The years go by.

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I only have fourteen more years where I have “control” over making decisions for Shanna. What was I doing fourteen years ago? I was sixteen. I was a high school drop out. I worked full time at Ross Dress for Less and my mother took my paychecks. I only had access to $20/week. To buy all of the food I didn’t get from the kitchen at home. My mom said my paycheck didn’t really even cover my room and board so she was being generous. At the beginning of June my mother wasn’t getting any child support for me any more. My father obviously wasn’t paying it while he was waiting for the trial. For some reason me saying, “I’m not interested in being raped” means my father doesn’t have to support me any more. Fair enough. I worked because I wanted to eat. I wanted to have my own room because all of the people I lived with looked at me like I was a dirty and disgusting person because I lied and claimed my father had sex with me. No one believed me. They were angry with me for making up lies. Rent on a room was $500. Auntie had to survive and pay the bills somehow.

So I worked full time. I made $6.00/hour. I had no benefits. I worked 40 hours/week, often with overtime even though I technically wasn’t legally allowed to do so. I reliably made just over $1,000/month. I was given a $20 bill every week. My room was half of my paycheck. My food took the other half. My mom was generous. I did not have a social life that cost money. Bus fare ate into that $20 quickly. I sat at home and read the same books over and over. I watched the same movies. How could I not be a geek fangirl? I watched Hackers hundreds of times.

My daughter is going to have a very different life. I cannot imagine what she will be like in fourteen years. I have no idea. I’m scared to death. I don’t think I could have imagined where I am now. Now when I think about figuring out money I’m working on a different scale. It’s a lot harder and more complicated. I’m learning a lot about planning. I think this is good for me.

Many years ago my brother told me that my insurance settlement gave me a mindset difference. He told me that whereas I could be broke I would never be poor again. I think he is right. There is some crucial jump that most people never make. How do I prepare for an unknowable future? It’s complicated. I don’t feel like I know.

But I know it will involve living on less money. And then less money again. And then less money again. Unfortunately, $60 for a mixer is still… $60. When I shouldn’t be spending any money I shouldn’t be spending $60.

What do we actually need? We need food. I make a lot from scratch. We still get a meal a week mostly from food I grew last year. That’s pretty cool to me. We are eating out less and less. I have downgraded our food in a variety of ways already. I’ve cut at least $200/month on food and I need to cut a bit more than that. I no longer buy raw milk. Noah is lactose intolerant and the difference he experiences is dramatic. Nevertheless at $16/gallon… that’s a luxury we can’t afford right now. We used to buy a quart a week. Now we go through more than a gallon a week because the girls like to drink milk. And I’m cooking with milk more. Things change.

It is interesting to examine where and how I make decisions. If Noah really manages to start going on a business he is going to need someone else to handle money. It’s just not his strong suit.

I feel like I am trying to learn how to actually get shit done with a certain amount of money. What does that mean? How do you handle shifting priorities? We will never run out of things we would like to pay for (the mixer is really a metaphor) and how do we handle that?

It means I have to think about how much labor I can accomplish with my body. If I can buy a season pass at the local water park (we can walk to it) or a mixer… I’m buying the season pass. It is incentive for me to walk 5 miles multiple times a week pulling the wagon. I’m going to be so fucking buff. And if I decide to be brave and start trying to make bread I will have to learn how to do it by hand. Oh god nooooooooo the horrorrrrrrr.

What things are more like needs and what things are more like “enh I’d have slightly fewer excuses for being lazy if I had ________ expensive tool”. Thing is, in my experience, having the tool doesn’t cause the work to magically happen. If I want to make cookies I make cookies. I don’t need a mixer. Not having it causes me to build up strength in my arms. How is not having a mixer a bad thing? Oh. It means I say, “Well making bread would be a lot easier.” I used to have a mixer. I didn’t make bread. I made cookies and cakes. I still do that by hand. Yeah.

If you “save money” by buying a cheaper version of something you don’t need… you haven’t saved any money. You have spent money you didn’t need to spend. I may not have taken any accounting classes or business classes or whatever. I took maths. I can add and subtract. Mint.com is a really fucking awesome website. I can’t lie about spending money. It is all tracked. I even parcel out my cash spending.

Right now I need to try to remember what it is like to live as if I have no money. If I am lucky I will never get back to the point where it is actually true. If I pretend it is true and live like it is true I am more likely to survive longer. I will have a buffer. I come from a long line of hearty peasant stock. I need to remember what it is like to walk and carry things by hand because that is what I have the money to do. Cars are expensive to operate. Right now I’m thinking about trying to live without it for the sake of saving money. I have certainly had times in my life where we simply didn’t have a car.

I’m trying to not feel weird about walking. I have a lot of weird internal dialogue about it. Here walking to the store is a conspicuously low class activity. No wonder my neighbors think we are poor. I’ve had people say I can come over and watch tv at their house. Uhh, no thanks. I don’t have a television because I don’t enjoy watching one.

It’s an entire culture I don’t share. It’s weird. I don’t watch very many movies either. People don’t know what to talk to me about. Random people I meet. I don’t think I’m the only socially awkward person. Uhm, obviously if you slog through all this shit I write you would probably be able to find something to talk to me about. I reallllllllly like all twenty or so of you. Ha.

Sometimes when I write I am kind of mentally addressing Noah and sometimes I have a specific person I think about. Not very many people have told me they read my blog. A number of people have told me adamantly that they don’t. I like talking to them the most. It’s extremely passive aggressive of me. I am going to hell.

And the kids came in. No more babbling today. I had fun though. I don’t know why I enjoy doing this so much. Thank you all twenty-ish of you.

More money.

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When I turned thirty we lost $14,400/year in income. I hadn’t thought hard about how much we depended on that to catch budget shortfalls. It was a cushion because I officially budgeted as if we saved all of it. Ha.

We have to start saving money. We have to if I am going to be able to keep my promise to Noah that he can quit his job and do something important to him. I have to be able to fund that promise. Noah doesn’t touch money very often. For a few years he didn’t have a pin number for his atm card. (That wasn’t actually my fault.) It’s weird having so much control over money I haven’t earned. But I feel like my annuity money was in the same category. I didn’t exactly earn it.

How different would my life have been if I hadn’t been essentially independently wealthy when I turned eighteen? I instantly had access to more money every month than my mother earned to support us both. What kind of sanctimonious bitch am I to judge how she managed to survive when she never earned enough money. No one was willing to pay her very much money.

My mother and I had very different approaches to being poor. I feel frantic if I am in the red in one section of my budget. I want to save for large purchases in advance. I want to pay in cash. If I don’t have the cash to spend then I can’t fucking afford it. My mother liked to impulse buy and worry about finding the money later. She was very status symbol focused. She had a large wardrobe of name brand clothing that she bought for a few dollars each because she worked in the Ross mark down department. I worked in the stock room. I saw things when they came in. She hid things under fixtures for months until it went into deep discount then she bought it on the employee 40% weekend. She had nice clothes.

I still wear a no brand random $5.00 dress I bought when I was fourteen. It hasn’t come apart at the seams. It is still fairly figure flattering, why not? I don’t go shopping until I’m about to be stuck running around in public naked. Or there is an important party coming up. I have a really nice costume collection. Most of that comes from the Tom-era.

I digress. Right now I am terrified Calli is going to spill a water bottle on my laptop. Corrective action taken. I can’t regain that train of thought.

So I’m having trouble downsizing our lifestyle in a way that isn’t bullshit. What I’m doing right now is bullshit. I’m depending too much on things being paid off over several months. I’m not saving up money in advance. I’m not getting ahead in any area. And I’m not saving anything. This isn’t working.

A rather large chunk of his salary goes towards things like property taxes, home owners insurance, life insurance and other such festive big chunks. Things that are fixed expenses. I need to build big buffers. I can’t just expect Noah to make more money to cover shortfalls. I can’t. That’s not reasonable. This is going to feel hard.

Things like: in the Sarah experiment I gave up a kitchen mixer. Whoops. That kind of blows now. I can’t purchase another one. I don’t have anywhere in the budget I can put it. I have a blender. I have a pastry blender. I can bloody well use my hands.

It’s interesting to think about. I am stopping to think about what messages I received when I was a child. If you didn’t have the “right” equipment you just didn’t do things. We were always waiting for our lives to begin. I wasn’t taught to use my hands. I was taught that you use money to buy a machine to do work. If you can’t buy that machine you can’t do the work. I’ve worked really hard at learning how to do hand sewing for minor repairs. It’s a simple skill. Sorta.

I’m thinking a lot about my mom and my class issues. But I have to go make dinner so those thoughts will stay in my head for now.

I think I can; I think I can.

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I get told pretty often that my kids are challenging. People tell me they are tired when they leave here. But my kids are difficult because they are used to a non-stop stream of energy and input from me. I talk all day. I answer questions. I interact. But my kids and I have an understanding. When I tell them I am at the wall and I need to rest they go play. We are learning boundaries slowly. I feel like it is mostly working because they are getting older and have fewer this minute needs. I tell myself it helps a lot that my kids have never known the feeling of having unmet needs. Not for more than a few minutes. We are working on differentiating between wants and needs. 


I’m having to work very hard on being patient and loving with the boy I am babysitting. I’m bloody well doing it because that’s the deal–but it’s so hard. I have to be patient even though his crying is very loud and I have a terrible headache. He’s sad and scared. He doesn’t understand why he was taken away from his parents. He has never been away from them for this long before. This is terrifying for him. And my kids scare the shit out of him. Their volume is jarring.

We are a loud house. I feel embarrassed about that. I consciously try not to speak when I am around people because I believe that my voice is irritatingly loud. I learned how to project when I was a stage manager. Then I was a teacher. I feel that I sound bombastic and didactic pretty much all the time. I feel like I don’t know how to have a conversation. I feel bad about it.

I don’t know very many men who waste time feeling bad that people can hear them clearly. I’m not screaming. I just have a voice that carries well. I did that on purpose. But when I see a little boy flinch when I speak I feel ashamed of myself. I try so hard to make my voice soft and gentle.

Right now I can’t let that feeling of shame be part of me. I have to not think about it at all. If I let that tape run my behavior will change and I won’t be able to notice. I’m not doing a thing wrong. I am a nice person. I am gentle with these kids. They do know they are loved.

He’s just also scared and confused and he can’t really communicate. Everything he is doing is the natural reaction to his biological state. He is not an inconvenience. If I have to wear ear plugs, that’s ok. I’m not being mean. I am dealing with my physical needs in a non-obtrusive way.

