My bdsm culture

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Noah told me last night that part of the problem is, I have a lot of unstated beliefs about how bdsm “should” be done.  But he has no way of going and learning what my beliefs are, nor how to emulate them.  He can’t go have a multi-year relationship with Tom to learn those expectations, and Tom is different now anyway.  The Wednesday munch has morphed beyond recognition.  The play parties I used to go to are different.  The time and space that created me is over.

Ok.  Well.  What am I?  I’ve been reading a lot about my friend Mo’s journey towards slavery and I’ll say flat out that there is a big part of me that is envious.  I liked being Tom’s slave the vast majority of the time. It was a kind of belonging and safety not many other things have given me.  Being married is better, but it’s the only bond that has ever felt even close to as safe as being a slave felt.  Even when I was fucking up (which happened a lot) I knew what I was supposed to be doing, saying, and thinking.  I don’t have a lot of that sensation in my life.  I constantly feel wrong, bad, misaligned.  I loved having it in my intimate partnership.  I felt a freedom to relax, just go through my set patterns.  I didn’t have to think all the time about what I should be doing in order to be “right” for my current environment.

It didn’t fucking matter where I was.  I was always his slave.  I had an extensive list of things I was supposed to be doing at all time.  If I wanted to please him I knew how.  It wasn’t mercurial.  It was dependable and safe.  It helps that Tom is very easy to please.  He had very low expectations of me and I savaged him for it occasionally.  It bothered me that he didn’t want to keep upping the ante.  He wanted to have our M/s relationship and give me direction and then coast.

I don’t handle that very well.  I need a lot of notice, attention, and subtle course corrections.  Or I end up on the wrong continent.  I’m not sure I would ever be able to be in an M/s relationship again.  I think about it.  The best circumstances I can imagine for it is that Noah and I will start playing with it in 20 years.  If he still has the energy.  Hell, if I still have the energy.  There are reasons that most of the “interesting” slaves are fairly young.  They also don’t tend to stay slaves forever.

There is this constant balance with sustainability.  How much time do you have to devote to various things in your life?  How much energy?  Maybe we will just have weekend flings over the years.  That may be all I am actually up for.

I feel like I am trying to talk myself into what I perceive as Noah’s level of interest in bdsm.  I am trying hard to grow in that direction.  My experience of bdsm was that it slowly oozed into every portion of life.  Ok, not work.  But your entire personal life becomes about fostering your “role”.  I experienced that even when you switch the physical activities (I topped Tom) you still needed to have most of your soul understand that you were just taking a break.  You were still really a _______.  My experience of bdsm was that scenes take a long time, an hour is a really short scene.  My experience of bdsm is that the goal is to fill as much time as you possibly can with things to do to a person so that they have to just endure it.

Death by a thousand paper cuts.  I don’t like bondage that is put on fast and sloppy.  If you only intend the rope to be on for five minutes people don’t take the time to ensure that circulation is properly functioning.  It’s not as comfortable.  I’m at the stage of life where five minutes of increased discomfort during sex is not a selling point.  Bondage that is put on carefully can be fairly comfortable.  It’s not about the discomfort of the rope on your skin.  Here, let’s use this lovely silk parachute cord.  It’s not about being uncomfortable because the rope is cutting off circulation.  It’s about being helpless.

What I like about bondage is for that period of time I am less able to be responsible for myself.  I am less able to be responsible for the people around me.  I love a good hog tie.  I love the gradual increase of pain over time as I fight with the need to stay tense so I can control what position I am in and increasing fatigue as my willpower wears out.  I like taking my willpower to the edge and then losing it and sagging into the rope.  Feeling my breath come shorter and shorter.  Eventually circulation starts to be a problem no matter how well the bondage is done (in most cases, not all) and there is this balance between trying to care for my needs (circulation is a fucking need) and having to trust someone else to be watching and caring for me.

When I dated Tom I was young and stupid.  I didn’t know what was going on with my body due to ignorance.  I let him do anything he wanted.  I trusted him.  He broke my arm six weeks into our four year relationship and I still trusted him with absolutely all of my physical safety.  It was something that wasn’t my problem.  But as you get older in the scene you discover that as a bottom your physical safety is your own damn problem.  Because other people can’t know what is really going on for you.  I miss the freedom of ignorance.  I miss the sensation of not having to be responsible.

I miss the sensation of slowly squirming in rope.  Of knowing that someone wanted to tie me up so that I couldn’t get away… and now they just want to sit and look at me.  What are they seeing.  What vulnerability do I have that is so tantalizing he just wants to sit and look at me so much he doesn’t want me to be able to deflect his gaze.  I can’t get away from being seen any more.  There is an element of pain, but the kind of bondage pain I like (minimal) is just not in the same universe as the kind of impact play (single tails and canes) that I like (intense).

I like bdsm play that is about capturing intensity.  Floggers don’t capture intensity to me.  I can’t handle them.  They are so much intensity spread out over such a large area that I can’t process or breathe or think.  I hate them.  I like bondage because it makes me helpless.  I like playing with the idea of being unable to stop someone from touching me.  That’s an intense line for me.  If the bondage is uncomfortable I am pissy about the bondage being uncomfortable.  If the bondage is comfortable I can’t evade my own intense internal storm around… oh my god he is touching me.  I can’t deflect anything.  I’m perfectly fine and comfortable…. I just can’t move.

I’m mixing up talking about roles and actions and that is part of what bothers Noah.  It’s hard to figure out which parts are important where and why.  It’s hard to make general statements.  I engage in bdsm because I enjoy being helpless, I enjoy taking pain for someone else’s enjoyment (this is where Noah doesn’t understand why I don’t like bondage that is uncomfortable–he enjoys that it is painful), and I like pleasing people.  I can be the do-er or the receiver of pretty much any activity I am comfortable with and be either submissive or dominant.  It really doesn’t matter.  The actions are only kind of the point.

I care about energy exchange.  I care about having to watch my tongue because it is the appropriate way for someone in my position to behave.  I have intense negative reactions towards any and all authority.  Of course if I have issues with authority I want to play with that during sex.  I want my lover to be the authority and controlling the environment and my mind set.  Not every time, certainly.  But I like being told what I have to say, feel, and think.  I can absolutely take that and go with it.  I take on roles very well.

Being Tom’s slave gave me a buffer between my anxiety of being “right” and every social situation.  I didn’t have to worry about being the right Krissy for the social group.  I had to be Tom’s slave and if they didn’t like it they can fuck right off.  It’s a certainty of place.  I go through most of my life feeling like I don’t have a certain place.  Like any of my friends or relationships might disappear tomorrow.  I certainly go long enough in between talking to most people that it feels like they disappear.  I spend most of my life in an agony of cycling between why hasn’t “a, b, c,….y, z” people contacted me ever again?  They must hate me.  It’s personal.  We had that great meet up at a coffee shop two years ago and I haven’t heard from them since?  It must be because I am a total asshole and they hate me.  I will now feel awkward and uncomfortable around them at random parties because it all feels personal and like a rejection.

When I was Tom’s slave it wasn’t about my comfort.  It was about pleasing Tom.  I learned a lot of fairly high functioning social skills because of that pressure.  These days it feels like I can’t please anyone, least of all myself.

These days I use being a mom as my compass.  That is my constant pressure.  It’s a lot less fun.  Mom is a kill joy.  I’m not pleasing people.  I’m the one who screams at everyone to clean up after themselves and I have to be constantly thinking ahead as to how to balance every crisis.  It sucks.  I am both in control and not in control of everything in my life.  So basically… no one has control.  No one is at the helm.  I don’t want to steer for everyone the way Tom steered for me.  And there really isn’t anyone who can steer for me.  I have too many different things I have to think about.  No one else tracks them.

If a scene is about causing me pain it is about causing me pain.  If a scene is supposed to be about struggling and helplessness, then I had better not be in pain because I won’t think about anything other than being in pain.  Being in pain while I am tied up is far far harder than being in pain when I am unrestrained.  I do not enjoy combining bondage with beatings very much.  I need to be able to move around to process pain.  If bondage is uncomfortable/painful and I can’t do anything to move around to adjust the pain I get increasingly frantic.  Being trapped and in pain sucks.  It triggers nasty panic attacks.

I’m as fussy about bondage as I am because most people who tie others up are pretty inconsiderate about incidental pain.  That’s not their problem.  I can do bondage scenes that aren’t comfortable.  By the end I am almost entirely dissociated.  It was made clear to me that what is going on is I am holding still and letting someone do things that suck to me.  I don’t have to be present for that.  It’s hard to stay present if someone is inflicting accidental or minor additional discomfort on me.  I feel invalidated.  I feel invisible. I feel like an accessory to the scene they want to be having with an inanimate object who happens to have a pussy.

I developed tastes in accordance with how Tom did bondage.  I have spent the last seven years dealing with the fact that Tom does bondage very differently than most people.  I don’t feel safe enough to be emotionally present and vulnerable with most people.  A lot of the reason is I don’t trust them.  They hurt me in unintentional ways because they aren’t paying attention.  They don’t know that ‘x’ thing will hurt me.  When I mention it in a small way they do not respond how Tom did with instant concern and adjustments.  I feel invisible and invalidated.  Ok fine, I don’t need to be here any more.

I can stop feeling what is happening in my body.  When someone does something that is low level uncomfortable in a way I don’t like I feel like I have no choice but to stop feeling.  This makes me less and less emotionally available over the years while playing.  It’s something that I feel bitter and pissy about.  It is hard to be skilled enough with rope to play the way I want to play.  It feels like obviously it is too much effort to be tied up the way I want to be tied up.  No one does it right from my short, choppy, unhelpful hints and that means I can never have it again.  That part of me is dead.

This all sounds very melodramatic, but it only sort of is.  I know two men who can tie me up without me giving them any pissy little comments.  They have both been tying people up for many hours a week for 20+ years.  If that is what it requires for me to like bondage I need to just give it up.  I should stop taunting myself.  Or maybe I should figure out how to communicate with my husband.  I should start suggesting a lot more often that he practice tying me feet up while I read a book.  That way I’m not nit-picking at him.  He needs to practice and find out what doing it right looks like.

I learned “right” by being tied up for hours and hours every week for years.  When I started learning on Tom I made him wear a blindfold and a gag because he couldn’t shut the fuck up and stop telling me what I “should” be doing.  Heh.  I am so hard on Noah.  I treat Noah as if it is a grand betrayal every time he doesn’t know something I know.

Ok so there are two separate things.  There is the physical experience and the mental experience.  They really revolve on different axis.  I’m really picky about the physical experience.  At this stage of my life I have experienced enough random pain.  I am not opposed to playing with pain again but I can’t deal with undirected pain.  I can’t deal with, “Well I want your hands tied up and oops I cut the circulation off, oh well.”  Because to me that sounds like, “I don’t know what I am doing and I could fuck up your nerve sensation for the rest of your life, but oops, oh well.”  I have a friend who ignored that kind of pain.  Last I heard she could barely feel her thumb six years later.  No thank you.  Bondage is taken very lightly by most people.  They only do small amounts of it and they do it for short times.  You can only get away with sloppy bondage if you want to do it for a few minutes and then immediately take it off.

I like long term bondage.  So if someone starts tying me up I immediately have the desire for the physical sensations that come with longer-term bondage.  Discordant feelings ruin the experience for me.  If I know while someone is tying me up that I am on a short timer because I’m already uncomfortable then I never relax and bother to feel anything else that is happening.  I can’t focus.  My fucking arms hurt.  No I don’t care that you are touching my clit.  It feels frankly fucking irritating.  It’s not sexy.  I am focusing on trying not to tap out early because my arms fucking hurt.  I am not focusing on you having fun, asshole.

