Alright. So I’m feeling really bad about myself. I feel like I’m ruining Noah’s life. I feel like I am a bad person who deserves suffering.

Why?

Because I know that Noah has worked and worked and worked to support me and I feel like there isn’t an amount of work I could do to repay what he has given me. Noah has given me safety, security, love, attention, and adoration. Things I didn’t really ever have before him.

I devalue almost everything I give.

Last night Noah and I had a date and a very positive conversation. It occurred to me that part of the problem with either of us dating outside the marriage is that both of us came into this marriage with extreme adoration deficits. Essentially: we both grew up being despised by everyone around us. It was perpetrated in different ways and there were vastly different surrounding circumstances… but the basic fact remains that we both arrived in adulthood feeling like we are unlovable.

Both of us drink in positive attention from one another like it is necessary for life. Seeing that elixir of life be given to someone else feels like the most extreme betrayal possible. You are supposed to be the one person who adores me and who doesn’t take it away to give to other people.

Shit.

Want to know something funny? My friends and my therapist are all starting to chant in unison, “Why in the hell do y’all consider dating?! Be swingers. Swinging is fine. Y’all like sex and don’t feel threatened by it. STOP DATING.”

Which is kind of hilarious to me. Ahem.

I feel like such advice would not have been on offer 20 years ago. I feel like I am uniquely blessed in having friends who see intimacy and sex as separate. I feel like I have managed to find a support network that probably sees us as basically healthy but we need to respect one another’s boundaries in this way.

Well, I don’t know if folks see me as basically healthy but an awful lot of people are rooting for my marriage.

Thank you. I am leaning heavily on your hope and your belief. I am depending on you all to believe for me when I can’t. Because if you carry the load for me while I can’t then maybe when I am able to pick it up again by myself it won’t be broken.

I find my attitude that I am alone in this world to be idiotic and hypocritical in the extreme. If I am more charitable I would say, “This is a part of my brain that is not able to recognize current reality through the damage that was done early in my life.” I have ridiculously loyal and wonderful friends. They touch base with me in a myriad of ways. The troublesome part is that they live so spread out that I don’t see them very often and that fucks with my sense of reality. I know that they are out there in the world loving me and rooting for me. But I don’t see them very often and that is hurting me. I miss Pam. Having her visit once a week for so long was a serious balm to my soul. I felt bad the whole time about the emotional variation she witnessed because she was around so often as a safe-to-vent-at-adult. But it was incredibly healing.

It is occurring to me that I need to schedule a night a week where I interact with friends. I’ve spent a lot of years just kinda hanging out in my house not interacting with people outside of the house that much. It hurts me. It hurts that it feels like I exist to meet the needs of Noah and my kids and I’m supposed to wait around and be nothing in and of myself in between when they have needs. I cannot keep this up. It is hurting me in ways that are going to cause big problems forever.

Have I mentioned that a few wonderful friends invited themselves over in December? I am so grateful I feel like a puddle of goo. Thank you for loving me enough to reach out and say, “Hey I’m free on this range of days. What works for you?” That was perfect and loving and kind.

Thank you.

What is the difference between intimacy and sex? I need intimacy with people other than just my family. I need it. It’s not optional for me. I feel like part of the reason I went for sex this year was because I need intimacy and I don’t have a lot of time in which to get it so I try to get a maximum size dump as quickly as possible. But I hurt Noah a lot in this process.

I’m not the only one in this relationship who feels like I should die if the other dates.

(This post has been open for a few days and I’m not going to keep going with it. So you get kind of a weird ending here.)

Do you know what I like about my marriage? We are the sort of people who want to schedule a 12 hour day of emotional processing and then we just do it. Hammer away at topic after topic after topic.

I haven’t been posting that much. Part of that is I feel like kind a fuckwad for how many ups and downs there have been. I understand that most relationships have ups and downs and all, but most people don’t publish them on the internet. I get to feeling self conscious and stupid.

I feel kinda bad about being a train wreck sometimes.

Things are improving a lot. I think. I don’t get to speak for Noah. We are doing a lot of bonding sorta stuff. We are talking about the nitty gritty of our insecurities. “I’m sorry I flip out when you date.” “Yeah but I do it too…”

It’s complicated.

What do we want from one another or from other people in our lives? Shit if we had an easy answer to that we wouldn’t need to spend so god damn much time talking.

Seriously, we had to get the kids out of the house so that we could talk and talk and talk without interruption. It is glorious having a Bonus Family in our lives. I gotta say. Support is fucking awesome.

Today we took turns wrecking our bodies and taking care of each other. Because it facilitates bonding in some weird ass way. When you are helpless, sick, and incapable of caring for yourself it just feels different having someone take care of you. We take care of one another all the damn time. We have an incredibly codependent relationship and we like it that way. But it’s different. If you can get up and do it for yourself… it’s a lot easier to take it for granted when someone does it for you. But if you are stuck sitting in one place as you kinda flail and you are incapable of doing for yourself…

You take care of me. I love you.

It’s complicated, yo.

We talked about M/s stuff and what it means to me. We really didn’t get that into what it means to Noah. Not really. I think that needs to move up the agenda in importance. Luckily we have another trash our bodies and talk all day event coming up soon.

These events have to go away soon. This is our last shot for years cause I don’t act like this while pregnant or nursing. I want to say and/or nursing because I know how it goes for me. Oh boy.

Anyway. We are trying to get a whole bunch of processing in before my body only kind of belongs to me. We tried doing a bunch of “set the rules and coast” ten years ago. It was mixed. I wonder how it will work this time. I made deals I could not keep. I was stupid. I was… uhm, I’ll call it optimistic to be generous with myself.

I thought I could take one for the team. Whenever it was needed. Forever. Guess what? I really fucking can’t.

But what does that mean?

Noah asked me what M/s means to me. I said it is kind of like a highly bred puppy. If the right person buys the puppy and trains them and enters them in contests… that puppy could be a shining star. That puppy could enrich the life of its owner both literally and metaphorically.

But if the puppy instead ends up in a shelter and is adopted as a random mutt… guess what? That puppy probably won’t hit its potential. I’m not saying it will be completely worthless and have nothing to offer in terms of companionship… but the animal probably won’t be as healthy. The animal will not be as comfortable or as cared for.

M/s, to me, is a way of taking responsibility for one another. It is a way of saying, “As the slave it is my job to serve you and make your life better and make us as a unit better than we can be alone. It is your job as the Master to look at me and sometimes know better than I know myself what I need to be ok and successful.”

It’s not really a fair deal, is it?

There is no fucking fair.

We are doing a lot of specifically talking about the work we do for one another. It’s a fucking long list. I used to be an asshole and say that Noah was lazy… uhm, err I haven’t thought it in years and I’ve been a terrible influence on him. At this point he probably works far past the point of healthfulness.

Dude, he showed me the scheduling program he uses to track how to be an adoring husband and how to be a devoted father (in addition to a wide variety of more selfish/not me related topics) and… I swear I got an organizational hard on. Holy shit. I’m a job.

