Back to hunting, I guess.

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Noah recently discovered that we have money in an HSA we forgot about. Woo. That means I all of a sudden have money in the medical section. I think I am going to call my former therapist and say I am ready for a referral now.

What I am doing right now isn’t working for me. That means I need to figure out how to change it. I’m not very good at doing that by myself. That’s ok. There are professionals for this shit. This is why I have been in therapy for decades and I probably will be for most of my life. Even though I feel ashamed of myself for that. My therapists are the most stable friendships I have. I need mirrors. I don’t seem to be able to construct a mirror with sufficient intensity any other way. I have to pay someone to pay attention to me before I believe that they will actually do so week after week.

I feel really pathetic. I also feel really suicidal. It’s time to call for a referral. I’m not managing on my own right now.

I really hate me.

stupid body

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I’m frustrated and angry. I can’t seem to get off. It’s this ache inside of me, this need. But I can’t get there. The galling thing is I know I would be able to go find a stranger on the internet and get off. My orgasm response is largely tied to being performative. That’s not really how my sex life works any more. So I just don’t get off. And if I’m any kind of honest I will admit that I kind of hate Noah right now. He can get off. No problem. And I’m left with this feeling of being a cum dumpster. It’s the only god damn reason I participate in sex. He needs somewhere for the goo to go.

I feel frustrated and angry. Running doesn’t help this ache. I can rarely make myself come when I masturbate (not that I get almost any chance to do that anyway).
Today I hate my body. It hurts. It feels bad. I feel so angry. So frustrated. I hate my body.

Random judgey thought.

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When people I am ostensibly “close” with tell me emphatically that they don’t read my blog and they didn’t read the book and they aren’t going to I feel a sudden and distinct cessation of closeness. This person only wants to know about the parts of me that are “nice”.

I don’t think that everyone has to keep up with the blog in order to like me. But I do feel kind of intensely about people not wanting to know about my life. I’d like to turn around and start walking so we can keep it that way. I’m not going to fucking censor so you so that you can avoid being uncomfortable. If you don’t want to know things like that about a person maybe you just shouldn’t know me at all. I will be better off if I avoid people who want me to think that parts of my life are unmentionable.


It isn’t that I think everyone has to read it. It’s that when people feel the need to emphatically tell me they won’t I want to leave. That feels like a door slammed in my face. They won’t allow themselves to find out things that are painful so they don’t want to know about me.

Ok. I’ll take that at face value and leave. There are people in this world who do not flinch when they look at me. I live with them. Maybe I should just stay home.

I’m tired of having to be supportive of people who want to avoid trauma by never knowing that people like me exist. I don’t have energy for this.

Editing is part of the creative process.

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I’m editing No Secrets again.

If you have read it, did you have any burning questions? Any parts you really didn’t understand and you wish you did? That was really what I was hoping to get from working with an editor, finding out where the holes in the story are. I didn’t get that feedback. Oh well.

It’s hard to read this story. It’s really annoying finding dozens of typographical errors in each chapter. I thought I fucking paid an editor. Oh well. :-\

I’m also working on another book. I feel like I have to be doing something. I feel so trapped and stuck and boring and… Oh man.

Since I’m not sleeping I might as well write.

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For the last day or so Noah and I have been talking about how he thinks the next book shouldn’t just be part two of the autobiographical series. He thinks the next book should be about suicide. So far this morning I’ve written about 2,000 words. I think there is a part of me that wants to hurry up and write about suicide now because I want to work on part two during NaNoWriMo. This isn’t the same kind of story telling. I want to tell stories! But he’s right. This is weighing heavily on my mind.

He keeps asking me who I want to talk to and why. Who do I want to talk to? People who think they have it so bad that there is no point in continuing to try. It couldn’t possibly ever stop hurting. Life is pain. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

But how do you bear it? How do you keep going? How do you get through yet another shitty day? A big part of it for me is this obsessive, tenacious belief I have that I am not alone and there are people in the world who understand me, at least a little, and more importantly there are people who love me and need me. I don’t just mean the kids.

I was a teacher for two and a half years. Former students talk to me at least once a week telling me thank you for helping them with something or other. I’ve helped some of them become better educated about their birth choices. A student told me that she avoided a c-section because I gave her the strength and assurance to argue for her rights. I feel like that’s a big deal. She had the brass plated balls to argue with a doctor about her rights because I told her she could. Fuck yeah.

When people are very suicidal they call me. Even if we aren’t close. Even if they barely know me. I wear my heart on my sleeve and I seem safe. I am not going to look down on someone no matter how low they feel because I feel like I’m sitting there in the gutter with them. You can’t look down when your chin is on the ground. Everything is level or up.

I feel pretty ridiculous sometimes because I feel like part of my gift this lifetime is the easing of other peoples pain. Even if I am not that important in and of myself I touch people. Maybe they will be important. Maybe they will be able to do something because they felt seen by me. Maybe I will be able to lend them some of my strength and stubbornness.

How do I make it through another day? By making deals and trades. Over time I have made some bad deals but all that mattered to me was making it through the day. By that metric I’ve been quite successful.

I feel pathetic because I measure my success in “not dead”. Seems like a pathetically low bar. Not so much of a high jump but rather something to trip you up. If you fuck up on “not dying” the consequences are bad. If you hit a trip wire it hurts even though it’s not a high bar. Landing on your face really really hurts.

I think a lot about survival. What does it mean to live? Why are we here? What am I doing? I feel overwhelmed by life. It’s too much and not enough. But I have to stay. I have things to do. There are people who need me. I have to believe in the pit of my stomach that somewhere out there in the world there is someone who needs me quite badly. I can’t die yet because I haven’t met that person. I want to. That’s enough to get me through today. I’ll find a reason to get through tomorrow then.

relationship blathering

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One of the best things about writing alone in a room is I don’t have to care about “over sharing”. If people want to stop reading they can and it’s really not my problem. Yay! Ok, that is as much of a warning as you are going to get.
I’m sick. I have a low grade fever; I’m coughing; I have post-nasal drip; I have diarrhea; my throat hurts. Yesterday I went running anyway. When I got home blacksheep told me that I don’t have to run when I am sick. This was exactly what I needed to hear. I have a weird attitude towards advice. Long-time readers are hesitant to suggest anything to me because for many years I responded with immediate vicious hostility to any sign of advice. Mostly because people who didn’t know me that well were going off half-cocked. The advice wasn’t always relevant and I’m not a very nice person about handling that. I understand that is basically a character failing on my part. Such is life.
I am extremely careful in my head about hierarchies. I assign people authority and stature in my head and don’t tell them. If you tell the bastards they get a big head and want to take the increased amount of influence for a spin. Bad plan. But I have little weights and measures in my head that tell me about the person who is talking. It carefully decides how much I should give a shit about what they are saying.
I have been told for a long time that I’m a counter phobic six. (Enneagram shit.) I hear they are very hierarchical. Like, for example, I have a hard time arguing in my head with what blacksheep tells me about exercise. I try hard to understand that she doesn’t know everything about my experiences and I have to give her a lot of information before her advice is perfect. But it is very rare at this point for me to think “She’s wrong.” I think, “Ennnnhhhh I think she doesn’t know what I’m dealing with.” I can understand that her advice is right for 95% of people. Today it doesn’t apply to me (or whatever). 
I have a lot of authorities in my head. I don’t tell people I am putting them on pedestals. You can’t tell people that. 
So a friend was criticizing another friend. She said, “She lets the internet think for her.” I asked for clarification. The other person asks for advice online and then follows it. A fair bit. I could feel the blush creeping up my neck.
I don’t go to the hospital for illness until I have checked with the internet and enough people tell me it is a good idea. I have a basic belief that I am not capable of evaluating my own health state. It’s not a good belief. So I let people on the internet (let’s not fucking kid ourselves I’m not saying these people know me well or have seen my illness state) listen to my list of symptoms and then decide if it is serious or not. I think the internet has a 50/50 rate of getting me to the doctor for major illnesses (bacterial infection, strep throat, mono) and times I’m told “It’s the flu. Go home and rest.” I’ll still listen to the internet because otherwise I wouldn’t care about myself enough to end my suffering when I am seriously ill. The misfires are probably worth it but I can’t bring myself to make the call alone. I just can’t.
Someone else has to think that my suffering is bad enough and has gone on long enough and that person has to tell me to stop the madness. Without that loop I sit here and cry and feel bad and just deal with it. The human condition involves a lot of pain. Don’t be a god damn whiner. Oh but I am a whiner. A big one.
This is something I talked to my therapist a lot about. I am very careful who I let be an influence on me. I’m well aware that the vast majority of people are poison for me. They will tell me that I am bad or wrong for things I can’t change. I am who I am. I don’t need more shame. I really don’t. I don’t hurt anyone. I’ve had a lot of life experiences that permanently taint me, that’s fine. I don’t hurt anyone (who hasn’t asked very nicely). Not even that, now. I will never hurt anyone again. I feel like I have been defanged. I will never again enjoy sadistic pleasure. It’s against the rules.
It’s really weird knowing that on one hand I am absolutely depraved and sick and blah blah blah and on the other hand I’m this really quiet, mellow little suburban mom. Whose advice is relevant to me? How do I pick people to give me advice on different topics?
The older I get and the longer I stay in one place the more I can judge people based on what they do rather than what they say. That has certainly changed the hierarchy of my internal advice pedestal. I pick very carefully who is behaving in ways I want to emulate. I am a copier. That’s what I do. I pattern myself off of people I respect. I do it in ways the people themselves often don’t recognize that way–but I’m just special that way. 
I care about who can show up and get the hard shit done, year after year. Who goes through strife and then recovers and moves on? Who has actual coping skills? What are they? How do they work? How did they develop their expertise in a topic? Why should I respect them?
I’m really harsh in my evaluations. If you ever want to know how I evaluate you go ahead and ask. I’ll tell you. I don’t see any point in hiding it or sugar coating it. I’ll tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly about what I see. Only there is this little manipulation hiding in that–the people I have a problem with probably aren’t reading my journal. Ha. 
Many of the women I know view their endurance in a shameful light. They do not take pride in their ability to endure. They are in a crappy relationship and they don’t leave so they view that as a sign of their generic weakness. Life is really complicated. Sometimes those crappy relationships are the bedrock of a whole town. If you take away that one relationship it seems like everything else will crumble. You will have to go build a new town. That’s hard. If you haven’t done a lot of big life transitions such a change is terrifying. Noah had better not turn into a shitty husband in ten or fifteen years because I will probably be too chicken to leave him at that point. I will have invested too much of myself in him. I don’t want to leave the parts of me I gave him. I get it.
Up to now leaving has been so easy. I couldn’t understand why people stayed. For me the devil you don’t know is pretty much always safer than the devil you know so jump ship often. You’ll end up in this magical tidal surge that will take you to the right deserted island in the Bahamas. It’ll work out.
I am so harsh in defending myself that I don’t think people understand that I think they are better than me. I’m defending my pitiful right to be less than you. I tell myself often that people disliking me is not a reason to die. Their opinion is not important enough. It’s hard to believe that my right to exist trumps other peoples right to not be bothered by disgusting people like me. These days it seems to me that I only have the ghost of disgusting behavior lying around the house and I should still be sacrificed. It’s for the good of the whole. People who are bad or unruly should be culled for the sake of the herd. One bad apple can spoil a bunch.
I sit here in isolation and think about the threads in my life. The people who touch me at least occasionally. I think about why I know them. I consciously decide over and over if I want to keep knowing them or if I want to just stop making the effort. Not very many people make a lot of effort to keep in contact with me. That’s part of what makes you so unique, D. You have called me every few months for more than ten years no matter where you were in the world. I feel so very special. You want to know what is happening in my life. Even though you drive me nuts sometimes and I can barely understand you because you talk so fast I feel like my life would be empty and sad without you. I wouldn’t have this mirror floating around in the world carrying a positive image of me. Btw- get off the internet and go finish your damn paper.
A lot of people have come and gone in my life. I have to consciously try to not have attachment to people staying. That is how I can end relationships. I know that if I stop trying the other person won’t put effort into it until they want something from me. Sometimes it is years before they look up and around and realize I’m not nearby any more. It is interesting when people still have attachment to me and I have psychologically let them go. 
There is a concept called the Monkey Sphere (maybe I’ll add a link when internet comes back on. If I forget you can google it yourself). Basically this theory is that you can only have intimate relationships with ‘x’ number of people and you can only have more distant friend relationships with ‘y’ people and you can only know so many ‘z’ people casually out in the community. As you get higher in the alphabet the numbers generally get higher. People become less of an individual investment. 
I consciously think about the inner circle very hard. Who can I allow to be an actual influence on me? It’s a very loaded self-conversation. I think about how much I have hurt people and how much they put up with. I think about how much they have hurt me and how much I can put up with. I think about whether or not this person behaves in a way that will make me safe. Someone can’t be in the inner circle if they will hurt me. I mean, a little bit of occasional hurt is different. Noah isn’t perfect. Neither are my kids. I do have to keep score and be honest about it in my head. If someone develops a long-term pattern of hurting me I can’t ignore that. It would be stupid. It would be self-harming. It would be deciding that this other person is simply more important than my continued safety and health. Err, not a good decision. 
People can be part of my distant community and do things that hurt me. That happens. It’s life. You ignore it and move on. That person doesn’t have a lot of influence. The hurt is small and contained. 
The inner circle just has too much access. Too much influence. When I notice a bleed out starting I’m better off severing the limb. I have no other options for keeping myself safe. That’s how it feels.
It’s hard for me to decide I am a good person given how callous and self-centered I am. But then I look around the rest of the world and I notice that I’m really not so bad in the scale of things. It is hard for me to be able to feel good about myself while people in the inner circle disapprove of me. Often I decide that it is easier to cut them out of the circle than try to reconcile the situation. I don’t need people who are going to tell me I am bad. What are they basing it on? How much time have they spent with me in person watching my actual behavior? How the fuck do they know?! Because they interpret things from my journal where I focus the vast majority of my writing energy on things I think that are negative and I don’t write about my behavior all that much. Right. Yeah. Don’t need that.
I’m well aware that even my bad days are significantly better than most of the good days I had growing up. I’m doing well at this point in my life. I really am. My behavior is pretty good. Sure I talk about conversational topics that make other people uncomfortable, but that’s not a big sin as things go. I’m not hurting anyone.
I’m not allowing people to pretend that people like me don’t exist. Even though they want to. Even though people would really prefer I shut up and follow the herd. Watch tv. Talk about movies. That’s what I should talk about. Hell, even if I wanted to get back into the academia shit and talk about books that would be ok as long as I only read authors that are approved parts of the Canon. Right?
I’m not like other people. I don’t know why. I don’t understand all of the differences. But I feel a deep hostility towards people who want me to be more like them. It’s kind of funny. I pattern off of people all the time but I pick specific small parts of their behavior. I am not interested in having someone else’s life. I want my life. I may think that someone is better at _____ than me but I can also hand you a long list of ways the person does ______, ____, and ________ worse than me. I’m alright(sic), Jack.
I really like my relationship with Shanna. I’m allowed to be direct with her in ways I’m not allowed to be with anyone else (until Calli can talk more). Why did I want to be a parent? Because I believe that I have a view of the world that does not deserve to be eradicated. Because in the core of my self-serving soul I believe that who and what I am deserves to continue on after I die. 
In cutting off my family I am actually showing the things my mom did right. My mother taught me to be strong. My mother taught me that not a god damn person in the world was going to make sure I was safe except for me. That has been an incredibly useful lesson. Is it possible to teach that lesson without damaging someone? I don’t know. I want to find out. In no other relationship in my life do I get to set terms from the beginning. It’s a compromise. I get to just exist in front of my kids and they can’t tell me to change. It’s… startling.
I could abuse the fuck out of them and teach them that the world is hurtful and violent. But I don’t. I teach them how to notice other people. I teach them how to be considerate and polite. I teach them how to ask for things in a way that will make it more likely they will get it. I’m trying to teach the difference between persistance and pestering. 
I can go out and interact with the world and seem totally appropriate. I can keep things hidden and just be sunny and delightful and friendly. People don’t know a fucking thing is going on with me. They weren’t able to see the scars I hid. I am a fucking good liar.
I want my kids to have the choice about how people perceive them. I want them to have my versatility without the underlying damage. I’m not sure if it is possible. I don’t want to control what their variations look like, precisely. And I am very well aware that I only get about ten years of setting the terms. Then I have to start handing over control at a quicker and quicker rate. That’s how they become independent. 
I don’t beat my kids because I don’t believe in my heart of hearts that what I am asking of them is always reasonable and appropriate. I know that I ask for things they can’t do. It would not be ok for me to beat them for their lack of development. I think that happens more than people want to admit. It truly is my responsibility to put a lock on the side gate so my kids can’t sneak out and play in the front yard unsupervised. Beating them for disobeying won’t help. They will still want to sneak out. They will just try harder to hide it from me. I don’t want them hiding it from me. I want to control the environment and make it safe for where they are now and gradually pull back. 
Calli can’t even speak yet. There is no way she should be in the front without adult supervision. A lot of Shanna’s limits are group imposed and we talk about that. I can’t consider individual safety yet because they aren’t ready to do much separate yet. Shanna gets to run five houses down to see her friend. That is the limit of her independent solo movement. She is resentful. I repeat, “I get to make these decisions until you are older. Then I don’t get to control you. Sorry, kid.”
Even though yesterday morning started off rough emotionally I had a good day. I sat on the couch and read. I don’t feel good. Shanna went to her friend’s house and Calli napped on me. It was restful and silent. Oh that was nice. Even when they were both home they seemed to trade off who wanted to interact with me so the day was paced well.
If I think hard about the words I used and my tone it was a pretty good day. My only nasty carping was at Noah about the topic of leftovers. I’m really grateful that he puts up with me. (The kids won’t eat leftovers for lunch and Noah gets food at work. I end up eating the same damn thing over and over and sometimes it makes me cry.) Batch cooking just isn’t for me.
Abrupt topic shift (like you aren’t used to that by now): Sometimes I think it is weird that the sex I have now isn’t much like the sex I trained for. When I was nineteen a sanctimonious bitch told me that no one under twenty-five should be in the bdsm community. People should go explore vanilla sex till their thirties and then start on rougher sex. I was, understandably, unimpressed with her. When I was nineteen I had been having PIV sex for seven years by choice and I had countless oral sex partners. Telling me that I wasn’t ready and I should have more sex was hilarious. Now that I am thirty I am slightly less annoyed with her and I can basically understand why she believes that. I still think she was a sanctimonious bitch and I am still unimpressed by her.
And now the kids are in here.