And part of that is… I haven’t been a slave in a long time.  Tom ended our M/s contract in July of 2003.  I haven’t done bdsm for someone else’s pleasure in a long time.  I do it for mine.  And if it’s uncomfortable, you have just lost.  This is where the roles part becomes important.  If I am your slave it is my obligation to take what you want to give and deal with it.  It is also my obligation to ensure that you do not damage me.  No one really wants to break their toys.  Something that people never understood about my relationship with Tom is, most of the snarky feedback that bothered other people was accommodating actual health issues for me.  We just didn’t talk about it that way.  We had our snarky dialogue and when I told him that something needed to be adjusted he just did it.  We both knew what we were trying to create together: a bondage scene where I could suffer for as long as possible because the longer I suffered the harder his dick got.  Being in bondage gear for multiple hours was far better than sex for Tom.

We rarely combined sex and bondage.  It feels like discordant energy to me.  The sex moves me around and makes the bondage uncomfortable.  Why am I doing this again?  If all you wanted for me to do was lie in a weird position during sex you could have just told me to do that.  Instead I have to deal with my arms hurting for days.  joy.

This all makes it sound like I’m difficult to play with.  This would be why I just don’t bother to do what I consider play any more.  Noah and I have a lot of rough sex.  We rarely have what I really think of as “scenes” and I don’t play with anyone else.

My bdsm is an adjunct to my sex life.  It’s not really part of it.  And for the last few years I’ve been focused on trying to meet Noah’s sexual needs and he doesn’t have a similar approach to play.  So we just don’t play.  It’s not that he doesn’t want to play.  It’s that the ways he plays feel weird/wrong to me and I don’t know how to adjust.  It feels too rough.  Too unfocused.  Too much too fast.  Or not enough. I can never decide.

He’s not Tom.  I don’t know how to get over this.  I haven’t ever really played with anyone over a long period other than Tom.  He is still 90% + of my bdsm experience.  I am still attuned to his playing.  I don’t know how to change that.  I don’t know what is my wants and what is his.  I don’t know how to be in accord with Noah.

Part of the problem is that Noah is dealing with such a deficit of sex and fun energy that he can’t muster much for the kinds of scenes I like.  It’s just a fact.  Today is Folsom.  I won’t be going.  I will stay home again this year with my kids.  I will feel left out and excluded from that community.  I will feel invisibile and unimportant.  Which is stupid.  I’m not invisible or unimportant, I’m just busy.  Folsom is not the place to take either of my kids.

A lot of why this is so hard is because I don’t know how to fit into bdsm culture without a role.  I don’t have one any more.  I’m not open to anything.  It’s not even that I would turn down people who asked to play if anyone had the cajones.  I’d probably say yes.  If they asked on the right day in the right way and I was in the right mood.  Ha.  I kind of feel like it would be stupid to do it though.  I know before I start playing that I will be disappointed.  Because no one else plays like Tom.  I miss our play.  I miss those physical sensations.  I miss having someone be that kind of attentive to my body.

I feel terrible guilt for writing that.  It sounds so dismissive of Noah.  Noah is a better partner in every way.  He is a better lover.  But he’s not my Owner.  Noah doesn’t think of me as a piece of property.  I’m sure feminists everywhere rejoice.  I kind of think that is the problem though.  Noah thinks of me as an autonomous human being who should be doing everything for myself.  And while I’m at it, here’s his laundry.  I did Tom’s laundry too, but it was different.  I wasn’t just doing the fucking laundry.  I was serving my Owner and there were consequences if I did it wrong.  My work was examined.  He cared what I was doing.  He paid attention to me, at least early on before he got sick of it.

The intensity of being a slave is hard to explain.  Any time I felt lazy or wanted to procrastinate I had the lead club of, “I am not allowed to disappoint my Owner.”  And I didn’t either.  I had a very clear set of expectations to meet.  If I met those then I was magically ok.  I was magically right.  I was magically pleasing.  If I didn’t meet expectations on a given day there was a clear course for making amends and restitution.  I felt secure in my behavior, attitude, and words.  I was pleasing my Owner.

Noah wants me to make myself happy.  While he’s standing nearby doing whatever makes him happy.  It’s a lot of pressure by contrast.  I am constantly having to decide for myself what my priorities are.  I have to decide my task list.  When I make my task list it is overly hard, stressful, and shitty.  At the end of the day I feel like I didn’t do enough even if I did more than three other people.  I have no standard to meet.  So I can never be done.  I never feel a relief of the pressure.  I have never done enough work.  I am always failing.  I have never found that magical combination of things I am “supposed” to do to keep Noah happy.

I believe that people who tell me they don’t want me to “make” them happy are liars.  They are just making the game harder and harder.  They want to have extensive deniability around why they will abandon me later because “things just didn’t work out”.  People always have expectations.  They are lying pieces of shit if they claim otherwise.  Even if their expectation is, “I’d like you to only talk about ‘a, b, and c’ when we are in person because I get enough of ‘d’ from your blog.”  They are never willing to say that out loud.  But they get pissy and snippy when I get to ‘d’.  The secret to happiness is low expectations.  Every time Noah says that I want to beat him over the head with a baseball bat because having low expectations really just means that you like to move the target on me.

From day to day Noah is pleased by different things.  On many days what pleased him yesterday will cause him to be snippy today.  It’s probably a mild version of what it is like to live with me.  (See, always with the self-denigration.)  Him telling me that he has low expectations means that from day to day I don’t know what will set him off.  It’s like a time bomb.  Some days he comes in and doesn’t care if it looks like a bomb went off in the living room.  Other days he comes in huffy and stomping and I feel like I am a terrible pathetic person for shirking in my duties.  I must never rest again.

What I miss about M/s the most is that I knew what was expected of me at all times in all places in all ways.  I couldn’t always meet it and that caused different problems.  I spend most of my time lately feeling anxious because I don’t know what is expected of me.  What I should be doing.  I can never do enough to make me or anyone else happy.  I am always failing because there is no way to not-fail.  There is no alternative in my life.

Other than increasing my apathy.  If I dramatically increase my apathy then I don’t care that I feel like I am failing everyone.  They can fuck off.

I’m not sure this is better.

Running away

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I do a lot of abandoning social groups.  I was nearly raped on the last day of school my sophomore year.  I didn’t go back to that school.  I couldn’t deal with facing him.  He was one of the most popular boys in our social group because his parents were the richest.  I stopped hanging out with theater people when I broke up with Stephen.  That’s his world.  I stopped hanging out at bdsm events when I broke up with Tom.  I stopped going to the public sex community after Nathan raped me.

Nathan raped me when I was 24.  I was teaching already.  I just stopped going out.  I won’t go to an event unless I have someone going with me.  Apparently I’m not safe alone.

I return heavily to this idea that I’m not safe.  I’m not safe.  I’m not safe.  There are pieces of my brain that tell me this fear is irrational.  There are much bigger parts of my brain that laugh hysterically at the idea that it is irrational for me to feel unsafe.  I have been proven unsafe so many fucking times that it is no longer an irrational fear.  It is a justified, rational, reasonable fear.  I hate myself for having it.  I feel like I am a coward and a wimp.

I let these men chase me off.  I felt like I couldn’t exist in the same space as them any more once I stopped fucking them.  I was no longer worthy.  Or something like that.  Don’t shit where you eat.  Don’t sleep with too many people in a social group.  It goes badly.  So I leave.

I assume that most awkward conversations are my fault because I am such an asshole.  If I was just nicer I would magically get along with people and I would stop having this constant stream of awkward moments.  I would stop feeling like I am harming people by existing near them.

There are parts of living with Sarah that I haven’t written about much yet.  Sarah is disabled.  A fairly large percentage of why I pushed for this to happen right now is because it isn’t safe for her to live alone any more, in my opinion.  And she loves me enough to move to a different state and deal with living with me because my opinion matters to her.  I’m not sure that she believes she is at the state where she can not/should not live alone, but I pretty much am.  She needs help. I need help.  This seems like a marriage made in heaven.

I have lived with people who were disabled before.  I have a very firm mental concept of “There are things you can ask them to do and there are things you simply can’t ask.”  We are dancing around that.  We are trying to figure what I can ask for how, how often, at what intensity…  It’s hard.  Because I hit Sarah’s limits.  And then I feel surges of anger, guilt, shame, overwhelm, and then I settle on being bitter because everyone except for me gets to have limits.

Of course this is hyperbole.  I have limits.  These days I’m even announcing when I approach them and I no longer have to grit my teeth till they crack.  It’s fucking nice being allowed to have limits.  But Sarah’s are in different places than mine.  So are Noah’s.  I am the only one in this house who can just handle the kids all the time.  I can do it 24/7.  I’m not nice, but I can do it.  I’m not sure Noah could do it for long without hitting someone.  Sarah can’t do it because she’s on medications that make her too groggy to be the only responsible adult at times.

So I have to step in.  I don’t know why that makes me angry.  I want to be the Mom.  I want to be the one who is the most important person ever.  I love that my kids are so attached to me.  (This is when I want to do a string of MDC smilies to indicate that truly, I do like my kids.  Those smileys are dangerous.)  I, however, don’t like that I feel I have to justify liking my kids.  Why do I assume that people will think that I secretly hate my kids?  I get frustrated with them.  I need long breaks in order to be patient enough because Shanna is in a hitting phase.

I feel bad because sometimes I feel like I want to run away.  Yesterday Noah and I went out on a date.  Sometimes it feels like time away from the kids just makes me resent coming home to them more.  I’m not done having fun.  Why do I have to stop having fun so that I can come home and start doing laundry and dishes and picking up the floor.  Fuck all of you.

I’m starting to have trouble with the amount of cleaning.  I think that I will sign up for SitterCity today and send out messages to people.  There are folks looking for housekeeping jobs who are ok with doing some nannying at the same time.  If I’m going to be a rich person, I might as well use my resources.  I can’t keep up with the five of us and be a nice person.  I resent everyone too much.  I spent hours yelling at Noah yesterday.  He has stuff.  He occasionally leaves it in piles in places that feel random and cluttery to me.  He doesn’t have much stuff any more.  He doesn’t leave that many piles.  But dear god did I flip out because one of them was in the wrong spot and I am sick of having to fucking move his shit around so that I don’t feel bothered by the visual clutter.  Of course, Noah is less than 10% of the picking up I do.  He’s fairly tidy.  He does a lot of dishes.

Who else can I yell at though?  I really am at maximum capacity on how much I yell at Shanna to clean. I should probably back off.  Calli, well, even I’m not that stupid.  Yelling at Sarah feels patently unfair because on the days she feels well she works all.damn.day.  But she has a lot of days where she doesn’t feel well and she doesn’t get much done.  I really can’t turn around and shame her because she has physical limitations due to a disability.  In my little constellation of sins harassing someone who is disabled because they don’t do more is like walking over to your neighbors house and kicking the dog to death because you are sick of barking.  It’s just not ok.  Not in any way.

But it doesn’t stop me from getting angry that I have to do the work.  I’m sure this is complicated by old stuff.  We babied Tommy.  There were a lot of things he “could” do for himself that he out and out refused.  As his baby sister I was expected to just do it.  I had nothing better to do, I should therefore be on call to help him as needed.  Right?  That didn’t go well.

For all that I kind of vaguely canonize Aunt Vonnie, it’s not like she parented in a way that produced happy healthy people.  All three of her children are financially dependent on her due to health issues.  Her oldest has Lupus and just hasn’t done much of anything for over a decade.  Her second child was in a motorcycle accident.  He’s a paraplegic.  Her youngest has diabetes and stomach problems and mental problems and he lets his girlfriend (finally wife!) support him.  She has for 20 years.  I’m not sure how she manages given that she periodically has brain tumors and can’t function for long periods because she’s not doing so hot.

I’m used to people who cannot do work because they are “sick”.  In my family there are a lot of disabled people.  They don’t take care of themselves well.  They dump all of the work in their lives on people around them even in ways they could manage.  I have decades of pent up anger around being forced to serve people who can fucking well do it for themselves.  Nearly anything can touch this off.

It’s not ok for me to be mad at Sarah all the time.  I’m not, but I don’t want to start being.  I don’t want to be angry at Sarah 40% of the time.  Not really even 20% of the time.  Sarah works as hard as she can all day long.  She is not a shirker.  She feels horrible guilt for the ways in which she is incapable of being more help.  I don’t need to shame her.  I get the impression she does it to herself.  I don’t need to be one more voice in her head being an asshole.