He has taken notes for years on how to be a better partner for me. He writes down what brands and styles of things I like. He tracks what kinds of prep to do before dates (take a shower, trim beard, research activities… he lists it all).

I god damn know I’m unworthy. Holy fucking shit.

I feel kind of guilty for not having taken more notes. heh (I keep it in my head better.)

Noah knows that one of the straws that broke the camels back when I left my Owner was that after four god damn years of eating together at McDonald’s together the bastard had no idea what sauce I ate on my nuggets week after week after week. That… that showed me how little I existed in front of my Owner.

Noah has heard all of my stories and he makes damn sure I don’t have to complain about the same problem repeatedly.

Except for the things where I do. Because life is like that. Damnit.

But there are some things that are easy to fix. He can see the simple stuff and make sure he doesn’t fuck up there. Holy tomato that’s a lot of effort.

We were talking about how hard it is when the other of us falls in love. He kinda asked why I fell so hard for Deity. Oh, that’s easy. Deity managed to jump up and down on one of my big buttons in life. He talks to me and about me like he is proud of knowing me.

I’ve fucked a lot of people. Do you know how many of them announce in public that they are connected to me and they are proud of that and they think I’m just so god damn awesome. If I stretch I could definitely get off a second hand of partners. Which means I’m probably under a 10% rate.

The vast majority of people who fuck me act kind of embarrassed about it later. They don’t introduce me to their families. They don’t bring me around their friends. They don’t talk about me in public.

Even most of my friends don’t introduce me to their families. I feel like Sarah, Jenny, and Pam stand out in that arena. They are the friends who have absorbed me seriously into their families. Blacksheep has done this to a slightly less extreme degree but I get the impression that if she liked her parents more I would have been introduced. I certainly know her moms-in-law.

It’s complicated.

I feel shitty about myself a lot of the time. I steal pride from the people who love me and pretend I felt it all along. Even though I didn’t. So having people be all, “Dude, you are AWESOME” is a completely self absorbed reason for loving them. They see me as lovable and that makes me love them.

I’m not sure if it is pathetic or just kinda normal.

I don’t want to make it sound like no one else has introduced me to their families. That’s hyperbole. It’s… there is a difference between, “Here is my buddy. You’ll probably never see them again” and “This is MY Krissy. You will be nice to her. She’s mine. I’m keeping her.”

I get that sometimes. I am that fucking lucky sometimes.

Pam treats me that way. Sarah treats me like that. I’ve known Jenny’s family so long that… if I’m around for family events I do feel invited even if I’m kinda sorta inviting myself. The trouble is physical proximity not emotional distance.

Noah didn’t have a great relationship with his family before me but when his family acted like I was to be shunned he ditched them and kept me. It’s a big deal.

As we look at having more children and we talk about why we want it so much and why our kids blow our minds… Our children don’t have that hollow, brittle, breakable feeling that people like us have. Noah and I both act like we are empty inside and we desperately need to chase love in order to be accepted. We manifest this drive differently but it is a very similar motivation.

Our kids don’t have that. Our kids glow with feeling loved and accepted.

I’ve been trying hard to reach out to adults who might be able to help me understand Youngest Child’s journey better. I need to write a whole separate post about this process, but in very short I’ll say: I’m hearing from a lot of different people that the fact that I want to help and I want to accept my kid however they feel they are… that’s going to make the difference.

I really and truly hope they are right. I’m trying so fucking hard to provide support. I want my kid to feel like whatever they needed, I found a god damn way to provide. I mean… I’m going to not do everything right. They will hurt and fail sometimes.

I recently read a thing. I feel bad about plagiarizing but I seriously can’t remember where I read it. It talked about how someone was reading The Little House on the Prairie and Laura Ingalls wasn’t traumatized by her life it was Just Something That Happened. It made me think about a thing.

People aren’t traumatized by bad things happening to them. It is bad things happening when they really should’t that traumatizes people.

That is complicated. There is a difference between everyone everyone starving because there isn’t food that is different from sexual assault. My whole life will be colored by that sexual assault shit. But why? When will it stop mattering? When it stops impacting how I interact with other people and it really still does.

I was talking to Noah about religion. I won’t tell his story because that is his to tell, but I keep coming back to how humanity is my religion. Not individuals. People. As a whole. I work and I try and I grow because I want to be better for people as a whole. I want to do better for you. I want to help all of us. From some person I’ve never met in Maine (I recently met a lovely Mainer for the first time) to people in Africa and Australia. It doesn’t matter to me that your life isn’t about me. I want to be better for you when I meet you someday because maybe I will. I do like to travel.

Do you know what I really suck at? Understanding that everyone has individual temperature comfort ranges. But anyway.

I should stop typing but I’ve missed you, internet. Thank you for being here. Thank you for giving me a place to feel like I get to exist even as fucktastically weird as I am.

We are made entirely of flaws stitched together with bad intentions. (And I didn’t make that phrase up either.) I meant good intentions. Now there is a slip…

I have been thinking about this constantly for months. What is it I got out of fucking people other than Noah? How does that help me have an individual self?

For one thing, it is about making a choice with my body about my body that isn’t about Noah.

I haven’t made many choices in the last ten years that didn’t have Noah as a strong influencing factor if my choices didn’t flat revolve around him. I moved into his house. I manage his money as respectfully as I can to ensure that he has a safe and comfortable old age. I do a lot of cleaning and organizing because it makes the house easier to live in and he agrees that I’m right. My work does improve his life.

Sometimes it is hard to feel like our children aren’t his children. Which is stupid and bullshit. I wanted these kids. I want them so much my heart aches. But I still feel like a nanny to his kids a lot of the time. It doesn’t help that just recently I’m feeling shitty about the fact that I’m the awful parent who enforces rules and academics and he is fun. I’m not very fun.

I interact with a lot of people. Is it for me? That’s such a weird question.

I spend a lot of time listening to people. I love it. I seek it out. I’m a great listener. I often wonder if people see me when I’m listening to them or am I taking the place of a useful stuffed animal? Sometimes I wonder who there is to see if someone looks at me.

I’m told I am “so strong” because I have “overcome” so much. I don’t feel strong and I don’t feel like I have overcome. Yes, I’m not poor anymore. Yes, I did get an education. So?

What do any of these things mean? I know people who went through college and had absolutely no individuation in any way. They participate in their parents sorority/fraternity and hang out with the children of people their parents knew. They marry the kind of person they are supposed to and occupy the position in society that was more or less carved for them at birth.

I really do know a lot of kinds of people.

I know people who live in extreme generational poverty and who will probably never escape that cycle even though they have “overcome” great hurdles in terms of mental health problems or domestic violence.

What are we overcoming? What does that mean?

I’m not in a political fight. There is no competition in my life. What have I overcome? My family of origin? My own inner desire to ensure that everything in my life turns to shit as proof that it was all meant to be to start with?