I can be patient. I can. I will be nice all god damn day. I will find games to play and we will be excited and happy. Today is Shanna’s birthday party. She is so excited she is bouncing all over. We have cooking to do. How can I get them involved.

This is my life. This is what I want to do. I am god damn lucky to be where I am and doing what I am doing. I have a lot of luxury and a lot of privilege. I don’t need to be a whiny bitch while I’m doing the things that are involved in life. I will be a good example to the kids. I will help them learn things that are hard. And I will smile while I do it.

God damn it.

I’d like to stop talking about my mom, eventually.

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Nights/mornings like these are the reason I tell people not to worry about my “triggers”; you can’t possibly figure them all out. No one can.
Someone I barely know on the internet posted about how her mother died years ago and left a bunch of quilting projects in process. She sent the pieces to her mother in law (because she is a master quilter) and now the woman I know talked about the joy she feels getting these pieces back finished. It’s like more love arriving postmortem.
It has made me cry and cry and cry. Why don’t I get to have a mother who wants to take care of me? Why did that pass me by this lifetime? My mother didn’t want me from conception. She was raped. She gave me the bare amount of care necessary to keep me from dying for a lot of my life.
I like to look at my children when they are sleeping. I like to think about how much I want them. If they disappeared my life would be over. It’s not exactly a healthy response. I think that I love them with all the love I couldn’t give anyone else in my life as a child. I love them as my daughters and my sisters and my friends and my mothers. I don’t have anyone else of my blood and I never will. Well, they could grow up and have children. But that is decades away.
Babysitting makes me think of my mother. He’s adjusting, slowly. It’s hard for him. He is to young to be able to understand what is going on and my girls are being kind of jerks to him. They are young enough to not be able to be sympathetic. They are playing the “Hey if we scream in his face he cries and that is funny” game. It’s not nice. They are also both wildly jealous of this interloper touching theirMama. This sweet little boy was left in my care because his mother trusts me. I don’t want to fuck this up. I cuddle him when he wants it even though it bothers the girls. They can adjust too. It doesn’t make me love them any less because I am rocking an interloper on my lap.
To be honest it makes me think it is highly convenient that my kids are on the smaller side because I can still rock both of them on my lap at once. With the boy I am babysitting it’s a one kid ride. It was weird cuddling him as he fell asleep. With my kids I can’t put an arm on their body as they are falling asleep. Shanna says it hurts. My arm is too heavy. This little boy held on to my hand so that my whole arm stayed on him. He didn’t want to be alone so he held me hostage. It was quite wonderful. I’m not Mama but I’m ok. He is starting to trust me more.
He got a huge goose egg last night. He and Shanna were running around as usual and they slammed into one another before bouncing off of separate walls. Of course I feel like a horrible child abuser. I let them get hurt. I honestly think it is better for them to run and get hurt so I will have this feeling again before too long. Free range parenting is not for the feint hearted. I think they collided because it was right before bed time and they both had slower reflexes than usual. They have to learn how their bodies work. I can’t teach them that by lecturing them and controlling their movement. I have to let them figure it out. That will be painful. For everyone.
I wonder if I will ever stop missing my mother. Somehow I doubt it. I think I will miss her on the day I die. I don’t understand Noah not feeling connected to his mother. I could understand breaking contact because you have to. God I miss my mother. It feels like this ache will never go away. But she hurt me so much. She would hurt my children. I can’t allow that. It doesn’t really matter that I would like to still be on the roulette wheel of abuse with her. It would be something. My mother does love me.
I can’t handle the lying. I can’t handle the stealing. I can’t handle being told that I should be grateful for all that people do for me as I serve them. No one else gets to set the terms of my reality. I can’t sit there while my mother and my sister talk about what good mothers they are. No. You cooperated when your children were being raped. You are by definition bad mothers. My mom at least kind of gets a pass on the fact that she was never in the room. She got to always say she wasn’t responsible. My sister actively taught her children oral sex. She is going to straight to hell on a bullet train. My mother was at least classy enough to only give me verbal pointers. My sister taught her children by modeling and direct instruction. I can’t prosecute and the victims would turn around and lie to a police officer to defend their mother. The only thing I can do is keep my kids away from them.
It hurts and hurts and hurts. I feel like I am not good enough. I wouldn’t be able to protect myself from them. I want them and miss them so much. I want to cuddle up with my mom. I slept with my mother till I was a teenager. I miss her smell. I miss brushing her hair. I miss…
I don’t know what to do with this ache inside of me. I don’t know how to stop crying. I smile during the day, as much as I can. The sun isn’t up yet. The kids are still asleep. I cry.
My stomach hurts. I have this horrible physical sensation of impending horror. Something bad is going to happen. Something terrible. I don’t trust that feeling. That feeling is a liar. Who is going to leave next? Who else is going to stop loving me?
I really want to hurt myself. I want to be in pain right now. I know I deserve it. I know I am bad. I know I am not deserving of good feelings. I don’t really care how I do it: cutting, beating my head on concrete, burning myself. I don’t really want to keep listing the things I have done to hurt myself. It’s fairly humiliating. I know this isn’t normal. I’m not going to. I’m going to cry because it is sad that I feel like I deserve to hurt this much. That’s enough. I don’t need more pain. This is enough.
When I went to the grief ritual a woman invited me to join her support group for people who were adopted or grew up in foster care. I sent her an email a couple of weeks ago. She wrote back asking me to explain my family situation before I could come, didn’t I grow up with a single mother? I can’t tell you again about my fostering situations. I just can’t. You enthusiastically invited me and then ask me to justify myself? I can’t do that. I can’t. I just know that again I’m asking for support I don’t deserve. I need to stop trying to find a support group. I have me. I have what Noah has going spare. That’s it. I can’t try for more. I can’t believe that more exists. Even if it exists for other people it doesn’t exist for me.
So what if I’m sad. Life is hard all over. Suck it up, Buttercup.

Babysitting

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I think that most people want to feel like they are part of something. Families, churches, college alumni—it doesn’t really matter. They just want a group identity. People like being an “us”.
Starting yesterday morning I have been babysitting my friend’s two year old. It’s going quite well, I think. He even slept well. He woke up at four with a dirty diaper. Noah had to change the sheets but he’s used to that. Noah couldn’t get him back to sleep (that’s normal for the kid) so I spelled Noah at five. I pulled the boy up onto my chest and rubbed his back. I talked to him softly about how happy I am that he is visiting us. I told him that he is a wonderful little boy and I’m glad I get to spend time with him. I told him that I loved him and I’m happy to take care of him. He went to sleep with a smile on his face.
I am doing something with my life. I am helping people grow up. We are not a culture that values stay at home parents. We treat it as an unfortunate occasional necessity when people can’t afford to pay day care because they don’t make enough money. I don’t make money. I do things that earn small amounts of money occasionally because that way I can take care of budget shortfalls without having to talk to Noah about it. Noah doesn’t really like talking about money.
We have had to start talking about money more lately. We have fairly large specific goals. Ok, how do we get there? It is feeling pretty humiliating to me that if we are to save money the only option I have is to deny myself things. To be fair, not all of the denial will be to me. I don’t make money. Sometimes being dependent feels humiliating. I’m having a hard time with the fact that I don’t feel like I am helping to build a life with Noah. I feel like I’m sitting at home and waiting for him to bring me a life.
I feel fairly guilty that I want to be with my kids this much. I have no interest in finding a job. Who would take care of my kids? The idea of them being with someone they didn’t know freaks me out. They are still so dependent.
Babysitting shows me a lot of this. He’s not mine. I don’t have an innate understanding of all of his needs in order. I have, in fact, specifically resisted learning even though his mother rattled it off every single time I talked to her for over a year. I have mostly trained her out of that. Learning a baby is hard. It is work. You have to sit there and stare at that person and figure out what the fuck do they need? Their needs are different from mine. They need slightly different foods and liquids than adults. As they age their needs are going to change. I have to figure them out and adapt. That’s my job.
I’m struck by the fact that refusing to call domestic labor  “womens work” means that women who stay home are treated like they aren’t doing any work at all. It doesn’t earn money. Therefore it’s not work.
Right now the sweet little boy is crying. He misses his parents. There literally isn’t anything I can do about it but tell him I understand and I’m sorry he is sad. I cuddle him when he wants it but he doesn’t always want to be touched. I get that. Watching him struggle with this tells me so much about my life. I was closer to Shanna’s age the first time I was sent away. I had more understanding of time. He is genuinely terrified that he will never see his parents again. Barring some hideous childbirth accident (You had better not read my blog while you are in labor) he will see his parents again soon once his mom finishes bringing his younger sibling into the world. He doesn’t get it. I can tell him I like him and I am glad I get to spend time with him all day. He’s still going to be sad. I am not his mom. I am just not as good. I know. I really really understand.
Then the storm passes and he plays again. He’s starting to try to play with the girls. He doesn’t have a lot of exposure to other children. Group play is a learned skill. It’s neat watching how he learns it. It makes me cry when I think there is the real possibility that I will spend more birthdays with this boy than I spent with my mother. In two more years I will have lived with Shanna longer than I lived with my mother consistently. Who I am now is already a bigger chunk of my life than any other stage. I have more consistency and routine and stable people. I struggle so hard with this.
I feel scared because every day is a whole new step in doing something hard that I have never done before. I have never stayed this long. I have never been part of anything like this. It’s all new.
I have this image of myself being a nasty, hateful person. I try very hard to pay attention to what I say. My tone of voice is often harsher than strictly necessary, but my words are gentle. “Oh that was an accident. Let’s practice cleaning up.” “That happens. Everyone makes mistakes.” “I love you. I want to spend time with you. Thank you for being here with me.” I am so overwhelmingly grateful for the ways in which I get to spend the hours of the day.  I have to steal time on the computer. I’m not bored. Well, sometimes I’m bored. But I don’t have time to kill. Sometimes I’m doing rote work that doesn’t engage my mind and I am trying to find my zone on that. It’s an every day challenge.
How do I do this? How do I be this person? I’m really gentle with kids. Sometimes I don’t enjoybeing gentle. I get so frustrated. I don’t want to clean up any more messes. I don’t want to gently say, “That’s ok. Let’s try again” when a kid makes an enormous mess. I want to scream and jump up and down. I want to hit. But I don’t. I take a deep breath. I close my eyes. I think, “If this is a day they remember, what will that memory make them feel?” I say it nicely for the 3,523 time. Everyone else can be impatient and difficult to adjust to. I’m going to help them learn how to do things without having to feel bad. No one is bad here for having an accident. Accidents happen to everyone. Accidents are value neutral.
He’s not crying. He’s pulling apart my broom. Calli is “typing” next to me on the couch. Shanna went to try out the shallow pool in the back yard. I can see her from where I am sitting. There is about 2” of water. Technically a drowning risk but come on people. I can see her. I doubt she is really going to get in. It’s pretty chilly at this time of day. Nope. She is going to poop on the ground instead. Right. I cleaned it up. She’s in her room for a while. I think it’s time to get off the computer. I have laundry to fold and dishes to wash and kids to talk to.
I’m scared that I won’t be good enough. But I just have to be good enough for a little while. I think I can do that even though it’s scary.

