million bazillion times worse. Because fucking is also a word for sexual intercourse. You know, having sex? Making babies? Putting a penis in a vagina? You have books about this.”

She kind of startled, looked at me with wide eyes and said, “Mother. How could you call us that?!”

I said, “Well to be fair.. that is how you were made.”

She fell over laughing. She giggled and said, “We are fucking kids!” And then she laughed until she snorted.

She asked why people think fucking is a bad word. I told her that people think it is bad because most people feel uncomfortable with any word that makes them think of sex because most people think sex is COMPLETELY PRIVATE and talking about it is bad.

She asked me if I think talking about sex is bad. I snorted and said, “Of course not. If you notice… I don’t tell you not to say ‘bad words’ I say pick where you use them carefully. Just because some people don’t want to hear something that doesn’t mean you never get to say it. Just find someone who is ok with you talking about it.”

So not cool and hilarious and awkward all in one story. I don’t think Calli followed the whole conversation but she was very sure that I needed to apologize profusely to both of them for being so mean. So I did.

They apologized for screaming at me. They said that next time they will make a different choice because they are sad about missing the event. I said, “Me too.”

I think I write these things down because I am afraid I will forget. I want to remember the whole arc, not just a piece of it. Yes, I fucked up. I will probably do so again.

I spent a while reading a book about mothers with Borderline Personality Disorder last night. My amateur armchair diagnosis says, “Nope. Not my issue.” So I’m glad I sat down with the book. Maybe I’ll let go of some of my guilty paranoia around that one. I’ve got issues, but that isn’t one of them.

I am predictable for my children. I don’t blame my emotions on them. They are very secure. My kids trust me and we all handle separation pretty well. I don’t feel like I’m doing the clingy attachment stuff. I let them go do their things. I smile and cheerfully wave and tell them that I will be right here when they need me again.

We are supposed to go to Aqua Adventure today. We are having dinner with my favorite former students. (Since they had me perform their wedding that title is now official.) I get to see their darling little nine month old.

I want to hurt myself because I believe that I hurt people and I must be punished for doing so. At least partially, there is a lot going on there.

But I have these people who persist in being in my life year after year when they have no reason to do so beyond desire for my company.

It is hard to be as self-hating as I am with this many people loving you. It takes work. It is really lame.

All I want for my birthday is pictures of people who love me. Despite my raging irrationality…. even I can’t argue with all the smiling faces I see on the walls around me.

I can understand why some religions were unhappy about the idea of capturing a likeness of people. You do capture part of their soul. And it comes and lives with me here in my house. And it tells me that they would be marked forever if I killed myself. So don’t do it.

It is hard sometimes to feel connection. I like visual reminders so much. I have so many people who love me. I am so lucky.

Maybe the kids and I will fill the morning with selecting pictures to print at Costco. We haven’t done a print run since last year. I was emailed a few pictures for the purpose of putting on the wall. I haven’t printed them yet. I should do that.

Right this minute I don’t want to hurt myself. That has to be enough for right now.

I should also hang the punching bag today. I really do need to hit.

The best part of growing up is being able to sit through a day or days of intense desire to hurt myself knowing that the feeling will end. Even though it feels like it lasts millions of years while it is happening.

Even if I feel ok right now, that feeling will end too. Nothing is permanent.

But I have a husband who loves me a lot. He demonstrates this with kind words and gentle touch and physical labor to make my life easier after lots of mental work to make money. I have a husband who, instead of protecting himself from me financially when we got married, put his separate property into a joint legal trust because he wanted to make sure I knew I was always taken care of.

Even if at some point we hate one another. There is no going back from this joint union of assets and help. It could be ripped entirely asunder but no one is going to just go back to how things were.

I hope we continue to like and respect one another. I hope I can continue to manifest being the kind of partner he wants to have. It’s not just the sex. I do a lot of things. Noah gives me more credit for them than I do. I notice that his life is more streamlined than it used to be, but I tend to under rate how much credit I should get for that.

He doesn’t stint in his praise.

I won the jackpot. I don’t know how I ended up with someone who likes me this much. I don’t know how I managed to find a partner who is willing to try so hard to make my life better. The listening and support and encouragement are the most important parts.

If Noah made this much money and tore me down I would not be ok right now. It’s not the money that makes things work. I think we would be ok with far less money. I think if he made less money but encouraged me the way he does I would probably work harder on figuring out how to get paid for writing. If I’m going to destroy my body for this task I might as well make it money earning. Geez.

Instead I’m an expensive pet writing for my ideal reader. (That would be Noah.) The more I write the better he is at treating me how I want to be treated. It’s a win for us.

I think it isn’t fair that I don’t get similar pointers, but life isn’t always fair. I’m expected to do way more mind reading. Good thing his mind is easier to track. Food. Sex. Comics. Games. Programming. Pretty much in that order.

I think I have multiplied my lifetime reading of comics by about a million since meeting him. I have never been a comics person. Now I even go buy them on my own. Damn him.

Even Noah has his downsides. (This is my attempt at being “funny”. Since people often fail to notice how funny I am I thought I would point it out to you.)

I can really appreciate a man whose main downside is that he is obsessed with comics. It is remarkably benign. He giggles a lot.

I hate the phrase “cry for help”. It carried innate shaming within it. Like you shouldn’t need the help. You shouldn’t be bothering people.

When I feel a lot of emotional distress it makes sense to me to ask for help with it. I’ve read a lot of books over a lot of years that tell me it is “healthy”. In fact all those books tell me that not asking for help is a problem.

So I talk about my self-harm urges and my suicidal ideation. Even though I’m also told that talking about those things is traumatic for other people and I shouldn’t do it.

These things are real problems for me. Dealing with them is hard. I have been trying to make progress on my self-loathing and self-harm for decades.

I’m better than I was. Am I better than I was 18 months ago? January of 2013? 2012 was a bad year. 2013 was a good year. January was the beginning of an upswing but I was probably still reeling from Christmas. Christmas is awesome. Christmas sucks golf balls through a garden hose.

I have another book I need to figure out how to publish. Lots more money. Less debt. I like my yard more. I like my house more. I like my kids more. I like my husband more. Do I like myself more? Am *I* better than I was?

I’m not sure I know what that means.

I have definitely learned things I am glad I have learned. I have not hurt myself on purpose in that whole time frame. I’ve ready more than 120 books since then, many of them new to me. Almost half. And then I read them a second time to make sure I got enough out of them.

I haven’t made nearly enough language progress. That’s kind of embarrassing. I’m having trouble keeping that high on the priority list for time spent. It isn’t feeling pressing yet. When it feels pressing I will curse my lack of forethought. I really need to develop some habits in my life.

Given that Noah hasn’t started breakfast yet I should go run. That’s a habit I need.

Ok. Bye.

post-therapy

Leave a reply

It is incredibly unusual for me to go to therapy and spend more than half the session crying. Today was one of those days.

She told me that it isn’t actually much of a surprise that I want to scream at everyone, even when I’m not angry at them. I have spent the last six or seven years whittling down my bad habits/escape paths.

I don’t hit people any more. I don’t get hit. I don’t pick up dangerous sex. I have even stopped drinking, even though I never did that much of it.

I write, I run, I talk, and I cry. That’s pretty much all I have left myself for stress relief. The problem is that the running is both good and bad. On one hand, it is good for me because it uses lots of large muscles. On the other hand I come home so activated that I am ready to freak out within minutes. Because my whole body is turned on and ready to react RIGHT NOW.

I can make anything complicated.

She said that given that for most of my life I dealt with these feelings by hitting people… I should probably cut myself some slack for feeling so frustrated with people. I’m not screaming at people. I’m not being totally inappropriate. I feel my feelings and then I go off by myself. Yes, I feel like I want to scream. But I’m not actually screaming at people left and right.

I feel like I want to and then I feel ashamed of myself and then I want to beat my head.

I think I’m going to take a few months off from parties where I know less than 25% of the people going. This isn’t going well for me right now. I have enough stress.

When I go to a party and I know the host and pretty much only the host I spend the event in an agony of anxiety waiting for me to do something inappropriate that will get me banished forever because of course the host likes whoever I am going to offend much more than the host likes me. Obviously.

Even though I have really good friends who have put up with a lot and who have really shown up to be supportive when necessary… I still think at any second a better person will be standing nearby and I will be told to take a walk.

This constant need to test relationships is bad for me and my friends.

We talked about my mom and how much I miss her. She wants me to consider starting a letter-only relationship like I have with Noah’s parents. I’m not sure it is a good idea. My mom isn’t good with boundaries. If you give her an inch she will take a hectare.

I can’t open that door until my kids are old enough to not be at risk near my family. My sister is too dangerous. That’s a hard thing.

My shrink wants me to strongly consider making an informational phone call to the police department in the city where someone I know lives. We were discussing my feelings about things he has posted online and she startled really hard. She told me that I am not someone to over react to threats, so if I feel like I need to get away from someone because he is physically dangerous I should probably tell the police that he exists. They may or may not follow up, but when you look at guys like the Santa Barbara shooter… Seriously. Someone needs to say, “These guys aren’t right and you should keep an eye on them.” Only… I’m conflicted. This is like complaining about doctors.

Have you noticed how I can complain about doctors on my blog but I can’t submit a formal letter of complaint? I couldn’t complain about the fucking plumbing company who fucked us out of thousands of dollars.

Do I think he is dangerous enough that the police should be aware of him? Is he or is he not a broken stair? Well, he defines bullying as being rejected from social groups he wants to be a member of and he believes he has the right to shoot people if they bully him. Maybe the police should hear about that?

I am scared enough that I no longer want him in my home. Probably ever again. No, I will not meet him in neutral public places. He believes he has the right to shoot me if I bully him. Oh he would deny that, but he has said enough time that he has the right to defend himself against bullying that… I have to believe him. He does think he has the right to shoot people for making him feel bad.

That’s pretty fucking scary.

And that was only a five minute derailment during my therapy session. We talked about it because I said the kids were asking to see him and I was ambivalent because the kids are very emotionally attached to him. After hearing more context she said that I should walk away and hope the kids mostly forget. It sucks, but that is what you have to do sometimes.

I feel like a piece of shit for walking away from my friendship. But I have to think that I am important enough to stay away from people who think they have the right to shoot other people because of their feelings.

Nope.

Hunh. Now that I realize that the two biggest things that came up in therapy were mom-things and scary-guy-with-a-gun-things maybe my incredible activation level isn’t so surprising.

I don’t know what to do about either situation. I feel like I have no good solutions. And these are kind of big things to deal with. This is heavy duty emotional processing to just toss on top of my full-speed-ahead life.

Ok, maybe it is less surprising that I want to beat my head on things than I want to believe. That is the easiest thing to “slip” and do. All I need is privacy–no gear. And when I have extreme emotional stuff going on, my way of dealing with that has traditionally been to hit or be hit. Noah’s not a masochist. I am so god damn loud I can’t really bottom at home. I should hang the punching bag. Maybe even today.

I had a really good visit at K’s house today. Her kids really like me and that makes me feel proud of myself. They are both kids who would flinch if I was scary. They don’t flinch from me at all. They run towards me with open arms exclaiming my name because they are so happy to see me.

Holy shit that feels good. It is worth every over-night babysitting gig and more of them. Many more over the years.

Even though I feel like a rabid beast who should be shot for the good of the herd, apparently I can be safe. I can take care of kids without hurting them.

My kids don’t seem like the same kind of proof. I’m well acquainted with the fact that abused children are the most loyal. My kids liking me is biological self-defense. K’s kids liking me… that’s a gift.

In the car this afternoon Shanna told me, “Your smile is the greatest Christmas present I could possibly receive. I treasure it more than all the toys I’ll ever get.”