Not everything I touch turns to shit. There are things I do well. I am a good teacher. I was a good teacher to other peoples’ children and I think I am a good teacher to my children.

What does it mean to be a teacher? For me, part of being a teacher has always been the ability to set aside my point of view and figure out why someone isn’t understanding something then back fill the schema necessary to help them understand.

It’s god damn exhausting.

Am I an individual when I do that? I feel like I give up bits of my personality over and over in this process. I am not an individual. I am a sliver of a thing greater than myself and I need to tap into that connection we all share in order to help you.

Is that individuation or melding?

I am scared to fucking death that when people think/say/hear “Krissy Gibbs” they will think, “Oh–Noah’s wife” or “______’s mom”.

I feel selfish and terrible because I want to be something other than an accessory to their lives. I don’t want to be the brood mare. I really don’t.

Which is kinda stupid. There are people all over the damn country who know me and who barely know Noah and who have only a nodding relationship with my children. Why isn’t that enough? Why do I feel so damn small?

Because for a very large chunk of the last 10 years my life has been inside my house cleaning. Woo.

Sometimes one of my female friends will indicate that the level of cleanliness in my house causes them to feel bad. Want to know something funny? When I go to their houses and I see the chaos I feel like, “Ah. Signs of someone with something better to do than clean. I feel envy.”

The grass is always greener.

I hate myself for my feelings. I feel deeply inferior to the women in my life who have jobs and careers and who help people and who accomplish things other than cleaning the kitchen.

But I don’t want to stop home schooling my kids. I really don’t. I would not give this up for a $250k/year job. I really wouldn’t.

So what the fuck. I created this bind and now I bitch and bitch and bitch about it.

Having babies is not a thing to do with a life. A life is bigger than that.

I miss teaching. I miss that feeling of connection. I god damn loved having a benevolent dictatorship where people came to learn in an environment where I set the rules. Ok, my house is that exact same dynamic only bigger. My students had a very strong sense of me as a person.

Sometimes I wonder if my students had a better sense of me than my children because my students had more perspective. My children barely view me as a human being separate from them. My children barely perceive me as getting to go pee without them.

Fuck. I’m about to lose the ability to use the toilet alone again for years. Sob.

I feel so incredibly torn. I want another baby. I really do. I want to meet this child. I love my kids so much I feel pain when I think of them and I definitely want to sign up for more of this. But I have such mixed feelings. Noah calls the way we handle babyhood the “high intensity version of parenting” and I call it “idiocy combined with little support network”.

I kind of give up the idea that I get to have needs in the first year of life. I exist as a life support unit. It really sorta sucks. But I pray it pays off in the long run. To be fair, my two existing children glow with attachment and health and love. Could I have done that with less effort? I’ll never know.

I am curious how it will go with two older children in the house who desperately want to bond with a baby. They won’t be adult support (I wouldn’t know what that was like anyway–not in an ongoing way) but they will be there to help play with a baby while I do the dishes. It’ll be different.

I’m still grateful that Sarah, Jenny, Andrew, and Paula babysat when Eldest Child was under a year old. Y’all are wonderful, amazing people to sit through that damn much crying. Holy shit that kid was hard. I did have some support. I can remember all the dates I got to have that first year. There weren’t many.

It isn’t that I have no support. I have some support. It is that it is sporadic and I can’t depend on it in an ongoing way. Not Sarah, not Jenny, not Paula nor Andrew will be around for Next Kid.

I’m not mad. I’m reflecting upon reality.

Why is it not worth it to me to let Noah date so that I can date if that is the easiest/best way for me to feel individuated at this stage?

Because I am honestly afraid I will not see my children become adults if I do. I really don’t like me very much. I’d kind of appreciate it if Noah replaced me so I could go. I can’t set up that possibility. It isn’t fair to anyone involved.

But that doesn’t mean I get to date and Noah doesn’t. That ain’t happening for a whole bunch of reasons.

Instead I’m flipping out in my house. I’m brittle and difficult and snippy. I’m being awful.

I need to find something that I can do by myself outside of my house that has no connection to my family or sex.

You know… maybe I could tutor at the library. It’s a small commitment. It’s local. It’s not a BIG THING. It’s not something Noah would find threatening. It would be small scale teaching. It would be contact with people outside my family.

I’ve been flailing for a while. I need to find an option to consider that is very different from what I’ve thought about so far. I’m not sure I can handle a hobby. They tend to consume my life. But I could find a way to have a 2-4 hour/week commitment to a volunteer thing. Noah would absolutely support that. He would shove my ass out the door with a big smile saying, “Have fun!”

It wouldn’t be threatening at all.

I think this is one of the more positive options I’ve come up with in a while. Maybe I should look into that. Do I have spare time? No. I really don’t. But 2 hours/week? That I could do. That wouldn’t eat me alive. It would be a commitment to something outside my family. I really fucking need that right now.

I’ve always been shit at taking criticism. That’s not new. But I feel like an old habit is popping its head up and making trouble lately. I can sometimes take criticism well. Sometimes I just… I feel like every specific “You could do x better” is the same as “You are a piece of shit who should die.”

This is kinda shitty for the people in my life.

Noah is still justifiably upset about a lot of what I did during nonmonogamy. I’m not upset that he is upset. He’s allowed to have feelings. What I’m not handling is long lists of “And then you did this and then you did this and then you did this” because I want to turn around and deflect blame. MAYBE I DID THAT BECAUSE I WAS SO FUCKING SICK OF YOU FUCKING ME WHILE I CLENCHED MY GOD DAMN FISTS AND GRITTED MY TEETH. IF YOU ARE SO PISSED OFF AT WHAT I DID MAYBE LOOK AT WHAT YOU DID TO ME FIRST.

It’s like my shrink immediately jumping to assuming Noah has ADHD (because I was diagnosed and we suspect he has it) and he needs to have his behavior excused for it but I still need to work on my behavior because my behavior isn’t good enough.

I’m feeling…

I feel like I’m standing next to the fucking golden boy who can do no wrong and I’m the evil bitch who is ruining his life by not being passive and accepting and giving enough.

I’m feeling really angry.

If I respond badly to being hurt I am bad.

I’m sorry I am not a fucking saint. Noah is the one campaigning for sainthood, not me. Yes yes, he’s perfect. He tries so much harder than other men so he can’t be criticized whereas I’m just an ungrateful bitch who is not trying hard enough to deserve him.

I’m feeling…

like shit.

I don’t feel good enough for anything and it makes me feel really mean.

I feel overwhelmed with waves of sadness.

I asked the construction workers how much longer this would take yesterday. I was told 5-6 more weeks. I wrote 7 on the calendar. They will be here till January. I’m living in hell till after Christmas. Weee.

Well, on the upside I only have ~20 hours of tile layout left and 3 weeks in which to do it. But a lot of the other settling can’t happen yet. I’m going bananas. We are on week 9. Of a 6-8 week project. And we have 5-7 weeks to go.