Don’t make someone a priority while you are their option.

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I’m really upset about these no-shows. I was already heading in the direction of feeling depressed and having two women who loudly and adamantly have told me they are my “family” behave this way convinces me that I must be a worthless piece of shit. Even my god damn chosen family just won’t bother to think of me. I’m feeling bitter. I try really hard for my friends. I go to great lengths and deal with inconvenience to spend time with them.

I’m feeling bitter and thin and unimportant. I don’t know if this obsession with BFFs is an American thing alone or if it is normal and natural to ache for people who value you this way. I think that is what the BFF thing is about. The longing for someone to really understand you and value you and love you and think you are important. I wish I had that. Instead I get to be an audience member. I get to be an adoring fan. Friendships aren’t based on me supporting your art while you sleep through visits where you might find out something real about my life. Obviously my life isn’t that interesting to you. I understand.

I wish people would stop lying to me. I wish people would stop telling me I am important when I am obviously and demonstrably not. The continual let down hurts so much. Just be honest. You will spend time with me if you can’t find anything better to do. You will spend time with me if you have managed to successfully straighten your stereo wires in time so you are truly bored so why not.

I have Noah. I have the girls. Those are the people I can count on. That’s the list. And I shouldn’t expect too much from my kids. I can’t talk to them about being upset. That’s inappropriate. They don’t need to know why I am crying today. “Because my “friends” are assholes who don’t actually care about me and it hurts my feelings.” I can’t say that to her. So instead I think I’ll just not leave the house this week. Bad things tend to go in threes. I just won’t make more plans. I don’t really want to be ditched again. I am so god damn tired of this being ditched shit. Echoes of my childhood go through my head.

Stupid girl. Why would anyone want to be your friend. Go away. No one likes you anyway. Pissy Krissy always whining about how people aren’t nice to you. Who would want to be nice to you anyway.

I was angry. I was angry because people hit me and raped me and called me names. So I don’t deserve friends because I am too angry and difficult. It doesn’t end at adulthood.

I have spent some time in the last few days on the friend with a close friend’s wife. I don’t know her that well but she is suicidal and I have time during the day to be on the phone and a fairly deep understanding of what it means to want to kill yourself. I have been trying to help her get through the worst of the impulses. Today will end. The intensity of this desire will fade. Let’s just trust the process. You feel this way sometimes. These feelings will end. The only constant part of life is change.

It feels kind of odd to be trying so hard to convince someone else of her worth when I don’t believe much about my own worth. I want her to have what I can’t have. I can’t feel good about myself. What the fuck is there to feel good about? I feel so very unimportant and stupid and stagnant and worthless.

I had kids because I needed to have someone who actually needed me in order to give myself a pass on suicide. I’m fucking needed. I don’t know what to tell a childless person. I don’t know what to tell someone who wanted kids and couldn’t have them. I thank the G-d I barely believe in for my children every day because I’m not sure I would be here without them. How can someone go find the same kind of meaning in another way? People do it. Not everyone has to breed in order to be important. But I wasn’t clever enough to find a way to feel like I mattered.

I survived because I used a long list of bad coping methods that got me through that day. I have spent most of my life worried about getting through today. I have plans, sure. The long-term plans help me find a way to structure my day.

In between conversations with her I am trying to figure out how I am going to explain this in the group. How am I going to talk about all the Craigslist Casual Encounter people I found just because I needed to not be alone. If I was alone I felt like I wouldn’t make it through that night. So I found people however I could. Most of society tells me I should be ashamed of myself. I am a disgusting whore for having sex with so many people. I have had a lot of sex with people I have never seen again. I don’t need to be in love with someone to have sex. I just need to feel desperate.

I will admit it is a bit awkward to me how many people Noah has worked with over the years who are part of my body count. I have gotten to know the men in this valley. The Christmas party last year was festive. Body Count Person’s wife was introduced to me and told euphemistically that I was uhhh someone he uhhh knew. She put it together and made some comment about his wild days. It wasn’t entirely approving so I did my best to become invisible. Good women don’t generally want to have their noses rubbed in the behavior of the filthy whores.

Today I feel convinced that the only use I have is child minder. I’m glad I have that. It’s something. I won’t always feel this way. But I think I’m going to stay home for a week or two. I don’t need to open myself up to more rejection right now. If you can’t handle dealing with what you might get, don’t ask for anything. If you can’t handle being told no or having people just not show up out of the blue don’t make plans. I don’t need anything else making me cry right now. It’s kind of embarrassing. It’s awkward to explain to the kids.

I should rest. I’m sick and I have to run twenty four miles this week. Maybe I can tell myself that my lack of social life is me preparing properly for the marathon. I keep doing things with friends that make training harder.

Like staying out very late with that friend who no-showed on me. That fucked up my running for the weekend quite a bit. I’m three miles down with some nasty blisters because I accommodated her schedule. Oh well! Apparently I am giving people too much of myself because I am doing it with the belief that I will get something back. When the something back fails I feel this enormous cavern of need. Because I was doing a trade not a gift. I don’t have enough spare to gift right now. So I should stay home and stop dealing with people for a while. I don’t have enough going spare to give without expectations so I shouldn’t give at all.

It hurts. I feel humiliated that at this point in time I should stay home and focus on the kids because otherwise the kids have to deal with me crying for hours during the day. They have to deal with me being impatient and inflexible. They have to deal with me not wanting them to help. They have to deal with me being upset.

Those people who are upsetting me don’t have to deal with my upset. They get to go back to their lives and not give a shit. My kids are the losers. That strikes me as unfair. I feel guilty because I want to do the Slow Fade out of most peoples lives because I just can’t handle the losing-trade of our friendship anymore. I don’t have anything left to give them. I’m out. That bucket is fucking empty and is currently being used to beat me on the head as folks look for more water. There is no more god damn water.

I keep thinking about a character sketch about a woman who isn’t much like me but whom I can understand. I have spent most of my life worried about inconveniencing or hurting other people. What would it be like to truly not care?

I have three people in this world I need to worry about. No one else is interested in a truly reciprocal relationship about needs. That’s ok. But I shouldn’t act like anyone else is a priority. They aren’t. I need to not be supportive and not feel guilty. You betcha. I’m not going to support you any more. You don’t fucking support me and I don’t have shit to give any more.

I think this is what self-care is?

There are a couple of people who come to my house to see me. I need to stop trying to expand the circle. It’s not worth it. I have exactly two people who make an effort to see me every month. That’s a lot better than zero, right? They don’t bullshit me or call me family. They don’t ask much of me. They just come hang out and watch my life for a few hours. They don’t add work or effort. It’s not an intense kind of support. But it’s nice. It feels settled and appropriate. They aren’t trying to be my BFF. They are trying to be part of a community. It is a relationship with more distance because they only give me what they have going spare and it’s not a lot. It’s ok that I don’t give them much.

I feel sad and scared and alone. I feel unimportant and invisible.

The thing is, a lot of people have affectionate feelings toward me. They just don’t have any way of meeting my needs. It’s not their fault. It’s not my fault. But it is. It’s real. I have no choice but to figure out how to get by without those supposed needs being met or I need to meet them myself. What is a true need?

I need to eat. I seriously need to knock it off with the sugar. I need sleep. I need to start going to bed at a consistent time again. I need to be kind to my family because they are kind to me. That means I need to limit stress.

I think today will move very slowly.

Today is fired.

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I have been vibrating with anger all day and that isn’t fair to my kids. Part of my anger level is I don’t feel like it is ok for me to talk about the things that are making me angry. It cycles from there. I feel like I owe people respect and privacy. I’m not sure why I feel like I owe people this. I guess that once people get to a certain level of inner-circle-of-friends I feel like they get dispensation from the normal rules I have with other people? I don’t hash out much of my friendships in writing. Not until long after things happen at least.

I’m allowed to talk about me and my experience of things but I don’t get to out people. That is what my “upbringing” in the scene taught me. It’s a harder line to walk than it appears on first glance. How can you talk about things and still obfuscate?

I’ve had two friends no-show in the last week. The second one just finally popped up at the end of the day to explain what happen. I’m frustrated but it’s a situation I understand given that I have done similar sorts of things myself. I’m not happy with her because it is the second god damn no-show in a week so now it feels like a big statement about my general self-worth.

I still haven’t heard from the first no show. It’s been six days. I sent her an email at forty minutes past the meeting time saying that I was going to head out and go to a La Leche League meeting so she probably shouldn’t come by at that point. I haven’t heard from her. I’m sure she’s busy.

I had to explain to my kids what was happening. She told them she was coming. Shanna was looking forward to it. I had to fucking explain to my kid why someone was god damn letting her down. Because she forgot. That happens. Because we aren’t fucking important enough to remember, I guess. I didn’t say any of that. What I said was, “Well, people make mistakes. I guess she didn’t write it down and it slipped her mind.”

I’m seething. And I’m ignored. It’s hard being reminded how little I matter. I hate being lied to. “I’ll be there.” Yeah. Right.

I feel guilty for not being more forgiving. I fuck up too. I expect people to tolerate so much, don’t I owe people an eternity of putting up with in exchange? That’s what this feels like. I’m being tested. Do I love her enough? Do I want a relationship enough? She wants to see what I will put up with before I prove her self-fulfilling prophesy that everyone leaves her. At least that is the story in my head right now. I don’t know another story to put in its place. I could reach out and try harder. If this was the first time I had ever had similar experiences I might. But this isn’t the first or second or third or twentieth. After a while it seems kind of stupid, don’t you think? Obviously I’m not wanted here.

Sometimes life is like that.

Chemical states and relationship transitions

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Something that probably isn’t obvious is: the frequency I write is largely dictated by how much shame I feel about what is swirling around in my head. I haven’t been writing as much. I feel too much shame. I feel ashamed of who I am and how I experience the world. I shouldn’t talk about how I am experiencing things because that is drama. Which means I am running in little hamster circles in my head. It’s almost fun only it isn’t.