My local bdsm community; or Sex is complicated.

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When I’m not writing I have a harder time remembering my resolutions and I don’t feel like I make progress in “processing” because I just say the same thing over and over. I like to pretend that when I write I occasionally mix it up and say different things and reach new-to-me conclusions or connections. This is what I tell myself to justify my continual verbal diarrhea.

My kind of rough plan at this point (in my head so far) is that I will finish editing a friend’s book by the end of June (I’m honest about my limited time available for such work) and then I need to start editing No Secrets again because I would like to put the kickstarter up during the summer. I think it would be nice to have it end on my birthday. After I see if I can get funding for a print edition (so I don’t have to front all the money [that I don’t have]) [incidentally–the ebook has paid for the editor and has mostly paid for the ISBN number. It’s only been out for nearly three months. I’m thrilled.] I will deal with that. Then I can turn my full attention to Part Two. If Noah says it is ok I want to spend October doing pre-writing stuff and then see if NaNoWriMo is sufficiently inspirational again this year. What do you think, Noah?

It’s hard trying to work on multiple projects in my head at once. Things get kind of muddled. Although I have to say that editing my friend’s book right now is ideal in terms of making me think about how I want to phrase things in Part Two (capitalized because for the moment it is the working title and that makes it a proper noun–I’m kind of obsessed with thinking about when capitol letters are appropriate right now).

I’m thinking about the bdsm community. What am I going to choose to write about? How am I going to show what happened? I don’t want this to be another “telling” book. I want this book to do more showing of what happened and that means cherry picking experiences I had and creating dialogue for them. Dialogue scares the shit out of me. I don’t want to remember something differently than someone else and be called a liar. Instead I will call it fiction and improvise freely to make my point. I’M NOT ACTUALLY SAYING YOU SAID IT. SEE IT’S FICTION!!! That’s my motto right now. And yes, I am yelling it in my head.

I came into a very particular community at a very particular time. I traveled a great deal during the four years I was heavily involved in the bdsm scene. I got to find out that people in Australia and England and the East Coast of the US treats things quite differently people do in the bay area. Holy moly the Seattle scene is different. And Portland was different again. There are a bunch more cities I could list off but that seems silly. I got out of my bubble as often as possible. At the time I don’t think I knew I was trying to learn bdsm in a studying kind of way. I wanted to find out what it meant to different people.

I only knew what my local community taught me at first. That was a fairly biased starting point. I went to the Wednesday munch in Palo Alto for four years. I rarely missed a munch in that time period. I went religiously. It is the longest period of my life of having an intensive social experience. I have certainly known people for longer than that–Britt and Jenny are the best examples of that. We have come-and-go relationships and we have rarely spent all that much time together. I saw the Wednesday munch crowd (there was a sizable ‘normal’ crowd) at least weekly and often more than once a week. That’s a lot of contact for me.

When I try to think of how to describe the crowd I am struck by how afraid I am. Most of the folks who still hang out near the munch like me well enough. I don’t want to fuck that up by writing about the experience I had. I don’t want them to know that sometimes they weren’t very nice to me and they didn’t even know they were doing something challenging. I’m pretty sure that folks were trying to be nice to me. It isn’t their fault I am damaged. I came pre-fucked up.

I’m beating around the bush and wasting time. Most of the folks who were part of that social group can be charitably described as being socially awkward. When you get together and hang out with people for years and years just because you all like deviant sex you are going to have an odd group. People different types of deviant sex, by and large. My opinion is that community focus comes about through a sort of peer pressure and exposure. Themes emerge. Seattle is known for blood play and suspension. In Australia they talk about “performing” and many people in their community will not play in private. They think it all must be done on a stage in front of an audience or you are weird for doing it. I thought that was hilarious.

In Palo Alto when I was part of the crowd there was a heavy emphasis on straight up fetish gear (mostly latex though no one scorned leather or pvc) and pushing people to the edge of their pain limits. The crowd really thrived on trying to break people. Not everyone. Just the loudest players who played the most often.

I get the impression that many of the people who were there for the social aspects were not looking to be bad ass players but they certainly were happy to egg the conversation on. I spent a lot of time there knowing that I was mostly attractive because of my age and willingness to do whatever someone wanted me to. I don’t play with safewords. In general that just means I don’t say no regardless of what someone wants to do.

But I’m really harsh and abrasively defensive with everyone I don’t want to play with. I think that got worse not better over the years of spending so much time in La Dolce Vita (the name of the café the munch was in). The group was very dismissive of the intelligence of women. Most of the men in the crowd worked in tech. Almost none of the women were computer people. As a female friend said to me years ago (roughly paraphrased because the passage of time is like that): “Of course they treat you like you are stupid. You don’t even work in the computer field.” If you aren’t a geek you are shit. Check. Got it. I wonder why I have such a fucking chip on my shoulder about the topic.

I had a bunch of men I would talk to. I did have female friends but they tended to pay less focused attention to me. The men appreciated me sitting on their laps and being flirtatious. Most of the men in that crowd had virtually zero traditional sex in their lives. I find that fascinating. There were a fair number of single guys who were single for many years and some married guys who had wives who just… didn’t. I was quite happy to fill their need for feeling interesting  and wanted. I’m not very good at talking to men without acting out in a somewhat sexual manner. All of a sudden I was the best thing ever.  It’s not that I was ever that hot, I’m not, and it’s not that I was ever going to fuck them, I didn’t, but I looked hard at them. I got to know them and had a consistent relationship. It was quite lovely in a variety of ways.

I’m willing to bet they would still enjoy having a friendship with me even if I didn’t sit on their laps and uhm move about. I have always had issues with compulsive sexual acting out. I was really grateful that Tom told me early on he wanted monogamy. I got to stop having to follow through on my teasing. I could tell people in advance that I was in a monogamous relationship so what I was doing had limits. When you are talking to men who aren’t getting any sexual activity and you say you will tease but not go all the way they get to make the decision and avoid anger. It stays friendly and light. They don’t start getting more interested and pushing. Monogamy gave me a lot of freedom. These guys were all good friends with my boyfriend and they had known him first. They weren’t going to push my limits because they didn’t want to step on Tom’s toes.

Once I broke up with Tom and moved around the community a bit more freely I had several sexual assaults in a short period of time. I think my local community is quite misogynistic. It is my experience that men who aggressively want violent sex often have no interest in asking for consent first because they would risk hearing “no”. Fetishists are different. Most fetishists (in my little corner of the world–who knows about your corner of the world) are not particularly aggressive about sex. There is a lot of bdsm play that lives in this weird gray area of sensory experience that feels unrelated to ones genitals. It may be pleasurable to each individual but they shouldn’t be sharing that feeling. It’s about them each having the body experience they want. Being encased from head to foot in latex makes sex basically impossible. Sure you can do some masturbation, but who counts that?

My local community had a bizarre focus on no-sex. Bdsm is not about sex! It’s a “hobby”. It’s members are enthusiasts. I know it wasn’t just Tom. I went to a party every month with this crowd. I think I can count on my fingers how many times anyone had sex at one of those parties. I went to more than fifty of those parties. If I count up all of the times someone was having sex and I was not involved the numbers fit on one hand with room to spare. That’s kind of odd for an event that is ostensibly sex focused.

That was where I spent my early adulthood in the sex community. I found a no-sex ghetto. It was hilarious. It was really weird to me that I managed to find the group that didn’t have sex. It massively shaped my attitude about bdsm. It has been a weird journey to try and combine the two. Noah is the sort who doesn’t play without sex. Sex is the point. That other stuff is kind of interesting for a bit but really we are here for sex. Let’s not kid ourselves.

It is a night and day contrast. Tom and I had sex in fewer than 5% of our scenes. Roughly. I didn’t actually count. We just didn’t have much sex. Sex was different. I think that sex was too emotionally vulnerable. He doesn’t like being vulnerable. With sex you can’t control a lot of it. Bodies are unpredictable. Tom has trouble orgasming. He doesn’t really do it any way other than masturbating by himself. Having a partner there is distracting. I am a competitive person and I learned how to get him off through oral and vaginal sex. I know I can count the number of times I achieved those goals on my fingers. It was too hard, honestly. Over an hour of oral sex makes your jaw hurt something fierce. Tom has an enormous cock. It hurts no matter where he puts it. Sex was really complicated.

So I lived in this strange world where people liked having me around to wear fetish gear in front of them because they liked seeing it and I was appreciated for hinting at sex and not delivering. It was a strange period in my life.

Tom wanted me to learn how to tie him up. He likes the experience. I was under contract so I couldn’t say no. I didn’t want to learn how to top. I was correct in assuming that once I was known for having those skills I would be asked to do them a lot. I have no sexual interest in having someone helpless. Just not my kink. But I have a lot of interest in meeting my friends’ needs and helping them have happier lives. I topped a lot. I’m sure it was a mixed bag experience for people because I’m an inconsistent top. I either broadcast that I’m doing this because I feel like I have to (how sexy is that? not at all) or I ask people how/where they want to be pushed. I like doing very intense scenes both as a top and as a bottom.

When I top I only do a few activities. I’m a very competent suspension top. I certainly can and do floor bondage on occasion but I really prefer suspension where possible. For me it is about the trust involved. Tying someone up on the floor always leaves me thinking, “Oh shit what now?” I often feel uncomfortable touching people. I don’t know what the fuck to do. I’ve never figured it out well. I was taught it wasn’t about sex so I feel uncomfortable going there. Not to mention that I don’t find submissive people sexually attractive so… yeah. I don’t want to go after peoples genitals. I actually did a lot of sex play with Tom when he was tied up. That was the big exception. (I swear to God I have asked for permission to talk about this at least three times and he says it is ok.) He liked doing the forced feminization then getting tied up and “taken” thing. I feel bad about these events in a variety of ways. He wanted to be forced to be like a woman (which I have weird feminist feelings about) and then raped. Lots of men fantasize about what it is like to have this happen.