I want to put my head through a window.

Be cheerful! Be chipper! Wait on everyone! Do it with a smile! Come up with intellectual exercises to stimulate and develop your children constantly without rest! Do manual labor all day then throw your legs up in the air with a smile! Don’t be ungrateful!

Fuck gratitude.

I am very seriously struggling with the fact that I’m not allowed to self harm to force myself back into the small box I’m supposed to be living in. I’m supposed to do it with just force of will.

I’m running low on willpower.

I should get everything done without being obnoxious about scheduling and neurotic about following through on things.

Oh yeah. That’ll be effective.

Geez Krissy. How dare you show your strain and inconvenience people. How rude.

I’m having big feelings.

I’m hiding from my neighbors because quite a few are Trump supporters and I just can’t talk to them right this minute or I will scream at the top of my lungs that I hope they die slowly in a lot of pain like they want to cause to minority groups. Not really useful. I’ll get back to useful dialogue. Right this second I have no persuasion or tact or diplomacy in me.

Fuck you and your bigoted actions that have damned millions of people. Fuck you with a fucking chain saw.

I have no patience for fools.

I’m not good at asking for what I need. I would go so far as to say I am a complete asshole. I bottle things up until I explode and then I’m mean.

Not good at asking for my needs. Not at all.

This is complicated. The reasons I am this way are many and beside the point. I can stand up for some needs in some ways. I’m way better at advocating for other people than I am for myself. But I can stand up for myself in some ways. In some specific ways it is harder than other areas of my life.

I am bad at telling someone I am deeply emotionally involved with about my sexual needs. Especially if I perceive my needs as being different from theirs and I am not supposed to make things difficult.

I’m really compulsive about responsibility for sexual gratification. Having a father who tells you over and over again that it is your responsibility to get people off makes that hard. I know that a great many folks have gotten the message in some way in some spaces but it’s different when it is your father and you are a toddler/young child.

Imprinting, yo.

I have tried very hard over the years to live up to my end of the bargain. I have tried to be always-available-at-your-pleasure-cum-dumpster. I was told by my mother that when you get married you agree to whore for that person forever, so pick wisely.

I have spent a lot of my marriage feeling like I married someone who wants sex every day and that means I get to do that. Because as my shrink says, Marriage is about meeting your partner’s sexual needs.

I’m hurting myself really badly in service of this belief.

I mean, I think I have slowed the damage. I think things are improving. Our sex life is getting less frequent and a lot better when it happens.

But no, I’m not good at asserting boundaries until I am attacking you because how the fuck dare you do that to me.

No it isn’t fair.

Do you know how hard it has been for me to learn the academic skills and organization stuff I do? All of a sudden I’m getting validation that yeah it is shittier for my brain to do these things and it feels like it comes way too late to do any good. I feel like I missed a lot of windows on being able to be functional or more adult than I am because I couldn’t fucking settle down and just do the thing.

I am as defensive and nasty as I am because my entire sense of self is built out of match sticks and playing cards. If you breathe on it too hard it might fall down. Then I have to build it again painstakingly. It is fucking annoying to do at this point.

I think that in life you pick your battles. You can’t have everything you want. You can’t win every fight. So be careful what you argue about.

I have not wanted to argue with Noah about the sex stuff harder than I have for a lot of very complicated reasons. And I hit a wall. A wall where I needed to see what is me and what is us.

I had a lot of time to think while he was in Cincinnati because I apparently just don’t need sleep if he isn’t here. I also didn’t eat much. It was swell. Anyway, I spent a lot of time thinking.

I have always assumed/acted like Noah not having much natural empathy means he doesn’t have the same feelings I have. Which has apparently been causing some problems and serious misunderstandings. Whoops.

It did take the second time of crying to feel like Holy shit this is really real and isn’t going to go away as a source of pain. Maybe that’s because I’m a self absorbed piece of shit. Noah sat here in this house and waited for me to go have an adventure on the road trip and then I came home and treated him like shit.

This has not been one of my best years.

I don’t understand why Noah thinks that being married to me is much better than not being married to me but as long as he’s staying, I am.

But we do need to find a way to build more separation into our relationship. We are merged to a point where it is causing problems. I don’t really have a me left and I need one.

Yeah yeah I went on the roadtrip… I worked in my mom role 24 hours a day 7 days a god damn week. It was me-not-me. There wasn’t room for just me. I had a handful of adult conversations that were not on the internet but not that many in 5.5 months.

I like my kids. I’m grateful I get to be with them as much as I do. Sometimes I feel like I am going to lose my god damn mind because I am with them too much.

More than one thing can be true.

Noah is making fun of me because he doesn’t think I will ever slow down my rate of working. Is the work enough to feel like “me”? Not really. What would be enough? I don’t know.

I tried going back to one of the most successful ways of solving problems in the past. It failed really big time this time. I really wasn’t trying to be more malicious than that. I was being selfish, I was being short sighted, I was callous. I was not consciously malicious. I wasn’t trying to get even. I was trying to find a different way of coping with a problem that is frankly bigger than me.

What is abuse and when should you flee from it and never look back?

Who gets to decide?

My mama had to run because her husband beat and raped her children. That seems pretty clear cut. Noah’s parents don’t split up despite periodic stretches of interpersonal violence directed at one another.

Who gets to decide what is abuse? Culturally these things vary.

Recently someone was trying to describe me unfavorably and they said that I give people money because I feel guilty.

That’s pretty damn accurate. I feel guilty in an existential sense. I have survivors guilt like a motherfucker. I was the beneficiary of a lot of help I didn’t deserve more than other people and they don’t get the help. I don’t know how to pay it back other than to pay it forward. There isn’t a rational system of “I help you because you deserve____” It isn’t that methodical. It is about giving what I can even knowing it is never enough. It is better than nothing. It isn’t enough. It really isn’t. I don’t think I’m solving a problem. I’m not a hero.

I’m just trying to not be a complete piece of shit given the options available to me in life.

I have put my money where my mouth is when it comes to supporting diverse businesses. I support communities I am not part of. I don’t think all help has to be for me or people like me. There are a lot of underserved populations out there.

It’s not all about race. There are other demographic factors involved. This isn’t that post.

But this money stuff is part of the sex stuff with Noah. I have incredibly mixed feelings about the fact that I am entirely dependent. Noah tells me frequently that I am entitled to half of his salary. He says I have earned half his salary.

Bleh.

I mean yes, I’ll take it. But it almost feels like blood money. Noah loves his job. I don’t want to denigrate that. But it’s a system I have resoundingly rejected being part of, only it is making me rich. I am complicit.

Noah is going to work in the industry he’s going to work in. It’s not about a particular company. I don’t want him to quit. He loves his work. It feeds a part of his soul and that’s super important. But it is super super super not my culture. Only I sorta married in. I have feelings about that.

What have I done with my life? I married a tech boy and had babies. Oooh. How original.