But it’s hard to have to do all the work.  Our pediatrician asked if it was better or worse with a disabled adult in the house.  It’s an astute question.  There is a balance.  I told her that it is immeasurably better, even with the extra work.  One of the biggest things Sarah does is she makes dinner 5/7 nights.  One night we eat out.  Noah and I balance the other night.  I no longer have to make it through every stressful day and start a big messy difficult for me to think about project right when the kids are melting down.  I cannot express what a difference this makes in every single day.

And even on Sarah’s worst days she can handle giving me thirty minutes in the garage.  I get to rest now.  I get to have personal time fairly randomly.  I get to take off and “go get something” from the store without loading the kids every single time.  And Sarah does clean.  It would be an asshole move to not mention that loudly right now.  She does clean.  But not 1/3 of the household cleaning, you know?  I don’t know what percentage she does, but I don’t split the work evenly with Noah and Sarah.  I’ll say that.  I was never truly intended to.  They have other issues on their plate.  It is appropriate that I do the lions share of household chores right now.  I am the person who is in the house the most who is most physically able to do it.

This is when I wish I was a socialist instead of a libertarian.  I wish I felt happier about the whole, “Everyone works according to their ability and takes according to their needs” thing.  I fucking resent it. I feel like I’m carrying the whole world.  I’m not.  And things will improve dramatically when Shanna gets over her current throwing phase.  But then Calli will move into it.  Sigh.

I was taught that running away is a good solution to most problems.  I no longer believe that.  I believe that the good solution is to find some kind of balance in my life so that no one in my family feels inappropriately burdened.  There is a lot of work to be done in life.  Shared work is light work.  I’m trying to change my attitude and I’m only moderately successful.  Bugger.

If I got to pick how I felt about housework it would be resignation.  I will have to do 1-2 hours of housework every day for the rest of my life.  It’s not because I’m oppressed.  It’s because there’s a lot of work to be done in a family.  It’s hard being the Mom.

When I get angry about housework it centers in my stomach.  All of a sudden I feel like I swallowed a bubble of acid and all of a sudden it breaks.  My whole stomach clenches and my torso burns.  It doesn’t really even just feel like my stomach.  It feels like the anger, stress, and frustration I feel is consuming me from the inside.  I’m really tired of feeling this way.  I’m tired of the Anger Stage.  

I’m tired of my mental health costing us over a thousand dollars a month.  It feels so very wasteful.  How in the world can I be worth this constant oceanic current of money?  Wouldn’t it just be cheaper to run away?

And we come full circle.

Being other

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I’m going to do NaNoWriMo this year.  I’ve never done it before.  I’ve always been too intimidated.  I want to write honest to goodness fiction.  But because I’m me it will be creative non-fiction instead. 😛  I want to rewrite my life.  I want to take the time to play in my head with some of the “might have beens” in my life. Stephen King says that if you want to write a book you have to do it in private, so the blog will see very little traffic in November.  I sort of feel like October is necessarily my time to do more of a run through of what happened for real and all.  Mmmm writers block.  I remember your sweet smell.  You always bring cookies.

I feel really weirdly conflicted about what I am trying to do, what I am trying to say.  Why does it have value?  Why does it have worth?  Why do I need to justify my life choices?  What am I doing?  Why am I important enough to talk about?  At this point I have to do it and get it over with because I have several hundred friends on facebook and even if only ten of them actually read the announcement, come hell or high water at the end of November I will have a book done.  I have been talking about doing this all my life.  Some day I will write down my life story.  It will be a terrible book.  I want to get past the terrible parts of my life so I can enjoy the parts that are really pretty wonderful.

I believe in the pit of my stomach that there is a story in me waiting to get out that many people will want to read.  Millions.  I’m afraid that I am too afraid to write it.  I am afraid that I am going to look for evasions.  I’m afraid I am going to instead write 3 million blog posts full of unuseful and misleading digressions.  I have something to say.  It will take a lot of words to do it.  But there is something useful in it.  It matters.  I tell myself that when I have insomnia at 5 am at least.  It’s hubris.  But I want there to be an awful lot of people who will cry when I die.  That will give me a reason to keep fighting.  And I’m too fucked up to have that as something I can deal with much in my day to day life.  So I have to keep people far away from me.

Viktor Frankl says that people can survive anything, anything, if they just have something they are living for.  People survived Auswitch because they wanted to find their mates, children, etc.  I didn’t survive torture.  But I did survive a pretty ridiculous amount of trauma.  When I talk to people about my life they react with horror, pity, disgust, sadness, and unfortunately sometimes empathy.  The degree of their reaction usually depends on how much detail I offer.  When I say, “I was abused” I get a lot of “Me too” from other people.  Then I keep talking.  There have only been a few women in my life who have met me head on and looked me full in the face while I have related anything like details.  I think Noah and Chris are the only men.  My story is too disgusting to tell.

That means that all the people who spout platitudes about how abuse sufferers shouldn’t compare trauma because people process things differently are actively damaging me.  I can not figure out how to go about living my fucking life because I’m told over and over again that abuse is abuse it is all the same and people tell me to just meditate and all my troubles will be over but the worst thing that happened to them is that their daddy touched them once through the sheet when they were 13.  I’m sorry.  My brain doesn’t work like yours.

I’m not coherent enough to delve into medical research, but I know that the research is there.  Trauma rewires your brain.  I am different from most people.  I think differently.  Throughout my entire life I have had issues in just about every place I go because my opinions are always off from the majority of the group no matter what group I am in.  I am discordant.  I don’t do it on purpose.  People tend to strongly dislike the discordant energy I bring.  Some of this is my imagination, some of it is true.  Being this kind of person is what allowed me to get away from my family.  It is why I am not wallowing in poverty with the rest of them continuing the abuse on to future generations.  Why the fuck should I have to feel bad because I think things other people don’t?

I survived.  I survived being raped over and over.  I survived being raised in a family with rampant drug addiction and alcoholism and my big problem is that my one year old and three year old trigger flashbacks so I anesthetize myself with pot so my time doesn’t wander.  I barely drink and it can’t be a bigger factor in my life because it hurts me physically too much.  Harder drugs just aren’t appealing because I don’t have the recovery time.  I’m turning to marathon running, which will require not smoking and dear god I don’t know what I will do.

This is what an honest to god healthy life looks like.  This is what the 95% have.  This is what normal people experience.  People like me don’t get here.  And I’m only kind of here.  I can’t be part of the 5%.  Because any time I chat with my neighbors I have to be very careful not to mention my sex life or my childhood.  Because even with our weird ass house… we are probably still normal, right?

If I write a book as good as my hubris tells me I can, my neighbors will figure something out.  Seriously. And that means that when people walk by my house they will whisper about me.  Oh bullshit.  They will talk loudly so I can hear it.  There will be people who think I am disgusting.  My children will have to face that.  Right now in this minute my friends who love me tell me that isn’t true.  I tell you it depends how many people read the book.  It depends if I actually get published.  If the book is published, I think it will sell.  If fucking lame ass Elizabeth Wurtzel can publish Prozac Nation…  Good God.  At least something actually happened to me that vaguely justifies my whining.  *ahem*

Who would I be if my life had taken different paths.  I don’t think that most people have as many wildly diverging options as I have had.  I can even imagine a fun, less self-destructive, path that would still lead to Noah.  I should write that tangent down.  Done.  That’s if I want to play with the idea of my One Twue Love.  He is pretty spiffy and all.  I don’t think I could do better no matter which rabbit hole I wander down.

As I’m thinking about how to write this book I realize how much my choices are influenced by the people who are standing closest to me.  I’m trying to think about what kind of people could have come into my life to lead it in a very different direction.  Like that girl I was friends with in Whittier.  When I lived in Whittier that was one of the darkest periods of my life, to use a Shamus Young phrase, and there was a girl who was my friend.  I can’t even remember her name.  She was the daughter of missionaries.  Her family was staying in a shitty house the church organization rented for them in between over seas placements.  She is the one who introduced me to books like A Wrinkle in Time; Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; The Secret Garden; The Island of the Blue Dolphins; Sideways Stories From Wayside School and biographies like Anne Frank and Helen Keller.  I was in 4th grade and I was in a serious rut.  I read nearly exclusively The Babysitters Club and I could read a new book in 20 minutes.  The other options in my house were pornographic romance novels.  I moved around so much that libraries weren’t really an option.  If you only stay in one place for three months as a young kid you don’t get around enough to go to libraries.  My mother didn’t consider such activities necessary.  That makes me think I should add the library to our weekly activities schedule.  Anyway.

So this one little girl, who happened to be the only other white kid in my class, talked to me.  She introduced me to classic childrens literature without knowing what she was doing.  She was just being near me.  I didn’t know many kids like her.  She was quiet and introspective.  Because of her upbringing she was unfailingly cheerful and big on advocating for Jesus, but that was worth the price of admission.

The first time I was invited over to her house after school was the last.  She stopped talking to me at school after that.  I went back to sitting on the edge of the playground alone.  I lived in that house for 18 months.  That was one of the shittiest periods of my life.  Third and fourth grades.  Tommy lived at home with us after he was released from the hospital.  He spent a lot of time trying to either kill me or rape me, he would probably have been happy to do either or both.  I bet he would have kept fucking my corpse.

The other kids at school taunted me about my “retarded” brother.  He would do things like run down the street naked.  He tried to attack kids.  Oh man.  I haven’t explained what Tommy was like after the accident.  Tommy was hit by a car May…something…1989.  He was in a coma for five months.  I was brought back to California by family friends (we had been living in Texas) because my mother flew out in advance to sit by Tommy’s bedside.  Because that is what you do when you are destitute and you have other kids to provide for, right?  You sit distraught next to one off-springs bedside and you completely abandon the rest of your obligations.

We lived with a lot of different people taking whatever hand outs were available.  When we got back to California it was a while before we found the house in Whittier and Tommy moved in with us.  I don’t know how much my dad paid but my mother eventually found a job.  I’m not sure how long we were homeless between Texas and Whittier.  My mom would try to claim we weren’t homeless, but we were couch surfing with friends and family.  I was watching my mom fuck a series of men to earn the shelter over our head.  I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want me to admit that out loud.  But that was my role model.  My mom went from guy to guy in between periods where she tried to feebly provide for herself and her kids and invariably things went badly.  She couldn’t earn enough money to make ends meet.  Only a couple of the people we stayed with were guys she was sleeping with (one was an old childhood sweetie and come on if you can’t leave your abusive second husband and run away to your old childhood sweetie, who can you run to?)  but the other one I remember distinctly is my uncle–my father’s brother.  So it wasn’t incest.  But it was awkward.  My fathers family appeared to me to have a pretty strict code that if a man was present it was the responsibility of whatever woman is present to fuck them.  My brothers expected it of me.  My father expected of me, my sister, and my mother even after they divorced.  My uncle traded sex for a roof for my mother and I.

These things are more complicated than they sound.  “My brother was in a horrendous accident so we stayed with my uncle for a while because his house was closest to the hospital.”  That sounds fine.  It doesn’t sound like we didn’t have anywhere to live.  Our stuff wasn’t with us.  I didn’t have my belongings and I was living out of a suitcase.  My mom was fucking my uncle and they weren’t quiet.  There was a lot of drinking.  My uncle kept his screwdrivers premixed in the fridge and that is the first place I got drunk.  When I was seven or eight.  No one noticed or cared.  For every age and stage of my life there is this easily apparent level of fucked up, and then there is all the stuff that happened in private.

I’m not doing that though.  For all that I am obsessed with transgressive sex… my kids sure don’t know anything about it.  Our conversations about all things sexual have so far been limited to things like, “Don’t put your finger in your anus or your vagina if it is dirty.  Go wash your hands first.  You don’t want to stick dirt inside your body because it will get itchy and painful.  And wash your hands afterwards because bodies have germs in different places that are supposed to stay in that place and not get spread around to other body parts.”  That’s ok, Jack.