I have this really uncomfortable set of emotions around these men thinking it might be fun to have my life for a few hours. I know that there are people who have never been raped who do rape play. I have mixed feelings about people thinking that rape is hot. There are things about rape that are hot, I get that. Power imbalance feels sexy. It’s just one way of imagining a power imbalance.

I imagine it would feel different for a woman who has never been raped to dress her boyfriend up in a dress and sodomize him. I have a whole complex swirl of emotions around, “See. I’m supposed to like it when people “rape” me. Obviously I am just interpreting things wrong in other situations in my life. I was supposed to enjoy them. Does that mean I am bad because I didn’t enjoy it when Jeremy sodomized me? Am I broken? Was I just not quite big enough? What? What did I do wrong?”

For me to do rape play as the top I have to play very carefully close to becoming my father. These things just pass right along don’t they?

And he didn’t want to be raped “as a man”. He wanted to be forced to be something weaker. Something that could be raped. I have some complex fucking emotions around that. The biggest part of me tries to believe that it is ok for people to have whatever sexual predilections they have. I just don’t need to do it with them.

I spent years at that munch listening to the loud, overbearing men lecture me about Libertarianism (I still haven’t resigned my party affiliation), cars, guns, and computers. I was welcome to develop an active interest in all of the above with them. If I had a dissenting opinion I could either deal with being shouted down (and called a bitch) or keep my fucking mouth shut. I learned to keep my mouth shut. Tom and I didn’t argue very much. We got along very well. I didn’t say a lot.

I sat on their laps and flirted and was looked at while not talking. That was what I was wanted for. That is what I felt was wanted from me. They haven’t made a lot of effort to continue to know me. When I broke up with Tom I stopped going to the munch and the monthly party. That was his space. Apparently all of those friends were his friends too. I didn’t try real hard to pull anyone out of the crowd with me and they haven’t tried to stay in contact with me. Several of them have given me half-hearted “sure we should do dinner some time” shit. When I ask for a date I get brushed off with, “I’m really busy right now and I will get back to you”. Crickets.

I didn’t really want to be the fetish doll for the rest of my life. I want to be allowed to have dissenting opinions without being told I am a bitch. I asked him flat out, “If I was a guy would you call me an asshole for saying that?”
“No. I wouldn’t call him anything. I would just think he had strong opinions.”
“Then why did you call me a bitch?”
“Because you are one.”

Why do I want monogamy with Noah? Because when I ran into that guy fairly recently I totally offered to have sex with him. I have thought about it for many years. So I told him flat out that I thought about it. For the record I did this before we agreed to monogamy. I have withdrawn all of the offers I was flinging out left and right.

I think it is time for me to move on to a new stage in life where I can recognize that people who only want to spend time with me because I will have sex with them are people I don’t actually need in my life. I have gone literally my entire life using sex as a way of developing relationships. I have a very hard time having contact with people without feeling like I owe them something for putting up with my company and I have so little to offer.

I can see Shanna figuring out how to organize groups of kids to engage in play she directs. It’s fascinating to watch. It gives me a lot of insight into how and when I locked on to sex as a coping strategy. I think that it wouldn’t have worked as well if I had been in one place. You run out of people eventually. Or you end up in cyclical patterns with one abusive partner. I had endless people to try out my opening moves on. It means I didn’t have to do the uncomfortable work of trying something else in order to make friends. I just did the same thing over and over again. When whatever sexual relationship I arranged kind of fizzled out I was dropped like a hot potato. I was usually not acknowledged again while I lived in that place.

I need to stop fucking people because then I feel shamed out of communities. I feel like if I am no longer offering up sexual interaction I don’t have a lot to offer. So I shut my mouth and feel unwanted and I leave.

There is a new family in our homeschooling group. The mom has moved a lot all her life. I’ve been talking to her about displacement and getting to know new people. It’s really interesting. She doesn’t have any abuse in her background. Her family isn’t warm but they aren’t abusive.

I have totally glossed over the beating part of bdsm so far. I grew up in the “hit her harder” school of thought. We were a crowd of very heavy players and we felt distinct pride about that. I showed up to this crowd when I was eighteen. I spent my nineteenth birthday feeling like I didn’t get to say no when everyone at the party wanted to line up to hit me. I never did a group spanking thing again. After that I learned that I was allowed to say no.

But you have to be careful. You can have rules like “I’m monogamous” because of course guys recognize that some guys are possessive of their pussy. But you have to be as available as someone else wants or you are a bitch. Telling guys no makes them hate you. There is a fine line between not looking like a good person to ask (and being roundly ignored as a result) and looking absolutely available. If he has the nerve to ask you really should say yes. You wouldn’t want to be part of the Embargo, now would you?

Sexual longing is so big. It encompasses so much of who a person is. My munch was full of male fetishists (there are not nearly as many women who are into it) who didn’t have sex. Either because they couldn’t because they didn’t have a willing partner or because they didn’t enjoy it that much. Sometimes I feel like a liar when I identify myself as part of the sex community. There wasn’t much fucking going on. But the needs came from similar places. Instead we encased one another in latex or rope. We beat the shit out of one another and called it love. “I know you have a need to feel pain, let me help you with that.”

I have a hard time with going to parties and not playing. I don’t play because I want to, exactly. I play because I feel compelled to. I feel compelled to meet someones needs. Either they want to hurt me or they want to be hurt. I don’t really play with people anymore unless they manage to hit that button. Well, uhm, before that monogamy switch. Ahem.

I don’t know how to channel this with Noah. I’m really struggling. I know that part of it is that I’m having a weird psychological reaction to the fact that I shouldn’t feel shame about what Noah and I do. What we do is given the thumbs up by every legal, moral, and ethical standpoint one can have. We have remarkably vanilla, standard PIV (penis in vagina) sex.

I’m not really a deviant any more. Was I ever one? I struggle with that. I think I wanted what I did when I was younger. But why did I run so hard and so far away from it? Why did I go find a partner who would not be capable of playing out similar roles with me forever? I often feel like I do things wrong for Noah. I’m not very good at the things he prefers. I feel like I am better suited to being in a relationship where I am continually silenced because then my depression is apparently entirely invisible.  Isn’t that better? No? I don’t know.

I haven’t been hit to the point of getting a bruise in a long time. It used to be my main hobby. Well, the bruise wasn’t entirely the point. We all loved comparing our bruises though. It was proof that we could handle it. That we liked intense play. We wanted to bear the intensity that someone else wanted to dish out. That proved how submissive we were. I don’t want that shit any more. I’m tired of having to accept pain in order to prove I like someone. If you fucking like me, don’t hurt me.

But but… it gets me off. Really. I’m having a hard time with how difficult it is to get off if I am not in pain. I’ve had a long life to acclimate to believing that I should experience pain as a normal part of sexual activity and I am supposed to shut up about it and smile. And get off. Because then it is better for the person hurting me. They have proof that what they are doing is justified.

I have a lot of complex feelings about that time in my life. I used to put up personal ads for girls. They would come over and we would have awesome, wild, vanilla sex and then they would go away and never be seen again. That was the only way I could have sex that wasn’t painful at that point in my life. Tom was simply too large to ever be comfortable. It always hurt. I just didn’t talk about it. He didn’t really know. And I am god damn good actress. I should have been in porn. I pretend sex is awesome better than most people.

Tom never ever once pushed past me actually saying “no”. Our relationship existed entirely within the realm of me actively consenting to what happened to me. Most of the time I scripted the play. He told me what porn websites he liked (insex.com was his very favorite) and I spent a lot of my free time looking at the pictures trying to figure out what I could handle doing. I tried to write a story with those pictures in my head. I would then tell him the story and how I wanted to play and he would do it. I picked a lot of really brutal play. I’m always interested in proving that I can take pain. At least these days I have gotten over punching games.

For a long time it felt like I was building towards the goal of being able to take enough pain that I could lie on the floor unable to stand and still say, “Beige”.

I want to be hurt. Deep inside me I want to hurt. I want to feel pain more than I want to breathe. Tom and I had a system that worked for several years. When I was getting antsy I didn’t talk about what I was feeling, I asked for a beating. It kept me distracted. Focusing on my beatings was far more socially acceptable than cutting. This way I got to be cool at the same time instead of a damaged little freak. I don’t think it was good for me to hang out with the “hit her harder” camp. I am very competitive in my head.

I feel the need to point out that I know people who take way more intense beatings than I ever have or want to. That’s ok! I’m done trying to climb that ladder. I don’t want to be the biggest masochist. I think I only need to be picked up by my pectoral muscles before being shaken like a dog once. I thought I was going to lose my mind from pain. I couldn’t get away from it. It was every where. It chased me through every back corner of my mind and screamed pain and pain and pain. Giving birth was not that painful. During labor I always had a corner of my mind that I could hide in for brief breaks. (Unmedicated home birth, for the record. After nine days of labor. I hemorrhaged and almost died. It was festive.)

I think I am comfortable saying that I have had the most intense scenes I ever want to have. I’m done climbing that mountain. Those were my personal peaks. I want to not go anywhere near them again. That was a very dark and scary place for me. I don’t think that all masochists have as little respect for their bodies as I do for mine but I am not that sturdy. I didn’t really enjoy all that much of it. I was way past the point when I was doing it for my own masochism. I like to play with sadists. Actual sadists. The kind who like it best when their partner genuinely isn’t having fun. They are willing to really hurt me. After all the years of cutting I have done it seemed kind of ridiculous for me to explore the lighter side of beatings. I didn’t bother. I like single tail whips. I like having my flesh ripped open. I like canes that leave welts that last for weeks. If I don’t have long-term reminders it is like it never happened. It is like I am not serving my purpose.

Noah and I have a hard doing sm play together. It’s complicated.

I wish I knew what I wanted from sex. I wish I had a better understanding of what parts I am doing because I like them. What I like is that my partner is having fun. But that’s a lie. There is stuff I wish Noah did. I haven’t really been talking about them so I can’t get mad at him for not doing them. I consider that to be an inconvenient proviso for life. I can’t get mad at people for not reading my mind. I’m not sure how to find enough time to think about this in my life. I don’t think about sex much when my kids are around. That is just off-limits for me. I’m with them so much that I don’t have a lot of hours of the day when I am able to think about sex. I don’t feel like I am finding a way to figure out new things. I am stuck on old tapes because holy crisco I don’t need something else to be working on really intensely in my personal life.