Ok so there are some fun details that I left out in that sentence. But I need to have more of an identity than wife and mother and I’m really not feeling it and I don’t know how to fucking feel it.

Slut has been comfortable for most of my life. That was a separate me. But it comes at too high a price.

The threat of him fucking people is good for our sex life. The reality of him fucking people often tanks our sex life and I go on a bender of suicidal ideation. If I could press a button and make this cycle go away I would.

If I could just be ok with him falling in love so fast and wanting to be there for someone else and…

I’m a bitter asshole about the fact that I’m with the kids more and getting the kids alone for a bunch of extra time so he can go be lovey dovey just fucking rains on my parade. Even if it is in trade for me getting time off to do the same thing. It isn’t the same kind of balance. He doesn’t spend as much time with his fucking kids. I mean, ok he spends a lot more now that he works in the house but still….

It’s different, yo.

When he says he wants to go see friends, that’s fine. He gets a kind of support from that interaction that he really can’t get from me.

I swear to fucking god I don’t feel suicidal because I want to manipulate him into doing what I want. I’m inconvenienced by this. It sucks. I am at a point where I am doing better than I have ever historically done and I still don’t like me an awful lot. I perceive him finding romantic happiness with someone else as a relief. Maybe I can be done here. He found someone better.

Pretty much anyone would be better.

Yeah yeah I don’t think that in reality it would be so simple. I’m not replaceable. It’s complicated. Blah. Blah. Blah.

Impulse problems. I’m trying to cope.

I have spent most of my life dealing with my self hatred by hurting myself in a myriad of ways that are basically completely off the table right now. If you eliminate all the small reactions then you get build ups and big reactions and those cause fucking problems.

It isn’t that Noah is hard to talk to. This is me. This is about my internalized inhibitions and prohibitions and safety and brokenness. But I think there is stuff he has had trouble communicating about too.

I’m being an asshole about “But we both suck” lately. I’m cool with taking responsibility as long as it is crystal fucking clear that I am not the only asshole in this relationship. I’m not sure it is a positive place to be.

I’m jumping up and down demanding credit for the parts I did do right. I canceled dates. I stopped doing things. I stopped seeing people. It was a collapse which is mixed… it isn’t sustainable either. But I stopped without being told to.

I didn’t make him veto people. I didn’t make him demand that I stop dating.

I just… stopped with the understanding that I’m not going to be monogamous and we’ll figure out what that means exactly later.

Noah wants to be the center of my world and he is. But what does that mean. How consuming does that need to be?

Too much to think about. But at least I started bleeding and I feel slightly less depressed.

Noah got the book Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel. I’m almost half done with it and I swear this woman knows my life. Yes. A lot of what I did earlier this year is explained in the book.

I’ve spent my whole life being textbook, why stop now?

You just have to find the right textbook. So I’m weird, I’m a statistical outlier… in a completely predictable set of ways. Humans are funny.

I desperately want to study other people who grew up in incestuous households and find out what else we large scale have in common. Anyway.

I have spent most of my marriage parenting. I have spent most of my marriage in my house relating to the people who live here and not many other people. If you look by time spent… I seriously don’t have that tight of relationships with anyone else. Attachment. Attachment. Attachment.

But who am I? Where did I go? Where is the space for me to have separation? Does it exist? In some ways this is like a teenage rebellion and in some ways it really isn’t.

I feel bad coming back to this over and over, but Noah has a career. He has a career where the best in the world in his field invite him to join them at lunch because they understand he is the up and coming in the field and they want to share his knowledge. Sure, he feels insecure about how much he “deserves” to be at the table… but he also has the job that was hotly contested and his heroes are glad he got hired.

Uh. Yeah. I’m a great mom.

Wooo.

You know what kinda sucks? I know a lot of great moms. They manage to do it and still have jobs and friends and hobbies and…

I spend a lot of time shutting everything else down to focus on parenting so that I don’t blow up inappropriately at my children. I go months without touching dirt in my back yard because I can’t even find time to garden because I need to keep my workload low or I will freak out at my kids and that isn’t fair.

What does “being disabled” mean?

What does individuation mean?

I have my friends. That’s kinda what I have. And it’s very important that I not depend on any of them too much so I need to have a really large number of them so that I can have a part time job in managing my connections to people because…

Otherwise there isn’t a me that is separate at all.

This is hurting me.

I mean yes, I write. I write a lot. Furtively. Usually before everyone has woken up or in stolen moments like these.

I feel shamefully small and unimportant and useless.

And I’m going to have more babies to compound my sense of being trapped and useless and limited with nothing to offer.

I have nothing to give beyond what I give to my children. I feel really bad about that.

I sideline sex with Noah too. There isn’t enough me in my life for me to desire sex for myself. Which means I have sex “for him” “for my marriage” a lot of the time and I feel sad and withdrawn and frustrated.

I used to have sex because I wanted to get off.

For a long time now it hasn’t been like that. Ok, things improved this year. This year has been great.

I’m scared about the previous 2-5 years and what is going to happen again.

We spend so much time quantifying our sex that we don’t pay a lot of attention to the quality of our sex.

And it is hurting me very much. I’ve done it. I’ve been complicit. In many ways I’ve helped drive it. I’m not denying that.

I have always been partial to self harm.

Hunh. I think I just figured out part of a dynamic we deal with. When I feel overwhelmed with work… I’m not great at recognizing that it is my project and I have to deal with it. I get kind of pissy and I push other people to work more. It’s not a great/healthy approach to life. I don’t care what you’re a workaholic about… just work. But the thing is, if I am the only one working, meaning not resting, people want me to take breaks to entertain them because they’re bored. Noah expects me to still have the same energy for sex even when my body hurts and I’m exhausted.

So yeah. I push them to work until they understand how I feel so they don’t fucking have the expectation of me that I feel as rested as them.

I don’t think I push the kids as hard as I push Noah. But that is something I’m going to have to watch because I get around my impulse to do so by reminding myself “Their work is play”. How will I behave when I perceive their work differently?

When I finish the remodel… I’m going to be directing Eldest Child’s screen time for the first time ever. She will be specifically encouraged to start working on a set of concrete skills and I’ll be supervising it like academics. She has stuff she wants to be able to do. The way you do that is to build the habits.

Guess what I know how to do like a motherfucker? Build habits. I’m not sure how I developed such a rigid, workable, way to acquire skills so quickly. In retrospect probably moving schools so much.

I went to 25 schools before I dropped out of high school at 16. Later I went to 7 colleges and universities.

I can adapt to environments and expectations and new rules. Sure.

That kind of flexibility is part of why I like traveling with my kids so much. I’m there with them for a much more structured, supported version of being dropped in a variety of environments.

Since we aren’t going to be going around the world doing work on farms with a tiny baby or a toddler… I just… can’t… I wonder what we will do with that allotment of energy and mental planning around. Hm. There was a lot I wanted to learn. A lot I wanted to do with my body. I won’t be able to a) manage my mood & b) manage my pain levels & c) learn & d)effectively transcribe for my older children & e) care for a baby. Nope. That’s… too much. I can’t.