I cried. Because I’ve been crying for days and man that was a wash of emotion. I’m so grateful they can’t see my face while I cry while I drive.

I am not complaining about my kids or diminishing how much they like me.

I feel very lucky.

Then we had a really good park day. There has been a huge influx of little girls in the 4-9 range. Those kids can fill a lot of hours of play.

I find it kind of funny how the moms I felt less comfortable around… aren’t coming to as many events any more. I hope I didn’t push them away from the group. The people I feel more bonded with are becoming more of a core group. There are still some interesting dynamics, but I’m really glad I found this community.

I can say I’m feeling crappy. I can allude to things I don’t do with my kids around without being explicit just to clarify a point and no one cares. It’s ok.

People know about the kink cafe in San Francisco. That kind of “knowing” but not discussing.

Oh man, speaking of that community. I was invited to a party. We will be going, because it is a special event for someone in my leather family. I get to meet her new Master. It’s going to be Quite The Party. I noticed that one of the people who likes me the least from that community was invited.

I think it is hilarious how many of my really close friends are very close friends with people who dislike me a lot. To be fair, the animosity is frequently reciprocated in these cases. The funny part is: I think the dislike exists when the person and I are too similar and we can’t bear close contact with someone who is like us.

So let’s be clear that I’m not saying, “I’m better than them.”

Of the approximately 18 people invited to this gathering I have previous positive relationships with 3, negative interactions with 1, and I’ve met 1 other person once and we had a cordial exchange as we expressed our mutual appreciation of our friend. That leave 11 people I don’t know at all.

Man I feel like I should say no. But this is family. Serious Bizness.

Why is Leather Family less of a hostile concept than chosen family? Why am I so god damn inconsistent?

Well, the Leather folk always made their limits and boundaries about what they were committing crystal clear. Well, or we fucked up a few times over the years and had lots of clarifying.

I have a much harder time figuring out how to do that kind of ground-up negotiation with vanilla friends. “Our relationship structure isn’t working and I need to change our dynamic” is kind of weird to most people.

I would like to have a short list of people to whom I was so Committed that I had to turn down lots of other events where I barely know anyone.

I go to a lot of parties where I know less than 25% of the guest list. I network like nobodies business. Weak ties are some of the most useful ties to have.

But man I’d like Family. Chosen family as a concept has blown up for me. Lots of people told me that I was part of their chosen family. I haven’t heard from almost any of them since I got married. Whatever.

Leather has been different for me. Sure, they are all flakey bastards and I kind of hate them sometimes. And yet they aren’t flakey. They just have specific paths they walk. When I want to come join them, they will always make space for me.

But I can’t bring my kids. You know how it goes.

So Leather Family is in a nice neat box for me. It feels safe and comfortable because if my Leather Family had a need that conflicted with my kids, hands-down my kids win. No question. But if I am in the same space as them, or if they need me I will show up. Just like they show up when I tell them they have to.

At my events you always have to kind of wonder who is conservatively religious and who is a flaming pervert. I love my life. I feel so grateful for the diverse cast of characters.

It’s National Night Out. Time to go see my neighbors.

Thank goodness for good days.

Leave a reply

Given that I started off the day crying and shaking and gritting my teeth I decided to not pressure myself to work hard all day. I puttered. I got my chores done but it took about four hours longer than normal. I went to the dispensary because I was down to three days of medication (yay babysitter) and discovered that San Jose no longer permits the sale of edibles. Only bud. That sucks. Yes, I have a vaporizer (technically two). It takes a lot of pot to get as stoned with a vape.

I think that today was good because I dropped so much from my work list. I got to feel like I did enough.

Also I called K. I have not been talking to her regularly lately and I’m struggling with that on a few different levels. Talking with her today was nice.

I ran three miles and did a yoga class.

I sorta wonder if part of the reason today was better was because I smoked instead of having edibles. I’ve been kinda wondering if the increased panic is somehow related to the edibles because it feels like it is really high lately. But I am never sure because the panic has come and gone for many years before I touched pot.

So the picnic on Saturday. It was nice. It was well done. The people there were very friendly. If only I could stop feeling like I am a disgusting asshole who should be screamed at to get OUT OUT OUT.

I don’t think other people are doing anything inappropriate to me lately. I think people have been fine. I feel really ashamed of myself.

I am having big feelings about everyone. Lots of feelings about why they should shun me and be disgusted by me. And when I think that really hard for a while I get angry. It is so hard to be nice to people when I feel like I already hate them for rejecting me. It isn’t fair at all.

I don’t feel very worthy of relationships.

Today with the kids was relatively good. There were bumps and several stints in time out for hitting (I wasn’t doing the hitting–for kids who have never been hit I’m continually shocked by how much hitting my kids do on each other) but mostly it was a really loving day.

At bedtime the kids asked me and Noah to sit on the couch and they took turns “reading” us stories. It was really sweet and loving and tender and wonderful.

I did something I’m pretty ashamed of. I haven’t even told Noah yet, though mostly for logistical reasons. I don’t want to talk about it in front of the kids.

I fucked up with the kids. At the party on Sunday. The one where I was losing control and crying a lot.

At some point the kids both got really defiant at once. I didn’t freak out but I asked them to go to the bathroom with me. (They were also sticky so I had a good cover.) When we got to the bathroom I kind of collapsed to the floor and started crying. I told them that I wasn’t having a very good time and I wanted to go home. I told them that if they wanted me to stay so they could enjoy the party they would have to change their attitude right now and stop arguing with me or we would have to leave.

They both looked rather taken aback. They said, “Oh. Uhm, ok.”

Then I washed my face with cold water because we needed to back to the party. They asked me why I was doing that. This is the part I’m ashamed of. I said, “Because people don’t actually want to know when you are crying and cold water helps your face look less puffy so you can hide it more easily. That way people can have an easier time pretending they don’t notice.”

I shouldn’t have said that. And this isn’t the kind of fuck up I can apologize for. If I apologize for this one I will cement the lesson. I need to just not repeat it.

I don’t want my kids to believe that no one gives a shit if they are crying and they should try to hide it. That isn’t the kind of people I want them to be. I want them to be ok with the fact that they matter to people.

Just because I alternate between hot and cold and feeling distant that doesn’t mean I should teach them to believe like me.

I’m sorry I said it.

Do I “really” believe that no one cares? No. The lovely party host followed me out to the side yard to tell me that she could see that I was upset and she wanted to know if there was anything she could do.

It isn’t other peoples fault that I am like this. Not any more. Whatever blame existed has expired. I’m just like this.

I’m sorry.

What did I mean when I alluded to being miserable at Disney next year? I meant that I’m this rich bitch who is going to go to Disneyland twice and Disney World for almost a month out of a calendar year and I am probably going to spend a lot of time crying while I’m there because I feel lonely. I think that is kind of pathetic and stupid. I think I’m pretty much a loser. What is the point of an ungrateful bitch like me getting to have these things?

There is no deserve. There is no fair. There is no right.

I think I’m a fucking idiot for spending so much time on crying and feeling lonely when I have a life that many people would desperately want to have. I am such an ungrateful bitch.

I’m not ungrateful though. I do appreciate what I have. I appreciate it very much. And I can’t stop crying even though I do.

There are these stories they tell you when you are growing up. Just do this thing. Get to this place. Have this relationship and you will be… happy.

I don’t know how to feel happy. Even though I have what I want. Even though I’m doing what I want.

I just want to crawl under my desk and cry for my mommy and I think that’s pretty fucking pathetic.

I want to take my mommy to Disney. She’s so much fun there. She likes to just sit on a bench with me and watch people go by. We would talk about the different dynamics we saw.

I miss my mommy so much. But I have missed her like this my whole life. Contact and attachment were always sporadic and random and hard to predict.

I feel kind of like a loser for posting on the internet about my self-harming urges. But it does help. When I talk about the fact that I want to and I am afraid of slipping then I create a situation where I would have to go back and admit in public that I screwed up. So I’m less likely to slip. It is embarrassing.

I want to beat my head really a lot. I don’t like me very much. I’m not real clear on why I feel I need punishment so bad right now.

It is very hard trying to learn to step back and be objective from my reality and try to convince myself that it isn’t real. These are just lies. I am not a disgusting piece of shit and I don’t need to die. I don’t need to be hurt.

But right now it feels so very true.

Sometimes I feel very sad because I understand why people believe that someone as fucked up as me shouldn’t have kids. I don’t really deserve anything good.

They are so good. Ok, so they can be assholes sometimes–that is part of life. They are good. They are empathetic and loving and considerate to a degree the development books tell me I just can’t expect from kids. But my kids are like this.

I feel so bad that they have to grow up with me. I try to remind myself that at this point without me is far worse in every way. Too late for take backs.

I should go to bed. At least I see my shrink tomorrow. See, this is why I still see a shrink. Cause here I fucking go year after year after year.

I feel pretty disgusted with me. I do well then I do shitty. I’m fucking tired of fucking bouncing.

California Time

Leave a reply

Before I launch into my complaints, let me take a moment to note that a nice lady from the party yesterday sent me an email to inquire how I was doing. She noticed I was upset and she wanted to follow up when she didn’t have children clinging to her and screaming in her ear. I get it. I really appreciate the thought. I feel more guilty for not having fun.

But back to the complaints. There is a frequent thing I hear “California Time” that really bugs me. Unless my mother was lying to me (I believe her on this topic) I am an eighth generation Californian. My family has been here a while. I feel unusually qualified to judge whether or not something is “just a Californian thing” or if it is an import thing. California is a state full of immigrants.

Not because I think all people who are born in California are just like me, anything but. However when I stand next to someone who moved here as a twenty-something adult for a job, I feel I have more broad experience to base my judgment on. More than likely their experiences are mostly with other imports at their job.

I’m not saying Californians are never late. People from every place are sometimes late. My personal life experience is that Californians are late (the kind who are born here) when they accidentally schedule two things too closely together. The imports are late because they can’t be bothered to show up on time. After all, they will say, they are just on “California Time”. When people say this to me I have trouble not hitting them.

The difference is intent is important to me. One set feels like people who consistently are trying to shove 27 hours into 24 and that’s hard. The other set feels like, “I don’t have to care about you because I’m allowed to just do whatever now that I live in California.”

I dislike the imports who claim California Time with such a passion. You are fucking up my culture. This is my fucking state. Go do your late shit somewhere else.

I hate this because I show up at a party of imports and they want to bitch about how much Californians suck. Fuck you. I was the only person here on time and I am the only actual fucking Californian. All of you can suck on behalf of Ohio or Pennsylvania and leave my fucking state out of it.

I’m over-sensitive. But I’m in a slightly better mood than yesterday. That’s improvement.

Today while I have babysitting I should probably work on Outrunning. I have some follow up stuff to do now that I have it back from my editor. She doesn’t like my title. She wants me to find something lighter and fluffier. Hrm. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’m looking for the suicidal kids. The light and fluffy title won’t grab their eyes.

I’m scared because once I finish the last editing bits… it is time to figure out how to send it out. I should probably try to send it to a dozen or more places by my birthday. Thinking that makes my stomach explode with acid. Oh shit. This is going to be a fun and festive activity.

Because it causes less stomach pain I will spend the next few minutes thinking about the party yesterday. It wasn’t that anyone did anything WRONG. I was off. I was feeling sensitive and whiny before I got there and a couple of people had tones of voices I reacted to when hearing them. That doesn’t mean they didn’t anything wrong. They aren’t responsible for my emotional state.

I had a better time but still a hard time at the picnic on Saturday. Not because anyone did anything wrong. People were really nice. Noah was really nice about the whole thing. He dressed up and danced with me and smiled and it was fun. The kids had a ridiculously good time.