This is how these things die. They become not a priority. I don’t know how to maintain balance and give everything in my life the attention it deserves. I’m not big enough. I look out at the next few years and see no sign of increased time for sex. Not really. Not for many years, probably. Between the kids and other things that pull our energy I just don’t see much happening. This is how bed death happens.

We still have sex a few times most weeks. We do skip weeks. It’s just not that high of a priority. Too many conflicting factors have to be in alignment. And then we are too tired to do anything all that exciting. I like the intimacy of sex a great deal or I wouldn’t be having it at all right now. Physically it is sometimes annoying and we have an understanding that I “take one for the team” at times. This is part of that sex that women don’t exactly want but they have any way.

This is so complicated. I love Noah. I want him to be happy with me. Noah loves me and wants me to be happy. We are trying to walk a very narrow line between his interest in having sex daily (and sex where I protest is really fairly hot) and the fact that being actually raped over and over again isn’t ok.

I have to get something out of it too. It doesn’t have to be the same thing he gets. If I don’t get anything at all out of it, then I shouldn’t be doing it. I’m ok with the fact that life has some weird trade offs. I get to pick what the hill is this time. I don’t have to have one goal at all times. I don’t get off very often. I know that I can predictably do that if I tell him how to inflict pain. I generally don’t want to feel pain so I don’t ask him to do that. As a result my body is dramatically less responsive and I often feel physically kind of uncomfortable during the act. But I love knowing that I am meeting his needs. This is something that he really needs in order to be a happy person. He will still be here whether I put out or not. But he will be sad and withdrawn. He won’t feel very loved. He will feel rejected. He doesn’t ask me for sex. I have to initiate the vast majority of our sex. I spend every day looking at him. When he is sad, I know I need to.

This sex stuff is so complicated. Noah and I are a good match largely because of the way we have complimentary compulsive sexual behavior. Woo. And we really are learning how to be nice to each other. He likes having sex with me when I’m fighting but he doesn’t push for it. He certainly doesn’t initiate it. I have to verbally request it. Usually by saying, “I want to wrestle and lose.” He perks up more than a child on Christmas.

Noah is my provider. He is my protector from the big bad world in some very material ways. Yes it is hot for him to feel like he is strong. He really isn’t the type to get into sports or other public ways of proving his manliness. He’s a geek. He’s realistic. But he does notice that he needs to work on getting stronger because I’m about to beat him.

It’s very complicated, this liking to lose. This liking of pain. It’s all wrapped up. It’s all wrapped up in thinking that taking pain is required of me. That I am only interesting if I am taking pain of some sort.

I didn’t start talking about my childhood in a public way until after I had mostly retreated from the public scene. They people I had all of my adult relationships with in the bdsm community knew very little about me. I think I talked to a few people one on one a little. I had a few conversations with motherly women. I had female mentors.

That’s all the time for today.

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People have asked me this more than once in the last week so I’ll just make a post about it. I’m ok with people linking to my journal. You don’t need to ask permission. I like credit for what I say (of course) but I’d be thrilled if people started sharing things.

Which is to say it would be really hard for my neurotic brain to convince me that I am still invisible if my stat page jumped. Just Saying.

Adoption.

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A friend is writing about her experiences as an adoptee. I have strong feelings on the topic of adoption. My sister is biologically my half-sister. My mother was pregnant when she graduated from high school. The father refused to accept that he impregnated my mother. My mother managed to meet and marry my father in her third trimester because he was willing to rescue her. Officially he didn’t have to “adopt” my sister but there was a lot of noise about how she wasn’t “really” his. He thought of her as adopted. Loudly. My father raped my sister for many years. When she was a teenager she went and found her biological father and his family. Her biological father didn’t like who she became after years of being raped and he was a nasty son of a bitch to her. She may have been better off not finding him.

I know a lot of people who were adopted. Sure, not that many in a cosmic sense. I don’t work in adoption so I don’t meet that many. I think that kids get to go find their parents. No matter what. This is not a universally popular opinion. I can live with that. It’s an opinion not an incontrovertible fact. I don’t care that parents don’t want to be found. Do I think it can be intensely painful for the parents, oh God yes. I still think that kids get to go find their parents if they feel they need to.

The sad fact about adoption is that while most (maybe) relinquishing parents do it because they want their child to have a better life than they can provide (at least this is the polite fiction) they don’t know what happened. They are happier never knowing what happened. I can understand that. I just don’t give them as much room in my brain. I don’t think that a relinquishing parent gets to feel ok about their decision while a kid has been raped for a few decades. But the statute of limitations has run out! The parent shouldn’t be held accountable or have to feel guilty! It’s not their fault, right? Oh of course not. It is never anyones fault.

I think there is no such thing as a statute of limitations when it comes to dealing with damage in your emotional life. Sure, maybe you can’t prosecute people for a crime (although I found it galling that when I prosecuted my father my sister, brother, and aunts all had similar stories and they were inadmissible because they were too far in the past) but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to deal with the emotional repercussions. Lots of people confront rapists or molesters years after they can press charges. I digress.

In my judgmental opinion you cannot sever the responsibility you have for your crotch fruit. You just can’t. There is no knife in the world strong enough to cut out a child’s desire for his/her mother. Many adoptees reach a place of peace where they don’t want to know their biological family. I respect that. I think it is probably a healthy choice. Many don’t. Many adoptees spend their entire fucking lives hurting because they were given up. I think they have the right to meet the people who gave them up. I believe that with all my heart.

I am the product of rape. I wish I had not been told that when I was five. I am glad I know it now. I think that people should get to grow up and ask questions about themselves. That is a very powerful belief for me. Not everyone shares it. I can live with that.

Sex and consent

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I believe there needs to be another word. It’s not “rape” if you never say no. But is the sex actually consensual if you have never said yes? There needs to be another word.

Last night a friend came over. I’m going to call her Popcorn, because I can. She was telling me about a situation with her lover where she said no to something and it happened anyway. While she was talking I could feel my stomach explode with acid. I felt scared and upset. Honey, don’t you know that when someone does things to you after you say “no” that is rape? But I didn’t say anything for a few seconds. When I spoke I very calmly asked if they had a consensual non-consent relationship. She said that the deal is she puts up with what he wants to do or he walks.

We need another word.

We need another word to explain how badly we want to feel that people like us and love us and want to be around us so we tolerate things that make us feel bad. We need another word to explain the intersection of scared-little-girl-who-knows-saying-no-won’t-stop-it and the adult woman who is allowed to make odd choices. I think that people are allowed to choose consensual non-consent relationships. I know people who desperately want to be in no-safeword relationships. Well, ok. If that works for you and you want it very badly, rock on. Not everyone has made that conscious decision. An awful lot of women just think there isn’t a point in saying no. It won’t stop what is happening and if you say no things will get worse, not better. Better to shut up and just take it. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.

Last night I masturbated right before going to sleep. I thought about domestic discipline stuff. I thought about what it would be like for Noah and I to come up with “rules” and for me to be held to them. I think that more than anything in the whole world I want concrete proof that someone is watching my behavior and giving me the equivalent of a gold star when I am good. It feels like no one notices or cares. I have a lot of hard days when getting through my basic list of tasks feels harder than running a marathon. I want someone to notice and comment on whether or not I have completed the tasks that make me “good” enough. I try so very hard. When I am not good enough I want someone to care enough to give me a way to earn back my goodness by submitting to correction. I want to be good enough so much it makes me cry. I don’t feel like I am.

I should just tolerate whatever someone wants to do to me. I’m not really good enough to ask for things to be different. I’m not really good. My behavior isn’t good. I think rebellious thoughts all day long. I want someone to know that I am feeling rebellious and tell me that they see that I am still doing the right thing even though I am struggling internally with the process. I want it so much.

Noah told me point blank that he is not willing to discuss “rules” at this stage of our life because right now I have too much pressure on me and he’s not going to be the straw that breaks my back. He’s a very schmott guy, that one.

I struggle with admitting to myself that I do things because I want them. I am so house proud it is kind of silly. I desperately want people to come over to my house and gasp because my garden is so pretty. Wow–I’ve obviously put a lot of work into it and it’s lovely. It’s stupid to work so hard so that phantom people who don’t really care will some day give me a pat on the back. I am doing it for me. Why the lie? I have a powerful need to control the world around me.

It’s all complicated, isn’t it? Wanting love and approval. Yes, Popcorn, being alone is safer. But we are social animals. Being alone isn’t actually safer. So many things can happen while you are alone and there is no one around to help you survive. I want you to survive. I want to survive. We are social creatures. It means different things to different people, yes; I know.

I think about these things so hard because I think about what kind of grown up I want to model being for my kids. I want my gorgeous daughters to believe that it fucking matters when they say no. I want my daughters to believe that no piece of shit man is worth putting up with if he is going to rape them. Complicated. I have some complex feelings about my sexual activity. Do I think Noah is a piece of shit man? Do I think Noah is a rapist? I think about it. I think about what the word rapist really means. Noah has had sex with me while I fought him off–because he had explicit permission in advance to do it once. He doesn’t deserve punishment for doing what I negotiated with him. It was a consensual non-consent scene.

Only that shit fucks you up. That shit fucks up your brain and your body. I consented to it. Did I consent because I think piece of shit girls like me should permit anything and everything to happen to me no matter how much it hurts? I’m not sure it mattered. It was a number of years ago. I went to intensive therapy over that–two or three times a week for a while around that event. It helped me break through a lot of walls around all of the other rapes in my life. I got to find out that I’m not physically all that strong and I can fight as fucking hard as I want to and I still can’t defend myself. I still can’t prevent someone from raping me if they want to.

It’s complicated. At this point in time Noah is very cautious with me. If he senses even mild hesitancy he pulls back and stops touching me and asks for verbal confirmation that I am ok. This man is trying as hard as he can to help me pick up the pieces of my life. This is his life too and he doesn’t want to live with someone who is continually damaged and redamaged. He wanted to have an experience. He wanted to know what something felt like. We found the wall together. We found out what too far felt like. Now he’s careful. I’m not sure he would be able to be careful if he hadn’t found the wall. In the long run I suspect that we will have a better marriage because we shared that experience. We have learned a lot together.