Home schooling my kids is my primary job. Not learning a skill I want to have. Even if that feels frustrating.

I “say” that we take it year by year and I don’t know how long we’ll home school. As long as the kids want. I’m setting up for the long haul.

I did an awful lot of training so I could shepherd my children through this process. As I go through the experience and I bring dusty plans out of a box because, “Hey I’ve already worked through part of my plan for this situation. No trouble” and I can handle things that would be too hard to deal with one after another after another if I didn’t know what I was doing.

I’m not perfect. Not by a long stretch. But I have Plan A and Plan B and Plan C and Plan D… because I know I suck. I know I will fail. That’s why I make so many fallbacks. And when I run out of plans I just improvise at full speed. Sometimes I’m shocked/thrilled by what comes out of my mouth. I have better impulses at a lot of this than I expected.

Expectations. That’s where we get into trouble. We the collective we, not me and my intestinal parasites. My family builds around getting a certain portion of support from me. When I don’t feel like I have it to give, because I feel under too much strain for whatever reason…

I don’t know how we figure out that fallback. That’s something I don’t have a plan for and we are fucking it up. I feel pressured all the time to be a god damn wind up toy for their pleasure. And we are together 24/7. I need to have less to do. I’m not sure how I feel about being so depended upon to be amusement and stimulation of all types.

I feel…. pissy. I was at the point where my kids were getting old enough to have some space from me. I was individuating and it was rocky and it sure as fuck wasn’t Noah’s favorite…

Baby.

I feel like I reached the end of a tether while wearing a choke chain.

I want the baby. I want the child. I want the person. I’m god damn pissy about the timing. I’m frustrated there was no warning so that I could have mental plans around this.

I spent so much energy mourning a future I wanted and couldn’t have and now it is kind of landing in my lap. I feel like an ungrateful piece of shit. But it’s complicated.

What will it be like going through those early triggering stages again with a different child? Will I reprocess them again? Oh goodness. I hope not. All I know is they will be something different. I like something different.

It is funny to me how much I’m not saying right now. So many specifics I’m not writing down. I’m already the problem. How deep do I want to dig myself?

Tile is coming along. Shifting stuff to more permanent homes is happening. I’m creating space in sections that are likely to expand. I haven’t done any painting lately because at this point I need to reclean the walls in the kitchen before I paint again and… oh man. It’s just a whole process and I’m tired. I have to get tile done. That’s soon. That’s other people work. I’ve done one whole wall of the wet room. I’ve done more than half of the wall next to it and the shower wrap around wall. I have done part of the facing wall.

I need to do: the small partial wall between the toilet and the shower. The walls around the bathtub and up near the sliding door.

I’ve done partial/decorative pieces for both spring and summer and I honestly think that’ll be fine.

A friend is currently remodeling their home and is interested in maybe having me use a whole bunch of my leftover tile for that project. Which is kinda thrilling to me. But crazy. I’ll probably ask to go lay out the tile and oh will that be fun for my back.

At least they are getting the 3″ tiles instead of the 1″ and 1/2″ tiles. That has been the hard part. All those tiny little fuckers to pinchy maneuver. Oh my hands.

There’s going to be a lot to look at in my bathroom. I’m so excited.

Last night the kids and I watched Pirates of the Caribbean for the first time. In the bath tub. It was glorious.

I like my life. I like the people in my life. I just…

I was individuating. Now I can’t again. It is feeling really hard. I know that the attachment is important. I know I want the long term relationship with adult children. I know it is worth it to me to put in another 20 years on kids. But I’m chafing. I was down to like 12 on a lot of measures.

I want to meet these people. These people who are like me but who aren’t touched by incest.

I really want to know people like that. I know that probably seems like a weird thing to motivate wanting children. But it is a huge factor for me. A lot of my feelings that I’m a monster originate in this idea of being “tainted”.

I’ve been thinking about cultural perceptions of violence and intimidation. By a great many measures I’m… not a particularly violent or controlling person. Not compared to some norms that exist.

What is the norm against which I ought to be judged? I’m really not sure.

I’m really not sure.

I’ve come really far from where I started. But is it far enough?

I don’t know.

I’m sure not. There is more I have to fix. Problems I need to solve. Ways of being that I have to root out and excise.

It’s an obnoxious process.

I’m tired. Most of the time that Noah has been gone I’ve been working very long hours. I have to put in my hours with the kids, then after a while they watch screens for about three hours while I work. Then I stay up long after they are asleep working. I’ve not gotten a lot of sleep in the past week. My body hurts. But I got a lot done.

It’s funny how resetting the house lets me see lots of things that I would like to “fix” long term. Not this year. Not next year. I’ll start a list for maybe 2019. Maybe that can be a project year. Maybe.

We’ll see how much slack I manage to keep in my schedule for how long. We’ll see how much debt I manage to pay off between now and then. Breathe in, breathe out.

The kids will wake up soon and I don’t have a buffer grown up. I should get off the computer now.

I’m finding myself extremely distraught over the reality that I’m told I have to just accept everything that other people do because they can’t help it but I need to hurry up and change.

I am the problem. No matter what I give or how much I give it will never be enough. No matter what I accept or adapt to, I still need to be more accepting.

I still need to change because I can’t expect other people to.

I’m the abusive monster. This is apparently a reality that… just is. I’m the problem.

I don’t feel any kind of hope right now.

Shut the fuck up you stupid bitch. Open your legs. Shut your mouth. This is what you are good for.

I don’t feel like things are hopeful. I feel like the next few years will be a nightmare of hyper vigilance trying to not be an unwitting part of a giant Milgram experiment.

Then there is my personal life. I still don’t know but I’m scared of that too. I’m scared because I opened Pandora’s box.

I’m fantastically angry about some things. I’m angry about being told that other people “can’t help” what they are doing and that means I have to accept things they do. How come I always get told that I have to change but others can’t help how they are? Am I magic?

I’m not saying I shouldn’t have to change anything. I’m just feeling annoyed about some dynamics.

I truly wish I had more ability to just change how I’m told. I wish I were less impulsive. I feel sad.

I think it is pretty funny that I pushed Noah to go see a therapist so the therapist could encourage him to leave me. Because his life might be better without me.

I wonder about that. If I thought that disappearing from life would improve Noah’s life I would probably do that. I’m not convinced though. He’s pretty fucking dependent on me. Not as dependent as I am on him–I know.

It’s complicated. We depend on one another for validation of our existence. We depend on one another for a listening ear and support for growth. Not many people, in my experience, want to push others into growth as aggressively as we do with each other. Does it always go well? What is life without a little risk.