How did I learn to be this?  I’m weird, to be sure.  But despite the incessant words in my brain, I’m not bad.  Not really.  I like to play at being bad.  I like doing things that are bad for some people or are bad in some ways.  But I always skirt a line.  I flagellate myself horribly if I feel I have gone too far over the line.  I kind of feel like hypervigilance is kind of the antithesis of being comfortable with your choices and uhm… I’d like to stop feeling it.  I want to be just comfortable in my skin.  That means accepting that some people are always going to dislike me.  I honestly feel like a lot of it is just because I smell funny.  I smell like not-them.  It’s not an actual odor, mind.  It’s a feeling that I am not part of their tribe.  That is the best way I can explain it.

Check up season

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Calli is 1! She weighs 19 lbs 6 oz and is 29″ tall.
Shanna is 3! She weighs 32.5 lbs and is 39.5″ tall.

Amusingly, Calli is actually the same weight that Shanna was at the same age. 🙂 Calli was declared charming and normal. She is officially a toddler. She walks all the time. She has something between 15 and 20 signs/words in her vocabulary. She can follow remarkably complex instructions/requests. She is practicing to be a steam whistle full time. She is intense and exploratory and wonderful.

At three the doctor starts asking questions of the kid. This was new. It was awesome. Shanna apparently knows basically all her letters and numbers (I didn’t know that) and her colors and shapes. Physically she is moving right along. Her doctor simultaneously told me that her BMI is a bit on the low side while telling me to take her off whole milk. Once again, I don’t agree with this doctor on dietary stuff.

Oh, I’m staying with this pediatrician. I picked her because she has a specialty in intergenerational patterns of abuse. I had a chat with her about my negative experiences and she was horrified. She felt really bad about making me feel uncomfortable. She told me that she thinks I am a great mother. I told her about the marijuana and she told me, “I suppose every mother has to feel guilty about something.” She’s a really nice lady. I don’t agree with all of her advice, but I’m a big girl and I can ignore it. She’s good at the important bits.

Growing and thriving.

Cheating sucks

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Stuff like that song is why I won’t agree to monogamy.  I don’t want to deal with tearful recriminations after breaking rules.  So I try to keep the rules to things I don’t want to do any way.  I really had to marry someone who is not only ok with, but enthusiastic about me having random sex.

It’s kind of weird, but at this point I sort of feel like my sexual orientation is “transgressive”.  Just like I don’t have any vanilla hobbies I am truly passionate about (except for maybe reading)… mostly I’m interested in whatever my partner is interested in.  Of course everyones taste drift with their influences.  With Tom there was a strong focus on me suffering and being denied.  By suffering I mean he wants women in 4″ + high heels pretty much all the time.  Uncomfortable bondage gear for hours.  He’s very physically demanding for all that he didn’t put out much or exercise.  His sexuality is very externalized.  It doesn’t have much to do with his genitals.  He is a true fetishist.

Noah is different.  Noah is very interested in intercourse, intercourse, intercourse.  Ok, if he has more time available to him he’s thrilled to do kinky shit as a prelude to intercourse.  But the idea of playing without intercourse is kind of confusing to him.  He gets this look on his face.  “So you get all turned on and then you…don’t fuck…  Why?”  I really love that about him.  At times when I’m at a lower libido (the last four years) it’s kind of intimidating to face some days.  I sincerely believe this breastfeeding thing will end some day and I will get my own hormones back.  My own hormones plus the benefit of never being on hormonal birth control again.  Yeah.  I’m going to want to fuck all day again.  I’m confident.

This leaves me in kind of a weird spot with bdsm stuff.  I have been “in the scene” for some value of “in” since I was 18.  I maintain contact with that world even though I don’t go to events.  I have friends there.  There is also a fuck-ton of drama.  Sex is a powerful force.  If you move through a community spreading too much of it around, you develop a bad reputation.  You want to know why you develop a bad reputation?  Because women are bitches.  Do you know what the difference between a bitch and a slut is?  A slut will fuck anyone.  A bitch will fuck anyone but you.  Or so I hear.  If you have sex with more than 2-4 (depending on community size) people in a group there tends to start being rumblings.  You will be stepping on the toes of other women.  They don’t want to share with girls like me.

I’m never entirely sure what it is about slutty women that actually unites them into a group of ‘them’ other than liking non-committed-sex.  Some do it for pay.  Some do it for fun.  Some do it in a desperate search for love.  Some do it because their entire family told them they were supposed to.  Some do it because they think it makes people like them.  Some do it because they don’t know how to have intimate friendships without rubbing sticky bits.  I would love to say that I don’t judge, but I’d be a lying sack of shit.  Of course I judge.  I judge fucking everything.  So what?  Who needs to care?

I have a lot of non-committed-sex because I like it.  It’s fun.  I like finding out what it is like to combine energies with a new person.  I love that thrill of the new.  I don’t move on into committing because it’s a lot of fucking work.  Very few people are interested in dealing with–and I mean actually dealing with, not giving me lip service–my long list of requirements of behavior.  It’s a pain in the ass.  I can’t believe there are two adults willing to live with me.  My friendships wax and wane as people can deal with my storm of emotions.  It’s hard.  I take a lot out of people.  Sex makes that more complicated, not less.  I don’t have room in my psyche to care about another person for longer than it takes to fuck them.  On one hand, that sounds awful.  But it’s reality.  Why does the truth often sound so bad?

I’ve been getting beat over the head lately from a variety of different sources with the idea that if I am a writer it is my job to write what I know as true as I know how to say it.  That does kind of sound like my vocation, yes.

I don’t cheat and I don’t want to deal with people who cheat.  People who cheat do so because they don’t feel like it is ok to change the rules such that their behavior is ok.  People cheat because they believe they are doing something wrong, but they want to do it anyway.  I don’t believe that what I am doing is actually wrong.  If I lay out the ground rules for dealing with me in advance, it’s ok.  It’s ok for me to have space in my life for what I have space for.  The drama comes from people looking at what is offered, taking it, and then complaining that it isn’t something else.

I don’t think I am really all that open to falling in love with someone again.  Never say never, but I doubt it.  Being fond of people?  Sure.  I love my friends.  But it’s different.  That’s weird only because Noah isn’t like me.  Noah probably will fall in love again.  I’ll tell you straight up that it scares the shit out of me.

Judgment

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Sometimes I wonder if I belong in a Surviving Abuse forum. I’m too judgmental. I’m sorry, once a man has escalated to chasing you with knives, beating you while *holding your 12 month old*, trying to throw you down stairs in front of your kids…

I don’t give a shit about your mental health, your needs, your whatever. I honestly kind of think you are a piece of shit if you stay with that and subject your kids to that. I have not been abused like that as an adult and I would sure as shit not let that happen in front of my kids. I have no compassion for the powerful pull to be loyal. I prosecuted my father when I was 16. I just don’t have compassion for adults who who subject children to their problems.

This would be why I moved another adult woman who is more emotionally stable than me into my house. I can’t provide 24/7 stability by myself. Between the three of us we are just about there. And there is almost an adult in the house who is kind of over sensitive from being abused herself so we monitor tone of voice a lot. 😛

Not everyone has my resources, but I honestly think more people should co-house. This kids thing is hard. Doing it alone in a nuclear family? I can’t do it. Truly. It’s just too hard.

But yeah. I think I said my piece. If you continue to subject your children to this behavior you are standing the very real risk that you will lose out on a relationship with your kids. I hate my mother. I think she is a fucking piece of shit. Do you really want your kids to feel about you the way I feel about my mother? Because I’ll tell you flat out that you (chick I’m thinking of) are going through stuff that is just as bad as what I went through as a kid. And you keep your kid there to go through it with you. I can’t be your support. I’m worried about your kids. I kind of wish I had your full name so I could call CPS and tell them to take your fucking children away from you because you are too big of a piece of shit to take care of your kids yourself.

And other things I will never post in that forum because I feel bad for her, kind of. But not enough to act like her behavior is ok. I don’t think I get to sympathize with the mother position over being an abused kid this lifetime.

Brain development

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“Addiction has been shown to be essentially a form of ‘learning,’ ” Jensen says. After all, if the brain is wired to form new connections in response to the environment, and potent psychoactive drugs suddenly enter that environment, those substances are “tapping into a much more robust habit-forming ability that adolescents have, compared to adults.”
So studies have shown that a teenager who smokes pot will still show cognitive deficits days later. An adult who smokes the same dose will return to cognitive baseline much faster.

NPR says that.  For the record, I smoked pot ~9 times before I was 27.  Ahem.

It depends on how you define it.

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In deference to those who have requested shorter posts, I had a thought that is totally different.  I usually say I haven’t been raped since I was 18.  Of course, like most of the things I say about myself, that’s true and not true.  I’ve done a fairly ridiculous amount of rape play, including things that felt absolutely traumatizingly real.  Oh, and there was that party.  With that guy.

So there’s this guy, Uncle Paul Nathan.  He used to run the Climate Theater.  I don’t know if he still does.  What I do know is that in his role as party host he is quite happy to play drug dealer.  I don’t have a moral issue with this.  What I do have an issue with is the fact that at one of his parties he pulled me into a back room and encouraged me to sit on a table or a desk, I don’t remember which.  I was absolutely enthusiastic about the idea of having sex.  It all felt good.

But you see, he didn’t have a condom.  And I wasn’t on birth control.  So as I lay there in a fairly drugged stupor I moaned “Please don’t put it in me without a condom. I’m not on birth control.  Please don’t.  Please don’t.”  He said, “I’m only going to stick it in a few times.  I won’t come.  It’s ok.”  I won’t even lie and say it felt bad.  It felt fucking incredible.

But you know?  I’m pretty sure that Paul Nathan technically raped me.  I should probably say that out loud.  I should probably publish that on fetlife.  Because I bet you I’m not the only one.  And I’m kind of angry that I have kept my fucking mouth shut for six fucking years.  Me.  I am such a fucking moron.

Wear a condom you abusive piece of shit.

Thanks for telling me to post about this, Wendy.

anger sucks

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The things I didn’t mention about my family structure before the divorce were the vices.  Apparently my dad loved to take long baths and read books.  I’ve always felt very ashamed that I had anything in common with me because my mother made it very clear that having anything in common with him was shameful.  She didn’t seem to care about the vices she shared.

At one point my mother explained to me that she didn’t believe that drugs taken while pregnant were all that big of a deal, look at her kids.  With Denise she neither smoked, nor drank, and at that point she had never been exposed to anything harder.  Denise is a heavy alcoholic and drug addict.  With J she smoked cigarettes and occasional drinks.  J is both an alcoholic and a drug addict but I get the impression he is pretty controlled with it these days.  With Tommy she smoked a lot of pot, lots of drinking, and constant smoking.  He started doing tequila shots when he was 3.  They thought it was funny.  He was probably hit by a car because he was so high he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing.  For my pregnancy?  Take the above list and add speed.  I barely drink because alcohol makes my stomach cramp and I have horrible diarrhea for days if I have more than two glasses.  I occasionally do recreational drugs. (uhhh… breastfeeding and recreational drugs don’t mix.  Neither does pregnancy and recreational drugs.  I have standards.)  But oh man do I smoke a lot of pot these days.  I find out tomorrow if I get into the PTSD study.  If I do, I have to go off the pot.

I’m very excited.  I am not enjoying smoking and I’m really not enjoying that when I go out to run I have coughing fits and they very nearly lead to puking on my neighbors lawn.  That would be pretty humiliating.  Right.  Need to find other ways of managing panic attacks.  Pot needs to go.  I hate that I have to deal with it.  I feel like smoking pot makes me like my family.  I don’t want to be like my family. My sister and brother both smoke pot so they can be nice people.  That is their line.  That is my current line.  I don’t want to be like them. I don’t want to have drug use in common with my family.  I don’t want to need a drug to function.  I hate this.  I don’t really think that pot is inferior to any pill I could be taking in its place.  I don’t want to need drugs to function.  I want to get off my ass and get it done.

Panic attacks are one of the very few things in life where working harder is one of the stupidest things you can do.  I feel unsafe.  I feel like I am careening out of control.  The important word here is control.  If I really analyze the situations that are sending me off the deep end… this is all about control.  Ok, all is a strong word.