It isn’t other peoples fault when I am struggling. I just happen to be standing near you when I have the struggle.

Despite how many words I can type, I’m not all that articulate when I’m having big feelings. So when I start feeling really uncomfortable and like I am wrong and like I should be forced to leave because I don’t fit with whatever is going on I get… much less socially savvy than usual. Which is bad because my social savvy is mixed anyway.

If you want me to articulately defend why I have an opinion in a mixed crowd where I don’t feel safe I am going to feel judged, loathed, and like I should go light myself on fire. Then I will be really angry with you because I had all those feelings standing next to you.

I’m not an easy person to talk to. I appreciate that people bother. I know it is hard sometimes.

I am really really shitty at responding to things cold. I don’t work that way. If you give me some time I can put together a 20 page defense, sure. This is why I don’t argue very much on twitter. I can’t do 140 characters.

I feel like I “should” start doing some form of work. Really I’d like a nice session of head banging. I don’t feel like I’m doing much right.

Even though Noah wanted me to hold firm on boundaries, I’m glad I let Calli go to sleep with us last night. I feel like I am doing wrong in so many places and in so many ways… I’m glad I hold my babies when they want me.

I will not look back in regret and think, “I wish I had snuggled them more. I wish I had appreciated how small and helpless they were.” I will take all the snuggles they want to give. Even when I don’t want to be touched. This time is so short. I have them for so brief a time.

She will be three for just a few more weeks. Shanna already doesn’t want us overnight. Calli will get there.

I don’t need to shove them towards independence. They will get there sooner than I am happy about anyway.

Shanna and I had a delightful conversation yesterday about wetting the bed. She’s had a couple of accidents recently. She insisted we go buy a mattress cover. She asked me why it happens. I said people wet the bed for all kinds of reasons. It is common for kids to have a period of time where they are learning lots of new things and they are so tired at night that they just can’t wake up to go to the bathroom. I told her it is common when kids have big scared or sad feelings they don’t know how to deal with. I told her it is called a “regression” and sometimes when your body is learning new things it kind of forgets stuff you already know for a few weeks while it is focusing on a new thing but it comes back. Sometimes you are having such an awesome dream that you just don’t want to wake up.

She said, “Well I am not sad or scared so I guess I must be sleeping too deeply. That makes sense. I sure am tired at the end of the day.”

Shanna expresses a lot of appreciation for how I handle accidents. Which is funny. Where did she get the idea that she should get in trouble? I’m not sure. But she seems to just know that some parents aren’t gracious. I tell her, “Dude I’ve had accidents as an adult. They are called accidents for a reason. Not a big deal.”

When I feel like I’m doing everything wrong. When I feel like I am a total failure I just have to look at my kids. They know they are loved. That was the bar. Ok. I’m not failing at everything. They don’t feel scared. They don’t feel sad. They like their lives. They like me so much that being away from me is nearly torture. Well, that doesn’t necessarily say anything about me–kids are like that.

I don’t feel like tagging.

 

Bad mood

Leave a reply

Right this minute I would kind of like to set people on fire. I’m in a bad mood. We went to a party today. It wasn’t one of the better parties I’ve been to this year. I mean, the party was fine. It seemed like everyone else had a great time. It was well organized from a kid point of view. But I spent a lot of time crying. And if my kid gets hit in the face next time we go over there I am done. Period. This is the second time she’s been smacked in the face there and a third strike means I’m just fucking done.

It didn’t help that one of the dads was being “playful” so he picked Calli up to swing her around and slammed her head into the side of the couch. “Oops” he said.

She’s ok.

There was a discussion about a childrens book. Other parents thought it was fine. I thought it belonged in a kitsch shop on Castro Street in San Francisco. Overly large horn being shoved forcefully into the rainbow? When I said that I wouldn’t want my kids repeating it at the park the response was that we need new friends.

I managed to keep myself from saying, “Actually my friends are nice people and you are an asshole so I’ll keep my friends.”

It isn’t that I shelter my kids. They can tell you about their vulva, vagina, clitoris, and uterus and what they all do. They know what a penis is and testicles and the scrotum and the anus and they know how babies are made and we have lots of books depicting gay families.

But we don’t have books about oversized phallic objects being shoved into other things as a way of making them better.

I’m ok with being a prude like that.

All of a sudden I’m mad at myself for committing to an event next spring. Because the folks I was around today are going to be there. And all of a sudden I’d rather stay home. Fuck.

Yes, I am more sensitive to the “fucking” imagery than most. Maybe I’m even over-sensitive compared to some of my religious friends. I can live with that.

I don’t have as many social plans as usual this week. Most of the ones I do have are with individual families. That’s probably for the best. I would like to crawl into a hole.

Actually I would like to get in the van and start driving. Maybe I’ll be back next year. Maybe.

I hate the bouncing between being ok and not being ok. Being alone doesn’t feel ok. Being around people feels much worse than being alone sometimes. Being around people reminds me that they are just people I know, not my friends. What makes someone a “friend”?

I don’t really know.

But this one dude didn’t acknowledge me for hours then he finally looked at me and said, “What’s up with Noah?” When I said Noah had time off he grunted and moved away from me and that was the conversation.

That was one of the only times anyone addressed a comment to me today.

I’d like to stay home now. Luckily it is my time off. And Noah and the kids are going to the park. I’ll sit here and cry. That’ll be fucking dandy.

Progress

6 Replies

The kids have blasted through a few different milestones this week. I should record this so I don’t forget. Both kids are now swimming without a life vest. This is huge. Both kids got off the bucket support in ice skating (Calli is doing better than Shanna). Last, but not least, both kids have suddenly decided they are interested in long bike rides.

I find it fascinating how neck and neck they are for physical skills. In a few years Calli will probably be far more advanced than Shanna at the rate she picks things up. They aren’t equally skilled in all areas of knowledge, but Calli has a great relationship with her body. Shanna reminds me of me. Ha.

I feel guilty anytime I say that they can be assholes, but when it comes to dealing with people who might take care of them it seems like fair warning. They can be sweet as pie and they can be serious assholes. You have to be prepared to hold boundaries and really fucking mean your “no” or they will make you sorry. They are tenacious and pushy in a way rarely tolerated in children.

I’m crossing my fingers it will work out in the long run. For now there are days when they are pretty hard to handle.

It isn’t about you (whoever you are) because they do it with me, Noah, K, and everyone else who has ever baby-sat. Children are supposed to test limits. I also believe that children are supposed to run smack into the brick wall of limits and be told NO. Because that is part of life. You don’t always get what you want and learning to manage that frustration is easier when you are under ten than it is over thirty.

I feel scared that I am doing them a disservice by allowing them to push as hard as they do. Most children are “broken” of that habit. I try to break my kids of the habit of shitting in the back yard. Backtalk is ok with me.

Pick your battles.

I want my daughters to be able to grow up and speak as assertively as any man. I don’t know many women who can. I know a few, because I hunt for such Amazonian Goddesses.

They bug me and delight me. They frustrate me and fill me with so much hope I feel like I will explode. Every day. I am grateful every day that I get to be with them. I stop and make time even when I’m being a pissy bitch.

“Today is kind of hard. But it is the best kind of hard I can imagine. I am grateful I get to be here doing what I’m doing.”

Shanna and I had a fight about something…can’t remember what about. It wasn’t a big one. She went to her room to cry. When I checked on her after a few minutes she said, “It feels like no one loves me today.”

I said, “Do you love me?”

“Yes.”

“Do you get mad at me sometimes?”

“Yes. You deserve it.”

“I’m not quibbling. But you can get mad at me without it taking away from how much you love me. Why do you think it works differently for me? You are the best thing that has ever happened to me and I love you to the moon and back. And sometimes you piss me off. Life is like that.”

She kinda laughed and hugged me.

When I really think about it… I feel bad for my mom. She probably does still love me. Even though she didn’t want me to start with. Even though she wasn’t very good at taking care of me. Even though I have pissed her off, maybe more than all her other children combined. She probably loves me.

I really hope my kids never need to pull away from me for their own safety.

This week has been tumultuous emotionally. But we’ve had internet connectivity stuff that prevented me from boring anyone with it. Huzzah?

Apparently today we are going dancing. Because someone finally responded with a yes. I was getting emotionally ready to back out on going. We don’t really have appropriate costuming. And Noah is not interested in dancing. And managing the kids while dealing with Noah’s unhappiness about being dragged to something he hates is always fun.

I was hoping that everyone would tell me no they weren’t going so I could skip it too.

I like to dance. I love dancing. Sometimes dragging a whole crew of people who need care of coaxing isn’t very fun. It is sounding really hard today. But a posse was formed so now I can’t back out. Even though it sounded like way more fun when I first heard of it months ago it doesn’t sound real fun today.

Noah didn’t go to bed last night. He’s probably going to be cranky. There is always the double whammy that being sleep deprived makes him cranky and then he’s extra cranky because I woke up in the middle of the night and yelled at him about not sleeping. Because when he doesn’t sleep at night he sleeps through the weekend. And we don’t have children who wake up at night anymore so I’m really sick to death of a partner who is cranky because of sleep dep. There is no excuse.

Only there are dozens of excuses and I’m an asshole for wanting to control his sleep so much.

Well, there are weeks when he naps enough during the days to make up a whole extra work day of time gone. Given that his time off amounts to a day of work amount of time off… he is effectively not available 7-9 hours of the day 7 days a week. And it’s not like he hangs out with them for all of the 4-6 hours he overlaps awake with them. Not even close.

The mothers helper kid stopped showing up. That’s a write off.

Getting actual, consistent support is hard. I’m tired.

I’m having a hard time with some communication stuff too. I don’t feel heard very much. When other people act like “they’ve heard all my shit because they’ve read the blog so when we get together it is their turn to talk” I feel… really shitty.

Writing on the blog doesn’t increase my sense of being seen all that much. I think it is important. I think it is helpful with a lot of my relationships. But I never blog about everything going through my head. I have so many layers of filters. If I mentioned x on the blog there is usually about fourteen layers of shit associated with x that I didn’t dare write about.

And people don’t really want to hear about it. I’ve already used my word count up for the day. Without ever once opening my mouth.

I’ve been wanting to bang my head a lot lately as a reminder to shut up. Shut up. Just shut up you stupid bitch.

I’m supposed to stand there and smile and be supportive about someone else’s issues and not say anything that might make anyone feel uncomfortable. Just shut up shut up shut up.

I don’t think it is “personal”. If I asked people about why communication stuff is wonky I would be dismissed or told I was imagining it or it was just my perception.

Ok fine. Maybe I should just stay home with my perception then. In my home with just my kids it doesn’t feel nearly as bad that I’m not allowed to talk about my shit. I knew that was the deal before I got into this situation. It doesn’t bother me very much with kids. I don’t want to hurt them and I know that knowing too much about people like me will hurt kids.

It is harder with adults. So much harder.

Today I run 4.5 miles before the dance event. Thank goodness today is a massage day.

For all that I seem to live at my pity party table I know I have a pretty fucking good life.

I’m going to go cry out my misery at Disney next year. Hilarious.

If I could stop wanting people and if I could start being happier with just being alone as I do things my life would probably be perfect. I really like what I get to do with my time in the main. Yeah, I won’t fill my hours exactly the same way when the kids are grown but I’m content with where I am for now.

If I could just stop feeling sad. If I could stop missing my mommy so much.

Shanna and Calli call one another “Sissy”. I’m not entirely sure how/where they picked it up but now I’m copying it with both of them.

That was what my sister wanted to be called. She would hit me if I used her real first name when I was little. She was Sissy. End of story.