We talked a lot last night, after our dance lesson. After a stormy relationship around the entire concept of dancing Noah went and scheduled an Arthur Murray dance lesson for us. We went to the place that is just over a mile from our house. We had a lot of fun. The instructor seemed quite impressed that we were “new students” but we actually can dance. Woo. The instructor there is probably the best dance instructor I’ve ever personally worked with. He can evaluate things like “You are technically on the beat but you are arriving as soon as the thought of the beat arrives which is a little fast.” He took feedback really well. When I said, “You can’t explain it to Noah like that. You need to say concretely, ‘Ok that trick didn’t work. Let’s try something different’ to let Noah know that you are no longer trying to get him to do the same adaptation.”

I understood that he was drifting from “try walking past her” to “stand in one place” but it was fuzzy and Noah just can’t have fuzzy dance instructions. I was impressed with how well the instructor took it when I said that Noah has baggage around bad dance instructors and he needs clear instructions. Super flexible guy.

Not that I really want to spend money right now. Ugh.

We might do it for a month or two because it sounds fun but I don’t think we are signing on for a serious many months long commitment. If you pay for four private lessons in a month you can get as many group classes as you want. I could handle dancing a lot more for a bit… I miss dancing. If he is finally coming around I don’t really want to miss the gravy train.

My end goal is to stay married to Noah. Why?

It’s so many things. I feel deeply selfish for most of my reasons. No one else on this whole planet looks at me the way Noah does. I want that. More than the sex or the money or the weight of shared history… it is the way Noah looks at me. I’m not sure I would be able to be as good of a parent without him. The way he looks at me creates the possibility for me being the best me I can imagine.

I can’t do that without Noah. Without Noah I get the me that is reflected off the rest of the world. I’m kind of a petty bitch in that light.

People who have known me for a very long time sometimes tell me how shocked they are by how much I have changed. Noah believed I had the potential all along. He isn’t shocked.

I need that.

I feel like I spent the first 25 years of my life being almost completely underestimated then Noah married me and said, “Alright. Now you’re off leash. Run.”

I need that.

I will accomplish, I will be exponentially more in life if I stay with Noah. I’m selfish. I want to see what that means.

I went and saw my massage therapist. I said, “My elbows and low back are killing me”. She said, “Ah. You are back to tile I see.” Like a clairvoyant genius.

I gotta stop fucking up my body. Oh yeah. I’ll stop typing now.

I’m thinking constantly about distance and closeness; individuation vs attachment. The depth of Noah’s devotion to me blows my mind. He’s obsessed with me after a decade of marriage, but not really in a creepy stalker sort of way. In a way that means that he cares what I want and will religiously center me in his decisions. That is both terrifying and wonderful as his therapist suggested.

Noah centering me as much as he does means I kinda have to center him as much, which is complicated.

I have spent ten years doing an awful lot of work to try and make Noah happy. I really have. I’ve tried to create a safe and secure little home where he doesn’t have to do that much work to have a really nice experience. I’m a pretty damn rad home maker.

But it isn’t all that I am. A long time ago I heard a little truism-quote “Women marry men hoping they will change and men marry women hoping they never will.” Sometimes that feels kind of true. Noah has changed during our marriage and I celebrate those changes and I’m grateful. I’ve changed and it seems to be… more of a problem.

Noah adapts to me then it kinda sucks if I keep changing.

We are in a weird spot. I was starting to try and do the hard work of changing out of the young-kid stage because I believe that’s a fairly unique stage in life. I shut everything down for a baby. Other people know how to attach to an infant and still participate in the world and I am a stunted loser. If I’m going to get to know my baby I have to eliminate most distractions and just sit with the baby.

My attention is a fascinating topic.

Recently I’ve been thinking very hard about my ADHD diagnosis and what it means about many of the PTSD symptoms I’ve had all my life. I’ve been told and told and told that I’m trying to extinguish these PTSD symptoms. What if they are ADHD symptoms and permanent? How much effort have I put into trying to change parts of my behavior/personality that can’t really change?

Shit.

For all that I don’t try to conform to be “normal” much… I have put a tremendous amount of time and energy into changing and trying to be a better me. How much of that time and effort was completely wasted because psychiatrists wouldn’t bother to give me accurate diagnosis because surely all of my problems come from trauma.

This is far more upsetting to me than it might seem.

I feel like I have wasted literally decades of therapy trying to extinguish behaviors that are permanent parts of my anatomy and I need to learn to manage instead of just thinking I’m fucked up and I need to be fixed.

Maybe I’m less broken and more nonstandard than I’ve ever been allowed to think.

That actually hurts very very very much.

I’ve seen 21 therapists and probably another 9 psychiatrists. No one has ever seen this. That sucks.

When I needed accommodations there was always this cloak of “Because you are so Fucked Up” whereas my kids get to grow up with behavioral and emotional support and get told, “Meh every brain/body combination needs something different. This is what you need. Ok.”

The amount of shame I have always felt about my inability to focus the way other people wanted me to. It was always claimed to be about me being damaged.

Brain damage.

How much of it is brain damage and how much of it is innate?

How much of it is because of my father’s behavior and how much of it is because of both of my parents genetics?

I was thinking about something recently. My father’s suicide. You know what? In some way… him doing that was a really kind, generous thing. Know why? Because we got money. Lots of it. When he died my mom started getting his social security. That was the most stable money my mom had access to in my childhood. It was four or five times what he irregularly sent in childhood. His death was one of the fortuitous events that let me stabilize around 17/18.

If he had lived; if he had gone to prison… things would have been different. They would have been bad.

He died a month after I turned 17 and that money let me go to a stable school for a year and build bonds with people, many of whom I still know.

I honestly believe that part of the reasons rape victims are prevented from prosecuting is because the system knows that recognized victims get help and financial support and the government doesn’t want that many new sources of financial obligation.

We are an ungenerous nation.

I am an ungenerous person. I do generosity wrong. I do it to fill a hole in myself instead of focusing on filling what other people need. I do it from a place of insecurity, fear, and trying to earn the right to take up space and resources.

It’s not really generosity if I do it because I have to.

Shiny change of topic. I think I know what I want to talk to my psychiatrist about. I’m not going to be starting any new drug regimes staring down a pregnancy. But I want to have a seriously outlined, well thought out plan to handle my next end-of-early-childhood-stage emotional boredom explosion. Cause it’ll happen as sure as rain.

My impulses go towards sex. Always have. But not sex with Noah because frankly there’s not much novelty left there. Marriage is like that.

So what the fuck do I need to do?

I need a whole series of plans for how to manage this. I will want Plans A-J at least. I will need them in writing with directions on how to bail out of a plan into the next plan when things break down.

Because that’s how plans go.

That’s how I go.

I fail a lot. I fail at a lot of things. The only reason these failures do not end my progress is because I always have another plan. I live by my plans. I live for my goals and I rigorously follow some kinda path towards them. I don’t make it to completion on every plan. Sometimes I just fail. Like the around-the-world trip. I had $40,000 saved towards it. Now that’s been rolled into my bathroom. Because we aren’t going around the world. We are having babies.

It’s one or the other.

Being a mother is the best route to happiness I have found in this life. I am going to follow that trail to its end. I’m not done.