I think I am depressed. If I look at my physical activity lately and my attitude I have (for me) almost stopped moving. For normal people this means I am still fairly productive. I do this by sitting down in the morning and drawing up a schedule for the whole day and marking by the half hour what I should be doing. I put in a lot of reading on days when I have to do this. I can follow a schedule and “do what I am supposed to do” if I am just following a set of instructions. I no longer have to think during the day. I check the posted schedule at least five times an hour because I can’t remember what I should be doing.
I feel very sad and disconnected. On one hand I am seeing friends and trying to deepen relationships. On the other hand I spend all of my time with people experiencing a lot of physical distress because I believe in the core of my being that people actually think I am a piece of shit and they are just tolerating me because that is what you do in life. It’s what I do with the pieces of shit in my life. I don’t tell them I think that about them. But I think it. So I firmly believe I am not the only one in the world.
I’m trying. I’m trying to ignore the irrationality in my head but it comes at a fairly high cost. My stomach hurts right now. It has been hurting for quite a while. My throat hurts. My arms even hurt from clenching. My jaw hurts. I can taste the bitter metal of fear and adrenaline a lot of the time. I can’t help but feel like living with this much stress will kill me whether I commit suicide or not. My body is simply working too hard. And I won’t give myself much of a break on the other activities in my life.
It is my job to show my kids how to be productive, sensible, functional adults. That means I can’t really model getting depressed and sitting around with my books and movies for months. Even though I know I used to do exactly that for long stretches. I’d go to roost and avoid people. I can’t any more. My kids can’t deal with that kind of isolation. They actually need people. 
I suspect that part of my issue is around money. I use money to fill in the cracks on what I have to do versus what I want to do–I expect that is standard. Right now and for a while I can’t do that. I have to stay home and not spend money. That’s hard because it means I am making today and yesterday and tomorrow a lot harder than they “have” to be so that some day off in the distant future we can do as ok as we are right now while we have a dip in income. Self discipline is hard. It wears through my willpower. I get physically tired. And knowing that I can’t do much of anything with money to make my life better triggers a lot of feeling hopeless about situations in my life. Either I can figure out how to do everything by magic with no money or I can deal with them just not happening. Things won’t get fixed. It makes me feel bad.
I don’t like feeling thwarted. It makes me want to stop trying. But I can’t. It’s not fair for me to stop trying. It’s not fair for me to stop hoping. I provide the structure of everything for my kids. They need to understand that frugality is not a death sentence. They shouldn’t view it with abject horror as making their lives terrible. You need to live within your means. It’s not a harsh sentence. It’s life.
My tomato harvest will once again be epic. I anticipate begging access to a pressure canner this year. I have frozen enough fruit to get us through the winter. I feel good about that. We will need more meat before the end of the year. Ok, I just set up a beef pickup in September. I believe the internet is Magic. This means I can save up the $600 for the meat over more than one month. Woo. I am starting to build my stockpile again. I cleaned out all the food in the house for Sarah so we could build a stockpile of foods we both like to cook with together. That didn’t really happen and I haven’t had a full larder in a year. I have a fair bit of stuff in the freezer I will probably never use because it’s not stuff I like and I have otherwise been just trying to make up the deficit in the food budget for a long time. We’ve been buying week to week until last month. I would like to spend the summer/fall stocking up so that over the winter I can lower the food budget and eat out of stores. We’ll see. Temporarily I raised the food budget by taking it out of other places. Money is not infinite.
I think it is kind of weird that I feel bad for feeling frustrated about money. I have access to far more money than anyone in my family. By far. My mother broke $30k/year for the first time the year she turned fifty. My sister I think got up above $60k/year. Noah makes more than twice that by himself. 
When people tell me that they don’t see any relevance for feminism in the current era I think: “Why is everything that women do esteemed so little and why is the stuff men do esteemed so highly?” If you think it is because the men stuff is more important I might kick you in the shins. If the poorly-esteemed work that women do stopped happening then all of a sudden you would have MUCH BIGGER PROBLEMS than if your god damn magical phone stopped working. Or if you didn’t have a computer oh no what would you do?! What your fucking ancestors did for millenium. Stop whining. 
We have an interesting way of deciding what is important and what is worth money here. I’m grateful that I get to be on the receiving end of that money but I feel pretty ashamed of the fact that I would never have had a life this comfortable without Noah. No chance. Comparatively I am worthless. That feels bad to me. If I didn’t have Noah I would probably have to go on welfare for a while. I can’t just go get a teaching job. I would have to go back to school because my credential lapsed. 
I know that all of my status is worthless if I stop having this man stand next to me. I feel thin. I feel unimportant. I feel permeable and insignificant. So of course I’m binge eating and I’ve gained weight.
I am only worthy of low status occupations and activities. It’s certainly all I do with my time. I garden and clean. I play with my kids. Shouldn’t I pay a gardner and a housekeeper and a nanny so I don’t have to sully my hands with those activities? Ugh. Yet more evidence of my class issues; I suppose. I feel strongly pressured to be idle. That should be the point of all this status I inherited from Noah. Only I physically cannot handle idleness. It makes me feel terrible emotionally and physically.
If I am not working to make my home nicer then I sit here and stare dejectedly at all the things I can’t fix right now and I cry. It’s not better.
I feel really bad because I can’t handle dealing with new people right now. I am slowly moving around the people I’ve known for many many years deepening relationships but I’m terrified of new people. I don’t know how to act around them. I feel so physically bad that the experience is really unpleasant. I feel guilty about this. I don’t believe I am done finding the people I will be close to this lifetime. I’m just really scared right now and I can’t do it.
Well I know one thing I’m doing today. I’m getting rid of the spider web right above where I write that is currently home to a spider the size of the tip of my pinky finger up to the joint. That’s rather disturbing. Awesome.

I feel bad because Noah takes my fussing over money as sign that he is not providing well enough. I’m having trouble convincing him that I believe he is a good provider. I think that is kind of funny. He is supporting me with a degree of luxury I have never consistently experienced in my entire life. Yes, it’s adequate. Really. When my petty cash runs in the tens of thousands no one should feel guilty. Holy fucking shit. We have a high burn rate. In order to ensure that we will actually be ok in case of a temporary set-back we need a very large cushion. It’s simple mathematics. Why does it feel so emotionally complicated?
But he grew up with parents who didn’t work at all and dealt with family investments. It’s a whole different world. He grew up with parents who didn’t have jobs and still paid people to clean their house and work on their property. It’s a whole different world.
I think I don’t want to have an outside job partially because I don’t want my kids to believe that cleaning up after themselves is beneath them and should be done by a menial laborer who cannot aspire to better for complex reasons of race, class, shame, and bigotry. I don’t want to get a job so I can have enough money to pay someone to be beneath me. I never get what I want from those relationships and then I hate people. It’s not a good system. You can’t pay someone enough to care about doing their job. People are either interested in their work or they aren’t. I’m interested in the work of maintaining my house. No one else is. I have to live here. I don’t want to live in a piece of shit house that is falling down around my ears. Maintenance is god damn mandatory.
Part of what I am struggling with right now is the fact that I want my kids to have relationships with people. That means they are going to have to deal with the fact that people are not reliable. They can’t be trusted to tell the truth. You have to be very careful how you partition out trust. Look at what people do and not what they say if you want to know the truth of a person.
This is what I tell myself because I try so hard to do the right thing even though I feel my speech is often offensive and wrong. I say inappropriate things. But at least I am physically doing all the right things at the right times of the day. Sometimes it feels like all that I have to prop up my self worth. Of course I value it highly. 
I have been thinking about storyboarding for the book but I haven’t picked up a pen. I’m afraid. I have ideas and I’m afraid I’m not good enough to complete them. I think the best thing about NaNoWriMo is the structured pressure of it. Produce, motherfucker. I am really looking forward to being post-marathon and in a writing phase again. I need a better ergonomic system before November or I am going to damage myself. My arms are tingling as I type. Shit.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the structure and nature of my compulsive sexuality. When do I do it? Why do I do it? What are the lead-up events? It’s a group coping activity. I don’t do it one on one in the same way–even with prey. I do it as a way of finding a position in a group of people. I know how to be the slut. It’s pretty much the only group role I feel comfortable in. As an aging woman it is one I need to get out of before I look more desperate and pathetic than I already do. 
I slept. I swear I did. I still feel tired. I feel exhausted in the marrow of my bones. I’m going out tonight. Sigh. Like, after bed time tonight. I leave at dinner time. Lately I have been finding it very important to financially prioritize supporting the endeavors of long time friends. I’ve paid to attend several shows/events recently just because I wanted to be in the same physical space as specific people. I don’t care much about the activity. I never really have. I want the people. I want to stand in close physical proximity to people who know a lot about me and like me. I ache for it. Being an audience is a fairly comfortable role right now. Little is expected of me but I get to make someone else feel good by being present. Nearly half of the fun money I have had for the whole year has been spent on going out to see two people in particular. I like them. I need them. If you add in this one other friend you get to more than half of the money I have spent other than the book. That’s been my money for the year. I don’t go to Starbuck’s. I don’t treat myself to books or music. I did take Shanna to see Brave. That is our movie for the year. We go to the park and to the kid places we have memberships to. We pack lunch. I severely limit my driving. Yesterday we drove to Oakland then Oakley then Vacaville to see people and I don’t think I can drive much the rest of the month. I’ve used more than half of my monthly gas allotment on one day. Well, ok. It was worth it. I only see them two or three times a year. I only drive up once. It’s worth it. That is how I am setting my priorities.
I like relationships that have a lot of hurdles to existence. If they continue then I feel like someone truly loves me. It is hard for someone to prove they love me. I get into trouble with expectations. I try to keep them low but once in a while I am foolish and I expect more from people than they are going to do. I recover from that with ill grace. I’m never thrilled when someone shows themselves to be not worthy of trust I have given them. It causes me to feel a lot of self-doubt about my general worth. I thought I could trust this person to do what they say and I can’t. It must be because I am not worth telling the truth to. It must be because I am not worthy of even thinking about long enough to follow through on commitments. That must be it. I am so fucking pathetic.
At this point I can’t talk about my anger and frustrations about these situations because I can’t express it in front of my kids. My kids get to have their own reactions. They don’t need to learn my anger. So I am doing a lot of stuffing. That means it creeps out in little insidious ways. I’m snippier and shorter of temper. It feels so unfair to my kids. I’m not mad at them. I’m just out of patience because I wasted it on adults.
I feel like I should hide in my house with my kids and not deal with people because that is the only way I can ensure I am just reacting to my kids and not the other people in the world. Only it only kind of works. Because then I bring the trouble home. The kids need relationships too.
This too shall pass. One of the greatest gifts of getting older is I trust that this phase will end. I won’t always feel this way. It’s a cycle.  I still don’t think I have bipolar disorder. This is why I put myself on a schedule when I feel like this. If I haven’t gotten anything done by nine in the morning I have to write up a schedule or it will be a couch day. I know it. I have occasional couch days when I believe that physically the rest is probably a good idea. I try to keep those to once or twice a month. I don’t want to teach my kids that a great big part of life is just sitting around not being productive in any way. You need rest, sure. But find a way to get your rest in while still doing something. Reading does count as an activity. It’s a great excuse to rest. Watching movies… well, sometimes. When you are sick, sure why not. Otherwise you need to move your body more than that. We don’t stay in one position while we read. 
I love seeing my kids develop my physical mannerisms. I feel affirmed and loved and seen. They read like me. We like to change positions a lot. Sitting still is quite hard. We squirm and wiggle and roll over and over. We stretch at the same time. They get books and do yoga with me. I get to set normal for them. They will grow up believing that what I do is right and good. It makes me cry. I have always been different from everyone around me and I was viewed as bad and a threat to be stomped down. I was supposed to be more like them. My kids think I am great. They don’t know that I have never fit in any of the molds I have been shoved towards. They don’t care. We fit.
I strongly encourage my kids to be different from me. I support them having different opinions. I talk to them (mostly Shanna still) about how I have control over them for a very short period and then they get to make all of their own decisions. I talk about how I don’t want to have control over them because they will have different ideas and opinions than me and they should do what will make them happy. I also talk about how to coexist peacefully. I talk about having respect for people around you. I model what that means. I really love my kids. I get to be good and kind and respectful towards people who absolutely deserve it and have no ability to let me down. My expectations of them are that they are helpless little amoebas at this point who will flail and be random. I’m pretty much right. But they will become adults who understand in the marrow of their bones what it means that Mom does what she says. 
That freaks me the fuck out. That pressure. That is what gets me out of bed every morning. That is why I make schedules and get shit done no matter how I feel physically. I god damn need to have more people in the world who believe that I am trustworthy and good and kind. I say some very harsh things and as a result a fair number of people think I am an asshole. I can’t really say they are wrong. But that is such a small part of me. I feel defined by the negativity in me. With my kids I have a perfect chance to have a different experience. 
I must say it is going well. This is one of the hard phases. I can objectively understand that my emotional cycles and their behavior cycles are being wonky and I’m being patient with all of us. That is what a good mother does. Well, I’m not patient with the screaming. I will put my hand over a screaming mouth because otherwise I get horrible headaches to the point where I can’t really see straight. If I have to drive I cannot allow them to hurt me in that way. I just can’t. Why do I feel so guilty about covering their mouths? I don’t make it hard to breathe. I am not cruel. I don’t do it for an extended period of time. I don’t shake them. I don’t hurt them. I don’t yell at them. I try to calmly say, “That’s an outside voice. Inside you have to be more quiet.” “No really, that hurts me so you cannot scream in my ear.” I have to teach them boundaries, right?
I don’t feel worthy of defending and my kids are pushing boundaries all over the place. It’s a hard combination. I’m trying to live up to my end of the bargain. I have to teach them how to be respectful of other people. It’s my fucking job. One for which I have managed to trade having a very cushy life. I have an easy job. I shouldn’t bitch about it. 
It’s weird to think about how I would handle these emotional cycles if I had a job. I think I never would have found time and space to really write. I think that would be one of the things I had to drop. I would be more volatile. When Noah showed up and asked me to marry him I was trying to work up the courage to ask him to raise a child with me but I thought I had no right to ask him for what I have now. I planned to work and raise one kid by myself. That would have been a very different life. I’m really glad Noah actually wanted me.
It’s really odd to me when I think about how to write about the journey from eighteen to now. My different phases seem extreme. When I was eighteen I was engaged to Stephen and supporting myself by working in the library and the theatre. I planned to make theatre my life. I really wanted to run a spotlight for Cirque du Soleil someday. I knew I wanted kids but I had things to do first. I thought college was a good idea but I was nervous. I really wanted to go to CMU for technical theatre.
Then I left Stephen and found Tom and the bdsm community. I transferred to the English department. I went to college but I did not have the immersive college experience; I was a commuter student on campus two days a week and I took classes straight through from ten in the morning till ten at night. When I finished my BA I had a choice to make. If I wanted to be active in the bdsm community and be an Adult all the time then I should probably go through graduate school and try to work at the college level. Then I don’t have to be as paranoid about being outed. Or I could decide that I wanted children and go for a degree that will give me a schedule more potentially compatible with theirs. Tom was not open to me being a stay at home mom. I went through some graduate school. I decided that kids were more important than Tom. I broke up with him and started the credential program. In order to transition out of that relationship and emotionally distance myself from him I started having sex with a lot of people. It worked.


I dated Noah for the last six months of my relationship with Tom. I think that Noah was probably a lot of the reason I finally had the nerve to end things with Tom. Noah doesn’t permit me to be unaware of why I am doing what I am doing. He’s kind of annoying. I broke up with him for a lot of reasons. I can’t sum that up.
I went through the credential hunting hard for someone to have kids with. I wanted to start soon and I knew it. I was very frank about it when I talked to people I was having sex with. There are some men who ping hard for the idea of having kids and there are some who are repulsed. I needed to know who was potential prey. I was hunting.

Puppy was a mistake. I thought he was like Tom only younger and wanted kids. I was quite wrong. I should have never tried to date someone who thought it was funny that I was an actual Californian and would mock me and my vapidness for living here. And he thought I was fat even though I was at my lowest adult weight. He was very harsh about my body. He was very bitter because of his ex-wife and has a lot of mommy-issues. That relationship didn’t stand a chance.

After that I had a few months where I stopped hunting. Then I met Spot. I knew he wasn’t The One to have kids with. I made up my mind to ask Noah about having kids with me even though I didn’t think he was interested in the kind of relationship I wanted. He wanted the kind of relationship he wanted and I was not going to fucking be the Other Significant Other. Hell Fucking No. I’m not going to make someone my priority as long as I am their option. 
But out of the blue he asked me to marry him. Just like that. Five months later we eloped. I moved into this house more than six years ago. Our sixth wedding anniversary is in September. I have to say that it is going well. I have the wonderful four year old and two year old of my dreams. My two year old is currently yelling “baby! high!” because she wants to be pushed on the swing. I should go before she slams the laptop screen on my fingers.

But I’ll come back to edit and tag and add that it is because my life is so good that I feel so bad about feeling bad. I need to stop feeling like someone who has had my life. It’s really hard.

hunting

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So I was reading this article about how 50 Shades of Grey Gives Bondage a Bad Name. She was quite scandalized by the use of cable ties instead of rope. She adamantly says that real players don’t use cable ties they use thick rope to prevent damage.

That’s for those folk what know the difference between fantasy and reality. I have been restrained with cable ties quite a bit. Want to see pictures? In a variety of different postures. Once I was even hog tied with cable ties face down in the bath tub. Then my partner filled it. Good times!