Sometimes when I hear Shanna and Calli say ever so sweetly, “Sissy will you please help me?” “Oh Sissy I’d love to” I walk away and cry.

I feel like an asshole. Why am I crying? Because I’m so fucking jealous. My Sissy hated me so much. Get over it. I’m trying. Thus the crying in the early morning hours. Because crying is how you get over it.

I feel really sad. I did sleep well last night. A good 7.5 hours. That has been my sleep cycle for most of my life. I’ve been trying to eat those shitty vegetable things everyone tells me are “good for me”. I’m mostly eating them cooked, so I don’t get massive diarrhea but sometimes people put them in front of me raw and I try to be all GGG and eat them anyway. And I burn with punishment.

It is funny how suicidal thinking works. There is a difference (for me) between suicidal ideation where I feel like I am working on A Plan and the sad anxious feeling of wanting to give up. The wanting to give up feels like a dog whining in the corner. Small, helpless, not able to get up and do much for itself. Pitiful and pathetic and not worthy of notice. It isn’t threatening. It isn’t real.

There is a difference between the days when I have to more or less crawl across freeway overpasses because I want to jump so fucking badly and the days when I want to just hide under the desk rocking and crying and beating my head.

Hiding this from my children for 7-9 hours a day 7 days a week is really hard.

I need to just be grateful that I don’t have to do much cooking. That is the most frequent point at which I fail to keep my shit together. Thank you, Noah. I really appreciate it.

I need to give my arms a break. Is it bright enough outside to run yet? This time I need to eat something before I leave. That last weekend run where I took off having eaten nothing felt really bad. You require fuel in your tank.

Good thing I pack little squeeze packets of peanut butter and chocolate just in case. I’m smarter than I look. Or, more accurately, I’ve been stupid a lot of times and eventually I learned. So I’m probably not smarter than I look.

I need to give Noah a chance with today. No, he doesn’t like dancing. He tries to be nice about it. He will help with the kids. He will in general be reasonable company.

My expectations of him are really unfair and ridiculous. I’m sorry. I expect Noah to be cheerful and upbeat about pretty much everything and it isn’t very nice of me.

When I’m around someone who is in a shitty mood I tend to sink to their level and keep on sinking. When I’m around people who are upbeat and perky I can ride the wave with them. I feel like a jerk for needing other people to lead my emotional experience.

Sometimes it is hard for me to feel happiness at all without someone modeling how it is supposed to work. That’s a lot of what I like about my kids. They are so happy. Yes, they can be abrasive assholes and they will scream when they don’t like something. (working on that) But mostly minute by minute they are just…. happy. Life is really good. They get their needs met.

That’s a lot of why I like hanging out with them so much. I will fake happiness in order to buy the relationships I want. It is part of why I have such trouble at jobs. I don’t care that much about money. Beyond subsistence and minimal safety I was never real motivated to work hard for money. Enough was good enough.

At every job I’ve ever had there is far less impetus to be in a good mood. Why, so I can make a customer happy? What fucking ever.

But if my attitude is the difference between Shanna and Calli having a good day or a bad day, then I need to work on my attitude. As one of the moms in our group says, “You’ve got to have a good attitude…”

I can’t control the fact that I have mental illness and it has impact on my kids. What I can do is work to mitigate the damage. What I can do is behave in such a way that they will grow up and be able to understand how hard I worked at being good to them. I hope. Who knows. Maybe they will never give a shit. Most kids don’t seem to care about their parents much.

Doesn’t everyone want to feel appreciated?

One of my neighbors is talking about home schooling her kids next year. She talked about wanting to do it from the first day we met. I asked her what was stopping her and it came down to fear that she couldn’t do a good enough job.

Then last year she had a bunch of problems with the school. Her children are really not being appropriately served. So she’s considering home schooling a lot harder.

She asked a lot of questions. I feel I was pretty balanced. I started with my normal, “Of course there is a whole spectrum of opinions from radical in the direction of no direct teaching to school-at-home with every minute scheduled. I’ll talk about what I do first and then I will move on to different points in the spectrum and talk about the pros and cons. The important thing is to figure out what works for you and your child because there is no universal right answer.”

I’m a good advocate.

I really hope she will consider it because she REALLY WANTS TO and she is incredibly organized and focused. She would be good at home schooling. She’s big on answering questions with, “I don’t know the answer to that yet, let’s find out.” Perfect. That is the attitude you need. And she’s super happy to hang with her kids all the time.

I told her the only think she is potentially going to lose out on for her kids is the time they get to spend with her. If you miss a year of public school you can catch up in summer school if you are bright and motivated. Whoopie. Her kids are quite smart (fully literate in two language before third grade is amazing–she mostly taught them) and I don’t see a down side. The only thing holding her back is fear. (That’s what she said. I’m not projecting.)

But it is her life. Who knows. It would be cool though. Even though we probably wouldn’t be live-in-your-pocket besties (even though she lives ONE BLOCK AWAY) it would be nice to have another home schooler in Fremont.

We are going to have to join or create a Fremont home school group or something. Yes, we will still love all the Castro Valley and San Leandro and Oakland people…. but the road is equidistant in both directions. I can only do so much driving.

I wish I felt less desperate. I know that desperation is one of the fastest way to drive people away from you. The depth and intensity are scary. I don’t have a good reason. I’m sorry. Just breathe. Go get some food. Read a few chapters. In about 40 minutes it will be time to run.

Now I will nom a muffin that is poison for Jenny.

Less than 10%.

Leave a reply

(Side note before I get going: my editor gave me back my book! I am super duper grateful I am working with her. As I go through the chapters I can see how she edited, but my voice still sounds like me. She improved flow so dramatically. Oh working with competent professionals is like a gentle summer rain. Ahhhhhh.)

Less than 10%. When you want to talk about problematic men that’s the figure you are looking at. In every group of 100 men not even 10 of them are douchebags or rapists or violent.

But lots of people (men and women) get attacked by this percentage. This is the problematic percentage.

Noah thinks it is a very good sign that female violent crime is on the rise. We aren’t that far behind men anymore. He says that is a sign of progress.

I understand the frustration around the #notallmen and #yesallwomen hashtags. No, not all men are a problem. But sometimes when people are angry and ranting about the problem they don’t have the spoons to slow down and gently stroke your hair and say, Of course not you honey.

If you are in the 90%+ of men who are not scumbags, congratulations. I may or may not be willing to thank you for not being a piece of shit all the time but I do notice and appreciate it.

Unfortunately it is the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. This problematic segment of society. Because it’s not just men. Women are doing more and more violence. We live in a world where they can.

Is there any way to morph the language from, “Men are predators” towards “The problematic portion of society” because there will always be men, women, and trans*folk who fall into the same wedge of the pie. It is stupid to act like ONLY men ever do bad things.

And with the yes all women–are you a woman if you don’t get harassed? Is not getting harassed a sign of shame because you aren’t attractive enough? I don’t think it is based on looks. I don’t know for sure what it is based on. I know that black women get it worse than white women in this country. I don’t have the authority to speak about international patterns.

If you never get harassed, are you a woman? That is what the #yesallwomen bandwagon seems to be about. All women have unpleasant things happen to them. Not all of those unpleasant things are sexual or about street harassment.

Do we really need to unite as a gender behind an experience that only happens to less than half of us? Why in the hell should that be the marker?

Seems pretty stupid to me.

There are bad people in the world. Lots of them. But they are still less than 10% of the population. How do we learn to focus on the problems rather than using gender or race as blanket permission to hate people?

I’m afraid this problem is too big for me.

I can handle this on a small group level. I had lots of classroom conflicts. I had opposing gang members in the same classes. We had issues. But I managed to get my classroom declared neutral territory and by the end of a school year sworn enemies would laugh and put on a stupid play together.

Scale is the problem. How do you deal with problematic people? By having someone stare at them all the time to make sure they don’t get away with shit. But it’s a hard job. Not that many people really want it.

And the worst predators are the ones who don’t go to jail anyway. They are never prosecuted. My dad was a rapist for decades before it took a sixteen year old child saying, “No more”. I am pretty sure I know about at least six other child victims of his. No telling what else he did.

Not all men are bad. Truly. Most men are decent. Some men are flat out wonderful. But y’all got a snake in your gopher hole. I’m not sure that the victims are going to be able to stop this problem.

This has to be seen as a problem that is bigger than perpetrators and victims. By-standers have to start to see it. By-standers need to be unafraid to walk into a public conflict and ask if everyone is ok. Deescalation is super hard. People who are currently amping up are rarely able to manage it alone.

I have walked into a lot of fistfights. I rarely come away with more than a bruise. It is worth the potential danger.

Sometimes I don’t understand how I became the one who is breaking up the fights instead of starting them. Life is so crazy. I think that conflict management training they made me do in junior high helped. The fact that I face steeper penalties now helps too. And I signed up to be a 20 year good example. Oh just shoot me now.

Six years in and no major fuck ups!

Only little fuck ups. Everyone does little fuck ups. That’s basically mandatory. Perfect parents are bad for kids. Kids learn how to handle mistakes and failure by watching their parents.

When I stop and think about it I am very proud of myself. I have an incredibly low frustration thresh hold so if I’m doing something hard for me… well… now I just mutter my constant swear words very quietly instead of screaming them at the top of my lungs. Progress.

I have broken multiple dishes this year. My response, “Ah drat! Back up and let me clean it up. Whoops.”

Shanna’s response every time has been, “Good thing that came from Ikea. *phew* It’s easy to replace!”

When my kids break things they say, “Oh no! Oh thank goodness it is replaceable.”

We don’t get the bone china out very much. We are all clear we won’t be able to just get another one. And it’s pretty. So we save it for very special occasions. (Their grandmother sent them one fancy bone china plate. Because that won’t start a fight at all. It’s Peter Rabbit and friends. Very cute.)

I’ve been talking to Shanna about this. About mistakes and the kinds of mistakes you make. The vast majority of all mistakes are no big deal and you just keep moving while learning from the experience. You have to fail to learn.

There are some mistakes that are bigger. There are some mistakes you can’t get back and they really hurt someone.

The problems with the destructive 10% of society fall into this category in my opinion.

Those problems really hurt. Those problems keep going. On the kid level of understanding we went to the glass case where we keep all of our dishes. Up high above the shelves the kids use Noah and I have a few glass art pieces we have acquired through life.

One of them was a wedding present from Dad and Francesca. Shanna already managed to break the other present I had from Francesca. This is the last thing I have left. I can never get another one. This was the last thing my good friend saw and said, “Oh this makes me think of Krissy.” (I don’t really understand why. It is not my color palette. Whatever.)

If that got broke I would be very sad. If Shanna got mad at me, went to the cabinet and broke it on purpose…. I would feel completely devastated. I told her I would rather have her punch me in the face over and over again. That would hurt me very much.

Even though it is just a thing and things are replaceable. This thing comes packaged with love from someone I will never see again. This item isn’t replaceable. I could buy more glass, but I can never buy more love from Francesca. It is not for sale.

I try not to talk to my kids about rape yet. So I try to talk about problems on a scope they will understand.

My kids understand that there are people in the world who will touch you in your private places without permission. They think that if anyone ever does that kind of thing that they have full permission to cause as much pain as they physically can. Outside of it coming up rarely in books (my kids are quite sure that if Prince Eric snuck into their room to kiss them while they were sleeping he wouldn’t be walking out because his legs would be broken–I love my kids.) I don’t talk about those problems much.

I don’t want them growing up with all rape all the time. And that’s hard for me to do. It is conscious effort to change topics and find accessible, appropriate things to talk about.

I’m kind of tired of the indignant, “But I’m not the problem.” Ok. Fine. Then stop fucking talking about you and TALK ABOUT THE PROBLEM.