When I was 12ish, we were living up in Redwood Estates.  I came bounding down the stairs in my energetic way and I spun around the corner quickly and almost ran right into Aunt Vonnie.  I screamed loud enough to rattle the sliding glass door and I flung myself backwards about three feet and landed on my ass.  She laughed for about five minutes.  I cried and shook.  I’ve always had a strong startle reflex.  When people appear “suddenly” in front of me I have a really strong fight or flight reflex.  And I’ll tell you that I trained myself out of flight.  At this point in my life when I feel that way I want to fight.  It takes a pretty enormous amount of self control for me to not hit or swing or shove all my body weight into someone.  It’s completely instinctive and I have the sensation in my body of tensing all of my muscles in preparation for physical contact.

I’m 30 now, so I’ve been in this body a while.  I’ve learned tricks.  I can surge forward and stop myself quickly enough to not hurt people anymore.  I couldn’t stop myself years ago when I was trying to learn this.  But I probably look pretty scary by the look Sarah keeps wearing. That makes me feel really bad.  I don’t want to trigger her either.  She had a mother with anger issues.  Noah had a mother with anger issues.

I don’t want to be the next in a long line of mothers with major anger issues.  I don’t want my children to be afraid of me.

Being a pleaser

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As I sit here alone in my thoughts.  I realize… I don’t think I’m clear on who I am.  One of my problems is that I am ok with any ‘x’ part of myself as long as it is the part that is ok given my current relationship, and I don’t even just mean romantic relationships.  Whoever I am talking to defines my current behavioral approach.  My neighbors only meet one side of me, know what I mean?  Because even when I leave the house in latex, I dodge the questions.  I had this huge long thing in my head while I was nursing Calli to sleep.  Let’s see if I can recreate it.

I came into the bdsm scene when I was 18.  It’s only now that I am understanding exactly how self absorbed I am and I am shocked and horrified by the crap people put up with.  My friends were very tolerant.  Anyway.  I came into the scene and immediately hooked up with one particular group of people.  We went to the munch together every Wednesday and on the second Saturday there was a play party.  Yes, you all know who you are.  We were a very tight knit community.  There was a lot of hanging out together on other nights of the week as well.  I was absolutely brought into a set bdsm “community” and enculturated.  That sounds pretentious.  I only think of it as a culture now that I am completely outside of it and I can examine how I changed my behavior because of it.

I started dating Tom three weeks before I turned 19.  He changed everything.  It didn’t have to be him, but it was.  In my head we had more than one relationship and I never learned to reconcile them.  I was never comfortable.  I took that out on him.  Before I say anything else, our relationship was consensual from start to finish.  He never did anything to me that broke relationship agreements.  Our relationship agreements were non-standard.  For two of the four years we dated (lived together for the last three and some) in the middle we had a 24/7 Master/slave relationship.  What that meant to us changed a lot over time.

Tom was 30 when I met him.  He had been in the scene for ten years.  Now that I look around and think about taking on a protégé I have a lot of different thoughts about him.  He followed the camp site rule but he was a heavy player.  I’m not sure that was really and truly what I should have been doing.  Now I know why Femme Car condescendingly told me that she didn’t think anyone should be in the scene at 18/19 and they should go have regular sex first.

I’m not very good at regular sex.  I’m not very good at allowing people to touch me gently.  I feel bored by gentle touching largely because I am so dissociated from my body that it takes a nasty whallop for me to notice.  I also prefer for my sex to be fast with very little foreplay.  It’s not really all that intimate of an act.  It’s about getting off.  I do it with such gusto and vigor that folks tend to feel positively about the experience.  I guess.  I don’t know.  But bdsm gave me a way to learn how to touch people.  It gave me a way to have physical connection with another body.  Tom doesn’t have sex when he plays much.  They are totally different.  It’s not that he can’t but at least at that time, they were different animals.  Most of the people he played with were not lovers.

I could play with Tom and get my needs for physical contact met without having to deal with the pain of sex.  I am hemming and hawing about saying this because it feels like an invasion of his privacy but I explicitly asked for permission.  He said he is ok with anything I write about him.  I think that is the thing he gave me, both then and now, that prove beyond a doubt to me how much he loves me.  He lived me with me long enough to know how I write.  He’s ok with the possibility of feeling public humiliation or condemnation because of things he did.  He is ok with who he is.  He knows that he never crossed any lines.  And he trusts me to talk about the things we did.  My Daddy still loves me.  Ok, end of digression.

I didn’t understand for years that we had a basic mismatch of sexual desire.  I naturally default to wanting sex 4-15 times a week.  I like sex a lot.  Thus a lot of the quick and dirty.  When you are having sex that much, it’s about the continual short burst you get from orgasm, not from the long-lingering looks you get during foreplay.  Tom… well… he masturbates every day.  That’s part of getting up.  Which always confused me, but hey.  For the first year we probably had sex 2-4 times a week.  Then it dropped to once a week.  Then I finally relented on condoms.  We had sex with condoms for years because he refused to get an STD test.  I finally decided that he would be my life partner and relented and bam, I had HPV.  He told me, “Oh yeah.  I guess I never told you I had a wart.”  When he told me that I was rocking on the bed sobbing about how I am dirty and I brought this home to him.  You see, this virus can live in your body for years and I thought I must have caught it from one of the people who raped me.

We had very different relationships.  We never learned how to communicate with one another.  He could not volunteer information and I did not know the right questions to ask.  At this point in my life I am capable of managing much more complex negotiations because of what I learned.  The HPV killed our M/s relationship slowly and then quickly.  I began acting out and he refused to punish me because he felt guilty.  From this comfy chair I project that me freaking out the way I did was fairly traumatic for him.  I began a quick descent into depression.  He didn’t know how to pull me out of it.  He told our therapist that he didn’t want to do M/s with me any more because it was too much work.  Which I interpreted as, “Holy shit!  I wrote these contracts where I promised that if she did ‘x’ I would do ‘y’ but I was just kidding.  She was supposed to do ‘x’ without me ever having to notice again and it’s not fair that she’s trying to make me work.”  I had it on god damn paper that he agreed!  God!  Fucking!  Damnit!  I don’t think I ever trusted him again and I began baiting him.

But that’s another story.  I’m talking about the sex.  Or I was.  I’m going to talk about my list.  What was my actual introduction to sex.

I count AJ as my first sexual encounter.  That was the blow job when I was three.  I skip the rapes.

The next was Jasmine.  She was a kid in the canyon where my aunt and uncle lived.  She was a year or so younger than me.  We spent hours and hours and hours lying around licking each other.  That was most of what we did.  Some digital penetration, but mostly that heavenly licking.  Ok, sometimes we would lie face to face with our thighs between one another.  I was… five, six, seven, eight?  I didn’t live there all the time.  We were both outcasts at Lakeside.  Last I heard she ran away from home when she was 13 to be a prostitute in Santa Cruz to support her drug habit.

Oh god.  I can’t do the full list.  It’s making my body shake.  I’m getting really scared when I try to think about what consensual sex I had starting around eight.  Where did I live.  Hmmm.  Oh, well it’s probably because I don’t want to admit how much sex play there was with Michael.  If I skip my rapist then I’m a liar.  That’s the problem with telling the truth.  It tends to not make you look how you want to look.

I don’t remember any sex play other than Jasmine until we moved to Texas.  The trailer park in Texas was honestly one big orgy.  It was really fucked up.  There was a lot of incest.  There was a lot of blatant sexual abuse.  And parts of it I absolutely joined willingly.  Little kids growing up in that atmosphere re-enact what they are experiencing.  It is part of life.  I feel it as a jolt every time Shanna yells “Stop it!”  Every time she yells that at me I feel this pang of horror because it reminds me of re-enacting my sexual abuse over and over and over with all those little kids.  Because I did.  I don’t know how to count that as part of my list.  I never have.  I feel very confused by it.  This is where I have issues with sex positive culture.

I want my kids to only have their early experience to sex be that some day when you are a grown up you will like someone soooooooooo much that you want to do that with them.  It will be a special and private thing.  It’s kind of weird and physically awkward but some day you will be so interested that you will be willing to be brave and talk about it so that you can figure out how to do it in a way that feels good.  Because if it isn’t feeling good then you shouldn’t be doing it.  You should stop and talk about how to make it feel good.  Really.  You deserve that.

I don’t have that.  Not really.  And I want her to.  And I want to learn how to have that.  I’m not topping from the bottom.  I am trying to allow my poor battered body some fucking rest.  I want to be allowed to feel good.  I’m tired of trying to be the heavy bottom so that I can be appealing.  That was what I was enculturated with in that little circle of bdsm people I talked about up there.  I do have a point tonight.  Hopefully I’ll get to it.

Starting when I was 18 years old I joined a little intense subgroup that focused on bondage, heavy pain, and D/s.  There was very little mention of sex.  Almost none of it happened at our “sex” parties.  And Tom and I weren’t having much of it off stage despite the fact that I have a really high libido and want really frequent intercourse.  I had to get my touch needs met in other ways.  I tried really hard to sublimate them into Tom’s needs.  (Want to know what is fucking awesome?  I came up with the word sublimate instinctually but then I second guessed myself and looked it up to make sure I am right.  That’s what reading does for you, folks.)  I wore those fucking high heels and suffered for him even when he wasn’t home.  I sat around our house tying myself up and masturbating while covering myself in clothespins.  I was going fucking insane from not fucking.  He never asked me to be monogamous.  I don’t think he wanted me to be monogamous because I bugged him constantly.  But it made him hot that I was denying myself something that I wanted that much.

Oh, and early on we learned a hypnosis party trick where you can train muscle response with hypnotic suggestion.  Have you caught on yet?  He taught me to orgasm on command.  I had an involuntary muscle spasm on his order.  He thought that was great.  Eventually I had to ask permission to orgasm.  At one point I was allowed, even encouraged, to masturbate all day but I wasn’t allowed to come without his permission.  And it really wouldn’t have been ok for me to call him all day.  Sometimes he would be nice and give me permission for more than one.  It was an odd dynamic.  Chastity play was something we did.  Yeah.  It was hot and I was engaging in such a constant amount of sexual stimulation that I really could orgasm that easily.  I needed the freaking release.

But actual intercourse became increasingly rare and increasingly painful.  Why does one always leap to animal metaphors when trying to describe a penis?  Ahem.  Tom has the cock of a porn star.  He liked to repeat the line, “You know how there are growers and showers?  One time this girl was getting ready to go down on me and she said, ‘Oh… you’re a shower, huh?’ and I said ‘What are you talking about?!'”  Hyuck hyuck.  But it was accurate.  Flaccid he is noticeably larger than a lot of men I have slept with have been while erect.  I have not missed his cock.  I’m kind of the anti-size queen.  Noah’s cock is just about dead average and I wouldn’t mind if it was smaller.  Thank god.  You all wanted to know that.

But it actually is part of the picture.  Tom was probably something like #32 on my body count list and you can see that it is a pretty generous list.  I was seeing adult penises regularly starting from when I was seven and living in that trailer park.  At 18 years old I knew I wanted intense sex all the time.  And I picked Tom.  In some ways it was a really good thing.  I did a lot of bdsm play in a very short period of time.  A lot of it alone in a room, which is about as safe as it can get.  I would really like to find out what foreplay is like.  I have trained myself out of it.  This is a digression again.

I didn’t know how to get my needs met in that relationship.  When I was his slave I tried to get my physical needs met through bdsm play because he sure as shit wasn’t fucking me.  When he withdrew emotionally because he felt guilty for giving me a disease that involved scarring part of my cervix… which might have caused problems with the children I was so intent on having… I acted out and broke our M/s contract.  I didn’t feel I had other avenues available to me for getting the attention I needed.  Asking wasn’t working.  He was at his job constantly.  When he ignored me breaking the rules of our M/s contract I became a hellcat.  I was nasty to him and I started acting out in fairly public ways.  He didn’t want to have to control me.  When we stopped doing M/s we morphed into a Daddy/little girl relationship and that actually did a lot to heal how we had treated each other.