I love when people loudly say that bdsm has no correlation to abusive childhoods. Except in those rare, freak cases–of course. *wave*

While I was running today the Prince song “Gett Off” came on and I got to wander down memory lane. Mmmm hunting. I remember hunting. That was one of my favorite songs to listen to as I got ready to go out and find sex. I wanted to go find someone who was looking for me and they don’t know it yet.

I can’t hunt with witnesses. I went to the parties of friends-of-friends and then I avoided the one person I knew. You can usually determine early in a party if there is any prey lurking about. Men with high libidos have a way of checking out women. You can tell the ones who have been without sex for a while. They squirm once in a while as they look around. I would hang back and watch them for a few minutes. I should only go after men who are willing to look at many women as potential. The kind of guy who stares wistfully after one woman all night is unlikely to want to fuck someone on the side.

I like big blustery guys. They are cocky and domineering and usually quite insecure. It’s certainly not all I go for. There have been some men with slight builds and everything in between. I don’t hunt for women like this. It’s different.

I like approaching someone who looks like he can be funny and at the center of the crowd but right now he is just sitting on the side. It’s best to approach prey when they are alone. It is less pressure. The stakes are lower to start with and you can raise them much faster.

I find that the best way to get people to have sex with me is to make knowing personal commentary. I point out things that are stark staringly obvious… that they believe no one knows about them. I am quite good at that. I can make people feel seen. Once you start having a connection and a conversation I just move closer. I reach out and almost touch them and visibly stop. Oh wait. I forgot. I don’t know you yet. I don’t know if it is ok to touch you.

Sometimes it isn’t. I like knowing that early.

Usually it is. Most people go through life pretty touch starved. Prey often don’t recognize themselves as such early on. They seem to believe no one would want them that way. I think that part of the reason my hunting technique works so well is because most people do not believe they are attractive and are happy to jump on any opportunity in life to prove otherwise to themselves. I try not to disappoint.

When I want things to move towards sex I start abruptly switching the conversational topic (might about books, computers, politics, religion, whatever) to something slightly inappropriately personal. Did you see that your seam is starting to come loose… here? Then rub my finger up the center of their thighs. I love the gasp and wide eyes. People really do fall into types and I can smell my prey. Not everyone reacts this way to my behavior. Only prey. If someone isn’t prey then they have usually made it clear long before this point and I move on.

Do you know how I have been so successfully slutty? I’ve been turned down hundreds of times. You can’t take it personally. Move on. Someone else will be interested.

In my wilder and friskier youth the next move was sitting on a lap and lowering my voice so my prey has to lean in even closer to hear me. It doesn’t matter what I talk about at this time. I can talk about the food at dinner and it is an obviously irrelevant point to what we are clearly doing. If I talk about something explicitly non-sexual I have the opening to act almost surprised by the growing cock underneath me while I squirm. It’s awesome.

Then comes the abrupt switch to talking about Responsible Adult Things. So, how often do you get STD testing? (I did every three months when I was active.) When was the last time? What were the results? How many partners have you had since then? What kind of protection do you use? Then I find a euphemistic way of alluding to the fact that I get around and I explain where I am right then. For a while I had a number of people in the poly community all getting tested every three months so that I would have unprotected oral sex with them. I felt like a good influence. I got to talk about HPV and HSV in detail. People end sex with me a lot more educated than they start.

I miss the hunt because I miss having to decide what kind of sex I want and then go out and find it.

Kids woke up.

relationships

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Sometimes it seems kind of funny to me how well suited Noah and I are for one another. I think about this mostly in comparison to the other men I have lived with: Uncle Bob, Tom, Puppy, Steve. No other man had an appreciable day-to-day influence at any point. It’s kind of interesting to think about how I have gone about trying out different lives. I tried to be who they wanted.

Uncle Bob wanted a meekness I never displayed. I was supposed to be grateful and I wasn’t. I was never grateful for anything throughout my later childhood and teenage years. Well, that’s not true. I was quite nice about presents and such. But I didn’t act like a beneficiary of charity. I worked hard for Auntie. I did my best to ensure that my presence impacted them negatively as little as possible. I started working at fifteen, as soon as someone would hire me. I paid my room and board. Didn’t I owe them for taking me in when I was a pitiful little girl? Fuck off and die. Oh wait. He did die. And I didn’t get to say goodbye. They didn’t tell me it was time. He died with a wedge between us. I’m sorry, Uncle Bob. I am grateful. I am. You did your best. I’m sorry that your best was so far from what I needed that I could never have the relationship you wanted. I could never look up to you. I could never treat you like my protector. You didn’t protect me. Not even a little bit. Not even at all. I suppose you prevented me from living in a car. You prevented me from going hungry. I am grateful that you helped me when I was otherwise helpless.

I tried to be what Tom wanted. I looked at his picture files and I dressed how he wanted and I wore shoes how he wanted and I mostly kept my mouth shut like he wanted. He was quite into gags. I have a lot of pictures of me tied up with a variety of gags in my mouth. I don’t look at the pictures much. Mostly what I see when I look at them is how sad my eyes seem. I wanted to be what he wanted. I tried hard. The dream of children was far more important to me than making him happy. That was the right choice. Thank goodness it worked out.

Puppy was a mistake. On paper he had similar attributes to Tom and I thought he was close enough that I could make it work. He wasn’t Tom. He wasn’t at all as close to wanted as I thought. I will never know for sure but I think he was lying to me from fairly early on. He told me what I wanted to hear. I’m not sure why. Oh well. He was always very jealous of Noah. Oh dear me. Now iTunes has provided me with the Heart classic “Alone” and it’s kind of funny timing.

Steve wasn’t the right fit for me. He was very submissive and vanilla sexually. He was repulsed by most of the “crazy” things I wanted to talk about during sex. Leaving that relationship was smart. I wish I hadn’t pushed it as far as I did. I thought he was my only way out. He wasn’t. But he was my first step.

Noah makes me feel comfortable. Noah makes me feel right. The way I want to do things is fine and should be mostly catered to. Occasionally he has a different preference and he’s willing to negotiate. I don’t feel like my voice is onerous. I don’t feel annoying. It is such a sharp contrast to how I feel when I am in the room with anyone else that it hurts. Why can’t I believe that anyone else really likes me? Given that most of the people who spend time with me go through great efforts to do so I know it is completely illogical to act like they don’t like me. Yet here I go. Every time.

I fucked up this weekend. We were invited to a brunch. I read that email at least four times. I put it on the calendar for the wrong day. Uhm. That’s embarrassing. These are people that Noah knows and I don’t really know them well. I have enjoyed all of the interactions I have had. The wife in question was quite pleasant and welcomed us into the house and we had a pleasant visit. Except for me wandering off to “find the bathroom” when I couldn’t control my crying because I felt so bad and stupid and wrong because I came on the wrong day and inconvenienced her. She didn’t seem inconvenienced terribly. It seemed like a nice surprise. Yet I couldn’t enjoy it. I felt horrible anxiety and stomach pain. I felt like I was on the verge of puking on the floor for most of the hour or so we sat there and talked.

I get really irrational about food at times like that. I don’t (can’t) eat a lot but I get very fussy about only wanting to eat real food and not snack food. I get bitey and pissy and fierce. All of a sudden what I eat is something where I get an idea in the back of my head and I latch on to it and I am like a starving dog defending my bowl.

Today I felt like I was vibrating with anxiety pretty much all day. Thankfully the neighbor and I seem to be passing the kids back and forth now. They tend to spend two or so hours at one place then trade off all day. Sometimes both girls go over there and play. It’s useful. It means that I can sit very still and stare at one point and calm down without the kids present in between volleys of screaming.

I keep telling myself that I am not working this hard on my tone of voice and attitude all the time because I am worried about her liking me today. I’m worried about how she will talk to me and remember me in twenty years. I can correct her, and I should–I am her mother, but I don’t need to be a bitch. Ever. I don’t know very many happy people. I feel like a liar.

I feel like Noah knows more about me than anyone. He understands a lot of my moods. He helps me figure out what triggers my mood swings because he stares at me so hard he knows when I have subtle shifts. It’s kind of weird to live with. But it makes me feel good. I feel important. I feel special.

I think I still participate on MDC (mothering.com) because hearing other women talk about the shitty things their husbands do makes me feel so much better about my marriage. I am reminded to be grateful. I feel fairly uncomfortable with how grateful I feel sometimes. I feel rather awkward about the fact that the intensity of emotion I feel for Noah is what I associate with the same feeling of thinking about G-d. It’s not an all the time thing. I couldn’t function that way. But when I stop to think about how grateful I am for what he has done for my life–yeah. I cry. I choke. How could anyone want me enough to change my life the way Noah has? How could I possibly be worth how much effort he has put into me? What have I done to deserve this?

I feel guilty that I am being supported. I feel like I must be taking advantage of him. Using him. What I offer in return is so meager, so little. I cannot possibly be earning my keep. But I’m so tired from working as hard as I can. I can never be enough. I can never do enough.

I try to figure out what it is that Noah wants me to be. To do. He’s a cagey fucker and he won’t give me any instructions at this juncture in time. Probably for the best. I don’t think children should have to deal with a power imbalanced relationship. I have to be responsible for me. It’s quite frustrating. I’d kind of like to relax into being chattel right about now. Then at least I wouldn’t have to wonder if I was doing enough. If I wasn’t told to do more I’m fine. It’s a system.

It’s hard to talk to Noah about my perception of isolation and loneliness. He works in an office and is required to talk to people quite a bit during the day. He’s just having an entirely different experience of life. It’s hard to make him understand how I see things. I don’t explain very well and I get frustrated and irrational quite easily. Luckily he’s patient and lets me control the flow of conversation a lot of the time. I can be testy and stop talking for a while and he doesn’t react much. Stoic. That’s really the word for him.

I worry about what I do to Noah. I worry about how I have changed him. Will change him. I feel guilty for my mercurial lashing out. He seems to think it is tolerable.

I’ve been reading a very long winded book series. Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. I haven’t read it since before I had kids. I think the last time was when I was on bed rest when I was pregnant with Shanna. I reread everything.

I have a different perspective on the comfort of a partner now. In a couple of months Noah and I will have been married for six years. That is far longer than I have consecutively lived with anyone else in my life. I think I only lost about a year and a half of time with my mom over the eighteen years of my childhood. But it was splotchy in pieces. It will be a while before Noah is the person I have lived with absolutely the longest. I think I have lived with him for more time than any of my siblings.

I live with people who like me. It fucking freaks me out. It must be because I am playing the right role right now. I had better not fuck this up. I hope they don’t find out I am bad.

When I was pregnant with Shanna a close friend told me that someone like me (meaning with my mental health issues) had no business becoming a parent. I couldn’t do a good job. I feel haunted by that prediction. Is it a prophecy? I’m aware that the baby shit is convenient for people to focus on. It’s this weird, isolated, obsessive part of life. Everything Feels So Important! Until it’s your third kid. Then you need to move on with your fucking life and things are more relaxed. Anyway.

I have felt very actively depressed all day. I am swimming through molasses. This week is action packed for us. I should probably go to bed. I have to get up and run as early as possible. Taylor is coming tomorrow night and I would like Noah to come home from work early-ish. But I procrastinate. Because I’m too busy singing along with The Verve Pipe and those stupid “Freshman”.

D- I think of you. And that stupid boy we dated. Scott. We can’t be held responsible. We fell in love in the first place. It’s kind of funny that the boy turned out to not be worth it at all but I kept you. I’m glad I have you.

Screaming, preschool, feminism, community

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Simmering. That is what the acid in my stomach is doing. No more rest for me tonight. That’s ok. I climbed into bed at eight. I didn’t sleep for over an hour because I was reading, but I did rest my body. I seem to be heading into the “need less sleep” portion of life. It’s about fucking time.

All of the kids I spend time with are in screaming phases. For some of them it comes and goes for some of them it is mostly a constant state of life. I’m struggling. More than once lately I have gotten up and specifically walked five feet away from a kid and clasped my hands firmly behind my back before I had the ability to speak to them about a situation without hitting them. If I stayed in striking distance I would have lost it and hit. I don’t think I am on the verge of giving anyone a terrible beating.

I have always told myself I “wasn’t hit much”. That’s a big part of my story to myself. My sister and my brothers were fond of telling me I wasn’t “really” hit. My mom didn’t leave bruises because she wasn’t strong enough. I wasn’t hit by my father so it didn’t count. Mom hitting didn’t mean anything. I was hit a lot. I was hit fairly constantly as a means of exerting control over me. I am learning it more and more as the years go by with my kids. Truth be told I was hit far less than any other child in my family in the generations before me. The generations after me weren’t hit much due to a change in public social climate and because I god damn hit back. My mom became afraid of hitting kids. The kids were now so disrespectful that they defended themselves.

It is hard to look at every impulse I have all day and think, “It’s bad. What should I actually be doing?” It’s exhausting. It is hard to find any love at all for such a nasty, fierce, mean-spirited person. I don’t want to turn my kids into competent adults! I want to turn them into quiet and polite children! Well, not really. Have you met my kids? Quiet will never be the word. Thank G-d. But that is my impulse. It really is.

Part of what I like about this parenting gig is that it is the most unrelenting training ground I have ever been through. Other people (sane people) take more breaks from their kids than I get. They have jobs or they have families or daycare or something. They get away from the kids. They are not in the house with the children for 21+ hours of most days. And for those ~ three hours we go out… I’m with the kids! How I am with them is how I am. That is how I spend my time. Who and what I am to my children is pretty much all that I am right now.

They see someone who has some pretty hostile facial expressions and someone who needs a fair bit of personal space sometimes but mostly I am patient and kind. Why don’t I believe that is who I am? It’s one of life’s little mysteries.

Lately I am in one of those super clingy phases where I initiate a lot of sex! Five times in three days! We didn’t keep going because Noah was tired. As much as he says, “It’s ok to wake me up for sex” he is a human being with limits and when the kids aren’t sleeping… yeah. Not so much. That’s ok. I need to touch him. I’m feeling like a fraud and invisible and bad and touching him makes me feel better. He loves me and wants me. I’m safe.

I don’t think that most modern wives look at their husbands and feel gratitude the way I do. Without Noah my life would be very different. When I sat down and wrote out a list of what I wanted–I think it was even before I left Tom–Noah had more than 80% of the things on the list.  What he didn’t have then he has since changed. It was like I created Noah out of thin air. I don’t understand why he likes me so much.

Well, until he explains how badly he feels about his interactions with the wide world. I don’t think I understood that nasty isolation like I experienced really doesn’t have to be about abuse. It can just be. Being rich doesn’t make you safe. What makes you safe is not needing anything from people.

Things are kind of awkward with the home schooling group. The other moms are actively trying to become friends. I’m trying to let Shanna make friends. I often sit on the edge of the crowd with a book. I can’t fuck this up. It’s not fair to my kids. This is the largest and most active home schooling community in our area. I can’t fuck this up. That is a terrifying kind of pressure for me. I fuck everything up. I get run out of every god damn community. Or I leave when I stop finding people to have sex with. One or the other. I’m not hunting so I’m waiting for pitch forks. I think I hide behind the men who want to fuck me in most communities. I feel like status is highly transferable and I am allowed to stay and be tolerated as long as I can find someone willing to take responsibility for me. I am not part of communities in my own right. I’m there as ________’s person–even if it is only person-of-the-night. Someone wants to talk to me. I’m allowed to be there.