All I know is that I have the safety to hide in my house a lot of the time. I live in a relatively safe neighborhood. Well, my next door neighbor keeps getting ripped off. I have not said out loud to him, “Well maybe if you spent less time in your front yard yelling asshole racist shit you would be less of a target… they don’t hit me.”

But that’s not the point. What is the point? Men are raped. Women are raped. Men are rapists. Women are rapists. More than half of the people alive are neither a rapist nor a rape victim.

How do we even talk about the problem? How do we get a handle on the scale? How do we talk about systematic solutions. If every community needs a few dozen people like me to follow around the problems and keep them out of trouble… that’s a hard burden systematically. It’s easier to put them in prison. Only that has so many problems it isn’t funny. Our country is obscene and disgusting in how we incarcerate our citizens.

People a lot smarter than me have been beating their heads on this problem. But I feel like defining the problem further is useful.

Have a good day.

post-interview

Leave a reply

It was 45 minutes. She ended it because she was worried about overwhelming me. I managed to not giggle. It’s hard to overwhelm me.

“You want to ask me questions about myself? I can talk all day.” I’m kind of self absorbed.

I think maybe the main thing I would have done differently if I got to steer a bit more towards the end is I would have done a bit more on coping methods: the failures and the successes. Lots of failures to talk about. Oy.

She wants pictures of me. Hopefully recent and some as a child. Does anyone have any pictures of me they particularly like? Eeek.

It will be put in UK print media and potentially online but she isn’t completely sure yet. Oh man. I’ll be sent the text in a week or so to approve/tweak before she sends it out. Apparently I will get paid. I was surprised by that bit.

And it begins.

Did I mention that I finally got the speaker information into the mail for RAINN? I don’t like RAINN as much as I might, but I would be willing to let them send me to high schools to talk to kids. The envelope was ready and just needed postage for many months. I mailed it when I sent the games off to Portland.

Just keep swimming swimming swimming just keep swimming.

Nothing else to do.

Today I will finish the puttering around the house chores I didn’t finish yesterday. I will rest. I will go to the water park. I will eat nachos for dinner.

I will be cuddly and lovey with my kids. Noah gets tonight off so he can get stuff done. So I have a looooooong day ahead of me. That’s ok. I can handle it.

Sometimes I surprise myself.

Letter writing

3 Replies

My generation is not so big on handwritten letters. In general we stick to email. It’s easier, less effort, less waste, etc. But I believe that letters still have a place in society.

I’m not big on the traditional “rules” around when and how to write so I ignore those. I have come up with my own general guidelines for writing letters. A bit ago a friend asked me about how writing letters worked and this is my attempt to respond. (Sorry it took me so long. I was thinking about it.)

We live in a time and a place where there are thousands of things competing for your attention. Being on the computer at all is an exercise in distraction.

Why: Why bother writing letters? It’s a pain in the hand. Mostly it is because the thrill of getting a personal letter doesn’t go away. Everyone is used to post-mail being bills and horrible advertisements. Getting an honest-to-goodness letter feels thrilling and exciting. Someone cared enough about you to write a letter. It is like a tiny little micro-gift of love and attention.

When: When do you write them? I don’t believe in hard and fast rules. We have too many things competing for our attention. I think that it is good to look at your calendar and spot areas where you have a good solid two hours. You don’t need to use all that time, but futzing with addressing an envelope, finding a stamp, etc adds at least half an hour. You want more than an hour because when you sit down you need to organize your thoughts a bit. Do you have to write a letter when someone gets married? When they lose a job?

Write a letter when you want to let someone know that you have been thinking about them. That’s really the only when.

Who: Who should you write letters to? Anyone! Older people appreciate it the most. If you know someone over 60, chances are they would appreciate a letter. It is a throw back to their childhood when communication was that way or no way. (Yes they had phones… but they were *expensive*.)

Kids love letters. Kids will save them and think of you throughout their childhood. Kids will know that you are an adult who cared enough to notice them. They remember.

Your friends will feel special and loved. An email is nice, but letters are so much nicer.

And I despise handwriting. I think that writing letters is torture. But it makes other people so happy. Writing someone a letter is a way of consciously demonstrating that they are important in your life. Sometimes there isn’t another way of doing so. Sometimes you don’t have the spoons to pay as much physical attention to someone as you wish you could.

But they can get a letter in their home. They can feel loved and seen and cared for. And it doesn’t take that many spoons.

I love writing letters. I love the feeling that, unlike my normal for the masses babbling, I’m specifically trying to create a relationship with a person. I only write a letter to further serve a bond. If I write you a letter it is because I want to show you about as much respect as I can show for a person.

Hand-written letters will never go out of style. Email will never take the place of walking to your mail box and seeing a letter from a loved one. It’s just… not the same.

What: What do you write though? It depends on who you are writing. For my in-laws I stick to mostly recounting what the kids are up to. I understand that they aren’t that into me. When I write to close intimate friends I tend to share feelings. I write to tell them why I was thinking about them–how it made me feel. “I was thinking about you last night. I was thinking about when we did _____. I am so glad you are in my life.” Lots of variation is possible there.

Letters exist to help people feel more connected. Reminding someone of a memory means they are very likely to remember it better. They will remember you better. They will remember how they feel about you.

Only it is tinged with the rosy glow of memory. Science has proven that it is much harder for us to remember bad things than good things. When you remind friends of times gone by, they tend to forget the irritations. The difficulties. They remember that you stayed. They remember that you were there. They remember that you were their friend.

That’s the important part.

Sharing memories is a lot of what relationships are built on. The more memories you share the deeper your relationship. The more reminders of your memories you have the stronger you feel about them.

How much: How much do you have to write? I’ve gotten six word postcards that made my day. I have had the good luck to receive twelve page letters. Frankly, that got a little overwhelming. He was an intense guy.

You are just writing to them to remind them to think of you the way you think of them. If you can do that in a few words, feel free. It is just as meaningful.

Revolutionary Women

1 Reply

On Twitter two women I think well of asked what they talked about in front of me that had such an impact. Because thirteen years later I nearly genuflect when I see them and they aren’t sure how they caused such a good impression.

So here we go down memory lane. To set the stage: I was nineteen and I had been dating this guy for a few months. He was to become my Owner but he wasn’t yet. He asked me if I wanted to go with him to Seattle to meet his best friend. I said sure.

At that point in time I had been away from my family for a very brief period of time, just over a year. Most of my childhood and teen years my parents and siblings spent a fair bit of time telling me that my only future career option was to be a whore.

Not a prostitute, not a sex worker–this wasn’t about being PC. My family wanted to make sure I was very sure that I knew I was worthless.

Then I go up to Seattle. I was freshly involved in the bdsm community. The community I had met in the bay area up to that point was mostly male dominant/female submissive. Some women topped, but they tended to still be more or less socially submissive because the guys we spent time with were… pushy. I’ll use that word and be polite.

There weren’t very many fierce women when I showed up. They were pleasant and kind and meant well, but they didn’t inspire my fighting instincts.

Then I went to Seattle. I met my boyfriend’s best friend–who is a really nice guy. I like him a great deal.

But more importantly… I met his partner. His partner was a professional sex worker. By the time I met her she was pretty firmly in the realm of professional dominance and she had stopped doing other forms of sex work. Though she did do other things when she was younger.

Given that I knew I was “meant” to be a whore from when I was a preschooler meeting my first honest-to-goodness sex worker was revolutionary.

She took no shit from anyone. It was like seeing light come down from heaven and hearing the angels sing Hosanna.

She was really educated–self educated, but she could talk intelligently on just about any topic. She was like a cross between Veronica Franco and Florence King. She was a Southern Lady and she could tell you where and how to go fuck yourself while making you smile and say thank you for the honor.

She is a force of nature. I have rarely met anyone with as much force of personality combined with civility. I have nothing like her skill. I would give just about anything to have that much courtesy mixed with my “Go Fuck Yourself”.

Then I met her best friend. Also a sex worker. And I listened to these two women talk.

I had never heard real life women talk like them. They were so mercenary about meeting their own interests. They didn’t give a shit if you were disappointed in what they are willing to offer you. To quote: that is not their dog.

They were able to take care of themselves, tell other people to piss off and manage their own needs, and smile while sounding polite the whole time.

They were allowed to have preferences and requirements and they got to set hoops for dealing with them.

They saw their own value. They are not willing to compromise on their own self worth just because someone else wants to devalue them. I have not known very many women like that.

I’m still not sure I have ever met any other women who can swing a sword to defend themselves while smiling with such glee. They still inspire me.

It took meeting honest-to-goodness sex workers for me to find out that I was not required to go into that profession. They were very clear that I was not a good personality fit. They could rattle off what makes someone a good sex worker. They were quite clear I wasn’t it. They were right.

Sometimes I think I have such strong feelings about them because they were the first people to really tell me that I shouldn’t consider sex work. I’m not a good fit.

I was told: “No one should do sex work unless they have a high sense of the ridiculous and they are good at laughing at life.”

That isn’t me. It is them. And I love them for it.

Great news

4 Replies

The kids rode their bikes to and from the farmers market. I am so happy I’m about to shit glitter. This is epic progress. I’m so happy Shanna was willing to give it a shot.

It was pretty fun listening to Shanna during the trip. “I was super scared to even get on the bike today. But look! I’m doing it! I just needed to have my mom walk next to me. Then I’m good. Now the scared feeling isn’t scary it is exciting.”

She talks all the time. And she has this self-help/you-can-do it thing that… I have trouble not making fun of her when she gets going. When I was a kid I would have been mercilessly taunted if I had said 1/10 of what she says. I was not allowed to think of myself as competent.

I like my life so very much.

In other news

2 Replies

A friend borrowed the kids yesterday. In the process I got to trade vehicles with her for a brief time. I miss driving zippy little stick shifts. Oh I had so much fun driving home. Next car. Not an automatic. Driving is so much more interesting with a stick shift.

I didn’t run yesterday for no good reason at all. So today I need to do 4.5 miles. Oof. I’m feeling stiff. More stretching.

My arms are in general hating me right now. Thus blogging tapers a bit.

Yesterday I had a conversation that bothered me. Shanna and I were talking about the road trip, and the things we are going to do instead of Mommy watching The West Wing all the time. Shanna said, “But you are brining medication, right? You need that or things won’t go very well.”

I kind of feel like shit. I feel like a pathetic piece of shit that my six year old can fucking tell when I’m not medicated and she tells me to go do it. “Mom. You aren’t calming down. It’s time for medicine.”

What am I teaching her? That feels so broken and bad.

It feels as bad as when children of alcoholic parents enable the drinking because the parent is a nicer drunk.

Only this is a medication that medical professionals say I need. I have seen no less than three medication prescribing doctors who think this is the appropriate medication for me.

People who have diabetes show behavior changes without their meds? Do I think a diabetic who has a kid who helps them remember is a bad person? Do I think they are disgusting?

What if it was Ritalin? What if it was Prozac? What if it was…

Would I still feel so guilty? Probably. I don’t like the fact that my kids have an easier time with emotional regulation than I have. That feels wrong on so many levels. But they have good emotional regulation because I have worked like a dog to create an environment where they safely can work on such things.

I am cheerful, engaged, patient, mellow, flexible, and easy to get along with when I’m medicated. Sober I’m wired for sound. My kids notice. They like me stoned much more than they like me sober.

If I was on Lithium again… would that make me feel less bad about myself? Probably not.

I feel bad about needing help. Any help. All help that I need. I’m kind of a bad person for needing it.