The problem is that when you grow into being Daddy/little girl… some day the little girl has to grow up and be a partner.  We couldn’t do that together.  He didn’t want to be responsible for carrying me as a burden and I don’t blame him.  He could never commit to being there for me.  It was too much work for me and a for better, for worse relationship really has to have enough of a balance to be worthwhile.  Tom never decided that my better was worth my worse.  Sometimes that is hard to live with because I worked so hard at that relationship.  I made that relationship a goal and I feel like I failed at reaching the goal.  That’s kind of a funny thing to realize.  That’s what I did.  I think I knew more of Tom than anyone ever had before I met him.  That might be hubris, but I doubt it.  I like to poke into people and we spent a lot of time alone.  He’s a good man.  He really is.  But he didn’t want me enough.

I chased him till I was done and then I left.  I left quickly and abruptly despite us having negotiated this long-term I could still live with him while I worked on school thing.  I couldn’t be in his house.  It hurt too much all the time to have it rubbed in my face that I wasn’t good enough for him.  It was the whole white trash thing.  I couldn’t fit in with his older, settled, more educated friends.  Or so I thought.  It took a lot of years for me to be ok with the kind of friendships I have now with his friends.  It’s a totally different relationship now.  They are people I used to know.  I care about them and they periodically reach out to me in ways that make me believe they care about me.  But life is busy and the monkey sphere is only so large.  I don’t fit in their culture and I rarely visit.  They consciously and specifically rejected mine.  It’s not a judgement.  They just didn’t want it.

It’s not even that, really.  I never learned how to integrate my sex community friends because I have never mastered how to navigate my different conversational/behavioral quirks and pitfalls.  I have a rather lot of them you see.  When I think of mixing the stream of people I know from different communities I have an adrenaline shot so intense that I start to hyperventilate and I get very angry because that is a really lot of energy for me.  Trying to stay present and focused in a conversation when I feel like I am supposed to be shifting my affect back and forth drains me and makes me feel like a deceptive and disgusting person.  I feel like I don’t know how to just be in the room.  I am supposed to be performing for the room and I don’t know what role I am in so I am reading two scripts at once and I start to panic because that means I am going to fail and then I feel abject terror because oh my fucking god here is more proof that I am a fucked up piece of shit I can’t even interact with two people at once oh my god I hate me so much and then I am angry.  I’m sorry for the run-on.  Once I hit that point of feeling angry with myself I instantly feel my face flush and I feel the need to start yelling at whoever is nearest to me.

Yesterday was a hard day.  And yes, it is all connected to the relationship that started when I was 18 and it’s all connected to that orgiastic trailer park.  I’m pretty sure I’ve never fully explained the extent of what I did in that trailer park, not even to Noah.  It was remarkably kinky.  In packs of children.  Oh what did we do.  Lots and lots of glorious oral sex on everyone.  Mostly this was a bunch of little girls ranging in age from 4-ish on to about 12.  Boys were around occasionally and when they were it tended to look just like a harem scene from a bad romance novel.  We competed to learn technique.  We knew what we were supposed to be doing.  It didn’t matter if we felt awkward.  It didn’t matter if we felt gross or bad or uncomfortable.

Most of it felt like shit.  I don’t count any of those kids on my list.  I felt degraded and nasty.  Most of them were dirty and smelled.  They had terrible hygiene and it grossed me out to perform oral sex on them.  Have I ever mentioned that Tom did not see a dentist during our relationship and he only brushed his teeth a handful of times when I specifically asked him to because the smell was bothering me so much?  We didn’t kiss.  I felt repelled by being too close to his face.  This is probably a big factor in our lack of intimate sex.  I didn’t want to face him.

Part of our M/s relationship centered around me doing his hygiene for him.  No really.  I bathed him.  I shaved him.  I cut his hair.  I trimmed his finger and toe nails.  I dressed him.  I shined and polished his shoes and boots.  Really the whole personal valet thing.  I picked someone with remarkably bad hygiene and made it my job to keep him decent enough for me to have sex with.  That’s really pretty fucked up, yo.  When I trailed off on doing the hygiene I expected him to just keep it up.  He didn’t.  I wasn’t very nice about his descent into being a slovenly disgusting… I don’t know… geek?  Who the hell did I think I was dating?  And then we look at Noah.  Ha.  I’ve given up on trying to clean him up.  I try to just not notice anymore.  I do pester him to get hair cuts because I think he should be looking vaguely more professional.  That’s it.  It’s kind of weird to not have control over his bodily functions.

It was this really weird enmeshed thing.  I truly had control over Tom’s body in ways that adults don’t normally have control over other people… and yet I wasn’t in control.  It was weird.  Now as a 30 year old who has been married for five years I understand some of the bdsm we did.  I can see how doing some of those things with Noah would build intimacy if done as a one time special occasion thing.  Or even as something it is ok to ask for once in a while. But it was my job with Tom.  It was my job to care for his physical body the same way I now care for my children.  It was a fucking pain in the ass.  But it was intimate.

A kind of weird false intimacy.  One emotionally distant pillar of the community asshole told me, “It’s good that he got you young.  This way you can be trained right.”  All the older people chuckled.  I got so angry I wanted to beat the ever-loving-shit out of all of them.  I felt completely enraged.  I wasn’t very interested in being trained.  I was interested in being appreciated for the things I did and acknowledged for the ways I behaved naturally.  I enjoy caring for people.  Ok, periodically I go through these periods where I feel enraged by the pointlessness of my life… but that’s a different issue.  There has to be balance.

I like caring for people and I like teaching people to be self-sufficient so that if my care is withdrawn for some reason they are able to carry on as if I was never there.  I like to get things on a well ordered clock. This is why I normally retreat to a room alone and refuse to interact with anyone when I’m having rage issues.  My rage issues arise because I am all of a sudden confronted with how little control I have over the people around me.  Someone is standing in front of me with a stunned deer look.  I should say, “May I get by” if I want to get through an entry way.  Instead I glare in silence as frustration and anger build and then I stomp off on in a different direction.  It doesn’t matter who the person is.  I do this no matter who is here.  I swear to god it isn’t personal people.  I get just as angry with the refrigerator.  I feel so overwhelmingly powerless to control the stupid, small annoyances in my life.  I feel like I am required to submit to the whims of anyone who demands from me because… after all… I enjoy caring for people–right?  It has to be all or nothing, right?

Haven’t you ever noticed that the men show up for a dinner party and sit on the couch to chat while the women walk into the kitchen and ask to help?  That’s true in some cases but not for all.  There are awesome men who always offer to help.  They aren’t in the majority.  And even the ones who offer to ask will stop asking if they are told no a few times.  Women tend to continue to pester.  They know that I am a lying sack of shit when I say I have everything under control because they know they don’t either.  Every woman needs more help than she is getting but getting help is sometimes a lot more work than doing it yourself… so we say, “I’ve got everything under control!”  Have I mentioned how much Sarah has improved my life?  I fucking hate cooking.

That’s not even true.  I hate long-term monotonous tasks that have to be done according to other peoples schedules.  I’m fucking sick of having to feed my fucking kids eleventy billion times.  It’s fucking boring.  I have have prepared and fed probably 70% of Shanna’s meals at this point.  The percentage is dropping fast.  The only reason it is so low is because Noah has been cooking breakfast for a long time.  Shanna eats four-five meals a day.  And it’s not just snacking.  I can’t believe how much that child eats.

So my intimate life with Tom became about me caring for his hygiene and enduring as much pain as I possibly could while complaining as little as I could manage.  While still being entertaining for the people who were watching because he really only wanted to play when people were watching.  I was his slave, not his girlfriend.  We supposedly had a concurrent girlfriend/boyfriend relationship… kinda…  We certainly did some vanilla things together and had fun.  We traveled but I’m a shitty traveling companion.

I could both see and not see Tom.  It’s only now that I understand that I feel like it was a failure because I was trying to be prescriptive of our relationship rather than descriptive.  I couldn’t just be in a relationship with him.  I had to name it and write out a long document of how it would go and we both had to live up to it or it wasn’t a real relationship.  We failed at doing what we said we were going to do.  That’s hard to live with.  We tried so hard to grow past the end of our M/s but we couldn’t.  He wasn’t a good match for me as a partner.

That is a lot of why I put Noah on the pedestal I do.  I dated Noah through the last six months of my relationship with Tom.  He even spent the night and I slept between them.  I couldn’t do it.  I couldn’t deal with the increasing separation from Tom.  He didn’t want to marry me.  He didn’t want to have kids with me.  What did he want?  He wanted me to wear horribly uncomfortable shoes and allow him to cause me pain while I smile for the rest of my life.  Uhh, no thanks.

It’s actually kind of nice to think of it as a role I was auditioning for and I rejected it.  It wasn’t right for me and he didn’t think I was worth much without that.  Ouch.  I think that’s what I grieve.  For years he called me One.  Because I was that special.  He had finally found the right one.  I would have let him do anything to me to prove how devoted I was.  I could not come up with scenes that were dirty or painful enough or dangerous enough to quench the need I had to prove that I loved him.  Being there wasn’t enough.  I wanted him to constantly test me.  I demanded that he do so.  He got sick of it.  He’s a good guy.  He can only abuse his girlfriend so much before he wants to go do other things, you know?

If he could have handled switching to having sex all the time we could have had a chance.  But only having sex eleven times in the last year meant it was a no-go.  That’s ok.  Noah is awesome.


 I want to explain more about how that little bdsm group shaped me.  There was a gentle constant pressure to behave submissively.  We had a lot of puppy-pile bdsm and a fairly rigorous lack of switching at an event.  People were expected to be one way all the time, even if they switched elsewhere.  Or when Tom and I switched in public… it was always understood that I was his slave giving him physical sensations he wanted to experience because it was my job to please him.  An awful lot of it I didn’t enjoy.  It was my absolute responsibility to be gung-ho and do what he wanted and perform sexual enjoyment to fulfill his fantasies.  I’m not turned on by cross dressed men.  I’m just not.  I don’t think there is anything shameful about it.  I don’t think it’s bad.  I can think it is fun to put makeup on someone.  But seeing a man in a dress does not inspire me to have sex with that man.  Tom is actually quite into cross dressing and being “forced” to do things.

Even the sex that was available to me was sex I frankly wasn’t interested in.  It’s kind of remarkable the store of guilt I have for not enjoying more of our relationship.  I forced myself to stay in it and stay enthusiastic long after it was apparent we weren’t a match.  I learned to do that.  I was specifically taught that sex was something fairly unpleasant (hygiene, specific activities that hurt) but parts of it feel good and you are required to be available for it at all times with anyone who asks.  I’m very angry with myself for the amount of time I have been demanding that guys perform in a set specific way because that is how I trained myself to get off.  I refined it with Tom.  Because the way that I push people to treat me is often fairly unpleasant.  But I egged it on.  It was my initiation.

Why do I keep insisting on having sex that hurts me.  Maybe instead of looking for a medical assist on not tearing vaginally I should start with foreplay.  It sounds obvious, doesn’t it?  But it’s not really an option in my life right now.  If sex lasts longer than about ten minutes it becomes really painful because we don’t have a good place to have sex.  I want to get it over with too.  I think that Noah is kind of tired of my mixed messages that I am upset about not having foreplay but I push him really hard to just get it over with already because my body hurts.

I’m tired of having my body hurt.  I’m tired of being hurt.  I want to be touched gently and that means modeling it for my wild animal children.  It’s very hard that they hurt me all day long.  They don’t mean to.  It’s hard to control all those pointy little joints.  They love me so much that they want to cuddle me all day long and climb on me like monkeys.  Mt. Mommy is the best ever.  And I sit there and with every jab of an elbow, every kick, every knee dug into me… I’m tired of pretending to be happy while I am being hurt by people who love me.  So tired of it.