Noah gives me the freedom to exist. I don’t think I have offended him much. When I hysterically demand that we stop speaking about _________ he listens and that topic is gone from the roster. He adapts to me seamlessly and enthusiastically. I don’t think I have met another man in my life who would have been a good coparent for me. Not like Noah. Noah wants me so bad that every hurtle is just an impetus to run faster as he sees it coming so he has the power to fly over it. Right now Noah is the reason I can leave the house. Noah wants me. I’m allowed to be here.

It’s hard because status is not transferable up. I can’t get status or worthiness or place from my kids in the same way. Shanna and Calli get to be active members of the home school group. I’m not much like the other moms.

For one thing I genuinely do not feel the desire to emulate the preschool experience. I am not preparing my children for “school” thus they do not need “pre-school” as a stage. It seems kind of silly to me. We do a lot of kinesthetic activities that are similar to some things in preschool but not much. And I’m not going to go through a lot of trouble to make silly staged art activities so they can “learn to interact with nature”. I just have a different approach.

This is the way in which I feel insecure about my educational approach. I am not particularly giving my kids what is commonly thought of as “child hood” in my time and place. I’m not interested in shoving them into a large mostly homogenous group of children who are all the same age and mostly from the same place and who all have the same experiences going through. When people talk about school being how children learn about diversity I have to guffaw. I have been to a lot of schools. I have seen diversity in education. I’m pretty sure few of my classmates saw similar diversity. You don’t know what you don’t know. If you have been standing in one place your whole life you might believe you understand diversity. That’s because you’ve never actually seen it! I keep my mouth shut at home schooling gatherings. My philosophies are not universal.

My kids have eighteen years where I am responsible for keeping them safe before they will be abruptly let loose on the world and they will have to make their way. That’s not a long apprenticeship, not really. I don’t feel like I have the time to waste on getting them ready for kindergarten. It seems like a besides-the-point set of activities.

I believe very firmly that extremely young children (under four) should not be encouraged to sit still at tables and write. That is a skill for older children. In this age group they need to be rolling around on the floor. They need to be figuring out how to move their body. They should be so brimming with energy you feel like you will lose your mind if you don’t take them out to run laps. Then take them out and run laps. What they are working on are the building blocks of physical existence. Yes, language acquisition happens. It’s very important. It should be happening incidentally. Take your child out to the mall and walk around. Get used to saying, “no”. Talk about everything you see. Talk about the different kinds of furniture. Talk about wood and metal and plastic. Talk about manufacturing such items. Talk about food. Talk about the fact that food requires a lot of fucking labor to get it to you. Talk to them about their position in the world.

Seriously, they are going to figure out how to draw a fucking square. I don’t need to sit there and pester them to practice. Give me a break.

For all of my choking social anxiety, I get over it and I get things done when I need to. I may feel bad why I am doing the things I need to do–but they get done.

When I feel generous towards my family I recognize that this was probably one of the most helpful lessons I learned as a child. Never expect things to be easy. Everything will be so hard you want to quit over and over. If you quit you will never get what you want. Ok, now how do you want to act?


My sister and my mother both go through very functional periods. Then they crack under the weight of life stress and mental illness. They don’t describe things that way but I do. Given my life I get to. Anyway.

A friend sent me an essay on Unschooling as a feminist act that is sitting heavy in my mind. What kind of world do I live in, anyway? I live in a world that values my ability to produce products or do work that creates money. What I am doing with my life is… almost an irrelevant hobby.

I don’t much care for the modern way of living. I want to have enough food and I want shelter and I do want money (I won’t lie) but I don’t need to always be striving for a bigger house. I don’t need to go buy a new car because mine has dents in it. It’s fine. It’s functional. It gets me from point A to point B. I’m told that people have to care about their appearance because appearances are how people are judged. No wonder I don’t fit in.

I think the lack of community in our country is oddly striking. We don’t view children as a blessing. We view them as an unfortunate pestilence. They should be hidden away and kept out of sight as much as possible. They should sit still in chairs and be entertained with handheld devices. No one wants to deal with the endless questions and talking and running and…

I feel that way still. Who and what I am doesn’t fit very well into the carefully constructed institutionalized view of the way people should act. I am not normal. I do things at unpredictable intervals. I can be silent when necessary.

I know a fair number of very quiet people who can blend into groups and feel comfortable anywhere. They don’t need to feel understood in order to feel accepted. They feel group identity by virtue of standing in the right place and that is good enough. I don’t have that. I need to be god damn wanted or I strongly feel like the right choice of physical action is for me to get away from the large group because large groups are dangerous. Large groups harbor bullies and predators. I get into trouble. I get kicked out. Not of every group but enough that I am not paranoid I am skilled at detecting patterns that really do come up time and time again for me.

The people who feel offended enough by me to send me nasty letters or emails or phone calls are in the minority. Why do I care?

Because unless I want all-out-war I have to avoid the turf of people who feel free to attack me. It’s a tactical decision. Unless I want to fight I should avoid people who start fights. It seems practical.

Ok, the screaming stage is hard. But why am I really freaking out lately? Part of the way that I avoid general arguments is I tend to speak very exclusively about my life and my experiences. I try to avoid larger commentary. It’s a decision. It’s not going to continue working as my kids get older. My experiences are unusual. I’m not sure how unusual. Everyone lies to me so I can’t get a good guesstimate. But I need to unconsciously adapt to their experiences. I need to allow them to grow up and become them and they are very different from me. How do I figure out which things are actual systematic problems and how do I decide that something is just my problem?

The thing about “just my” problems is that I live with them. And the people who live with me have to deal with me. The people who are my friends have to deal with them. Oh wait. Maybe all problems are community problems. Why am I so angry? Because I have these problems. And a lot of them are things that I really need some fucking support for and I don’t have anyone. How do I deal with that? How do I teach my children to deal with these situations? Should I teach my children that they should expect to be alone their entire lives? That no one will give a shit? That no one will show up when they need help?

Shall I teach them to conjure a partner out of thin air so they don’t have to do everything alone? It doesn’t work out very well. It’s highly probable the bastard won’t enjoy dancing. Even though he has all that wonderful, juicy status to share… it’s not enough. I still want to take up space and have status in worlds he is not connected to. And I can’t go fuck anyone else and steal their status. That’s why I hid behind my girl-friends at the last dance event. I wasn’t looking for a guy to fuck so I just didn’t talk to men much. I was there to see the people who liked me. The two people who asked me to come. I don’t need to interact with all of those people who are at best ambivalent about my presence. They want me. I’m allowed to be here.

I feel like part of my feminism is this pathetic need I have for community. It’s not that I need a community of just-women (I’m not a separatist) but I need a community that values who I am and what I do. I don’t get a lot of that from general men. I have men who value me: Taylor is the main one I think of who isn’t a former lover. I don’t have very many men in my life I haven’t had sex with. If they stick around I eventually have sex with them because that is the trade–right? In order to bribe people to put up with me I will put out. It seems a fair exchange.

For the 4th we were invited to a friend’s house. She has a five week old baby who is just out of the hospital after having open heart surgery. They didn’t need to go anywhere. When I was there I had a great conversation with the dad. We talked about religion and spirituality. I don’t talk about my relationship with unseen things very often because I can’t deal with being ridiculed. Tom was fond of saying, “Anyone who believes in God is brain dead.” That was accompanied by a loud chorus of laughter from all the munch guys. But I had a conversation with a man about what we believe. And he wasn’t nasty to me. He didn’t obviously think I was stupid even though he is older and has more experience. It was novel.

It isn’t that I need a community of just-women. It is that I need a community of people who genuinely see what I am doing as good and worth doing. I need people who believe that I have worth. Outside of using sex I don’t know how to find that with men very well. I have mostly found it in the last few years through parents. Other young-parents understand how hard what I am doing is. But there seem to be two general camps. Either they think it is a good and worthy thing to be doing or they think I am stupid and I should pawn it off on someone who is lower status/less able to earn money than me. Shouldn’t I be above such menial labor?

What are we teaching children? That they should only be influenced by people who are too poor or too little educated to do something better than hang out with kids? Really? If you have more privilege/education/whatever you should go out to the real world. That world that doesn’t have any children in it. Because children aren’t real and they don’t matter. You cannot look at America and say that I am wrong.

We want children to be entertained and Educated. By someone else. But we don’t understand how to educate. You educate by allowing someone to do things over and over at their own speed. People do things in different orders. It is hard to predict what a child needs. Mostly safety, security, love, affection, and room to run. Time out in the woods.

Seriously? Every time in the woods has to involve sitting down and writing activities? For kids under five? Really? Yeah I don’t fit in at the homeschool group.

We will write. When my children are teenagers they will be able to write long, complicated pieces of writing. I kind of know how to ensure that happens. Right now I take dictation for letters to relatives. That’s the extent of me encouraging writing. I want them to think of the physical act of moving a pen/pencil over a paper as magic. It allows things they say to be “heard” by people far away. Typing is many steps more magical and we aren’t getting there yet.

I want my children to think about the world as a place they can have influence on. What kind of influence do they want to have? I don’t care if you know what a rhombus is while you are four. And no I don’t need you to prove over and over that you know your colors. You fucking know your colors and we don’t have to do yet another color scavenger hunt.

So I sit on the edge with a book and the kids play. I really don’t have the extra physical energy to create a bunch of preschool-style activities. That shit is work. I would have to alter my priorities. Most people say that they give up cleaning. I uhhh don’t want to. I don’t think that it is worth that much of my time and energy to manufacture “entertainment” for my kids. In the overall scheme of my life I will be better served by teaching my kids that I god damn expect the house to stay clean. And I spend time every day helping them learn how to clean house.

Right now I am worried about teaching my children mindfulness and connection. I’m not worried about counting. We count, sure. But I say, “Can you pick up three dolls for me?” I don’t go get out a fucking counting activity with manipulatives like beans. Then I would just end up cleaning up the fucking beans as well. Fuck no.


I’m feeling some internal conflict about being a fascist because I took most of the toys away. I’ve noticed that their play hasn’t slowed down at all. Shanna has brought me more bags of things to put up “Because I’m sick of having to pick them up and Calli keeps dumping them on the floor.” I told her that was an excellent approach. So I feel a little guilty but not much. My irritating focus on cleaning is something my kids can learn to live with if I figure out how to make it manageable for them. Part of that is being fair in my expectations.

If it is possible that their mess takes a sustained forty-five minutes of picking up to sort out then it is above their skill set. They can’t pull that apart. It’s too hard. In giving them enough belongings that they are overwhelmed to the point of tears I am not serving them well. Ok! Pull back! Its been a week. Going well. At least I’m not feeling pissed off about picking up those toys. The screaming is of the “I told her not to follow me and she’s following me” variety. Everyone wants privacy but no one can leave anyone else alone. All three of the girls are trading off these roles. I want to beat my head through a window. But they have to work it out. They will. It’s not easy to figure everything out. They have to figure this shit out on their own. I should probably start putting ear plugs in the morning as a matter of course instead of waiting for the headache to start. See, writing is good for me. I figure shit out. Oy.

There are a lot of things in my head I wish I had time to sit down and Really Write About. I don’t have the mental energy. I’m starting to try and think about scheduling. I try to look for predictive patterns in life. If I can find the natural energy cycles and schedule things that way then everything goes better. Things like: don’t start a painting project in December when I’m focused on Christmas. Even if the pantry is pissing me off. There are also financial concerns for a lot of the things I would like to do. Self-control is hard.

Right now summer is just starting. Summer is the time to be outside. I need to deal with growing and preserving food. I need to be playing at the water park. I need to be running. It’s not the time to do serious writing projects. I think that is a switch that has hit post-parenting. Now I want to do more than record the endless flow of my thoughts. I want to produce specific things. I want to make my own status. I want to be doing and not just being. I want to find how I fit into that world out there that I will have to deal with again in fifteen years. Ugh.

This intersects strongly with my feminism. My complication wants me to write about feminism. The thing is, that’s on that list of “uhh… later” topics right now. I am too busy trying to construct what I believe to explain it. If someone believes the feminist battle is over then I want to know why I have to worry so much about staying “relevant” if I don’t want to end up sitting alone in my house after my kids leave because no one will hire me to do anything else once I was stupid enough to stay home with my kids because kid care is obviously only done by people who are too stupid and uneducated to do anything else!

I have no interest in ever working in a setting where I have to behave but at some point I will probably work again out of boredom. What can I do? I can write. Blogging isn’t shit and I know it. I have project ideas. I’m thinking about them pretty hard while I run. There are things I can say. It’s scary to think of really being judged on products. I have to do it. I have to deal with people not liking me. That is part of being a functional adult and I have to do it and I have to show my kids how to do it.

I think part of my current food issues is another way of dealing with the conflict about being good/bad/defective.

I think I need to read more about potatoes. If I’m not supposed to be eating grains, how about potatoes? (I know they are a New World food. They probably aren’t good for me. Maybe I won’t read about them. I don’t want to know.)

Anyway. I woke up really early. I don’t have to go yet. But I think that is all the venting of my spleen I have at the moment. I’m a lot less frustrated. I suppose that’s good. I like purging all of the swirling negativity. If I don’t get it out in some form then it stays and intensifies. It’s hard. I suppose it’s like using a leech. You just have to get some of the bile out.

I was hella smart yesterday. I acquired supplies for making dinner in the crockpot today. Hella smart. That way I don’t have to come home from the county fair and cook. Lately Noah has been making more dinners.

That’s something I haven’t written about lately. I’ve been thinking about Noah a lot. I’m thinking hard about how I am going to shape the book. It means I’m thinking really hard about Noah and his behavior. What am I going to show about Noah?

Noah has shaped my feminism. Noah appreciates me. Noah looks at me and values what he sees in a way I have never experienced before. Noah looks at me how I imagine people look at men.

Then the kids woke up. Oops.

In one of those festive bad moods.

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Right now I feel like I am being batted back and forth between “shoulds”. I should be working on this part of my life or that. I should be more patient. I should be. I should. I should. It’s hard to be ok with just being. It doesn’t really matter what I should be doing it matters what I am doing. Is what I am doing good enough? Why do I feel like there should be more? Why do I persist in feeling unworthy, bad, inadequate?

I don’t know but I’m kind of sick of it.

Kids go through periods of disequilibrium and then they get back to equilibrium. Both kids are off kilter. There is a lot of screaming in Wonderland. Not very much of it comes from me. I feel like my ears will bleed soon. My patience runs thin. My screaming is usually at the fifteenth time of saying, “I said stop kicking me” in a fierce and slightly escalating objectionable volume. Then I get smart and get up and walk away. Parenting is hard.

I spend a lot of time thinking about perspective. And about the plotline of the book to come. And myself as a character. And about sex. I think about sex with lots of different people in lots of different ways and I wonder about the sex that other people have. What is sex like for most people? When I read pornographic stories I have to wonder. What is this biological urge we have?

I’m thinking about how I feel about projecting my version of the truth on events that other people perceive differently. I have to deal with the potential outcome of people being mad at me. Far easier to not speak.

But I can’t. I really can’t. I finished editing my friend’s book.. I need to do some editing on NS, NS, NS so that it can move towards a paper edition. I also need to start doing the storyline for the book. Because I want to combine people and have a few composite characters it means choosing events from my life and figuring out how to tell them and when and how to integrate all of the supporting people. One of the big difficult-to-understand parts of the first book is the lack of explanation of other characters. They just came and went. That was how life felt. Things were different once I became an adult. I have many relationships that date back to my teenage years. I am experiencing development from my friends. It’s actually kind of weird. People are changing. I’m having to adapt to that. It’s probably all healthy and shit. I’m not sure I believe it.