And I picked Noah as a breeding partner, quite frankly. He didn’t ask me to spend my life hanging out with him. He asked me if I wanted to be his slave and have children with him.

We are still talking about that first part. What does it mean in the overall light of our parenthood and my unwillingness to be submissive in front of my children? But hoo boy we were serious about the kids part.

We like our kids and they are sunbeams of happiness.Their needs are met. They are getting the support they need to thrive. Not much makes me fee more like I am doing my life right.

We all set our own standards of judging ourselves. I judge myself based on how I parent. I’m not perfect. I fuck up. I am not always kind or generous.

I was thinking recently about how most strong leaders are raised in adversity. I don’t think my kids will grow up to be genuine leaders despite both of them saying they want to be president. I just… I doubt it. They just haven’t yet figured out that there are lots of ways to help people other than being president.

I think that’s ok. I talk a lot about the path they will need to take if they are serious about any career. It’s kind of remarkable that both of them have buckled down to daily academics with nary a whimper. I have not been this… pushy with book work ever. Now they both sit at the table and just plug it out, cheerfully. “I want x. This is the process. Ok.”

I feel like a terrible terrible person for admitting this, but I’m going to anyway. I have the strong suspicion that Youngest Child is far more globally gifted than Eldest Child. Eldest Child is starting to catch up on academics and Youngest Child is standing nearby looking over her shoulder and telling her all the answers.

Reminds me of me and my older brothers.

This is going to be interesting to watch. Eldest Child is precociously verbal and has a ridiculously strong EQ but academics are more of a slog. She isn’t coordinated. She is strong and she has endurance… but she’s still not comfortable with her body.

Youngest Child (oh crud the kid will need a new nickname) is fast and has endurance and they are coordinated and they pick up academics at the rate of whoever is standing near them because they want to be able to follow along and be right. This kiddo is much more emotionally stormy. They don’t understand their own emotions or other peoples emotions as well. They try really hard though, but despite tons of modeling and support… this is just hard for them.

We all have what we struggle with.

It is fascinating to me to look at my kids and see the distribution of my genetics. I have some prodigious athletes in my family. I’ve started talking to Youngest Child about going to middle school for sports. If you want to be good in high school and get a college scholarship for sports… start playing in middle school. I mean, ideally try lots of sports to see what you like in grade school.. but seriously start in middle school. And the kid will probably have an easy adjustment to school style academics.

Eldest Child… would love the social aspect of school and would fail academically. I think she will do fine in college. I don’t think she has the attention span to switch topics on demand like earlier levels demand. She gets frazzled and can’t follow things. She needs a very controlled pace. She can’t have distractions (like other fascinating people nearby) because she can’t focus. I do suspect she has a learning disability but I’m not entirely sure which one or if I’m handling it right. I’m handling it ok enough that it is mostly masked but I feel confident it will become more obvious how I’m failing her with time.

It’s remarkable what watching them causes me to forgive in myself. “You’ve got to work with what you’ve got kid. No point in longing for what someone else has.”

We’ll see. We’ll see. They are both fascinating to me. I assume children are fascinating like this to most parents. I certainly get told similar breakdowns of traits from most of my friends.

I have subsumed a lot of my identity into trying to figure out how to meet the needs of my children because through this process I will learn to identify my own needs and figure out what I need to be doing to meet them. I sure wish I could do this faster. It’s a process.

How does that interlay with all the kinky sex I wish I was having? Sigh.

I don’t know yet. It’s complicated. One of the shrinks I say keeps saying “It’s not complicated it is complex” which is a distinction that… I really just don’t buy into. La la la la.

Saying complexity is good and complication is bad seems like a shitty way to treat a language.

Yeah, anyway. Good morning.

I believe with all my heart and soul that an advanced first world nation should supply a living wage to all citizens just for existing. You never know which poor kid will grow up to be a genius who can change everything. So support everyone.

To me it seems like self interest. Enlightened self interest, but whatever. I’m selfish as fuck. I think every citizen should be able to feel like their housing and food are secure so they can fucking think about other things. I think we will grow like nothing ever seen if we do this.

Can you imagine what it would be like if a country as advanced as us let the collective brainpower of a generation sit around and think in safety?!?!?!!? So many problems would get solved because people have time and bandwidth to do so.

Just about exactly one year ago today I picked up a hitch hiker in New Mexico. She was young. After a while, given contextual clues, I picked up that she was Navajo. She was trying to get from one reservation to another reservation in Arizona. Her only means of transport was walking or hitchhiking. 100 miles through the desert. At night. Oh honey. I’m going to drive you the whole way because I couldn’t live with myself for dropping you off in the desert in the middle of the night. I am not a monster.

I asked her what kind of work she does and she hung her head. She said, “I don’t have a job.” I laughed and said that just because no one is paying her that doesn’t mean she isn’t doing work. I don’t get paid for most of the work I do; it is still work.

She looked flabbergasted.

I think of this a lot.

I’m having one of those days, where for no reason at all, I feel like everything I do is pointless and I’m stupid and I’m not all the way back to worthless, but I’m having a day. Maybe I’m in the PMDD window? I’m on day 21 of my cycle. 31 day cycles certainly happen for me.

I don’t know. All I know is it is hard to feel like I’m being stupid and wasting time and refusing to do work that matters.

We live in a world that says ones value is largely calculated based on ones ability to earn money. I… I really kinda suck at that. Sure I can manage money like a bad ass. I can’t earn it though. I’m well aware that if I had picked a partner who also wasn’t good at making money… I would have had a very different life.

I’m having a hard time believing that this much time and effort on my house is really appropriate. I feel like I am doing something bad.

It is a frightful amount of money. I feel like I should settle for something 1/6 this price and do something worthy with the money. Too late.

I’m selfish. So very selfish. I want this. I spend a lot of time in my bathroom.

Unworthy.

People in Flint Michigan do not have clean water to drink. People in Haiti are struggling to pick up the pieces of their lives. 1 in 4 children in my county go hungry.

I’m part of the problem.

I’m not working to improve the lives of humanity. I’m… building a rad bathroom. Hey, if you want to come over and take a bath you can. I’ll share.

I’m feeling petty and small for needing to have a setting that reflects what I see in my head. All of life is a stage and I need specific stage dressings.

How do we figure out who we are? Is it based on our actions? Our relationships? What other people see in us?

How much do intentions matter vs effect?

Tricky.

My house is weird right now, because things can’t get put away right, yet. But when I’m done it is going to be incredible. There are different areas and different purposes and it is highly evocative of far away places. So as you are doing whatever you are doing, you always have the option of day dreaming. It is lovely.

I’m very close to thinking I have the prettiest house I’ve ever seen. And I’ve been in a lot of expensive houses. I’ve seen what wealthy people find pretty. Ugh. No. Not for me.

I have planted a jungle of plants in the yards. It is quite impressive how much diversity and color there is in the yard.

I feel so much potential in this tiny little space.

But that feels small and petty and selfish.