Then I hide and feel guilty.  Wanting to be away from my children feels like a sin.  Like I am abandoning them.  Like I am the thing that their whole fucking world is pinned on…  For most of my life my mother was the only consistent person.  I lived with her more than I lived with anyone else but I moved constantly and I wasn’t always with her.  I had to constantly adjust to new rules and new expectations of me.  If I didn’t perform appropriately, instantly, I was punished.  It was for my own good.  I had to learn.  I wanted so badly to learn and perform and be a good girl.

I really wish fewer of the lessons had been about sex.  I wish fewer of them had come from new neighbors.  When I would go over to play at the houses of my new friends in Texas I would wander by the bathroom door.  One of the step fathers spent a lot of time in there supposedly peeing while sitting down.  Most of the time he was masturbating and waiting for us to show up.  We helped.  He smelled really bad.  His hair was dark.  He probably shaved about once a week because he was pretty shaggy a lot of he time.  His breath was foul.  I remember him asking me, “Here, won’t you touch it?”

I wanted to vomit from the smell, but I stepped in and did it.  I don’t think it occurred to me until much later that I could have said no.  I was seven.  I didn’t believe I was allowed to say no when someone dropped their pants and told me to do something with what I found.  That step father only ever had us masturbate him with our hands.  He didn’t touch us.  It barely even counts, right?  I don’t consider him a rapist.  I don’t really consider myself his victim.  We were just fucking around, right?

If someone did that to my daughter I would castrate him.  I think that is why I need to have my lovers not interact with my children.  Noah has a good healthy respect for me and a bone deep understanding of me that frankly freaks me out.  I trust him because of this.  I do not trust the men I have transgressive relationships with.  I just don’t.  They’ve already proven that they have no respect for the rules of society, why exactly should I trust them around my kids?  They have proven to me only that they have a moral code that is transgressive… not that they have a moral code that aligns with me.  The only way to prove that you have a moral code that aligns with mine is to absolutely only behave in ways that you agree in advance to behave.  Tom didn’t do that.  Do I think Tom would hurt my kids?  Oh give me a fucking break, no.  Not in a million years.  I don’t think Tom has it in him to hurt a child.  Most perverts are actually pretty helpless people.  They are so petrified with guilt and shame for the things they want to do that they have to go construct this little other-life where they get to be their “real” self.  It’s not integrated into your whole person.

Unless you want to be really socially transgressive and rude about the fact that you like kinky sex.  You want everyone in the fucking coffee shop, including the five year olds, to hear about it.  No thanks.  I don’t want that in my life any more.  I need to start monitoring myself better.  I’m just as guilty about this as other people.  I take on that persona when I am out with that kind of group.  Now, I want to specifically say one thing.  It’s not about clothes.  I don’t care much about someone wearing clothes that are explicitly “adult” where children might see them.  That is something a parent is supposed to help their child learn to navigate.  I actually think that is healthy.  There is a range of human expression out there and kids have to learn to navigate it.

But I think that should be done much more slowly than other people do.  That’s ok.  As I’m dealing with the intensity of my feelings about this topic I realize that I will be fine with my kids “overhearing” those conversations in coffee shops once they hit 11, 12, 13… whenever they are obviously starting to have hormonal surges.  Because then we can talk about them and I can present my values.  I don’t want people out in the world to really change.  But I do want to be very very careful about who I bring around my kids when they are little.  I don’t want to be asked what porn is yet.  I love my friends, but I never associated with them in contexts where they watched their mouths.  So I don’t believe they can.

Most of this is because when I am around those friends I bring it up.  I am so desperate for adult conversations and flirting that I will take it any chance I can get it.  And then I feel like I am crossing lines.  And then I flagellate myself for days.

I hope I had a point somewhere.  It’s time to go have breakfast.

temper tantrum

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I just yelled at Noah and Sarah.  It’s hard that Noah has absolutely nothing he is interested in that is interesting to a child.  He insolently tolerates childrens activities because he has to.  I think that is one of our biggest points of friction.  I feel like I should entertain the kids away from him then.  Right now I am so angry that I want to hit someone.  I have all this energy and nothing to do with it.  I sit here and get bored and frustrated and all I can do is fucking clean house.  I feel like the most stupid pointless person on earth.  I hate my fucking life and I fucking hate these fucking fuckers who make me sit here fucking bored all the fucking time.

Do you know what I leave my house to do?  Go to therapy.  Go get groceries.  Entertain Shanna.  Once in a while I sneak off and do something for me but that’s probably less than once a week.  I sit in this house day after day hating my life.  As a result I have a very stable kid whose moods can be managed.  And I am so fucking insanely bored I want to do something very violent.  I am angry and trapped.  I hate these people and I hate this life.

I understand why the housewives of the 50’s were using valium.  The dispensary opens in an hour.  Being stoned means I don’t care that I have no control over my life.  That I feel apathetic about the fact that I stay home all the time.  I don’t sit any more.  I have too much nervous energy.  Instead I wander around cleaning and yelling at Shanna for making messes.  It’s charming.  I know things are changing and getting better.  It’s just not happening very fast and I am so tired of doing this.  I hate that I can’t take my kids out when I’m having a bad day because I will freak out.

Even when I’m walking around this angry, I don’t think I’m actually projecting it very much in my life.  I certainly don’t think this anger is apparent.

I’ve been thinking about my family all morning.  Thinking about how my parents hooked up.  Thinking about how people go out into the community and get really really involved because the bigger a pillar of the community you are the bigger your shadow for hiding all your dirty secrets.  I hide at home but I don’t have any secrets.  If I feel mean I admit it.  If I feel angry I talk about it.  I make people uncomfortable because I don’t know how to do the public persona thing.  I feel so raw.

Why am I so mad?  This isn’t about Noah.  Why am I so mad that he doesn’t want to do things with his kids?  I want to say my father didn’t do the kid things, but he did.  I think there is a part of me that feels like Noah just isn’t ever going to be as interested in the kids I had because I didn’t have a boy.  He is going to volunteer his interests as things to share less.  I don’t know if that is real or not, but that popped up right now.

I’m really sad.  I feel like a failure.  I feel like everyone around me has all of these needs and I have nothing to give.  I’m tired.  I want to have fun but I’m not allowed to do anything that I consider fun because it all comes with this backbreaking amount of work that makes me so angry I am incapable of enjoying anything any more.  I don’t know why I resent doing work so much.  When I am doing it I don’t mind.  I enjoy physical activity.  I do actually enjoy getting up and the physicality of maintaining a house.  But I have to do it in very particular ways and I can’t be stopping to go around people.

I feel very guilty because I keep getting angry with Sarah.  It’s making her jumpy and then I feel like a terrible person.  When I get up to do chores I tend to dart around the house.  I spontaneously jog regularly.  I just like to do it.  But uhm, she takes up space as an adult human being does and then

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I spend a lot of time feeling vaguely upset with myself for being so self-obsessed that I am utterly incapable of writing fiction.  But I just had an idea.  What would I be like if I had not been abused.  It would be interesting to try to write two chapters in parallel going through an imaginary life I could have had while comparing it to what did happen.

===================================
You never know the full impact of your life until you are dead.  I don’t want to die yet.  I figure I have at least fifty more years.  Given that I am thirty that means I have a long way to go before I hit halfway through my lifetime.  I hope I am grown up by then.

I was born the fourth child in an established relationship.  My mother was a stay-at-home mom who excelled at cooking, baking, sewing, and being involved in all aspects of her children’s school.  She often babysat for half the neighborhood because she was just good at managing children.  My father was a printer.  It was the family business.  He tended to work graveyard shifts because it earned a lot more money.  My father was also kind of the suburban ideal dad.  He coached many sports teams.  He was heavily towards boys, that’s normal.  He only wanted to teach things like sports, heavy Sci-Fi novels, and appreciating alcohol.  He figured that was his role in the family.

The first few years of my life were just a continuation of the same-ole-same-old my family had been doing for years before me.  My father was apt to say “no” to things so my mother learned how to work around that.  My mom thought that her little boys should have linoleum in their room because all they wanted to do was play cars and the carpet was terrible.  So she put the boys to sleep in her bed, took speed, and ripped the carpet out in the middle of the night and had the linoleum 3/4 installed before he came home from work.  She never did tell me what he said when he got home.  Now I can never ask.

I have to admit that most of the same-old-same-old in my family was pretty darn good.  My mom said that my father was bringing home $900/week in the 1970’s.  That’s a fair bit of money.  They were able to do things like install a pool in the back yard.  That was my sister’s 16th birthday present.  My father asked her if she wanted a horse or a pool.  She wanted to be popular in the neighborhood so she said pool.

My brothers were both born gifted athletes.  And they lived with a rather good coach who worked with them night and day.  Everyone did well enough in school to not bring shame on the family.  My brother Tommy had learning disabilities.  It was obvious he would never enjoy reading as a hobby.  Frankly it was already obvious he had a career as a professional athlete ahead of him if he wanted it, so who cares?  At least that seemed to be the feeling.  That is what the stories say.

My family lived in idyllic Southern California.  Far enough from Disneyland to be considered hick but close enough for annual passports.  We also lived biking distance from Magic Mountain.  I hear Canyon Country was a fun place to grow up in those days.  It was the kind of community you see in movies.  Tight knit.  Not the kind of place that produces monsters, right?  But actually that is the perfect place.  Most people are good kind people.  They mean well and all.  It’s easy to understand why they want to believe the nice family down the road is ok.

My father gave my sister the pool to buy her silence and consent.  I don’t know exactly what her sexual abuse was, she was never willing to tell me.  Years later she told me I never asked and I had to laugh.  I used to pester her like crazy.  I wanted to know what he did to her because I had been told he molested her.  I didn’t know what that meant.  I didn’t know how to match that up with my experiences.  I didn’t know if I was being molested or not.

My family went camping a lot.  My parents were on adult soft ball teams.  They were very active in the community.  Everyone knew them.  Why would anyone think he was raping his teenage daughter?  After all, he was so nice for adopting her anyway.  You see, my sister was a bastard.  My mother slept with someone in high school and he wasn’t ready to admit being a daddy.  He accused my mom of sleeping around.  Folks believed him.  My father’s brother married my mother’s best friend.  My parents eloped a week or so later.  I think my sister was around a year old, but I’m not sure.  Hey!  I have the family bible!  My parents got married on January 13th, 1969.  Holy shit.  My sister isn’t a bastard.  My sister was born on January 21, 1969.  Oh wow.  My father married her when she was 9 months pregnant.  I don’t know how I got that detail wrong my entire life.  Holy shit.  I thought he adopted her.  That’s actually an intense clue for me.

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

Holy shit.  I’m Russian.  Now I’m distracted by the family bible.  I had no idea that whole branch of the family was Russian.  I was always told German.  Maybe I should reread the Mennonite books.  If I want to tell this story right, I need all the background.

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I spend a lot of time feeling vaguely upset with myself for being so self-obsessed that I am utterly incapable of writing fiction.  But I just had an idea.  What would I be like if I had not been abused.  It would be interesting to try to write two chapters in parallel going through an imaginary life I could have had while comparing it to what did happen.

===================================
You never know the full impact of your life until you are dead.  I don’t want to die yet.  I figure I have at least fifty more years.  Given that I am thirty that means I have a long way to go before I hit halfway through my lifetime.  I hope I am grown up by then.

I was born the fourth child in an established relationship.  My mother was a stay-at-home mom who excelled at cooking, baking, sewing, and being involved in all aspects of her children’s school.  She often babysat for half the neighborhood because she was just good at managing children.  My father was a printer.  It was the family business.  He tended to work graveyard shifts because it earned a lot more money.  My father was also kind of the suburban ideal dad.  He coached many sports teams.  He was heavily towards boys, that’s normal.  He only wanted to teach things like sports, heavy Sci-Fi novels, and appreciating alcohol.  He figured that was his role in the family.