For the last several days I’ve been simmering in my own bile. I’ve been seething. My jaw aches from clenching. Today when I was running I tried to put it into perspective. I thought about my day. I asked myself what parts of it I would take away and why? I don’t want to change what I am doing. So why do I feel so hateful? Because I can imagine someone else feeling very resentful. Because I know that a great many people feel above the work I do and think of people like me as being beneath them. Oh, but I’m different because I spent more time in college.

The arbitrary reasons people decide that other people are better or worse than other people are interesting to me. On one hand I have a number of traits, skills, attributes, qualifications, whatever of “high class” people. I’m still white trash. It doesn’t matter. I can still offend the shit out of you in five minutes flat if I want to. Just try me. I can find your buttons, motherfucker. I want to get in a fight. I want to be hit. I want to hit back. I don’t think I want to lose this time but I’m ok with it as a risk. I want to hurt someone. I want to damage someone. Luckily I married someone who doesn’t like to be hit so I don’t have to worry about being all “safe” or “sane” as I beat the shit out of someone. I have to just sit on it. I have to just be with this anger and hatred and rage over… nothing.

I’m kind of tired of being told these horrible generalizations that totally include me and then being told, “Well you’re different.” Most homeschooling parents are abusing/neglecting their children because they aren’t qualified to educate their kids but I’m different. Enh. Whatever. Maybe. I don’t know. It depends on what you think people need to grow up and be capable of doing. The whole point of education is to teach children how to be adults. Everyone grows up to be something. Why do we have a meritocracy where we only value people who attain “higher education”? Is that the only kind of life worth having? Really?

I hate that I feel like I am failing strangers by not being all that attractive. I make up for it by being friendly and personable when I’m in the mood to get along with people. I hide behind it and my towering hostility when I’m not in the mood. Regardless people comment.

Sometimes I wonder about the freedom of hijab. I wonder what it would be like to not feel like I have to live up to expectations of my appearance. Noah and I talk about the invisibility, the feeling of completely being unwanted in the world he experienced as a teenage boy. As a teenage girl I didn’t know how to keep them off me. Saying no didn’t matter. Now I avoid people and flash my big shiny wedding ring. Taken. Not looking. Not available. Safe. Really. I am. I believe it. I hope.

Reading Mo’s book made me think a lot about M/s. What I have sought from it. What do I want from it? How does it work?

Today I talked about my feelings about G-d and connection and universality and the purpose of figureheads. I don’t usually have the balls to talk about my way of living in the world.

Lately when I start running I listen to Dolly Parton tell me that I Better Get to Livin’. When she gets to the part about falling on your knees to pray every day I think about the fact that I don’t really kneel before anyone’s idea of the Christian G-d. I like to kneel in front of a mirror. The only person who is going to be with me every day is me. If I feel like I can’t walk then I had better start crawling. I’m it. If I’m not ready to roll over and die then I need to get the fuck up and go. I have to. No one is going to rescue me. I don’t think there is some omnipotent force that is going to save me. If I don’t get up every day and work on my attitude and do what I believe is fucking right then there isn’t much point in anything.

Right now the right thing is getting up with a smile. And doing laundry. And dishes. And playing games. It really is. Learning patience and humility is part of learning to be stronger–it really is. I need this. I need to find it in myself to have the perspective to understand that the people in my life now have never hurt me I need to rely on the safety and certain truth of that statement to learn how to stop acting like a wounded animal.

Running is starting to feel good again because it is starting to feel hard in a way that makes me have to decide many times to put my head down and go. Just don’t stop. That’s what you have to do. Put your head down and go. That’s all I have to do in order to log the miles I need on my body. I don’t have any time goals. I don’t have any other commitments. I just have to move my body over a given distance. That is my only obligation now. I’m doing it slowly and proving to myself that I can. I am strong. I am more capable than I ever dreamed.

Even as my psyche tries like hell to find a way to make me feel bad and hurt myself and feel sick. Noah didn’t tell me to eat the fucking muffin. He just said eat the muffin. But I heard it with more harshness. More negativity. More anger. Because I hate myself for being hungry. Because I hate myself for having needs.

Right now what I need is to go to bed. I need to be up and out the door running in eight hours. I need sleep.

Ahh, I love sneering.

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Today as I was walking into Costco some woman stopped right in front of me and looked me up and down. She apparently didn't approve of what she saw because she sneered. It was remarkable. Yes, I was dressed down. Yes, you could see my fat belly. GET OVER IT. Yes, my hair was sticking out in a few thousand directions; I have curly hair. It does that.

I really and truly feel like people believe there is some social expectation of people being at least a certain degree of attractive. Or at least dressed in a certain fashion. I wasn't dressed skimpily. I was wearing gaucho style pants and a Victorian undershirt that buttons just over the breast area so there is a little gap where my belly button shows. I thought I was cute. People suck. 

The funny thing is I don't get those reactions when I'm out with Noah. People just ignore us. We match. When I am out by myself I think I look like a trashy single mom with two very loud kids. I'm always tempted to flip them off with my left ring finger. I may be white trash but I married above my station, asshole. Stop looking at me that way.

My response to such behavior at this point in my life is to stare at them really hard with the teacher face. The "you are being an asshole" face. I like it when they flinch. The one today didn't flinch. She got her back up higher. It was awesome. I then smiled at her. Shanna yelled, "Have a nice day!" She's like that. Then the woman flinched. Then she went blank. Then she smiled in a kind of painful way at Shanna and waved.

Shanna is one of my very favorite people to hang out with. I find her inspiring.

rbus, if you follow  I may stop posting here all together. I'm just sayin'.

Perspective

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I’m thinking quite hard about about the different kinds of bdsm play I have engaged in. It seems somehow important. Who did I play with and how? Was heavier play a sign of greater trust or greater stupidity? I’m not sure.

It feels weird to talk about being a masochist. Mostly it hasn’t been part of my life since having kids so I haven’t thought about it much in years. Except that I’m starting to feel that itch. Part of why I picked Noah as a partner is the way he reacts to that itch. I like the way his reactions make me feel. When I want him to hurt me he gets excited. Visibly excited. Nearly trembling with excitement. I like that I can make him feel that way just by saying yes. Ok, I usually say a lot more than that. I’m kind of a talker.

I don’t think I would be able to come up with an accurate list of “everyone I have played with”. I think of different event spaces as my way of trying to come up with memories and it isn’t a fool-proof system. It’s easy for me to forget. I remember some more than others.

The night before Dore Alley in 2000. I hadn’t “met” anyone from the scene yet. I hadn’t been to a munch yet. An old guy from match.com sent me to the Power Exchange. He gave me an address and told me to go. He didn’t explain what I would find. Technically he sent me two weeks before Dore Alley. I was a towel girl with my sister. I was afraid to go alone. She was freaked out. I came back the next week by myself. A gorgeous trans woman picked me out of the crowd and beat me. It was my first flogging. I don’t really like being flogged. But it was intense. It was my first experience. I’m grateful. I had to top it off by finding one of the PE employees and expressing my interest bluntly. He pulled me into the laundry room and fucked me there. He wasn’t supposed to have sex during his shift. Oh well.

It wasn’t my favorite scene ever, but it was my first. It broke the ice. It taught me that there were indeed people who wanted to hit me. It wasn’t my imagination. If I found one person I could find more. The next day I went to Dore Alley and spent time with two lovely queer men I knew through campaigning for Californians for Same Sex Marriage. They took delighted half naked pictures of me at the street fair. I had just pierced my nipples. They wanted to see. Sure, why not?

It isn’t enough for me that I have done these things. That in the privacy of my own mind I can think back on these events. I like talking about them. I don’t like being the only one who knows. When I feel like these stories are only in my head I feel like I should be actively trying to hide them. If people know this about me they won’t respect me any more. They won’t like me.

When I was eighteen I ran to the sex communities as fast as I could. I had sex with just about everyone who was willing to say “yes”. It was awesome. There is power in being a young woman who is willing to say yes. It’s a power I have watched slowly slip through my fingers as the years go by. I appeal to different people now. I don’t know how to approach them. And now it doesn’t matter. I will never go hunting again.

I learned hunting as a skill. I learned how to smell for people who would be interested in me. It’s not just that I break the Embargo left and right it is that the kind of sex I want is not standard issue. And for the love of shiny green apples I wish we could dispel this myth that men want to have a lot of sex and women don’t. It’s horse shit. Some men want a lot of sex. Some women want a lot of sex. And vice versa. Move on. I have ended up with a shockingly high number of partners who were completely uninterested in trying to keep up with my libido. I’m really tired of this myth that men want tons of sex and women turn it down.

When I am thinking about my compulsions fairly clearly I can direct them. I know how to ask for kinds of pain (spankings, canings) that really aren’t going to damage me long term–they don’t carry the inherent risk that cutting has. Cutting myself with a scalpel is far more potentially dangerous. People do slip and cause too much bleeding. Hit the wrong blood line and you are in trouble. I’ve looked into that a bit and I avoid those areas but that isn’t the point.

Somehow using spanking as a means of controlling my paralyzing anxiety seems nearly benign. I asked Noah for a spanking this morning. I don’t feel the strong urge to start the day by smoking pot. My stomach isn’t churning. It relieves a lot of that ache. Forcing myself to go through and experience negative/painful feelings causes a relief from the miasma of crazy that rules my life. I can feel a lot more control over how much I hurt when I decide the causes of pain. When my pain comes from the fact that I’m just plain crazy–it’s been a rough life–I can’t do a lot about that. I feel helpless and scared and trapped. When I am being hurt by a partner as a conscious decision it takes up the same space as my normal crazy and my normal crazy kind of has to back off into a corner and take up less space.

It’s going to be interesting to describe my relationship with Tom. I used him. He didn’t want to understand what I was doing but I had a pretty clear picture of what I was doing. He didn’t want details. I filled my life with externally supplied pain because that allowed me to be much closer to functioning. It couldn’t do all the work. I’m still me.

I would like to move through the world without fear. That sounds trite. I would like to move through the world without feeling heart-pounding-terror that people will hate me. Soon more people will come who hate me. They will hurt me. I am different. I am bad. People like me end up in jail. When will I go there? What will I have done? I don’t know. I feel like I haven’t done anything that bad. That doesn’t always seem to matter.

If I lived in the wrong time and place I would absolutely be locked up for being a sexual deviant. That’s scary. It is weird knowing that I exist at this intersection of privilege and experience. I don’t know what the future will bring. I don’t know what experiences I have yet to come.

I’ll tell you though, I look at Noah and I’m a lot less scared. He is my bulwark. I feel guilty when I think about my history of partnership because I was desperately searching for someone who was not close to their family. I can’t be all that close to someone who has a close relationship with their parents. Steve’s parents hated me and openly attacked me at Christmas dinner. Tom’s parents didn’t like me but weren’t loud or rude about it. Puppy’s parents and siblings openly ridiculed me and laughed.

Noah’s mom hated me when I met her. The first time I met his parents his mom sneered at me that she wanted to have a private conversation with her son and pulled Noah off for a three hour tirade about how awful I was. Noah’s response to this was to stop coming home for holidays. He has only gone back to Texas for his brother’s wedding. He only did that because I pushed him to do it.

I don’t understand why people hate me so much. I know it must be my fault if it happens so often. If the only consistent force in your relationships is you then you must bring the problems, right? Why do so many people feel the urge to berate and belittle me? Why do so many parents feel like they have to tell me how disgusting and bad I am? Steve’s parents told me I was going to ruin his life. That was part of why I ran. I couldn’t live with that. I couldn’t take on the position of whipping girl in a new family. I couldn’t once again be the person whose fault every bad thing was. I just couldn’t.

Noah picked me. Noah didn’t like his family much to start with and he was quite ok with the idea that his path would diverge from theirs. He says their dislike of me isn’t my fault or my problem and I don’t have to deal with it. I feel so guilty about being the reason he doesn’t see his family. To be fair he saw them aout as little as he could get away with before we were together. But now that tolerance has dropped to once every five years. His family has met Shanna once. They haven’t met Calli.

I can’t be in the closet. I can’t keep my mouth shut about who and what I am, about the things I have done. I just can’t. I can’t act like I am ashamed. Silence is consent to the larger social order. I don’t agree with it. I break the rules. I do it loudly and consciously.

For years I have known someone who refers to herself as a sexual outlaw. She did a lot of actual sex work: stripping, phone sex, escorting, being a prodom. I don’t do things for money. I do them because I want to. It’s confusing. I don’t do these things because I need to earn money and I don’t mind doing them. I do them because I can’t not do them. I need them. I want them.

I like stripping. I’ve done it in clubs a few times. I always let the people who are on shift have the money. I like having sex with lots of people. I like cybersex and phone sex. I’ve done them with a myriad of people over the years most of whom I can’t really remember.

What does it mean to be a sexual outlaw? I think I have avoided money partially because I don’t want to deal with the potential legal ramifications. It’s one more thin line I don’t have to skate. My income has been small and traceable my entire life. Well, until marrying Noah. Now “my” income isn’t small. It’s still highly traceable.

I have slept with a number of very inexperienced boys/men. I have done the whole, “I’ll teach you how to do this” thing. It’s quite fun to take very well endowed boys condom shopping. When they discover that there is a variety of sizes and brands to try so that maybe condoms won’t hurt anymore… they light up like a roman candle. You just gave them a present beyond measure.

Sex is a skill like any other. I found out a lot about the variation possible. It was fun. How can I talk about it without sounding like I am still hunting for it?

I’ve been thinking about my Top Five. Why they are there. How I feel about them. How I feel about the fact that there are four men walking around in the world I will have a difficult but not impossible time saying no to. They are the ones who have earned privileges over many years. They are the ones who understand the compulsive hypersexual part of me. They are all compulsively hypersexual as well. That is a lot of why I bonded with them so fiercely. Not very many men understand the degree to which sex has shaped my life. Very few men have enough sex to understand it. Very few men run across women who are willing to have the kind and quantity of sex I have had.

The internet is not providing me the data I want. Stupid internet. All I can find is that most extremely promiscuous women max out around twenty lifetime partners. That makes me giggle. I love how websites say: “Then you find out your 23 year old girlfriend has slept with 17 men and you feel kind of repulsed.” Ha. By 23 I hit triple digits. I’m repulsive. Awesome.

Why does this make me repulsive? I don’t understand. It’s a taboo. I rigorously get STD testing. When I was being rampantly slutty I got tested every three months and I used condoms religiously and I even used dental dams a few times. I never got good at them, but during the really risk-taking stage I tried to figure it out.

I feel defensive and sad. No one is actively judging me this minute (I can believe this because it is early in the morning and normal people are sleeping) so I don’t need to feel these feelings. Sometimes life just works that way.

Compulsions

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I’m obsessively staring at my training schedule. I’m scared. This week I run twenty miles for the first time this round. Woof. The peak of training gives me forty miles in a week. I am lovingly and loathingly (yes I know that isn’t a word) noticing that hell week is my birthday week. I turn thirty-one and then immediately have to run forty miles in the five days following. I don’t fuck around.