I’m not sure how I’m going to handle medication. We are going to be gone a long time. I’m not sure I have the cojones to try looking for dealers in states where it isn’t legal. And traveling with a five month stash from the beginning seems like it is begging to get busted as a “dealer”. When I really have no such plans. This is all for me. Go away. Mine. Mine. Mine.

I haven’t figured that out yet.

The difference in my attitude is palpable. It is the difference between me being able to sit calmly in a chair and have a conversation versus me twitching and moving around the room constantly complaining about how people haven’t done enough cleaning.

I like pot so much. I wish I didn’t. I feel so much guilt. I wish I could just relax on my own. So far not so much.

I feel like I want to run today before the sun even comes up. I will probably be home before anyone else wakes up.

I wish I was better support for my family. I wish I were less needy. Can’t change that now.

Interview practice part the second

Leave a reply

Hello, I’m Krissy. I’ve had a somewhat unusual life. My father started sexually assaulting me when I was between 14 months (when I potty trained) and when I was 3 years old (when my parents divorced). Those early, formative experiences have shaped most of my life.

The father/daughter incest in my family was only the tip of the ice burg in terms of our problems. My father raped 3/4 children so far as I have been told. He was a serious drug addict and alcoholic. Our family dealt with a lot of physical and emotional violence on top of the sexual assault. When my mom found out about the sexual abuse she divorced him. Then things got worse.

Running from domestic violence is not a life I would wish upon my worst enemy. We lived in dire poverty. We were homeless and dependent on charity for much of my childhood. My mother didn’t have job skills nor education. She truly did the best she could with a monster terrorizing her.

I didn’t grow up so well. I went to 25 schools before I dropped out of high school at 16. I did get a high school diploma through a continuation school experience. Then I went to a series of junior colleges culminating in a trip to university. I hold a BA in English Literature and an expired teaching credential. I did not complete the MA in English Literature I spent seven years working towards because the final exam was handwritten.

I learned handwriting in a school where the teacher was allowed to beat me daily for my poor handwriting. Given that I was already a severely traumatized child the teacher hitting me ensured that I would never have reasonable handwriting. And I have paid the price long-term.

My life has been like that over and over. I have learned reactions or aversions that I developed because of severely abusive environments and now I get to be punished for the rest of my life for being the kind of person who has such reactions.

I wish the incest had been the extent of my sexual abuse. It wasn’t. My father told my brother he was allowed to rape me. Due to him having a severe traumatic brain injury (he was hit by a car when he was 12 and I was 8–it was a terrible accident) he was not physically capable of winning the fights. But I spent a lot of my childhood fighting my brother off of me.

Then I was sent out into a series of low-income neighborhoods with no supervision. All in all I have been raped by twelve men and boys. It took a very long time before I was capable of understanding what I was doing that created safe space for rapists in my life. It took a long time before I understood that the secrecy that was part of my innate behavior only protected bad people.

I have been a writer for a long time. I was given my first journal when I was seven. My sister was mean and terrible to me because she read my journal and mocked me for the contents, which is really sad when everyone is being severely sexually abused. I shouldn’t have been mocked. I should have been helped. But that wasn’t how my family worked.

I have had mixed experiences with trying to report things to law enforcement. With the incest and my father I got excellent support. The San Bernardino Sheriff Department was kind and supportive to me. Those men were some  of the best people I’ve dealt with in my whole life around sexual assault. They believed me. When the detectives came back to see me after interrogating my father for 72 hours straight (it took a long time for him to come down from all the drugs he was on) they were physically green. They told me they had never heard anything so horrible in their whole lives.

Yup, that was my childhood.

When I tried to report other sexual assaults I was given a range of responses from, “We won’t ruin that nice boy’s life for you” to “What else did you expect?” to “You clearly have problems and you should be in therapy not making false calls to the police.” I hate the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Department with the fire of a thousand suns. If their office burnt to the ground I would dance on the cinders. I won’t set the fire but I’d dance.

The primary reason I am not dead is because I have been in court ordered therapy for nearly thirty years. I’m 32. I have seen 21 therapists over the course of my life. Only 4 of them have been truly excellent. I have gotten better at picking therapists as time goes by.

I have been suicidal for most of my life, not too surprising. I was institutionalized for suicide attempts twice as a teenager. Both times were before I got up the nerve to prosecute my father.

I prosecuted my father when I was 16. I had called him on the phone to ask him if I could have a computer for school. He told me I could have a computer if I spent a weekend at his house earning it. I slammed the phone down and called 911 and said, “I need to find out how to report my father for sexually molesting me” and I burst into tears.

Part of what made my life as hard was my lack of vocabulary to even talk about what was happening to me. I didn’t learn the word incest until I was a teenager. I didn’t think that what was happening to me was rape. I thought everyone just did those things.

I had to get old enough and read enough books that I understood that my life wasn’t normal.

So like everyone with a lot to figure out I have turned to writing. Writing allows me to gather my thoughts and figure out my overwhelming emotions. Writing is my lifeline.

Interview practice

Leave a reply

I asked for some idea of the interview questions so I could get my thoughts in order. Here is what I got back: “your earliest memories of abuse, did you get to experience the justice system/think of it/attempt to get help, did you tell anyone, when did it end and how, how the following years were for you and when you decided to start writing, the reaction you got etc.”

My earliest memories of abuse were of sitting on my father’s lap. He would put his fingers under my dress and penetrate my body. We were often in public places or in large groups of people and I had to be as still as possible. I had to smile or I was punished. If I didn’t smile and act happy I was being “ungrateful”. It progressed on from there. My parents divorced when I was three because a neighbor came forward about my sister being raped by my father.

You would think that getting divorced over incest would mean that he wasn’t left alone with the other children. You would think wrong. I was put in court ordered therapy and still required to visit my father. The abuse continued and escalated.

The most extreme incident was when I was nine or ten years old, my memory always jumps around on this topic. It culminated with my father holding a gun to my head and asking me if I deserved to live after I gave him a blow job.

I prosecuted my father when I was sixteen. I did so when he upped the ante and wanted me to go further than I had gone before. Specifically I needed a computer for school and he told me I would have to come spend a weekend with him alone and earn it.

After a lifetime of hearing my mother talk about how she didn’t want to have sex with him in exchange for child support so we went hungry… I understood the trade.

I hung up the phone and called the police and said, “I need to find out how to report my father for molesting me” and I burst into tears.

The San Bernadino County Sheriffs I worked with earned their pay and treated me quite respectfully. They interviewed me before my mother got home from work, which was important because my mother would have derailed and interrupted. Denial and secrecy were the standard in my family. I knew I would pay for opening my mouth.

My father was arrested and interrogated for 72 hours. It took him a long time to come down from all the drugs in his system. He confessed to everything; he added detail upon detail to my stories so was placed on suicide watch. The sheriffs needed to talk to all the women in my family. My father’s sisters. My sister. There was a long list of crimes he could no longer be prosecuted for due to statute of limitations.

He killed himself the first day of his trial. He sat in his garage with the motor running and wrote note after note about how I was a liar and he was innocent.

It didn’t help that in the lead up between me starting the prosecution process and the court date my brother killed himself. Specifically he lit himself on fire. He had a severe traumatic brain injury and he needed a lot of care and he could not perceive a life past my father going to jail.

My family blames me for both deaths and we have no contact.

That all happened right around when I was turning seventeen. My birthday happened after my brother’s suicide and before my father’s. It wasn’t a happy event.

The best thing I can say about it happening then was I only had a year left to be with my family and endure their anger with me. I had broken all the rules about silence.

I moved almost 50 times as a child and I went to 25 schools. I dropped out of high school at 16 more or less concurrently with prosecuting my father–he stalked me during the run up to the trial and I stopped leaving my house. I entered into an alternative education program at 17 and I have a high school diploma I earned mostly through community college classes.

I have a bachelor’s degree. I have an expired teaching credential–I let it lapse when I stopped working to home school my kids. I spent 7 years in a masters program for English and I don’t have a degree because the entire thing rested on my ability to hand write quickly in a short period of time. I wish they had given classes on that skill instead of on writing research papers. I had a high GPA. I can type a great research paper.

I learned hand writing in a school that thought the best way to teach me was to hit me. Daily. I don’t hand write much and what I do is torturous and slow. I think very quickly and my normal typing speed ranges between 50 and 100 words/minute depending on how excited I am with a given topic. That my degree rested on handwriting is pretty much what living with PTSD means for my life. I was beaten a lot as a child and I will be punished for my learned aversions for the rest of my life. (This is going to feel off-topic.)

I’ve been blogging for about eleven years. I would intermittently journal before that. For me, part of the draw of writing is getting to exist in front of people. So much of my life has been kept secret that I needed to have a public way of acknowledging who I am and what I go through to counter the fact that I can’t talk about most of my issues with most people.

It is a hard fact that when you grow up with incest there are a lot of topics that you have to walk away from when “normal” people get to have a friendly conversation. It sucks knowing that you can traumatize people just be letting them know that you really exist.

Writing allows me to step outside of myself and outside of the current moment by moment experience I am having of the world. If I record what I am feeling, thinking about, processing, and how I am processing things then I am capable of determining when I am stuck in a rut. “Day #63 of sitting here watching The West Wing. This isn’t good.”

I hold myself accountable. Also it means that I give myself credit where credit is due. That’s an important part of the process most people overlook. If you don’t give yourself credit for what you do right, you are less likely to maintain it.

I have come a long way in my life. I was more or less a feral child.  Despite the fact that I will probably be in therapy for the rest of my life (30 years so far–many of them paid by the state of California because I was a victim of violent crime. Prosecuting does have benefits beyond the obvious ones.) I am reasonably happy at this stage.

I have a husband. Two precocious, delightful children who are growing up with a kind of safety and love I could not have imagined. I spent ten years researching child development and training as a teacher so that I could be a parent without doing it badly. Not everyone is as lucky as me when it comes to healing and resources post-incest.

 

Ok, around 1100 words. I have to go eat breakfast now.

Yelling at people isn’t so bad.

Leave a reply

Apparently things with Noah’s family are very different than my previous perceptions. Yes, I got a preview of this last week at dinner. This week my sister in law came over for many hours and told story after story. Noah is absorbing the stories and thinking about implications.

Apparently my words are being used to slap my mother in law around. (There isn’t much, if any physical abuse in the house–it’s a verbal abuse sorta space.) I told my father in law that I wasn’t interested in trading one abusive mother for another. I’m sorry that has been used by a gaslighter to punish someone.

But on the upside apparently me being a bitch in that way spurred my mother in law into therapy and there have been dramatic strides in her behavior. Kinda like when I yelled at Rebecca’s dad all those years ago.

I find it kind of… funny… that when I yell at people it sometimes spurs life changes. That’s like negative reinforcement all over the place. See, I should yell at people. It’s good for them.

No, no it isn’t. Only my kids show lots of signs of resiliency and part of it is that they are non-jumpy because of how desensitized to noise they are. Sudden yelling isn’t scary. They know that nothing bad will happen but they need to change their behavior.

I’m kidding about yelling being good for them. I think that it actually is more of a big deal that I don’t yell that much. They don’t get tirades about their behavior. I cut that shit off after a couple of sentences. It’s not ok to berate kids. I can express that I don’t like something and then I need to move on.

I told my sister-in-law to brace herself for kind of a dump on the way to the house. I’ve seen the house she has grown up in. I saw the house she was visiting in Los Gatos. My house is kind of a dump in comparison. Small, dark, and messy. Not to mention the chips in the paint all over the walls from my obsessive furniture moving.

Her response was, “I like this. It’s cozy and homey. I want a house like this.”

Oh, I forgot. She has had to grow up with cleaning a huge, empty, unloved house. Oh. Of course she doesn’t value them much.

Noah and I had a talk this morning about how it is working out that he still doesn’t have much of a relationship with his family… but I do.