The first few years of my life were just a continuation of the same-ole-same-old my family had been doing for years before me.  My father was apt to say “no” to things so my mother learned how to work around that.  My mom thought that her little boys should have linoleum in their room because all they wanted to do was play cars and the carpet was terrible

There are more ups lately

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That said!  (You see, Marisa, I take directions!  Shorter entries.)  I feel like things are improving and growing ever more stable in the house.  I can’t express the safety that Sarah gives me.  She is in the house and aware.  She tracks my moods.  She appears with food and watches me eat.  She knows if I am eating enough vegetables or not.  She gives me enough protein.  I no longer have to think about buying groceries or putting them away.  My contribution to cooking lately has only involved the microwave and sandwiches.  Ok, one day I fried sausages.  The amount of work I have to do in a day is substantially lower.  So much lower that I am kind of reeling from the possibilities.  I don’t know what to do with myself.  I’m trying to find a comfortable rhythm on housework right now.  I’m trying to figure out how to structure our days.

I tend to get up and spend my time in the garage fortifying myself with apathy.  Yay apathy.  I then proceed through my morning chores (here’s the mommy-blogger part of life): I water the front and back yards (yes I’m aware there is modern technology that could take care of this for me.  Acquiring it costs money and installing it takes time, unless you are volunteering both shoosh.), dishes (we use a mountain of dishes), at least one (often three) load(s) of laundry every single day, and I’m playing with how I want to balance things like sweeping, mopping, vacuuming.  I should probably clean the windows on my house some year.  Somehow I doubt that year will be 2011.  Then I have the whole rest of the day to do stuff.  I’m generally done by 9am.  I don’t start working till 7:30.  My work day starts when Noah leaves.

That’s the part that is unbelievable luxury.  My wonderful, gorgeous, considerate husband gets up every morning and deals with both children while making breakfast.  He does this so that I can have time to go be me off away from the clamor in peace.  He believes I deserve space.  He is an introvert.  He loves me and he gives me that thing he wants more than anything else in the world: peace.  He does it by taking on all the clamor that is much harder for him.

I come out here and I purge whatever stupidity is lurking in my brain.  I do it in a myriad of ways.  I read.  I watch movies.  I think.  I get to think about my place in this universe.  I get to think about myself and my life and try to gain perspective.  A lot of why I don’t go out more is that I lack perspective.  That’s an interesting thought.  Do you want to know why people survive genocides and atrocities?  Because we are animals and we want to fucking live.  Because no matter what happens to you today, there is always hope that tomorrow will be better.  There is always hope.  As long as mankind manages to trudge forward there will be better.  If not for you, then for your children.  You have to come to a point as a parent where even if your life really sucks, you keep going because you have an obligation to try to make things better for your children.

The challenge becomes what is “better”?  I don’t think most people think about that very hard.  Of course in America that means more money, more things.  Dude, my fucking three year old has an iPad.  I am not throwing stones here.  This is my culture too.  But I’m trying to figure out what things are better in terms of my culture and what things are actually objectively “better” for a human being.  Honestly that is a lot of what I sit here and think about.

My children are going to be shaped by growing up with a mother who suffered severe trauma.  This is a fact of life.  They will never have different parents.  God damnit.  They are mine.  I get to decide what that means though.  It’s not all bad, yo.  I know that my childhood was weird, from top to bottom.  I don’t think other people understand quite what that means.  I have no idea how to pass on a standard childhood.  I quite literally don’t think I am capable of bowing to the yoke now.  My children will travel an extraordinary amount.  That’s part of why I think homeschooling is the right choice for our family, honestly.  And yet travel doesn’t teach you all of that.  Children are exposed to different cultures right where they live.  To this effect, I have to learn how to get along with other people.  That takes effort for me.  Ha.

To this effect we are out meeting our neighbors.  We are plotting a block party.  I know what my childhood was like.  I don’t know what other people really and truly experienced, by and large.  I know what kind of “better” I want for my kids though.  I want to build community where we are.  I want to know my neighbors.  I want to walk to the park from my house.  I don’t want to drive all over the bay area so I can get to know the “right kind” of people.  I am not going to chase down the crunchy crowd.  It’s too hard.  I don’t meet people well in those kinds of circumstances.  But when I’m just kind of around, and you are mostly meeting me as Shanna wanders through life?  That’s easy.  I can do that role well.  When I am being Shanna and Calli’s mom I focus on things like exploring and talking about the physical world.

There’s not a lot of room for crazy in that role.  So my neighbors don’t see it.  To them, I am the mom who has her kids out on walks all the freakin time.  I’m obviously pretty weird, but I am so friendly and cheerful that I just can’t be that bad–right?  And oh those darling little girls.  When my neighbors look at me they don’t see a crazy girl.  They see an impressively good mother because they see my kids before they see me and they make judgments.  I am told all day long what a good mother I am by everyone in my neighborhood.  I don’t think I have even told Noah or Sarah that.

I’m growing to like Fremont.  I want to stay.  I’m not overloading my neighbors.  I see them casually on walks.  We talk about the weather and gardening and children.  They don’t know anything about my childhood and I see no reason they ever should.  It’s not being in the closet exactly.  Because when I’m acting kind of twitchy and they kind of recoil I say, “I’m sorry.  I have PTSD and sometimes I say things that come out sounding a little weird.  I’m sorry.”  Then they smile in an affirming way, touch me on the shoulder and say it’s ok.  That has happened twice.  They now make a point of coming out and talking to Shanna.

I need to find out how to put down roots right where I am.  If I am going to be…something.  I don’t know what.  I need to do it here.  I need to figure out what better will be for my kids.  And early mornings are a great time to think about it.  Whatever it is I don’t have time to do it yet.  Right now I need to figure out how this daily life thing goes.

We have started spending more dedicated time every day where I more consciously lead us in a learning direction.  Working more specifically with numbers, talking more about the stuff I am reading.  Playing games where she responds with answers.  I am not pushy about it and when her attention wanders I follow.  I tend to explain why I think she will want to learn ‘x’ some day but now isn’t the time.  Like surfing.  She has noticed that surfing exists and I told her that I totally support her in wanting to learn to surf!  Uhm, let’s start with swimming…

I feel like I am trying to help her understand long-term planning.  Doesn’t every parent do this?  I won’t have a public school to teach her stuff though.  I have to do it.  It’s really complicated trying to think about all the things public school actually teaches as opposed to what they think they are teaching.  What lessons about conformity, group identity, and innate understanding of beurocracy will my children simply miss?  What did I miss?  Do I care?  It’s fun to think about.

I’m mostly trying to rest and recover from the amount of sleep deprivation I have been operating under.  My body is so wasted.  I want to start running soon, but I need to get sleep under control first.  I don’t actually think I can yet.  I get too dizzy.  I’m working on it.

I have to post or I’ll ramble…

This is why reading is dangerous.

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I’ve been reading Le Liasons Dangeruses and it’s hot and fun and neat.  I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a short story in that style.  I uhm had the not-so-brilliant idea to start a livejournal flamewar between entirely consensual people about a fictional break up.  See a parallel?  It uhm, didn’t go well.  I feel guilty because I more or less pulled everyone into it and it turned into a whole drama and now people are very upset.  Maybe I should stop reading books.  They give me ideas.

Or maybe I should have paid more attention to the preface.  The author was not well thought of.  In fact, most of society reviled him, rejected him, and treated him like a monster.  By the end of his life he publicly repudiated the book and tried to start converting other people into rejecting the book.  If I think things like an internet flamewar are funny, I am going to be in limited company.  I like the satire involved.  I actually had a fairly long entry mostly done to continue on with the next stage of the drama.  I started getting specific.  Then someone told my friend that this process felt like an assault.  Like a violent airing of dirty laundry.  I panicked and deleted what I had written.  I’m kind of pissed off at myself for deleting it.  It was an interesting entry.  It had potential.  I had many points in my little entry that were wonderful jumping off points for my cohorts.  There were things for Noah, Sarah, and L to play off of.  It was completely over the top.  Truly.  How could anyone have magically been involved in my life in a daily fashion for 18 years without anyone hearing about it?  But I digress.

I was not going to post any of that here.  And that is when I realized that I was filtering the story.  For whatever reason this space is a space where I keep my writing absolutely publicly accessible.  I’m not going to require that anyone keep up with a bunch of other sources to follow this.  And most entries are fairly stand alone, I think.  That other blogging site is different.  It’s a community site.  It’s self-referential.    I think that if I had really wanted to do this right, the thing to do would have been to coordinate more.  Maybe all of us should have created a filter and written the whole thing to completion before publishing the entries at specific times or all at once.  That would have worked and been interesting.

Uhh… what we did was kind of lame and half-ass.  We weren’t writing fast enough.  And the people who had posted were not available all day to monitor the dwama and stomp on the flames.  Jury duty is kind of a bitch like that.  We probably should have thought of that too.  Shit.  My stupid is showing.  Or rather, maybe that I’m not the best planner at all times.  This was ill thought out.  That frustrates the hell out of me.  Now I don’t feel comfortable finishing.  Even if we did make a filter and do the whole thing off in private, I now have this ball of anxiety in my stomach.

You see, my filth rubbed off on my friend.  People are mad at her just because she was stupid enough to come be influenced by my.  The things I want to do are bad.  I triggered an “assault” through “violent airing of dirty laundry”.  Wow.  I’m going to now do everything I can to ensure I don’t run into that woman at a party.  I don’t think I would be able to look her in the face without feeling waves of shame.  I’ll take my shitty white trash taste away from you.  I’m sorry I did something somewhere you could possibly see it that you don’t like.

Lj is dead. Long live satire.

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LJ has been a constant in my life for a long time. At this point I am moving most of my serious blogging elsewhere. But I like LJ. I have been a festering pit of despair for a few months. I’m trying to pull out of it. To that effect I am inviting more people over to my house and we are being silly and creating in-jokes. How about if I make a deal with you, Oh LJ-land. When I am being silly with the people who visit my house and creating in-jokes I will use the tag -that-. If you don’t like bitchy dwama-filled flame fests amongst people who have never dated, probably will never date, and who think it is all hilarious skip those posts.

Why I write about my trauma

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Recently else-net some folks were talking about the fact that getting into the nitty-gritty of their trauma just feels like rewounding.  It serves no purpose so they avoid doing it.  I immediately felt defensive.  I have been explicitly told by a therapist that I am damaging people by writing about what happened to me.  I only had one appointment with her.  Whereas it is good and healthy for me to journal about it… I shouldn’t inflict my trauma on anyone.  I am in fact abusing them.

Let’s uhhhh look at that for a minute.  If I sit in the privacy of my garage and write about things that happened to me as a child on the internet I am an abuser.  Even though no one (not even my husband) is compelled to read what I write?  If people are not interested or it is too intense, they stop reading.  Most of my closest friends can’t handle reading my blog and they are very frank about it.  Not only do they not want the intensity of the stories they can’t handle the volume of reading.  I’m uhm prolific.  That’s ok.

This kind of thing is a difference in philosophy.  In my opinion.  Now, I don’t have a degree to back me up on this topic (psychology) but it seems as though most of them are just making shit up.  I might as well do the same thing seeing as I’m only trying to make me happy.  My theory is: I feel better when I talk about the stuff from my childhood.  Not right away.  Not when I am doing it.  After every mad rush of writing I feel relieved.  I feel like I no longer have to carry the secret around any more.  It’s not a secret.  It’s just a story.  It’s a story that other people know now.  It’s a story I can look at and try to find value in as I go about my life.  It probably won’t have value to other people because their lives are different.

I’m not really writing for anyone else’s benefit though.  I write because I am compelled to.  I always have been.  I don’t think my approach is necessarily sane but I’m not sure you can call it insane exactly.  Well, I do the same thing over and over and I hope to keep getting the same reaction–self improvement.

I write because I want to.  It’s as simple as that.  I don’t think that means anyone else has to.  But I want to.  If you don’t like what I write, don’t read it.

Now if only I believed all this.

I feel so betrayed.

3 Replies

I have worked so hard on my issues. I have tried to be the best condescending primary partner ever. I tolerated all that interacting. I didn’t make drama. I don’t understand exactly why anyone would get to the point of not wanting to share my husband. Didn’t I bend over backwards far enough for you? Didn’t I ensure that all your picky little preferences were met?! I see how it is now. Fine. Show up for dinner at 4 if you are going to be like that.