Do I think other women should do it? Well… it doesn’t matter what I think, right? I don’t want my daughters to feel like they need to be violently raped as an adult to prove to themselves that they have no ability to defend themselves. How about if we get them into intense martial arts and self-defense classes at five. Sure, everyone can lose to someone. But let’s improve their odds. Motherfucker. I want my daughters to know how to stand up straight and say, “No I don’t want this” and back it up with leaving because no fucking man is worth putting up with shit that hurts. (Unless they want to consent to SM. I’m not a hypocrite. That’s different.) I want my daughters to feel loved and confident and built up and like they have status and worth and they don’t need a fucking man. Does that mean I want them to be alone and lonely? No. But I want them to communicate about their needs. I want them to believe that their needs are important and I want them to hang out with people who agree that their needs are important.

I like having daughters. It challenges me to think very hard about what kind of woman I want them to see. Do I want them to grow up to be brittle and delicate? I can’t decide who they will be, not really. But I can decide who I want them to see. Who they eventually become is up to them. I can make sure that they do not learn from me that they should tolerate whatever someone wants to do. It’s complicated.

I strongly dislike the idea that people “shouldn’t judge”. Fuck you motherfucker I’m going to fucking judge all I want. I’m going to judge if things are safe or smart. I’m not going to try and control you because you have to make your own choices and live with the results. But I really should judge in my head what is going on. I should evaluate things and decide if that is something I think is a good plan or not and I should think about why. I don’t need to share this process, unless people want to hear it, but I really should judge. Saying that people shouldn’t judge is a good way of saying, “I’m not going to bother thinking about actions in advance and I will be a victim all my life.” No thanks.

If a man tells you he doesn’t care about your needs you need to believe him and get the fuck away from him. He probably won’t wake up every single day and look in the mirror and have to deal with the consequences of your interactions. You will. You have to look at yourself every day for the rest of your life. Do you want to be proud of yourself or ashamed? How do you feel about yourself right now? I’m not real fond of my hair this short, I’ll be honest. Overall it is getting easier to look at myself in the mirror. I know I am actually behaving in a way that is consistent with my values. I am judging the fuck out of myself and using that judgment to change my behavior and mannerisms. I’m changing how I experience my life because I want to model for my children what having a good life means. I tell them actively that people live all kinds of good lives. There isn’t one blue print. But for me, I’m very serious about following a fairly distinct progressive path towards being a better person. I will fuck up along the way, but I’ve already come so far.

Even though I really wish I was I’m not a special snowflake. I’m not ever going to be the best. But I’m ok. Everything will be ok in the end; if it’s not ok it’s not the end. I have to be good enough. I have to keep my kids safe enough. We are an accident prone family and we all get a lot of small injuries. I shouldn’t try to prevent that. But I am careful to ice my injuries now and talk about what things I should change and do differently in the future. I no longer sit around extensively talking about how stupid I am when I get hurt. I turned that tape off. That was a strong tape from my childhood. Only stupid people get injured. Only people who aren’t good at (insert activity) get hurt doing it. Incompetent people. When I had to go see the doctor as a child for injuries I was yelled at.

I think I deserve bad treatment. I have to judge how people talk to one another and decide how I would feel about that treatment being given to me. If I don’t do that I have no perspective whatsoever on what things might be like in the lives of other people. All I know is what I know and what I know is that I deserve bad treatment. I deserve to not be able to say no when someone wants to rape me.

I think we need another word. How can we talk about this rape that is not rape? How do we talk about this lack of sense of self that causes women to not even try to prevent bad things? How do we convince our girls that they should learn these self preservation skills? What does that even mean? It all feels so complicated.

I think that part of it involves learning to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. I think if you really and truly believe that you should be raped over and over again you should probably work on that. I don’t care if it makes me a judgmental asshole or condescending or whatever. If you think you deserve to be raped over and over… you should work on that. If you want to play rape games with your lover but you have a safeword for when things get too intense, that’s fine. In my judgmental asshole opinion. As soon as you lose the ability to say no or use your safeword then you shouldn’t engage in the play. In my opinion. We need a word for that kind of sex. I don’t know what it should be.

Any thoughts?

Learning and shame

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Therapy was unusual last night in some awesome ways. I showed up half an hour early because I wasn’t sure about public transit to the new location and the appointment before me cancelled so she was just sitting around. We could have started early but instead she decided to pick my brain. She moonlights as a guidance counselor at a middle school. The school is more than 60% black and over 30% latino. They have some problems. I don’t think I can explain how good it felt to talk to her about how to handle these children. She is the “emergency” therapist who sees the kids who are in serious crisis Right Now. I had a lot to say. It was interesting how the end of the conversation was quite sad. We had to plainly discuss the fact that there ARE things that can be done for these kids, but how much time and energy do you have? What are the things that you can really sustain doing? It’s hard to evaluate. She took notes on the things I said. I felt so respected. She told me that she is going to strongly consider how she can get me up there to talk to her really at risk kids. She thinks it will be good for them to hear a white person with my history because they don’t believe a white person can understand. I used the fuck out of that misperception when I was teaching. You can’t buy tools as handy as that.

I told her about what an asshole I am being to a friend who is having issues with the public education system. I told her I don’t understand why I still have friends. This directly linked into a lot of my attitudes about education and child rearing which ties into a lot of my feelings about having less worth in society because my earning potential is really quite low. Being a stay at home mom is not a very respected position. Oh well.

We talked about my frustration and confusion that Americans don’t seem to be training their children to be adults. They prepare the kid for preschool so the kid can be prepared for kindergarden so the kid can be prepared for the lower grades, then middle school, then high school, then college, then graduate school, then a PhD program, then a postdoctoral… I suppose we should all be college professors? I suppose some people transition into working in industry. Many companies run a lot like schools. It’s odd. Outside of academia I have worked in food service. I worked in the library and the theatre in college. I have taught. Really those have been my jobs. I feed people and help them learn. I like it–mostly.

I feel a lot of uncertainty about the future. I’m sadly aware that many of the people who are alive and making decisions now care very little about the long-term consequences of what we are doing as a society. I feel like it is ridiculously important that my kids understand that we are animals that require food. What are all the steps involved in arranging for adequate, constant food. My children will probably never know food uncertainty. What can they learn and figure out about how to help other people have the same life experience? What problems are going to crop up in our food supply? I’m quite nervous about this. I want my children to be incredibly practical. One of the up-sides of doing all these home improvement projects by myself with the kids is they are seeing how to do these tasks. Very soon they will be learning how to do them.

I also think my children will need to know how to program. I suspect that will be a mandatory skill for people who want serious job prospects in the future. I want my children to have options. I want them to feel like they are prepared to take the world by storm when they are adults. I want them to know so many things that they feel completely competent to go learn whatever they need but don’t yet know. I want them to see themselves as strong and able to assimilate new information.

I struggle with learning a lot of things. I don’t have the best memory. I read extremely quickly and I can synthesize ideas quickly but I forget things. That’s kind of a problem. I hope my kids get Noah’s memory.

My therapist and I talked extensively about how I feel like the next fifteen years are a gift. I have always wanted to go learn things but I didn’t want to go alone. Soon I will be able to go to dance events with my kids. Soon I will be able to do martial arts classes with my kids. I already practice languages with my kids. I’m discovering that I remember more Spanish than I think. I’m not as incompetent as I assume. It’s nice. I have these wonderful companions to learn with.

Shanna and Calli don’t think I am lame for how little skill I have at gardening. I feel really pretty silly for the intensity of my emotions around gardening. I grew up with people who had no respect for farming as a career and as a result they tried hard to never touch anything growing. My family felt they “got off the farm” and they had no interest in looking back. My family hasn’t farmed in at least three generations on all sides. Why is there so much hostility? Such disdain? We don’t garden.

Only I’m going to have this house paid off in another decade or so and I’m going to be stuck looking out that back window for all the remaining years of my life. I’d like it to be pretty. I feel kind of vain and silly about that. I would like to look at a colorful, interesting yard. I want it so bad I ache with wanting. I want to feel like a stupid, incompetent, worthless person still gets to look at something nice because I have the physical ability to create it.

It’s always harder than I think. I forget to water. I don’t have good weeding technique. I would starve to death if I had to take care of a whole field in order to eat. I feel ashamed of that. I feel weirdly pathetic because I can’t figure out the physical motion that will allow me to do this work quickly. It’s hard. I don’t know what I can do without damaging the plants I want to keep. I’m trying things and experimenting. It’s a slow process.

When I can remove my idiotic self-deprecation from this thought process I find it really kind of wonderful that I am learning all of these things and talking them through with my kids. Calli is too young to really understand yet, but Shanna is picking things up. I am really moving at about the right speed for Shanna. I feel ponderously slow and incompetent. Really I’m just moving at four year old speed. If I went faster she would feel left out. I wouldn’t want to outpace my companion.

It’s a lot of how I think about running. How do you find a pace for running with other people? I worry about it. I have several upcoming opportunities for running with friends. Some who are far more experienced runners than me and at least one who runs less than me. I’m fucking thrilled by the idea of running with someone who runs less than me. I won’t feel like I am slowing her down. I won’t have to feel embarrassed when I need to walk. I’m scared of running with people who are honest to dawg athletes. Standing near them makes me feel like my low status in their world is blinking in neon over my head. LOSER WHO CAN BARELY RUN. Physical Education classes were never kind to me.

It was an odd experience to look around the park on Tuesday and realize that whereas the home school kids will have various “coaches” they won’t have a PE teacher. If they do that position will fall to me. What athletic activities do I think my kids should know how to do? I have to figure out how to teach them or arrange to have someone else teach them. I think I should buy a small soccer ball and bring it. I feel odd about that. I want them to love things I don’t love. I want them to have access to ideas and hobbies I am not actually into.

This was one thing that surprised my therapist last night: how focused I am on trying to figure out what I don’t know that I should be teaching my kids. I feel intense pressure to work constantly on dealing with the extent and damage of my ignorance. I feel crippled by the extent and volume of my ignorance. I am not trying to be a know-it-all. I’m trying to be an actual competent person. The problem is that I value an odd combination of competences. I am extremely specific in what I care about and I totally ignore things I don’t understand or see value in. That’s kind of a problem. I simply can’t limit my children due to my biases. I want them to be competent adults. I want to know in twenty-five years that I have loosed two extremely fucking competent women on the world and they are off building and learning things I can’t wrap my mind around. They took the genesis of information I gave them and went off to do things I can’t understand.