I talk to his aunts and grandmother and parents more than he does. I haven’t reached out as dramatically to his siblings, but that is partially because they have reached out less to me. All the older generation women have put effort into me. They just… did. They send presents and letters and they volunteer their interest.

It is a lot more than I have ever gotten from a family member. So I respond. Noah kind of tunes it out because he has never experienced anything else so he doesn’t value it.

Contrast is useful.

Oh. Wow. A journalist in the UK (not from a very well developed site–it looks like they are just getting off the ground) found my blog and asked to interview me. Sure. I can do that. Incest, PTSD, and how it effects my life. I’m grateful I didn’t have to track a reporter down and say, “Please interview me” so I’m glad to have the practice. I don’t have to start with the NY Times.

Life plugs along. It isn’t a good thing I yell at people. It is a good thing I am in the world. I say things that make people think. I am a useful data point. It is good to have extremes. Without them the middle gets very boring.

It is ok to have us progressives in the world. It gives the conservatives something to contrast with.

Comorbidity

Leave a reply

That word is awesome. Comorbidity. It means the simultaneous presence of multiple conditions. Such a fabulous word. Like juxtaposition only in one spot.

My shrink and I were discussing my hypomania yesterday. Hypomania isn’t true mania. It means that you have an elevated activation of your nervous system but you aren’t necessarily doing anything rash or dangerous. I just flip between feeling happy and pissed off with a gentle breeze. I may be spending a “lot” of money but given that all of my big purchases in the last few months are things like “items I will use on cross-country trip” and “shed to prevent bicycles from disintegrating” I don’t really count as manic. I’m not blowing thousands of dollars on the lottery.

I have a lot going on. I have a lot of people in my life and I have dramatically different feelings about different people. Keeping all those feelings inside me and more or less cogent is really hard. It is very disruptive. If I knew fewer people maybe this would be easier… ha. Never happen.

The kids have been pretty explosive too. They are feeding off of me and I take responsibility. It’s like when Jenny copied my tone of voice and we had a bad first 24 hours. It sucks knowing that you are the one triggering the bad interactions in the whole house.

My attitude needs to change, and fast. I have about 18 people coming over in five hours. I haven’t made the food yet. I haven’t moved the tables yet. No biggie. That’s all there is left to do. It’ll get done. But I need to have a good attitude.

There is a family in our home school group who says that a lot when we are doing stuff like hiking and camping, “It’s important to have a good attitude.” I try really hard to listen to them. They have a good point.

So of course I woke up and at 5am I am standing at the freezer saying, “How should I medicate today?” Modern science is wonderful. The variety the dispensary has… it takes my breath away. I am thrilled. Cupcakes and rice crispy bars and brownies and cookies and about 10 different kinds of candy and chocolate bars and pills and oil and wax and ice cream and…

Whoa. All so I don’t have to give myself lung damage. Well done legalization industry.

I’m not a mellow person. I never have been. I am more calm and reflective than I used to be by a large measure. I no longer feel like someone not-paying-attention-to-me-right-now means death.

My shrink and I did several body-calming-exercises. Trying to help my central nervous system calm down. Sometimes I don’t think I could be more activated if I were hit by lightning. I’m already vibrating with energy. (Ok I know that actual lightning would be more… but you understand the metaphor.)

One of the things she had me do was visualize kicking someone. The thing is, that brings up my mental Rolodex of so-and-so and him and her and them and… Memory lane is a funny thing for me.

I will probably never do that again. I will probably never kick anyone in the nuts again. I will probably not kick someone in the chest hard enough to fracture ribs again.

Although I could do martial arts or kick boxing. Maybe that is a work around so that I can still beat the crap out of people but I’m being “monogamous”. As long as I claim I don’t get off on it–it’s fine, right?

Once my Owner watched a Famous Fetish Model/Educator (I’m capitalizing it because she’s a big deal in his little world and he nearly genuflects when he talks about her–whatever.) and her partner do a scene in which she only used her feet. Given how obsessed with feet my Owner was… well, nothing would do but that I do something similar to him. I learned that I liked it. I’ve done a lot of scenes where I didn’t touch someone with my hands.

Not to mention that I have literally had my ass kicked by many people. It feels awesome.

Bdsm gives me a fully consensual and appropriate space to work through my feelings of aggression. Not having it is hard. Cause seriously, if someone sidled up to me and begged me pretty please to knee them in the balls and slap them around right now… Oh I would have trouble saying no. That would be so much fun.

Ahem. Tea Party. Get your head on straight. Sweetness. Light. Gentle hands for the love of toast.

I’m irritated. That’s the only word I can come up with. My shrink wants to stick with activated. Wired for sound.

But these ups and downs, this is why there is so much conflicting opinion about my diagnosis. I’ve heard just PTSD. I’ve heard PTSD and GAD. I’ve heard bipolar. I’ve heard borderline personality disorder (but never from a qualified professional so I’m more doubtful of this one). While on a terrible psych medication I was told borderline schizophrenic but never while not on the evil psych med so that one I get to say isn’t mine.

I swing from depression and suicidal ideation to anxiety and hypomania. This is more tiresome for me than for you. I promise.  I can’t get away.

I’m a weird balance between extrovert and introvert. Finding the right balance is hard. I need people something fierce. But they are draining and tiring.

I am so very driven by my attachment needs. I am driven towards and away from people at the same time. It feels like a war inside my brain. I am afraid to attach too much to any one person. I’m afraid to not try with everyone because you never know who will fit.

But I have a full time job plus overtime of socializing and it is not actually good for me. But culling people feels brutal. Even just putting people on a longer rotation feels hard.

And now that my kids are bonding with my friends… kicking them out of my life is a whole different story. Just like I’m not real approving of polyfuckery in front of children I’m not that thrilled about the idea of a revolving character cast of friends. Kids need to know who is in their lives. Kids needs to have relationships that are not just instant-friends.

So I’m trying to be ok with some people being on a longer leash but not out of my life. It is a really hard transition in thinking.

I think Pam hit level 2 because I completely discounted her as a friend many times over the years and she kept reappearing. We would have intense conversations and I would assume that she never wanted to speak to me again after what I said and… there she was calling me again.

From across the world she kept calling me. So I developed the habit of dropping whatever I was doing because Pam wanted to talk to me.

It was like how Air Force Michael managed to call me from Turkey spontaneously several times while I was institutionalized as a teenager. Only I didn’t get to talk to AF Michael because… I wasn’t at home to take the calls. And he stopped calling after that.

So I fucking answer the phone for Pam. Because I can say whatever crack-brained shit that comes to mind and she keeps calling.

I don’t remember if I wrote what was so amazing about Shanna’s second birthday yesterday. I think I kind of hinted but didn’t get to the meat.

I emailed my friends and said: “My kid needs a party and I don’t want to do it. You do it.”

So they did. And I sat in a chair. And it felt like magic. I felt loved. I did feel supported in that net feeling.

I don’t know why I have such a violent need to hurt myself if I try to get that feeling from a party that is actually literally about me. But I have some suspicions.

I don’t want this feeling for the rest of my life. But you can’t decide to “just stop feeling something”.

You have to decide what you want and move towards it.

Time to go set up for the Tea Party.

Logistics

Leave a reply

Thank you for all the comments. I certainly know I am not alone in experiencing social anxiety and group troubles. I read textbooks. I know how common my issues are. Heh. It is interesting seeing where other people are with handling it. I go in and out of phases where I can handle putting myself out there. Sometimes I can and sometimes not so much.

Tomorrow is a tea party at our house. The current RSVP count is maddening because it never stays the same in the last 24 hours. This group is… really big on changing their minds in the final hours. Which means if I start baking this afternoon there is a non-zero chance I will make two or three times as much food as I need because half or more of the people will cancel.

But the house is pretty much ready. I’ll choose to just be happy about that. I am ridiculously impressed by how helpful the kids are becoming. Shanna washes dishes now too. With every party that goes by they do more and more of the work.

My secret plan is working. My kids are going to be entirely adept at hosting before they are ten.

My kids are going to have very different issues than me. I really can’t predict what they will be like. But I know they will show up as adults with a large variety of skills.

We aren’t going to the park today because Shanna’s favorite girl in the neighborhood is only available to play on Tuesdays. Shanna asked if she could stay home to see her friend and that will make my life easier. I don’t know what it will mean about the whole shape of the day.

The kids were going to K’s while I have therapy before the park then Aqua Adventure. Now… I’m not so sure. We’ll see.

I finished all the invitations for Calli’s birthday yesterday. I feel on the ball on that one because I’m a month early. *phew*

I need to make a list of foods I’m making for tomorrow so I can email people. Folks always ask what they can do. The thing is, given how high the flake rate is for events… I hesitate to share duties. If someone decides not to show up at the last minute then I have to scramble and I don’t like that much. Tea parties aren’t like pot lucks. They aren’t events that can have a completely random menu. Says my little control freak brain.

I’m sorta thinking that I could say, “You can contribute $5-$10 on a sliding scale for what your family can afford per kid if you want to defray the costs. I do not require that any kid pay. If I couldn’t afford the parties I wouldn’t have them.”

I like them being just so. That makes it easier for me to get set up in advance. If I am reacting to an unpredictable amount and quantity of food from other people… I experience a lot of anxiety. What if someone else has a bad morning and brings their six kids without having made the food they agreed to make? I’d be uhhh up a creek. Either I would spend the whole party making food such that I didn’t get to talk to anyone or have fun, or kids would be standing there picking through my snack cart for the whole time. Neither option pleases me.

(I specifically said six kids because at this moment in time no one in the group has six kids. [Err, at least not that have all six active within the homeschool group…] So I’m not picking on anyone. It’s a metaphor. It could be one kid. But it would be more likely with six kids because man I have a lot of sympathy for moms with that many kids. I can’t imagine keeping up with that workload.)

I would be just as fussy with two or three kids.

I can create a smoothly ordered system if I am in control of all the pieces. I’m shitty at adjusting to, “Well I forgot to buy cucumbers so I made pb&j’s instead” when I already made the pb&j’s for the party and now that’s all we have to eat….

People are variable. And if I just do it then I don’t get mad at anyone for being human. I get that they are human and all. I need to be loving and accepting of people being where they are.

I’m probably better off saying that people can give $ if they really want to contribute. I totally don’t think I want help. Maybe some help. Not really. Go away. Don’t help me.

I’m kidding. Don’t go away. Come to my party. Enjoy yourself as a guest. Don’t pressure me to make-work for you because that’s hard. I’ll get to the work at a pace I can handle. Then I don’t have to stop my train of thoughts to create something for you to do. That can be pretty frustrating.

When I want help I ask for it. Shanna’s second birthday was awesome. I told my friends to come over and do everything for the party because I was very pregnant and I planned to sit in a chair.

They did.

It was really pretty breathtaking. The fact that I have social anxiety and insecurity about my relationships is pretty much horse shit. They show up. They work like dogs. I am so grateful.

I suppose that yesterday when I thought of the wedding reception and my 30th birthday I was looking for mass. At that quantity of people I start cracking.

The birthday parties for the kids have all been really great. I know that the parties aren’t for me so a lot of my anxiety goes away. I have a much narrower parameter of acceptable behavior “Ok for my kids” and that relieves the pressure of what to say to people.

As I look at the group of people who is working hard to know my kids throughout their lifetime… I feel quite humbled. My kids have an extensive network. There are a lot of grown ups who have been there over and over for six years running for Shanna. She trusts and loves them with absolutely no limits.

I feel so grateful that I get to see what that looks like. Even as I go through my feelings of rage that “chosen family is bullshit” these people show up for my kids. And they show up. And they show up.