I’m scared and elated. I’m going to do this. It can be done by a human being therefore it is god damn going to be done by me. I will. I won’t fuck this up. Perseverance is one of my more admirable attributes. Tenacious as a honey badger. I tell myself while running in my “Badass as a Honey Badger” tshirt. I’m the exact opposite of sexy.

I don’t know how to be this person in the world. I don’t know how to be open to people and yet not available. I have committed my life and all that I am elsewhere. How do I have time for other people? You just do. You have to. You have to be part of something bigger. At least I do. I need to have friendships. I’m having trouble keeping my panties on. I have a hard time not sitting on peoples laps. That is how I break the ice. But that’s ice I don’t need to be breaking ever again. Awkward.

There is this reserve developing. Now there are parts of me I will defend with a machete. Off limits. It is scary for me to think about having to say no at some point. I am nervous because I like to stand in places where asking is significantly more friendly than not asking. Most folks go out to hunt. I don’t even know what I’m hunting for.

I want people who want to know my kids. Who want to part of my familial dynamic. Who want to have a real space in my life. Most people fill these roles with family. Most people think of friendships as low stakes. I will always be a low stakes relationship. I will always be who they see when people are “avoiding their family”.

Part of what I have been thinking about while running lately is how it isn’t my fault I don’t have a family. It’s not like I am less deserving than other people. But you roll the dice and you take what you get. There is no deserving in life. I am not physically capable of keeping the silence my family of origin required of me. That just can’t be asked of me. Too late. I’m an evil liar, blah blah, whatever. It doesn’t matter what I deserve. It matters what I can create with my hands and my mind. It matters what effect I have on the world.

When I ask former students what I taught them they say that I taught them to like themselves. That’s a fuck load more than my family did for me. My family taught me that when the men and boys in my family couldn’t find a willing pussy it was my job to lie down and provide.

What can I create? What can I be? What matters? If you can’t be a good example be a horrible warning?

I don’t know. I’m afraid to take pride in anything. I don’t want to develop a weak spot where I can be attacked. I don’t want to feel insecure about someone letting me know that I actually really suck at that thing I think I am good at. I am terrified to build myself up.

I’m well into training for a marathon. I don’t talk about it much in person. I don’t think anyone gives a shit. I think they listen with glazed eyes so I should just shut up and let them tell me what they are doing. That’s all they care about anyway. Why don’t I brag about this? I’m fucking doing it. I’m out running four days a week and stretching and doing strength training. I’m doing it. I’m not going to win speed records and that’s ok! Doing this is a fairly big deal. Why do I minimize this to myself? Why do I act like I’m not doing this good enough? Why do I feel like if I am doing it then it must not be that hard. I’m nothing special. If I can do it then it must not be a big deal. Talking about it is rather fraught, so I don’t.

It’s kind of weird, this being a writer. I have been blogging fairly consistently for nearly nine years. A number of people have read basically all of it. That’s a large body of knowledge about my life. But it was acquired in a room without me in it. There was no shared intimacy. This is very similar to the sexual exhibitionism. I feel like a freak because I can’t talk about a period of my life without talking about how and why my sexuality went through a massive change. And for me that has meant a lot of different partners and different approaches to sex. I understand why my former therapist asked me pointed questions about multiple personalities.

If I make sure people only see me in a certain set of circumstances with a certain environment I can tailor my behavior. I can be appropriate with great effort. If I keep people out at arms length. That’s kind of awkward with this whole out thing. Now I don’t really know what people are thinking about when they look at me. Oh holy fucking shit. For most of my writing life I’ve known the dozen or so people who seriously followed my writing. We had dinner so that I could fill in the bits on the stories I won’t tell in public. I tailor what I share with the world. I feel odd wondering what that actually looks like. How close is it to me?

What is more real, after all? The image that I carefully construct in writing (or rather the image that free form spews out of my brain never to be looked at or thought about again–I couldn’t reread the volume I produce; there isn’t enough time in the day) or how I behave? I’m never really sure. If you are judging me by how I behave then which group of friends will you judge by? I’m very different in different settings.

Compulsive hypersexuality is kind of a funny thing. If I think back I can see parallel lines between when I started smoking pot and when I stopped sleeping around. I guess I traded addictions. I am a very compulsive person. Right now I’m having a hard time with food. I’m having trouble respecting my body’s “full” signal. I’m making myself hurt. And I’m gaining weight… while training for a marathon. I’m eating a lot.

I’m scared because I think I’m getting closer to one of those periods where I feel the need to experience pain. That was how it worked with Tom. That was what our relationship did for me. I stayed with Tom instead of cutting. He was a reliable source of discomfort. He provided the hogties that fueled his masturbatory life and he was willing to play a lot harder to meet my needs. I think I came up with most of our heaviest play. In no way shape or form was I a victim. But I’m very compulsive. And I have a strong disinterest in my continued physical safety. Or had, anyway.

It is weird looking over at Noah. He’s biting his finger nail. He’s the only person I will ever have sex with again. Well, barring early death. If he kicks the bucket I’m not staying celibate for his memory. I’m not that devoted. He wouldn’t either and fair is fair. It’s weird looking at him. I get to sit here and have this intense feeling of power and ownership. He is mine. I don’t have to check his google calendar so I can schedule a date with my husband. I don’t have to know when he is out dating and fill that time carefully in a way I can handle without crying or freaking out. He does go out and do things occasionally, but it is rare. What he is doing with his time is hanging out with his kids and his wife. I feel really special. This really amazing person wants me. He does have kind of a funny hunch back. I guess we truly are perfect for each other. I’m not quite Beauty and he’s not quite the Beast. He’s not all the way to Quasimodo either so he still works for me. Definitely cute enough to be the hero.

While I’m running I’m playing over the years in my head. What am I going to write about? Which relationships are the most important? How can I show the pivotal times and places and people? How am I going to set the different tones of the different parts of my life? How am I going to make it obvious in text that my behavior radically changes based on where I am standing? How do I make an image of me that is real and true?

The first book was what happened to me. A lot of it I couldn’t change. I could have made different decisions, maybe. Whatever. It’s over. What happened when I was an adult is different. I had agency. I made choices. I acted. I wanted. I was compulsive. I learned to manage my compulsions in a variety of ways. What did that trial and error process look like? What bridges did I burn and when and how and why in the process? I’m trying to get my head around the whole story arc and it feels so large. So complex. I feel like a freak as I carefully compare the continuing evolution of my behavior in separate, non-adjacent parts of my life. What did I learn? How did I learn it?

I don’t know. I can’t find an object lesson in my life. I survived. I just did. That was all I did. I can’t make a lesson out of it. Maybe it is closer to a horrible warning. I feel bad about that though. I’m not. I have had a fairly decent adulthood. I want to explain why rape is just such a casual part of my life. I want to really work through all the connections between different parts of myself growing up.

Tom gave me a safe space to grow up. He hurt me when I asked nicely so that I could deal with my urge to self mutilate. After Tom I went on to drugs and a rather indecent amount of casual sex. And graduate school. And teaching. And dancing. More travel.

I’ve done a lot of things. Not all of it has been sex. Yet when I think of myself I see nothing of potential interest outside of sex. That says a lot about my priorities.

I am trying to figure out how to be proud of myself without sounding like I am bragging. I’m not bragging. I’m telling the truth. Sometimes the truth sounds cool and sometimes it sounds fucking embarrassing. Bah humbug. It’s time to go to sleep.

Hand-me-downs

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I think I know eight pregnant women right now. And a close friend has a one month old. And there are lots of slightly older kids. It’s weird thinking about getting rid of things, now. There are a few ways I can go about maintaining sanity in my house. I can ensure that we have a small enough number of items that cleaning it takes very little time or I can allow items to creep in and spend more and more and more time cleaning. It’s time to purge.

This is more complicated now that the stuff is “Shanna and Calli’s”. I really shouldn’t just raid their stuff all the time getting rid of things. That’s rude. Sorta. Letting them make my life shitty is far more rude let me tell you. I have no fear that the river of stuff will run out. More will come, inevitably. They age out of things anyway. How do I allow them to form sentimental attachments and yet bow to the inevitability of life that stuff comes and must go? I think we are going to go through stuff today and make piles. Shanna loves giving gifts. How can we be generous with our bounty?

This leads to all kinds of maybe-not-polite-but-necessary corollary conversations. One pregnant friend has few friends and no family. Others have many friends and large, wealthy families. We have people in our lives who have very different levels of need. That makes a very large difference in how I behave with people. I offer to treat friends who are barely surviving. I let friends who have more money than me pay for me. I smile and say thank you. I don’t offer to return the favor. For me I am very ok with accepting favors from people who have a lot to give. Sure, no problem. I struggle with allowing friends who have more need than me do things for me. It’s complicated.

I feel like it is important for me to be very clear what my values are and why. I’m teaching how to be a part of society. What part do I play? To have great privilege is to have great responsibility. What does that mean? What does that mean in terms of our life? What does it mean that the people around us have equal and sometimes greater privilege? How do I think responsibility trickles around us?

Part of what I am teaching is responsibility to the household. It is not fair that I have to spend so many hours cleaning up messes I am not making. If she can’t clean up after herself we need to start scaling back so that she can. She needs to learn how to take care of the amount of space she can handle. I need to give her a smaller scale so that she can succeed. Right now I am failing her by giving her a task that is far too large for her. I am not properly scaffolding her learning experience. That’s fine. We have pregnant friends.

Today is going to be one of those structured learning days, as I am starting to think of them. I have a specific lesson I am working towards. We are all responsible for maintaining our stuff. How much stuff do you actually think you can handle? I am going to do a preliminary pull of stuff that will be good to give away. We’ll negotiate from there.

It’s going to be a long day. It will be a good day. As long I remain patient today will be fantastic. Shanna is really happy to work with me towards goals like this, at least for now. She likes making decisions. She likes being generous. It makes her feel good to think about other people being happy to “get” her stuff. I talk about how neat it is that objects can take on a history and a story. “Oh this used to belong to ____ and then it went to _____ and now it is _______’s.” We have things like that. We tell those stories often. I constantly talk about the origins of objects. Shanna thinks her grandparents in Texas are the most generous people in the world because most of her favorite clothes and toys arrive magically from them. She thinks about it a lot. I have feelings about that but I keep my mouth shut about all of them. What I say to the kids is, “Your grandparents love you.” That’s it.

Shanna and I will have fun going through the clothes pile and deciding which pregnant woman needs that item more. She gives good “why’s”. Not all needs are financial or material. With most people I expect the story of items to be lost. When the story of an item is important I have to be careful who I give it to. We have a lot of clothing from Noah’s family. We may be the second or third in hand made clothes. That story matters to me. It’s not particularly rational. This is the story my children are being born into. This is what they have of their family on that side. I want them to know where it goes once it leaves them. I just do. That means I need to be careful where I send it.

I want to send the clothes to people who will take pictures of their children wearing it and give them to me. I want to be able to send them to Noah’s mom and show that things she made are still being used and loved. That is all the family relationship I will ever have. That depresses the fucking shit out of me. I feel like I come from nothing and I will become nothing and there will be no trace of me. I have no connection to anything that will outlast me. I want other people who touch me to understand that the touch carries on. They are still actively doing good in the world by having done this thing years ago. Thank you for doing that. It’s a thing. Maybe it isn’t a rational thing. But this is what I have right now. It’s the best I can do.

So when I think about pressuring my daughter into going through her belongings so we can give them away it’s kind of a loaded thing. This is going to be a long and emotional day. Which things can I give to people and have no expectation of the story carrying on? Which things do I have an attachment to the story moving on? How will I deal with it?

This is why I normally give stuff to a thrift store and come home and cry. Letting go is hard. I do understand attachment. I just can’t function and be a nice person when I have to clean all the f’in time. No. It’s just not necessary. We have to figure this out. Ok. I think I have girded my loins and set my purpose and all that shit. Time to go mommy. Oy.

I’m a big dork.

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If you don't read Soggy in Milk I don't blame you but I wrote about sex tonight. I feel silly because I'm blushing. I haven't written about my sex life like that in a while. There hasn't been much to write about. I used to have very different sex. And I am showing great self restraint by not babbling this on facebook. My former coworkers don't want to know. gak.

{tmi} pick up play

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Fairly explicit sex stuff. Read at your own risk.

Noah would like it if I could get it up tonight. Which means I’m trying to get in the mood. Right now my favorite song is Stuck on f*cken you. It makes me happy. I’ve been thinking about what stories I want to tell in the book. On one hand this is my version of exhibitionism; on the other hand I’m not just doing a gratuitous listing of the sex I’ve had.

I have been thinking about a woman I dated for a while when I first got into the scene. Technically I dated her and her master. I was already seeing Tom but we hadn’t decided to be monogamous yet. I was out having experiences that he didn’t really want to know about. I had an interesting time hearing them talk about doing drugs and playing. That was something forbidden in Tom’s corner of the scene.

I met all of these people through an IRC channel. There was a local room. I spent a lot of time there. When I was bored late at night I would periodically ask people what they were doing. Then I would meet up with them wherever they were. This couple in particular lived in San Francisco. She was a database administrator for , a large internet company with ties to many nations. He worked at the same company in a much less prestigious position. I suspect it was partly because she was technically his superior at work that it was so fucking hot to own her and have the right to degrade her whenever he felt like it. 

I remember visiting them in the office. She was babysitting something and couldn’t leave. I drove up from San Jose. She mostly worked but occasionally walked out for a fondle or a grope. The guy and I had a highly suggestive conversation. Of course we would be going to their place once she finished up for the night. While we were killing time the guy told me to walk over to the large windows at the front of the building. It was after ten at night in the financial distract–at least there weren’t many people around. When I was there he talked me through masturbating in front of the window. He was quite explicit in how he wanted to see it happen. Pull my skirt up. Move my panties to the side; don’t take them off. It’s nice seeing the cloth bunch up in the crease between my thighs. It’s dirtier. He had me fuck myself with my fingers for a while. Then I sucked them clean. I smiled when he asked me if I was a dirty whore. Only on my best days.

When we went back to their place it was interesting. The woman and I pretty much had to wrestle one another to decide who got to be in the middle. Who is more aggressive? It was clear that the boy was going to be giving most of the directions. Who had to be on the bottom of the pecking order?

Wasn’t me.

I hurt her. I hurt her a lot. I spanked her. I used a cane on her thighs. I beat her with her clothes on. He smiled and watched. They both knew I was new and he gave me occasional pointers. She was generous and accommodating with her smart ass comments designed to provoke me into hitting her harder. Eventually I got tired of pushing her around the living room and I grabbed her by the hair. I asked him where their bedroom was and he pointed. I half dragged half pushed her in an awkward position somewhere between being down on all fours and up on her knees down the hallway. I didn’t want her to get there in any kind of comfort or dignity.

We had our safety chat with her on her knees in front of me. STD prevention is important.

I lay back on the bed and pulled my skirt up and my panties off and she decided I was a low enough risk that she was happy to start licking my cunt without a dental dam. I have never managed to figure out dental dams. I feel like this is a failure in my sex life. Anyway.

After a few minutes of squirming I sat bolt upright and said, “Right!” Then I grabbed her by the hair and dragged her on to the bed on her back. I stopped and breathed a big deep breath and smiled slowly and deliberately. I knew this would be different. When I got her pants and panties off I smiled again.

“Nice clit, girl.”

She beamed at me. She glowed. She looked like it was her birthday and Christmas all rolled up in one. She bit her lower lip as she squirmed. I think she liked how I looked at her.