I like being a jill of all trades. I don’t really aspire to master many topics. I’m a generalist. I like and highly value generalists. But like many people like me I feel like my lack of mastery means I am low in status. I’m not the best at basically any task. I notice and have a hard time with that emotionally. I don’t do competitive things because I can’t handle the fact that I’m never fucking going to be first. Do you know what second place is? The first fucking loser. I cried watching people pass me during the half marathon. I’m an idiot.

I want my kids to either be such prolific generalists that they terrify people or able to become masters in something. Other than talking to abused kids, which really… I’m awesome at that, I don’t think I will attain mastery of any subjects in this lifetime. That really kind of bothers me. I’m trying to gain peace with the idea that I will never really take anything to eleven. I will never be the best. Not everyone gets to be. lame.

My wonderful daughter just wandered out to sit on my lap. Today we are going to the redwoods to cut down trees so I can build her a play house. I should really take pictures of this process. I have a vision in my head. I know what I am going to do. It’s going to be really neat. You’ll see. I’m good at taking pictures in my head and turning out a decent approximation. Heck, look at my daughters.  This looks like my picture in my head of a family. We are kind to each other. Maybe I do have a reality distortion field.

Too many characters, how shocking.

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I wrote this on the comment field for this post on Band Back Together but it was too long. Links are blessedly short.

I had to write a whole book telling the whole of my trauma before I could understand how bad my life was; I get it. It’s hard to understand how little we have compassion for ourselves.

I understand that people are traumatized by events that seem “minor” compared to some of the things that happened to me. I get that. I see how it has changed the whole course of their life. I don’t give myself the same slack. I feel like I am a failure at life because I have ongoing effects from the abuse. I’m ok with being nice to other people as they cope… but not myself. I should be Over It. Damnit.

I’m not over it. PTSD is no joke. What happened to you was very serious. Some of the most serious I’ve heard about in a first world country. You are out at the far end of the bell curve. We are different. We have actually survived. People who haven’t done that have a different perspective on the world. It’s ok that we are different.

I often feel like I don’t know how to have normal conversations. I feel like everything I know, everything I am was colored by my life when I was a child. I hear over and over in my mind when people are talking to me, “They wouldn’t like you if they knew you were a dirty whore who sucked your father’s dick.” I feel like I want to blurt it out instantly when I meet people so that I can get it over with. I want the people who are going to reject me to hurry the fuck up and do it already. Do it because I am “inappropriate”. That way I can feel like I have control.

Dealing with trauma is serious work. I feel like I have to work all.the.time. on my behavior and thinking. I have a lot of hypervigilance. I can’t relax and just be with my life. I have to think about how I would be acting if I was a good person and then try to pretend to be that. I’m a nasty angry bitter person in my head and I don’t want that to be what my children remember.

I thought about you a lot. I left this comment box open over night and came back to it. It is so easy for me to read things like this and think, “Well duh! Of course she was abused. Who wouldn’t recognize that? That is *totally* trauma.” I had very similar life events and I gloss them over in my mind. Yeah ok some “bad shit” happened. I can say I sucked my father’s dick. I have a hard time saying I was raped.

My dad held a gun to my head and asked me if I deserved to live. I don’t think we will ever really forget. I have a hard time figuring out what moving forward looks like. It’s hard.

I’m not you. I don’t think your struggles look exactly like mine. Nevertheless I can project all I want from this side of a computer. I imagine you have some days that are as bad as my bad days. That’s hard. I’m really sorry. On your very worst days remember that your story has the power to make other people feel less alone and scared.

Other women have survived. I can too. Even though I really don’t even feel like I want to keep trying some days. Other women have survived. I can too.

Thank you for being with the band.

On the job training

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Some day I would like to like myself. Some day I would like to be willing to try and convince someone that they should want to spend time with me. Right now my impulse is, “If you don’t want to fucking spend time with me then don’t”. Not always a useful response. In fact, rarely. I won’t say never. I have a hard time with trying to figure out why my existence is a net positive for the universe. I feel like a drain of energy and resources. I take up space. I don’t make things. I don’t produce things. I am a consumer. It is an existential complaint.

Yesterday I went to the park with the home schooling group. I ran laps. I was the only parent to rough house with the kids. I pick up the rough and energetic boys and throw them around for a while. I feel far more comfortable interacting with the kids than I do the other mothers. I assume the other mothers would dislike me and think I am bad if I talked to them. I have already outed myself as ok with the idea of nonmonogamy and been given the stink eye for that. There was a conversation a few weeks ago with all the mothers chuckling together about telling their kids “You have to pick one person (of the opposite gender) to marry.” I said that I don’t tell my kids that because it woud make it very confusing to explain why their Grandpa ____ has a wife and a girlfriend. I figure they have to decide their own configurations. You could have picked the chins up off the ground.

So I don’t talk to the other mothers much. I don’t want to poison the well for my kids. I am their biggest liability in life. I may always be. Who knows. The kids are getting to know me and they like me. I like to play. I like to run. I had a pack of kids running laps with me yesterday. Most of the kids ran at least 3/4 of a mile. They would run a lap then rest then run another. It was really cool to have this ever-changing group of children with me. They wanted my company. What I was doing was way more interesting than their other options. That feels rather weird.

I enjoy talking to the kids about their bodies. About why they should consciously try to be stronger. It felt really amazing to practice sprinting as fast I could go to keep up with the little kids. This one boy is five and a half and he sprints like a cheetah. He has no stamina, but holy moly he hits high top speeds. When I caught up with him I felt like my heart was going to burst but then I just kept going past him. And I kept going for a long time after that. Ok, I slowed down a lot after I passed him, but I fucking did it. At the end of the run I fell to the ground and told all the (ebullient, proud) children that I was really afraid of what was going to happen in a few years because they are all going to keep improving rapidly and I’m only going to get older. I won’t be able to outpace them for long.

I spend my life wishing that I was the kind of person who was a leader. I don’t want to be a boss. I don’t want to tell people what to do. I want to do the fucking right thing. I want to live my life in a way that inspires emulation. I feel vain and over proud because of this.What a conceited asshole, right? I don’t seriously look up to very many people. Even fewer of them are alive. I don’t feel this way because most people are bad or doing things wrong. I have had an unusual life. I have weird calibration on needing inspiration and teaching. I need to develop non-standard skills. To me, learning how to do the right thing and I mean the right thing is the most important thing I can do. The right thing for me isn’t the right thing for other people. Life circumstances are like that.

What I mean when I say that I want to be a leader is I want to be someone who does very hard things and causes other people to realize that they, too, can do very hard things. Yes, it is going to hurt. I know. I truly do. Things that are worth doing are often hard. It means you have to figure out how to get stronger.

Some day when I am a grown up I will figure out how to actually do work that improves the world around me. Between now and then I need to study as much as I can and work as hard as I can to be stronger. Some day when I am grown up I will have a better idea of what I will be specifically working for. Right now all I know is I need to be less ignorant and I need to be stronger.

I don’t have to care that other people have different priorities. I should encourage it. Stay out of my specialty. Don’t crowd me out. I don’t know much about anything yet. It’s going to be interesting to go learn. I want to learn about the real world. I want to know things about plants and survival. I want to feel comfortable with the idea that I will actually be able to survive. I have already proven to myself adequately that I can get a job and make money if that is what is necessary for survival. I want to see for myself if I am a brighter-than-most animal that can survive. Modern society is weird. My daughter adamantly denies that she is an animal. Many pundits do the same. Uhm. I’m made of meat. That means I am an animal. I am an animal that needs to eat food. Can I provide it? Do I have the skills to go out into the world (instead of Safeway) and actually continue to live? What good am I?

I live in a strange world. I have been inside of many homes that were worth upwards of $5,000,000. My mother made more than $30,000 in a year for the first time when she was fifty one. People like me should only get into the kinds of homes I have been invited into if they are being paid to clean it. Or if there is a whole class birthday party when you are little. It’s complicated.

I was not brought up learning how to be successful in the world. I was not brought up learning actual skills that would benefit me. I was taught to watch television and eat cheap, unhealthy food. Occasionally you would go to some shopping space (outdoor “festivals” are generally just portable malls) and spend money you don’t really have to spare on something you don’t even remotely need. That was what we did and that was all we did.

I want to have a life that is worthy of emulating. I want to be a good enough person. I want to do this mainly for my daughters but I think that you can’t want to be that kind of person and only set your sights that low.

My world is small now. I have done that on purpose. It is hard to learn when you are distracted. It is hard to learn when there is too much going on. I have already limited my life a great deal and I am trying to embrace the freedom I have within the structure of my life. I have given myself the gift of sixteen years of safety and learning. I picked a job where what I supposed to do with my time is go out into the world and learn as much about it as I can because I am responsible for teaching my children far more than I currently know. Get busy.

I think hard about how I am going to teach maths and science. I talk about physics at the playground. I seem to be the PE teacher for the home schooling group. I think I should make a serious habit of that. I should just get up and do that. I shouldn’t expect someone else to ask me to. I should do it. I should do my strength training exercises (mostly yoga, honestly) daily so my kids do it with me. They also want to do more things. Shanna is starting to eye the monkey bars but her arms aren’t strong enough.

Life requires strength. How do I go about getting more of it? How do I teach my children? I am so lucky and so privileged that I get to sit around think about the structure of my life. I get to think consciously about what habits I want to have and figure out how and where they will fit into my life. I have increasing freedom to do most things I want to do with my kids. I think soon I will venture to dance events with them. It will be fun. I will finally have companions.

I have spent my entire life desperately wanting to do things with people. I simply don’t enjoy doing things alone. Now the only thing I do alone is hide in the garage because I desperately need some time when I get to be alone. Even though it feels overwhelming at times I feel so much gratitude. Every morning and every night I hold my daughters close and tell them that I feel very lucky because I get to spend the day with them. I really enjoy their company. I am so glad I get to spend my life with them. This is exactly what I have always wanted.

But the thing is… this isn’t going to continue on forever as it is. This is going to change dramatically and then end. Oh shit. I’m going to be kind of an asshole and say I can understand why people keep having kids. What am I going to do after this? It’s terrifying. I have a lot of identity wrapped up in being the one to take care of my kids. For now. My kids are not going to be coddled forever. I don’t have the patience for this shit.

I’m going to go on record saying that I think baby wearing, extended nursing, tandem nursing, home birth, and co-sleeping all suck rocks. They are horrible. My fucking back hurts. The problem is I don’t think the other solutions are better.