Even my worry about an “appropriate place” for them to go should I die… they have options. They have lots of aunts who would make it work. My kids may not get to have the life I would give them, but they would be loved and cared for. They would be told good things about me.

I’m so grateful that I have gotten to this point. Even though sometimes I feel like I am going to have to leave because I am a monster who will hurt people.

Other people have to decide for themselves if I am hurting them or not. I should not proactively withdraw just to keep them safe. That isn’t actually what they want. They would rather tell me to knock it off if I start over-stepping. Well, maybe they don’t like doing that.

But I’m not shitty company all the time. Clearly folks like talking to me once in a while. I can stop pretending that I am torturing people just by existing near them. It is a really annoying habit of mine.

And I settled the menu for the tea party and followed up with sending my address to all the guests. Checking things off lists.

The kids have been staying up till 9 pretty consistently. Stupid Day Light Savings. They are sleeping later. It’s pretty awesome.

Oh, it’s official. I will not drink hard alcohol anymore. I had one fucking drink and it made me puke. I can have a glass of wine on rare occasions. When we run out of what is in the house I should probably stop buying it. Noah likes his rum and that’s his call. My body doesn’t like it. I had horrible diarrhea for more than 24 hours. It is time to recognize this limit. Yes, body. You win.

Ok. Time to go start the day.

Continuing on a theme

3 Replies

If the problem is that I just can’t scale my emotional connection rather than I can’t have individual connections with that many people, that is a very different flavor of possible. It’s not that I can’t love multiple people at once. (Maybe–hopefully) it is that I don’t feel it now. I can feel it with and for those people as pull-outs.

What is the problem with scaling and/or crowds?

I am probably more intentional with my behavior than average. I think really hard about what I can say and to whom. I mess up, sure, but I work very hard at being appropriate. It isn’t very natural for me. Noah says it isn’t for him either so I don’t know if it is easy for anyone.

I feel like I earn love in an ongoing way. On a daily, maybe hourly basis. I have to continue to behave in a way that will deserve someone loving me.

But I slip a lot. I’m not a polished person. I say things that are too harsh, things that are off-putting, things that are too intense. I’m a lot better than I used to be.

When I am in a group of more than four or five unrelated people (I do ok with a mom and her kids even if there are eight kids) I experience so much terror. Group think is so viscerally terrifying to me. It isn’t fear. It is terror. I shake.

Watch me at home school events. Or parties. It only happens when I feel like I “should” be able to be friendly and work the room but I don’t know what these people want from me. If I screw up I will be ejected from the group and everyone will hate me.

It is my perpetual new kid problem writ large. (25 schools before I dropped out of high school followed by five colleges/universities.)

Social group hopping is part of my problem. I only go to a given group long enough to get to know a very small number of people. Then I have a minor conflict with one person and I never come back. Because I’m scared.

Since I was 17, so in the last 15 years: theatre (first in college then moved on to the local community theatre crowd so this was two very distinct groups of people), bdsm (I have met people in dozens of states and multiple countries–my bdsm contacts are legion), a few different sex communities, vintage ballroom/ceili (they were very overlapping crowds but not identical), Renaissance Faire, Dickens Fair (some overlap but not identical), teaching (I worked at two schools longer-term and subbed at many more), libraries (I spent a lot of time in every school library–those librarians were big deals to me), Burning Man crowd, BaGG people (some overlap with bdsm crowd but mostly its own distinct group), home school groupings, the S&P crowd, poly people…

I have moved through a lot of groups. And they have such completely differing social values that anyone who can act the same way in every location… that person has super powers I don’t have. I act very differently from group to group. Social norms differ wildly.

You wouldn’t look at that list of group associations and assume that I have friends from every religion. Many of my friends are incredibly conservative. I walk quite the line with my friends. They are worth the effort.

Sometimes I feel weird about the degree to which I live in a bubble. I live in a unique time and place where someone like me is allowed to exist without continual punishment.

I am hyperaware that I live in a bubble. Bubbles can be popped.

The sufferance that allows me to be part of a given group can be revoked pretty fucking easily. Let me tell you.

Group think is terrifying to me. Groups are dangerous. Groups are very difficult to turn aside if they decide they are angry. Groups carry out lynchings and other reigns of terror. Individuals are… very differently dangerous. I can fight off an individual who has a problem with me, or I can run.

Groups are scary. Yes. Even groups of people who have been carefully selected to come to my house because I’m pretty sure they like me.

Want to know one of the problem with the wedding reception? We used it as a reunion of as many ex’s as we could invite. Noah and I are big whores (ok, I’m way friskier than him a few times over) so it was festive having all our men and women in one place. No potential for issues there. Some of my bio-family was there. That was awkward as fuck.

I think this problem is tractable. I may not ever get to the point where I can handle any group without terror but perhaps I could get to the point where my hand selected crowds are less intimidating.

I mean, good fucking grief.

I have had more than one woman over the years tell me that they dislike me because I am so bouncy and hyper around groups of people. I look like I am trying to get attention. I seem like I want to be the center of attention.

Err, my central nervous system is going haywire. My voice gets louder because I’m scared and I can’t keep it within a normal range when I am trying to control the shaking. Yes, I get up and move around a lot. I stand and sway. It’s better than trying to sit in a chair and letting everyone in the room hear it rattle because I am not physically capable of sitting still. I have to be so tired I can barely move before that goes away. Luckily I experience a lot of sleep deprivation at this point in my life.

Well, I can start consciously paying attention to what works and with whom. I can try to deliberately combine small groups of particular people. Perhaps if I can cross connect a couple of lines I can increase my feeling of safety.

The problem is that my friends are different. They vary from one another dramatically. It is hard to talk people into adding someone radically different from their norm into their life. I’m usually already the biggest aberration in their life.

It also doesn’t help that I’m not willing to blanket say, “If I know them that means they are wonderful and safe and a “good” person.” I try not to lie. I know a mix of people. Some of them are not actually “good” people.

I don’t require people to reach a certain level of “good” before I will know them. I simply interact with people differently based on how they interact with my neighbor.

I go from nice and friendly to hostile on a dime when my neighbor starts his racist shit. Sometimes I am pretty nasty. But when he minds his manners I’m happy to hang out with him.

I know more than one rapist. My boundaries with them vary dramatically based on the context of the rape that I know about.

I know a lot of drug addicts. I think it is a really hard situation to struggle with. I watch my boundaries and try to be a good friend when I can do so in a way that is healthy for me.

I even know conservative Christians and instead of alienating them as my more liberal friends urge me to do, I nurture them close. I like these people. They are working hard to manifest what they believe in the world. Rock on. I am similarly interested in the teachings of people from every other religion. If someone is willing to sit and tell me about their life and their family then I probably want to listen.

I don’t allow people to attack me, but I like aggressive people. Almost every other detail is negotiable.

When you put a large number of aggressive people in a room, especially when they are all aggressive in different directions….

Well the two men who used to shout down all of my female friends in the room won’t be at events any more for very complicated reasons. (Ok, one moved. That’s not so complicated.)

I hope that means that some women will come back. I know more than one woman who stopped coming to avoid them.

How do I create an environment that feels safe? What kind of overlap works?

I’m not interested in being a recluse for the rest of my life. What will work?

I will probably keep trying. Life is long. I tell myself pretty often that if something doesn’t work out with one person there are 7 billion people I haven’t met yet. I don’t need to assume that I have to be alone if one person doesn’t like me. Even if a dozen people don’t want to know me. Even if a hundred people. Thousands. Millions.

There are more than seven billion people on this planet. I don’t have to be alone.

Even if I am annoying. I don’t need to feel so terrified that people are going to hate me and tell me to go away at the first sign of being annoying. Most people don’t actually do that. Most people are kind of lonely too. They can overlook some failings.

Just make sure the failings fall within a given, limited range of acceptable issues. It’s ok that my voice gets a bit too loud sometimes. People can either not be in my life or ask me to soften it. I can if given feedback. I do require feedback. I’m sorry. I know that can be annoying.

How do you learn the right list of disclaimers. “I am too loud sometimes. If my voice bothers you, please ask me to soften it. I’m happy to. I used to stage manage little girl dance shows and it has had a permanent effect on the volume of my voice. Sorry.”

“I have had an unusual life. If I ever start on a topic that feels uncomfortable for you it is ALWAYS OK to say shiny change of topic and we can abruptly switch to a neutral topic. It’s ok. I promise. I won’t be mad. I will be grateful you helped me learn about your boundaries.”

I want to know people and it is hard. You always start viewing people through the filter of how like you they are. Projection is almost always part of a relationship–in both direction. It isn’t just me.

I learn about their differences when they show me their boundaries. It is a valuable opportunity.

Thing is, in a group situation it is much harder to say shiny change of topic when you feel intruded upon so people have to withdraw to deal with problems. It’s not a great cycle.

I will always talk about things like incest and rape. It is ok if you don’t want me to have much of a conversation with you about those topics. Or any other topic I’m obsessed with. You are allowed to have different interests.

But I’m going to walk away if the conversation turns to World of Warcraft or other games I don’t play or movies I don’t watch or tv I don’t watch or gets too technical for me. I’m not going to say you shouldn’t have those interests. I will let you stay and talk to the people who share them and I will go stand somewhere else.

It’s ok.

But when people walk away from me because I said something… it usually isn’t neutral. I’m not upset by the gaming or technical stuff I’m just kind of burnt out on social listening to such topics. It isn’t visceral or anxious. When people pull away from what I am saying, often it is with churning guts.

I feel pretty bad about that.

I’m not going to stop talking about these topics. There are people who need to hear what I have to say. Sometimes I am the first or only source of information people have had. I’m really happy to get the ball rolling for people. I make sure I represent multiple points of view when I talk about stuff. “So I tend to agree with ______ but there any many opposing views such as _____ and _______ and people have different preferences because of _______. You have to figure out what will work for you.”

Balance. There has to be a point of balance somewhere. Ok I haven’t found it yet. That doesn’t mean I won’t. That doesn’t mean the balance doesn’t exist. I just haven’t gotten there yet. I’m not dead yet. Nothing is set in stone until I do.

Today is not always. What I am feeling right now is not what I will feel for always.

Today I get to make invitations for a birthday party. We have a joint birthday party coming up soon. Calli has a birthday twin and luckily, they like each other. *phew* Most of their friends overlap and it would be super awkward if they didn’t get along. This year the other family is hosting but I’m helping. It’s going to be fun. She’s getting a bounce house. I’m pretty sure I will never rent a bounce house. So I’m super happy we have friends who will.

I think I’m not doing goody bags any more. I don’t like the waste involved. Even if people get mad at me. I can live with that. I don’t need to contribute to a system I think is broken. My whole life is kind of that. I opt out of a lot of things. That’s ok.

My kids break everything in the goody bags before we get home. I collect the now-trash into the bag and drop into the trash on the way into the house. The madness has to stop. Yes, my kids are more destructive than average. All of my friends are drowning in schtuff. I don’t need to make their lives worse.

I’m taking a stand. Goody-bag free zone.

Luckily the birthday twins mom agrees with me. *phew*

I don’t have anything against bouncy houses. I think they are fun. I just don’t think I will rent one. There are lots of things I like and don’t do.

I feel freaked out the whole time my neighbor works on his boat because of the motor. I can’t imagine having a bouncy thing that close to my house. The noise would send me up the wall. I handle noise better out. There I have a very different level of sensitivity to intrusion. At home I keep it pretty quiet. We hear our neighbors walking by if they talk. I like being able to hear who is coming and going. They stop to chat. It’s fun.

I like hearing the birds. I like the train noise off a ways

And my time is up. Have a day. Cause I’m not the boss of how it goes for you.