“How do you want me to touch you?”

She showed me.

I was fascinated. The point was not to get the biologically-still-a-penis hard and sit on it. What the hell do I do now? It was different. It was lovely. The point was making her squirm and moan. The point was alternating biting her thighs with gentle strokes on her clit. That made her fists clench and her toes curl and she had the best throaty growl/giggle.

After a while I started getting bored again but I wasn’t sure how to transition. Luckily she was a perceptive girl. “You want a dick, don’t do?”

I conceded that this might in fact be the case. She sighed deeply and reached over her head towards a drawer. I looked because I am nosy as hell. Out came a strap on harness and dildo. Oh my.

She was really good at fucking. This was back in my oh my god it all feels so good I think I’ll orgasm again, thanks stage. I miss that stage. We went through a variety of positions and eventually my head was buried in a pillow as she fucked me from behind. She alternated slamming her cock into me with slapping me on the ass to make me scream.

Her partner got tired of watching. I found this out when he grabbed her by the hair and yanked her off of me. I only knew that was happening because she cried out when it hurt. Then I felt him behind me. I reached back with my hand, felt a condom, and started saying, “Yes” over and over. He fucked really well too.

I like fucking people who expect to get a show. They both wanted big reactions out of me and they were quite happy to taunt me, ridicule me, hurt me, or be sweet and loving if they had to. But not for long before they want back to hurting me and fucking me. I liked them liking me. I felt really hot.

Sometimes with slutty people I think, “Ah! You have low standards” and sometimes I think, “Ah! You are highly sought out” and it’s more fun to fuck the second kind. With the first kind it feels kind of extra dirty in the less fun way. I still do it because I have low standards. See, this is why I don’t want to do that any more. I digress.

There is a particular kind of fame that comes from being able to do the fun-to-watch performative sex well. It’s very limited in scope unless you get into porn and then it defines your life in a different way. I have never been paid as a pornographic model though I have done it for free. It’s all about fuzzy lines. I’ve never been a sex worker.

The after cuddling was almost as fierce as the sex. There is an intense bonding from violent sex. You are orchestrating an experience together that is about skirting the line of how much pain can be doled out. It’s a complicated balance. In my experience I feel a lot of bonding emotion short term and I always maintain a little bit of a connection. Sex is intimate. With them there was a lot of relief all around at finding another person who gets us. Wanting to be hurt the way we all hurt one another isn’t common in the vanilla world and we were all young and fairly new to the scene. We still had the thrill of recognition of tribe.

She is the one who told me that I shouldn’t call myself bisexual. I asked her why not. She asked me if I wanted her to pick a gender and stay there or is she allowed to play somewhere in the middle. I told her that she can do whatever she wants. She told me then there isn’t a binary gender and I’m not “bi”. I asked her what I was and she told me queer.

I remember how she raked her nails down my neck. It hurt. It burned. It felt really good. It made me gasp. I like it when my breath comes short like that–with a little squeak. I like being surprised.

I watched them have sex next. I asked them to tell me why they like each other so much. It was quite sweet hearing what they each like about the other. The beauty they find in one another. I was just a visitor–what bound them together?

I had private reservations about some of the things they said but I decided that it wasn’t my life and I could be just supportive. I focused on the good sex. How can I help you two?

Eventually I passed out on the bed. I think I ended up in the middle. I love being in the middle of multiple bodies after sex. It feels comforting and assuring. Here are these people who like me and will be here to guard my dreams. If you have the intimacy of shared sleep after group sex it is a different experience, in my experience at least.

Your early experiences form who you are.

I run into her every so often. Him too. They aren’t together and haven’t been in a long while. Life has taken them very different places. When I saw her last I told her I didn’t feel like I was queer any more and she laughed at me. She stroked my face and told me that leopards don’t change their spots. Then she kissed me. I lurched towards her to kiss her back. I would have done pretty much whatever else she wanted too.

Now I’ll never kiss her again. I don’t feel very queer any more. It feels like my orientation is “not hunting”.

But when I masturbate sometimes I think of her. I think of touching her. I think of her smile and the way she sighed. I think of the taste of her. I think of how surprising it was to have her suddenly start fucking me. I think of how nice it was when it wasn’t a surprise any more and we had been fucking for weeks and we knew the rhythm and the height and the speed. She was really good at fucking. She taught me how to use a strap on. She bought me my first vibrator and taught me how to make myself come.

Eventually the guy kind of scared me and I stopped coming around. I didn’t like finding out he was on ecstasy while single tailing me after I had been made to bleed repeatedly. I would have made a different choice.

Once you say yes once your only way to say no is to walk. That’s my life experience. It makes it hard to have ongoing relationships. I have to be very careful what I say yes to.

Time to go think about this Noah person.

Working is fun.

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I don’t know what I was thinking. How did I think I would get through over-night without Noah and the kids yesterday? Ha. I came home for bed-time. I called and told Noah to let the kids stay up a bit late and wait for me. When I got home I felt better.

I crawled into the lower bunk between Shanna and Calli. I cuddled both of them. Shanna rapid-fire told me all about her day. I wanted to know. I wanted to know about every second I missed. I was sorry that I missed them. I was sorry she got hurt yesterday and I wasn’t there to kiss it. She survived, of course. Kids get hurt. It’s ok. It sounds like she figured out most of the “class” parts of ballet. No more telling the teacher no one else was present. Ha.

I spent the day working in a coffee shop. That’s tiring work. I worked from the minute I arrived until I left. I took one ten minute break. I was in the shop for seven hours. Then I left to find food because I was starting to feel mean. I can understand why people in the community tell me that they don’t come in because they don’t like the food selection. We don’t have filling food. We have snack food. Hm. And I don’t want to take food from the shop because we need to make money and I’m too stubborn to pay for my food there after working that hard all day. Complicated. Luckily my share of the tip money (which I didn’t expect to get–that was kind) covered dinner. Woo.

At the shop I am working with Noah’s former partner. The one he was dating when he and I originally met. It was quite smooth. She has a very cheerful professional “face”. If she has a problem with me it was totally absent from her training me for the job. I wouldn’t say I felt comfortable but there is no way that I can say that any discomfort I felt was her fault. I was really impressed with watching her as an employee. That woman works like a demon. She takes pride in where she works. (Not this whole Gay Pride weekend stuff.) If something needs to be done she up and does it. She doesn’t wait for anyone else. She certainly doesn’t wait to be told what to do. I’m quite glad the coffee shop has her. I doubt we would have made it this far this year without people who just up and do things like she does.

It was kind of funny. When I got there an employee I don’t know was the only one working. I introduced myself as one of the owners and asked what work needed to be done. She gave me tasks and it worked out. She kind of fished around for how I got involved. I told her I met R many years ago at Shibaricon and then I ran TNG4 with him. D and I knew one another in junior college–we met when I was sixteen. She expressed surprise. Oh! Then you do know these people. Because she has never seen me around it is hard to understand that I existed all that time. Ha.

I like talismans. I like fetishes (in the traditional sense not in the modern “kinky” version). “An inanimate object worshiped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit” Like that. Noah and I do not have a formal all-the-time d/s or m/s relationship. We play with power exchange occasionally but it isn’t a formal all the time part of our life. This means that I have strong feelings about collars. 


In the bdsm world that I grew up in there are signals. Signs that help people understand how to relate to one another. Different collars are used in different ways. The thing is, this varies by person. I have seen patterns emerge but there are always people who break the pattern. Nevertheless I observe trends. I have given away most of the collars I shared with Tom. He wished that I gave them back so he could reuse them. I said hell would freeze over first. You are a rich guy. Fucking replace it if you care so much. No you may not use my god damn collars on your long-line of women. Just no. Anonymous people with little-to-no-connection can have them with pleasure. Enjoy them. I still have some collars we shared. I don’t think I will ever have them around my neck again.


When I am going out to a bdsm event and I do not want to be hit on I have to think about signaling. I have a Big Shiny Wedding Ring quite on purpose but in the poly world it doesn’t matter much. In the bdsm world many people are at least open to playing with many people even if they won’t have sex with them. If you represent yourself as property then you aren’t approached as much. People have to feel really fucking confident that it’s ok before they ask to play. And they don’t do things that are pushing my boundaries because they want to respect my partner. It’s hilarious. People don’t seem to care if they offend me but if I look like property they want to not offend my owner. Fuck all y’all.


So I wore a shiny padlock on my sternum. It’s a very simple, old fashioned sort of collar. Dog choke chains make a statement. It’s been a long time since I have gone out in public making this sort of statement. I notice that I have a different kind of wariness now. I assume I am invisible now. I feel like I have learned better camouflage as prey. I no longer feel hunted a large percentage of the time. The space I take up in the world has changed.


I have spent a lot of my life moving from place to place. I always meet people easily. Looking friendly and approachable was part of how I had friends at all. People see me from across the room and come over to say, “You look like a good person to talk to.” I can generally talk to just about anyone. I am quick with words. Part of this was because I was in the habit of scoping every room I was in for people to have sex with. It makes you look friendly. Seriously. You smile a lot. I don’t do it any more. I can feel my facial expression. I always look harried an frustrated. Ha. Harried and frustrated looks like it might bite your head off, not give you a pleasant chat.


I spend my life in a very small and secluded sphere. I live in my role of “mom” for the vast majority of my time. Even given how much time I spend on that role I give it a disproportionate amount of energy compared to any and every other thing I have done. I am no longer hunting. It’s quite simple, really. I am not looking for lovers but I’m also not looking for friends. I have a full roster right now and I don’t even feel the need to particularly seek out new acquaintances. People will wander into and out of places I am standing. I don’t feel the need to chase them any more. I don’t need to fill up idle hours of my life. I’d give anything to have more idle hours. Oy.


I have no interest in modeling m/s or d/s while my kids are little. I want them to see a partnership. I want them to think that women are bad ass, not obedient. I want my kids to see an actual long term partnership. Staying together is important to me. People get distracted and unhappy with one another and they turn to other relationships to keep things interesting. I want my kids to think that their parents find one another interesting. I want to spend a lot of time with Noah. I like him. Being near him and talking to him makes me feel far better than I have felt at any point in my life. There is no other person on this planet who is as willing to put a mountain of time and energy into me. I am special to him. If he took that energy and gave it to someone else I would know. It would be an active withdrawal. There is a limited amount of time and energy in this life. I have something really special. I want to nurture it, not ignore it.


I have learned a lot about being gentle from being with Noah. He is the only big-tough-guy I have ever dealt with who will actively tell me I am hurting him. He’s both extremely picky and not picky at all–meaning that he chooses when to talk about when he is feeling. He can endure things stoically like the next big-tough-guy. He just doesn’t do that with me. He thinks I shouldn’t hurt him. He doesn’t want to be hurt by me. So he tells me when and how I hurt him so that I can lean to do better. Mostly we don’t hurt each other any more. It’s rare to have a slip. I don’t even lick his nose.


I feel really glad that I get to model the relationship I have with Noah. Some day we will do more with other power structures because we want to. I really like that it will happen after many years of earning careful trust. In the modern USA “slavery” is kind of an ephemeral concept. It’s not real. It’s not binding. It’s a choice to have a conscious power structure with someone else. It’s just a consciously and specifically chosen relationship style. There are a lot of Father Is In Charge mentality left in this country, I’m not sure why people are surprised that people want to formalize this. The language is charged, yes. 


Right now I am using all of the caring-for-other-people energy I have for my children. They will not always need it and some day it will be unhealthy for me to pour this much energy into them all the time. I will still have this energy. I had this before I had kids. Noah spends a lot of time massaging me. He went to massage school as part of his learn-to-pick-up-chicks training. He really did go to school for how to be a better partner for me. I win. He also did hypnotherapy training. I’m totally going to be able to make him sound like a freakishly good fit when I write about him. I’m thinking about dialogue. I think I am hilarious. This will be a very different book to write.


I’m thinking very hard about what slavery meant to me. What did I do with Tom? How did that relationship fill my needs? I was under contract for two years. He ended that part of our relationship in a couples therapy session wherein the counselor told me that our problems were all my fault because I was asking too much of him by saying that he should follow the relationship rules of the contract we both signed. Needless to say, I felt quite good about myself at that point, right? That was when I started hounding him about kids. I was nearing the end of college. I had told him that I had no interest in getting married before I graduated from college. There was the strong implication that I wanted to get married after. He prevaricated for a while and pushed me to consider grad school. 


I decided I had two paths for teaching. If I was going to do the get married and have kids thing I should teach K-12 something. If I am going to “be a grown up” forever and build my life around the bdsm scene I should teach college so that I can be out. I decided to start the masters program first. Either way I didn’t feel qualified to teach much yet. I felt like there was some magical level of smart I would feel at some point and then I would be qualified to teach. I would know enough about a topic that I felt comfortable saying, “Yes! I know this!” It’s ironic that I failed the final test after years of getting good grades and being told I was good at this–writing, that is. Oh well.


I asked Tom if we could open our relationship in December of 2003. I didn’t technically have sex with anyone till January. I think I knew from the first person that I was hunting. I started the masters program first but I started the teaching credential the next term. I moved out of living with Tom in October about six weeks after I broke up with him. I started the credential and broke up with him at the same time. He would never answer the marriage and kids thing. So I disengaged. I threw that energy out into the world. I went hunting. I started dating Noah in February.


It’s going to be really fun to write about Noah. Knowing how this story goes it means that I am having an interesting time figuring out how to approach tone. This is going to be so different to write. How do I represent my time as a slave? What did I tell Tom? What kind of relationship was that?


I want to wear a lock on my sternum while I am working at Wicked Grounds because I want to announce that I am protected. I am wanted. Someone has already found me. When I was part of those communities I was always hunting. Always willing to say yes. It changed how I talked to people. In the past I have had issues with men taking liberties. I want to discourage it. Signaling is complicated.


I have been raped at a public sex party. I’m aware that it happens. A coffee shop isn’t a sex party. But I have had people casually touch my breasts. I have had people grab my ass. These actions aren’t “rape” but I’m kind of a ticking time bomb. One of these times I am going to break something on someones body as a result of them grabbing me. And it will probably escalate from there and be “all my fault”, right? I’m scared. I don’t like that I am scared. It is very hard for me to be in places I think of as hunting territory when I am not hunting. I feel physically sick. I feel scared. I am going to bring any fetish of protection I have.


Slavery is a way of acknowledging that someone is that interested in me. Different people do slavery differently. I’ll write more about that later. It’s time to start getting ready. Today will be a long day. I need to bring a water bottle and specifically drain it every so often. I think I was dehydrated yesterday. I know I was hungry. I ran five miles yesterday morning before working on my feet for seven hours making food and washing dishes. I ate a bowl of oatmeal, a thin slice of quiche… and that wall before dinner. By which time I was starving and had a raging headache. I think I should take better care of my body today. Today is supposed to be a “cross training” day. I hope this counts. I hope it will be fun. I had fun yesterday. It was fucking awesome to get to talk to people with a counter between us so they couldn’t touch me. I have serious issues. Whatever. It worked. I felt safe. I felt like I was doing something and I had a place and a purpose. I was using some of my caring-for-other-people energy on that community. Twelve years is a long time. I’m not gone. I’m on sabbatical. I’m training for my next relationship. It will be very different to use more of that energy on Noah. I feel specifically spooked. 


And I should go take a shower.