I am starting to better understand the desire for a four year age gap between children, now that Shanna is basically there. Now she tells me she wants space at the park so she can play out of my eye sight and hearing range. We agree on check in times. She is pretty good. Now I can go focus on the other baby. Calli is so excited by this she can barely stand it. She likes being pushed in the swing and she will make me do it literally for hours. Yesterday she was in the swing for more than two hours. She laughs and laughs and laughs. She is so happy she nearly bursts.

I need to try and predict the future and know what kind of adult my grown up children will respect. How can I help them become adults? This is my job. I’m kind of a work-a-holic. It feels like my whole life right now is this really intense on-the-job training program. I can’t stop. I can’t take a break. This is my life. What kind of adult do I want to be? What do I want to teach my children to be like?

It means I’m thinking very hard about my self identity. I have been a nonmonogamous queer pervert for most of my life; a rather shocking majority of my life if you use liberal definitions for consent. My children see a monogamous heterosexual couple in a very standard male/female set of roles.

Why do I need to talk about how often I think about fucking women? Because if I don’t then people think I am something I am not. If people think I am something I am not then they form a picture in their mind of who and what “someone like me” looks like. At some point the conflict will be realized and it will be shocking. Ok, so who am I? Am I really a nonmonogamous queer pervert? Not really. It means I don’t know what I am. It means I don’t know what I am. I’m not really a voyeur so I don’t see much point in going out anymore. I don’t know how to go out looking for conversation to a sex-oriented event where I am not looking for pick up play without feeling like I am doing something terrible in some way. But I honestly don’t really know where else to go. I consider munches to be sex-oriented–I can’t bring my kids. If I have to find non-kid hours to go to an event… that’s a tough sell in my life. I don’t get much time off and I desperately need to spend most of it alone. I’m exhausted.

I will never be nonmonogamous again. But I still think about sex just as much. No, that’s not true. I haven’t thought about sex much for a long time. My libido is starting to return. I am just barely starting to think about sex. It feels very weird to feel like I should actively state that I am queer. It is a political identity. I have these feelings. Biologically I am not exclusively attracted to any particular gender.

And…. that’s when the kids missed me.

Going down the rabbit hole is uncomfortable.

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Today is going to be bad. I started my period yesterday, I’m sure that contributes to how emotional I feel, but it’s not all of it. A friend asked me if I wanted to spend brunch with her on Mothers Day. I told her I didn’t want to because it would be too hard for me, can we meet another day. She said that was fine because she was offering for my sake instead of hers. I want to beat my head against the floor and scream, “That’s why I don’t want you here.” That is what I’m hearing in my head this morning. I don’t want you here. I’m only doing this for you. I don’t want anyone to do anything for me. I want people to want to be with me. They don’t.

If she didn’t want to be with me she wouldn’t offer, right? I’m just over reacting, as usual. I feel so stupid and ungrateful and mean and vicious. I feel hateful. Why can’t I let anyone just like me? Right now my needs are so big I can barely see around them. I am so selfish.

I can’t find my sports bra this morning in the dark. I find that incredibly frustrating. It’s enough to make me sink to the floor and just lose my shit crying. I am so stupid and pathetic I can’t even keep track of my things. This morning I feel like I hate pretty much everything about myself. I am forgetful. I am bad. This is a problem because if I wait too long from when I wake up to start running then I have to eat breakfast because my stomach hurts. I can’t run too soon after eating. It fucks up the timing of my whole day.

I get the impression I cry more than average. I cry for several hours every week. I’m sure I have weeks where I don’t cry but it has been a while.

Yesterday I stopped the car while I was driving because I had to cry for a while. I couldn’t see the curves on the road through my tears and I don’t want to have that kind of accidental death. I don’t want Noah to think I killed my kids on purpose. That would be a horrible thing to live with. I can’t stop crying lately. I feel so terrible. I feel like such a terrible person. I feel like I don’t deserve to live. I think it doesn’t help that I’ve been stubborn about being sober. Needing medication makes me bad. If I don’t use the medication I am “less bad” but I feel far worse about myself. It’s complex.

I dropped Shanna off at her Godmamas’ house yesterday. She stays for the weekend frequently. Soon it will be every month. She loves staying there. She loves her Godmamas. So far they are the only people who have a regular, consistent relationship with the kids. I feel like that is my fault. That other people would be present in their lives if I wasn’t a bad person. Shanna has lost friends because of me and my stupid mouth. People no longer spend time around my kids because they dislike me so intensely. They are so angry with me that they don’t want to know my children.

Why shouldn’t I feel like a terrible person? I drive people away. I hurt them. I do bad things. I am too angry. No one should be as angry as I am. It’s apparently horrifying. Whether or not I started out deserving to have bad things happen to me I deserve it now. I have earned it by being such a bitch. I’m not good or kind or gentle or nice. I know. The only thing I can do to stop earning bad things is to never speak again. It sounds like hyperbole but I’m terrified it is true. I am terrified that I am so bad that the only thing I can do to be less bad is to simply stop speaking. My influence is bad. I hurt people. I am bad.

I feel like it was the wrong decision for me to have children. I am not good enough. I can’t change it now. I feel sorry that my children don’t get to find out what it is like to grow up with a good mother. I’m sorry that my children don’t get to find out what it is like to grow up in a family. I bring nothing but myself. There is no one who is attached to me.

Interacting with people is hard. I talked to my friend yesterday. I met her four days before I met Tom. She told me that in her opinion I shouldn’t refer to my situation with Tom as a “relationship” because to him I was a fetish doll, not a person. She said she always disliked the relationship. She explained some of his techniques when we were arguing when I saw him on Monday. He has to discount me as a source of information. My opinion is literally worth less to him. He denies it when challenged directly, but he casually mocks me continually.

I spent my entire childhood being put down. Sarcasm is generally used when someone wants to dig at someone else. To poke them. To take them down a peg. Noah is not sarcastic with me very often. He is quite careful to do it in ways I’m not going to be bothered by.

Tom was very sarcastic with me pretty much all the time. It was hard to live with. If I spoke I was inviting being taunted. He meant it all in great fun. He thinks he is quite the wit. I found it rude and dismissive. I can get him to concede an argument but it gets bloody and nasty and I just don’t want to have that kind of relationship so I get used to not being right. I get used to just closing my eyes and shutting my mouth and trying to make my face go blank while say, “Ok. Fine.” But if he’s laughing while he is saying it then it’s just a joke and I can’t get butthurt, right?

I wonder if I feel so intensely suicidal because I am thinking so hard about my relationship with Tom. I’m not sure I want to admit to myself how bad that was. I did a lot of things I shouldn’t have. It wasn’t rape. It was all fully consensual. But I consented to a lot of things I shouldn’t have. I used Tom as a way of attaining harm that was only marginally less bad than slicing my legs up. I don’t think anyone  plays like I did if they aren’t very ok with the idea of possibly dying today. I’m feeling really freaked out as I think about this book. I haven’t even gone through the pictures yet. Tom took thousands of pictures of me. By far my sex life is the most photographed part of my life. I feel weird about that.

I think this book is going to be a lot harder than I thought. I should probably start looking at pictures. It is hard to know that I let someone treat me in ways that weren’t very nice. I don’t have a problem with the beatings. I had to ask for those. I have a problem with the fact that I can go to seven years of graduate school in English and teach the language for several years and he will still tell me that I am stupid for not believing him about a made up grammar rule. I’m really glad I broke up with him. I understand why I have missed him. He does feel comfortable and familiar in a way the rest of my life right now doesn’t.

I don’t think I’m going to go to the rope munch on Monday. I don’t want to see Tom. My triggers are my problem, right? No one else has to care about stupid things that set me off, right? I don’t like being treated like a lower class of person. My response to being treated that way is to feel intensely suicidal and I just can’t deal with that. I can’t deal with being told I should be cheerful about being demeaned and ignored.

I’d rather start a fight. I would rather behave in a way that is bad. I would rather tell you to fuck yourself. And thus I drive more people away. I should stay home.

Irrational feelings.

4 Replies

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

===============================

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memory lane

5 Replies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have to go run.

Apparently I don’t want to track.

8 Replies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Planning

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Noah is a lot smarter than he looks. He let me buy into the Disney time share program. Even though it was a lot of money. And he hasn’t gotten mad at me for not paying it off faster. He’s really quite patient with me. I say that he is smart because a lot of how I manage self-discipline is in service of some goal. I can talk myself out of eating out if I know that all of my Disneyland spending money in October and December have to just come out of our normal budget. I have to save up gas money in advance. I can’t buy a race day t-shirt at the marathon unless I save money. I have to think about these things in advance. If I want to have the money then I have to save now. Our income dropped dramatically. I can’t just doall of the things I expect in the back of my mind to do. It’s feeling hard to adjust to. We lost a big darn cushion. I always planned for us to live on his income and the reality is we spent every penny of extra income too. Some of it was shuffled off to savings/investments but not a lot. We have had a really comfortable and fun life. It’s been awesome.
Noah wants to try some big hard stuff. My role in that is to be the one to save the money in advance that will allow us to take this risk and not suffer from it regardless of the outcome. I have to plan in advance and it’s feeling hard. It’s feeling like more self discipline than I have.
Part of the reason I am walking as much as I am with Shanna is I’m trying to see if I can live without the van and be ok with the kids. Can we get to the places we want to go? I’m trying to learn what places near here we want to try. Every additional car adds a huge amount of liability: gas, insurance, repair. Saving multiple thousands of dollars a year is a lot. It just limits my range with the kids a lot. We are thinking hard about that.  Things like: it would really suck to not be able to go to many home school events. I’m trying to figure out when they happen and if I could manage it. I should probably actually investigate options on the peninsula because then it makes a lot more sense to take Noah to work and use the car during the day. Most everything we do now ranges up and down the east bay.
I saw my therapist last night. Yeah. I feel like this. And that is probably going to keep happening. This is my normal. Time to move on with life. Life isn’t going to wait for me to feel better. I have to think about things that matter. Things like: what are the actual needs in this house? How can I meet them? What would a life that meets those needs look like? I need to backwards plan this. I need to draw up a long flow chart so that I can figure out what I should be doing now in order to move towards those goals. Yes, my stomach hurts. Yes, I feel like I am about to puke. Yes, I feel like my heart is racing. Yes, I am afraid.
But Noah slept in and I have to go make breakfast. That’s a lot more important. He really needed the sleep. And he will want to go in early today because we are having dinner with a friend tonight.

Everything must be bad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today is going to be a long and hard day.

Parenting, anxiety and me!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s nice, dear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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